Blog | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

The story of my life in China is here.

Privacy at Apple  

Former Apple engineer David Shayer explains on TidBITS why he trusts Apple’s new exposure notification. He touches the internal processes that prevent excessive user tracking:

Once I had recorded how many times the Weather and Stocks apps were launched, I set up Apple’s internal framework for reporting data back to the company. My first revelation was that the framework strongly encouraged you to transmit back numbers, not strings (words). By not reporting strings, your code can’t inadvertently record the user’s name or email address. You’re specifically warned not to record file paths, which can include the user’s name (such as /Users/David/Documents/MySpreadsheet.numbers). You also aren’t allowed to play tricks like encoding letters as numbers to send back strings (like A=65, B=66, etc.)

Next, I learned I couldn’t check my code into Apple’s source control system until the privacy review committee had inspected and approved it. This wasn’t as daunting as it sounds. A few senior engineers wanted a written justification for the data I was recording and for the business purpose. They also reviewed my code to make sure I wasn’t accidentally recording more than intended.

Read the whole thing. It’s fascinating.

In the Transporter Room

Captain Picard and his crew stand in the transporter room and actor Patrick Stewart mixes up the terms:

Engage! No. Don’t engage… Emm… Energize! That’s what we say in this room. Energize!

Love this.

Sean Ellis Test  

The Pisano blog explaining the Sean Ellis Test:

Sean Ellis test was formed thanks to the experiences gained during the consultation period, and in a very short time, it became a standard throughout the industry. The most indicative question addressed to the clients in this qualitative test is as following:

How would you feel if you could no longer use our product? - Very disappointed - Somewhat disappointed - Not disappointed (it really isn’t that useful)

If the ratio of the answer “very disappointed” is more than %40, then well-done to you; that means you have the product/market fit.

Drunken Walk  

First Round Review follows Credit Karma’s former Chief Product Officer Nikhyl Singhal. I love his term for the pre product/market phase:

Phase 1: “Drunken walk." The company’s goal is to experiment as much as possible to find product/market fit.

Every C-3PO Costume

Wired:

Anthony Daniels, who most famously portrays C-3PO in the Star Wars series of films, sits down with WIRED to discuss, in detail, the variety of costumes he has worn while filming Star Wars. Anthony explains just how he was able to fit into the costume and what his thoughts were when he first saw Ralph McQuarrie’s designs.

A Billion Viruses

Jörg Blech, writing for Der Spiegel:

There are up to a billion viruses in our intestines alone – per gram of content.

Turns out those viruses are bacteriophages.

Ed Yong (who wrote the amazing article about Giraffes) in The Atlantic:

This isn’t an infection in any meaningful way. The phages aren’t hijacking human cells to make more copies of themselves, as viruses like influenza, Zika, or Ebola might. Instead, Barr thinks that the cells are in control. They’re actively engulfing phages, and shuttling them from one end to the other. Why?

They might help our immune system fight bacteria.

Phu My Hung

Phu My Hung is one of my favorite places in Saigon. It has so many nice corners, a lot of soothing greenery 😉 and walking around the area is pure pleasure.

This Website Will Self-Destruct  

ThisWebsiteWillSelfdestruct.com:

Hi,

I’m a website. I’ll be gone soon, and that’s okay.

You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.

That’s okay though.

Until then, let me know how you’re doing. Other people will be able to read what you write, but your name or identity won’t be attached to anything, so feel free to say what’s on your mind.

It’s been a rough month.

With love,

ThisWebsiteWillSelfdestruct (dot) com

Head over and read the messages. Or send one yourself and keep this wonderful page alive.

It seems to have survived for three weeks already.

Five Steps to Your Ideas  

Chuck Frey on The Sweet Setup:

Like many things in business, creativity responds well to a process — one that guides you along the path of birthing, nurturing and implementing game-changing ideas. This simple system includes 5 steps:

Investigate → Generate → Incubate → Evaluate → Activate

It never ceases to amaze me how all these techniques can be expressed as ways through the Munich Procedural Model of product development.

Gell-Mann Amnesia  

Michael Crichton in his talk Why Speculate? given at the International Leadership Forum:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

How to Choose a Chinese Name  

Sinosplice founder John Pasden:

Should learners of Chinese have a Chinese name? That’s a good question, but it’s not one that I’ll be answering in this article. Assuming that you feel you need a Chinese name, there are several approaches that you can take, depending on your preferences and your needs.

I got my Chinese name assigned when I enrolled in Tongji University.

Marry Early  

Viet Tuan for VnExpress International:

Vietnam is urging citizens to marry before 30 and bear children early to maintain an ideal replacement fertility rate. […]

The decision calls for people to marry before they are 30 and bear children early. Women should have their second child before 35, it advises.

The reason being:

Vietnam’s population hit 96.2 million last year, which is third in Southeast Asia and 15th globally, according to the Central General Census and Housing Steering Committee.

The country however reached a turning point in 2015 when it started to become one of the countries with the fastest aging populations in the world, the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs said in a 2016 report.

Arai

Each Arai helmet is hand-crafted. And the professional racers get to wear the same products as the consumers.

The Design Squiggle  

Damien Newman created a squiggle to symbolizes the design process from research on the left via concept and prototyping in the middle to the final design on the right.

The Design Squiggle

The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com

The person who asks is a fool for five minutes, but the person who does not ask remains a fool forever.

–– Georg Christoph Lichtenberg?