I was interested in this when I saw it posted recently, but I don't have the money for it, so I'm definitely interested in getting into the beta. Where would I even get the code though? Twitter? Reddit?
Steve Jobs wasn't anti-gaming. The only moment he was anti-gaming was when he was trying to sell $2500 Macintoshes and battling IBM PC's, when IBM was applying FUD against Apple, calling their computers "toys".
I remember being 12 years old and obsessively reading through fravia's pages into the morning in the mid-90's. On a whim, I e-mailed +orc. He responded so kindly that it had a significant effect on my interests and attitudes. I'll always remember that time fondly. It's too bad fravia passed. His legacy lives on in those he influenced.
I wonder what is out there today that feels like the enlightenment that fravia's writing provided back then. The links between technology and philosophy, in its original meaning as the love of knowledge. Fravia really helped form my worldview. Going back and reading it again, it doesn't feel the same due to how the internet unfolded over the last 20 years.
I wish I had thought to reach out! Glad they were nice!
I always thought of Opera as the quintessential engineer's browser. I switched away from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back since. It's fast, has tons of extensions and works well for pretty much everything.
The full name is the "Yerkes-Dodson Law of Social Facilitation." It's this idea that a task requires an optimal amount of nervous system arousal. Too much and you get jittery, too little and you get lethargic. So it looks like an inverted U with the optimal performance at a middle level of arousal.
Although you're right it's more complicated. If you're an expert at a task, then you do better if you have increased arousal. This is because stress hormones cause new synaptic production to slow down and old networks/circuits to increase in their conduction/strength. So if you're an NBA player, and it's the playoffs, you're going to be better than normal - because you're an expert at the task.
If however the task is 'complex' (like, say, software development) then if you put pressure on people (or if they're putting pressure on themselves), the performance falls significantly. I forgot the name of the study, but this was shown cross-culturally. They gave poor Indian men (in India) 3-months salary to solve a decently straight forward lateral thinking puzzle. The men who got paid performed way worse, then the other men who weren't paid at all.
Sometimes that strikes me as oddly familiar. Paying someone to do something they love and putting too much pressure on them makes their performance degrade.
The highest pressure situation I was in was for fed gov approaching deadlines having missed milestones. The more pressure the put on, the calmer and more relaxed I became. Everything worked out fine in the end because the managers didn't understand investing in developing a framework. When that was done all the apps came together, more or less with outliers needing more exceptional additions.
The major difference is that a warrant to access a safety deposit box allows the keys for that specific safety deposit box and no other. What the FBI is asking for is the equivalent of asking for a master key to all the safety deposit boxes to access just the one box. Given what was revealed in the summer of 2013 by Snowden, I think we'd all agree that the FBI and other state agencies (not just American agencies) will use the software as a backdoor to access whichever iPhone they choose. Let's not be naive.
Well the FBI would have to have the iPhone in their possession to unlock it I presume. SO that's one level of security - I don't think the USA has become a place where property can just be confiscated without reason (I hope I am right here). If Apple were custodians of the unlock process then only once due legal process had been followed would an iPhone be unlocked i.e. Apple would own the unlocking mechanism. Maybe in the CEOs safe...
Does Apple really have to create a "master" key though? Couldn't Apple write the backdoor that would only activates on the iPhone in question? Even if it was something as simple as "if (secure_id == terrorist_phone_id) [accept any pin]", it's not like the FBI could remove the condition without invalidating the signature. If they could, they wouldn't need Apple's help to begin with.
Do you have any books or posts that you'd recommend looking at? There's a huge mountain of information I'm looking at right now. Any specific leads? I'm genuinely asking because I agree with you but didn't know about any link.
