essays and ideas from Eliza Sarobhasa
Bots are a kind of manifestation of Walter Ong’s secondary orality—text that works like spoken language, even though it’s written, made ever more strange by being filtered through the uncanny valley of a bot’s impression of that language.
Maybe this is a tertiary orality, even—an orality removed first by text, then by bots.
The end of a mobile wave — Benedict Evans
The mobile phone industry has had two waves – first voice and SMS and then the smartphone. The voice wave has taken it from zero to 5 billion people on earth with a mobile phone, and now close to 2 billion mobile phones are sold every year.
In parallel, starting 9 years ago, the smartphone wave converted a larger and larger percentage of those phone sales to smartphones.
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All of this is now reaching an end – the wave is almost over.
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On one level this is just classic saturation – no industry can grow forever. But what happens next?
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At the level of the consumer internet, it’s been clear for some time that Apple and Google won the platform war and that the important questions have moved up the stack – how far can Google and Facebook capture attention and intent, what other interaction models will emerge, how far Android and iOS can shape interaction and consumer behaviour, and so on.
For the hardware companies themselves, though (and that includes Apple), when you’re selling to everyone on earth (something the tech industry has never really done before), what do you do next? TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones, and so are watches and (to some extent) even tablets. VR and AR are some time away with unclear market size, though I think AR could in principle be the next ecosystem after the smartphone.
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This is all rather like the PC clone market of the 1980s – hundreds of undifferentiated companies fighting it out to sell commodity computers built with commodity components running a commodity operating system (though those companies mainly made the PCs themselves, where many phone brands do not). That world in due course led to companies like Dell – people who embraced the volume, low-margin commodity model and found an angle of their own. We’re starting to see equivalent model-creation now.
Science Fiction-Media in Transition
Butler: I don’t have access to this kind of thing on computer but, oddly enough, what you’re talking about sounds very much like the way I start looking for ideas when I’m not working on anything. Or when I’m just letting myself drift, relax.
I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect.
I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.
So, I guess, in that way, I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext.
The current state of machine intelligence 2.0 – O’Reilly Media
A year ago today, I published my original attempt at mapping the machine intelligence ecosystem. So much has happened since.
I spent the last 12 months geeking out on every company and nibble of information I can find, chatting with hundreds of academics, entrepreneurs, and investors about machine intelligence. This year, given the explosion of activity, my focus is on highlighting areas of innovation, rather than on trying to be comprehensive.
Despite the noisy hype, which sometimes distracts, machine intelligence is already being used in several valuable ways. Machine intelligence already helps us get the important business information we need more quickly, monitors critical systems, feeds our population more efficiently, reduces the cost of health care, detects disease earlier, and so on.
The two biggest changes I’ve noted since I did this analysis last year are
(1) the emergence of autonomous systems in both the physical and virtual world
and (2) startups shifting away from building broad technology platforms to focusing on solving specific business problems.
The Shape of Things — Welcome to Thington — Medium
In particular I want to talk about the relationship we’re starting to build between physical network-connected objects and some kind of software or service layer that sits alongside them, normally interacted with via a mobile phone.
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I think we all forget how quickly things can change, but I think it’s fair to say that the era of the modern smart-phone starts with the iPhone, and it’s really important to remember that only launched a little under nine years ago. This by the way, is the very first advert for the iPhone which essentially replaced single use telephones with general purpose computers connected to the phone network.
Three years after the iPhone launched — so about six years ago now — in addition to all of the desktop and laptop computers we were buying, we were also buying 150 million smart phones a year.
Five years later — 2016 — and it’s projected that 1.6 billion smartphones will be sold. In one single year, one smart phone will be bought for every five people on the planet.
But what happens next? A world of connected objects.
Science Finally Explains Why Books Smell So Darn Good | Brit + Co
Ask an avid reader what their favorite scent in the world is, and the answer is almost immediate: the intoxicating smell of old books. Whether you’re taking a good whiff in an indie bookstore or breathing in the delicate pages of an ancient volume at a local library, there’s no denying that old books smell damn good.
But why exactly is that?
Well, thanks to Andy Brunning, a Cambridge chemistry teacher who devotes his free time to debunking complicated chemistry, you don’t need a master’s degree to find out.
If you go into your local Barnes and Noble and sniff a few different volumes, odds are they all smell a little bit different. This is because each individual publisher has different preferences when it comes to paper, ink and book binding materials, which means that the chemical compounds found in new books are extremely varied. This, in turn, leads to each individual title having a slightly different scent, making the exact smell of new books difficult to pinpoint.
Continue reading “Science Finally Explains Why Books Smell So Darn Good | Brit + Co”
The Unicode Consortium enables people around the world to use computers in any language. Our freely-available specifications and data form the foundation for software internationalization in all major operating systems, search engines, applications, and the World Wide Web.
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Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.
These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs the risk of corruption.
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystems, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends.
Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and websites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. Unicode enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It allows data to be transported through many different systems without corruption.
The Unicode Consortium was founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in modern software products and standards. The Consortium is a non-profit, 501(c)(3)charitable organization. The membership of the Consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing industry. The Consortium is supported financially through membership dues and donations. Membership in the Unicode Consortium is open to organizations and individuals anywhere in the world who support the Unicode Standard and wish to assist in its extension and implementation. All are invited to contribute to the support of the Consortium’s important work by making a donation.
For more information, see the Glossary, Technical Introduction and Useful Resources.