Privacy and product design.
Cases where the design of a product tells you what its makers actually optimized for. Includes the two-post account recovery saga that took 60,000 views to resolve.
HumanSlop: How Does a $110 Billion Company Ship Software This Bad?
AI slop gets the criticism, but a $110 billion utility shipped a billing site that caps passwords at 13 characters and rejects American Express CVVs.
Read→Email Is Awful. AI Can Fix It, but Only If We Protect the Inbox.
Email desperately needs AI classification, but the inbox is too sensitive to casually hand to another cloud service. The case for privacy-first filtering.
Read→The One Place I Wouldn’t Replace Humans With AI Is Customer Care
AI can automate customer service, but it should never stand between a frustrated customer and a human being.
Read→Why I Quit Duolingo After a 1,000-Day Streak
After a 1,000-day Duolingo streak, I quit. Here is what daily gamification taught me about proxy metrics and products that optimize the score, not the mission.
Read→Microsoft Gave My Son’s Account Back. It Shouldn’t Have Taken 60,000 Views.
Microsoft restored my son’s hijacked account after an escalation, but the ordinary recovery process should not require a viral blog post to work.
Read→Microsoft’s Account Recovery Is Security Theater
Microsoft has the evidence to restore my son’s hijacked account, yet its recovery process protects the attacker. Here is why that is security theater.
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