Tag: smartphones

Do Less Of

Here is a list of things I hope to do less of in 2023:

  1. Exams (setting papers, correcting papers). Exams, given the way they are conducted almost everywhere I teach in India, are stupid. They fill hours of my time, but neither I, nor the students, benefit from them in any way. I am more than willing to die on this hill. Exams are stupid.
  2. Eat lesser. But conversely and not at all paradoxiacally, make every meal count. If the option is between eating a badly made meal and not eating, I hope I have the wisdom to pick the latter every time. It will have at least two advantages – I get to fast more than I did this year, and when I do eat, it is likely to be a much more pleasant experience.
  3. Spend less time reading stuff on the phone. My attention span suffers for it, and I need to get better at not taking my phone out of my pocket every chance I get.
  4. Reading while I am eating. Related to the second point, of course – I aim to make every meal I eat a celebration of food – but this is also related to the third point. But in general, try to get out of the habit of using the phone as a way to escape the world around me.
  5. Mindless YouTubing. That’s not the same as spending less time on YouTube – I’m convinced that I need to spend more time on the platform. But YouTube Shorts is the enemy, and so is YouTube’s recommendation engine. It doesn’t optimize for what is best for me in the long run, and I think Odysseus may well have been on to something.

Etc: Links for August 2nd, 2019

Links to five games that you can play on your smartphone. Yes, timepass, but also, teach you to think differently, or better (or both!). Some of these you have to pay for – I have purchased and played all of them, and have found them useful.

  1. Monument Valley. (1 and 2)
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    Beautifully designed, haunting music, and for a person like me, who struggles with three dimensional visualization, this game was a literal eye-opener.
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  2. Threes!
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    The free copycat version became much more popular, but this game is rather more challenging, well designed, with better music and sound effects.
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  3. MiniMetro
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    I loved playing this game because it taught me how to think about designing public transportation. To be clear, real world public transportation design is much more difficult, but that’s kind of the point. If this is as difficult as it turns out to be…
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  4. Flipflop Solitaire
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    Solitaire reimagined. That is the point of this game for me – unlearning a lifetime’s worth of conventions is fun in its own right.
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  5. Peak
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    Games, they say, for your brain. I don’t know if that is true, but I have purchased the annual subscription, and made it into a habit. So far, I am enjoying playing these games everyday. I score the least in the Focus category (surprise, surprise) and do the best in language (ditto, ditto).

Of the five, I currently have the last two on my smartphone.

Tech: Links for 2nd July, 2019

Five articles from tech, but about something that took place about twelve years ago.

  1. “One of the most important trends in personal technology over the past few years has been the evolution of the humble cellphone into a true handheld computer, a device able to replicate many of the key functions of a laptop. But most of these “smart phones” have had lousy software, confusing user interfaces and clumsy music, video and photo playback. And their designers have struggled to balance screen size, keyboard usability and battery life.”
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    Thus began Walt Mossberg’s review of the first ever iPhone. That review is fun to read in order to understand how far smartphones have come since then, and we we took for granted then, and do now.
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  2. “With the iPhone XS and Apple Neural Engine, the input isn’t an image, it’s the data right off the sensors. It’s really kind of nuts how fast the iPhone XS camera is doing things in the midst of capturing a single image or frame of video. One method is to create an image and then apply machine learning to it. The other is to apply machine learning to create the image. One way Apple is doing this with video is by capturing additional frames between frames while shooting 30 FPS video, even shooting 4K. The whole I/O path between the sensor and the Neural Engine is so fast the iPhone XS camera system can manipulate 4K video frames like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix.”
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    That was then, this is now – well, this is also last year. John Gruber on how far we’ve come – he reviews the iPhone XS, and reading both reviews one after the other points to how far we’ve come.
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  3. “…I’m not convinced that anyone at Google fully thought through the implication of favoring Android with their services. Rather, the Android team was fully committed to competing with iOS — as they should have been! — and human nature ensured that the rest of Google came along for the ride. Remember, given Google’s business model, winning marketshare was perfectly correlated with reaping outsized profits; it is easy to see how the thinking and culture that developed around Google’s core business failed to adjust to the zero-sum world of physical devices. And so, as that Gundotra speech exemplified, Android winning became synonymous with Google winning, when in fact Android was as much ouroboros as asset.”
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    It’s not just technology that changed then – entire ecosystems and business models had to be changed, updated, pilfered. Microsoft, obviously, but most significantly, Google.
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  4. “There’s that word I opened with: “future”. As awesome as our smartphones are, it seems unlikely that this is the end of computing. Keep in mind that one of the reasons all those pre-iPhone smartphone initiatives failed, particularly Microsoft’s, is that their creators could not imagine that there might be a device more central to our lives than the PC. Yet here we are in a world where PCs are best understood as optional smartphone accessories.I suspect we will one day view our phones the same way: incredibly useful devices that can do many tasks better than anything else, but not ones that are central for the simple reason that they will not need to be with us all of the time. After all, we will have our wearables.”
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    One risk that all of us run is to think of the future in terms of what exists now – which is one reason why 2007 was such big news for tech and then for all of us. What might a similar moment be in the near future? Earlier, you had to have a computer, and it was nice to have a smartphone. Now, you have to have a smartphone, and it is nice to have a computer. When might it be nice to have a smartphone, while you have to have a ‘wearable’?
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  5. “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a new “Molecular Informatics” program that uses molecules as computers. “Chemistry offers a rich set of properties that we may be able to harness for rapid, scalable information storage and processing,” Anne Fischer, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said in a statement. “Millions of molecules exist, and each molecule has a unique three-dimensional atomic structure as well as variables such as shape, size, or even color. This richness provides a vast design space for exploring novel and multi-value ways to encode and process data beyond the 0s and 1s of current logic-based, digital architectures.” ”
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    Not just the rather unimaginable (to me, at any rate) thought of molecules as computers (did I get that right?!), but also a useful timeline of how calendars have evolved. Also note how the rate of “getting better” has gotten faster over time!