> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.

I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.

Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.

> The author provides as counterexamples MacOS and Windows, but that's a silly comparison. Apple nor Microsoft never coordinated with anybody else on their APIs.

No, but each of those two systems is ruled by one dictator and has one blessed way to do things. For example in the Windows / .NET world, it's WinForms, er I mean WPF, er I mean...

> Also, I'm not sure what kind of standard this author is pining for.

It sounds like a wish for the clarity of a cathedral rather than the chaos of a bazaar.

> The underlying force there is the absence of one unified baseline set of APIs for writing desktop programs.

It's called the Common Desktop Environment.

> Now, I actively avoid anywhere much hotter than about 80F.

It is currently - well after sunset - 82°F outside. A couple days ago it was mid-90s in the afternoon, and it should get back to that after the current weather passes in another few days.

Mowing the yard when it's high 90s and muggy and sunny is not as rare an occurrence as I might like.

> When 42 of the participants came back to the laboratory weeks, months and even two years later, to take part in another 24-hour measurement, the trained algorithm could identify them from their breath patterns. Data from periods when the participants were awake gave more accurate results than did those from sleeping periods, but when the researchers used a 100-parameter characterization of a full data set instead of one using 24 parameters, they could pick individuals out with 96.8% accuracy.

The correctly identified .968x42=40.696 of the participants.

Also any standard-ish physical activity that comes with instructions usually includes breathing in those instructions. So I would expect results to vary substantially depending on where they found the study participants.