deathmtn

What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits

Basically, we have now made piling up tons of digital garbage normal and now need to pay services to sort it for us.

This aside was the most striking part of the article, though:

A note for older readers: More time separates us today from the debut of the first iPod than separated the first iPod from the debut of the first Macintosh computer.

I…did not realize that.

10-4-4-4-4-8 this morning.

Goddamn, I did not mean to be doing that until midnight, though.

I tried a bunch of stuff to avoid choppiness in Field. I have to say, profilers are useful, but it's very hard to compare apples to apples with them. Doing the same exact thing in your app every time you record a profile is almost impossible.

Still, while I didn't get results that are statistically rigorous, I did get some directional information that eventually lead me to find a whole bunch of stuff that totally did not have to be done every single tick of the physics simulation. Getting rid of that has made it faster in an undeniable, literal way, putting aside the question of perceivable speed.

I do think that it definitely feels less choppy, and I always want to have my apps do less work, so the profiling did lead to good changes.

I feel like I'm always thinking about rewriting projects to use canvas, but they're always projects that involve a lot of mouse interaction.

Rethink having photos of yourself or your kids unsecured anywhere.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

…

Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name. Strangers would be able to listen in on sensitive conversations, take photos of the participants and know personal secrets. Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.

The way it builds its database is by scraping the web, even if it's against the web site's policy. I've known for a while by looking at my own logs that robots.txt is a joke to many bots. It's the chief reason my kid's site requires a login.

I have a picture of myself in my GitHub profile and on my home page that I should consider taking down.

💡 Software that uses an eye tracker to grow UI elements based on the amount of time you've spent looking at it. Imaging how big spinners would get.

75% sure I did 10-4-4-4-4-8, but it might have been 10-4-4-4-8. Staying focused when counting sets is important!