Well, this is just wonderful! Jim has written copious notes after listening to my favourite episode of season three of the Clearleft podcast, measuring design:
I’m going to have to try really, really hard to not just copy/paste the entire transcript of this podcast. It‘s that good. Don’t miss it.
A new episode of the Clearleft podcast just dropped and I have to say, this is one of my favourites so far. It’s all about measuring design.
There was a bit of a theme running through UX Fest earlier this year. On the one hand, there was all the talk of designers learning to speak the language of business (to get that coveted seat at the table), which means talking in numbers. But on the other hand, isn’t there a real danger in reducing user experience to numbers in a spreadsheet?
For this episode I put the narrative together using lots of snippets from different talks, not just from UX Fest but from previous Clearleft events too. I also got some good hot takes from my colleagues Chris, Andy, and Maite. Oh, and it opens with former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. If you know, you know.
This episode comes in at 22 and a half minutes and I think it’s well worth your time. Have a listen.
This is the penultimate episode of season three. Just one more to go!
I’ve been watching The Right Stuff on Disney Plus. It’s a modern remake of the ’80s film of the ’70s Tom Wolfe book of ’60s events.
It’s okay. The main challenge, as a viewer, is keeping track of which of the seven homogenous white guys is which. It’s like Merry, Pippin, Ant, Dec, and then some.
It’s kind of fun watching it after watching For All Mankind which has some of the same characters following a different counterfactual history.
The story being told is interesting enough (although Tom has pointed out that removing the Chuck Yeager angle really diminishes the narrative). But ultimately the tension is manufactured around a single event—the launch of Freedom 7—that was very much in the shadow of Gargarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight.
There are juicier stories to be told, but those stories come from Russia.
Some of these stories have been told in film. The Spacewalker told the amazing story of Alexei Leonov’s mission, though it messes with the truth about what happened with the landing and recovery—a real shame, considering that the true story is remarkable enough.
Imagine an alternative to The Right Stuff that relayed the drama of Soyuz 1—it’s got everything: friendship, rivalries, politics, tragedy…
I’d watch the heck out of that.
Playing Chief O’Neill’s Favourite (hornpipe) on bouzouki:
Tiny ruins.
May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
Fair play, Tim Bray!
The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.
I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?
What a time, as they say, to be alive. The Situation is awful in so many ways, and yet…
In this crisis, there is also opportunity—the opportunity to sit on the sofa, binge-watch television and feel good about it! I mean just think about it: when in the history of our culture has there been a time when the choice between running a marathon or going to the gym or staying at home watching TV can be resolved with such certitude? Stay at home and watch TV, of course! It’s the only morally correct choice. Protect the NHS! Save lives! Gorge on box sets!
What you end up watching doesn’t really matter. If you want to binge on Love Island or Tiger King, go for it. At this moment in time, it’s all good.
I had an ancient Apple TV device that served me well for years. At the beginning of The Situation, I decided to finally upgrade to a more modern model so I could get to more streaming services. Once I figured out how to turn off the unbelievably annoying sounds and animations, I got it set up with some subscription services. Should it be of any interest, here’s what I’ve been watching in order to save lives and protect the NHS…
Superb! I suspect you’ll want to have read Alan Moore’s classic book to fully enjoy this series set in the parallel present extrapolated from that book’s ‘80s setting. Like that book, what appears to be a story about masked vigilantes is packing much, much deeper themes. I have a hunch that if Moore himself were forced to watch it, he might even offer some grudging approval.
Ex Machina meets The Social Network in Alex Garland’s first TV show. I was reading David Deutsch while I was watching this, which felt like getting an extra bit of world-building. I think this might have worked better in the snappier context of a film, but it makes for an enjoyable saunter as a series. Style outweighs substance, but the style is strong enough to carry it.
Genuinely hilarious. Watch the first episode and see how many times you laugh guiltily. It gets a bit more sentimental later on, but there’s a wonderfully mean streak throughout that keeps the laughter flowing. If you are a parent of small children though, this may feel like being in a rock band watching Spinal Tap—all too real.
I cannot objectively evaluate this. I absolutely love it, but that’s no surprise. It’s like it was made for me. The execution of each episode is, in my biased opinion, terrific. Read what Nat wrote about it. I agree with everything they said.
The third series is wrapping up soon. I’m enjoying this series immensely. It’s got a real cyberpunk sensibility; not in a stupid Altered Carbon kind of way, but in a real Gibsonian bit of noirish fun. Like Devs, it’s not as clever as it thinks it is, but it’s throroughly entertaining all the same.
The languid pacing means this isn’t exactly a series of cliffhangers, but it will reward you for staying with it. It avoids the negativity of Black Mirror and instead maintains a more neutral viewpoint on the unexpected effects of technology. At its best, it feels like an updated take on Ray Bradbury’s stories of smalltown America (like the episode directed by Jodie Foster featuring a cameo by Shane Carruth—the time traveller’s time traveller).
A near-future family and political drama by Russell T Davies. Subtlety has never been his strong point and the polemic aspects of this are far too on-the-nose to take seriously. Characters will monologue for minutes while practically waving a finger at you out of the television set. But it’s worth watching for Emma Thompson’s performance as an all-too believable populist politician. Apart from a feelgood final episode, it’s not light viewing so maybe not the best quarantine fodder.
An ahistorical space race that’s a lot like Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut books. The initial premise—that Alexei Leonov beats Neil Armstrong to a moon landing—is interesting enough, but it really picks up from episode three. Alas, the baton isn’t really kept up for the whole series; it reverts to a more standard kind of drama from about halfway through. Still worth seeing though. It’s probably the best show on Apple TV+, but that says more about the paucity of the selection on there than it does about the quality of this series.
When it’s good, this space-based comedy is chucklesome but it kind of feels like Armando Iannucci lite.
It’s fine. Michael Chabon takes the world of Star Trek in some interesting directions, but it never feels like it’s allowed to veer too far away from the established order.
A tense and creepy Stephen King adaption. I enjoyed the mystery of the first few episodes more than the later ones. Once the supernatural rules are established, it’s not quite as interesting. There are some good performances here, but the series gives off a vibe of believing it’s more important than it really is.
The latest series (four? I’ve lost count) just wrapped up. It’s all good stuff, even knowing how some of the pieces need to slot into place for Breaking Bad.
I heard this was good so I went to the BBC iPlayer app and hit play. “Pretty good stuff”, I thought after watching that episode. Then I noticed that it said Episode Twelve. I had watched the final episode first. Doh! But, y’know, watching from the start, the foreknowledge of how things turn out isn’t detracting from the pleasure at all. In fact, I think you could probably watch the whole series completely out of order. It’s more of a tone poem than a plot-driven series. The characters themselves matter more than what happens to them.
A silly 70s-set jewsploitation series with Al Pacino. The enjoyment comes from the wish fulfillment of killing nazis, which would be fine except for the way that the holocaust is used for character development. The comic-book tone of the show clashes very uncomfortably with that subject matter. The Shoah is not a plot device. This series feels like what we would get if Tarentino made television (and not in a good way).
Given its origins and composition, the Obama library is already largely digital. The vast majority of the record his presidency left behind consists not of evocative handwritten notes, printed cable transmissions, and black-and-white photographs, but email, Word documents, and JPEGs. The question now is how to leverage its digital nature to make it maximally useful and used.
Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.
A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.
Craig talks about reading, writing, books, publishing, and Amazon:
Kindle and non-Kindle book sales account for less than two percent of Amazon’s market cap. The Kindle could disappear tomorrow, and Amazon would not be materially affected. Even from a branding perspective, I don’t think AMAZON = BOOKS anymore, certainly not to younger consumers. AMAZON = PRIME. PRIME = A 3D PRINTER on a one-day time-delay that deposits anything you can imagine on your doorstep.
There’s also this about the double-edged sword of working at scale:
Does affecting one hundred lives turn you on? A thousand? A million? A billion? Why? What does it mean to have a positive impact on a life? How intimate does that connection need to be? Understanding your scale — the scale that moves you — is critical to understanding with whom and how you should work, how you should live.
Russell Davies:
That’s the web I want; a place with spare corners where un-monetisable enthusiasms can be preserved, even if they’ve not been updated for seven years.
This looks like a handy JavaScript library for scroll-based events. But “scrollytelling?” No. Just …no.
Merlin mentioned this service on a recent podcast episode. If you have an Amazon Echo, you can authenticate with this service and then point it at an RSS feed …like your Huffduffer feed, for example. From then on, Alexa becomes a Huffduffer player.
This is the clickbaitiest of titles, but the post has some good sobering analysis of how much traffic driven by a small handful players. It probably won’t make you feel very cheery about the future.
(For some reason, this article uses all-caps abbreviations for company names, as though a stock ticker started generating hot takes: GOOG, FB, AMZN, etc. It’s a very odd writing style for a human.)
The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama.
This article about a specific security flaw in voice-activated assistants raises a bigger issue:
User-friendliness is increasingly at odds with security.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Don’t make me think” is a great mantra for user experience, but a terrible mantra for security.
Our web browsers easily and invisibly collect cookies, allowing marketers to follow us across the web. Our phones back up our photos and contacts to the cloud, tempting any focused hacker with a complete repository of our private lives. It’s as if every tacit deal we’ve made with easy-to-use technology has come with a hidden cost: our own personal vulnerability. This new voice command exploit is just the latest in a growing list of security holes caused by design, but it is, perhaps, the best example of Silicon Valley’s widespread disregard for security in the face of the new and shiny.
This is the way the web ends
This is the way the web ends
This is the way the web ends
Not with a bang but a duopoly.
Charlie conducts an experiment by living without JavaScript for a day.
So how was it? Well, with just a few minutes of sans-javascript life under my belt, my first impression was “Holy shit, things are fast without javascript”. There’s no ads. There’s no video loading at random times. There’s no sudden interrupts by “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE?” modals.
As you might expect, lots of sites just don’t work, but there are plenty of sites that work just fine—Google search, Amazon, Wikipedia, BBC News, The New York Times. Not bad!
This has made me appreciate the number of large sites that make the effort to build robust sites that work for everybody. But even on those sites that are progressively enhanced, it’s a sad indictment of things that they can be so slow on the multi-core hyperpowerful Mac that I use every day, but immediately become fast when JavaScript is disabled.
But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.