[tialaramex]

It's certainly busking, which, I dunno if this is a regular column he did, but if so as commissioning editor I'd be pretty unhappy with that. I was serious that this feels like it was churned out at pace.

I can't see a way to interpret this that doesn't come back to, fix passwords and stop bothering with this other stuff. In some forms (e.g. satire) you are supposed to sneak in an actual point you wanted to make (e.g. Swift's "Modest Proposal" lists the things Swift thinks would actually work, pretending to dismiss them as inferior to eating babies). But I believe in Burlesque it is considered satisfactory just to point and laugh. I didn't laugh, maybe that's on me.

[saagarjha]

So, just for context, he wrote a number of these: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens. They're joke articles meant to satirize some field of computer science; cryptography isn't the only topic he discusses.

[tialaramex]

Six articles like that :( Worse, it appear this is his style everywhere, including live in person. Perhaps somewhere in amongst this James is actually an expert on something who has useful knowledge to impart to Harvard's students, but perhaps not? Maybe you really can go to a "lecture" in which a tenured Harvard professor expects you to laugh at jokes which even by the already woeful standards of Computer Science jokes, are not funny. Ouch.

One of these articles proposes that the problem with smartphones is that they aren't very good phones. In this "satirical" form it proposes a pyramid shaped "hierarchy of needs" for phones with "Make phone calls" as the most important element at the bottom.

Perhaps in 2014 that felt like an insight, to James Mickens or to his readers. I don't think so, but maybe 2014 is longer ago than I think it is, and maybe nobody had noticed back then that (and I apologise if this is an amazing insight to you now):

Calling them phones was an excuse. People aren't very good at figuring out what they actually want, so telling people we're going to offer them Network capable handheld computers wouldn't work, they don't realise they want those. So you say these are "phones" and then let them gradually figure out that actually they have never wanted to make a telephone call in their life but they did want a handheld computer to access the Network.

The form factor makes no sense for a phone. Clearly a rectangular sheet of glass isn't the right shape for a phone. But it is a good shape for a handheld computer. Which, again, is what you actually wanted anyway.