Linked List: April 13, 2017

Thursday, 13 April 2017

The Talk Show: ‘Good News, My House Burned Down’ ★

Special guest Matthew Panzarino returns to the show for an in-depth discussion of last week’s “future of the Mac Pro” round table discussion between a handful of Apple executives and journalists who cover the company. We talk about what went wrong with the 2013 Mac Pro design, speculate on the timeline of when Apple made this decision, why touchscreen Macs are almost certainly a bad idea even though a lot of people think they want one, and more.

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Star Ratings Are Garbage, and Hurt Uber and Lyft Drivers ★

Caroline O’Donovan, writing for BuzzFeed, goes deep on the problems with 5-star rating systems:

The other problem is that not everyone can agree on what the star ratings mean — not even the companies themselves. Lyft says that five stars means “awesome,” four means “OK, could be better,” and three means “below average.” But for Uber, five stars is “excellent,” four is “good,” and three is “OK.”

Individuals have different interpretations, too. “For some people, three could mean this is good, while four is great and five is perfect. Some people might say, nowhere is going to be perfect, so I’m going to say five stars is really good, and four is good,” Celis said. “The way you can interpret those stars is infinite, and most people don’t have the exact same system.”

Read through to the end for an anecdote from yours truly. Thumbs-up/thumbs-down is the way to go — everyone agrees what those mean.