Does This Make You Happy?

	Does This Make You Happy?
Number	2843
Broadcast Date	AUGUST 28, 2016
Episode Length	44:51
Hosts	Peter Wells
Guests	James Croft

Facebook goes back to bots, Everybody Hates Drake, And Revisiting Reviews.

Guest

James Croft
- Reckoner

Top Stories

Facebook says humans won’t write its trending topic descriptions anymore

Following on from complaints that the Facebook Trending Stories had too much human interference, revealing a disturbing "decent human being" bias, Facebook today announced the algorithm is now purely in the hands of the robots. Actually, thats not true. Humans will still select which stories ultimately make it into the trending section. An algorithm will surface popular stories, but Facebook editors will weed out the inappropriate or fake ones. The big difference is the robots will take over writing the excepts that appear in the news feed.

Spotify Is Burying Musicians for Their Apple Deals

On yesterday's headlines show, Tom passed along a story from Bloomberg, claiming Spotify is punishing artists such as Frank Ocean and Degrassi Junior High Alumni Drake, for signing exclusive deals with Apple Music. Well, according to a Spotify rep chatting with Recode, the accusations are "unequivocally false."

Retailers, payments association want banks granted negotiation rights with Apple

Last month Australia's Banks asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission if they could negotiate as a block with Apple to demand Apple open up the NFC chip within iPhones, to allow the banks to set up their own NFC payments systems, and not rely on Apple Pay. The ACCC has denied the request in an interim motion, but now the Australian Retail Association has backed the move of the banks, arguing they'd also like access to the NFC chip if it's up for grabs.

NBN’s witch hunt for whistleblower highlights need to scrap Australia’s draconian leaking laws

Former Sydney Morning Herald Tech Editor, now PR sellout, Ben Grubb took to Medium to point out the raids happening in Australia's Parliament house over leaked NBN documents could easily be avoided if Australia had decent whistleblower protection laws. In case you had forgotten, the Australian Federal Police have been raiding the homes and offices of Senator Stephen Conroy and his staffers, to determine if he was responsible for leaks of official NBN documents, which showed the National Broadband Network's budget was blowing out, and that HFC cable was turning out to be just as expensive to roll out as Fibre to the Home would have been... Hilariously, Senator Conroy is sealing every document seized under Parliamentary Privilege, so we may never know what the documents reveal.

The eureka factory: Australia’s solar champions face an uncertain future

The Monthly has a great, long article on the very smart people working at UNSW's photovoltaic research lab, and the race to build efficient solar cells. Unfortunately, the research lab is facing an uncertain future, as the current Australian government looks to cut research funding for the project. Disclaimer, Peter works for UNSW.

Discussion

Product reviews - should reviewers update every few months?
I urge no one to believed the product reviews I write - there are so many flaws:
When I first started reviewing Android phones, I had so little knowledge of the Android market it was hard to make statements about 'the best'.
I've now used more Android phones than any man should - but still feel the same when reviewing a camera.
Also, there are brands I'd love to get my hands on but find it difficult to organise, while other brands send me every bit of crap they release, whether I ask or not - all this should be take into account when reading product reviews
Another difficulty is finding the reviewer you agree with - in movie reviews, it's not that hard, you watch movies for years, and you start to know that if Ebert digs a movie, you probably will too. For products reviews, it's much harder to figure that out. You can't just buy every TV released until you think 'yeah, i think so and so from CNET likes the same contrast levels I do."
But to the question - should reviewers return to the product every six months? I do on Twitter, not so much in the review.
What products did you love on day one that sucked six months later? What product sucked out of the gate, got better?

Pick of the Day

Friday Night Lights!

I've been watching it the last few weeks and it's amazing - although we skipped the gas leak season, which is Season 2 of Friday Night Lights - that was the year of the writers strike - and of the show trying ridiculous plot lines in the hope of getting higher ratings. It didn't work. Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Cant lose. According to a pop up on Netflix, FNL will be removed from Australian Netflix September 23rd, so start now. I've never seen that pop up before, but I appreciate it - imagine being a few episodes from the end and suddenly the show disappears from Netflix! Great they're giving you a few weeks warning.