#you only want to decry the app to make yourself feel better

[luminous-stones]

I have a three strikes rule when it comes to tumblr where if I don’t like someone’s reblogs three times in a row I just unfollow them.

I feel like people should use this more, specifically on platforms like tiktok, where you have to press not interested to have a good algorithm. But weirdly enough, the two people I’ve unfollowed happen to have both harped on tiktok and it’s content for more than three posts in a row.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Watomatic, for lower Whatsapp switching costs

Any discussion of monopolization of the web is bound to include the term “network effects,” and its constant companion, “natural monopolies.” This econojargon is certainly relevant to the discussion, but really needs the oft-MIA idea of “switching costs.”

A technology has “network effects” when its value grows as its users increase, attracting more users, making it more valuable, attracting more users.

The classic example is the fax machine: one fax is useless, two is better, but when everyone has a fax, you need one too.

Social media and messaging obviously benefit significantly from network effects: if all your friends are on Facebook (or if it’s where your kid’s Little League games are organized, or how your work colleagues plan fun activities), you’ll feel enormous pressure to join.

Indeed, in these days of Facebook’s cratering reputation, it’s common to hear people say, “I’m only on FB because my friends are there,” and then your friends say, “I’m only there because you are there.”

It’s a form of mutual hostage-taking.

That hostage situation illustrates (yet) another economic idea: “collective action problems.” There are lots of alternatives to Facebook, but unless you can convince everyone on Facebook to pick one and move en masse, you’ll just end up with yet another social account.

This combination of network effects and collective action problems leads some apologists for tech concentration to call the whole thing a “natural monopoly” — a system that tends to be dominated by a single company, no matter how hard we try.

Railroads are canonical “natural monopolies.” Between the costs of labor and capital and the difficulty in securing pencil-straight rights-of-way across long distances, it’s hard to make the case for running a second set of parallel tracks for a competing company’s engines.

Other examples of natural monopolies include cable and telephone systems, water and gas systems, sewer systems, public roads, and electric grids.

Not coincidentally, these are often operated as public utilities, to keep natural monopolies from being abused by greedy jerks.

But the internet isn’t a railroad. Digital is different, because computers are universal in a way that railroads aren’t — all computers can run all programs that can be expressed in symbolic logic, and that means we can almost always connect new systems to existing ones.

Open up a doc in your favorite word processor and choose “Save As…” and just stare in awe and wonder at all the different file-formats you can read and write with a single program. Some of those formats are standardized, while others are proprietary and/or obsolete.

It’s easier to implement support for a standard, documented format, but even proprietary formats pose only a small challenge relative to the challenge presented by, say, railroads.

Throw some reverse-engineering and experimentation at a format like MS DOC and you can make Apple Pages, which reads and writes MS’s formats (which were standardized shortly after Pages’ release, that is, after the proprietary advantage of the format was annihilated).

This is not to dismiss the ingenuity of the Apple engineers who reversed Microsoft’s hairball of a file-format, but rather, to stress how much harder their lives would have been if they were dealing with railroads instead of word-processors.

During Australia’s colonization, every state had its own governance and its own would-be rail-barons. Each state laid its own gauge of rail-track, producing the “multi-gauge muddle” — which is why, 150+ years later, you can’t get a train from one end of Oz to the other.

Hundreds of designs for interoperable rolling stock have been tried, but it’s proven impossible to make a reliable car that retracts one set of wheels and drops a different one.

The solution to the middle-gauge muddle? Tear up and re-lay thousands of kilometers of track.

Contrast that with the Windows users who discovered that Pages would read and write the thousands of documents they’d authored and had to exchange with colleagues: if they heeded the advice of the Apple Switch ads, they could buy a Mac, move their files over, and voila!

Which brings me to switching costs. The thing that make natural monopolies out of digital goods and services are high switching costs, including the collective action problem of convincing everyone to quit Facebook or start using a different word-processor.

These switching costs aren’t naturally occurring: they are deliberately introduced by dominant firms that want to keep their users locked in.

Microsoft used file format obfuscation and dirty tricks (like making a shoddy Mac Office suite that only offered partial compatibility with Windows Word files) to keep the switching costs high.

By reverse-engineering and reimplementing Word support, Apple obliterated those switching costs — and with them, the collective action problem that created Word’s natural monopoly.

Once Pages was a thing, you didn’t have to convince your friends to switch to a Mac at the same time as you in order to continue collaborating with them.

Once you get an email-to-fax program, you can discard your fax machine without convincing everyone else to do the same.

Interoperability generally lowers switching costs. But adversarial interoperability — making something new that connects to something that already exists, without its manufacturer’s consent — specifically lowers deliberate switching costs.

Adversarial interoperability (or “competitive compatibility,” AKA “comcom”) is part of the origin story of every dominant tech company today. But those same companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to extinguish it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Just as a new company may endorse standardization when it’s trying to attract customers who would otherwise be locked into a “ecosystem” of apps, service, protocols and parts, so too do new companies endorse reverse-engineering and comcom to “fix” proprietary tech.

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. Once companies attain dominance, they start adding proprietary extensions to the standard and fighting comcom-based interoperability, decrying it as “hacking” or “theft of intellectual property.”

In the decades since Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook were upstarts, luring users away from the giants of their days, these same companies have labored to stretch copyright law, terms of service, trade secrecy, patents and other rules to ban the tactics they once used.

This has all but extinguished comcom as a commercial practice. Today’s comcom practitioners risk civil and criminal liability and struggle to get a sympathetic hearing from lawmakers or the press, who have generally forgotten that comcom was once a completely normal tactic.

The obliteration of comcom is why network effects produce such sturdy monopolies in tech — and there’s nothing “natural” about those monopolies.

If you could leave Facebook but still exchange messages with your friends who hadn’t wised up, there’d be no reason to stay.

In other words, the collective action problem that the prisoners of tech monopolies struggle with is the result of a deliberate strategy of imposing high technical and legal burdens to comcom, in order to impose insurmountable switching costs.

I wrote about this for Wired UK back in April, comparing the “switching costs” the USSR imposed on my grandmother when she fled to Canada in the 1940s to the low switching costs I endured when I emigrated from Canada to the UK to the USA:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-competitive-compatibility

Today, there’s a group of tech monopoly hostages who are stuck behind their own digital iron curtain, thanks to Facebook’s deliberate lock-in tactics: the users of Whatsapp, a messaging company that FB bought in 2014.

Whatsapp was a startup success: founded by privacy-focused technologists who sensed users were growing weary of commercial surveillance, they pitched their $1 service as an alternative to Facebook and other companies whose “free” products extracted a high privacy price.

Facebook bought Whatsapp, stopped the $1 charge, and started spying. In response to public outcry, the Facebook product managers responsible for the app assured its users that the surveillance data WA extracted wouldn’t be blended with Facebook’s vast database of kompromat.

That ended this year, when every Whatsapp user in the world got a message warning them that Facebook had unilaterally changed Whatsapp’s terms of service and would henceforth use the app’s surveillance data alongside the data it acquired on billions of people by other means.

Downloads of Whatsapp alternatives like Signal and Telegram surged, and Facebook announced it would hold off on implementing the change for three months. Three months later, on May 15, Facebook implemented the change and commenced with the promised, more aggressive spying.

Why not? After all, despite all of the downloads of those rival apps, Whatsapp usage did not appreciably fall. Convincing all your friends to quit Whatsapp and switch to Signal is a lot of work.

If the holdout is — say — a beloved elder whom you haven’t seen in a year due to lockdown, then the temptation to keep Whatsapp installed is hard to resist.

What if there was a way to lower those collective action costs?

It turns out there is. Watomatic is a free/open source “autoresponder” utility for Whatsapp and Facebook that automatically replies to messages with instructions for reaching you on a rival service.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parishod.watomatic

It’s not full interoperability — not a way to stay connected to those friends who won’t or can’t leave Facebook’s services behind — but it’s still a huge improvement on the nagging feeling that people you love are wondering why you aren’t replying to their messages.

The project’s sourcecode is live on Github, so you can satisfy yourself that there isn’t any sneaky spying going on here:

https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic

It’s part of a wider constellation of Whatsapp mods, which have their origins in a Syrian reverse-engineer whose Whatsapp comcom project was picked up and extended by African modders who produced a constellation of Whatsapp-compatible apps.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability

These apps are often targeted for legal retaliation by Facebook, so it’s hard to find them in official app stores where they might be vetted for malicious code.

It’s a strategy that imposes a new switching cost on Whatsapp’s hostages, in the form of malware risk.

Legal threats are Facebook’s default response to comcom. That’s how they responded to NYU’s Ad Observer, a plugin that lets users scrape and repost the political ads they’re served.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/553000000-reasons-not-let-facebook-make-decisions-about-your-privacy

Ad Observer lets independent researchers and journalists track whether Facebook is living up to its promises to block paid political disinformation. Facebook has made dire legal threats to shut this down, arguing that we should trust the company to mark its own homework.

Whatsapp lured users in by promising privacy. It held onto them post-acquisition by promising them their data would be siloed from Facebook’s main databases.

When it reneged on both promises, it papered this over by with a dialog box where they had to click I AGREE.

This “agreement” is a prime example of “consent theater,” the laughable pretense that Facebook is “making an offer” and the public is “accepting the offer.”

https://onezero.medium.com/consent-theater-a32b98cd8d96

Most people never read terms of service — but even when they do, “agreements” are subject to unilateral “renegotiation” by companies that engineered high switching costs as a means of corralling you into clicking “I agree” to things no rational person would ever agree to.

Consent theater lays bare the fiction of agreement. Real agreement is based on negotiation, and markets are based on price-signals in which buyers and sellers make counteroffers.

A “market” isn’t a place where a dominant seller names a price and then takes it from you.

Comcom is a mechanism for making these counteroffers. Take ad-blockers, which Doc Searls calls “the largest consumer boycott in history.” More than a quarter of internet users have installed an ad-block, fed up with commercial surveillance.

This is negotiation, a counteroffer. Big Tech — and the publications it colonizes — demand you give them everything, all the data they can extract, for every purpose they can imagine, forever, as a condition of access.

Ad-block lets you say “Nah.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

The fiction that tech barons have “discovered” the “price” that the public is willing to pay for having a digital life is a parody of market doctrine. Without the ability to counteroffer — in code, as well as in law — there is no price discovery.

Rather, there is price-setting.

Not coincidentally, “the ability to set prices” is the textbook definition of an illegal monopoly.

[jonathanalumbaugh]

What I learned

January 13th, 2018, 7th issue. A roundup of what I learned this week, sources linked. Published weekly. All blurbs written by yours truly unless otherwise noted. Grouped in quasi-random order.

Design

Land art is awesome. — 10 Female Land Artists You Should Know

There's free money out there for projects! — The Complete Guide to 2018 Artist Grants and - Artwork Archive

Better design can help guide the user to what they want to do, while leaving them in control. Bad design lets them flounder. — Hawaii missile alert: Blame terrible interface design for the Hawaii debacle — Quartz

Looking at a familiar environment through a photo can give us a new perspective. — January Cure 2018 Assignment 7 - Photograph Your Home - Apartment Therapy

Design-centered companies like IBM seem like the ideal, if there must be monoliths like them. — IBM’s Quest To Design The “New Helvetica”

Things that are interactive get more attention than things that are static. Things that are interactive in strange and unexpected ways, probably even more so. — Ikea’s New Ad Is A Pregnancy Test You Pee On. Really.

The impact of simple choices ("this font or that one?") is important. — The importance of typography in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

International fire code/OSHA guidelines for evacuation floor plans are a thing that exists. — Is there a Standard for Emergency Evacuation Maps? - NFPA Xchange

Basic principles of animation apply to more than just animated films. — Making CSS Animations Feel More Natural - CSS-Tricks

CNC made houses cause quite a stir in the comments section. — The PlyPad: CNC Machine Yourself A Tiny House - Hackaday

Design nostalgia looks to an era that never existed, a charicature of an era that wasn't as glorious as it's made out to be. — That font you hate is coming back in style - The Outline

Git

Yes, a section dedicated solely to all the things I learned about git.

Git is a powerful way of managing projects that have releases, ongoing development, and multiple team members. — A git Primer

Use "git checkout" to use files from a different branch in the current branch. — Git: checkout files or directories from another branch – clubmate.fi

This was supposed to help me deploy my website. — Git: copy all files in a directory from another branch - Stack Overflow

Git can also be used to automate deployment of web apps or websites, especially powerful when combined with post receive hooks. — Setting up Push-to-Deploy with git - Kris Jordan

Order of operations: git commit > git pull > merge whatever needs to be merged > push to server. — When do I need to do "git pull", before or after "git add, git commit"? - Stack Overflow

Finance

In systems of continually growing complexity, administration becomes more and more difficult. — An Alleged Theft of a Billion-Dollar Fund Grips ETF World - WSJ

A lot about retirement accounts. — Congratulations, Your Income Is Too High: Non-Deductible IRA Conversions - Part 2 - Seeking Alpha

Ethereum is a crypto-currency that is built to be used for smart contracts, which function as multi-signature accounts, manage agreements between users, store information about an app, and more. — How Do Ethereum Smart Contracts Work? - CoinDesk

Scandal

In a shitstorm of bad apologies for terrible assaults, a victim accepts her harasser's apology. — Dan Harmon’s apology to Megan Ganz was a moment of self-reckoning - Vox

Excerpt: “We are talking here about destroying all the ambiguity and the charm of relationships between men and women,” explained the writer Anne-Elisabeth Moutet... “We are French, we believe in gray areas. America is a different country. They do things in black and white and make very good computers. We don’t think human relationships should be treated like that.”

What I learned: I'm not really sure.

— Opinion: Catherine Deneuve and the French Feminist Difference

In the almost every one of the differing opinions about Ansari's wrongdoings, even the ones who decry his accuser, there is at least some shred of truth. — The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari

Social media

Facebook has shifted its focus from personal connection to advertising. Can it be saved? Probably only by killing it. — Facebook Can’t Be Fixed. — Facebook (FB) is using an old drug dealer tactic to keep its users hooked to News Feed

In a society anxious to be texted back, we value the ability to put off replying. — How It Became Normal to Ignore Texts and Emails

Algorithmic systems like Youtube feed off of its users preferences. If we don't like it, it's our fault. — Making a Better YouTube

There is a new dialectic, or at least one that has been brought to the fore by the over-availability of news: virtue signalling vs. engagement. Every inflammatory headline begs to be shared with righteous opinion attached, and every time one is it fans the flames of the 24 hour news cycle. Maybe before long, it'll be called the 1400 minute news cycle. — Seriously, You—Ok, We—Need To Stop Watching The News This Year

Massive systems like Youtube are now almost completely run by algorithms that are exploitative. It's not that there is aberrant behavior in the algorithm; it is built to be exploitative, and it's now being taken to its natural end. And yes, as users, we are complicit. — Something is wrong on the internet – James Bridle

We need to consider the root beliefs collectively held by society that have given rise to the services that now run our lives. — Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here?

Life

A catch-all category for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else, or fits in too many other categories!

There are points in time that we're more likely to work to push beyond our current capabilities; perhaps by preparing for them, we could push even farther. — The Bizarre Motivating Power of Aging Into a New Decade

Spiciness is carried to our brains through nerves in the dermis on our tongues, not through taste buds. — Did You Know That "Spicy" is Not a Taste?

Alcohol hits the bloodstream very quickly (~90 seconds) but takes hours to be fully released into the bloodstream, so BAC can climb even after the last drink. — Here's Why You Vomit After Drinking Alcohol And How To Feel Better After Getting Sick

Discomfort and fear keep us from enjoying ourselves. When we experience them, slow down, check them at the door and forge ahead. — I Was the Youngest Person at the Dump - Kathleen Ann Thompson

The authors argue that inequality is almost the same as it has been for decades, the top 1% is simply receiving their large slice of the pie in salary, rather than in increasing shareholder value pre-Reagan tax changes. — A new study says much of the rise in inequality is an illusion. Should you believe it?

Making room for opportunity to occur is the first step to seizing opportunity. — Opportunity Knocks When You Least Expect It. - Kathleen Ann Thompson

What I learned: The internet is a utopia; it does not physically exist, it's a virtual space that enables the amplification of the moral outrage that is a tool of self-absolution. And now we are no longer able to shape the internet, what we made now shapes us. Excerpt one: "The utopian ideal of the internet—unregulated access to information, pure connectivity—now feels antiquated. Also antiquated: trying to determine if the internet is simply good or bad. Possible and necessary: thinking more deeply about how it’s rewiring our brains and warping our experience of time, about the vistas of reality it’s revealing and creating, and what to do with our positions therein, so that we do not go mad from it all nor flee altogether." Excerpt two: "Communicating every thought about every moral conflict has become so effortless, even obligatory, that it feels like nothing could possibly be informing our reactions beyond the conflicts themselves." Excerpt three: "The myriad reckonings we’re desperate for might be cultivated in the kind of safe space Kaufman describes. Not a literal dream state, but somewhere where you don’t feel watched or compelled to perform. Somewhere private, or where you’re listening to one person at a time rather than a ton of little representations of people all at once. Somewhere where the discomfort of moral responsibility can’t be mowed over with the stimulus of an outrageous story. Where, if you’re disturbed to come upon a transgressive thought of your own, the next move is to pick it apart, rather than to go online and project an image of yourself as perfectly evolved." — Rookie » Editor's Letter

Automating repetitive tasks using whatever tools at hand is a powerful way to reach past a productivity plateau. — Schedule Tasks on Linux Using Crontab

Giving our viewers "everything" is doing our audiences a disservice. Shows like Twin Peaks make us work to understand. — ‘Twin Peaks’ Episode 8 Explained: Recap & Top Theories

B teams at Google (teams that were not composed of top performers) made more significant contributions to the company than its A teams, once again proving that soft skills are incredibly important. — The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students

Figure out your most productive hours and be prepared to work on your most important projects in that time. — Work During Your Hours of Peak Productivity

Google may not be explicitly evil, but it is starting to force web developers to do things the Google way. — Web developers publish open letter taking Google to task for locking up with web with AMP / Boing Boing

Psychology

I have no idea what's going on here. — Carl Jung Was Alt-Right

Contradicting perhaps decades of psychology, personality (as measured by OCEAN, or the "Big Five") shows downward trends in all traits except agreeableness. — Study of 50,000 people shows personality changes throughout life

A free "Big Five" or "OCEAN" test! — Understand Yourself - Personality Test

Beginnings, endings, and other psychological landmarks are powerful times to take advantage of in our lives. — You’re Most Likely to Do Something Extreme Right Before You Turn 30

[zenruption]

A Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your MacBook

Add to Flipboard Magazine.

by Lina Martinez

  https://unsplash.com/photos/1SAnrIxw5OY

The MacBook is seen by many as the number one device for those who are serious about how they use their computer. Loyal fans of Apple and its products will swear by the fact that once you go Mac, you never go back. However, those more familiar and comfortable with Windows or other operating systems will decry the MacBook as an overly priced fashion accessory, not some groundbreaking technological accomplishment.

Whatever your feelings about the usefulness of the MacBook, it is almost impossible to change any serious Mac owners’ mind. And the most you can hope for is to ensure that if they’re going to own such an expensive piece of hardware, they better take full advantage of its features. Otherwise, what’s the point?

SYNC, SYNC, SYNC

One of the most useful features on your Mac is the ability to sync with whatever other Apple devices you have. And now, with updates to the OS, there are even more ways to make sure you are never without any important information.

The recent software update has brought about the ability to sync desktops on multiple Macs. This is particularly handy if you have one for work and one for your personal use. By having the ability to sync with the iCloud, you essentially have two desktops at your disposal that can be accessed anywhere, anytime.

GET THE GOOD GADGETS

Or, get the good gadgets and apps. Programs such as AppCleaner, among others are exclusive to the MacBook, and it would be unreasonable not to take full advantage of these handy little programs.

Furthermore, new applications are being developed for the Mac every day. Some of which being created to make your life all that much easier. An example of this is the wifi analyzer which allows you to diagnose and solve problems with minimal effort and no professional knowledge required. For those who work from home, this can be a life and time saver when your wifi connection unexpectedly (but always inevitably) goes down during a crucial time.

STAY IN CONTACT

We’ve all been there, too hard at work, not looking at our phone in who knows how long. It happens, time can easily run away from you when you’re completely focused on a task. The problem with this is that it is all too easy to miss an important phone call or message, and potentially miss out on seeing friends and family or going on an adventure.

One of the neat features on your Mac is the ability to both make and receive calls. While it is run through the iPhone (presuming you also have an iPhone), it still allows you to answer any phone calls on your MacBook. The signal is transferred through devices, giving you absolutely zero reason to ever miss or ignore a phone call ever again (sorry about that).

TAKING SHORTCUTS

While in the real world it is (mostly) advised to not take shortcuts and earn your way, when it comes to computers and gadgets people seem to believe the complete opposite, after all, who has the time?

With your Mac, you can make shortcuts for anything. Instead of clicking and searching and typing around searching for something, using the Application Shortcuts option will give you the opportunity to create keyboard shortcuts for whatever you desire.

This feature is of particular use if you are frequently jumping between or needing to launch new programs. You will be able to save a great deal of time by using a keyboard shortcut than going through your files to find the desired program. The only problem will be remembering them all.

NO TIME TO WASTE

In these times of needing to be ready at a moment’s notice it can be frustrating to have to wait around for your computer to load up before you even think about opening a program. For people who follow the same routine every day, such as working from home, you will know what type of programs you are going to need each day, every day.

To save any waiting around, desired programs can be set to launch upon startup by accessing System Preferences and selecting Login Items. From there, you can choose which important programs - such as iTunes or Notes - you want ready for you on startup. However, it can slow down your computer if too many are selected, so choose which programs are vital, and which you can launch by yourself.

If you have purchased a MacBook and are still not sure whether you believe the hype, going on a voyage through some of its less obvious but infinitely helpful features might just change your mind. While the MacBook certainly isn’t for everybody, it can still do a job for most consumers, but making the most out of it is all up to you

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