Disqus - Latest Comments for Bertil

Re: » News from Supercell

Bertil — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 10:06:42 -0000

Shame, I had 25 L of booze I was trying to get rid off, two blocks away from Slush…

Re: Sources And Sinks: The Epic Battle To Control How Content Flows Across The Web

Bertil — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:58:22 -0000

Sorry Madeleine, but that's one of my pet peeve.
I don't understand why the graph at the end of the article has to be confusing. There are clearly two category introduced, springs and sinks, and the remaining two or three are ‘curator apps’ or what have you. Mixing them doesn't really help making sense of any nuance, or even that clear-cut distinction. So I tried to make a more intelligible version; it's ugly because I screen grabbed the icons and did that in Keynote on a plane, and it doesn't have the nice colors, but I hope it still helps.
https://dl.dropboxuserconte...
All rights to whomever cares about having them—fairly certain it's not me.

Re: Teen Bieber Fan To 4Chan: Why Do You Want Me To Cut Myself? - by Lianne M

Bertil — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 07:28:22 -0000

Like anyone with human decency, it’s hard to justify what 4chan/b/ trolls. However, if you ask that 15 year old Bieber fans not be responsible for their actions because they are too young, you might want to extend that leniency to 4chan — a site dwelled by 15 year old boys, as the comments supporting the site below indicate.

It's hard to justify, but there is an argument, regularly used by “bad guys” in the cultural references that these boys like (Batman is probably the clearest, but all SciFi or Superhero movie with moral dimension has it): the vaccine rhetoric. It’s heavily tied to education: say there is a crowd of spineless people that face grave danger; the Joker, or Raz’Gul moral obligation could appear to attack them to force them into a reaction, but in a way that they might survive, stronger.
The limit of this model are obvious, and heavily discussed, hence the countless interpretation of Batman: fascism, personal responsibility, etc. If you really want a proper exposé on how diverse those are, check Mandel’s Harvard class on Justice.
In your case, you are facing magazines targeted at your gender, that will manipulate you and shame you into doing things to your body that are far worst that cutting. You seem to be a strong and stable teenager that will overcome the deluge of photoshop coming your way. That’s fantastic. Many of your classmates aren’t, and might have realised so recently, not “thanks to” but through that very stupid prank.
4chan/b/-dwellers, that could very your male classmates, promoted this prank. The kindest your can be to them (and I realised that might come as a big leap of faith, a trust that most of them are not ready to welcome) is to see this as a misguided attempt from them to protect you. Thank them for that intention but correct their approach. I know it can come as a very odd reaction, but stay with me for a second: trolls, the kind who would promote such a campaign, strive on expected reactions. If you diverge from the expected gregarious following (cutting) or the expected moral anger (your post), they’ll be powerless. If you turn their actions into “moralfag”, something serious, resolute, morally good, you take away their power to provoke. The Joker can survive anything, except being serious.
More importantly, all people tend to conform, after a short while, to what they feel society expects from them. 15 year old boys are generally expected to be testosterone-driven assholes most of the time; results are bad, as you can see from your high-school. If you treat them like clumsy but considerate visionaries that could do better, you’ll make them use their instincts for better than Bieber(-fan) bashing. After all, they have a proven disregard for the horrible prejudice sexist magasines will trunk on your head throughout the coming decades.
They don’t hate Bieber because they are jealous of his good looks (well, many probably are).
They hate his songs because it’s… well, soup: a very efficient, commercially-driven kind of music. Soup is not bad; it's predictable, uses transparent techniques to trigger basic emotions. It’s the McDonald’s of music. Feeds billions with one recipe.
They hate his lyrics because they are not sure if they relate to how he talks about relations, and they shouldn’t: it’s targeted, using common marketing techniques, to female teenagers. Bieber himself might be sincere, but the people who decided to put the spotlight on him are looking for profit. His sincerity clashes with how unrepresentative he is of boys is age, and that’s… wrong in a non-obvious way, because the manipulative end of that (the producer’s selection process and motivation) is hidden.
Nobody does campaign to go after people who are unanimously bad. There are no marches against Hitler. People are more vocal when faced with ambiguity; people are more violent when they feel powerless. The best you can do is to ask them what they think of Bieber, what they mean by “gay” when talking about a guy that is obviously very heterosexual. Ask them what they like (Batman, obviously), and why. You are in luck: there are dozens of version, with easy connexion to more serious discussion on moral ambivalence.
Apparently, they like pointing out that you and your peers appear stupid; they’ve almost turned into a twisted artform. Ask them why this is so important to them.

Re: Microsoft takes on Internet Explorer’s haters in yet another biting video

Bertil — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:25:35 -0000

Most developers don’t really about having yet another standard-compliant browser. What they care is that Microsoft offers an alternative to IE6 for the many companies that forces their employees to use it because their ancient intranet software was developed for it.
It would probably have been simpler for Microsoft to re-name their browser—at the expense of alienating their countless users trapped by the fallacy of purposefully shortened “Internet …” button on their desktop.

Bu the good thing is: I wanted to launch a campaign saying: “Intelligent people paint their opponent as smart” and I needed, as a counter-example, a corporation that bluntly painted their more astute users as inarticulate trolls. Who would have thought I would have found it so fast?

Re: Beards of Silicon Valley: A Field Guide to Tech Facial Hair

Bertil — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 09:56:40 -0000

Nothing for data scientists?

Re: http://littlebigdetails.com/post/35775193711

Bertil — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:23:04 -0000

Great idea.

Shame they didn't reuse a principle in heraldic tinctures that a combination of colors came with a combination of symbols (orange was Gules stipes mixed with Golden dots) or more generally that their isn't a universal conversion, to prevent colorblind people to have to ask “What stipes are blue, on this graph?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Amazing: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice

Bertil — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:05:16 -0000

Be reassured: it *is* Mandarin, and an actually fairly good translation.
It's a shame he didn't do it the other way around too, so that more people could appreciate how it's imperfect but business-usable.

Re: Kim Dotcom Must Be Allowed To See FBI Evidence Against Him, Court Rules

Bertil — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 03:31:29 -0000

Nice one Habeas Corpus?

Re: Jack Daniel's has a very nice trademark lawyer

Bertil — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 12:41:19 -0000

I would send that lawyer a bottle of the good stuff, to thank him for his affable tone — and apologise for the derangement. What do you think he likes to drink?

Re: Charles Carreon drops lawsuit against The Oatmeal

Bertil — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 06:07:15 -0000

Can he pleased be disbarred now?

Re: Seriously, what’s up with old media not crediting bloggers?

Bertil — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:50:08 -0000

Many people in this thread seem to judge, and it feels a bit late after the deed has been corrected — however, being entrepreneur and all, I mostly believe in solutions and prevention, preferably software-based: there are plagiarism-detection software that are used in academia. I'm not familiar with those and how efficient and how easy they are to work with, but I'm sure one can hack something similar via Google and maybe even add some Klout score, just to avoid calling Tim O'Reilly a scruffy horse breeder who kills trees.

What about asking Old media, or anyone with a significant readership, really, to use those regularly? Better, what about using it if they don't, classify them by (audience*rip-offs) and ridicule them if too many lightly edited quotes show up?
It will force them to show the extend of their quotations or, better, to offer original content. It might have some greater positive impact, since I think that the lack of originality is far bigger problem than proper attribution.

(Oh, and: I'm not an entrepreneur, actually but I am a teacher; I got those confused somehow.)

Re: Location’s “Creepy” Problem

Bertil — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:21:25 -0000

Giles Corbett from Orange Vallée has been thinking about that aspect from at least 6 years when developping On VoiceFeed. You might want to ask him about his attempts. The product has pivoted a little towards voice mail, but the intention to overcome that is still there, I hope.

Re: Social Media is Not Ruining Journalism

Bertil — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:20:59 -0000

Not being able to interview before the story is out could actually be a good thing, provided most of the audience reads (or comes back to) the story *after* the interview has been added. For instance, it gives PR a sense of urgency, and allows them to see how reactions evolve when, say, the engineer in charge clarifies the situation.

Re: Huge blow to Facebook? Forced to make targeted advertising opt-in

Bertil — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:17:20 -0000

If this goes through, expect Facebook to react by asking users in a fairly convincing manner: Imagine a short text about making sense illustrated with a “Which ad you rather see?” with two ads: a relevant and clean one, against one of those yellow-teeth for tooth whitening, or sogging bellies for weight-loss programs — and have their lawyers lobby the answer to be considered as a form of informed consent.

I would actually consider that honest enough from their part, or at least within their forward-thinking moral compass.

Re: 5 Problems with Gmail's New Design

Bertil — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:45:20 -0000

> Google's UI team is full of closet Mondrian fanatics

Actually Marissa Mayer (whose title I can't remember, but whose visual influence over Google is peerless) is very openly a Mondrian & De Stij fanatic — to a point that is worrying. You might want to look at Google's main page for an example of her preference for nothing but pure white, and some geometric shapes in four basic colors.

Re: New Bill Would Allow Robo-Calls to Mobile Phones

Bertil — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 05:33:22 -0000

Well, I guess people will learn how to use the filtering options on their telephones—RWW could do a quick video demo for the most popular brands, and apps will most likely forward the most common robo-call operator numbers, not unlike AdBuster does.

Re: The Curious Connection Between Gay Applications and Sex Offenders - Mike Ananny - Technology - The Atlantic

Bertil — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:45:54 -0000

Has anyone seen a similar association?
Because I can't see any connection, I have to assume that the most likely scenario is that this market place randomly pairs any applications once or ten times, to test possible connexions — and that particular unsavoury association just happened to come across someone with enough sensitivity to notice, and enough wit to write for a magazine with a large readership.

Re: Has Facebook Disappeared 40% of Its Chinese Users?

Bertil — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:18:26 -0000

They could have decided to attribute them to neighbouring countries (or the origin of their most common proxy) to help them evade the RPC's grasp.

Re: Traffic Down at Post-Paywall New York Times [STATS]

Bertil — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:18:30 -0000

10% less? Are they counting failed attempts to connect?

Re: Plus rien à écouter

Bertil — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:11:32 -0000

Le jour n'est que la somme nulle d'une double négation, la lumière est la nuit de la nuit, et la musique, le silence du silence.

Re: Airbnb

Bertil — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:48:55 -0000

If I may over-simplify blogging, I think your serious answer to my joke explains why you have the best blog around: attention to your audience, and our idiosyncrasies. I wouldn't want to diminish the merits of candour, or your writing talent, but sometimes, success makes sense.

Re: Airbnb

Bertil — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:16:32 -0000

Please, Uncle VC, next week, could you tell us the story about the Jolly Rancher?

Re: Introducing Zite, the iPad’s Smartest Magazine Yet

Bertil — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:21:35 -0000

Are they offering a “On the other side of the aisle” look at politics, as seen from the opposing views?

Re: The Real “Authenticity Killer” (and an aside about how bad the Yahoo brand has gotten)

Bertil — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:34:25 -0000

You are confusing two things: Steve, and you (and me) are OK with signing at least some of our statements. That doesn't mean that everyone wants to, or can: “most Japanese” (to take the largest group that we can summarize in two words) don’t. They are not coward, mean or lame: they just prefer to keep things separate.

Please stop considering your personal experience as representative of everyone’s moral. This is a almost constant drawback of your reporting: your plaster your value system over everyone whom you come across.

Re: Kik

Bertil — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:09:22 -0000

Twitter? Advertising, social targeting, spam control? T9, auto-correct, txtspk? Conversation mode, group text, all-you-can eat plans?
MMS was a (pricing) failure, but Kik is far from being the only innovation in that area.