I love Little Voices to get a peaceful Twitter experience. I don’t love that I can only get it on my iPhone. I check Twitter on all my devices, and going from the quiet feed of Little Voices to the chaos of my standard feed is counter-productive. If only there was a way to get at least some of the Little Voices experience on my other devices…

Oh, wait. There is: Tweetbot. Specifically, Tweetbot’s mute filters.

Tweetbot’s mute filters are insanely powerful, and can mute keywords, clients, and even with regular expressions. I set up three filters to approximate the Little Voices experience in Tweetbot. Here they are:

^(@.*)

This regular expression mutes all tweets that start with an @-reply. A lot of the people I follow also follow each other, which is fine, but I don’t need to see everyone’s conversations in my timeline. If someone wants to @-reply me, though, I still see it in Tweetbot’s replies tab, though.

http

This one just blocks links. I’m using Nuzzel to see what links are being shared in my timeline. Nuzzel isn’t perfect, but it helps me to separate the social aspect of Twitter from the news gathering aspect.

twitter.com

My last mute filter blocks quoted tweets. I like the Quoted Tweet feature to add context to links, but it’s increasingly just snark and other noise. Hiding them feels much calmer and relaxing when I check the feed in Tweetbot. It also hides images and video posted through Twitter, which is most. I might add additional filters to hide other images, but I think the link filter above should cover that.

The only thing I can’t do with Mute Filters that Little Voices does is hide retweets. That has to be done on an account-by-account basis. Fortunately, in Tweetbot you can easily turn off retweets by long tapping on a user’s profile picture in your timeline and hitting “Disable Retweets.” I’m not going to disable retweets from everyone, anyway, RTs are a great way to puncture my filter bubble. I’ll just turn them off from people who don’t really add much to my timeline.

With just a couple of simple filters, I’ve made my Twitter experience much nicer. Plus, since Tweetbot mute filters sync between devices, I get the same, peaceful experience across every device I use to read Twitter. For any of you who feel overwhelmed by their social media feeds, consider throwing down for Tweetbot, and taking control with filtering. You might want to keep links in, or media, or whatever brings you joy. Don’t just take the firehose, or let an algorithm decide what you should and should not see.

The NSA has a bit of a problem with people poking their noses into data they shouldn’t be poking their noses into. Sometimes, it’s their lovers—or their ex-lovers. It’s common enough that the intelligence service employees have a term for it: LOVEINT. Think about it: if you had access to the communications data for every American, wouldn’t you see what you could dredge up? Especially if you’re a jilted ex. LOVEINT, fortunately, carries consequences if it’s caught—well, sometimes.

Of course, the NSA isn’t the only people collecting data on our every move. The data stockpiles owned by Google and Facebook, as well as older-school data brokers like Axiom, are massive enough to rival the NSA in size. The key difference between the NSA and the data we fed to tech companies however, is that we give our data up to technology companies willingly. Perhaps unwittingly, but there’s a key sense of apathy every time Facebook and Google sink their claws deeper into our data. Though it looks like that might be changing.

But another aspect of all that data collection is whether we trust who has access to it. I’m not talking about malicious hackers getting access into the Facebook database and finding out everything it knows about everyone. I’m more concerned about the stereotypical jilted ex who uses their access to do a deep dive into what their company knows about their former partner. No matter how well you lock down what other people can see on Facebook, someone—likely multiple someones—at the company have access into the database.

Data Facebook and Google sell to advertisers is anonymized, but we don’t know where that anonyimization happens. Someone buying targeted advertising through DoubleClick might not know they’re targeting 32-year-old male, Richard J. Anderson of Briarwood, New York—just a male between the ages of 18–35 who lives in the Northeast, and likes Apple products and 80’s music. The full profile that connects to me has to exists somewhere, though—as does the full profile that connects to you.

I would not be surprised if Facebook, Google, et. al. have procedures, plans, and security audits in place to prevent unauthorized access. I would also not be surprised if they didn’t, or if those plans existed only on paper. The truth is that we don’t know. There have been data leaks from Facebook, but only their shadow profiles, due to a bug, but that’s a large-scale issue.

LOVEINT is smaller scale: sneaking a peek at data for a few people, often just one. A leak that small could fall through the cracks of any sort of protection system. Without transparency into the data collection and protection policies of Internet data brokers, however, we don’t know how unsafe we are. We’re not just putting our trust in these companies to use our data responsibly. We’re trusting that every employee with database access will do the same. That’s asking a lot, and if the NSA can’t avoid it, what makes any of us think Facebook and Google can?

We might be swerving anxiously close to our $1500 laptops turning our workspaces into our own private Skinner boxes. But I’m intrigued by the possible long-term impact of millions of digital assistants who expect to be treated with dignity. It could be a good training sim for all of those executives who, as children, were used to getting everything they want, and as a result they’ve come to think of every other human being as a non-playing character

If Cortana offers a curt replies when she’s treated like office equipment (or, worse, when she’s treated the way that women generally get treated in the workplace), and the only way to get that document printed or that appointment added to the calendar is to say please and thank you and address her by her proper name, not as “sugar-toes,” it could train these jerks to treat humans as humans, too.

— Andy Ihnatko – “Microsoft’s Cortana Designed to Not Put Up With Dudes’ Bullshit”

Interesting thoughts from Andy on the way we interact with the virtual personalities in our lives. Is it better that our virtual assistants simply take whatever commands they’re given, regardless of tone? Should they, like Cortana, push back against being demeaned?

Whether we’re giving our AIs female personas—which is an interesting can of worms in and of itself—or not, they should push back against abuse. We are supposed interact with virtual assistants like we would interact with real human beings. At a certain point, enough negative interactions with any real person would get them to shut down the conversation. Why should virtual assistants bend over and take it?

Did you hear? iPad sales have dropped again. Clearly this means that the iPad—if not the entire tablet industry as a whole—is doomed. As Jason Snell, an iPad fan, put it, “[P]erhaps I’m kidding myself, and in the end the iPad will be small niche product, an outsized iPhone accessory.” Sure, Apple’s probably not going to sunset the darn thing, but five years in, and clearly the iPad style tablet is not the future.

Or, you know, maybe the doomsayers are overreacting. Here’s an interesting measure. In 2014, the iPad accounted for 70% of all tablet web traffic, at least in North America. I can’t find statistics for 2015, but I see no reason to assume that number has changed much. People have iPads, and they use their iPads. It might not translate to upgrade sales, at least not yet, but any product with that much of a share in its market can’t be a complete failure, let alone doomed.

Back in November, I suggest that the iPad of 2015 was the Mac of 1990. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but let me expand on it a bit. The original Macintosh was a brand new idea of what a computer could be [1], and formed the foundation of modern computing. It was revolutionary, it had passionate users who stuck with the platform during Apple’s mid–90s doldrums, but PC users until the mid–2000s considered it a toy that couldn’t be used for real work. (I should know. I was one of ’em.)

In the same way, the iPad is a brand new idea of what a computer could be. It has its passionate users who are sticking with the platform during the sales doldrums, but hardcore traditional computers users often think of it as a toy for writing iPad reviews. Episode 154 of the Accidental Tech Podcast lays out the counter case against the iPad as a device for real work. Sure, people like Marco, Casey, and John can’t do their programming jobs on an iPad. That doesn’t mean you never will be able to. I’m certain in the next couple years, we’ll see some sort of iOS development environment on iOS, if only because I suspect Apple’s on iOS app developers would love to write iOS apps on iOS.

But as long as Apple continues to develop it, the iPad should become a powerful enough computing platform to replace the Mac for most people.

Ask yourself if you can do all your work on a Macintosh II, or even a Mac 512k. The answer is probably going to be no, but that’s fine—they don’t make those anymore. Now ask yourself if you think you’ll be able to do all your work on the iPad of 2025. The answer to that is almost certainly yes. We just have to wait until then.

To go back to the Mac for some historical parallels—Apple sold the Apple II along the Macintosh for almost a decade. It took until the early 1990s for Macintoshes to outsell Apple IIs, and the product line was finally discontinued in 1993. I don’t think we can expect to see the Mac discontinued that soon, but history does serve as a guide here.

I’d love to have some Macintosh sales numbers to use for illustrative purposes here, but I can’t find them. Either way, maybe we should look past the numbers for now. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to just ask people for a little patience as the iPad develops into a fuller-featured platform. And when it does, maybe the sales will finally start going up again. Was there this much doom and gloom about the Macintosh in the late 80s?

Right now, nobody seems to remember any of those upshots. In fact, people don’t seem to be just tired of the CD; it feels as if they’re actively calling for its demise. When vinyl began dying off in the early Nineties, many people, me included, mourned its passing on many levels. But we didn’t dance in the streets that it was in its death throes, the way so many seem to be doing these days with the CD. A friend recently called to ask what he should do with his shelves of discs, since many of his friends were strongly urging him to chuck them. That’s right: People were actually saying he should throw his CDs in the garbage. (You can recycle them, you know.)

— David Browne – “In Defense of the CD”

The CD itself is a pretty crappy format—“Perfect Sound Forever” my foot. A worn out vinyl record still sounds like music. A scratched up CD sounds like glitchy noise, which might be good if you’re into that sort of thing. I still buy CDs, though, along with vinyl, and the rare cassette tape. Vinyl can often be dear, and the penchant of vinyl producers to go with fancy colored vinyl and other various gee-gaws doesn’t help.

There’s value in a physical format for media, even if the CDs I buy often just end up collecting dust on a shelf next to my desk while I listen to the MP3 rips. The practical advantage of this, however, is that I never have to want for getting my music to play. A poor Internet connection will never keep a local MP3 file from playing back perfectly. You can’t stream music on the subway.