Bad execution: Google maps accessible routes

Google recently launched wheelchair accessible routes on Google maps. The feature is far from good.

1- The data is inaccurate: I used it today in Berlin and it took me to a station with no elevator. I verified by cross referencing with the local app. And there is no obvious feedback mechanism.

2- The routing is weird: sometimes it shows me longer route with later arrival time.

3- The UX sucks: someone using the wheelchair accessible option is less likely to not use it the next time. I have to go to the options menu and choose wheelchair accessible with every search query. Why can’t this be a default option?

MarcoPolo App

I am surprised I didn’t blog about it although I am using it for close to a year. I heard of it from a press release that Benchmark Capital, the backers of Uber, Snap, and StichFix invested in it.

It is an asynchronous video messaging app. This solves a huge problem for me since currently my family, and all my friends live in different countries, with different time zones. It is hard to setup a time with all those people to sit and talk. MarcoPolo allows us to stay in touch.

Here is how it works:

  • You start recording a video.
  • Your friend/group receives a notification that you are recording a video.
  • They can go watch you live, or watch this message later when they see the notification.
  • They can record you a reply and you will get notified.

It is different from WhatsApp

  • You don’t have to tap and hold while recording.
  • There is no limit I faced on the length of the message.
  • Here is the best part: If you have no internet, or the internet is slow, it keeps working in the background until the full message is uploaded when you have a faster connection. This solves the problem of internet speed which forces us to schedule calls in places with fast internet, leading to the call not happening.
  • It only allow text on top of the video. No text chat interface.

Give it a try. Download it and message me. I am using my Egyptian mobile number on it. If you don’t have it, message me and I will send it to you.

Note: I took permission the people on those screenshots to show them on this post.

Blocking on YouTube

I don’t like Hussein Elgasmi. I blocked his channel on YouTube sometime ago thinking I won’t get his videos again. I was wrong.

As you see his channel is blocked, however I still got his latest video in my YouTube recommendations.

I am still getting Boshret Kheir in my autogenerated playlists. I always delete it when it is there.

It seems that blocking a channel and removing certain video/artist from your playlists aren’t strong enough signals for the YouTube recommendation algorithms.

I thought the former is a hard rule, not optional parameter for the algorithm. Maybe it is a bug, or no one thought of it.

Human Uniqueness

Someone asked me what’s unique about myself. I started my answer by saying “unique” is a strong word. There are 7 billion people on the planet so probably there are many people that can do the same things I do, or think the same way I think.

I gave it more thinking, the first thing that came to mind as unique is my fingerprints, then came the fact that actually my genetic combination is unique.

But the one thing that makes a human being really unique is their life journey. No two humans ever will have the exact same life journey. And the respective perception of each journey an individual lives is what gives life its meaning. That’s what make each individual “unique”.

My city is better than yours

An Egyptian friend asked me whether he should relocate to London or Berlin, and whether I know someone living in London that he can talk to.

Here is my answer, since every-time I sit with a group of Egyptians living abroad, they start comparing the cities they live in, and this is one of the most annoying discussions for me.

The problem with these questions is everyone will be biased to the city they live in.

You shouldn’t ask which is better, you should have specific parameters and judge based on them.

For example: Average salaries after taxes, accommodation costs, what differs if you are married/have kids?

Then there are more meta questions: Language. Ease of changing job (in terms of supply and visa). Citizenship if you are interested like how many years, does it require giving up the Egyptian, are you opposed to renouncing your Egyptian citizenship?

The salaries point is also rhetorical. As someone working in tech you are probably in the 90th percentile of the pay scale of any city in Europe. I have no data to back this claim, but at least I know it is the case in Berlin. I wouldn’t imagine London, or Zurich are any different.

It all comes down to answering a simple question: What are you optimizing for?

Walking Speed

During Easter I traveled with a group of friends. Every time we wanted to go some place, we had to make a decision between walking and taking transportation.

I use Google maps, my friends use HERE maps. HERE always shows double the ETA of Google maps when it comes to walking. We kept arguing which is more accurate with no result.

Personally I have the same problem, my speed is mostly slower than what Google tells me. I thought Google does this based on historical walking speed for every person (I have location history enabled). Apparently it is hard coded at 12 minutes per kilometer, or more accurately, 20 minutes per mile.

We are afraid of AI taking over humanity, while someone at Google maps hard coded that all humans walk at 20 minutes per mile.

Random Thoughts

Starting this year my writing frequency went significantly down. Last year I wrote 70 posts. This year we are in April and this is my 9th post. Assuming uniformed distribution of posts and no growth in the number of posts, this should be my 18th post.

The main reason of this is I moved to a new apartment. I had no desk for three months and this cut my habit of writing. This even impacted my ability to write on mobile although almost 30-50% of my writing happens on mobile.

I don’t have a rhythm or schedule for writing. I write whenever I feel comfortable. I also don’t care about quantity vs quality. I am just trying to build a habit of writing because it has multiple benefits.

It is a form of therapy especially for an extroverted person such as myself. It improves my communication skills, since the more I write, the more mistakes I commit, and the better I get at it. It helps me meet new people, I sometimes get contacted by people because they read something I wrote. And it has some career benefits even though the blog is not 100% about my professional life.

I recently wrote about loneliness and its impact on productivity specially for newly migrated workers. I am working in an international environment and I can see it among almost everyone. I don’t know why no one is talking about it enough. I didn’t finish my thoughts and ended up not publishing the post. The tl;dr version is that if I have a company with internationals, I will make sure to track their loneliness, I argue this is one of the biggest factors of low performance/high attrition for newcomers from abroad. I hope to see some studies about it or someone talking openly about it.

I recently finished two books “Sapiens”, and “Ready Player One”.

I liked Sapiens a lot. It was shocking in some areas. I liked how Harari mixed fundamental theories of how history progressed with well known stories and modern day examples. This made the book easy to read, however it made it time bound. The book will be obsolete in 10-20 years. Another problem with the book is he mocks almost every religion in a relatively disrespectful way. My Muslim friends said he is biased against Muslims, when I read it carefully, I found he is biased against everyone. However, he never mentions the Jews or the Jewish religion sarcastically as he did with the rest. My hypothesis is he had to be politically correct since he is Isareli and the book is originally written in Hebrew, otherwise my friends are right and he is biased against certain religions.

Ready player one is the first English fiction book I read. I tried with other fiction books but got bored quickly. It was easier to finish this because it was about a dystopian technological world, which is highly relevant to my interests in technology. If you have fiction book recommendations, shoot them along my way.

As you saw in the title, this post is about random thoughts. I wrote to it to try to get back to my writing habit without thinking too much of a post’s content. Now you have reached the end. Until next post.

Sympathy, empathy, and compassion

This morning I was thinking about empathy, it was triggered by a call I had with a friend yesterday where I could’ve been more empathetic. This made me also think about sympathy, and compassion.

I tried to think of my definitions of the three.

Sympathy is about identifying the existence and causality of feelings.

Empathy is having feelings because of someone else’s feelings.

Compassion is taking action/saying something to ease the pain.

LinkedIn Closed Networker

People who add/accept anyone on LinkedIn (LION) to increase their reach might be doing it wrong. The way feed algorithms work – in principle – is they show your post to few of your connections, if they interact with it, the algorithm boosts it to more connections, and so on until it becomes viral, dies, or get replaced by other more viral content.

Unless your content is inherently viral, a big factor of people interacting with your content is them knowing you. Having a big network where you don’t really know the majority decreases the chance of your posts getting to someone who actually knows you in the initial phase, hence decreasing chances of interaction, which leads to lower virality and eventually less reach.

I am curious to see if LinkedIn data matches my argument (people with more connections, get less interaction on their posts).