Man. Standing ovation to this quote. I just want to know!!!
I’m not here to debate if the jump from lossy AAC to lossless ALAC is audible. Many people say they cannot hear the difference between the two (lucky them). Others say they can. Most importantly for any comments section, that second group is not seeking permission from the first group to stream losslessly. Apple Music supplies ‘Lossless’ and ‘Hi-Res Lossless’ streams at no extra cost to the subscriber, and some listeners just want to know that their audio hasn’t been lossy compressed along the way, even if they’re not 100% sure they can always hear the benefits. Many of these same people already know that an album’s mastering technique will impact its sound quality more than the delivery format.
Anyway. This article is your reminder that if you’re using AirPlay or Bluetooth with Apple Music you’re not getting lossless.
I would argue, strenuously, that the phone is the natural AI device. It already has: always-on networking, cameras, a screen, microphones, and speakers. Everyone owns one and almost everyone takes theirs with them almost everywhere they go.
In the article From Four Wheels to Two RJ Marsan talks about the Lyft engineering team’s principles for quickly and safely adding major features to a mobile codebase. It’s full of interesting learnings as they went through the process of adding scooter rentals to the app. Here’s a good point about trying to avoid doing everything in the first release of a new feature:
Every new feature is a chance to start with a clean slate, and it’s often tempting to immediately build for scale. We all want our products to launch to massive fanfare and usage, but more often than not, the path to success for new features is slow and steady. With steady growth in mind, we designed our first architecture to support exactly what’s needed for our first product iteration, and nothing more. For Lyft Scooters, we cut out many features one might expect from a classic ride such as sharing ETA or setting a destination.
I’ve been a long-time subscriber and fan of Craig Mod’s newsletter. In the latest edition he has some really interesting thoughts on Instagram, and social media in general:
Instagram will only get more complex, less knowable, more algorithmic, more engagement-hungry in 2019.
I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best. And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is what these general algorithms seem to optimize for: things that are easily digestible, firmly on the scale of “fine, just fine.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more boring stuff we shove into our eyeballs, the more boring our taste becomes.
I’ve long since deleted my Facebook account, but in what has become a fairly familiar form of hypocrisy in myself and many of my friends, I’ve stubbornly held on to Instagram. I’ve toyed with Sunlit in conjunction with Micro.blog as an option, but as with most of the Instagram “alternatives” out there, the network effect simply isn’t there.
The other important distinction is that I see a major difference between photographers and Photographers (capital P). Craig is a Photographer, so it makes sense for him to be way more thoughtful and concerned about where he shares his photos. I mostly post pictures of whatever vinyl I’m listening to, so it’s not exactly high art.
Which brings me to an even bigger question… what is the purpose of sharing photos for small-p photographers? For me, I want to connect with people I know, make them part of my life, maybe influence their music taste a little bit. And I want to see similarly mundane things about their lives. And that is why starting a photography newsletter like Craig — or moving to Sunlit — isn’t really an option for me. Because I need to use the thing where my people are at.
I just wish the thing I have to use was less yucky. I’d absolutely pay a monthly fee to remove the yucky parts.
The mere presence of our smartphones is like the sound of our names or a crying baby — something that automatically exerts a gravitational pull on our attention. Resisting that pull takes a cognitive toll.
A bit more about that “gravitational pull”:
Research in cognitive psychology shows that humans learn to automatically pay attention to things that are habitually relevant to them, even when they are focused on a different task. For example, even if we are actively engaged in a conversation, we will turn our heads when someone says our name across the room. Similarly, parents automatically attend to the sight or sound of a baby’s cry.
Having recently, in my forties, gotten reading glasses, I now find myself having to choose between reading and being, since I can’t read without them and I can’t see the world with them. The glasses date from a time when reading was much rarer a pastime than being; you’d grope for them to see a book, while relying on your naked eyes for driving, talking, walking.
There is no “solution” to this, but as someone who also has reading glasses, I do like her approach to make this weird feeling a little better:
When I pull away from the screen to stare into the middle distance for a spell, I take off my glasses. I try to find a tree. If I’m inside, I open a window; if I’m outside, I will even approach a tree. I don’t want mediation or glass. The trees are still strangers; I hardly know their names yet, but I’m testing myself on leaf shapes and shades of green. All I know so far is that trees are very unlike screens. They’re a prodigious interface. Very buggy. When my eyes settle after a minute or two, I—what’s that expression, “the scales fell from my eyes”? It’s almost, at times, like that.
I should start by stating the obvious: I like technology and phones, and I think it’s essential for kids to be exposed to it so that they can be prepared for the future ahead. That said, despite its click-bait title, Jean Twenge’s Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? really got to me. She studied how teens tend to spend their time, and how it affects their mental health, and came to some alarming conclusions:
More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
I know that sounds a bit like fear-mongering—and maybe it’s not as bad as Jean makes it sound. But it’s still worth reading the article and making up your own mind based on the data presented.
I accidentally went to a Best Buy the other day. To make a long story short, after an unplanned but long and pleasant chat with an Amazon rep I walked out with an Amazon Echo. Much has been written about Alexa and how good it is, and everything you’ve read about it is accurate. But I want to focus on a different aspect of Alexa: how it’s making my kids more self-sufficient.
See, the thing about kids is, they need you all the time. And that’s cool, because we’re their parents and we love them and we want to be there for them. But some tasks are incredibly boring and menial. I’ve outsourced some of those to Alexa to the great delight of our kids, who continue to find new things she never gets tired of doing.
Alexa, turn on some music that Mom and Dad are totally sick of
The biggest win for my kids so far has been the realization that they can listen to any music they want to. Right now it’s the Moana and Trolls soundtracks. Over and over and over and over and over and… But that’s ok, because my wife and I can be in another room, and they can listen to Get your hair up as much as they want without driving us insane.
Alexa, help us not fight over the iPad
We let our kids do iPad. Let’s just get that out of the way first. Anyway, it’s usually a choice between TV or iPad, and when they choose iPad it tends to result in a constant fight over whose turn it is. Not any more. Now they each get two turns of 10 minutes, and Alexa keeps score. They use Alexa to set the timer, and there hasn’t been any fighting (well, about this…) since.
Alexa, make us laugh
My daughters aren’t big fans of my jokes. It’s fine, I’m not bitter about it. Anyway, they discovered Alexa tells jokes too. I personally think my jokes are way better than hers, and here’s my proof:
Like I said, I’m not bitter about it.
Alexa, are we bad parents?
This is, of course, the big question when it comes to technology. Should we immerse our kids in it or should we shield them from it? We all find our own way when it comes to parenting, and even though we’re still working on what this technology balance looks like, my current feeling is that voice-activated UI doesn’t have many of the issues that are traditionally brought up as negatives about kids and technology.
First of all, Alexa is inherently social. It’s conversational, friendly, and it never gets tired. We laugh at her together. The Echo is not an “alone” device, and I think there’s something really powerful about that. But second, it’s also really useful. Our kids love asking it questions, and coming up with new ways to trick it into a misunderstanding.
Conversational UI certainly has a long way to go. But I will say that I am so far pleasantly surprised with the natural way in which it integrates with our family life. It’s not a substitute for human interaction and connection, and our kids get that. But as a useful playmate of an entirely “other” type of technology, it’s a winner.
The act of being with someone—or better yet, a group of people—and on one’s phone is just the modern iteration of a key pleasure of family life: to be among those whom one is sufficiently comfortable with to drift in and out of communication. Like doing homework at the kitchen table, it is the state of doing your own thing while others do theirs around you. The point is, whatever you are doing on your phone, it would be less pleasurable were you to be doing it alone in your room.
Screen addiction alters this, and there are levels of disengagement that can turn a sentient being into a piece of furniture, but the parameters of acceptable phone use should surely widen at this point to permit some middle way between being on one’s phone and considered rude, or turning the device off altogether.
Now demarcations blur as technology accompanies us everywhere, all the time. We are too quick to celebrate the continual presence of a technology that knows no respect for traditional and helpful lines in the sand.
[A] stream of messages makes it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude can look suspiciously like hiding.
Anyway, back to Emma’s article. She also references Susan Dominus’s Motherhood, Screened Off, an article that was in heavy rotation towards the end of last year. Susan makes the point that smartphones result in a lack of transparency, since people (i.e. our kids…) don’t know what we’re up to when we’re on them:
It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she apprised herself of the news. […] All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool, the specific use of which is almost never apparent.
And that’s where the answer to all of this comes back to “it’s complicated.” Yes, sometimes it’s ok to be alone on our devices, together in quiet contentment. But other times the lack of transparency about what we’re doing can be incredibly alienating to others. This wouldn’t be a problem if we could tell the difference between the two situations perfectly, every time. But alas, we are only human.
Nick Bilton quit his Nest Thermostat because a software malfunction left him unable to heat his house for a while. In Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold he extrapolates to concerns about what happens when connected devices stop working as they should:
We’ve seen this before, with wireless fobs for keyless cars. They are supposed to make life easier by letting us do away with car keys, but they also make it easier for thieves to break in (by using a simple radio amplifier).
It also happened recently with Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers. The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco asserting that the wristbands failed to “consistently and accurately record wearers’ heart rates,” which is vital for those with certain medical conditions.
I’ve heard dozens of other stories from people with connected homes who were locked out by malfunctioning door touch pads, or about newfangled security alarms going off in the middle of the night because a bug (one with wings, not a digital one) flew by.
This reminds me of Daniel Rivero’s Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. Since companies are starting to require customers to sign agreements that prohibit them from filing law suits in the event of a malfunction, there is no one to hold responsible. Combine this with last week’s The internet of all the things, and I’m suddenly not so keen on this “connected home” thing any more.
What’s the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser. Updates to HTML apps happen entirely on the server, so users get them immediately. There’s no window of vulnerability between the release of a security fix and the user applying the update. So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site.
The primary issue with moving back to the web is mainly what the web has become in recent years. As Maciej Cegłowski points out, we have a website obesity crisis. The talk (which you shoud definitely read) starts like this:
What do I mean by a website obesity crisis?
Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled “The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat”. It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size.
The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.
We can’t have it both ways, unfortunately. The only way that the web can become a better mobile platform than apps is if we take the obesity/performance crisis seriously. Otherwise the “it’s too slow!” argument will always win.