cassowary

How can someone seriously propose I put a copyrighted symbol in my text to let them know it's sarcastic? [rhetorical question device] I'll bet the world will be a better place if they profit off every sarcastic sentence someone writes. [sarcastic sentence device] If you're too dumb to work out what's sarcastic, why should you benefit from my help? [friendly period]

(nb. There's a missing "sarcastic sentence device", but I don't know where to put it, when it applies to a piece of punctuation.)

The point was that being displayed on my screen doesn't mean I read it. For instance, I have a problem where sometimes I'll log in to my phone and an app will be active. I don't want that app; I need to do a bank transaction. But now someone thinks their message has been read, when so far from reading it I don't even know it exists! It was just displayed on my screen for half a moment when my eyes and my attention was somewhere else. (Another common problem I have is when I send a message, and then they reply so fast that the message arrives at about the same time as I'm trying to return to the homescreen to ensure I get a notification when the message arrives. Well unfortunately the message arrived first, got marked as read and no notification exists. After twenty minutes I realise what happens but maybe I've already offended someone by "reading" their message and ignoring it.)

Delivered vs read is only accurate if you have an eye tracker.

The notification and icon badges help hide when you're sleeping, but they advertise when you're interacting with someone. You're "unseen" for twenty hours. The guy you're cheating with logs in and sends you a message. Five minutes later, you log in and read it. You wait two hours, read it again and send another message. He doesn't check for an hour. You're so longing for his response, so every five minutes you're logging in "how many ticks? what color? has he read it yet??". Once he's out of his meeting, he (finally noticing the notification) logs in and sends a message. Your activity drops off now that you have your reply, but you nevertheless send yours...

I'm not by any means a Snapchat power user. But I really like the way my phone tells me where my normal photos are taken — it makes it very easy to find the photos. Also, any chat app would benefit because it's very easy for me to remember "i was talking about foo with Bar when I was over in Baz", but much harder for me to remember when that happened. So to me location tracking would offer many useful features. (They may not be worth it, and even the useful ones might not be available, but those aren't answers to the question you asked.)

If this is true it isn't apparent to me. You're stating it as if it's received wisdom. Could you clarify?

(4) is an interesting question. Unfortunately it's much harder to understand than it is to ask. For instance, to people really understand, rather than just providing a thin illusion of understanding? What does it actually mean to understand something? Can you make a test that can distinguish arbitrary systems which truly understand from those which provide a thin illusion of understanding?

Optical illusions (there's also physical ones) are often demonstrations that the problems aren't solved in humans either; they're just "things that work sort of, some of the time, with caveats about how you define 'work'".

More so if you include reasoning illusions like people being more scared to catch a plane than drive a car or thinking that a lotto ticket is a good investment.

Human intelligence doesn't really meet intuitive definitions of human intelligence. But it does work well enough as long as you ignore all the times it doesn't.

An emergent property is precisely one that obtains unexpectedly from simple components. For instance, it is supposed by some that the universe truly consists of nothing more than electrons and quarks and what have you which interact in relatively simple ways, and that subjective human experience emerges from that. We then have a situation that is easier for us to reason about using higher level concepts, but there isn't a chapter in the laws of physics called "subjective human experience". That's in the book called "diverse applications of the basic laws of physics".

In any case, I dispute your facts too. I don't think we have the ability to cross apply our heuristics. I can calculate fairly accurately a lot of mathematical problems when I'm riding my bike, but put me in a maths class and I'm stuffed. I don't have independent access to those hacks.

I hate both. If "ask" is on, it's constantly harassing me. If "ask" is off, I have to search hard to find the setting that lets me connect to a wifi network in a tool that also lets me change the language I'm using.

Yes. Apple used to be about empowering people. That's what ease of use was about. You can keep doing the same thing and you get the same result, but when you're ready you can finally press that button you've always ignored. You'll discover something new which you might want to undo. But that's fine too, because it's clear and obvious how to.

This meant they got a reputation for building easy-to-use tools.

This meant they got a reputation for building things for people who want their stuff to just work.

This meant that they believed their role should be to remove things that are ugly or powerful, hiding features.

This means that they're no longer building easy-to-use tools. You don't know what your phone is going to do any more. You can't predict if wifi is off or not. There's two ways to turn wifi off, one of them doesn't work. One of them allegedly works. There's no way to know this without reading documentation or relying on word of mouth.

There's a good reason to want wifi to only be pseudo-off, but there's other ways they could have implemented this feature that would have been empowering. They opted for this one not because it's the right option, but because they've given up on the spirit that made them great in the first place.

RTFM. It's the new motto of the Apple apologist. Soon we'll be saying "next year will be the year of Apple on the desktop".

Hi Lathiat. Why do you need to disconnect from the current network? I can think of many alternatively implementations which would meet most requirements that have been proposed, like turning the wifi back on when the battery is charging or at 5am. All the proposals involve compromises, but it seems much easier to make a notice that clearly says "Wifi will reconnect at 5am" then to say "Wifi is still using your battery, but we've disconnected from the current network". I mean, the message itself fits in the same space as the current message, and the icon itself could have a timer band counting down till 5am so you know that it's only temporarily disabled. (I too have accidentally used up all my month's data because I left the wifi off for a few days. It's not nice. I'd appreciate a feature which deals with it. But this one is unpredictable, unreadable and confusing.)

Also, are you proposing that low power mode with wifi uses the same amount of power as lower power mode without wifi? If I know I'm not going to see a power point for many hours, I turn my phone onto low power mode and turn wifi off (and the brightness right down and some other things). I might do it as I leave the house in the morning when I still have 95% battery. In these cases, I very often need my phone most in precisely when the battery will be weakest.

That isn't fair. My microwave "doesn't work" until I press some buttons. I leave my bluetooth, wifi and data on most days because I have bluetooth headphones and I want people to be able to send me messages and stuff. Sometimes I turn them off to get the battery to last longer. It seems like it could be quite reasonable for a large group of non-technical users to be quite happy with a phone that turns off the radios when the screen is off.

That's a really silly reply. There's nothing in the UI that tells me turning Wifi off in the control centre has a different meaning today than it had last week. It's not at all clear that turning it off in the Settings app will have a different result. Literally. You're obliging us to read someone's mind.

Moreover, going to the Settings app is laborious. There's a lot of stuff there. When you open it, you don't always "start from the start", so that pulling it up requires working out where it is in the app you are in order to navigate appropriately. Instead of focusing on the task of disabling wifi and going somewhere, you have to focus on the task of navigating an app. And also if you have a phone that wasn't bought yesterday, it will probably close some other app you were running because it's run out of RAM.

All so that some weird usecase I can't understand is available. This fellow is the only person who's described a usecase for disconnecting from wifi networks while leaving wifi on, insofar as leaving the radio on won't have upsetting results for him. But the feature doesn't work for him.

For me, sometimes I need my battery to last all day not just till dinner. I want the radio off.

I can't think of a non-technical/non-exceptional use that is benefited by this feature.

(NB. I quite like the idea that my wifi will spontaneously turn back on again when the battery is charged adequately, or at 5am or some such. It would've saved my data on numerous occasions. But that's a different feature that hasn't been implemented.)

Honestly I don't think it's effectively identical for the vast majority of users.

Every single time I've wanted to turn off Wifi and Bluetooth, it's because I know I'm going to struggle to get my battery to last till I can charge it again. I'm going to be out and on the move, so Wifi has no value to me except as a battery drain.

In fact, I struggle to think of any other ordinary use for disabling Wifi and Bluetooth. The real exceptions are like (I have this one now) I don't have ADSL at home but I haven't been bothered to turn off the modem or my mate who's paranoid of being stalked by companies. But those are exceptional. I wouldn't write a feature to deal with them. Except to keep the battery going, who turns wifi off?

It sounds like I've lost a real feature and I don't know how to get it back any more. If I want to be able to send and receive data but I want my phone to last all day[], what can I do?

[]: NB. The only reason I want my phone to last all day is because I want to use it. Consequently, saying "my phone lasts all day no problem" isn't an answer. You probably don't use your phone like I do.

How do I know when I can use it? and if my phone doesn't have 3D Touch, how can I access the same features? (I don't know if my phone has 3D Touch, but I guess it doesn't because I've never been able to make it do something different. Except once when I long clicked the control centre and it did something different. I don't know if that's 3D Touch though. My iPhone used to teach me how to use it, now it just hides things because it makes someone else feel like an elegant designer.)