Is a voice assistant the killer app for anyone? I haven't ever used them, and I've only ever seen someone use it as an ironic 'look at me' at a party.

For users who have reasonably functioning products, yes. For Siri users, looks like not so much.

In our house they are used a lot for music, TV, answer all kinds of questions to look at photos.

> Is a voice assistant the killer app for anyone?

For a smart speaker, yes.

Why mandatory? Why not let people do as they want?

Just trying to put this in the most bare terms, there's obviously plenty of edge cases and caveats around gender, but:

a) Society places a greater burden on women than men for child-rearing. b) Women who take leave lose out on career opportunities. c) Men receive greater opportunities to advance their careers relative to women, since they are expected to take less leave.

Even in the presence of equal parental leave, men (or just as often, their employers) can lean on the social expectation to return to work sooner, disadvantaging women.

This becomes a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem since the culture and structure are mutually reinforcing. From a policy perspective, structure is easier to change than culture. In my view, that makes it a logical first step.

Godel, Escher, Bach. I hated math for most of high-school, but I read this book between semesters and it changed my career choice.

So we should all reject tolerance wholesale if we think at any point in the future website could be in the out group? The point is to jostling and get along with and not murder peole who's ideas we despise at our very core.

Tolerance is radical "choosing to get along" or why bother?

How is this different than shutting down your phone at the border crossing?

It is dramatically different -- so different, in fact, that I suspect you haven't even attempted to think about it. Maybe willfully so.

You are a person entitled to rights. A company is not a person. Border searches are warrantless, arbitrary, and lack any oversight whatsoever. The company was searched by a court order signed by a judge for suspicion of a specific crime. In every way possible, these situations are entirely different.

I tend to lose track of time when I meditate, so I found an app that silences my phone and then alarms audibly every fifteen minutes. I guess that is my version of a mindfulness app.

What's the name of the app?

I would love to see an RSS reader that was smart enough to follow links and make a 'source graph' so it the NYT and Slashdot write articles about the same source they both appear in the same 'thread' about that source. To me that would be the killer app for RSS.

That's how I feel about social sites, unlike RSS I have no control about items, they just disappear in a sea of tweets. To me it sounds like you subscribe to a lot of spammy feeds.

I do fine without an algorithm, everything appears at the rate it is published in chronological order, if I dislike a feed or discover I rarely read it I remove it.

The future is finally looking up from my perspective, hopefully this leads to an asetic culture.