Week 50

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This Medium post from a 23 year-old Millennial telling herself to “stop rushing life” seemed to hit a chord with many.  It captures well the sense of what it must be like to live in the insatiable maw of permanent FOMO.  If this is what being 23 and me is today, it sounds awful:

I want to get to my goals faster. I want to be better tomorrow. I want to learn everything I can so I can go create value ASAP. We all have 24 hours in a day and I feel compelled to use every minute in the most productive manner. If I’m eating breakfast, I’m watching a tutorial on Udemy; if I’m in transit, I’m listening to a podcast; if I’m waiting for the bus, I’m reading an article on Pocket. If I don’t, it feels like I’m falling behind.

The ‘secret’ of age is that falling behind is all there is.  Tim Urban of WaitButWhy dramatically conveyed it in a recent post in which he visualised a full human lifetime in a number of different thought-provoking measurements.  His realisation from the exercise was that even as young adults we are already living at the “tail end” of several of them including for instance time spent with parents:

Time to get real and fall behind with grace.  For Urban that means:

1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.

3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time this year writing these weekly posts so for my final one yet to come for 2015, it seems appropriate to reprise my self-visualisation efforts one more time and examine the year in terms of word counts.  At least that’s the plan.  Time permitting:

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

Manufacturers and Devices

WeChatBeyondMobile

Laptop

Google and Android

Google says business owners can help by redirecting their HTTP site to their HTTPS version and by changing the HSTS header on their server. … Google has also created a guide for what constitutes a good HTTPS site, including things like not redirecting visitors to or through an insecure page.

Apps and Services

“Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making,” Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi write in the blog post. “It’s also about tough choices.”

DesignWeekly

Conversational UIs

Bots are to modern messaging apps what APIs were to Web 2.0; a way to build on top of other services, experiment, and create a new way of interacting with existing services. It’s the start of a significant new way of interacting with computers.

Asia

Artificial Intelligence

“I think that we will begin to see a time when we’re able to simply just talk or even press a button” to interact with a machine to get things done more intelligently, instead of using keyboards or rudimentary voice recognition systems.

  • Charles Arthur wrote a good review of the current thinking around artificial intelligence and technological unemployment in November which contains the following quote from Calum Chace, author of Pandora’s Brain, which somehow seems very hard to square with the reality of the world today:

“There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else.  Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of ‘gods’, and then the rest of us.  I think our best hope going forward is figuring out how to live in an economy of radical abundance, where machines do all the work, and we basically play.”

Essentially, OpenAI is a research lab meant to counteract large corporations who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems devoted to profits, as well as governments which may use AI to gain power and even oppress their citizenry.

A recent study by Stanford University says people may experience feelings of intimacy towards technology because “our brains aren’t necessarily hardwired for life in the 21st century”. Hence, perhaps, the speed at which relationships with robots are becoming a reality.

Cloud, Big Data and Analytics

IBMIdigitalisation

  • Really useful post surveying the payment API landscape by segment.  Bear in mind this is just the picture from the perspective of the US and UK.  There’s a whole separate collection of propositions for China let alone Russia:

Quill

Wearables and the Internet of Things

  • This Medium post by Wristly provides insights from a cohort of dissatisfied Apple Watch customers.  Here are the top 5 reasons these early adopters gave for giving up on the product:

“Apart from great devices, Fitbit’s partnerships with fitness- and health-focused companies [like MyFitnessPal and Runkeeper] and their growing distribution network have been key in maintaining their lead.”

  • Koru CEO Christian Lindholm has published a SlideShare on wearable trends 2016 in which he suggests payment is the killer app for the industry:

 

  • Vayyar sound interesting.  They’re a chip startup populated by ex-Intel staff that is looking to produce imaging sensors that incorporate radio waves to provide 3D images.

Vayyar

  • IoTStars looks like a useful event to attend at MWC if (unlike me) you’re going.

IoTStars

Work, Management and Innovation

CulturalDifferences

  • Looker CTO Lloyd Tabb presents an entertaining taxonomy of engineering superheroes including Aquaman “nimble and acrobatic enough to penetrate operating system, database and controller layers to dig for a bug” and The Flash who “firmly believes that making something to play with is the best way to get a feel of its potential and understand it better.
  • It’s a common trope to focus on execution rather than ideas but this post suggests that’s a mistake.  Ideas are not cheap or easy.   The author provides a challenging checklist by which to assess the quality of yours:

The truth is the vast majority of ideas are worse than worthless because they are simply bad ideas. Bad ideas will sometimes work because of luck or effort, but good ideas are much, much more likely to succeed. Life is too short to work on bad ideas.

  • Customers are often touted as a good source of ideas but as Michael Sippey, Twitter’s ex-VP Product, points out in this FirstRound post that requires really engaging with them properly in the first place.  He suggests ‘getting in the van’ and going out to meet with customers, not starting on a major feature until you’ve spoken to at least 30 of them and focussing on their problem not your solution.

MOOCs

  • This ClassCentral report outlines the best free online courses in 2015 based on review feedback.  The results are an eclectic mix with the top rated course aptly entitled “A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment”:

calvinAndHobbes

Space and Cosmology

launch-walk_3526609b

Three astronauts on Mars

SelfCreatingUniverse

Trump

  • Donald Trump’s crude and incendiary anti-Muslim statements have polarised the Republican nomination debate appalling many in his own party. Even if he doesn’t continue his unwelcome rise in fortune, serious damage has already been done to the view of the US from the outside where “Trump is tanking the American brand globally“.  His intolerance has also led to a public response on Medium from Google’s Indian-born CEO Sundar Pichai:

Everyone has the right to their views, but it’s also important that those who are less represented know that those are not the views of all. … Let’s not let fear defeat our values. We must support Muslim and other minority communities in the US and around the world.

  • As one LinkedIn poster suggested it’s not as if his ‘legendary’ business skills are up to much either:

  • At least Harrison Ford was able to knock him down a couple of pegs:

Culture and Society

  • It’s part of a wider migration-driving housing apocalypse facing London in particular as it is increasingly viewed as the “world’s safe haven” a trend that will be exacerbated should Donald Trump achieve the unthinkable.  The extent of the catastrophe that is looming for London is laid out in this alarming post by Nadeem Walayat of MarketOracle.com.

uk-house-prices-forecast

  • NYT on the case against decluttering.  Throwing out the books and records after digitising them could have unforeseen negative consequences for friends and family unable to visually browse the physical history they represent – eternal sunshine of the spotless shelf:

in our digital conversion of media, physical objects have been expunged at a cost. Aside from the disappearance of record crates and CD towers, the loss of print books and periodicals can have significant repercussions on children’s intellectual development.  …  The implications are clear: Owning books in the home is one of the best things you can do for your children academically. It helps, of course, if parents are reading to their children and reading themselves, not simply buying books by the yard as décor.

  • Christmas geek tweet to end with.  Ho ho ho:

https://twitter.com/KarenMN/status/677111492135661569

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