DEMAREE.ME

Mar 7 2010

#Portal
#Valve
#gaming

You Just Keep On Trying Till You Run Out Of Cake

If you hadn’t heard, Valve is expected to announce Portal 2 this Tuesday at GDC. GameInformer’s upcoming cover story on the new game leaked over the weekend, and the helpful folks at the Portal Wiki scanned and transcribed it.

The whole article is worth reading, so I won’t summarize it here. But I will point out one interesting detail: the the list of launch platforms on the first page of the article includes the Mac, confirming what you already knew if you’ve been following Valve’s recent teaser campaign. Even so, let’s take a step back and ponder this: Portal 2 is a major game from a big-time developer, and it will have Mac support on day one.

Of course, “Mac support” can mean a lot of things. EA has been selling “Mac-compatible” versions of its games on launch day for years. But they cheat: their Mac versions are in fact just the Windows versions running in an emulator.

But Valve is a company known for making quality products. Emulated Windows games are adequate at best, and I just don’t see Valve shipping something that’s just adequate.

#psych
#creativity

Depression's Upside

Sadness, it turns out, may have benefits. A pair of psychologists believes that when we suffer setbacks, ruminating over them actually helps us recover and improve by forcing us to study painful situations, and come to logical conclusions about how they came about, and how to fix them.

The researchers, Andy Thomson and Paul Andrews, hypothesize that in depressed patients, a part of the brain responsible for attention and problem solving becomes more active. This implies that at least as far as the brain is concerned, figuring out why you hate your job isn’t that different from solving a Sudoku puzzle.

Consider a young professor on tenure track who was treated by Thomson. The patient was having difficulties with his academic department. “This guy was used to success coming easy, but now it wasn’t,” Thomson says. “I made it clear that I thought he’d need some time to figure out his next step. His problem was like a splinter, and the pain wouldn’t go away until the splinter was removed.” Should the patient leave the department? Should he leave academia? Or should he try to resolve the disagreement? Over the next several weeks, Thomson helped the patient analyze his situation and carefully think through the alternatives. “We took it one variable at a time,” Thomson says. “And it eventually became clear to him that the departmental issues couldn’t be fixed. He needed to leave. Once he came to that conclusion, he started feeling better.”

It also seems the relationship between sadness and analytical thinking can easily work the other way:

In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. …

When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

You could easily replace ‘writing’ in these examples with ‘writing software,’ and you’d be describing every really good programmer I’ve ever met.

Ars Technica vs. ad blockers

Ars Technica editor-in-chief Ken Fisher, following up on a failed experiment in blocking users of ad-blocking software from the site:

As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature. We’ve all seen it happen. I am very proud of the fact that we routinely talk to you guys in our feedback forum about the quality of our ads. I have proven over 12 years that we will fight on the behalf of readers whenever we can. Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads. But any of you reading this site for any significant period of time know that these are few and far between. We turn down offers every month for advertising like that out of respect for you guys. We simply ask that you return the favor and not block ads.

I work for a web site that like Ars is part of an old-media conglomerate, that depends on ad revenue to survive, and this is a real thing. It doesn’t matter if you think web sites should or shouldn’t be ad supported. It doesn’t matter if you think we’re idiots who need to be forced to find a better, more sustainable business model. When you block ads, you are costing people money they can’t afford to lose.

And I should also say, about those annoying expandable ads Fisher refers to, that when Ars turns those down they are leaving a lot of money on the table in order to ensure a quality product. That’s really awesome.

#Alex Payne
#OkCupid
#love

“True love will sneak up on you. Let it.”

Alex Payne, who’s getting married next week to a lady it turns out he met on OkCupid.

I don’t know Alex—though we did meet once at RailsConf, back in my “fat dorkwad” phase—but he’s a quality gentleman, and his OkCupid experience sounds pretty consistent with mine.

#Yelp

Yelp's CEO Responds to Extortion Charges with Not One, But Two Straw-Man Arguments

Jeremy Stoppelman, on the Yelp company blog:

We’ll be the first to admit that, by conventional standards, Yelp can seem weird. We’re different than other review sites and that can throw people off. The main basis for confusion: Yelp has an automated system in place that helps to maintain the legitimate quality of content. This automated system often removes reviews from business pages that people don’t want removed.

What does that even mean?

It means through an automated software algorithm, we filter reviews that might be shills or malicious spam. Because this is a difficult task, sometimes that results in legitimate reviews being suppressed from business pages.

It’s worth repeating: Legitimate content, i.e. real reviews, will sometimes not appear on a business page.

It’s counter-intuitive, right? You’d think we would want as much content on Yelp as possible, so why wouldn’t we show all of it?

That’s a very good question, and it speaks to the core of Yelp’s problem: they just aren’t transparent enough, and they think that’s a good thing.

Stoppelman’s engaging in an interesting bit of doublethink here. He’s saying their filtering algorithm sometimes turns up false positives, apparently often enough for people to mistake the automated filtering for salespeople manually deleting good reviews. As a software developer, this leads me to believe the algorithm is not stable, and can’t be trusted.

But Stoppelman is saying that because the process is automated, it should and must be trusted. It’s just that people have trouble understanding how “nuanced” it is, and people who see a conspiracy are just personifying Yelp’s inscrutable filtering system.

And as if one straw man weren’t enough, he piles on one (or two) more in attributing the lawsuits to “the Orly Taitz of internet lawyers,” implying that this would be just a casual disagreement between Yelp and business owners, except for greedy charlatans who want attention and a quick buck.

Here’s my take: if you’re right, you shouldn’t need to work this hard to prove it. I don’t think Stoppelman is lying; if he and some former salespeople all say it’s not possible to manually suppress reviews, that’s probably true. But they’re making excuses for their methodology instead of just apologizing and trying to work through this crisis. They don’t look guilty, but they definitely don’t look innocent.

This is La Boite in Austin, a café built in a shipping container that serves French pastries and French press coffee. There’s something wonderful about repurposing something so hard, cold and industrial into a delicate little café. From Neighborhood Treasure, a collection of photos of special local hangouts, in Pictory. View full size version

This is La Boite in Austin, a café built in a shipping container that serves French pastries and French press coffee. There’s something wonderful about repurposing something so hard, cold and industrial into a delicate little café.

From Neighborhood Treasure, a collection of photos of special local hangouts, in Pictory.

Mar 5 2010

#iPad

iPad Has a Ship Date: April 3

That’s just the regular Wi-Fi model; Wi-Fi + 3G ones aren’t out until “late April.” Both versions will be available for pre-order (either for shipping, or for in-store pickup at an Apple Retail Store) starting next Friday, March 12.

Note that the shipping iPad does not have a camera. (Not that any sane person expected Apple to add a camera, but anyway.)

Also, the iBooks app (and yes, it’s an app, not bundled with the iPad) will be available from the App Store on April 3. No word yet on whether the iPad version of iWork will also be available that day.

Mar 1 2010

#iphone
#usability
#instapaper

“Losing your read position is a form of minor data loss.”
Marco Arment, whose latest version of the Instapaper Pro iPhone app adds a fallback for people who accidentally trigger the ‘scroll-to-top’ behavior by tapping on the status bar—a feature that, let’s be honest, most iPhone OS users probably don’t even realize is there.