Google cars drive like your grandma — they’re never the first off the line at a stop light, they don’t accelerate quickly, they don’t speed, and they never take any chances with lane changes (cut people off, etc.).— Un residente di Mountain View, sulle macchine che si guidano da sole

What if, in fact, we’re not very good at being distracted? What if we actually don’t value distraction enough? It may be that, with our mobile games and Twitter feeds and YouTube playlists, we’ve allowed distraction to become predictable and repetitive, manageable and organized, dull and boring—too much, in short, like work. — Joshua Rothman sul New Yorker, A New Theory of Distraction

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. — Edward Snowden, in un AMA su Reddit poche ore fa.

In general, privacy is something people tend to undervalue until they don’t have it anymore. Arguments such as “I have nothing to hide” are common, but aren’t really true. People living under constant surveillance quickly realise that privacy isn’t about having something to hide. It’s about individuality and personal autonomy. It’s about being able to decide who to reveal yourself to and under what terms. It’s about being free to be an individual and not having to constantly justify yourself to some overseer. — Bruche Schneier

Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity – a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home – to one of perfect complexity – every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other hand, no-one knows water like Google. No-one else has the same lead in building understanding of how to deal with this. Hence, I think, one should think of every app, service, drive and platform from Google not so much as channels that might conflict but as varying end-points to a unified underlying strategy, which one might characterize as ‘know a lot about how to know a lot’. — Benedict Evans, What does Google need on mobile?

The biggest problem with redesigns, however, is their removal of context. Design is compromise. Anyone who’s ever designed a logo, made a movie, or built a house, knows that the final product reflects a series of mostly hidden goals and constraints. To redesign without knowing these constraints — the client insisted on pink! the lead actor broke his ankle! the zoning board was insane! — is, in some sense, unfair. — Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg, Design and Redesign in Data Visualization

People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer. — Steve Jobs, 22enne, spiega computer e Apple su un numero del New Yorker del 1977 (da Becoming Steve Jobs, via M.G. Siegler)

Voglio capire come il giornalismo si inserisca nel panorama informativo odierno. Prima di tutto, denoto uno spostamento da contenuto a prodotto. Una fonte d’informazione è molto più delle storie che produce; è anche il sistema con cui decide quali notizie coprire, o come consegnare al lettore l’informazione. In secondo luogo, dobbiamo includere gli algoritmi. Tutte le volte che un programmatore scrive un codice che si dovrà occupare di informazione sta facendo una scelta editoriale. Sotto quest’ottica, il giornalismo è parte di un ecosistema informativo che include tutto, da Wikipedia a motori di ricerca. Tutti questi prodotti coprono un bisogno di informazione, e tutti usano una combinazione di professionisti, partecipanti e algoritmi che la producono e consegnano agli utenti. — Jonathan Stray, The Editorial Product

Twitter is two things. It is a concept — everyone in the world connected in real time — that’s so obvious in retrospect that it is impossible to imagine it not existing. It is also a product that has had a rough time living up to that concept. […] “For users that use Twitter and are able to set up an account and follow the right people it provides really disproportionate value. […] We have all of this great content, but today what…you actually see is a function of when you’re checking your phone, who you happen to follow, if you know the right hashtags, that sort of thing.”

— Matthew Panzarino, Twitter’s Dilemma

Nel momento in cui la stampa diventa uguale all’ambiente informativo che la circonda, nell’istante in cui le informazioni che possiamo raggiungere sui social network su Twitter e sui media sono le medesime, in quel momento la stampa perde il proprio ruolo di bussola informativa e si trasforma in semplice aggregatore dei deliri del mondo. — Mantellini

Il numero di cittadini che si collega quotidiamente a Internet in Italia oggi secondo Eurostat è il 58%. Si tratta di un dato importante perché esprime prevalentemente il divario culturale rispetto a quello infrastrutturale. In un Paese come l’Italia che ha connettività paragonabile a quella di molti altri paesi europei, quei 4 cittadini su 10 che non usano Internet o la utilizzano in maniera saltuaria, sono uno dei principale ostacoli alle mille cose che si potrebbero fare attraverso la Rete per lo sviluppo del Paese. — Italiani che odiano internet, Massimo Mantellini

The crux of the Internet loneliness debate isn’t actually the Internet; it’s the tension between Internet reality and real world reality. There’s a sense in which the Internet is somehow fake, and that the real world is better, but we go online to talk about it anyway, hovering in that space between technological connection and physical connection. It’s illogical to think of the Internet as separate from the real world — we’re still regular people communicating regular things on it — and yet we constantly differentiate between the two. — I am lonely, will anyone speak to me?

On the very first iteration the design possibilities are wide open. The designer defines some screens and workflows and then the programmer builds those. On the next iteration, it’s not wide open anymore. The new design has to fit into the existing design, and the new code needs to fit into the existing code. Old code can be changed, but you don’t want to scrap everything. There is a pressure to keep moving with what is already there. Our early design decisions are like bets whose outcome we will have to live with iteration after iteration. Since that’s the case, there is a strong incentive to be sure about our early bets. In other words, we want to reduce uncertainty on the first iterations. — Ryan Singer

People don’t like what they don’t understand and so far, nobody understands the Apple Watch. I’m not even sure anybody can; we just don’t know enough about it at this point. In the absence of a valid reference, many are sure to dismiss it as either irrelevant or flawed, simply because it doesn’t conform to their own existing preconceptions. — Álvaro Serrano

We allow people access to us 24/7. We’re always in public, constantly checking an anonymous comment box, trying to explain ourselves to everyone, and trying to win unwinnable arguments with strangers who don’t matter in our lives at all. — Marco Arment