What would Christmas morning be like if Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick or Woody Allen filmed it?
Merry Christmas!
What would Christmas morning be like if Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick or Woody Allen filmed it?
Merry Christmas!
iA Writer underwent a product revolution. It became Writer Pro and this is the intro video.
It adds a workflow for your writing and now costs 20 bucks. It looks epic.
Source: Writer Pro.
TIME reporters recorded these creepy phone conversations with a robot telemarketer that, when asked if it is a robot, laughs and insists it is a “real person.”
But was it actually a robot who could understand and reply as quickly?
Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic investigated:
Samantha West is a human being who understands English but who is responding with a soundboard of different pre-recorded messages. So a human parses the English being spoken and plays a message from Samantha West. It is IVR, but the semantic intelligence is being provided by a human. You could call it a cyborg system. Or perhaps an automaton in that 18th-century sense.
Amazon Drones: As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap
The naysayers were out in force. “Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon’s Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense,” bleated Wired‘s Marcus Wohlsen. Dan Lyons reacted to the piece with a condemnation of “the credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes,” again complaining that drone deliveries are “years away.” The Guardian‘s James Bell dismissed it as “little more than a publicity stunt,” and added: “what happens when next door’s kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?” And Slate called it “hot air” and compared it to an April Fool’s joke.
What is wrong with these people? Do they moonlight as stock analysts who only care about the next quarter’s results? Do they have no vision at all? Do they not care about anything unless it will directly interact with them tomorrow, or at the absolute latest, next year? They’re the same ilk who, I’m sure, claimed that credit cards would never work, that merchants would never adopt them, that people would not use them, that fraud would make their use untenable.
I fully agree with Jon Evans. People say it won’t happen. But can you now imagine a world where this kind of stuff does not exist? I’m not sure. It looks like it’s bound to happen. “Is it bad?” is the correct question, not “will it happen?”
Photographs from the 1960s NYC subway by Enrico Natali.
Product Hunt is a project by Ryan Hoover and Nathan Bashaw. It’s a HackerNews-like feed of new products. It currently does not accept submissions nor comments in order to to keep quality high. And it’s high. Highly recommended if you’re into product design.
Marco’s Christmas coffee guide
If you’re linking to buy coffee gear for Christmas, check out Marco Arment’s recommendations.