There may be some real life fallout
November 20, 2018 8:19 AM   Subscribe

"Shortcut Roulette is a game of chicken with your social life built entirely on iOS 12 Shortcuts. When you activate the shortcut, your phone will execute one of [up to] 100 possible functions: maybe it'll send your last five selfies in a PDF to a modelling agency, maybe it'll send your nudes to your boss, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll do nothing." Via HackerNews, where the developer is soliciting beta testers for this wonderful, awful idea.
posted by RedOrGreen (31 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Cue moral panic about the Teens doing this now instead of eating Tide pods/drinking Tide wine.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 8:20 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Even the logo has a Tide pod-esque look.

This is terrifying and exhilarating and I have given up all lies but hide things all the time and Oh My Gawd.
posted by wellred at 8:23 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


(Oh, I meant to add a link to this spreadsheet of possible outcomes.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:30 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't get it. Why would you do this? Why not just tweet your pin number.
posted by hilberseimer at 8:33 AM on November 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


My company's firewall blocks access to that site as "Gambling."

Which...yeah, I think that's probably a fair call.
posted by Naberius at 8:34 AM on November 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


is this how middle-aged people get their kicks?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:36 AM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


Shortcuts in iOS is one of those things that I feel like I should be doing stuff with but for whatever reason haven't gotten into. This article has some neat ideas (apparently they can parse text from a web page) including a link to the author's choose "your own adventure" story made with them.
posted by exogenous at 8:47 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Why would I tweet my personal identification number number?
posted by NerdtoriousBIG at 8:49 AM on November 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


Old news. Politicians have been doing this for years.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 8:51 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is the greatest thing that I've ever wanted someone else to try.
posted by bondcliff at 8:52 AM on November 20, 2018 [22 favorites]


In the immortal words of Bartleby The Scrivener - I would prefer not to. Do this. Ever.
posted by 41swans at 8:54 AM on November 20, 2018 [6 favorites]


> Shortcuts in iOS is one of those things that I feel like I should be doing stuff with but for whatever reason haven't gotten into.

I only use one shortcut regularly, but I use it every single weekday. "Hey Siri, what's at Zeus today?" reads me back the daily (divine!) soups on offer at our Temple of Zeus.

To make it, I borrowed heavily from a public shortcut called something like "What did the orange menace tweet today?" which parses El Cheeto's twitter feed. Good things can come from the strangest places.
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:56 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


(disclosure: the following is a modified version of a post I wrote elsewhere.)

Shortcut Roulette is absolutely brilliant.

Right now it seems more conceptual than practical, but I think an engaging and potentially "fun"-to-play (😜-to-play!) game could come out of this.

The key would be to classify shortcuts into tiers/difficulty levels where higher tiers included shortcuts from the earlier tiers.

For example:
  1. Bumper Cars (little to no real consequence)
  2. Teenager (slight potential embarrassment)
  3. Reckless (mortifying but not career- or relationship damaging)
  4. Daredevil (would require apologies and other face-saving actions to recover)
  5. Drunken (even with face-saving would inflict career- or -relationship damage)
  6. Destroyer (guaranteed social consequence; possibly career- or -relationship ending)
  7. Just No (immoral and illegal in many jurisdictions)
Opponents would create and join a game with real stakes (money, labor, product, reputation, etc.), possibly with a percentage or commission depending on the type of stake.
posted by mistersquid at 8:57 AM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


In high school my friends briefly did texting roulette where someone would get your phone and you either got to choose the message or the recipient.
posted by little onion at 9:05 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


is this how middle-aged people get their kicks?

Good question! Let's look at some of the possible outcomes:

Tweet your most recent screenshot
Well, in my case, my "most recent screenshot" is usually an accidental capture of the lock screen, so I'm not really feeling a threat from this. Most people might like the cute picture of my dog.

Volume all the way up +endless Beibs
Where's it getting the Beibs from? Probably more embarrassing would be for it to play from my podcast backlog, revealing just how far behind I am.

Sends random selfie to random contact
How does it differentiate a selfie from any other photo on the phone? I don't think I've ever taken one.

Invites friend to a coffee date
Yes please; we're all too busy and I haven't seen some folks in a long time. But how does it know a "friend" from my list of contacts?

Deletes a random photo
Oh thank god, I've been getting storage warnings for weeks and just can't be bothered to clean out the junk I have in photos.

I don't know, I'm bored now and my questions are more about how this works or differentiates things that it is going to select and do (and that might be because I'm not up to date on what the new iOS enables). I guess I'm just saying I don't get it, I'm old, and you kids have fun on the lawn while I go have a nap.
posted by nubs at 9:06 AM on November 20, 2018 [7 favorites]


Humans are SO WEIRD
posted by crush at 9:57 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


So someone just appified The Game from Black Chalk?
This will not end well.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:57 AM on November 20, 2018


RedOrGreen: "When you activate the shortcut, your phone will execute one of [up to] 100 possible functions: "

FTA: *well, 23 functions for now, 100 in release 1.0.0

Worst funding round reason evar
posted by chavenet at 10:14 AM on November 20, 2018


Presumably a "selfie" is just any photo with your face in it. I don't know if Apple exposes an API for this from within iOS Photos, but it's certainly possible. Google Photos, at least, interprets a search for "me" just fine, assuming you have enough tagged photos of yourself for the algorithm to work.

Now, recognizing nudity is actually a fairly hard problem. I worked on a system that tried to do this once, and it ended up flagging a tremendous number of engagement-ring-showoff photos.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:19 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Shortcuts in iOS is one of those things that I feel like I should be doing stuff with but for whatever reason haven't gotten into.

I use it daily to create named links (like this) for a variety of formats (HTML, BBCode, Markdown).

It's also fairly good at simple image manipulation tasks, like turning a screenshot into a reasonably sized image or avatar. You can even make simple GIFs.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:21 AM on November 20, 2018


Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: there's an app for that.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:37 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


iOS puts photos taken with the front facing camera into a special folder called “selfies”. It doesn’t matter if there is a face in the picture.
posted by capnsue at 10:38 AM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is the greatest thing that I've ever wanted someone else to try.

Wait til your bestie gets a boat. It's great.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:39 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Put me on the "hell no" list. Just thinking about this makes me anxious.
posted by Anonymous at 11:38 AM on November 20, 2018


Games that depend, for their fun, on getting a reaction from people who didn't volunteer to take part always seem like kind of a dick move.

Yeah, maybe you want to play silly buggers sending out random emails or nude pictures, but don't involve me unless I signed up for your mailing list.
posted by howfar at 1:06 PM on November 20, 2018


Pffft! Kids these days!

If you really wanna play for real stakes, it’s a Deck of Many Things or gtfo.
posted by darkstar at 1:54 PM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Apple bought the app called Workflow and integrated it into iOS 12. So lots of powerful things to unlock if you can come up with them. If you're looking for some useful ones, I tend to see what people are making over at the Shortcuts subreddit. Some interesting ideas at least.
posted by msbutah at 2:36 PM on November 20, 2018


If I made this game I'd call it SOCIAL POTLATCH.
posted by mistersquid at 2:58 PM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Thank you, mistersquid, for introducing me to that fascinating new word and tradition!


*googling*
posted by darkstar at 3:38 PM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I would beat my kids lol
posted by Guide Your Health at 4:07 PM on November 20, 2018


Why would I tweet my personal identification number number?

So people could use it at the automatic teller machine machine, obviously.
posted by pompomtom at 9:28 PM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


« Older Let's spice it up, my friends!   |   I still hear you saying you will never break the... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments