Have you noticed we're seeing more "time lies"? Two clear ones: "Your driver is 3 minutes away" and "5 minute read". It's the precision that's intriguing. Like "asap" is more a lie about your priorities than about time.
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We’re just encoding the same white lies we used to hide under human fallibility into algorithms that we expect to be more precise.
“I’ll be 5 mins late” from a human is understood.
What’s new is there are people who think explicitly about how to do them and coding it up.
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The interesting thing is that they are algorithmically obviously "wrong". Like word-count --> read time is trivial to recalibrate to be more accurate via a decent sampling experiment. So it's a deliberate UX choice to sucker you into not getting impatient or something.
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What makes this all the more infuriating is the remarkable precision of google maps estimates. You know they have the data to make it correct, but we’re already trained to be impatient so they have to play dumb
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I really really hate when a UI has some line item on an activity feed that says something happened “about an hour ago”
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