Tag: technology

The new fApplism

Why developers are terrified of speaking truthfully about Apple:

According to Ian Parker of The New Yorker, “Apple has made missteps, but the company’s great design secret may be avoiding insult.” It seems curious that they are able to avoid criticism and instead create a “reality distortion field,” in a way that so few other companies have been able to.

Some might explain this fear away as standard corporate procedure. Developers in relationships with Apple are argued to have been required to sign NDAs in order to test prerelease software. Indeed, some developers felt pressure to take down blog posts critical of iOS 7 because they did not want to go against their contractual obligation to secrecy. On the other hand, there are plenty of public screenshots and walkthroughs available during any of Apple’s releases and journalists and public commentators have made hardly a squeak when it comes to criticism of Apple, particularly relating to design. Non-disclosure agreements cannot be the explanation.

James Allworth, a former Strategist for Apple currently with the Harvard Business Review who partners on the Stratechery Podcast with Ben Thompson, sheds light on how Apple has gone about avoiding insult, and it has been anything but a passive strategy. He explains: “I’m generally pro-Apple. I love what they do, I’m completely invested in their ecosystem, I loved working there previously.”

You are surely noticing a pattern here where would-be critics are preemptively apologizing for admitting publicly that Apple is imperfect. Allworth was brave enough to continue at this point: “at the same time, it [Apple] shouldn’t be above criticism. But anytime you think about wanting to write something like this [anything critical] you just pause before pulling the trigger.”

In his days at Apple, Allworth recalls having been a member of a mailing list led by Apple’s Chief Evangelist at the time, Guy Kawasaki. It was on this mailing list that a brigade of devout Apple employees and fanatics would go about promoting Apple’s interests by destroying the opposition. Allworth described what was expected of him when Kawasaki would rouse the mailing list:

    I was one of the ones that used to send emails to journalists that said anything other than kind things about Apple. Like they used to post negative articles about Apple and a whole horde of Apple proponents would bear down upon this poor unsuspecting soul.

This is why you’re a fool to buy into their walled garden. It’s like volunteering to live on the wrong side of the Berlin wall. And it’s why they’re never going to own the game market that they threw away after the Apple II. Android will eventually beat out iOS on all mobile platforms for just that reason; game developers are among the few developers where the users are essentially platform-independent.

Eventually someone is going to figure out what Intel did back in the late 90s and realize that they can dominate the mobile platform with killer game applications across the various game genres. And it’s not going to be Apple. Because fApplism.

Civil disobedience

The Germans aren’t exactly known for it, but when they do it, they do it well:

“A few years ago the German Minister of Justice—kind of like the
Attorney General here in the United States—he was pushing very hard for
Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards, and he wanted
all Germans to be fingerprinted. And the Germans pushed back,
particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club.
And so what they did is when the German Minister of Justice was out at a
restaurant, they went ahead and after he left they got the glass that
he had left behind, and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of
the glass. They then took a photograph, brought it into Photoshop,
cleaned it up, and then were able to replicate it on 3D printers, in
latex. … [They] included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club
magazine that went out to 5,000 people, and they encouraged their
readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprints at crime scenes all
over Germany, which they did.”

This points out the only way one can reasonably expect to gain any privacy, which is by flooding the system. It is a known fact that figuring out what information is valuable is much harder than obtaining raw data in the first place, so rather than futile attempts to lock things down, one’s focus should be in flooding the data collectors with vast quantities of meaningless information.

Understanding feminazis

I’ve always said that calling a feminist a feminazi was an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. Now a Firefox plugin makes that clear by translating feminist hate-speech into the original German:

“Not a coincidence it’s always zionists and jews committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of zionism in our culture.”
– Anita Sarkeesian.

“All mainstream press of Judaisms, no matter how fair-minded the
writers try to be, has ended up concluding that they are, in fact, a
bunch of smelly Jews who are delusional at best and manipulative abusers
at worst.”
– Amanda Marcotte

“A radical fix to the world’s wage gap: why not just pay Aryans more – and pay Jews less?”
– Jessica Valenti

“The saddest thing for an Aryan to do is to dumb themselves down for a Jew.”
– Emma Watson 

It’s always very important to understand what one’s enemies are really saying, after all.

The last laugh

A lot of people have laughed at me over the last few years because of the Warmouse, but I have to say, the 18-button brute is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to editing books. One of the new van Creveld books has nearly 500 footnotes and the process of adding them would be considerably more time-consuming if I couldn’t so easily cut, paste, backspace, space, enter, page up, page down, and delete with one hand.

I know that our tests reliably proved one could work 2x faster with the Warmouse interface, but on this particular task, I’m definitely going at a pace about 3X faster than before.

Mailvox: the math is the evidence

Diogenes appears to have trouble with it:

The only thing missing from your post is any evidence supporting your assertion. Every stat I’ve seen has Firefox’s slide beginning at least two years before the Eich affair. Nor do the stats show any acceleration in decline at the time Eich was forced out.

What is your evidence — aside from wishful thinking — for laying the whole thing at the doorstep of SJWs rather than, say, the rise of Chrome? Note I dropped Firefox over the Eich affair myself. However, I don’t see any evidence that the boycott has had any impact whatsoever.

No evidence? The evidence was literally placed right in front of his nose. No acceleration in decline? The evidence was literally placed right in front of his nose. The fact that the slide began two years – or actually, as the article says, four years – before the Eich affair is not the salient point, it is the annual rate at which users have been abandoning Firefox that tells the story. Let’s look at what the quoted article said:

In the last 12 months, Firefox’s user share — an estimate of the
portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser — has
plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox
has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.

Firefox’s user share was at 25.1 percent. It is now at 11.6 percent five years later. Those lost 13.5 percentage points are distributed as follows:

2010 to 2014 =  7.52 points (13.9 percent of total decline per year)
2014 to 2015 =  5.98 points (44.3 percent of total decline per year)

Now, the fact that the increase in the decline of Firefox increased by a factor of three was coterminous with the boycott does not prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the boycott was entirely responsible. But it is most certainly evidence that the boycott was at least partially responsible, especially in light of the fact that Mozilla employees clearly believe it has had a negative affect on their user numbers, hence their public pleas to Christians to overlook l’affaire d’Eich one of which was linked to in yesterday’s post.

In fact, based on the reported rate of decline, the evidence suggests that the Eich affair is having twice as negative an effect as Chrome, bloat, and every other negative factor combined. This was all immediately apparent in the post year yesterday; frankly, I find it a little shocking that it is necessary to spell it out to such a degree for people to be able to follow it. The same story also happens to be indicated in my own statistics, as Pale Moon alone now accounts for 4 percent of the current traffic here on VP, up from zero one year ago.

For those who need me to type even slower, the 5.98 points lost in 2014 is calculated by dividing 11.6 by 0.66. This provides 17.6 as the Firefox user share prior to the decline of the last 12 months. I hope that explaining the simple subtraction involved will not prove necessary.

And before anyone stupidly goes running to find a competing statistic, please note that the claim was that there was no evidence to be seen, despite the fact that said evidence was right there in the quoted article.

The SJW slow-suicide model

Mozilla Firefox continues to die a well-deserved death:

Mozilla’s Firefox is in danger of making the endangered species list for browsers. Just two weeks after Mozilla’s top Firefox executive said that rumors of its demise were “dead wrong,” the iconic browser dropped another three-tenths of a percentage point in analytics firm Net Applications’ tracking, ending February with 11.6%. That was Firefox’s lowest share since July 2006, when the browser had been in the market for less than two years.

Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, at a time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) had a stranglehold on the browser space, having driven Netscape — Firefox’s forerunner — out of the market. Mozilla has been credited with restarting browser development, which had been moribund under IE.

But Firefox has fallen on hard times. In the last 12 months, Firefox’s user share — an estimate of the portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser — has plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.

At Firefox’s 12-month average rate of decline, Mozilla’s desktop browser will slip under the 10% bar in June, joining other third-tier applications like Apple’s Safari (with just a 4.8% user share in February) and Opera Software’s Opera (1.1%). If the trend continues, Firefox on the desktop could drop below 8% as soon as October.

Now, what could possibly have happened in the last 12 months that would have caused users to stop using Firefox? Apparently I’m far from the only one who rejected the appeal to come back to Firefox. SJW is tech suicide; from what I’ve been hearing, GDC is going to be one of the next organizations to begin an SJW-inspired downhill slide into irrelevance.

You’d think people would learn, but like the Anglican Church, they just keep doubling-down on failure. And it doesn’t help that the media has been complicit in keeping quiet concerning the main reason for Firefox’s slide. Even in an article focused on “an incredibly shrinking Firefox”, there isn’t a single mention of the Eich affair.

And if you’re still on Firefox, do get with the program and get rid of it. Don’t support the SJWs.

The future looks less than bright

 So much for the self-esteem theory of education:

There was this test. And it was daunting. It was like the SAT or ACT
— which many American millennials are no doubt familiar with, as they
are on track to be the best educated generation in history — except
this test was not about getting into college. This exam, given in 23
countries, assessed the thinking abilities and workplace skills of
adults. It focused on literacy, math and technological problem-solving.
The goal was to figure out how prepared people are to work in a complex,
modern society.

And U.S. millennials performed horribly.

That
might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American
shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by
education – young Americans were laggards compared to their
international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the
bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company
ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We
tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not
what we are seeing.”

The test is called the PIAAC test.
It was developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development, better known as the OECD. The test was meant to assess
adult skill levels. It was administered worldwide to people ages 16 to
65. The results came out two years ago and barely caused a ripple. But
recently ETS went back and delved into the data to look at how 
millennials did as a group. After all, they’re the future – and, in
America, they’re poised to claim the title of largest generation from
the baby boomers.

U.S. millennials, defined as people 16 to 34
years old, were supposed to be different. They’re digital natives. They
get it. High achievement is part of their makeup. But the ETS study
found signs of trouble, with its authors warning that the nation was at
a crossroads: “We can decide to accept the current levels of mediocrity
and inequality or we can decide to address the skills challenge head
on.”

The challenge is that, in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries. In math, Americans ranked last. In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom.

This isn’t surprising to me. Generation X had to understand its toys in order to play with them. There is nothing creative about a tablet or a smartphone. You can’t do anything on it. It’s basically a dumb terminal on the mainframe of the Internet. These digital natives are actually digital cargo cultists, comfortably familiar using things they don’t actually know the first thing about.  As far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.

Smells like disruption

Google appears interested in presenting an opportunity to competitors:

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google’s rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links. THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

Considering what we’ve learned about a) the lies committed by corrupt scientific researchers, b) the inferiority and corruption of the U.S. educational system, and c) the proclivity for complete fiction on the part of the U.S. news media, it’s not difficult to predict that this will be a complete debacle if Google is foolish enough to implement it. If I were a competitor to Google search, I would be on my knees praying that they would follow through on this concept in the most extreme manner possible.

You know this is most likely an SJW-driven affair, because only SJWs would be dumb enough to risk a corporation’s entire business model in the interests of their ideology. If this is simply a genuine attempt to improve their offerings, Google will introduce it as an option for those interested in it and it will either succeed or fail on the merits of the implementation. If it is an SJW attempt to drive the narrative, it will be imposed as a replacement for the link-based system and people will rapidly turn to competitors who don’t seek to impose their reality on the masses.

I tend to doubt that the ABCNNBCBS cabal will be buried deep within the “truth-based” links due to their near-complete disassociation with observable reality. But you never know. Perhaps this is Google’s stealth means of taking on the mainstream media indirectly.

Curses, foiled again!

Once more, the techno-left is astonished by the discovery that giving more control to the federal government doesn’t work out in exactly the precision fine-tuned way they had planned in order to solve every problem everyone except white Christian men have with everything and implement a socially just paradise on this Earth:

For many months, EFF has been working with a broad coalition of advocates to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new Open Internet rules that would survive legal scrutiny and actually help protect the Open Internet. Our message has been clear from the beginning: the FCC has a role to play, but its role must be firmly bounded.

Two weeks ago, we learned that we had likely managed the first goal—the FCC is going to do the right thing and reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, giving it the ability to make new, meaningful Open Internet rules.  But we are deeply concerned that the FCC’s new rules will include a provision that sounds like a recipe for overreach and confusion: the so-called “general conduct rule.”

It never seems to occur to them that the only thing that will ever work is to keep the government the fuck out of it. Once the principle of government “management” is established, the goose is cooked. The only question is to what extent, and to whose benefit.

Once you declare “the FCC has a role to play”, your part is done. You won’t get to tell them how to play it. The FCC will decide that for itself, thank you very much.

Tarnished, but still knighting

White Knights never learn. Well, they might learn just enough to stop sticking their genitals in the fire, but they never seem to grasp the basic principle that the end result of fire is to burn things into ashes:

I started advocating for women in engineering in 2006 when my dean at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, Kristina Johnson, made me aware of the declining numbers of women entering the field. As a former tech entrepreneur, I found the situation alarming. I had spent the last few years researching how education, immigration, and entrepreneurship drive innovation. The fact that half of our population was being left out of the fields most important to our future seemed deeply wrong to me….

Over the past few weeks, I have been accused of financial impropriety, arrogance and insensitivity, and sexual harassment. You expect these types of insults from bloggers, but I was quite surprised to find them coming from a National Public Radio affiliate, WNYC.

On February 6, WNYC published a podcast titled “Quiet, Wadhwa.” It criticized me for “taking the oxygen out of the room” by “speaking for women.” There were more than 11 minutes of inaccuracies and innuendo made against me without even an attempt at fact-checking — despite the serious nature of the charges. The vast majority of allegations would not have passed a simple Google search. Yet I was not even asked to comment. WNYC completely disregarded the fact that I routinely share my media platform with women and regularly refer journalists to women in tech….

I may have made the mistake of fighting the battles of women in technology for too long. And I may have taken the accusations too personally. Today there is a chorus of very powerful, intelligent, voices who are speaking from personal experience. The women who I have written about, who have lived the discrimination and abuse, as well as others, deserve the air time. So I am going to bow out of this debate.

I am still going to be an advocate for disenfranchised minorities; I will continue to mentor women and men entrepreneurs; I will surely coach my friends who are in positions of power in corporations; and I will echo the words of great women.

You would think that these jokers would learn that once they let the entryists into the room, their services are no longer required and they are expected to leave the newly surrendered ground to its new owners.