Linked List: March 18, 2017

Saturday, 18 March 2017

Quip Electric Toothbrush 

My thanks to Quip for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Quip is a vibrating electric toothbrush with a two-minute timer, and automatic delivery of fresh brush-heads every three months. Everything your teeth need, nothing they don’t.

Quip was named one of the 25 best inventions of 2016 by Time magazine. Just look at it, it’s adorable. Special offer for DF readers: get your first brush-head and toothpaste refill for free.

Recreating Asteroids With Lasers 

Seb Lee-Delisle recreated the vintage Asteroids coin-op game using lasers, and the result is glorious. Great video from Matt Parker.

Why YouTube Switched From 5-Star Ratings to Thumbs Up/Down in 2009 

I got a lot of pushback from readers regarding my post yesterday supporting Netflix’s switch from a 5-star rating system to a simple thumbs up/down system. The gist of the complaints is that some people do carefully consider their star ratings, and do value the granularity of being able to say that you like/dislike something a little or a lot. But of course some people take that care. The problem is that most people don’t, and collectively, 5-star rating systems are garbage.

This post from YouTube back in 2009 shows it with data: when they had a 5-star rating system, the overwhelmingly most common rating was 5-stars. The next most common was the lowest, 1-star. 2-, 3-, and 4-star ratings were effectively never used.

For a personally curated collection, 5-star ratings can be meaningful. But for a recommendation service that averages ratings among all users, they are not. It’s the difference between designing for the ideal case of how people should behave versus designing for the practical case of how people actually behave.

The Case Against Uber 

Daniel Compton lays out the case that Uber coordinated with Anthony Levandowski to steal Google subsidiary Waymo’s self-driving car technology:

From Waymo’s filings, it seems that they have Levandowski dead to rights on stealing their LiDAR designs. That alone should be enough to bring Uber’s self-driving car program to a halt and cause some big problems for Levandowski. California’s Trade Secrets law is weaker than other states, but if successful, Waymo will be able to seek an injunction, damages, and attorney’s fees. Because all law is securities law, the SEC may also be able to bring a case against Uber (similarly to their case against Theranos).

See also: Compton’s update yesterday.