An Amazon employee from 1997-2004, Eugene Wei spells things out for people who still parrot out the lazy argument around Amazon’s profitless business model:

Amazon has seen that lowering its shipping costs and increasing the speed of shipping items to customers is like a shot of adrenaline to customer’s propensity to buy from them, and so it has doubled down on building more and more fulfillment centers around the world. When I joined Amazon it had one fulfillment center. Today it has dozens just in the US alone, and I would not be surprised if it has more than 100 fulfillment centers worldwide now.

That is a gargantuan investment, billions of dollars worth, and it takes a significant bite out of Amazon’s free cash flow. Add in its investments in infrastructure to support a growing AWS client base, and Amazon has again hiked its fixed cost base to a higher plateau. But for Amazon this is nothing new, it’s just the same typeface bolded.
And:
But Jeff [Bezos] is not wired that way. There are very few people in technology and business who are what I’d call apex predators. Jeff is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I’ve met in my life. An apex predator doesn’t wake up one day and decide it is done hunting. Right now I envision only one throttle to Jeff’s ambitions and it is human mortality, but I would not be surprised if one day he announced he’d started another side project with Peter Thiel to work on a method of achieving immortality.
As Eugene points out, the people who bitch and moan about the profitlessness of Amazon sound a lot like the people who bitch and moan about the slow, deliberate iterations Apple has with its products.

He’s all dressed in black.

via shoqvalue

The Most Fascinating Humans In New York, Collected In One Place:

At 21 years old, Brandon Stanton—the creative force behind the immensely popular photo blog Humans of New York—had flunked out of college (earning a combined score of zero on his five courses). Kicked out of his parent’s home, he was doing drugs, working at a dead end job at Applebee’s and living in his grandparent’s basement in Atlanta, Georgia. He was also convinced that he was going to write a bestseller.
I love stories like this—taking a hobby, a passion, a side project and turning it into much more than than what it might seem like at first glance.

MIT Technology Review: Data Shows Google’s Robot Cars Are Smoother, Safer Drivers Than You or I

Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.

A robot can probably wipe my ass better than I can, but that doesn’t mean I want it to. I’m a human being, I can do it my damn self, thank you. Perfection is overrated.

Update: Actually, a robot can totally wipe my ass, just stay away from my car keys.

New banner ads push actual Google results to bottom 12% of the screen

Google might want to add another sentence to their company motto: don’t be a glutton.
Seriously, Google, I think you have a dependency problem.
(Image taken from Ars Technica)

PandoDaily: Los Angeles School District’s $30 million iPad program falls flat

Last week, I wrote about how one-to-one tablet programs in Missouri and Texas K-12 schools had hit some road bumps. In North Carolina when 73,000 Amplify tablets arrived — from Robert Murdoch’s edtech company — a good chunk of them were shattered and labeled “dangerous.” The program got discontinued. In Texas, a consultant review of the science program iAchieve, that 70,000 students were doing on iPads, found it didn’t meet curriculum standards, and students weren’t learning what they were supposed to. The program was discontinued.

At the time I said, “Uh oh, this doesn’t bode well for the Los Angeles School District, which just ordered $30 million worth of $700 retina display iPads for its students.” School districts and tablet providers are screwing up the execution of what otherwise sounded pretty cool.
The key to improving student performance isn’t in iPads, or any other tablets. They’re not magical pills you give kids and they’ll suddenly all be A students.
It’s about great teachers using great technology.
Technology alone won’t do it.

via Stephen Hackett

From Spin:

A Tribe Called Quest will serve as the opening act for two shows on Kanye West’s fast-approaching Yeezus tour. That’s a noteworthy pairing in and of itself, but the upcoming gigs have taken on some extra heft now that Q-Tip has hinted they’ll be his group’s last-ever performances. “In August, ATCQ did our last show FOR Cali,” Tip tweeted on Wednesday (via Consequence of Sound). “It’s only right we do our FINAL 2 joints where we started… NYC.”
ATCQ opening for Kanye is like Led Zeppelin opening for Guns ‘n Roses.
I should be happy ATCQ is back together and on tour. And I am, it just feels weird.

—Salvatore Dali

Dave Wiskus shares the methods to his madness for the note-taking app, Vesper.
First off, Dave and his team members put a lot of time and effort into their creation. That said, I still think the rationale behind icon outlines is bad:

At first glance, it looked as though the fashionable thing to do in iOS 7 would be to take your existing icons and just turn them into outlines. That ends up looking pretty good for most glyphs, but instead of mimicking the style we wanted to emulate the spirit. It’s not about being thin or wispy, I don’t think. It’s about lightening the UI so the content can stand out more.
His rationale sounds good, but he still implemented outlined icons:

I’m going to once again quote Aubrey Johnson’s observations on the cognitive issues with hollow icons I quoted back on October 2nd:
Take a look at the example above. The red lines indicate areas where cognitive load is occurring. Your brain traces the shapes on the first row an average of twice as much. Your eye scans the outside shape and then scans the inner line to determine if there is value in the “hollow” section.

Icons without this empty core are processed as definite and only the outer lines are processed. Depending on the outline of the shape, this happens pretty fast. No matter the shape, though, the hollow icons take more time to process.
If I may be a broken record,
Hollow icons are an example of form over function.
Hollow icons are an example of form over function.
Hollow icons are an example of form over function.
Hollow icons are an example of form over function.
Hollow icons are an example of form over function.

Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland recented compared Oakland to Brooklyn.
Peter Lawrence Kane of The Bold Italic sees if this comparison holds up:

How cool is Oakland? Well, Manhattan is the global capital of all media. Brooklyn has Girls and writers named Jonathan. San Francisco has Looking, the newest Real World, and Blue Jasmine, as well as Twitter, Yelp, Reddit and all the rest. Oakland has Pandora and a growing number of high-profile tech companies, but not nearly as many ­- and there lays part of its charm, at least for now. Oakland is considered cooler by not being quite as marketable, because Manhattan and San Francisco – and, rapidly, Brooklyn – are taking coolness down with them as they ascend up out of reach. The human body is exquisitely attentive to a certain calculus wherein it feels its movement relative to everything going on around it, not just from geographical center to periphery but in the vertiginous up-is-really-down movement of the city and desire.
I lived in Manhattan for 12 years, 5 of which were in the the East Village—still one of the best neighborhoods in NYC. My brother moved to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn a few years ago and I will admit, if my wife and I ever move back to NYC, Brooklyn is one of the top places I’d consider moving to.
From what I’ve heard from natives here in San Francisco, Oakland doesn’t have BKLN Cool Status yet.

Taken from The Combustion Chamber