Listening to the most recent episode of ATP, I learned a surprising fact about how Apple developers see their user statistics: the number of people who opt out of sharing is not available, and the only statistics developers get is about the users who opted in. This may make naïve sense — hey, they don’t want you to know about them so we’ll erase them from existence Soviet-style — but is in fact statistical malpractice. The numbers Apple does share are only a sample of the total user base, which is fine as long as you know or can estimate the size of the population you are sampling. Without a way to estimate the denominator, the numbers are meaningless.
The bare minimum that Apple could and should do, without breaking any privacy rules, is to share the number of people who opted out. With this number in hand, a developer would be able to project worst-case scenarios and likely ranges for each statistic of interest. If Apple dedicated just a tiny bit more resources to developer relations, they could automate this step and build in worst-case numbers into the interface. A more sophisticated company that cares about the developer ecosystem could even create complex predictions models that would give both worst-case numbers and the 95% confidence intervals for each statistic in question.
Why should Apple care, other than doing a solid to their developer ecosystem with a minimal investment? Well, by making their default user statistics useless they are in fact incentivizing developers large and small to track their users by other means. Large developers may do that anyway since they are likely to have a could component to their app. But an indie developer may turn to third party services: if I am a teenager working on my first big app I will probably turn to the fastest and cheapest way to track, and not knowing anything about anything I am going to guess some of the offerings in that part of the price-value spectrum are going to be less than scrupulous.
So this is how Apple’s privacy-minded view combined with thriftiness and lack of care towards developer experience can lead directly to worse overall privacy for their users. What a surprise.
📚 Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, who lists Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, Benoit Mandelbrodt and Nassim Taleb as his main intellectual influences. It shows. And since Flyvbjerg’s book is lighter than what people on that list tend to publish it can also serve as a gateway for those not initiated in probabilistic thinking.
🍿 Anora (2024) telegraphs what it will do and then does it, and I have become so jaded by movies that I thought it would never do that and yet it did. What 60 years ago was the price of entry is now so rare that it turns you into an automatic award contender. So be it.
Happy Friday! A few links for the week’s end:
ChatGPT can now take any photo you send it and create an image of any style based on it (↬Stratechery). The results range from OK to spectacular, particularly if the style is simple, and the Internet is now awash with famous photos done in the style of Studio Ghibli.
Miyazaki would be horrified and out of respect to him I won’t link to any of it, but this update has immediate and great effect on our household as we will now have all of our family photos redone in his style, for personal and private use.
A few changes to my iPhone setup, courtesy of a YouTube video which is itself c/o r/dumbphones:
So far so good.
With 23andMe closing shop today and the bluebird bio sale to private equity last month it is clear that the DNA bubble has burst.
Every bubble leaves something positive in its wake. Yes, there was a lot of speculation with tulips in the Netherlands, but the Netherlands is still the world’s top exporter of cut flowers. There was a railway bubble in the United States that left us with a lot of railroad tracks and not so great passenger rail. More recently, the dot-com bubble left decent network infrastructure and a lot of IT professionals with nothing better to do than to invent Web 2.0.
And so with DNA. Sequencing has never been cheaper, and it does have some valid uses. Unfortunately, there are many harms of fetishizing DNA, from thinking that DNA mutations are the be-all and end-all of every disease pathology — think, “the fat gene” — to completely missing the point of the entire field of epigenetics, which has much more to it than molecular changes to histones and base pairs.
Business and finance are now the first to realize that there is more to genetics than DNA, and more to medicine than genetics. Academia and funders, ossified as they are, will be slower on the uptake and come to this epiphany one retirement at a time.
🍿 Martha (2024) was well worth the time (nearly two hours — long for a documentary). Excerpts from her 30-minute rant to the NYT about why she hated it were the cherry on top. Only in America…
A quick Ranking of DC restaurants I’ve eaten at within the past 6 months of so:
Moon Rabbit > Rumi’s Kitchen > Chloe > Blue Duck Tavern > Rasika > Albi > The Dabney
For all his good work, Jose Andres’s restaurants are lackluster. Oyamel was just OK. Jaleo and China Chilcano stank. Haven’t been to Zaytinya but I doubt it could be better than Rumi’s Kitchen and Chloe.
It was time for my quarterly now page update. Ludus longus, vita brevis.