This helped me to find out that my Huawei phone had "AI Touch" enabled. That apparently is a feature to touch any image with two fingers and the super smart AI finds out what is shown in the picture and where to buy it.
Goes without saying that I immediately disabled this. /shrug
The next version: When you touch an item in a photo you automatically buy it. There is supposedly a way to see that this is happening and cancel it, but that part of the interface isn't intuitive and attempts to cancel more often result in additional purchases.
This cannot be turned off, and the new phone can't be used in the first place until you set up credit card billing. It also seems to trigger "automatically" and "by accident" very frequently.
It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!)
Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone, which was the only way I could see to enforce that he couldn't do it again, but then someone made a payment and ended up saving the payment method again.)
I feel like it's only a matter of time before it happens again; at least the address is correct now so we'd actually receive the item if we were unable to cancel/refund.
I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics.
They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do.
I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to.
I've been frequently flabbergasted how these obvious observations come across as novel to people I talk to, as if 2 year olds have their own email address and password.
I even heard someone say unboxing and cartoon videos "somehow" are popular among women in their 30s.
Oh my god. As a father of two small kids (4 y.o. and ~1.75 y.o), I've been watching this happen in front of me every day for years, yet somehow the implications never registered. Thank you for writing this - and yes, I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree.
Even though we're way below what seems to be average in terms of exposing kids to digital content, at this point my wife's digital activity on Spotify, YouTube, Netflix and Storytel is actually between ~30% (YouTube) to 95% (Spotify) the activity of our kids. Spotify only plays music they like to sing or dance to. Storytel is pretty much only ever playing kids' stories (to the point that even with kids asleep, we sometimes let those stories play as background noise). YouTube much less, plus I tend to yt-dlp any music/show we intend to play to kids often (which probably generates its own interesting telemetry stream, as we play those files from my wife's previous phone). Netflix... Netflix has Paw Patrol.
I bet that her advertising profile is in half really an advertising profile of our kids. And I imagine the effect is much, much stronger with moms that hand their phones to their toddlers (we don't).
On that note, I remember "learning" more than a decade ago that apparently casual games are a huge market, very popular with adult women. I kind of accepted it as fact, even though it went entirely against my life experience ("they must be right and I must be wrong, after all they've measured it, they're doing Data Science!" - thought the naive me, not yet aware just how much bullshit this "data science" is). But now I'm reconsidering - it would make much, much more sense if those results were actually coming from kids (up to teenage years) playing those games on their parents' computers / phones, logged in to their accounts.
EDIT: interesting corollary - IIRC, the thing about causal games and adult women came up around the time Zynga became a big deal, and was quoted to explain and justify investing in/developing these kinds of games. But if it's really just a misclassification - i.e. the market is real, but it's not the women after 30 that play those games, but their kids, then Zynga and all the follow-up companies were effectively targeting kids, while thinking (or pretending) they're targeting adults.
Right, the vast invisible army of 30-something suburban female gamers playing Roblox and Minecraft on weekdays between 3-5pm.
It's worth noting adult advertising fetches a higher rate than child advertising and ad networks will fill at a much greater rate, especially in RTB systems.
So even if they do realize it, it's um, better to stay quiet and pretend.
> Right, the vast invisible army of 30-something suburban female gamers playing Roblox and Minecraft on weekdays between 3-5pm.
Yeah, when you put it that way... I really feel ashamed now, because as I said, I actually believed that, back when it was not Minecraft and Roblox, but a some random mind-dumbingly stupid casual games. I explained it to myself as those women using those games to relax or wind down after a hard day of work (at home, at dayjob, or most likely both). It was almost believable with simple causal games - ones that you can pick up at any moment and play 5 or 15 minutes at a time.
Good point about advertising rates. This seems like a good explanation why this isn't talked about more.
> I'm a big believer that toddlers are a large contribution to behavior analytics and dictate modern design by analytics.
Holy shit, you just blew my mind. This explains so much of the mainstream internet's degeneration into a family-friendly dumbed-down version of it.
The dangers of having big corporations raising a new generation of people (instead of their parents doing it) are even more concerning. I bet that's the exact reason we are moving towards a woke authoritorian dystopia.
That's not really what I meant. I was talking user flow, CTA placement, sizing, color, presentation medium (such as video versus text), length of text content (toddlers find lots of words less attractive than colorful drawings and big letters), ad placement and design, recommendation algorithms biasing towards repetition, whimsical animal and "America's funniest home videos" style content, animations, bright colors, things like that.
All these techniques capture the attention of children who then get miscategorized as their parents.
What you're talking about is companies trying to maximize their customer base by trying not to offend or alienate people. That makes things less direct, more bland and less specialized. That's because there's been efforts to decrease localization of international marketing and expand customer bases.
Starbucks, for instance, is so boring because it's identical in every country and thus caters to the sensibilities of everyone. They avoid shapes, flavors, numbers and colors that are off-putting in other cultures and use ingredients that can be globally sourced. That's just international industrial capitalism trying to be efficient.
The real problem is suburbia has been robbed of local color and all you have left there is Starbucks. It's a soulless corporate wasteland that totally sucks. I agree. That's a city planning and urban development problem.
I wasn't trying to mirror your opinions, I just gave my own thoughts.
If toddler's usage in analytics can drive UI design, I don't see why would it be implausible that it also drives content policies. I get reminded of it every time I open youtube from a fresh browser - all I get is a bunch of toddler-level videos with people doing stupid shit like spilling a barrel of hot chocolate on the table while shouting "CHOCOLATE!" in an obnoxious toddler-like manner.
There may be a lot of truth to that, but I've absolutely seen women in that age group play games on their phones, e.g. Bejeweled, or, famously, Tetris at world record breaking skill levels: https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007...
I would not know about unboxing videos, but there are several cable channels that seem to show nothing but hours and hours of close ups of hands fondling more or less tasteful necklaces, and I'm pretty sure those do not cater to toddlers.
There's certainly women who play video games of all ages! Absolutely! That demographic bucket gets overrepresented and thus misrepresented as an artefact of how the data is collected because small children can't be easily extricated from the dataset
I'm sure there's many top female gamers. No question. (I don't play video games so excuse me ignorance on the details)
>I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to.
Christ, man, I can literally see it, seen it tons of times, and yet ... just wow.
Stop. Do you mean that the fridge has Google Photos app running?
Or do you mean that your phone is not locked when given to the enterprising toddler in question?
Sorry for the confusion, the fridge was just part of the photo he was looking at. We gave him the phone to look at photos, thinking he couldn’t make too much trouble with that app. But while looking at a photo of himself with ketchup, he managed to complete the ordering process for ordering a photo canvas - a feature of the photos app I had always ignored until I saw the email that the order had shipped.
I recently came across a review of a Samsung Smart fridge made by a non tech influencer, some of the things that grabbed my attention were:
- The fridge had both front and back cameras
- It had a microphone
- It could play music, which maybe was important if you considered it for a glorified kitchen tablet
- It could install regular android apps
- It could sync photos and notes
- It was compatible with the Uber app, so I have to assume you could actually have payment info in there
I have never bought a nice fridge and I will go out of my way to avoid pointless smart, so it really came as a surprise to me, but the situation seems posible and probably will happen to someone at some point
The listed features are interesting, probably useful for a fridge IF by back camera, a camera that can show me the inside of the fridge is meant - I'd love being able to access that during shopping trips.
The rest are all potentially useful as well, but more important than any of these are security and longevity - a flagship phone from Samsung gets something like 5 years of updates if I recall right, and those updates are prioritized according to how premium the phone is - how far down the list are fridges? I would definitely want my fridge to last longer than 5 years and NOT be a security risk in my network.
I'm curious, how is your toddler using the Photos app? I won't launch into a spiel about giving devices to young children as I'm not a parent myself and never will be (rainbow month yeeeah boi)
But I do find it interesting to compare with my own upbringing. Seems kids are given relatively unfettered access to phones/tablets these days, proper ones with a regular OS. I suppose the upside is learning/becoming familiar tech stuff sooner, downside as they enter tween/teen years is probably social media :(
We definitely relaxed our standards for kid #2 compared with kid #1 in terms of phone time.
Mainly he would watch photos and videos of himself and his big brother. We did not install any kid-specific apps and did not allow YouTube at that age.
He did enjoy Wordle - at his peak he knew how to type in around 8 different valid five letter words, which I thought was pretty impressive at age 2! His favorite was TRAIN.
I wouldve just had them change the shipping address, that sort of album / canvas is the stuff you as parents will be cackling over for decades to come :D
Unfortunately it was too late to change the address by the time I discovered it, but we, uh, actually did order our own copy (from a much cheaper photo place) and it's currently hanging on the wall in our kitchen.
Assuming it doesn't completely blank out or disintegrate by then.
When it comes to durability, I have little trust in companies today, and the quality of techniques and materials they use - not in a hyper-optimized economy we have now. Especially when we're talking about prints ordered through a button in an app made by an advertising company, one that wants you to stay subscribed to their digital playground (instead of focusing on physical ownership of media, such as photo albums), one "products" (services, really) have a half-life on the same order as digital print/ad shops.
Nah, the very presence of this "feature" actually pushed me away from Google Photos. In a perfect world, it would make sense. In the real world, it's just first-party user interface spam.
Medium? Substack is where the kool kids and their money hang out these days. You have to keep up with the startup mill!
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I’ve witnessed a good number of online interactions that went like “where do I buy your blouse/dress”, “I don’t recall, just use <app>’s AI feature to recognize it”. I’ve witnessed it once or twice in meatspace as well. So it’s absolutely a thing that real people find useful, especially among women who are into clothes shopping.
I can't provide a direct citation but I worked on image detection shopping for Kakao[1] and can say from personal observation that at least in Korea these features are far more popular (and ridiculously profitable) among women. According to Forbes women drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing decisions in the US[2] so I can't imagine it's that rare there either, but I could be wrong and this could be an entirely eastern thing but given Huawei is a Chinese company I would bet it's a very popular feature for the phone.
Google lense can do that! I actually shop a lot through various apps with reverse image search (in SEA both Lazada and Shopee support this) and the results are alright at best but it can be a major time saver. It's often the only way to find the thing you're looking for as every e-commerce platform seems to be gamed to death these days.
At some point, the reverse image search on Google started doing this, which was really annoying. Although I kind of would like it to see if I can find a replacement for a pendant lamp that I accidentally broke one of the glass cylinders that surround the light bulbs on, but I can’t find any photos of the non-broken light fixture.
Android (on my Pixel6) does this in a more subtle way, which I think is Ok:
Swipe bottom to up, to show the list of open apps, it will detect the images on the app preview. Click on an image, and there is a "shopping" option (part of Google lenses).
Just the other day he posted about how they were able to modify the one member of the family identified in their paper which is not an aperiodic monotile into one that tiles without reflections.
+1 csk is as good as it gets. Had him for my first CS class there and to the end of my time there, that class stood out both in terms of quality and enjoyment/engagement.
If you're at Waterloo and have the chance to be in Craig's class, jump at it.
Unconventional, but I played this both solo and with my kiddos. As a multiplayer co-op game it really shines. Granted it's easier than solo, but maneuvering multiple people around a tiny phone was absurdly funny.
I wouldn't say that rotating the phone is against the point! I found it an interesting subversion of the idea that a phone is only ever used in landscape / portrait mode.
Made it to 3 fingers and then couldn't advance as my phone interpreted a 3 finger swipe as a screenshot. I'm counting it as a win since I learned a new feature of my phone!
Had the same problem at first, but moving one finger before the others made it work.
At four fingers my phone can't do it anymore. It seems that it can only detect 3 pressure points at a time.
Does it really not? I remember a lot of years back everyone was boasting how they can recognize 10 touches at the same time. Perhaps try an app, to see if the limitation comes from hardware or software?
My Note9 is able to register at least 10 separate touches in Chwazi app (just tested). Seems weird a newer phone in the basically same line would downgrade to three.
Found out that if you activate 3-finger touch for screenshot, that disables the phone's ability to register more than 3 touch points.
With that disabled I can now play the game again (and after several 4-fingered ones I'm now stuck at a 3-finger one)
> Seems weird a newer phone in the basically same line would downgrade to three.
You have data scientists busy analyzing telemetry all the time. It's conceivable someone figured "the data shows" most people don't even use 3 fingers at a time, much less 5+, so why not simplify the screen driver / hardware to save costs (or trade it for some improvement elsewhere)...
Newer phones are more optimized than older ones. On the market, optimized doesn't mean better.
quit at 2 fingers because, why am i doing this? (i've actually commented before on HN about my dislike of all the sliders in the iOS UI, what an annoyingly difficult specialized skill to have to say up on just to hit what should be very fast and simple radio buttons or checkboxes)
The slider-style switches are dumb eye candy, I agree, but you don’t have to treat them as such, they toggle when tapped.
My big annoyance is how these massive balls of JavaScript and images and crap have infected UIs of web apps everywhere, as though people couldn’t understand a checkbox or something. Silly “UI designer” fad, and quite pathetic for a designer really, to just copy whatever Apple did.
You could probably run a successful "ai design" scam where you ask your mark a bunch of psychographic details about the customer and product, then ask them for their website url.
You discard all the psychographic data and blindly apply let's call "apple-ify.css" where you change the fonts, colors and contrast to just knockoff apple and then charge something like $499 for it with an elaborate pitch using buzzwords about machine learning and big data on how you're doing the latest in analysis driven design with cutting edge AI.
What's annoying and counter to popular convention / user expectations is that you have to keep your finger in the established path to keep grip of the "ball". (S'pecially given your finger often blocks the view of it).
I'm not sure that the game would work without this restriction. If you kept grip of the ball regardless of if your finger was on the path none of the game's puzzles would work since you could just move your fingers wherever you wanted without losing the ball.
For me it wasn't that the slide doesn't stay in place (that much is expected), but that if you deviate from the path it immediately slips back to the beginning. That's a bit anti-pattern w.r.t. typical slides that either have a forgiveness zone around the element or update to the point on the slide nearest to the gesture point.
Uhm haha. On behalf of our community I would like to say that I was perfectly capable of understanding this mechanism thank you. Pretty sure the reason for the unintuitiveness for some people must rely on something else entirely.
Android stock maybe. Android as delivered by various vendors? It depends. I've seen variations of this mechanism pop up - including ones requiring to keep the finger on the path or else you "lose the ball", and that one was in the phone UI, where you needed to swipe to accept or reject a call!
Definitely one of the core challenges of the game, and understandably not to everyone’s taste. I learned that I inadvertently swipe in a slight arc on the first puzzle and enjoyed learning to move precisely.
Doesn't work well on phones though, you really need a tablet. When you get to 4 fingers, it starts randomly losing track of a finger or two when fingers get close to each other. I tried two different Android phones and an iPhone.
This would be a fun game with some UX improvements. It's extremely frustrating when the reason I can't finish a puzzle is because my finger slipped off the line and not because I just don't know the solution. I stopped playing because of how frustrating that was.
Totally agree, the dexterity is what makes it fun. I was thinking about how a larger screen would help, or if I had longer fingers, or if I cut my nails it'd be better. The annoying fails build me toward a sweet victory. good rush.
Also, the cost of failing is not much, quick iterations. You just have to remember what you did.
No, they're not the same. In Jenga you usually lose in a way that you know could have been avoided. "If I had just held my hand still" or whatever. That is not what this is. This game is frustrating because it was poorly designed not because it is "hard".
How far does it go? I hit some really hard ones with 3 fingers. I think my phone gets confused if my fingers are too close to each other, which makes it especially difficult.
This also feels like playing a game of Operation [1]. The author just needs to add an annoying buzzer sound whenever you fail.
It goes up to 4 fingers, and the last one is 3 fingers again but basically impossible without switching fingers. Edit: nvm its possible without cheating
The hardest one for me was the 4 fingered puzzle where you had to move all 4 from one side of the screen to the other in a line, except the lines overlapped with the neighbors multiple times.
I used an iPhone 12 Pro, and it was pretty hard - couldn't get to 3 fingers because the site froze whenever I accidentally slightly triggered another gesture. Had to do a lot of phone-spinning though, lol. Pretty cool!
Some frustrating with this game comes from the slider resetting when moving too fast. With debug touch points enabled I can see that I never leave the path, but it still resets. This is exasperated on Firefox where rendering seems to be slow resulting in constant resets.
No, I'm used to low difficulty, high speed, because I can run uBlock Origin on mobile Firefox. It makes the web so much easier and snappier, compared to Chrome, even on a fast 5G connection.
I get it. A gamified version of all the frustrations I have with mobile UX and my fat fingers exaggerated to absurdity. Personally I take it as art, not as a game. I won't play it for more than 3 minutes.
This is pretty fun! It seems the starting position of your fingers is important, as is the ability to rotate the device. Interesting to see how many mobile HN users there are too.
It doesn't, but the first white horizontal swipe is always needed.
Unfortunately there is a "reset" button that, when pressed, resets your progress without confirmation.
I wish cookies or unique URLs for level saving was implemented. I restarted multiple times because Firefox and Safari had phantom sticky activations I couldn't override. That final 3 finger twitter was a nice challenge. (I suppose a "reset detected inputs" button would do too).
I made it to a level where you need to use 4 fingers and can't figure it out. This is level [0] could someone give me a hint or tell me how you solved it on mobile?
For a horror/slasher movie inspired version of this, check out the smartphone game Slice HD - it's "multi-touch-fiddly" the same way as this, but any time you mess up, you get an unnerving impression of having your fingertips sliced off.
Great game! Though I'm not sure if I solved the last level in the way it was intended to be solved - I wouldn't have been able to do it the way I did it if my fingers were like half a cm shorter
I solved it with some creative initial positioning. Thumb and index of one hand on the curved and middle straight line and my other hand index going between the two to reach the start of the other curved line
I changed the user agent of the Mac Safari to be that of iOS, and changed the window size to be in portrait, yet it still does knows it’s not a mobile device. How does it know?
i think it does, i accidentally locked my phone, when i went back, did a refresh, and it loaded the last game after an initial "slide to unlock" screen
Goes without saying that I immediately disabled this. /shrug