Some things I read this week Dec 5 — Dec 11
Aliens, robots, VR, AI, decentralization, and more in this edition of what I read last week. I’m trying out some new formatting as well, so please let me know what you think!
In case you missed last week:
Interesting
My friend Lexi just started her own summary of things she read the previous week. Some fantastic stuff in there and great inspiration.
An ancient still unsolved mystery. Why where so many settlements burned every 70 years or so? The evidence shows it wasn’t accidental, due to warfare, or for demolition.
Not an idea that I totally agree with, but still an interesting proposal on how to tie policy to outcomes.
Product Management
Robots
Virtual Reality
The theme of these first VR articles is that the business and economics of VR are more complicated than people seem to understand. There’s already been a lot of finger pointing at the different headset creators, a lot of shots fired at Oculus, and these posts aim to give a better picture of where things stand and the road ahead.
All of the big names in VR hardware are starting to work together to create open standards and to solve industry concerns.
Who has more of a closed system, Vive or Oculus. This article does a great job of showing how most people’s analysis of Oculus, Vive, and Valve has been way off.
Creating a VR experience isn’t as simple as plugging together a bunch of pre-made things like legos.
Hopefully, this means you’ll soon be able to see your hands and use them in mobile VR.
Watch a professional sculpt in VR. Mesmerizing!
Design & User Interface
I don’t agree with the conclusion of this post, but I do agree with the premise. There needs to be a balance between beauty and function, attractive color choices and readability.
Using Flexbox for layout design has certainly made my layouts easier to craft. Yoga attempts to bring Flexbox everywhere.
Does UI design need to be intuitive to be successful?
Artificial Intelligence
Politics
Decentralization & Cryptography
Good security is useless if no one uses it. The future of security will depend on putting user experience on the same level of importance as strong security.
With the state of the internet today, websites you use and interact with can see your password and personal information in plain text. If a hacker wants access to this data, they only need find a flaw in one of these site to get troves of personal data. This has already happened with the likes of Home Depot, Target, Sony, and many more. In the decentralized future, you own your data.
Zero knowledge (zk) proofs are an amazing way to have a system that can prove a statement is true without giving away an information it used to determine it’s truth. Currently, this allows things like anonymous trustworthy voting system, and the the anonymous currency Zcash, and it’s only a matter of time before we see these crop in other decentralized systems.
This is an older article, but it’s still an interesting read on the powers the NSA may have.
Blockchain technologies have been used more frequently to create “tokens”, almost like securities or stock. May of the big players are coming together to better define that process and its legal implications.
