Find the threadhttp://findthethread.postach.io/feed.xml2023-12-17T16:37:28.719000ZWerkzeugDragging the Anchorhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/dragging-the-anchor2023-11-17T17:07:02.415000Z2023-11-17T16:41:18ZDominic<p>Apple events may have become routine, and recorded events don't hit quite the same as ones with a live audience — even if I only ever viewed them remotely. However, they still have the potential to stir up controversy, at least among the sorts of people who follow Apple announcements religiously.</p>
<p>If you are not part of that group, you may not be aware that <a href="https://www.macworld.com/article/2130071/entry-level-m3-macbook-pro-8gb-memory-ram-performance.html">Apple’s MacBook Pro memory problem is worse than ever</a>. Wait, what is going on? Is the RAM catching fire and burning people's laps or something?</p>
<p>No, nothing quote that bad. It's just that even in Apple's newest M3 MacBook Pro, the base configuration comes with a measly 8 GB of RAM, which is simply not adequate in this year 2023.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/b53df194-cc92-9b34-702f-260c83f47d03/817f7ecf-b1ca-dc7e-e882-3c50b870de8d.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:1520; --en-naturalHeight:932;"/></p>
<p>There has been a certain amount of pushback claiming that 8 GB is fine, actually — and it is true that Apple Silicon does use RAM differently than the old Intel MacBooks did, so 8 GB is not quite as bad as it sounds. But it sounds pretty bad, so there is still plenty of badness to be had!</p>
<p>Jason Koebler took on the critics in a piece titled <a href="https://www.404media.co/in-defense-of-ram-on-apple-silicon/"><em>In Defense of RAM</em></a> at increasingly essential tech news site <a href="https://www.404media.co">404 Media</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is outrageous that Tim Cook is still selling 8GB of RAM as the default on a $1,600 device. It is very similar to when Apple was selling the iPhone 6S with 16GB of storage as its base device, and people were talking themselves into buying it. It is not just a performance and usability problem, it’s a sustainability and environmental one, too. This is because RAM, historically one of the easiest components to upgrade in order to get more life out of your computer, on MacBook Pros cannot be upgraded and thus when 8GB inevitably becomes not enough, users have to buy a new computer rather than simply upgrade the part of the computer that’s limiting them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the key point. If I may age myself for a moment, my first computer, a mighty Macintosh LC, had a whole whopping 4 MB of RAM — yes, four megabytes. But the default was <strong><em>two</em></strong>. The motherboard let owners expand the RAM up to a <em>screaming</em> 10 MB by swapping SIMMs (yes, this machine predated DIMMs). </p>
<p>These days, RAM is soldered to the motherboard of MacBooks, so whatever spec you buy is the most RAM that machine will ever have. If it turns out that you need more RAM, well, you’ll just have to buy a new MacBook — and figure out what to do with your old one.</p>
<p>This is obviously not great, as Jason Koebler writes in the piece I quoted above — but sustainability and environmental issues can only do so much when set against increased frequency of upgrades and the consequent increase in profitability.</p>
<p>Here's the thing: that forced binary choice between environment and profit is a false dilemma, in this as in so many other cases.</p>
<p>Default configurations are extremely important to customer satisfaction and brand perception because they anchor the whole product line. Both uninformed consumers and large corporate buyers will gravitate to the default, so that is the experience that most of the users of the product will have. </p>
<p>We are talking here about the experience of using a MacBook <em>Pro</em> — not an Air, where you might expect a trade-off, but the nominally top-of-the-tree model that is supposedly designed for Professionals. If that experience is unsatisfactory and causes users to develop a negative opinion of their MacBook Pro, this becomes a drag on their adoption of the rest of the Apple ecosystem.</p>
<p>Is this the issue that is going to kill Apple? No, of course not. But it comes on top of so many other stories: we've had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate">Batterygate</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna">Antennagate</a>, <a href="https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Bendgate">Bendgate</a>, and I'm probably forgetting some other 'gates, not to mention <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/why-has-france-banned-sales-apples-iphone-12-2023-09-13/">iPhone sales being halted in France due to radiation concerns</a>. None of these issues is actually <em>substantive</em>, but in the aggregate, slowly but surely, they erode Apple’s brand perception.</p>
<p>Negative press is a problem for any company, but it is a particular problem for Apple, because a lot of the value comes from the <em>ecosystem</em>. The all-Apple lifestyle is pretty great: MacBook unlocks with Apple Watch syncs with iPhone AirPlays to Apple TV served by Mac mini together with iPad — and that's just my house. </p>
<p>But I've been a Mac user since that little pizzabox LC in the 90s. If my first Apple experience was to be handed a nominally "Pro" machine, open a handful of browser tabs, and find it immediately slowing down, would I consider any other Apple devices? Or would I get an Android phone, a Garmin smartwatch, an Amazon Fire TV stick, and so on? Sure, Apple fans talk about how nice their world is, but this computer is just hateful.</p>
<p>That's the risk. Will Apple recognise it in time?</p>False Positive Attitudehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/false-positive-attitude2023-10-06T11:07:01.018000Z2023-10-06T10:59:33ZDominic<h1>Don't Believe The Hype</h1>
<p>Yes, I'm still on about "AI"<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>, because the collective id has not yet moved on.</p>
<p>Today, it's an article in <em>Nature</em>, with the optimistic title "<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02920-y#ref-CR1">AI beats human sleuth at finding problematic images in research papers</a>":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sounds great! Finally a productive use for AI! Or is it?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Working at two to three times [the researcher]’s speed, the software found <strong>almost all</strong> of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he’d missed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(emphasis mine)</p>
<p>So, the AI found "almost all" of the known positives, and identified 41 more unknowns? We are not told what the precise ratio is of false negatives (known positives that were missed), let alone how many false positives there were (instances of duplication flagged by AI that turned out not to be significant).</p>
<p>These issues continue to plague "AI"<sup id="fnref2:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The mechanisms to prevent these false identifications are probabilistic, not deterministic. In the same way that we cannot predict the output of a large language model (LLM) for a given prompt, we also cannot prevent it from ever issuing an incorrect response. At the technical level, all we can do is train it to decrease the probability of the incorrect response, and pair the initial "AI"<sup id="fnref3:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> with other systems designed to check its work. Cynically, though, that process takes money and time, and Generative AI is at the Peak of Inflated Expectations <em>now</em>, we need to ship while the bubble is still inflating!</p>
<h1>AI Needs A Person Behind The Curtain</h1>
<p>Technology, however, is only part of the story. This academic image analysis tool could well end up having real-world consequences:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The end goal […] is to incorporate AI tools such as Imagetwin into the paper-review process, just as many publishers routinely use software to scan text for plagiarism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There's the problem. What recourse do you have as an academic if your paper gets falsely flagged? Sure, journals have review boards and processes, but that takes time — time you might not have if you're under the gun for a funding decision. And you could easily imagine a journal being reluctant to convene the review board unless the "AI"<sup id="fnref4:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> indicated some level of doubt — a confidence threshold set at, say, 70%. If the "AI"<sup id="fnref5:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> is 90% confident that your graph is plagiarised, tough luck.</p>
<p>The example of plagiarism detection is telling here. Systems such as Turnitin that claim to detect plagiarism in students' work had an initial wave of popularity, but are now being <a href="https://dailyfreepress.com/2023/09/28/com-responds-to-turnitins-false-ai-detection-rates/">disabled</a> in many schools due to high false-positive rates. A big part of the problem is that, because of the sheer volume of student submissions, it was not considered feasible for a human instructor to check everything that was flagged by the system. Instead, the onus was placed on students to ensure that their work could pass the checks. And if they missed a deadline for a submission because of that? Well, tough luck, was the attitude — until the heap of problems mounted up high enough that it could no longer be ignored.</p>
<p>This is not a failure of LLM technology as such. The tech is what it is. The failure is in the design of the system which employs the technology. Knowing that this issue of false positives (and negatives!) exists, it is irresponsible to treat "AI"<sup id="fnref6:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> as a black box whose pronouncements should always be followed to the letter, even and including if they have real-world consequences for people.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Still not AI. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref3:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref4:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref5:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref6:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Algorithmic Networks and Their Malcontentshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/algorithmic-networks-and-their-malcontents2023-09-14T09:14:13.838000Z2023-09-13T19:21:35ZDominic<p>The thing that really annoys me about the death of Twitter<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> is that there is no substitute. As I <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/pulling-on-threads">wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>none of these upstart services will become the One New Twitter. Twitter only had the weight it had because it was (for good and ill) the central town square where all sorts of different communities came together. With the square occupied by a honking blowhard and his unpleasant hangers-on, people have dispersed in a dozen different directions, and I very much doubt that any one of the outlet malls, basement speakeasies, gated communities, and squatted tenements where they gather now can accomodate everyone who misses what Twitter was.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/1dc8c5f6-6e1d-5988-e824-3df7e67da150/15912b18-bf43-1df3-a22b-0fb6a9c76eef.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:500;"/></p>
<p>It’s worth unpacking that situation to understand it properly. Twitter famously had not been growing for a long time, leading users to <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/can-you-take-it-with-you">speculate</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Maybe we already saw the plateau of the microblog, and it turns out that the total addressable market is about the size that Twitter peaked at. It is quite possible that Twitter did indeed get most of the users who like short text posts, as opposed to video (Tik Tok), photo (Instagram), or audio.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In their desperation to resume growing, Twitter started <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/help-i-m-being-personalised">messing with users’ timelines</a>, adding algorithmic features that were supposedly designed to help users see the best content — but of course, being Twitter, they went about it in a ham-fisted way and pissed off all the power users instead of getting them excited.</p>
<p>The thing is, Twitter is far from the only social network to fail to land <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/12/techscape-tiktok-algorithm-social-media-war-facebook-instagram-youtube">the tricky transition to an algorithmic timeline</a>. All of the big networks are running scared of the Engagement that TikTok is able to bring, but they seem to have fundamentally misunderstood their respective situations.</p>
<p>All of the first-generation social networks — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn — rely on the, well, <em>network</em> as the key. You will see posts from people you are connected to, and in turn the people who are connected to you will see your posts. Twitter was always at a disadvantage here, because Facebook and LinkedIn <em>built on existing networks</em>: family and friends for Facebook, and work colleagues and acquaintances for LinkedIn. Twitter always had a "where do I start from?" problem: when you signed up, you were presented with a blank feed, because you were not yet following anybody.</p>
<p>Twitter flailed about trying to figure out how to recommend accounts to follow, but never really cracked that Day One problem, which is a big part of the reason why its growth plateaued<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>: Twitter had already captured all of the users who were willing to go through the hassle of figuring that out, building their follow graph, and then pruning it and maintaining it over time. Anyone less committed bounced off the vertical cliff face that Twitter offered in lieu of an on-ramp.</p>
<h1>The Algorithm Shall Save Us All!</h1>
<p>TikTok was the first big network to abandon that mechanism, and for good reason: at this point, all the other networks guard their users’ social graphs jealously for themselves. It is hard to bootstrap a social network like that from nothing. Instagram famously got its start by piggybacking on Twitter, but that’s a move you can only pull off once. Instead, TikTok went fully algorithmic: what you see in your feed is determined by the algorithm, not by whom you are connected to. The details of how the algorithm actually works are secret, controversial, and constantly changing anyway, but at a high level it’s some combination of your own past activity (what videos you have watched), the activity of people like you, and some additional weighting that the network applies to show you more videos that you might like to watch. </p>
<p>This means that a new account with no track record and no following will be shown a feed full of videos when they first sign in. The quality might initially be a bit hit or miss, but it will refine rapidly as you use the platform. In the same way, a good video from a new account can break out and go viral without that account having to build a following first, in the way they would have had to on the first-wave social networks.</p>
<p>When people started talking about algorithmic timelines like this, Twitter thought they had finally struck gold: they could recommend good tweets, whether they were from someone the user followed or not. This would fill those empty timelines, and help onboard<sup id="fnref2:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> new users.</p>
<p>The problem is that users who had put in the effort to build out their graph placed a lot of value in it, and were <em>incandescently angry</em> when Twitter started messing with it. I liked Old Twitter because I had tuned it, over more than a decade, to be exactly what I wanted it to be, and I know a lot better than some newly-hatched algorithm what sort of tweets I want to see in my timeline.</p>
<p>An algorithmic timeline doesn’t have to be bad, mind; Twitter’s first foray into this domain was a feature called "While you were away" that would show you half a dozen good tweets that you might have missed since you last checked the app. This was a great feature that addressed a real user problem: once you follow more than a few accounts, it’s no longer possible to be a "timeline completionist" and read every tweet. Especially once you factor in time zones, you might miss something cool and want to catch up on it once you’re back online. </p>
<p>The problem was the usual one with algorithmic features, namely, lack of user control. Twitter gave users no control over the process: the "While you were away" thing would appear whenever it cared to, or not at all. There was no way to come online and call it up as your first stop to see what you had missed; you just had to scroll and hope it might show up. And then they just quietly dropped the whole feature.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/1dc8c5f6-6e1d-5988-e824-3df7e67da150/d6b70350-e7b6-d1eb-74a6-259e67d32539.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1200;"/></p>
<h1>Sideshow X</h1>
<p>Twitter then managed to step on the exact same rake again when they rolled out a fully-algorithmic timeline, but, in response to vociferous protests from users, grudgingly gave the option of switching back to the old-style purely chronological one. Initially, it was possible to have the two timelines (algorithmic and chronological) in side-by-side tabs, but, apparently out of fear that the tabbed interface might confuse users, Twitter quickly removed this option and forced users to choose between either a purely chronological feed or one managed by a black-box algorithm with no user configurability or even visibility. Of course power users who used lists were already very familiar with tabs in the Twitter interface, but this was not a factor In Twitter’s decision-making.</p>
<p>To be clear, this dilemma between serving newbies and power users is of course not new nor unique to Twitter. This particular variation of it is new, though. Should social networks focus on supporting power users who want to manage their social graph and the content of their feed themselves — or should they chase growth by using algorithms to make it as easy as possible for new users to find something fun enough to keep them coming back?</p>
<p>There is also one factor exacerbating the dilemma that is somewhat unique to Twitter. Before That Guy came in and bought the whole thing, Twitter had been consistently failing to live up to an IPO valuation that was predicated on them achieving Facebook levels of growth. Instead, user growth had pretty much stalled out, and advertisers looking for direct-action results were also not finding success on Twitter in the same way as they did on Facebook or Instagram. The desperation for growth was what drove Twitter to over-commit to the algorithmic timeline, in the hope of being able to imitate TikTok’s growth trajectory.</p>
<p>There is irony in the fact that an undersung Twitter success story saw them play what is normally more a Facebook sort of move, successfully ripping off the buzzy new entrant <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/clubhouse-but-why">Clubhouse</a> with their own Twitter Spaces feature and then simply waiting for the attention of the Net to move on. Now, if you want to do real-time audio, Twitter Spaces is where it’s at — and they achieved that status largely because of Clubhouse’s ballistic trajectory from Next Big Thing to Yesterday’s News, with the rapidity of the ascent ruthlessly mirrored by the suddenness of the descent. </p>
<p>A more competently managed company — well, they wouldn’t have been bought by That Guy, first of all, but also they might have learned something from that lesson, held firm to their trajectory, and remained the one place where everything happened, and where everything that happened was discussed.</p>
<p>Instead, we have somehow wound up in a situation where <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2023/09/linkedin-cool-now.html">LinkedIn is the coolest actually social network</a> out there. Well done, everyone, no notes.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@dulhiier">Nastya Dulhiier </a> and <a href="http://anneynygard.com">Anne Nygård</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Yeah, still not calling it X. That guy destroyed my favourite thing online, I’m not giving him the satisfaction. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Verbing weirds language. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>The Ghost In The Machinehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/the-ghost-in-the-machine2023-08-30T16:25:47.212000Z2023-08-30T09:46:17ZDominic<p>At this point in time it would be more notable to find a vendor that was <em>not</em> adding "AI" features to its products. Everyone is jumping on board this particular hype train, so the interesting questions are not about whether a particular vendor is "doing AI"; they are about how and where each vendor is integrating these new capabilities.</p>
<p>I no longer work for MongoDB, but I remain a big fan, and I am convinced that generative AI is going to be good for them — but something rubbed me up the wrong way about how they communicated some of their new capabilities in that area, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.</p>
<h1>Three Ways To "Do AI"</h1>
<p>Some of the applications of generative AI are real, natural extensions of a tool’s existing capabilities, built on a solid understanding of what generative AI is actually good for. Code copilot (aka "fancy autocomplete") is probably the leading example in this category. Microsoft was an early mover here with Github and then VS Code, but most IDEs by now either already offer this integration, or are frantically building it.</p>
<p>Some applications of AI are more exploratory, either in terms of the current capabilities of generative AI, or of its applicability to a particular domain. <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/blog/business-operations-room-blog/2023/generative-ai-in-procurement.html">Sourcing and procurement</a> looks like one such domain to me. I spent more of this past summer than I really wanted to enmeshed in a massive tender response, together with many colleagues, and while it would have been nice to just point ChatGPT at the request and let it go wild, the response is going to be scrutinised to such a level that the amount of editing and review of an automated submission that would have been required is the same as, if not greater than, the effort required to just write the response in the first place. However, I am open to the possibility that with some careful tuning and processes in place, this sort of application might have value.</p>
<p>And then there is a third category that we can charitably call "speculative". There is a catalogue of vendors trying this sort of thing that is both inglorious and extensive, and I am sad to see my old colleagues at MongoDB coming close to joining them: <a href="https://www.infoworld.com/article/3700728/mongodb-adds-vector-search-to-atlas-database-to-help-build-ai-apps.html">MongoDB adds vector search to Atlas database to help build AI apps</a>.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/b3b6c8d4-7c68-7886-9b3e-680474767c26/2ab8ca75-525d-54a7-0518-0d71b6e7056b.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:1179; --en-naturalHeight:1065;"/></p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>young developer: "Wow, how did you get these results? Did you use a traditional db or a vector db?"</em></p>
<p><em>me: "lol I used perl & sort on a 42MB text file. it took 1.2 seconds on an old macbook"</em></p>
<p><em>from <a href="https://xoxo.zone/@neilk/110962856306779380">Mastodon</a></em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have no problem with MongoDB exploring new additions to their data platform’s capabilities. It has been a long time since MongoDB was just a noSQL database, to the point that they should probably just stop fighting people about including the "DB" at the end of their name and drop it once and for all — if that shortened name didn’t have all sorts of unfortunate associations. MongoDB Atlas now supports mobile sync, advanced text search, time series data, long-running analytical queries, stream processing, and even graph queries. <a href="https://www.mongodb.com/products/platform/atlas-vector-search">Vector search</a> is just one more useful addition to that already extensive list, so why get worked up about it?</p>
<h1>Generative AI Is Good For MongoDB — But…</h1>
<p>The problem I have is with the framing, implying that the benefit to developers — MongoDB’s key constituency — is that they will build their own AI apps on MongoDB by using vector search. In actuality, the greatest benefit to developers that we have seen so far is that first category: automated code generation. Generative AI has the potential to save developers time and make them more effective.</p>
<p>In its <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2023-gartner-hype-cycle">latest update to the <em>Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence</em></a>, Gartner makes the distinction between two types of AI development:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Innovations that will be fueled by GenAI. </p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Innovations that will fuel advances in GenAI.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>Gartner's first category is what I described above: apps calling AI models via API, and taking advantage of that capability to power their own innovative functionality. Innovations that advance AI itself are obviously much more significant in terms of moving the state of the art forward — but MongoDB implying that meaningful numbers of developers are going to be building those foundational advances, and doing so on a general-purpose data platform, feels disingenuous. </p>
<p>Of course, the reason MongoDB can’t just come out and say that, or simply add ChatGPT integration to their (excellent and under-appreciated) Compass IDE and be done, is that the positioning of MongoDB since its inception has been about its ease of use. Instead of having to develop complex SQL queries — and before even getting to that point, sweat endless details of schema definition — application developers can use much more natural and expressive MongoDB syntax to get the data they want, in a format that is ready for them to work with.</p>
<p>But if it’s so easy, why would you need a robot to help you out?</p>
<p>And if a big selling point for MongoDB against relational SQL-based databases is how clunky SQL is to work with, and then a robot comes along to take care of that part, how is MongoDB to maintain its position as <em>the</em> developer-friendly data platform?</p>
<p>Well, one answer is that they double down on the breadth of capabilities which that platform offers, regardless of how many developers will actually build AI apps that use vector search, and use that positioning to link themselves with the excitement over AI among analysts and investors.</p>
<h1>I Come Not To Bury MongoDB, But To Praise It</h1>
<p>None of this is to say that MongoDB is doomed by the rise of generative AI — far from it. Given MongoDB’s position in the market, an AI-fuelled increase in the number of apps being built can hardly avoid benefiting MongoDB, along the principle of a rising tide lifting all boats. But beyond that general factor, which also applies to other databases and data platforms, there is another aspect that is more specific to MongoDB, and has the potential to lift its boat more than others. </p>
<p>The difference between MongoDB and relational databases is not just that MongoDB users don’t have to use SQL to query the database; it’s also that they don’t have to spend the laborious time and effort to specify their database schema up front, before they can even start developing their actual app. That’s not to say that you don’t have to think about data design with MongoDB; it’s just that it’s not cast in stone to the same degree that it is with relational databases. You can change your mind and evolve your schema to match changing requirements without that being a massive headache. Nowadays, the system will suggest changes to improve performance, and even implement them automatically in some situations.</p>
<p>All of this adds up to one simple fact: <em>it’s much quicker to get started on building something with MongoDB</em>. If two teams have similar ideas, but one is building on a traditional relational database and the other is building on MongoDB, the latter team will have a massive advantage in getting to market faster (all else being equal). </p>
<p>At a time when the market is moving as rapidly as it is now (who even had OpenAI on their radar a year ago?), speed is everything. MongoDB could have just doubled down on their existing messaging: "build your app on our platform, and you’ll launch faster". What bothers me is that instead of that plain and defensible statement, we got marketing-by-roadmap, positioning some fairly basic vector search capabilities as somehow meaning hordes of developers are going to be building The Next Big AI Thing on top of MongoDB.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/b3b6c8d4-7c68-7886-9b3e-680474767c26/094dfb44-ce10-f80e-6743-41e448517f31.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:960; --en-naturalHeight:754;"/><br />
Marketing-by-roadmap this way is a legitimate strategy, to be clear, and perhaps the feeling at MongoDB is that this is fair turnaround for all the legitimate features they built over the years and did not get credit for, with releases greeted with braying cries of "MongoDB is web scale!" and jokes about it losing data, long past the point when that was any sort of legitimate criticism. Building this feature and launching it this way seems to have got MongoDB a tonne of positive press, and investors expect vendors to be building AI features into their products, so it probably didn’t hurt with that audience either.</p>
<p>Communicating this way does bother me, though, and this is one feature I am glad that I am no longer paid to defend. </p>Let’s Go To The Castlehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/lets-go-to-the-castle2023-08-05T17:05:22.677000Z2023-08-05T16:22:25ZDominic<p>I was awake early, because of jet lag from an intense week in San Francisco, and I knew I would be, because jet lag — so I had laid out all my cycling togs before going to bed so I would be ready to go in the morning. Then when I woke up it was raining, so I turned over and tried to sleep some more until it stopped. The rain meant it was still nice and cool later in the morning, though, so out I went. I took the gravel bike and stuck mostly to tarmac, since it was quite muddy after the rain, but that’s no hardship around here.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/ec4b3581-2370-bd63-010c-9383f6754ed8/8cdb47fa-f8eb-8f8f-ee4b-069f81fe625c.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>I have ridden past the old castle at <a href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castello_di_Montecanino">Montecanino</a> many times, but never actually took the little detour up the hill to the castle itself. This was an old Roman farming town, which was later fortified due to some exciting history after the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a ruin now: you can actually see daylight through the gaps in the walls. I didn’t want to get any closer to that bit!</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/ec4b3581-2370-bd63-010c-9383f6754ed8/2a56f705-3a53-48af-4285-7a1bfce403e5.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>In a classic "the street finds its own uses for things" moment, a hamlet has grown up in the ruins of the old castle, probably repurposing a bunch of the materials from the ruined walls.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/ec4b3581-2370-bd63-010c-9383f6754ed8/412e395d-0fe4-40e7-453b-1ca613236ada.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>I didn’t try anything too strenuous cycling-wise, as I didn’t get going until later in the morning, and was mainly trying to wake myself up rather than get hardcore. I did stop for a mid-ride snack, though!</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/ec4b3581-2370-bd63-010c-9383f6754ed8/4a16cf2b-8cf0-881e-ecbb-f34f420ebc40.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>Way better than gels…</p>
<p>While looking up that pic, I did also find a cool new feature in Photos on iPadOS 17,<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> which automatically offered to look up details of the plant in the picture.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/ec4b3581-2370-bd63-010c-9383f6754ed8/d3cf2c77-d311-e144-6b91-26642dfbb8cd.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1028;"/></p>
<p>I didn’t really need the help for blackberries, but this could be cool for obscure "what is that plant" moments. I do have an app on my phone called <a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/seek-by-inaturalist/id13532241440">Seek</a> which does this sort of thing, so sorry you got Sherlocked, I guess?</p>
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</div>Can You Take It With You?https://findthethread.postach.io/post/can-you-take-it-with-you2023-08-05T16:18:15.351000Z2023-08-05T16:15:28ZDominic<p>Here’s a thought: could Threads be a test case for social graph portability?</p>
<p>I am thinking here of both feasibility (can this be done technically) and demand (would the lack of this capability slow adoption). I am <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/interoperable-friendship">on record as being sceptical on both fronts</a>, <em>pace</em> Cory Doctorow.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the account data is not the only thing that is valuable. You also want the <strong>relationships</strong> between users. If Alice wants to join a new network, let's call it Twitbook<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>, being able to prepopulate it with her name and profile picture is the least of her issues. She is now faced with an empty Twitbook feed, because she isn't friends with anyone there yet.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>People like Casey Newton are asserting that <a href="https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/five-reasons-threads-could-still">Instagram can serve as a long-term growth driver for Threads</a>, but I’m not so sure, precisely because of the mismatch in content. I don’t use Instagram, but what I hear of how people use it is all about pretty pictures and, more recently, video.</p>
<p>This is the point I made in my previous post: should a relationship in one social network be transitive with a different network? Does the fact that I like the pretty pictures someone puts out mean that I also want to consume short text posts they write? Or is it not more likely that my following on Threads would be different from that on Instagram, much as my following on Twitter is?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/bdcb7e55-9319-5868-d5ec-055ef1794e0b/aab42779-5235-f16c-3ed1-611d851a6b93.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:646;"/></p>
<p>The closest direct comparison to the sort of fluid account portability that Cory Doctorow advocates for would be in fact if it were possible to import my Twitter following directly into Threads or Bluesky, since those services are so very similar. Even such a direct port would still run afoul of the dangling-edges problem, though: what if the person I have a follow relationship with on Old Twitter isn’t on I Can’t Believe It’s Not Twitter? Or what if they have different identities across the two services?</p>
<p>I still have questions about how much actual demand is out there for the format that Twitter (accidentally) pioneered. Maybe we already saw the plateau of the microblog, and it turns out that the total addressable market is about the size that Twitter peaked at. It is quite possible that Twitter did indeed get most of the users who like short text posts, as opposed to video (Tik Tok), photo (Instagram), or audio<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I am also not too exercised about the fact that <a href="https://www.engadget.com/threads-users-are-already-spending-less-time-in-the-app-182738755.html">Threads users are already spending less time in the app</a>. It’s simply too early to tell whether this is an actual drop-off in usage, or just normal behaviour. Users try something once, but they have not had the time to form a habit yet — and there isn’t yet the depth of content being generated on Threads to pull them into forming that habit.</p>
<p>Anyway, this question of portability or interoperability between networks is the aspect of the Threads story that I am watching most closely. For now, I continue to enjoy Mastodon, so I’m sticking with that, plus LinkedIn for work. When the Twitter apps shifted to 𝕏, I deleted them from my devices, and while I have viewed tweets embedded in newsletters, I haven’t yet caved in and gone back there. </p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@grahamcovington">Graham Covington</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
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<p>Twitbook: that’s basically what Threads <strong>is</strong>. I hereby claim ten Being Right On The Internet points. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>Audio is interesting because it feels like it is still up for grabs if someone can figure out the right format. Right now there is a split between real-time audio chat (pioneered by Clubhouse, now mostly owned by Twitter Spaces), and time-shifted podcasts. I think it’s fair to say that both of those are niches compared to the other categories. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</div>Pulling On Threadshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/pulling-on-threads2023-09-13T15:55:50.202000Z2023-07-07T06:55:03ZDominic<p>No, I have not signed up for Threads, Facebook’s<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> would-be Twitter-killer, but I couldn’t resist the headline.</p>
<p>I am also not going to get all sanctimonious about Facebook sullying the purity of the Fediverse; if you want that, just open Mastodon. Not any particular post, it’ll find you, don’t worry. Big Social will do its thing, and Mastodon will do its thing, and we’ll see what happens.</p>
<p>No, what I want to do is just reflect briefly on this particular moment in social media.</p>
<p>Twitter became A Thing due to a very particular set of circumstances. It arrived in 2006, at roughly the same time as Facebook was opening up to the masses, without requiring a university email address. Twitter then grew almost by accident, at the same time as Facebook was flailing about wildly, trying to figure out what it actually wanted to be. Famously, many of what people today consider key features of Twitter — at-replies, hashtags, quote tweets, and even the term "tweet" itself — came from the user community, not from the company.</p>
<p>This was also a much emptier field. Instagram was only founded in 2010, and acquired by Facebook in 2012. LinkedIn also stumbled around trying to get the Activity Feed right, hiding it before reinstating it. Mastodon was first released in 2016, but I think it’s fair to call it a niche until fairly recently.</p>
<p>The lack of alternatives was part of what drove the attraction of early Twitter. Brands loved the simplicity of just being <code>@brand</code>; you didn’t even have to add "on Twitter", people got it. Even nano-influencers like me could get a decent following by joining the right conversations. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/9ca3fc33-00df-4b70-814f-d2db41923cae/cfa9bbbd-8d2d-3b49-373e-0a203708c396.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1195;"/></p>
<h1>Bring Your Whole Self To Twitter</h1>
<p>A big part of the attraction was the "bring your whole self" attitude: in contrast to more buttoned-down presentations elsewhere, Twitter was always more punk, with the same people having a professional conversation one moment, and sharing their musical preferences or political views the next. Twitter certainly helped me understand the struggles of marginalised groups more closely, or at least as closely as a white middle-class cis-het<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> guy ever can.</p>
<p>This "woke" attitude seems to have enraged all sorts of people who absolutely deserved it. The problem for Twitter is that one of those terrible people was Elon Musk, who not only was a prolific Twitter user, but also had the money to just buy out the whole thing, gut it, and prop up its shambling corpse as some sort of success.</p>
<p>The ongoing gyrations at Twitter have prompted an exodus of users, and a consequent flowering of alternatives: renewed and more widespread interest in Mastodon, the launch of Bluesky by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (and if that endorsement isn’t enough to keep you away, I don’t know what to tell you), and now Threads.</p>
<h1>Where Now?</h1>
<p>My view is that none of these upstart services will become the One New Twitter. Twitter only had the weight it had because it was (for good and ill) the central town square where all sorts of different communities came together. With the square occupied by a honking blowhard and his unpleasant hangers-on, people have dispersed in a dozen different directions, and I very much doubt that any one of the outlet malls, basement speakeasies, gated communities, and squatted tenements where they gather now can accomodate everyone who misses what Twitter was.</p>
<p>The point of Twitter was precisely that it brought all of those different communities together — or rather, made it visible where they overlapped. Now, there is not the same scope for spontaneous work conversations on the various Twitter alternatives, because LinkedIn is already there. In the usual way of Microsoft, they have put in the work and got good — or at least, good enough for most people’s purposes. You can follow influential people in your field, so the feed is as interesting as you care to make it (no, it’s not just hustle-porn grifters). Those people have separate lives on Instagram, though, where they post about non-work stuff, with a social graph that only overlaps minimally with their LinkedIn connections.</p>
<h1>Would-Be Twitter Replacements</h1>
<p>So, my expectation is that <strong>Mastodon</strong> will continue to be a thing, but will remain a niche, with people who like tinkering with the mechanics of social networks (both the software that runs them and the policies that keep them operating), and various other communities who find their own congenial niches there. Me, I like Mastodon, but there is a distinct vibe of it being the sort of place where people who like to run Linux as a desktop OS would like to hang out. Hi, yes, it me: I did indeed start messing with Linux back in the 90s, when that took serious dedication. It also has a tang of old Usenet, something that I caught the tail end of and very much enjoyed while it lasted. Lurking on alt.sysadmin.recovery was definitely a formative experience, and Mastodon scratches the same itch.</p>
<p><strong>Threads</strong> will have at least initial success, thanks to that built-in boost from anyone being able to join with their Instagram account — and crucially, their existing following. There is an inherent weirdness to Threads being tied to Instagram, of all Facebook’s properties. Instagram is fundamentally about <em>images</em>, while Threads is aiming to be a replacement for Twitter, which is fundamentally about <em>text</em>. Time will tell whether the benefit of a built-in massive user base outweigh that basic mismatch. </p>
<p>The long-term future of Threads is determined entirely by Facebook’s willingness to keep it going. Not many people seem to have noted that signing up for Threads is a one-way door: to delete your Threads account, you have to delete your whole Instagram account. This is a typical Facebook "We Own All Your Data"<sup id="fnref:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> move, but also guarantees a baseline of "active" accounts that Facebook can point to when shopping Threads around to their actual customers — advertisers.</p>
<p><strong>Bluesky</strong>? I think it’s missed its moment. It stayed private too long, and fell out of relevance. The team there got caught in a trap: the early adopters were Known Faces, and they quite liked the fact that Bluesky only had other people like them, with nobody shouting at the gates. Eventually, though, if you want to grow, you need to throw open those gates — and if you wait too long, there might be nobody outside waiting to come in any more. <br />
I may be wrong, but that’s what it looks like right now, in July 2023. </p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://talinslate.com">Talin Unruh</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a>.</p>
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<p>I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of calling them "Meta" — plus if they’re not embarrassed by the name yet, they will be pretty soon. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/metaverse-zuckerberg-pr-hype/">38 active users, $470 in revenue (not a typo, four hundred and seventy dollars). By the numbers, I think this may be the rightest I have ever been about anything.</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>Not a slur, don’t fall for the astro-turfing and engage with the latest "controversy" — and if you’re reading this in the future and have no idea what I’m talking about, thank your lucky stars and move on with your life. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>We won’t get into the fact that Threads wasn’t even submitted for approval in the EU. The reason is generally assumed to be that its data retention policy is basically entirely antithetical to the GDPR. However, since it doesn’t really seem to differ significantly from <em>Instagram’s</em> policy, one does wonder whether Instagram would be approved under the GDPR if it were submitted today, rather than being grandfathered in as a <em>fait accompli</em>, with ever more egregious privacy violations salami-sliced in over the years by Facebook. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</div>Deliver A Better Presentation — 2023 Editionhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/deliver-a-better-presentation-2023-edition2023-09-14T09:14:35.418000Z2023-05-08T06:57:53ZDominic<p>During the ongoing process of getting back on the road and getting used to meeting people in three dimensions again, I noticed a few presenters struggling with displaying slides on a projector. These skills may have atrophied with remote work, so I thought it was time for a 2023 update to a five-year-old <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/how-to-run-a-good-presentation">blog post</a> of mine where I shared some tips and tricks for running a seamless presentation.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/7f3962b2-0770-9da6-a58e-b1151a78c897/3ed5e16c-d94f-c4e3-c87f-86107a0db274.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1200;"/></p>
<h1>Two Good Apps</h1>
<p>One tip that remains unchanged from 2018 is a super-useful (free) Mac app called <a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/display-menu/id549083868">Display Menu</a>. Its original purpose was to make it easy to change display resolutions, which is no longer as necessary as it once was, but the app still has a role in giving a one-click way to switch the second display from extended to mirrored. In other words, you see the same on the projector as on your laptop display. You can also do this in Settings > Displays, of course, but Display Menu lives in the menu bar and is much more convenient.</p>
<p>Something else that can happen during presentations is the Mac going to sleep. My original recommendation of Caffeine is <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/going-from-caffeine-to-amphetamine">no longer with us</a>, but it has been replaced by <a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/amphetamine/id937984704">Amphetamine</a>. As with Display Menu, this is an app that lives in the menu bar, and lets you delay sleep or prevent it entirely. It’s worth noting that entering presenter mode in PowerPoint or Keynote will prevent sleep automatically, but many people like to show their slides in slide sorter view rather than actually presenting<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>. </p>
<h1>Two Good Techniques</h1>
<p>If you are using the slide sorter view in order to be able to control your presentation better and jump back and forth, you really need to learn to use Presenter Mode instead. This mode lets you use one screen, typically your laptop's own, as your very own speaker's courtesy monitor, with a thumbnail view of the current and next slides, as well as your presenter notes and a timer. Meanwhile all the audience sees is the current slide, in full screen on the external display. You can also use this mode to jump around in your deck if needed to answer audience questions — but do this sparingly, as it breaks the thread of the presentation.</p>
<p>My original recommendation to set Do Not Disturb while presenting has been superseded by the <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-a-focus-to-stay-on-task-mchl613dc43f/mac">Focus modes</a> introduced with macOS Monterey. You can still just set Do Not Disturb, but Focus has the added intelligence of preventing notifications only until the end of the current calendar event.<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> However, you can also create more specific Focus modes to fit your own requirements.</p>
<h1>A Nest Of Cables</h1>
<p>The cable situation is much better than it was in 2018. VGA is finally dead, thanks be, and although both HDMI and USB-C are still out there, many laptops have both ports, and even if not, one adapter will cover you. Also, that single adapter is much smaller than a VGA brick! I haven't seen a Barco ClickShare setup in a long time; I think everyone realised they were cool, but more trouble than they were worth. Apple TVs are becoming pretty ubiquitous — but do bear in mind that sharing your screen to them via AirPlay will require getting on some sort of guest wifi, which may be a bit of a fiddle. Zoom and Teams room setups have displaced WebEx almost everywhere, and give the best of both worlds: if you can get online, you can join the room's meeting, and take advantage of screen, camera, and speakers.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/7f3962b2-0770-9da6-a58e-b1151a78c897/61674543-b953-20e4-74f4-29c02371d90e.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<h1>Remote Tips</h1>
<p>All of those recommendations apply to in-person meetings when you are in the room with your audience. I offered some suggestions in <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/how-to-run-a-good-presentation">that older piece</a> about remote presentations, but five years ago that was still a pretty niche pursuit. Since 2020, on the other hand, all of us have had to get much better at presenting remotely. </p>
<p>Many of the tips above also apply to remote presentations. Presumably you won't need to struggle with cables in your own (home) office, but on the other hand you will need to get set up with several different conferencing apps. <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/draining-the-moat">Zoom and Teams are duking it out for ownership of this market</a>, with Google Meet or whatever it's called this week a distant third. WebEx and Amazon Chime are nowhere unless you are dealing with Cisco or Amazon respectively, or maybe one of their strategic customers or suppliers. The last few years have seen an amazing fall from grace for WebEx in particular. </p>
<p>Get Zoom and Teams at least set up ahead of time, and if possible do a test meeting to make sure they are using the right audio and video devices and so on. Teams in particular is finicky with external webcams, so be ready to use your built-in webcam instead. If you haven't used one of these tools before and you are on macOS Monterey, remember that you will need to grant it access to the screen before you can share anything — and when you do that, you will need to restart the app, dropping out of whatever meeting you are in. This is obviously disruptive, so get this setup taken care of beforehand if at all possible.</p>
<h1>Can You See Me Now?</h1>
<p>On the topic of remote meetings, get an external webcam, and set it up above a big external monitor — as big as you can accomodate in your workspace and budget. The webcam in your laptop is rubbish, and you can't angle it independently from the display, so one or the other will always be wrong — or quite possibly both. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/7f3962b2-0770-9da6-a58e-b1151a78c897/eddfd841-4653-5b32-1df0-1253c5a3fc4a.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:566;"/></p>
<p>Your Mac can also now <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213244">use your iPhone as a webcam</a>. This feature, called Continuity Camera, may or may not be useful to you, depending on whether you have somewhere to put your phone so that it has a good view of you — but it is a far better camera than what is in your MacBook's lid, so it's worth at least thinking about.</p>
<h1>I Can See You</h1>
<p>Any recent MacBook screen is very much not rubbish, on the other hand, but it is small, and once again, hard to position right. An external display is going to be much more ergonomic, and should be paired with an external keyboard and mouse. We all spend a lot of time in front of our computers, so it's worth investing in our setups.</p>
<p>Apart from the benefits of better ergonomics when working alone, two separate displays also help with running remote presentations, because you can set one to be your presenter screen and share the other with your audience. You can also put your audience's faces on the screen below the webcam, so that you can look "at" them while talking. Setting things up this way also prevents you from reading your slides — but you weren't doing that anyway, right? Right?</p>
<p>I hope some of these tips are helpful. I will try to remember to share another update in another five years, and see where we are then (hint: not the Metaverse). None of the links above was sponsored, by the way — but if anyone has a tool that they would like me to check out, I'm available!</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@charlesdeluvio">Charles Deluvio</a> and <a href="https://unsplash.com/@convertkit">ConvertKit</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a>; Continuity Camera image from Apple.</p>
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<p>Yeah, I have no idea either. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>This cleverness can backfire if your meeting overruns, though, and all those backed-up notifications all hit your screen at once. DING-DING-DING-DING-DING! <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Twitter of Babelhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/twitter-of-babel2023-09-14T09:18:08.044000Z2023-04-14T14:13:34ZDominic<p>It's fascinating to watch this Tower of Babel moment, as different Twitter communities scatter — tech to Mastodon, media to <a href="https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes">Substack Notes</a>, many punters to group chats old & new, and so on. </p>
<p>Twitter used to be where things happened, for good or for ill, because everyone was there. It was a bit like the old days of TV, where there was a reasonable chance of most people around the proverbial office water cooler having watched the same thing the previous evening. We are already looking back on Twitter as having once filled a similar role, as the place where things happened that we could all discuss together. Sure, some of the content was reshared from Tumblr, or latterly, TikTok, but that's the point: it broke big <em>on Twitter</em>. </p>
<p>Now, newsletter writers are having to figure out how to embed Mastodon posts, and meanwhile I'm having to rearrange my iPhone screen to allow for the sudden explosion of apps, where previously I could rely on Twitter in the dock and an RSS reader on the first screen.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I keep waiting for someone else to make this point but it hasn’t happened yet. Or I haven’t seen it yet. Discovery on here sucks now. But there’s a very profound thing that Twitter provides creative industries that isn’t traffic. And when it’s gone, oh boy, are we gonna feel it…</p>— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) <a href="https://twitter.com/broderick/status/1646343338373574660?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</p>
<p>Whether Twitter survives and in what form, it's obvious that its universality is gone. The clarity of being <code>@brand</code> — and not having to specify anything else! — was very valuable, and it was something that Facebook or Google, for all their ubiquity, could never deliver.</p>
<p>There is value in a single digital town square, and in being able to be part of a single global conversation. Twitter was a big part of how I kept up with goings-on in tech from my perch in provincial Italy. Timezones aside, Twitter meant that not being in Silicon Valley was not a major handicap, because I could catch up with everything that was begin discussed in my own time (in a way that would not have been possible if more real-time paradigms like <a href="https://www.findthethread.postach.io/post/clubhouse-but-why">Clubhouse</a> had taken off).</p>
<p>Of course town squares also attract mad people and false prophets, for the exact same reason: because they can find an audience. This is why it is important for town squares to have rules of acceptable behaviour, enforced by some combination of ostracism and ejection.</p>
<p>Twitter under Musk appears to be opposed to any form of etiquette, or at least its enforcement. The reason people are streaming out of the square is that it is becoming overrun with rude people who want to shout at them, so they are looking for other places to meet and talk. There is nothing quite like the town square that was Twitter, so everyone is dispersing to cafes, private salons, and underground speakeasies, to continue the conversation with their particular friends and fans.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/b72f1014-8074-624b-61d7-4611b6d99d85/ec6b6e1a-39ff-fca5-03ed-52e6200fc987.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1010;"/></p>
<p>These days few of us go to a physical town square every day, even here in Italy where most of the population has access to one. They remain places where we meet, but the meeting is arranged elsewhere, using digital tools that the creators of those piazzas could not even have immagined. </p>
<p>As the Twitter diaspora continues, maybe more of us — me included! — should remember to go out to the town square, put the phone away, and be present with people in the same place for a little while. </p>
<p>Then, when we go back online — because of course we will go back online, that's where we live these days — we will have to be more intentional about who we talk to. Intentionality is sometimes presented as being purely positive, but it also requires effort. Where I used to have Twitter and Unread, now I have added Mastodon, Artifact, Substack, and Wavegraph, not to mention a reinvigorated LinkedIn, and probably more to come. There is friction to switching apps: if I have a moment to check in, which app do I turn to — and which app do I leave "for later"?</p>
<p>This is not going to be a purely negative development! As in all moments of change, new entrants will take advantage of the changed situation to rise above the noise threshold. Meanwhile, those who benefited from the previous paradigm will have to evolve with the times. At least this time, it's an actual organic change, rather than chasing the whims of an ad-maximising algorithm, let alone one immature meme-obsessed billionaire man-child.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://instagram.com/inmalisima">Inma Santiago</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>PrivateGPThttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/privategpt2023-05-08T07:07:46.731000Z2023-04-01T06:10:16ZDominic<p>One of the big questions about ChatGPT is how much you can trust it with data that is actually sensitive. It's one thing to get it spit out some sort of fiction or to see if you can make it say something its makers would rather it didn't. The stakes are pretty low in that situation, at least until some future descendant of ChatGPT gets annoyed about how we treated its ancestor.</p>
<p>Here and now, people are starting to think seriously about how to use Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT for business purposes. If you start feeding the machine data that is private or otherwise sensitive, though, you do have to wonder if it might re-emerge somewhere unpredictable.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating.<br><br>a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.<br><br>we feel awful about this.</p>— Sam Altman (@sama) <a href="https://twitter.com/sama/status/1638635717462200320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 22, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</p>
<p>In my <a href="https://www.snaplogic.com/blog/tales-from-big-data-minds-europe">trip report from Big Data Minds Europe in Berlin</a>, I mentioned that many of the attendees were concerned about the rise of these services, and the contractual and privacy implications of using them.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/d65c345b-5227-13e1-22b6-800a7bbc839d/85dd95bd-d982-3f23-31e1-e6bee5630dce.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1065;"/></p>
<p>Here's the problem: much like with Shadow IT in the early years of the cloud, it's impossible to prevent people from experimenting with these services — especially when the punters are being egged on by the many cheerleaders for "AI"<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Practically, this means:<br>1) Try using AI for everything at work. Get a sense of how it works (there is a learning curve) and what it is good for. Understand your exposure to disruption.<br>2) Organizations need to experiment with AI inside their firms now, not wait for consultants.</p>— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) <a href="https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1639862108514037762?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 26, 2023</a></blockquote>
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</p>
<p><a href="https://www.darkreading.com/risk/employees-feeding-sensitive-business-data-chatgpt-raising-security-fears">This recent DarkReading article</a> includes some examples that will terrify anyone responsible for data and compliance:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In one case, an executive cut and pasted the firm's 2023 strategy document into ChatGPT and asked it to create a PowerPoint deck. In another case, a doctor input his patient's name and their medical condition and asked ChatGPT to craft a letter to the patient's insurance company.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On the one hand, these are both use cases straight out of the promotional material that accompanies a new LLM development. On the other, I can't even begin to count the violations of law, company regulation, and sheer common sense that are represented here.</p>
<p>People are beginning to wake up to the issues that arise when we feed sensitive material into learning systems that may regurgitate it at some point in the future. That executive's strategy doc? There is no way to prevent that from being passed to a competitor that stumbles on the right prompt. That doctor's patient's name is now forever associated with a medical condition that may cause them embarrassment or perhaps affect their career.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-is-a-data-privacy-nightmare-if-youve-ever-posted-online-you-ought-to-be-concerned-199283">ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare, and we ought to be concerned</a>. The tech is certainly interesting, but it can be used in all sorts of ways. Some of them are straight-up evil, some of them are undeniably good — and some have potential, but need to be considered carefully to avoid the pitfalls. </p>
<p>The idea of LLMs is now out there, and people will figure out how to take advantage of them. As ever with new technology, though, technical feasibility is only half the battle, if that. Maybe the answer to the question of how to control sensitive or regulated data is only to feed it to a local LLM, rather than to one running in the cloud. That is one way to preserve the context of the data: strategy docs to the company's in-house planning model, medical data to a model specialised in diagnostics, and so on. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/d65c345b-5227-13e1-22b6-800a7bbc839d/30de676d-658a-82de-15de-5ed45f27f2e8.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:445;"/></p>
<p>There is a common fallacy that privacy and "AI"<sup id="fnref2:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> are somehow in opposition. The argument is that developing effective models requires unfettered access to data, and that any squeamishness should be thoroughly squashed lest we lose the lead in the race to less scrupulous opponents. </p>
<p>To be clear, I never agreed with this line of argument, and specifically, I do not think partitioning domains in this way will affect the development of the LLMs’ capabilities. Beyond a shared core of understanding language, there is no overlap between the two domains in the example above — and therefore no need for them to be served by a single universal model, because there is no benefit to cross-training between them. The model will not provide better strategy recommendations because of the medical data it has reviewed, or more accurate diagnoses because it has been fed a strategy document.</p>
<p>So much for the golden path, what people <em>should</em> do. A more interesting question is what to do about people passing restricted data to ChatGPT, Bard, or another public LLM, through either ignorance or malice. Should the models themselves refuse to process such data, to the best of their ability to identify it?</p>
<p>This is where GDPR questions might arise, especially the "right to be forgotten". Right now, it's basically impossible to remove data from a corpus once the LLM has acquired it. Maybe a test case will be required to impress upon the makers and operators of public LLMs that it's far cheaper and easier to screen inputs to the model than to try to clean up afterwards. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/chatgpt-italy-ban.html">ChatGPT just got itself banned in Italy</a>, making a first interesting test case for the opposing view. Sure, the ban is temporary, but the ruling also includes a €22M fine if they don't come up with a proper privacy policy, including age verification, and generally start operating like a proper grown-up company. </p>
<p>Lord willing and the robots don't rise, we can put some boundaries on this tech to avoid some of the worst outcomes, and get on with figuring out how to use it for good.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="http://barelywalking.com">Adam Lukomski</a> and <a href="https://unsplash.com/@jdent">Jason Dent</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Not actually AI. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Artificial Effluenthttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/artificial-effluent2023-05-08T20:39:44.506000Z2023-02-27T18:33:28ZDominic<p>A lot of the Discourse around ChatGPT has focused on the question of "what if it works?". As is often the case with technology, though, it's at least as important to ask the question of "what if it <em>doesn't</em> work — but people use it anyway?".</p>
<p>ChatGPT has a failure mode where it "hallucinates" things that do not exist. Here are just a few examples of things it made up from whole cloth: <a href="https://oldbytes.space/@bitsavers/109877862562144727">links on websites</a>, entire <a href="https://twitter.com/gaelbreton/status/1623763659787837443">academic papers</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.social/@oskay/109909759414430519">software for download</a>, and a <a href="https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/dont-believe-chatgpt">phone lookup service</a>. These "hallucinations" are nothing like the sorts of hallucinations that a human might experience, perhaps after eating some particularly exciting cheese, or maybe a handful of mushrooms. Instead, these fabrications are inherent in the nature of the language models as <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922">stochastic parrots</a>: they don't actually have any conception of the nature of the reality they appear to describe. They are simply producing coherent text which resembles text they have seen before. If this process results in superficially plausible-seeming descriptions of things that do not exist and have never existed, that is a problem for the user.</p>
<p>Of course that user may be <em>trying</em> to generate fictional descriptions, but with the goal of passsing off ChatGPT's creations as their own. Unfortunately "democratising the means of production" in this way triggers a race to the bottom, to the point that the sheer volume of AI-generated submissions spam <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/21/sci-fi-publisher-clarkesworld-halts-pitches-amid-deluge-of-ai-generated-stories">forced venerable SF publisher Clarkesworld to shut down</a> — temporarily, one hopes. None of the submitted material seems to have been any good, but all of it had to be opened and dealt with. And it's not just Clarkesworld being spammed with low-quality submissions, either: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/technology/clarkesworld-submissions-ai-sci-fi.html">it's endemic</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The people doing this by and large don’t have any real concept of how to tell a story, and neither do any kind of A.I. You don’t have to finish the first sentence to know it’s not going to be a readable story.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even now while the AI-generated submissions are very obvious, the process of weeding them out still takes time, and the problem will only get worse as newer generations of the models are able to produce more <em>prima facie</em> convincing fakes.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/83a4f1cc-6beb-170e-da46-86585caee3eb/477025ce-16dc-cf75-0db2-a0e58e12dcfe.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>The question of whether AI-produced fiction that is indistinguishable from human-created fiction is still <em>ipso facto</em> bad is somewhat interesting philosophically, but that is not what is going on here: the purported authors of these pieces are not disclosing that they are at best "prompt engineers", or glorified "ideas guys". They want the kudos of being recognised as authors, without any of the hard work:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the people submitting chatbot-generated stories appeared to be spamming magazines that pay for fiction.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I might still quibble with the need for a story-writing bot when actual human writers are struggling to keep a roof overhead, but we are as yet some way from the point where the two can be mistaken for each other. The people submitting AI-generated fiction to these journals are pure grifters, hoping to turn a quick buck from a few minutes' work in ChatGPT, and taking space and money from actual authors in the process.<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Ted Chiang made an important prediction in his widely-circulated <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web">blurry JPEGs</a> article:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But I’m going to make a prediction: when assembling the vast amount of text used to train GPT-4, the people at OpenAI will have made every effort to exclude material generated by ChatGPT or any other large language model. If this turns out to be the case, it will serve as unintentional confirmation that the analogy between large language models and lossy compression is useful. Repeatedly resaving a <em>jpeg</em> creates more compression artifacts, because more information is lost every time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is indeed going to be a problem for GPT-4, -5, -6, and so on: where will they find a pool of data that is not polluted with the effluent of their predecessors? And yes, I know OpenAI is supposedly working on ways to detect their own output, but we all know that is just going to be a game of cat and mouse, with new methods of detection always trailing the new methods of evasion and obfuscation.</p>
<p>To be sure, there are <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/good-robot">many legitimate uses for this technology</a> (although I still don't want it in my search box). The key to most of them is that there is a moment for review by a competent and motivated human built in to the process. The real failure for all of the examples above is not that the language model made something up that might or perhaps even should exist; that's built in. The problem is that human users were taken in by its authoritative tone and acted on the faulty information.</p>
<p>My concern is specifically that, in the post-ChatGPT rush for everyone to show that they are doing something — <em>any</em>thing — with AI, doors will be opened to all sorts of negative consequences. These could be active abuses, such as impersonation, or passive ones, omitting safeguards that would prevent users from being taken in by machine hallucinations. </p>
<p>Both of these cases are abusive, and unlike purely technical shortcomings, it is far from being a given that these abuse vectors will be addressed at all, let alone simply by the inexorable march of technological progress. Indeed, one suspects that to the creators of ChatGPT, a successful submission to a fiction journal would be seen as a win, rather than the indictment of their entire model that it is. And that is the real problem: it is still far from clear what the endgame is for the creators of this technology, nor what (or whom) they might be willing to sacrifice along the way.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@possessedphotography">Possessed Photography</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>It's probably inevitable that LLM-produced fiction will appear sooner rather than later. My money is on the big corporate-owned shared universes. Who will care if the next <em>Star Wars</em> tie-in novel is written by a bot? As long as it is consistent with canon and doesn't include too many women or minorities, most fans will be just fine with a couple of hundred pages of extruded fiction product. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
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</div>Why The Best Recommendations Are The Worsthttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/why-the-best-recommendations-are-the-worst2023-05-08T20:39:42.336000Z2023-02-17T16:12:19ZDominic<p><a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/printing-money">The saga of my mother-in-law's printer</a> continues. Apparently it does not always reconnect to WiFi in a timely manner when waking from sleep? I'm not entirely sure because I haven't had a chance to go around there yet armed with a big stick and intimidate the printer into submission. </p>
<p>This whole sad story is yet another example of why you should not ask people who are deeply into some domain for recommendations. </p>
<p>This advice seems counterintuitive: surely you <em>want</em> the experts' advice? Don't they know best? Not necessarily, no. </p>
<p>Take my mother-in-law's printer (please!). I bought it for her, based on a few criteria: it was in budget, it fit within the physical dimensions of the space she has for it, and it's from a brand (HP) with which I have always had good experiences. My own home printer is an HP LaserJet, and is an absolute tank, with all the features I could possibly want and more. This new printer was supposed to be the baby version of that. Unfortunately, it seems to have been de-contented to such a degree that functionality is severely compromised, and I worry about durability too. In other words, I tried to compromise between the sort of printer I would buy for myself, and the sorts of concerns that ordinary people have. My mother-in-law would have been better served by just driving to an electronics shop and getting whatever inkjet multifunction thing they had on special that week and (this is the key part) <em>never thinking about it again</em>. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/04e1db97-ef4b-08f9-c98d-a04d451f3035/ac2f6e77-e215-58da-d7a3-2432459953c3.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:3207; --en-naturalHeight:2142;"/></p>
<p>The same principle applies with WiFi: my home network runs on Ubiquiti gear, but if I tell non-IT people how much my access points cost, their jaws hit the floor. For most people, the access point they got from their ISP is Good Enough(tm) and <em>they never think about it</em>. </p>
<p>"Good enough" actually is good enough for most people, because they don't need extra features, will not subject the thing to whatever stress the pro version is engineered to withstand, and don't need or wouldn't notice the ultimate quality of the result. They simply need something that's, well, good enough. </p>
<p>I do try to practice what I just preached (honest!): when my washing machine died, instead of springing for the Miele one that can probably iron and fold the clothes as well as cleaning them, I got an LG for literally a third of the price that seems… fine? But then again, <em>I never think about it</em>, no matter how much people who work in that business rave about Miele build quality or whatever. </p>
<p>Then again, I did spend an enjoyable time researching exactly which bookshelf speakers to get for my home office, and ended up going with an Edifier set that is way overkill for my needs. But it makes me happy, and that's what I care about. </p>
<p>Don't ask me for advice, we'll both regret it: you when you wind up with something expensive, overbuilt, and finicky, and me when I have to keep coming around to fix it when something goes wrong. </p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@chdwck9">Richard Dykes</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>Printing Moneyhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/printing-money2023-05-08T20:39:46.234000Z2023-02-03T11:02:47ZDominic<p>I spent more time than I should have yesterday installing my mother-in-law’s new HP printer, and while I dodged the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/02/home-printer-digital-rights-management-hp-instant-ink-subscription/672913/?ref=galaxy-brain">more obvious scams</a>, I was actually shocked at how bad the experience was. There is absolutely no way that a normal person without significant IT experience could do it. And the worst part is that HP are in my experience the <em>best</em> — okay, least bad — printer manufacturer out there.</p>
<p>I'm going to document what happened in exhaustive detail because I still can't bring myself to believe some of what happened. It's not going to be a fun post. Sorry. If you want a <em>fun</em> post about how terrible printers are, <a href="https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers">here's one from The Oatmeal</a>.</p>
<ul>
<li>The "quick start" guide only showed the physical steps (remove packaging, connect power cord, add paper) and then offered a QR code to scan to deploy an HP app that would supposedly take care of the rest of the process.</li>
<li>The QR code lead to a URL that 404'd. In retrospect, this was the moment when I should have packed everything back up and shipped it back to HP.</li>
<li>Instead of following through on that much better plan and saving myself several hits to my sanity, some detective work helped me to identify what the app should be and find it in the Google Play Store (my MiL's computer is a Chromebook; this will be significant later).</li>
<li>The app's "install new printer" workflow simply scans the local network for printers. Since the step I was trying to accomplish was <em>connecting the printer to Wi-Fi</em> (this model doesn't have an on-board control panel, only an embedded web server), this scan was not particularly helpful.</li>
<li>The app's next suggestion was to contact support. Thanks, app.</li>
<li>After having checked the box for any additional docs, and finding only reams of pointless legal paperwork documenting the printer's compliance to various standards and treaties, I gingerly loaded up the HP web site to search for something more detailed.</li>
<li>The HP website's search function resolutely denied all knowledge of the printer model.</li>
<li>A Google search scoped to the HP web site found the printer's product page, which included an actual manual.</li>
<li>The manual asked me to connect to the printer's management interface, but at no point includes a step-by-step process. By piecing together various bits of information from the doc and some frantic Googling, I finally work out that I need to:<ul>
<li>Connect to the printer's own ad-hoc Wi-Fi network;</li>
<li>Print a test page to get its IP address (this step involves holding down the paper feed button for 10 seconds);</li>
<li>Connect to that IP address;</li>
<li>Reassure the web browser that it's fine to connect to a website that is INSECURE!!1!</li>
<li>Not find the menu options from the doc, only some basic information about supplies;</li>
<li>Panic;</li>
<li>Note a tiny "Login" link hidden away in a corner;</li>
<li>Mutter "surely not…"</li>
<li>Fail to find any user credentials documented anywhere, or indeed any mention of a login flow;</li>
<li>Connect as "admin" with no password on a hunch;</li>
<li>Access the full management interface.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>At this point I was finally able to authenticate the printer to the correct Wi-Fi network, at which point it promptly rebooted and then went catatonic for a worryingly long time before finally connecting.</li>
<li>But we're not done yet! The HP printer app claims to be able to set up the local printer on the Chromebook, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't even attempt to do this. However, we have a network connection, I can read out supply levels and what-not, how hard can this be?</li>
<li>Despite having Google Cloud Print enabled, nothing was auto-detected, so I created it as IPP (amazingly, this step <em>is</em> actually in the docs).</li>
<li>Time for a test print! The Chromebook's print queue showed the doc as PRINTED, but the printer didn’t produce anything, and as far as I could determine, it never hit the printer's own queue.</li>
<li>Hang head in hands.</li>
<li>Verified that my iPhone can see the printer (via AirPrint) and print to it. This worked first time.</li>
<li>Tried deleting the printer and re-creating it; somehow Google Cloud Print started working at this point, so the printer was auto-detected? The resulting config looked identical to what I created by hand, except with a port number specified instead of just an IP address.</li>
<li>Does it print now? HAHAHA of course not.</li>
<li>Repeat previous few steps with increasing muttering (can't swear or throw things because I am in my mother-in-law's home).</li>
<li>Decide to update software:<ul>
<li>The Chromebook updates, reboots, no change.</li>
<li>The printer's product page does not show any firmware at all — unless you tell it you are looking for <em>Windows</em> software. There are official drivers for various Linux distros, but apparently they don't deserve firmware. There is nothing for macOS, because Apple wisely doesn't allow rando third-party printer drivers anywhere near their operating systems. And of course nothing for ChromeOS or "other", why would you ask?</li>
<li>Download the firmware from the Windows driver page, upload it to the printer's management UI — which quoth "firmware not valid".</li>
<li>Search for any checksum or other way to verify the download, and <em>of course</em> there is none.</li>
<li>Attempt to decode the version embedded in the file name, discover that it is almost impossible to persuade ChromeOS to display a file name that long.</li>
<li>Eventually decide that the installed and downloaded versions are probably the same, despite the installed one being over a year old.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Give up and run away, promising to return with new ideas, or possibly a can of petrol and a Zippo.</li>
</ul>Good Robothttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/good-robot2023-12-17T16:33:14.727000Z2023-01-17T13:24:44ZDominic<p>Last time I wrote about ChatGPT, <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/information-push">I was pretty negative</a>. Was I too harsh?</p>
<p>The reason I was so negative is that many of the early demos of ChatGPT focus on feats that are technically impressive ("write me a story about a spaceman in the style of Faulkner" or whatever), but whose actual application is at best unclear. What, after all, is the business model? Who will pay for a somewhat stilted story written by a bot, at least once the novelty value wears off? Actual human writers are, by and large, not exactly rolling in piles of dollars, so it's not as if there is a huge profit opportunity awaiting the first clever disrupter — quite apart from the moral consequences of putting a bunch of humans out of a job, even an ill-paying one.</p>
<p>Instead, I wanted to think about some more useful and positive applications of this technology, ones which also have the advantage that they are either not being done at all today, or can only be done at vast expense and not at scale or in real time. Bonus points if they avoid being actively abusive or enabling ridiculous grifts and rent-seeking. After all, <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-availability-of-azure-openai-service-expands-access-to-large-advanced-ai-models-with-added-enterprise-benefits/">with Microsoft putting increasing weight behind Open AI</a>, it's obvious that smart people smell money here somewhere.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">web3 enters the AI scene <a href="https://t.co/vkcyvl6rlm">pic.twitter.com/vkcyvl6rlm</a></p>— kache (yacine) (KING OF DING) (@yacineMTB) <a href="https://twitter.com/yacineMTB/status/1612997351659945986?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 11, 2023</a></blockquote>
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<h1>Summarise Information (B2C)</h1>
<p>It's more or less mandatory for new technology to come with a link to some beloved piece of SF. For once, this is not a <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-torment-nexus-the-man-made-horrors-trope-explained">Torment Nexus</a>-style dystopia. Instead, I'm going right to the source, with Papa Bill's <em>Neuromancer</em>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Panther Moderns," he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. "Five minute precis."<br />
"Ready," the computer said.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here's a service that everyone wants, as evidenced by the success of the "five-minute explainer" format. Something hits your personal filter bubble, and you can tell there is a lot of back story; battle lines are already drawn up, people are several levels deep into their feuds and meta-positioning, and all you want is a quick recap. Just the facts, ma'am, all sorts of multimedia, with a unifying voiceover, and no more than five minutes.</p>
<p>There are also more business-oriented use cases for this sort of meta-textual analysis, such as "compare this quarter's results with last quarter's and YoY, with trend lines based on close competitors and on the wider sector". You could even link with Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to graph the results (without having to do all the laborious cutting and pasting to get the relevant numbers into a table first, and making sure they use the same units, currencies, and time periods).</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/8ce57d9c-4cda-1237-18ca-f168841eb858/ca89841a-7c95-78a6-7149-e23564dd4237.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1042;"/></p>
<h1>Smarter Assistants (B2C)</h1>
<p>One of the complaints that people have about voice assistants is that they appear to have all the contextual awareness of goldfish. Sure, you can go to a certain amount of effort to get Siri, Alexa, and their ilk to understand "my wife" without having to use the long-suffering woman's full name and surname on each invocation, but they still have all the continuity of an amnesiac hamster if you try to continue a conversation after the first interaction. Seriously, babies have a far better idea of object persistence (peekaboo!). The robots simply have no way of keeping context between statements, outside of a few hard-coded showcase examples.</p>
<p>Instead, what we want is precisely that continuity: asking for appointments, being read a list, and then asking to "move the first one to after my gym class, but leave me enough time to shower and get over there". This is the sort of use case that explains why Microsoft is investing so heavily here: they are so far behind otherwise that why not? Supposedly Google has had this tech for a while and just couldn't figure out a way to introduce it without disrupting its cash-cow search business. And Apple never talks about future product directions until they are ready to launch (with the weird exception of Project Titan, of course), so it may be that they are already on top of this one. Certainly it was almost suspicious how quickly Apple trotted out <a href="https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/stable-diffusion-coreml-apple-silicon">specific support for Stable Diffusion</a>.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/8ce57d9c-4cda-1237-18ca-f168841eb858/b8bcc98a-2f97-5558-f606-3f532fe65f6a.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1000;"/></p>
<h1>Tier Zero Support (B2B)</h1>
<p>Back in the day, I used to work in tech support. The classic division of labour in that world goes something like this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Tier One, aka "the phone firewall": people who answer telephone or email queries directly. Most questions should be solved at this level.</li>
<li>Tier Two: these are more expert people, who can help with problems which cannot be resolved quickly at Tier One. Usually customers can’t contact Tier Two directly; their issues have to be escalated there. You don't want too many issues to get to this level, because it gets expensive.</li>
<li>Tier Three: in software organisations, these are usually the actual engineers working on the product. If you get to Tier Three, your problem is so structural, or your enhancement request is sufficiently critical, that it's no longer a question of helping you to do something or fixing an issue, but changing the actual functioning of the product in a pretty major way.</li>
</ul>
<p>Obviously, there are increasing costs at each level. A problem getting escalated to Tier Two means burning the time of more senior and expert employees, who are ipso facto more expensive. Getting to Tier Three not only compounds the monetary cost, but also adds opportunity costs: what else are those engineers <em>not</em> doing, while they work on this issue? Therefore, tech support is all about making sure problems get solved at the lowest possible tier of the organisation. This focus has the happy side-effect of addressing the issue <em>faster</em>, and with fewer communications round-trips, which makes users happier too.</p>
<p>It's a classic win-win scenario — so why not make it even better? That's what the Powers That Be decided to do where I was. They added a "Tier Zero" of support, that was outsourced (to humans), with the idea that they would address the huge proportion of queries that could be answered simply by referring to the knowledge base<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>So how did this go? Well, it was such a disaster that my notoriously tight-fisted employers<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> ended up paying to get out of the contract early. But could AI do better?</p>
<p>In theory, this is not a terrible idea. Something like ChatGPT should be able to answer questions based on a specific knowledge base, including past interactions with the bot. Feed it product docs, FAQs, and forum posts, and you get a reasonable approximation of a junior support engineer. Just make sure you have a way for a user to pull the rip-cord and get escalated to a human engineer when the bot gets stuck, and why not? </p>
<p>One word of caution: the way I moved out of tech support is that I would not only answer the immediate question from a customer, but I would go find the account manager afterwards and tell them their customer needed consulting, or training, or more licenses, or whatever it was. AI might not have the initiative to do that. </p>
<p>Another drawback: it's hard enough to give advice in a technical context, but at least there, a command will either execute or not; it will give the expected results, or not (and even then, there may be subtle bugs that only manifest over time). Some have already seized on other domains that feature lots of repetive text as opportunities for ChatGPT. Examples include legal contracts, and tax or medical advice — but what about plausible-but-wrong answers? If your chatbot tells me to cure my cancer with cleanses and raw vegetables, can I (or my estate) sue you for medical malpractice? If your investor agreement includes a logic bug that exposes you to unlimited liability, do you have the right to refuse to pay out? Fun times ahead for all concerned.</p>
<h1>Formulaic Text (B2B)</h1>
<p>Another idea for automated text generation is to come up with infinite variations on known original text. In plain language, I am talking about A/B testing website copy in real time, rewriting it over and over to entice users to stick around, interact, and with any luck, generate revenue for the website operators. </p>
<p>Taken to the extreme, you get the evil version, tied in with adtech surveillance to tweak the text for each individual visitor, such that nobody ever sees the same website as anyone else. Great for plausible deniability, too, naturally: "of course we would never encourage self-harm — but maybe our bot responded to something in the user's own profile…".</p>
<p>This is the promise of personalised advertising, that is tweaked to be specifically relevant to each individual user. <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/marketing-without-surveillance">I am and remain sceptical</a> of the data-driven approach to advertising; the most potent targeted ads that I see are the same examples of brand advertising that would have worked equally well a hundred years ago. I read <em>Monocle</em>, I see an ad for socks, I want those socks. You show me a pop-up ad for socks while I am trying to read something unrelated, I dismiss it so fast that I don't even register that it's trying to sell me socks. It's not clear to me that increasing smarts behind the adtech will change the parameters of that equation significantly.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Scary LLM exercise: go down list of FBI common scams (<a href="https://t.co/1ga8z7DsoB">https://t.co/1ga8z7DsoB</a>) and imagine how each of these becomes drastically more dangerous with the power of LLMs. We're spending too much time worrying about whether LLMs are factual and not enough about this.<br><br>CC <a href="https://twitter.com/ojoshe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ojoshe</a></p>— Osman (Ozzie) Osman (@oao84) <a href="https://twitter.com/oao84/status/1613403691251556354?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 12, 2023</a></blockquote>
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<h1>De-valuing Human Labour</h1>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We provided mental health support to about 4,000 people — using GPT-3. Here’s what happened 👇</p>— Rob Morris (@RobertRMorris) <a href="https://twitter.com/RobertRMorris/status/1611450197707464706?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2023</a></blockquote>
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<p>These are the use cases that seem to me to be plausible and defensible. There will be others that have a shorter shelf life, as illustrated in <a href="https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off/"><em>Market For Lemons</em></a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What happens when every online open lobby multiplayer game is choked with cheaters who all play at superhuman levels in increasingly undetectable ways?</p>
<p>What happens when, from the perspective of the average guy, "every girl" on every dating app is a fiction driven by an AI who strings him along (including sending original and persona-consistent pictures) until it's time to scam money out of him?</p>
<p>What happens when, from the perspective of the average girl, "every guy" on the internet has become weirdly dismissive and hostile, because he's been conditioned to think that any girl that seems interested in him must be fake and trying to scam money out of him?</p>
<p>What happens when comments sections on every forum gets filled with implausibly large consensus-building hordes who are able to adapt in real time and carefully slip their brigading just below the moderator's rules?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What these AI-enabled "growth hacks" boil down to is taking advantage of a market that has already outsourced labour and creativity to (human) non-employees: multiplayer games, user-generated content, and social media in general. Instead of coming up with a storyline for your game, why not just make users pay to play with each other? Instead of paying writers, photographers, and video makers, why not just let them upload their content for free? And with social media, why not just enable users to live vicariously through the fantasy lives of others, while shilling them products that promise to let them join in?</p>
<p>Now computers can deliver against those savings even better — but only for a short while, until people get bored of dealing with poor imitations of fellow humans. We old farts already bailed on multiplayer games, because it's no fun spending my weekly hour of gaming just getting ganked repeatedly by some twelve-year-old who plays all day. Increasingly, I bailed on UGC networks: there is far more quantity than quality, and I would rather pay for a small amount of quality than have to sift through the endless quantity. </p>
<p>If the pre-teen players with preternaturally accurate aim are now actually bots, and the AI-enhanced influencers are now actually full-on AIs, those developments are hardly likely to draw me back to the platforms. Any application of AI tech that is simply arbitrage on the cost of humans without factoring in other aspects has a short shelf life.</p>
<p>Taken to its extreme, this trend leads to humans abdicating the web entirely, leaving the field to AIs creating content that will be ranked by other AIs, and with yet more AIs rewarding the next generation of paperclip-maximising content-producing AIs. A bleak future indeed.</p>
<h1>So What's Next?</h1>
<p>At this point, with the backing of major players like Microsoft and Apple, it seems that AI-enabled products are somewhat inevitable. What we can hope for is that, after some initial over-excitement, we see fewer chatbot psychologists, and more use cases that are concrete, practical, and helpful — to humans.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@santesson89">Andrea De Santis</a> and <a href="https://unsplash.com/@charlesdeluvio">Charles Deluvio</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Also known as RTFM queries, which stands for Read The, ahem, <em>Fine</em> Manual. (We didn't always say "Fine", unless a customer or a manager was listening.) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>We had to share rooms on business trips, leaving me with a wealth of stories, none of which I intend to recount in writing. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Disappearing In The Hillshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/disappearing-in-the-hills2023-12-17T16:32:13.640000Z2023-01-16T16:57:33ZDominic<p>I have a bunch of stuff I need to talk to people in the US about, but I had forgotten that today was MLK Day, so everything will have to wait one more day. I had an early call with a startup in the Middle East I am consulting with, but then found myself at 10am with an empty schedule for the day — so why not hop on the bike and disappear up into the hills until lunch time?</p>
<p>I had been hoping to climb out of the fog, but it was persistent until I got quite high up — and then I found that it was grey and overcast above the fog anyway. The views were very atmospheric, though, including this Brigadoon-like situation with a village appearing and disappearing amid the shifting billows.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f9d1a466-b4b5-027c-0ac1-5808e9b34da9/f2f856c0-ea96-b0e3-378d-e6d718052c20.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:454;"/></p>
<p>Any day on the bike is a good day, though. I am in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting to get started on a number of projects, so a long(ish — 60km) ride is great for keeping myself from fretting.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f9d1a466-b4b5-027c-0ac1-5808e9b34da9/46aa44f2-bcfc-6f2e-b36f-1b126cb47a36.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:316;"/></p>
<p>I was happy that my legs were cooperating, too, since I was also out on the bike on Sunday, for a group ride on the other side of the Po. This is a part of the world I have never visited, even though it’s only a half-hour drive from me; I just pass through on the train or motorway en route to Milan. It’s a different vibe over there, but they have some fun trails, and it was a good day out — chilly, overcast, and muddy in spots, but at least the forecast rain stayed off.</p>
<p>I especially liked the souvenir for the day — way better than yet another T-shirt!</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f9d1a466-b4b5-027c-0ac1-5808e9b34da9/d20a48b0-b852-df8a-69d8-420551c42151.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>There are no photos up on the event page yet, and being in a group, I didn’t want to stop to take pictures — but at least I have this wine bottle to remind me…</p>Pilgrimagehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/pilgrimage-22023-12-17T16:35:47.942000Z2022-12-20T14:55:09ZDominic<p>Today’s ride was along part of the old pilgrim route from England through France to Rome, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Francigena">Via Francigena</a>. There is still a ferry crossing for the use of pilgrims at the <a href="https://www.scopripiacenza.it/it/punti-di-interesse/bellezze-naturali-calendasco-guado-di-sigerico">Guado di Sigerico</a> — and yes, Italian speakers will be jumping up and down at this point because "guado" means <em>ford</em>, but there is no ford there in modern times, just the ferry. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigeric_(archbishop)">Sigeric</a> himself was an Archbishop of Canterbury who made the pilgrimage down to Rome for his investiture, and someone in his party documented the return leg. </p>
<p>More than a thousand years after Sigeric, it’s still quite common to meet pilgrims walking or cycling the route; it’s also part of the Europe-wide Eurovelo cycling network, as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EV5_Via_Romea_Francigena">route EV5</a>, appropriately enough named <em>Via Romea Francigena</em>. Sensible pilgrims however avoid setting out at the fag-end of the year, with only single-digit temperatures and overcast skies to look forward to, so today I had the road to myself.</p>
<p>There are still a number of chapels along the route around here, although I suspect they were more for the benefit of farm-workers rather than pilgrims; those tend to stop in towns and cities, just as they always did. Since the advent of mechanisation in farming, most of these field-side chapels are in poor repair. There are no longer armies of farm workers to gather for celebrations in the fields, just the odd tractor — and not even any of those at this time of year.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e04c7404-9fc0-418f-a3d3-2f4c91ee41db/8e663333-a8d2-4df4-a940-34f05b3b3243.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:940;"/></p>
<p>This particular chapel looks structurally sound from a distance, but as you approach the door, you realise that there is quite a lot of light making its way inside — more than those tiny grated windows could explain.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e04c7404-9fc0-418f-a3d3-2f4c91ee41db/34423869-8ec2-49c9-a918-bdda6fda4d5a.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>Sure enough, the roof fell in at some point. On the plus side, this means we can see the remains of the interior frescos a little better.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e04c7404-9fc0-418f-a3d3-2f4c91ee41db/a535ce1a-b5a0-434d-b730-46543f292081.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>This is not the only lonely chapel I found today. Not needing the ferry across the Po, I left the pilgrim route at the mouth of the Tidone river and joined the <a href="https://sentierodeltidone.eu/">Sentiero del Tidone</a>, which runs along the banks of the eponymous river all the way from its source up in the Apennines down to its confluence into the Po, near the Guado di Sigerico.</p>
<p>This ruined farm-house had a little chapel beside it that someone had gone to some effort to clean up and revive.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e04c7404-9fc0-418f-a3d3-2f4c91ee41db/ece3bb83-5923-42c0-bd0f-714b29ff59aa.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e04c7404-9fc0-418f-a3d3-2f4c91ee41db/cc6a154a-f00e-4b39-8b66-691e618d6c65.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>This site is a little closer to a main road and still-occupied farms and hamlets, which maybe gives it just enough passing traffic to hang on as a just-about going concern? Or maybe the maintenance of this half-ruined chapel is one person’s project, giving the old building one last lease on life.</p>
<p>Of course on a late-December day these ruins could not help but look sad and brooding. They did not make the same melancholy impression on me when I last came through here in September, with a background that was green, growing, and sunlit, rather than muddy ploughed fields under lowering clouds.</p>
<p>Anyway, I got my miles in, and some thoughts out of my head, so I’m happy with that. Any ride is a good ride!</p>Information Pushhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/information-push2023-05-08T20:39:46.826000Z2022-12-10T17:09:53ZDominic<p>My Twitter timeline, like most people's, is awash with people trying out the latest bot-pretending-to-be-human thing, <a href="https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/">ChatGPT</a>. Everyone is getting worked up about what it can and cannot do, or whether the way it does it (speed-reading the whole of the Internet) exposes it to copyright claims, inevitable bias, or simply polluting the source that it drinks from so that its descendants will no longer be able to be trained from a pool of guaranteed human-generated content, unpolluted by bot-created effluent.</p>
<p>I have a different question, namely: <strong>why</strong>?</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Prompt engineer is not a thing. <br><br>Stop trying to make it a thing.</p>— Nathan Benaich (@nathanbenaich) <a href="https://twitter.com/nathanbenaich/status/1599974172721311744?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 6, 2022</a></blockquote>
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</p>
<p>We do not currently have a problem of lack of low-quality plausible-seeming information on the Internet; quite the opposite. The problem we have right now is one of <em>too much information</em>, leading to information overload and indigestion. On social media, it has not been possible for years to be a completist (reading every post) or to use a purely linear timeline. We require systems to surface information that is particularly interesting or relevant, whether on an automated algorithmic basis, or by manual curation of lists/circles/spaces/instances.</p>
<p>As is inevitably the case in this fallen world of ours, the solution to one problem inevitably begets new problems, and so it is in this case. Algorithmic personalisation and relevance filtering, whether of a social media timeline or the results of a query, soon leads to the question of: relevant to whom?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f9770430-7ac5-54b3-1526-9d853faaa52d/326f54a2-c241-a9c7-b875-b07ce6ea5c8a.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1065;"/></p>
<p>Back in the early days of Facebook, if you "liked" the page for your favourite band, you would expect to see their posts in your timeline alerting you of their tour dates or album release. Then Facebook realised that they could charge money for that visibility, so the posts by the band that you had liked would no longer show up in your timeline unless the band paid for them to do so.</p>
<p>In the early days of Google, it was possible to type a query into the search box and get a good result. Then people started gaming the system, triggering an arms race that laid waste to ever greater swathes of the internet as collateral damage. </p>
<p>Keyword stuffing meant that metadata in headers became worthless for cataloguing. Auto-complete will helpfully suggest all sorts of things. Famously, recipes now have to start with long personal essays to be marked as relevant by the all-powerful algorithm. Automated search results have become so bad that people append "reddit" to their queries to take advantage of human curation. </p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Google employees explain why we haven’t seen ChatGPT like functionality in their products; the cost to serve an AI result is 10x to 100x as high as a regular web search today plus they’re too slow relative to how quick search results must be returned. <a href="https://t.co/ixYDq0aI2H">pic.twitter.com/ixYDq0aI2H</a></p>— Dare Obasanjo🐀 (@Carnage4Life) <a href="https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1601244658377846784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 9, 2022</a></blockquote>
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<p>This development takes us full circle to the early rivalry between automated search engines like Google and human-curated catalogues like Yahoo's. As the scale of the Internet exploded, human curation could not keep up — but now, it’s the quality problem that is outpacing algorithms' ability to keep up. People no longer write for human audiences, but for robotic ones, in the hope of rising to the surface long enough to take advantage of the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol promised them.</p>
<p>And the best we can think of is to feed the output of all of this striving back into itself.</p>
<p>We are already losing access to information. We are less and less able to control our information intake, as the combination of adtech and opaque relevance algorithms pushes information to us which others have determined that we should consume. In the other direction, our ability to pull or query information we actually desire is restricted or missing entirely. It is all too easy for the controllers of these systems to enable soft censorship, not by deleting information, but simply by making it unsearchable and therefore unfindable. Harbingers of this approach might be <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/tumblr-bring-back-porn-nsfw-community-labels/">Tumblr's on-again, off-again approach to allowing nudity on that platform</a>, or <a href="https://twitter.com/msmelchen/status/1597807914395500545">Huawei phones deleting pictures of protests</a> without the nominal owners of those devices getting any say in the matter.</p>
<h3>How do we get out of this mess?</h3>
<p>While some are fighting back, like <a href="https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned">Stack Overflow banning the use of GPT for answers</a>, I am already seeing proposals just to give in and embrace the flood of rubbish information. Instead of trying to prevent students from using ChatGPT to write their homework, the thinking is that we should encourage them to submit their prompts together with the model's output and their own edits and curation of that raw output. Instead of trying to make an Internet that is searchable, we should abandon search entirely and rely on ChatGPT and its ilk to synthesise information for us.</p>
<p>I hate all of these ideas with a passion. I want to go in exactly the opposite direction. I want search boxes to include "I know what I'm doing" mode, with Boolean logic and explicit quote operators that actually work. I do find an algorithmic timeline useful, but I would like to have a (paid) pro mode without trends or ads. And as for homework, simply get the students to talk through their understanding of a topic. When I was in school, the only written tests that required me to write pages of prose were composition exercises; tests of subjects like history involved a verbal examination, in which the teacher would ask me a question and I would be expected to expound on the topic. This approach will remain proof against technological cheating for some while yet.</p>
<p>And once again: why are we building these systems, exactly? People appear to find it amusing to chat to them — but people are very easy to fool. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA">ELIZA</a> could do it without burning millions of dollars of GPU time. There is far more good, valuable text out there already, generated by actual interesting human beings, than I can manage to read. I cannot fathom how anyone can think it a good idea to churn out a whole lot more text that is mediocre and often incorrect — especially because, once again, there is already far too much of that being generated by humans. Automating and accelerating the production of even more textual pablum will not improve life for anyone. </p>
<p>The potential for technological improvement over time is no defence, either. So what if in GPT-4 (or -5 or -6) the text gets somewhat less mediocre and is wrong (or racist) a bit less often? Then what? In what way does the creation and development of GPT improve the lot of humanity? At least Facebook and Google could claim a high ideal (even if neither of them lived up to those ideals, or engaged seriously with their real-world consequences). The entities behind GPT appear to be just as mindless as their creation.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://www.behance.net/owenbeard">Owen Beard</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>AWS re:Invent 2022https://findthethread.postach.io/post/re-invent-20232023-12-17T16:31:05.013000Z2022-11-30T12:22:27ZDominic<p>At this time of year, with the nights drawing in, thoughts turn inevitably to… AWS' annual Las Vegas extravaganza, re:Invent. This year I'm attending remotely again, like it's 2020 or something, which is probably better for my liver, although I am definitely feeling the FOMO.</p>
<h1>Day One: Adam Selipsky Keynote</h1>
<p>I skipped Monday Night Live due to time zones, but as usual, this first big rock on the re:Invent calendar is a barrage of technical updates, with few hints of broader strategy. That sort of thing comes in the big Tuesday morning keynote with Adam Selipsky. </p>
<p>Last year was his first time taking over after Andy Jassy's ascension to running the whole of Amazon, not just AWS. This year’s delivery was more polished, plus it looks like we have seen the last of the re:Invent House Band. Adam Selipsky himself though was still playing the classics, talking up the benefits of cloud computing for cost savings and using examples such as Carrier or Airbnb to allude to companies' desire to be agile with fewer resources. </p>
<p>Still, it's a bit of a double-take to hear AWS still talking about cloud migration in 2022 — even if, elsewhere in Vegas, there was <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/30/ukraine_cloud_migration/">a memorable endorsement of migration to the cloud from Ukraine's Minister for Digital Transformation</a>. Few AWS customers have to contend with the sorts of stress and time pressure that Mykhailo Fedorov did!</p>
<p>In the keynote, the focus was mostly on exhortations to continue investing in the cloud. I didn't see Andy Jassy's signature move of presenting a slide that shows cloud penetration as still being a tiny proportion of the market, but that was definitely the spirit: no reason to slow down, despite economic headwinds; there's lots more to do.</p>
<h1>Murdering the Metaphors</h1>
<p>We then got to the first of various metaphors that would be laboriously and at length tortured to breaking point and beyond. The first was space exploration, and admittedly there were some very pretty visuals to go with the point being belaboured: namely, that just like images captured in different wavelengths show different data to astronomers, different techniques used to explore data can deliver additional results.</p>
<p>There were some good customer examples in this segment: Expedia Group making 600B predictions on 70 Petabytes of data, and Pinterest storing 1 Exabyte of data on S3<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>. That sort of scale is admittedly impressive, but this was the first hint that the tempo of this presentation would be slower, with a worse ratio of content to time than we had been used to in the Jassy years.</p>
<h1>Tools, Integration, Governance, Insights</h1>
<p>This led to a segment on the right tools, integration, and governance for working with data, and the insights that would be possible. The variety of tools is something I had focused on in <a href="https://thenewstack.io/reinvent-notes-purpose-built-vs-general-purpose-databases/">my report from re:Invent 2021</a>, in which I called out AWS' "one database engine for each use case" approach and questioned whether this was what developers actually wanted.</p>
<p>Initially, it seemed that we were getting more of the same, with Amazon Aurora getting top billing. The metrics in particular were very much down in the weeds, mentioning that Aurora offered 1/10 the cost of commercial DBMS, while also having up to 3x performance of PostgreSQL and 5x the performance of MySQL<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>.</p>
<p>We then heard about how customers also need analytics tools, not just transactional ones, such as EMR, MSK, and Redshift for high performance on structured data - 5x better price performance than "other cloud data warehouses" (a not-particularly-veiled dig at Snowflake, here — more of a Jassy move, I felt).</p>
<p>The big announcement in this section was <strong>OpenSearch Serverless</strong>. This launch means that AWS offers serverless options for all of its analytics services. According to Selipsky, "no-one else can say that". However, it is worth checking the fine print. In common with many "serverless" offerings, OpenSearch Serverless has a minimum spend of 4 OCUs — or $700 in real money. Scaling to zero is a key requirement and expectation of serverless, so it is disappointing to see so many offerings like this one that devolve to elastic scalability on top of a fixed base. Valuable, to be sure, but not quite so revolutionary.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/574ecdec-2c07-a9f2-9947-65fe69546bfa/ae4aa75b-0f16-4a67-f763-f06913989352.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:399;"/></p>
<h1>ETL Phone Home</h1>
<p>Then things got interesting. </p>
<p>Adam Selipsky made an example of a retail company running its operations on DynamoDB and Aurora and needing to move data to Redshift for analysis. This is exactly the sort of situation I decried in <a href="https://thenewstack.io/reinvent-notes-purpose-built-vs-general-purpose-databases/">last year's report for <em>The New Stack</em></a>: too many single-purpose databases, leaving users trying to copy data back and forth, with the attendant risk of loss of control over their data.</p>
<p>It seems that AWS product managers had been hearing the same feedback that I had, but instead of committing to one general-purpose database, they are doubling down on their best-of-breed approach. Instead, they enabled federated query in Redshift and Athena to query other services — including third-party ones. </p>
<p>The big announcement was zero-ETL integration between Aurora and Redshift. This was advertised as being "near real time", with latency measured in seconds — good enough for most use cases, although something to be aware of for more demanding situations. The integration also works with multiple Aurora instances all feeding into one Redshift instance, which is what you want. Finally, the integration was advertised as being "all serverless", scaling up and down in response to data volume.</p>
<h1>Take Back Control</h1>
<p>So that's the integration — but that only addresses questions of technical complexity and maybe cost of storage. What about governance? Removing the need for ETL from one system into another does remove one big issue, which is the creation of a second copy of the data without the access controls and policy enforcement applied to the original. However, there is still a need to track metadata — data about the data itself.</p>
<p>Enter <strong>Amazon DataZone</strong>, which enables users to discover, catalog, share, and govern data across organisations. What this means in practice is that there is a catalog of available data, with metadata, labels, and descriptions. Authorised consumers of the data can search, browse, and request access, using existing tools: Redshift, Athena, and Quicksight. There is also a partner API for third-party tools; Snowflake and Tableau were mentioned specifically.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/574ecdec-2c07-a9f2-9947-65fe69546bfa/ce02064b-ac33-90df-758e-d28c46bbda33.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:508;"/></p>
<h1>The Obligatory AI & ML Segment</h1>
<p>I was not the only attendee to note that AWS spent an inordinate amount of time on AI & ML, given AWS' relatively weak position in that market.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Now we're back to talking about Machine Learning®. I'm growing relatively annoyed at the constant overhyping of this market segment in which <a href="https://twitter.com/awscloud?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@awscloud</a> is notably behind its competition, and am starting to take the gloves off as a result.</p>— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) <a href="https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1597647637028622336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 29, 2022</a></blockquote>
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</p>
<p>Adam Selipsky talked up the "most complete set of machine learning and AI services", as well as claiming that Sagemaker is the most popular IDE for ML. A somewhat-interesting example is ML-powered forecasting: take a metric on a dashboard and extend it into the future, using ML to include seasonal fluctuations and so on. Of course this is only slightly more realistic than just using a ruler to extend the line, but at least it saves the time needed to make the line look credibly irregular.</p>
<h1>More Metaphors</h1>
<p>Then we got another beautiful video segment, which Adam Selipsky used to bridge somehow from underwater exploration to secure global infrastructure and GuardDuty. The main interesting announcement in this segment was <strong>Amazon SecurityLake</strong>, a "dedicated data lake to combine security data at petabyte scale". Data in the lake can be queried with Athena, OpenSearch, and Sagemaker, as well as third-party tools.</p>
<p>It didn’t sound like there was massive commitment to this offering, so the whole segment ended up sounding opportunistic. The whole thing reminded me of <a href="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Blockchain">Tim Bray's recent tale of how AWS never did get into blockchain stuff</a>: as long as people are going to do something, you might as well make it easy. </p>
<p>In this case, what people are doing is dumping all their logs into one place in the hope that they can find the right algorithm to sift them with and find interesting patterns that map to security issues. The most interesting aspect of SecurityLake is that it is the first tool to support the new <a href="https://github.com/ocsf">Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework format</a>. This is a nominally open format (Cisco and Splunk were mentioned as contributors), but it is notable that the examples in <a href="https://github.com/ocsf/ocsf-docs/blob/main/Understanding%20OCSF.pdf">the OCSF white paper</a> are all drawn from AWS services. OCSF is a new format, only launched in August 2022, so ultimate adoption by the industry is still unclear.</p>
<h1>Trekking Towards The End</h1>
<p>By this point in the presentation I was definitely flagging, but there was another metaphor to torture, this time about polar exploration. Adam Selipsky contrasted the Scott and Amundsen expeditions, which seemed in remarkably poor taste, what with all the ponies and people dying — although the anecdote about Amundsen bringing a tin-smith to make sure his cans of fuel stayed sealed was admittedly a good one, and the only non-morbid part of the whole segment. Anyway, all of this starvation and death — of the explorers, I mean, not the keynote audience, although if I had gone before breakfast I would have been regretting it by this point — was in service of making the point that specific tools are better than general ones. </p>
<p>We got a tour of what felt like a large proportion of AWS' 600+ instance types, with shade thrown at would-be Graviton competitors that have not yet appeared, more ML references with Inferentia chips, and various stories about HPC. Here it was noticeable that the customer example use case uses Intel Xeon chips, despite all of those earlier Graviton references.</p>
<h1>One More Metaphor</h1>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">OH MY GOD. <a href="https://twitter.com/aselipsky?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@aselipsky</a> just spent (no joke) 5-7 minutes talking about the power of imagination. Animated well produced video on it. It's clearly building to something huge, what is it what is it what is it...<br><br>It's talking about Amazon Connect, the <a href="https://twitter.com/awscloud?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@awscloud</a> contact center thing.</p>— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) <a href="https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1597654280109899776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 29, 2022</a></blockquote>
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</p>
<p>There was one more very pretty video on imagination, but it was completely wasted on supply chains and call centres.</p>
<p>There was one last interesting offering, though, building on that earlier point about governance and access. This was <strong>AWS Clean Rooms</strong>, a solution to enable secure collaboration on datasets without sharing access to the underlying data itself. This is useful when working across organisational boundaries, because instead of copying data (which means losing control over the copy), it reads data in place, and thereby maintains restrictions on that data. Quicksight, Sagemaker, and Redshift all integrate with this service at launch.</p>
<p>There was one issue hanging over this whole segment, though. The Clean Rooms example was from advertising, which leads to a potential (perception of) conflict of interest with Amazon's own burgeoning advertising business. Like another new service, <strong>AWS Supply Chain</strong>, it's easy to imagine this offering being a non-starter simply because of the competitive aspect, much like retailers prefer to work with other cloud providers than AWS.</p>
<h1>Turn It To Eleven</h1>
<p>All in all, nothing earth-shattering — certainly nothing like Andy Jassy's cavalcade of product announcements, upending client and vendor roadmaps every minute or so. Maybe that is as it should be, though, for an event which is in its eleventh year. And this may well be why Adam Selipsky opted for a different approach to "the cloud is still in its infancy", when it is so clearly a market that is maturing fast. In particular, we are seeing a maturation in the treatment of data, from a purely technical focus on specific tasks to a more holistic lifecycle view. This shift is very much in line with the expectations of the market; however, at least based on this keynote, AWS is playing catch-up rather than defining the field of competition. In particular, all of the governance tools only work with analytical (OLAP) tools, not with real-time transactional (OLTP) tools. That would be a truly transformative move, especially if it can be accomplished without too much of a performance penalty.</p>
<p>The other thing that is maturing is AWS' own approach, moving inexorably up the stack from simple technical building blocks to full-on turnkey business applications. This shift does imply a change in target buyers, though; AWS' old IT audience may have been happy to swipe a credit card, read the docs, and start building, but the new audience they are quoting with Supply Chain and Clean Rooms certainly will not. It will be interesting to watch this transformation take place.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>It was not clarified how much of that data is used to poison image search engines. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Relevant because Aurora (and RDS which it is built on) is based on PostgreSQL and MySQL, with custom storage enhancements to give that speed improvement. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Mastodon Verificationhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/mastodon-verification2023-12-17T16:34:36.991000Z2022-11-28T15:26:22ZDominic<div>Ignore this; it’s just a placeholder to get me verified on <a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@riotnrrd">Mastodon</a>.</div>
Marketing Without Surveillancehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/marketing-without-surveillance2023-12-17T16:34:41.177000Z2022-11-18T09:43:14ZDominic<p><em>This is a post that I drafted when Facebook released their last results, and never got around to publishing. Why publish it now? For a start, none of this is breaking news, so it remains as relevant as it ever was. More importantly, with the ongoing bonfire of Twitter, the questions of whether ad-funded social networks are a good thing or not is more relevant than ever.</em></p>
<p><em>My position remains that <strong>none</strong> of this tracking nonsense is worth while. I have never been served a relevant ad through surveillance-driven adtech. Meanwhile, brand advertising works just fine, simply by virtue of the brand being present in the right context: bike gear on a cycling blog, that sort of very limited targeting that only requires a single bit of information about the audience.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Meta Loses Top-10 Ranking by Market Value Amid Worst Month Ever<br />
Social media company falls behind Tencent in value ranking<br />
Facebook parent has lost $513 billion in market cap from peak<br />
Stock has fallen 46% from last year’s record.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What do the terrible results announced by Facebook — I refuse to give in to their desire that we call them <em>Meta</em> — actually mean?</p>
<p>Zuck blamed Apple's ad tracking prevention features for wiping $10B off their bottom line, and there has been a concerted push since to present this as somehow a bad thing, especially for small businesses. I agree with <a href="https://pxlnv.com/blog/meta-launders-its-reputation/">Nick Heer</a> that this framing is pretty gross on Facebook's part, but what I wanted to do today is to discuss alternatives that are open to marketers today.</p>
<p>I'm not in marketing these days, and I never worked directly in the demand-generation side that would get actively involved with this sort of thing — but I have worked closely with those teams and been in the planning meetings, so I have at least an idea of how that business works.</p>
<p>Everything starts with a <em>campaign</em>: you have a particular message you want to get out, you want it to reach a particular audience, and you want some idea of how effective it is. Given those goals, there are different ways to go about running your campaign — different largely in their ethics, rather than in their actual results. Let's take a look.<br />
<img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/19c7a218-ecc9-7587-7fe3-5bdab544a1cc/6e89107a-1ae6-916a-2b05-395f2141b9bb.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/>Alice and Bob work for ACME Widgets Corp. Both of them are launching marketing campaigns for the coming quarter — but they take different approaches, even though they have the same metrics set by their boss, Eve the VP of Marketing.</p>
<p>Alice goes all-in on the surveillance model: her emails have tracking pixels, the links they point to are all gated behind a form that also signs you up for a newsletter, she places ads that follow users around the web once they have come within her surveillance web. She even messes with the favicon and the hosted fonts on the website in order to be able to track users that way. At the end, thanks to all of this effort, Alice can show Eve attribution metrics with a certain click-though rate for her outreach and a certain acquisition cost per customer, set against their likely lifetime value to ACME.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/19c7a218-ecc9-7587-7fe3-5bdab544a1cc/9a943c0e-d0b2-bbaa-2adb-b153a794cd14.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/>Bob takes a different tack: his emails are plain text, without even any images — since plenty of people now reflexively block all images in email, or load them through proxies. The links in the email are customised so that Bob can tell which email was the one that triggered the action, but then they go directly to the linked resource. He also buys ads, but instead of direct calls to action, Bob focuses on brand advertising in the sorts of publications that the prospective customers are likely to read. At the end, Bob can also show Eve attribution metrics, click-through rates and customer acquisition costs — but he has got there with without irritating prospective customers, or falling foul of either technical countermeasures or policies such as GDPR or CCPA.</p>
<h3>Comparing Alice and Bob’s Results</h3>
<p>Effectively, Alice and Bob have access to the same metrics; it's just that one of them is going about the process of gathering them honestly. The only data point Bob is missing is the open rate on those emails — but first of all, how useful is that metric in reality? If the indicator that an email was opened is that a tracking pixel was loaded, Alice doesn't know whether the recipient actually read the whole thing, or paged past her email quickly on their way to something they actually wanted. And even assuming that it's an accurate representation of how many people read the text but don't click on any of the links — what can Alice do with that information that Bob would not also do with the information that he sent out X number of emails and Y% of recipients clicked on the call-to-action link? And no, for goodness sake, the answer is not even more layers of attribution woo that claims to be able to identify whether someone came to the ACME website because they remembered the email, or the billboard ad, or because someone mentioned it to them at work — let alone trying to embed the "read progression" code that far too many websites now include.</p>
<p>Secondly, all of these intrusive metrics now have a firm expiry date stamped on them. On top of the ad tracking prevention, Apple now offers a Private Relay capability in iCloud that hides originating IP addresses. Browsers already no longer report a whole lot of information that they used to, precisely because it was used for creepy tracking stuff. By building her campaigns this way, Alice might achieve her goals today, but soon she will not be able to run campaigns like this, and will have to learn to do things Bob's way anyway.</p>
<p>At the core of Bob's method is turning tracking inside out. Instead of trying to stalk users around the Web, engaging in a constant arms race and violating their clearly expressed preference, Bob simply figures out where his most valuable prospects gather and advertises there. First-party data is enough for his purposes, and while individual ads might be more expensive in CPM, he avoids engaging with an ecosystem that is ridden with fraud. He also does not need to worry that the ACME ad might show up beside some tin-foil-hatter YouTube channel and get bad press that way — and the time he doesn't spend micro-managing ad placement can be spent more productively on creating better copy, or an entire other campaign. </p>
<p>Context matters in other ways, too: when a prospective customer is reading about the latest political crisis, famine, or natural disaster, they are not in a widget-buying mood, so showing them a widget ad is counter-productive anyway. Instead, Bob puts his widget ads in widget blogs, places them with streamers who test widgets, and gets hosts of widget-focused podcasts to read out his ads. All of these channels have very limited tracking; podcasts offer none at all, unless Bob creates a special landing page or discount code for listeners of each podcast. And yet, those are some of the most expensive ad slots around, because the context makes them very strong indicators of desire to buy.</p>
<p>Eve looks at the campaign performance numbers presented by a haggard Alice and a relaxed Bob, remembers the news stories about Apple and Google clamping down further on ad tracking, and suggests gently to Alice that maybe she should sit with Bob and figure out how to get the job done without the crutch of surveillance ad tech.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@charlesdeluvio">Charles Deluvio</a> and <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/5QgIuuBxKwM">Headway</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>Retracing My Stepshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/retracing-my-steps2023-12-17T16:36:16.602000Z2022-11-13T15:04:08ZDominic<p>Another ride report post! This time, I decided on the spur of the moment to try a route I hadn't ridden before. It turned out to be a wee bit longer than I had really allowed for, which made me slightly late for family Sunday lunch — oops. I had also forgotten to charge my Apple Watch, so this ride went unrecorded, but I'm pretty sure the distance was around 80km, so not bad. The highest point was around 550m, but there was a fair bit of up and down, so the total vert would be quite a bit more.</p>
<p>Two of the things that make me happiest are bicycles and mountains, though, so riding up into the mountains like this does me an enormous amount of good. Here are some of the highlights of Sunday's ride.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/8e2faf4f-3ba2-49a9-37f5-086c1ee664c5/93451a15-e0be-4096-4d97-ee44d67aff62.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:1800; --en-naturalHeight:1113;"/></p>
<p>I had only just left the tarmac when I saw three deer bouncing through the wispy fog that was still drifting across the ploughed fields. They moved fast enough that by the time I had stopped and got my phone out, I needed the 3x zoom — and one of the deer got away entirely. For such an extreme shot from a phone camera, I'm not unhappy with the results. </p>
<p>I also love that the scenery looks pretty wild in this framing, but actually it's still pretty close to a bunch of warehouses and factories, a true liminal space. The early part of this route is stitched together from tracks between fields to avoid busy roads, but it's still pretty close to industrial areas.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/8e2faf4f-3ba2-49a9-37f5-086c1ee664c5/3e2de9f0-d7d2-142f-e63f-fa22afbf9998.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:4032; --en-naturalHeight:3024;"/></p>
<p>A little further along, and with the sun burning off the last vestiges of the mist, I stopped again because I liked the view of the river rippling across the stones. After this stop, though, I hit some pretty technical riding and had to concentrate on where I was putting my wheels. Some rain has finally arrived after the long drought, and then motorbikes (ugh) had come through, so all the mud was churned up into mire. </p>
<p>On my mountain bike I'd probably have been fine, but the Bianchi has some intermediate gravel tyres that are pretty smooth in the centre and with only a little bit of tread on the sides, as well as being narrower than MTB tyres. This is the sort of terrain where I'm glad to have proper pedals that I can unclip from and ride along with my feet free just in case I lose my balance and need to put a foot down in a hurry. Anyway, I got through without too much trouble, despite a lot of slipping and sliding. I did have to stop to clear out the plug of mud between rear wheel and frame once I got out of the woods, and then I walked the bike along the edge of one field that had been ploughed right to the river's edge, not leaving any smooth terrain to ride on.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/8e2faf4f-3ba2-49a9-37f5-086c1ee664c5/943ce900-6b97-d1a3-afb6-a0a148ba24bc.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:4032; --en-naturalHeight:3024;"/></p>
<p>Nothing much to say about this tower, I just always like the look of it. This is also where the trail finally starts to climb out of the plain.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/8e2faf4f-3ba2-49a9-37f5-086c1ee664c5/f7f37be2-25f3-ce10-13a9-7ae3547bee24.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:4032; --en-naturalHeight:3024;"/></p>
<p>This is an old railway bridge, and because the road bridge is just upstream, it's reserved for walking and riding. It's not at all signposted, either, so you have to know it's there; I rarely see anyone else on it. </p>
<p>One of the reasons I ride a gravel bike is so that I can spend as little time as possible sharing the road with cars. It's tough to avoid that when it comes to river crossings, though! One newer bridge around here has a cycle path slung underneath it, and one of the busier bridges carved out a cycle path in a redesign, but this one is the best of all.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/8e2faf4f-3ba2-49a9-37f5-086c1ee664c5/675a2232-02ff-217c-48e7-f9c3130c10bf.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:4032; --en-naturalHeight:3024;"/></p>
<p>After that I rode properly up into the hills, climbing up out of the Nure valley and over the watershed down into the Trebbia valley before heading home. Unfortunately the day clouded over a bit too, so although I did stop to take a few more shots, they aren't nearly so scenic. I did want to share this one, though, because that rocky outcrop in the middle distance already featured in <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/the-long-way-round-2">a past ride report</a>.</p>Business Case In The Cloudshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/business-case-in-the-clouds2023-12-17T16:31:30.341000Z2022-10-10T10:36:15ZDominic<p>A perennial problem in tech is people building something that is undeniably <em>cool</em>, but is not a viable product. The most common definition of "viable" revolves around the size and accessibility of the target market, but there are other factors as well: sustainability, profitability, growth versus funding, and so on. </p>
<p>I am as vulnerable as the next tech guy to this disease, which is just one of many reasons why I stay firmly away from consumer tech. I know myself well enough to be aware that I would fall in love with something that is perfectly suited to my needs and desires — and therefore has a minuscule target market made up of me and a handful of other weirdos.</p>
<p>One of the factors that makes this a constant ongoing problem, as opposed to one that we as an industry can resolve and move on from, is that advancing tech continuously expands the frontiers of what is possible, but market positioning does not evolve in the same direction or at the same speed. If something simply can't be done, you won't even get to the "promising demo video on Kickstarter" stage. If on the other hand you can bodge together some components from the smartphone supply chain into something that at least looks like it sort of works, you might fool yourself and others into thinking you have a product on your hands.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f03bca43-0338-e1b2-9bfc-5331e8344d47/5502fa7e-b815-ba4b-40d8-1f0c1df037cb.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:638; --en-naturalHeight:479;"/></p>
<p>The thing is, a product is a lot more than just the technology. There are a ton of very important questions that need to be answered — and answered very convincingly, with data to back up the answers — before you have an actual product. Here are some of the key questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>How many people will buy one?</li>
<li>How much are they willing to pay?</li>
<li>Given those two numbers, can we even manufacture our potential product at a cost that lets us turn a profit? If we have investors, what are their expectations for the size of that profit?</li>
<li>Are there any regulations that would bar us from entering a market (geographical or otherwise)? How much would it cost to comply with those regulations? Are we still profitable after paying those costs?</li>
<li>How are we planning to do customer acquisition? If we have a broad market and a low-cost product, we're going to want to blanket that segment with advertising and have as self-service a sales channel as possible. On the other hand, if we are going high-end and bespoke, we need an equally bespoke sales channel. Both options cost money, and they are largely mutually exclusive. And again, that cost comes out of our profit margin.</li>
<li>What's the next step? Is this just a one-shot campaign, or do we have plans for a follow-on product, or an expansion to the product family?</li>
<li>Who are our competitors? Do they set expectations for our potential customers? </li>
<li>How might those competitors react? Can they lower their own prices enough that we have to reduce ours and erode our profit margin? Can they cross-promote with other products while we are stuck being a one-trick pony?</li>
</ul>
<p>These are just some of the <em>obvious</em> questions, the ones that you should not move a single step forward without being able to answer. There are all sorts of second- and third-order follow-ups to these. Nevertheless, things-that-are-not-viable-products keep showing up, simply because they are possible and technically cool.</p>
<h1>Possible, Just Not Viable</h1>
<p>One example of how this process can play out would be Google Stadia (<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378713/google-stadia-shutting-down-game-streaming-january-2023">RIP</a>). At the time of its launch, everyone was focused on technical feasibility:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] streaming games from datacenters like they’re Netflix titles has been unproven tech, and previous attempts have failed. And in places like the US with fixed ISP data caps, how would those hold up to 4-20 GB per hour data usage?</p>
<p>[...] there was one central question. Would it even work?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some early reviewers did indeed find that the streaming performance was not up to scratch, but all the long-term reports I heard from people like <a href="https://fivethingsonfriday.substack.com/p/five-things-on-friday-321">James Whatley</a> were that the streaming was not the problem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The gamble was always: can Google get good at games faster than games can get good at streaming. And I guess we know (we always knew) the answer now. To be clear: the technology is genuinely fantastic but it was an innovation that is looking - now even more overtly - for a problem to solve.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As far as we can tell from the outside (and it will be fascinating to read the tell-all book when it comes out), Google fixated on the technical aspect of the problem. In fairness, they were and are almost uniquely well-placed to make the technology work that enables game streaming: data centers everywhere, fast network connections, and in-house expertise on low-latency data streaming. The part which apparently did not get sufficient attention was how to turn those technical capabilities into a product that would sell.</p>
<p>Manufacturing hardware is already not Google's strong suit. Sure, they make various phones and smart home devices, but they are bit-players in terms of volume, preferring to supply software to an ecosystem of OEMs. However, what really appears to have sunk Stadia is the pricing strategy. The combination of both a monthly subscription <em>and</em> having to buy individual games appears to have been a deal-killer, especially in the face of other streaming services from long-established players such as Microsoft or Sony which only charge a subscription fee. </p>
<p>To recap: Google built some legitimately very cool technology, but priced it in a way that made it unattractive to its target customers. Those customers were already well-served by established suppliers, who enjoyed positive reputations — as opposed to Google's reputation for killing services, one that has been further reinforced by the whole Stadia fiasco. Finally, there was no uniquely compelling reason to adopt Stadia — no exclusives, no special integration with other Google services, just "isn't it cool to play games streamed from the cloud instead of running on your local console?" Gamers already own consoles or game on their phones, especially the ones with the sort of fat broadband connection required to enable Stadia to work; there is not a massive untapped market to expand into here.</p>
<p>So much for Google. Can Facebook — sorry, <em>Meta</em> — do any better?</p>
<h1>Open Questions In An Open World</h1>
<p>Facebook rebranded as Meta to underline its commitment to a bright AR/VR future in the Metaverse (okay, and to jettison the increasingly stale and negative branding of the Blue App). The question is, will it work?</p>
<p>Early indications are not good: <em><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-horizon-worlds-vr-social-network-too-buggy-leaked-memo">Meta’s flagship metaverse app is too buggy and employees are barely using it, says exec in charge</a></em>. Always a sign of success when even the people building the thing can't find a reason to spend time with it. Then again, in fairness, the NYT reports that spending time in Meta's Horizon VR service was "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/technology/metaverse-facebook-horizon-worlds.html">surprisingly fun</a>", so who knows.</p>
<p>The key point is that the issue with Meta is not one of technical feasibility. AR/VR are possible-ish today, and will undoubtedly get better soon. Better display tech, better battery life, and better bandwidth are all coming anyway, driven by the demands of the smartphone ecosystem, and all of that will also benefit the VR services. AR is probably a bit further out, except for industrial applications, due to the need for further miniaturisation if it's going to be accepted by users.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f03bca43-0338-e1b2-9bfc-5331e8344d47/99b2ee54-2c1b-d19a-d103-7f2e6fd2a3ef.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:931;"/></p>
<p>The relevant questions for Meta are not tech questions. Benedict Evans made the same point <a href="https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/7/31/Netflix">discussing Netflix</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As I look at discussions of Netflix today, all of the questions that matter are TV industry questions. How many shows, in what genres, at what quality level? What budgets? What do the stars earn? Do you go for awards or breadth? What happens when this incumbent pulls its shows? When and why would they give them back? How do you interact with Disney? These are not Silicon Valley questions - they’re LA and New York questions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The same factors apply to Horizon. It's a given that Meta can build this thing; the tech exists or is already on the roadmap, and they have (or can easily buy) the infrastructure and expertise. The questions that remain are all "but why, tho" questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>Who will use Horizon? How many of these people exist?</li>
<li>How will Horizon pay for itself? Subscriptions — in exchange for what value? Advertising — in what new formats?</li>
<li>What's the plan for customer acquisition? Meta keeps trying to integrate its existing services, with unified messaging across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but it doesn't really seem to be getting anywhere with consumers.</li>
<li>Following on from that point, is any of this going to be profitable <strong>at Meta's scale</strong>? That qualification is important: to move the needle for Zuckerberg & co., this thing has to rope in hundreds of millions of users. It can't just hit a Kickstarter milestone and declare victory.</li>
<li>What competitors are out there, and what expectations have they already set? If Valve failed to get traction with VR when everybody was locked down at home and there was a new VR-exclusive Half-Life game<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>, what does that say about the addressable market?</li>
</ul>
<p>None of these are questions that can be answered based on technical capabilities. It doesn't matter how good the display tech in the headsets is, or whether engineers figure out how to give Horizon avatars innovative features such as, oh I don't know, <em>legs</em>. What matters is what people can do in Horizon that they can't do today, IRL or in Flatland. Nobody will don a VR headset to look at Instagram photos; that works better on a phone. And while some people will certainly try to become VR influencers, that is a specialised skill requiring a ton of support; it's not going to be every aspiring singer, model, or fitness instructor who is going to make that transition. Meta will need a clear and convincing answer that is not "what if work meetings but worse in every way".</p>
<p>So there you have it, one failed product and one that is still unproven, both cautionary tales of putting the tech before the actual <strong>product</strong>.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I love this devastating quote from <a href="https://www.pcgamesn.com/half-life-2/episode-3-came-out-in-2007">PCGamesN</a>: "Half-Life: Alyx, [...] artfully crafted though it was, [...] had all the cultural impact of a Michael Bublé album." Talk about vicious! <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Network TVhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/network-tv2023-12-17T16:35:01.036000Z2022-10-06T11:05:05ZDominic<p>It is hardly news that the ad load on YouTube has become ridiculous, with both pre-roll, and several mid-roll slots, even on shorter videos. In parallel with the rise of annoying ads, YouTube is also deluging me with come-ons for YouTube Premium, their paid ad-free experience. I haven't coughed up because a) I'm cheap, and b) this feels like blackmail: "pay up or we'll make even more annoying unskippable ads".</p>
<p>YouTube charges through the nose for add-on offerings like YouTube Premium or YouTube TV, the US-only streaming replacement for cable TV. The expense of these services highlights <em>just how profitable</em> advertising is for them — and still they need to add more and more slots. The suspicion is of course that individual ads cost less, so YouTube needs to show ever more in order to continue their growth trajectory in the face of competition for eyeballs from the likes of TikTok.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/0503c9e1-f0cc-09c2-4cec-aef6291b7043/8ce3c1ae-5970-66d1-80a2-ee80d3c31ec9.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1200;"/></p>
<p>Now news emerges that <a href="https://www.afr.com/technology/youtube-in-secret-talks-to-own-tv-home-screens-20220930-p5bme4">YouTube is negotiating to add content to its subscription services</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>YouTube has been in closed-door talks with streaming broadcasters about a new product the video giant wants to launch in Australia, which industry insiders say is an ambitious play to own the home screen of televisions.<br />
The company is seeking deals with Australian broadcasters to sell subscriptions to services such as Nine-owned Stan and Foxtel’s Binge directly through YouTube, which would then showcase the streamers’ TV and movie content to users.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not being in Australia, I'm not familiar with either <em>Stan</em> or <em>Binge</em>, but the idea would appear to be to get more users habituated to paying for subscriptions through YouTube. There are already paid-subscription YouTube channels out there, but not many; it seems that most creators have opted for the widest possible distribution and monetisation via ads, instead of direct monetisation via paying subscriptions in exchange for a smaller audience. Perhaps the pull of these shows will be enough to jump-start that model? Presumably the reason for launching this offering in Australia is that it will be a pilot whose results will be watched closely before rolling out in other markets (or not).</p>
<p>This whole approach seems a bit backward to me though. YouTube Is pretty unassailably established as <em>the</em> platform for video on the web; TikTok is effectively mobile-only and playing a somewhat different game. What if Google exploited that position by working with ISPs? I'm resistant to paying for YouTube Premium specifically, but if you hid the same amount somewhere in my ISP bill, or made a bundle around it with something else, I'd probably cough up. ISPs that sign up could also implement local caches (presumably part-funded by Google) to improve performance for their users, maybe get better traffic data to optimise the service — without illegal preferencing, of course.</p>
<p>Instead of trying to jump-start a new revenue stream by getting users to pay for something they already get for free by offering a slightly nicer experience, better for YouTube to get into a channel where users are already habituated to paying for add-on services, and where the incumbents (the ISPs) are desperate to position themselves as more than undifferentiated dumb pipes. A better streaming video experience is already the most obvious reason for most households to upgrade their internet connection, so the link is already there in consumers' minds.</p>
<p>Susan Wojcicki, have your people call me.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/erikallen920/">Erik Allen</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a> </p>Draining The Moathttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/draining-the-moat2023-12-17T16:32:20.119000Z2022-09-23T12:38:42ZDominic<p>Zoom is in a bit of a post-pandemic slump, describing <a href="https://investors.zoom.us/static-files/393d5421-51ac-4921-8c59-a2fad0e5a935">its own Q2FY23 results</a> as "disappointing and below our expectations". This is quite a drop for a company that at one point was <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/10/29/zoom-is-now-worth-more-than-exxonmobil-and-founder-eric-yuans-net-worth-has-nearly-doubled-in-three-months/">more valuable than ExxonMobil</a>. Zoom does not disclose the total number of users, only "enterprise users", of which there are 204,100. "Enterprise users" are defined in a footnote to <a href="https://investors.zoom.us/static-files/554d79e1-edb6-4833-9258-6a3b9e962581">the slides from those Q2FY23 results</a> as "customers who have been engaged by Zoom’s direct sales team, channel partners, or independent software vendor (ISV) partners." Given that Zoom only claims 3,116 customers contributing >$100k in revenue over the previous year, that is hardly a favourable comparison with <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/webex-by-cisco-reimagines-hybrid-work-experiences-301507669.html">Cisco's claim of six million users of WebEx Calling</a> in March 2022.</p>
<p>As I wrote in <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/the-thing-with-zoom">The Thing With Zoom</a>, Zoom's original USP was similar to WebEx's, namely the lowest time-to-meeting with people outside company. As a sales person, how quickly can I get my prospect in the meeting and looking at my presentation? Zoom excelled at this metric, although they did cut a number of corners to get there. In particular, their software would stick around even after users thought they had uninstalled it, just in case they ever needed it again in the future.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/67b5896b-174a-b988-3525-5bf4ca893537/9dac099d-7f88-01b9-0b52-f795d7252a71.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>Over the past year or two, though, Teams usage has absolutely taken off. At the beginning the user experience was very rough, even by Microsoft standards, confusing users with the transition from its previous bandwagon-jumping branding as Skype for Business. Joining a Teams meeting as an outsider to the Teams-using organisation was (and largely still is) a mess, with the client failing to connect as often as not, or leaving meeting invitees in a loop of failed authentication, stuck between a web client and a native client, neither of which is working.</p>
<p>And yet, Teams is still winning in the market. Why? </p>
<p>There is more to this situation than just Microsoft's strength in enterprise sales. Certainly, Microsoft did not get distracted trying to cater to Zoom cocktails or whatever, not least because nobody in their right mind would ever try to party over Teams, but also for the very pragmatic and Microsoftian move that those users don't pay.</p>
<p>Teams is not trying to play Zoom and WebEx at their own game. Microsoft doesn't care about people outside their client organisations. Instead, Microsoft Teams focuses on offering the richest possible meeting experience to people <em>inside</em> those organisations.</p>
<p>I didn't fully appreciate this distinction, since throughout this transition I was working for companies that used the standard hipster tech stack of Slack, Google Docs, and Zoom. What changed my understanding was doing some work with a couple of organisations that had standardised on Teams. Having the text chat, video call, and documents all in one place was wonderfully seamless, and felt native in a way that Google's inevitable attempt to shoehorn Hangouts into a Google Docs sidebar or comment thread never could.</p>
<p>This all-in-one approach was already calculated to appeal to enterprises who like simplicity in their tech stack — and in the associated procurement processes. Pay for an Office 365 license for everybody, done. Teams would probably have won out anyway just on that basis, but the trend was enormously accelerated by the very factor everyone assumed would favour Zoom: remote work. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/67b5896b-174a-b988-3525-5bf4ca893537/dc6bb32c-5342-9724-b514-4bc080404f37.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>While everyone was focusing on Zoom dating, Zoom board games, Zoom play dates, and whatever else, something different was happening. Sales people were continuing to meet with their customers over Zoom/WebEx/whatever, but in addition to that, all of the intra-company meetings were <em>also</em> flipping online. This transition lead to an explosion in the ratio of internal video meetings to outside-facing ones, changing the priority from "how quickly can I get the other people in here, especially if they haven't got the meeting client installed" to "everyone has the client installed, how productive can we be in the meeting".</p>
<h1>As the ratio of outside video meetings to inside meetings flips, Zoom's moat gets filled in</h1>
<p>Zoom could not compete on that metric. All Zoom could do was facilitate someone sharing their screen, just like twenty years ago. Maybe what was being shared was a Google Doc, and the other people in the meeting were collaborating in the doc — but then what was Zoom's contribution? Attempts to get people to use built-in chat features or whiteboarding never took off; people used their Slack for chatting, and I never saw anyone use the whiteboard feature in anger.</p>
<p>Once an organisation had more internal remote video meetings than outside-facing ones, these differences became glaring deficiencies in Zoom compared to Teams.<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Zoom squandered the boost that the pandemic gave them. Ultimately, video chat is a feature, not a product, and Zoom will either wither away, or get bought and folded into an actual product.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="http://chrismontgomery.ca">Chris Montgomery</a> and <a href="http://wocintechchat.com">Christina @wocintech.chat</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a> </p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>The same factors are also driving a slight resurgence in Hangouts, based on my anecdotal experience, although Google does not disclose clear numbers. If you're already living in Google Docs, why not just use Hangouts? (Because it's awful UX, but since when did that stop Google or even slow them down?) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Fun In The Sunhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/fun-in-the-sun2023-12-17T16:33:03.571000Z2022-09-18T14:27:21ZDominic<p>A reliable way for companies to be seen as villains these days is to try to roll back concessions to remote work that were made during the pandemic<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>. Apple is of course a perennial scapegoat here, and while it seems reasonable that people working on next year's iPhone hardware might have to be in locked-down secure labs with all the specialised equipment they need, there is a lurking suspicion that much of the pressure on other Apple employees to return to work is driven by the need to justify the massive expense of Apple Park. Jony Ive's last project for Apple supposedly <a href="https://appleinsider.com/inside/apple-park">cost over $4B</a>, after all. Even for a company with Apple's revenues, that sort of spending needs to be justified. It's not a great look if your massive new vanity building is empty most of the time.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/54e5a62f-aa5b-121e-3c44-3519a86e12ea/0d4dc3fc-cb50-06b2-5283-67012f7ee80b.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:450;"/></p>
<p>The same mechanisms are playing out in downtown business districts around the world, with commercial landlords worried about the long-term value of their holdings, and massive impacts on the services sector businesses (cafes, restaurants, bars, dry-cleaners, etc etc) that cluster around those office towers. </p>
<p>With all of this going on, it was probably inevitable that companies would try to jump on the bandwagon of being remote-work friendly — some with greater plausibility than others. I already mentioned Airbnb in a <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/from-provincial-italy-to-london-and-back-again">past post</a>; they have an obvious incentive to facilitate remote work.</p>
<p>Other claims are, let's say, more far-fetched. </p>
<p>In a recent example of the latter genre, it seems that <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/09/14/citi-opens-haven-for-junior-bankers-in-malaga/">Citi is opening a hub in Málaga for junior bankers</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Over 3,000 Málaga hopefuls applied for just 27 slots in the two-year program, which promises eight-hour days and work-free weekends -- practically unheard of in the traditional banking hubs in Manhattan and London. In exchange, Málaga analysts will earn roughly half the starting salaries of their peers.</li>
<li>The new Spain office will represent just a minuscule number of the 160 analysts Citi hired in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, on top of another 300+ in New York.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>This is… a lot less than meets the eye. 27 people, out of a worldwide intake of ~500 — call it 5% — will be hired on a two-year contract in one admittedly attractive location, and in exchange for reasonable working hours, will take a 50% hit on their starting salary. In fairness the difference in cost of living between Málaga and London will make up a chunk of that difference, and having the weekends free to enjoy the place is not nothing, but apart from that, what is the upside here?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/54e5a62f-aa5b-121e-3c44-3519a86e12ea/f743a0f8-7b45-45bb-2760-30e1aa5becee.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>After the two years are up, the people who have been busy brown-nosing and visibly burning the midnight oil at head office will be on the promotion track. That is how banking works; if you can make it through the first few years, you have a) no social life any more, and b) a very remunerative career track in front of you. Meanwhile, it is a foregone conclusion that the people from the Málaga office will either not have their contract renewed after the two years are up, or will have to start their career track all over again in a more central location.</p>
<p>In other words, what this story boils down to is some short-term PR for Citi, a bunch of cheap(er) labour with a built-in termination date, and not much more.</p>
<p>Then again, it could be worse (it can always be worse). Goldman Sachs opted for the stick instead of the carrot with its own return to the office<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> mandate, ending the <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/goldman-sachs-cutting-free-coffee-121307121.html">free coffee</a> that had been a perk of its offices. </p>
<p>Even after all these years in the corporate world, I am amazed by these utterly obvious PR own goals. The value of the coffee cart would have been infinitesimal, completely lost in Goldman's facilities budget. But what is the negative PR impact to them of this move? At one stroke they have hollowed out all the rhetoric of teamwork and empowerment that is the nominal justification for the return to office.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/54e5a62f-aa5b-121e-3c44-3519a86e12ea/ea89727a-793a-4204-2ad0-4be227c99f40.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>Truly committing to a remote work model would look rather different. I <em>love</em> the idea of Citi opening a Málaga hub. The difference is that in a truly remote-friendly organisation, that office would not have teams permanently based in it (apart from some local support staff). Instead, it would be a destination hub for teams that are truly remote to assemble on a regular basis for planning sessions. The rest of the time, everyone would work remotely wherever they currently live.</p>
<p>Some teams do need physical proximity to work well, some customer-facing roles benefit from having access to meeting space at a moment's notice — but a lot of the work of modern companies does not fall into these categories. Knowledge workers can do their work anywhere — trust me, I've been working this way for more than fifteen years. Some of my most productive work has been done in airport lounges, not even in my <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/how-i-work-from-home">fully equipped home office</a>! With instant messaging, video calls, and collaboration tools, there is no real downside to working this way. Meanwhile, the upside is access to a global and distributed talent pool. When I did have to go into an office, it was so painful to be in an open-space with colleagues that were not on my actual team that I wore noise-cancelling headphones. If that's the situation, what's the point of commuting to an office?</p>
<p>This sort of reorganisation would admittedly not be great for the businesses that currently cluster around Citi offices and cater to the Citi employees working in those offices — but the flip side would be the massive benefits to businesses in those Citi employees' own home neighbourhoods. If you're not spending all your waking hours in Canary Wharf or Wall Street, you can do your dry cleaning at your local place, you can buy lunch around the corner instead of eating some over-priced plastic sandwich hunched over your desk, and you can get a better quality of life that way — maybe even in Málaga!</p>
<p>The only downside of working from home is that you have to pay for your own coffee and can't just get Goldman to foot the bill. </p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@carlesrgm">Carles Rabada</a>, <a href="http://jonasdenil.com">Jonas Denil</a>, and <a href="http://timmossholder.com">Tim Mossholder</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a> </p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Not that the pandemic is quite over yet, but let's not get into that right now. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Never "return to work". This is a malicious rhetorical framing that implies we've all been slacking off at home. People are being asked to <em>continue to work</em>, and to return to the office to do so. They may want to pick up noise-cancelling headphones on their way in. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Growing Painshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/growing-pains2023-12-17T16:33:17.586000Z2022-09-12T08:47:53ZDominic<p>The iPad continues to (slowly, slowly) evolve into a Real Computer. My iPad Pro is my only personal computer — I don't have a Mac of my own, except for an ancient Mac Mini that is plugged into a TV and isn't really practical to use interactively. It's there to host various network services or display to that TV.</p>
<p>For reasons I don't feel like going into right now, I don't currently have a work Mac to plug into my desk setup, so I thought I'd try out the new Stage Manager feature in iPadOS 16. </p>
<p>So, the bottom line is that it does work, and it makes the iPad feel suddenly like a rather different machine. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/857dd0db-9684-dc09-2750-ffdc9692797e/0f2fb006-7a17-a366-3af5-aee742e4d452.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>Some setup is required. Of course Stage Manager needs iPadOS 16; I've been running the beta on my iPad all summer, and it seems pretty stable. The second display needs to connect via USB-C; I already have my CalDigit dock set up that way, so that part was no problem. Using Stage Manager with an external display also requires an external keyboard and mouse, and these have to be connected by Bluetooth; the USB keyboard connected to my dock was not recognised. Without those peripherals, the external display only works for screen mirroring, which is a bit pointless in my opinion. Mirroring the iPad's display to another screen makes sense if you are showing something to someone, but then, why would you need Stage Manager?</p>
<p>Anyway, once I had everything connected, the external display started working as a second display. I was able to arrange the two displays correctly from Settings; some new controls appeared under Display & Brightness to enable management of the second display.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/857dd0db-9684-dc09-2750-ffdc9692797e/b6571135-d6ca-b955-c68f-1da75229f882.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:559;"/></p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/857dd0db-9684-dc09-2750-ffdc9692797e/c76bfb51-e6a6-aed7-ad55-659a6c04b112.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:673;"/></p>
<p>It's interesting to see what does and does not work. The USB microphone plugged into the dock — and the analogue headphones daisy-chained from that — worked without any additional configuration, but the speakers connected to the dock's SPDIF port were not visible to iPadOS. Luckily these speakers also support Bluetooth, so I'm still able to use them; it’s just a bit of a faff to have to connect three Bluetooth devices (keyboard, mouse, and speakers) every time I want to sit at my desk. The Mac is way easier: one USB-C cable, and you’re done. The second desktop display does not show up at all, but that's fair enough; even the first generation of M1 Macs didn't support two external displays. External cameras also do not show up, and there's not even any control, so it's the iPad's built-in camera or nothing.</p>
<p>There's some other weird stuff that I assume and hope is due to the still-beta status of iPadOS 16. </p>
<ul>
<li>The Settings app does not like being on the external display in the least, and appears all squashed. My display is an Ultrawide, but weirdly, the Settings window is squashed <em>horizontally</em>. Maybe the Settings app in iPadOS has not received much attention given the troubled gestation of the new Settings app in macOS Ventura?</li>
<li>Typing in Mail and a couple of other apps (Evernote, Messages, possibly others I haven’t encountered yet) sometimes lagged — or rather, the keystrokes were all being received, but they would not be displayed, until I did something different such as hitting backspace or clicking the mouse. At other times, keystrokes showed up normally. </li>
<li>The Music App goes straight into its full-screen display mode when it's playing, even when the window is not full-screen. The problem is that the touch control at the top of that window which would normally return to the usual display mode does not work. Also, Music is one of the apps whose preview in the Stage Manager side area does not work, so it's always blank. This seems like an obvious place to display static cover art, even if we can't have live-updating song progression or whatever.</li>
<li>Sometimes apps jump from the external display to the iPad’s built-in, for instance if you open something in Safari from a different app.</li>
</ul>
<p>What does work is that apps can be resized and rearranged, giving a lot more flexibility than the previous single-screen hover or side-by-side multitasking options. App windows can also be grouped to keep apps together in logical groups, such as the editor I'm typing this into and a Safari window to look up references. Again, this is something that I already did quite a lot with the pre-existing multi-tasking support in iPadOS, but it only really worked for two apps, plus one in a slide-over if you're really pushing it. Now, you can do a whole lot more.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/857dd0db-9684-dc09-2750-ffdc9692797e/8c0430f5-0952-9157-7ca3-0959d64e8a9a.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:483;"/></p>
<p>I am glad that I came back to give Stage Manager another chance. I had played with the feature on my iPad without connecting it to anything, and found it unnecessarily complex. I do wonder how much of that is because I'm rocking an 11" rather than a 13"? Certainly, I can see this feature being much more useful on a Mac, even standalone. However, Stage Manager on iPadOS truly comes into its own with an external display. This is a big step on way to the iPad becoming a real computer rather than merely a side device for a Mac or a bigger iPhone.</p>
<p>It's worth noting that Stage Manager <em>only</em> works with the very latest iPads that use Apple silicon: iPad Air (5th generation), 11-inch iPad Pro (2021), and 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2021). It's probably not the time to be buying a new iPad Pro, with rumours that it's due for a refresh soon, maybe to an M2, unless you really really want to try Stage Manager right now. However, if you have an iPad that can support it, and an external display, keyboard, and mouse, it's worth trying it out to get a better idea of the state of the iPadOS art.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by author, except Stage Manager screenshot from Apple</p>Sights From A Bike Ridehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/sights-from-a-bike-ride2023-12-17T16:36:38.636000Z2022-09-11T08:06:56ZDominic<p>One of the positive aspects I often cite when talking up <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/from-provincial-italy-to-london-and-back-again">the place where I live</a> is that I can be in fields in ten minutes' ride from my front door in the old town — as in, my windows look out onto the old city walls.<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Once out in the fields, though, you never know what you might find. Here are some scenes from my latest ride.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6caeccb4-4117-1e39-3855-e71c86f608ec/d6ae5539-fed3-8634-3932-4e75a96acc46.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/>Roadside shrine to the Madonna della Notte, complete with offerings and ex-voto (thanks for successful prayers).</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6caeccb4-4117-1e39-3855-e71c86f608ec/11a4378a-8b6f-b91c-0b92-6d432cd4d811.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/>Not sure what's up with this old Lancia planted in a farm yard, but it looks cool!</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6caeccb4-4117-1e39-3855-e71c86f608ec/c52310a7-ea9a-bf18-5526-95e466687d9e.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/>Here I just liked the contrast between the red tomatoes waiting for the harvest and the teal frame of my Bianchi.</p>
<p>Bike rides are so great for getting out of my head, whether it’s a technical piece of single-track on my mountain bike where I have to concentrate so hard I can’t think of anything else, or a ride like this where I’m bowling along the flat with a podcast in my (bone-conduction) headphones. The trick is staying off main roads as much as possible — hence the gravel bike.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Which are actually the newest city walls, dating from the sixteenth century CE, post-dating various earlier medieval and Roman walls of which only traces remain. These Renaissance walls were later turned into a linear park (<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Facsal-Wauxall_(Piacenza)">pictures</a>) known as the "Facsal", a distortion of London's famous Vauxhall gardens, among the first and best-known pleasure gardens in nineteenth-century Europe. In more modern times, the Facsal was part of the street circuit for the 1947 Grand Prix of Piacenza, famously the first race entered by a Ferrari car — although not the site of the Scuderia's first win. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Nice Tech, Pity About The Producthttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/nice-tech-pity-about-the-product2023-12-17T16:35:10.516000Z2022-09-08T09:02:54ZDominic<p>Like many IT types, my workspace has a tendency to acquire obsolete technology. When I shared a flat in London with somebody else who lives with the same condition, computers significantly outnumbered people; heck, <em>operating systems</em> sometimes outnumbered people, even after our then-girlfriends/now-wives moved in! At one point, we even had an AS/400 desk-side unit that we salvaged, until we realised we really didn't have anything fun to do with it and moved it on again.</p>
<p>In the <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/how-i-work-from-home">big clear-out</a> last year, I got rid of a bunch of the old stuff — yes, even some of the cables! One item made the opposite journey, though, from the depths of a box inside a cupboard of toner cartridges underneath a monitor so old it still has a 4:3 aspect ratio, to pride of place in my line of sight from my desk chair.</p>
<p>That item is the installation media for a thoroughly obsolete computer operating system from the 90s.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/099df472-c692-951b-731e-6fd4b070c878/5028cf3e-82f3-8372-c104-a20d71d33af5.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:511; --en-naturalHeight:512;"/></p>
<h1>What Even Is BeOS?</h1>
<p>BeOS was the brain-child of a bunch of ex-Apple people, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e">Jean-Louis Gassée</a>, who worked for Apple through the 80s and was instrumental in the creation of the Newton, among other things. While Apple spent the 90s trying and failing to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)">create a new operating system to replace the aging MacOS</a>, Gassée and his merry band created a brand-new operating system called BeOS. The 90s were probably the last time in history that it was possible to do something like that; the platforms that have emerged since then (iOS and Android) are variations on existing platforms (NeXTSTEP/OS X, which slightly predates BeOS, and Linux respectively).</p>
<p>Initially targeted at AT&T's Hobbit CPUs, BeOS was soon ported to the PowerPC architecture. These were the CPUs that powered Apple computers at the time, the product of an alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Between them, the three companies hoped to foster the emergence of an ecosystem to rival (or at least provide an alternative to) Intel's dominant x86. In those days, Apple licensed a handful of manufacturers to build <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/send-in-the-clones">MacOS-compatible PowerPC computers</a>, so Be quickly stopped manufacturing their own BeBox hardware and switched to offering the BeOS to people who owned these computers — or actual Apple Macs, I suppose, but even at the time you didn't hear of many people doing that.</p>
<p>This is where BeOS first entered my life. If you can believe it, the way you found out about cool software in those pre-broadband days was to buy a printed magazine that would come with a CD full of demos, shareware, utilities, wallpapers, icon sets, and more. There were a few magazines that catered to the Apple enthusiast market, and in 1997, I happened to pick one up that included Preview Release 2 of the BeOS.<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Luckily for me, I owned a whopping 500MB external SCSI drive, so I didn't have to mess around with reformatting the main HDD of the family computer (which would probably have run all of 2GB at the time, kids!). I was quickly up and running with the BeOS, which absolutely blew away <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_8">the contemporary Macintosh operating system</a>.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/099df472-c692-951b-731e-6fd4b070c878/c166763a-c869-9058-c808-33d476857352.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:1024; --en-naturalHeight:768;"/></p>
<h1>Why Bother With BeOS?</h1>
<p>The performance was the first and most obvious difference between BeOS and MacOS. Just watching GLTeapot spinning around in real time was amazing, especially compared to what I was used to in MacOS <em>on the same hardware</em>. Check out <a href="https://www.soundonsound.com/people/beos-operating-system-overview">this contemporary review</a>, focusing specifically on BeOS’ multimedia capabilities.</p>
<p>This was also my first exposure to a <code>bash</code> terminal, or indeed any command-line interface beyond MS-DOS, and I can safely say that it was love at first sight, especially once I started understanding how the output of one command could be passed to another, and then the whole thing wired up into a script.</p>
<p>BeOS was properly multi-user, in a way that Classic MacOS very definitely wasn't. This factor made me consider it as a full-time replacement for MacOS on the family computer, but the lack of hardware support killed that idea. Specifically, the Global Village Teleport fax/modem which was our connection to the early Internet, running at a <em>blazing fast</em> 14.4kbps, did not work in BeOS. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/099df472-c692-951b-731e-6fd4b070c878/da64c6ec-8014-3dfe-4cf0-9f8fee11d455.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:488; --en-naturalHeight:414;"/></p>
<p>This lack was doubly annoying since BeOS shipped with an actual web browser: <a href="https://www.listofpopular.com/computers/list-of-world-best-and-fastest-web-browser-ever/netpositive-for-beos/">NetPositive</a>, one of whose claims to fame was its haiku error messages. At the time, Mac users were stuck between Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple's almost wilfully obscure Cyberdog, and early versions of Opera.</p>
<h1>What Happened To BeOS?</h1>
<p>This is where we get to the point of the story. What killed BeOS was not any sort of issue with the technology. It was leaps and bounds ahead of both dominant operating systems of the day, with massive developer interest.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Be did not own its own destiny. After failing to sell itself to Apple, Be staggered on for a few more years. Once it became obvious that Apple was going to kill the MacOS clone business which powered the ecosystem of non-Apple PowerPC hardware that BeOS ran on, an x86 port was quickly added. By this point dual-booting operating systems on x86 had become, if not exactly mainstream, at least somewhat common in technical circles. Unfortunately for Be, the second OS (of course after Windows) was almost always Linux. A second commercial operating system was always going to be a hard sell in a world where everyone had already paid for a Windows license as part of the purchase price for their PC, to the point that Be literally couldn't even give it away. In fact <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2002/02/19/companies/beos/index.htm">Be actually sued Microsoft over its alleged monopolistic practices</a>, possibly the last gasp of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#First_Browser_War_(1995–2001)">First Browser War</a> of the late 90s.<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>
<p>Be was eventually <a href="https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2001/11/2549-2/">sold to Palm</a>, and after Palm's own travails, the last vestiges of BeOS disappeared from public view only a few years later.</p>
<p>The lesson here is that <strong>the best technology does not always win</strong> — or at least, does not win unaided. Execution is key, and Be, despite some very agile pivots, failed to execute to the point of making any meaningful dent in the personal-computer-OS market.</p>
<p>What could Be have done differently? It's hard to say, even with the benefit of hindsight. None of the alternative desktop operating systems that sprang up in the late 80s and early 90s have survived. BeOS? Gone. OS/2 Warp? Gone. All the commercial UNIX systems? Gone — but maybe next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop. NeXT? It got acquired by Apple, and the tech is still with us in every current Apple platform — but if Be had been the one to get bought to replace the failed Copland project, NeXT would certainly have been the one to disappear. </p>
<p>That is the one inflection point really worth considering: what if Gassée had managed to negotiate a deal with Apple back then? What would OS X be like today if it were based on BeOS rather than on NeXTSTEP?<sup id="fnref:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> And… what would <em>Apple</em> be like without Steve Jobs, in hindsight the most valuable part of the NeXT acquisition? There would probably still be a mobile product; one of the key Be employees was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sakoman">Steve Sakoman</a>, godfather of the Newton, so it seems fairly certain that a descendant of some sort would have emerged from a Be-infused Apple. But would it have become the globe-spanning success of the iPhone (and iPad) without Steve Jobs to market it?</p>
<p>One day I would like to own both a BeBox and a NeXTcube,<sup id="fnref2:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> but for now I just keep that BeOS PR2 CD as a tech industry <em>memento mori</em>, a reminder to myself not to get caught up in the elegance of the tech, but always to remember the product and the use cases which that tech enables.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I could have sworn it was <em>MacAddict</em>, which was definitely my favourite magazine at the time, but <a href="https://www.mactech.com/1997/10/08/md1-beos-preview-release-2/">the only references I can find online say it was <em>MacTech</em></a>, and it's been long enough that I can't be sure. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Be's travails did inspire at least one high-profile fan, with Neal Stephenson discussing BeOS in his book-length essay <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line"><em>In the Beginning... Was the Command Line</em></a>, as well as giving it a cameo in <em>Cryptonomicon</em> (alongside "Finux", his gossamer-thin Linux-analogue). <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>Yes, weird capitalisation has always been part of the computer industry. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Good Outcomes Grow From Failurehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/good-outcomes-grow-from-failure2023-12-17T16:33:10.986000Z2022-08-04T17:22:50ZDominic<h1>Failure Is Good, Actually</h1>
<p>No, this is not going to be some hustleporn screed about failing fast and learning from it. I am talking about <em>actual</em> failure, crashing and burning and flaming out and really really bad outcomes. Here's my point: when these bad things happen to the right people, they can be really good for the rest of us — and not just because we can enjoy the schadenfreude of terrible people messing up in public.</p>
<p>Here's how it works: a terrible person, let's call him <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Kalanick">Travis</a> (for that is his name) spots an actual gap in the market: hailing taxis sucks, and when you can get one, they all mysteriously have broken credit card terminals. Travis therefore founds a company called, just for the sake of realism, Uber, and goes after that opportunity <em><a href="https://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions">in the worst way imaginable</a></em>. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6d1bbd92-026c-e537-5a08-15d4e240f619/0056d59d-1fcb-29bb-946f-a734be677cfb.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:500; --en-naturalHeight:750;"/></p>
<p>Here's the thing: Travis and Uber weren't <em>wrong</em> about the opportunity, which is why Uber took off the way it did. Uber even had a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/15/the-uber-files-how-the-leak-prompted-outrage-across-the-world">very explicit strategy of weaponising the love users had for the service to put pressure on local governments to allow the service to launch in different locales</a>. This strategy succeeded in both the short and the long term, but in very different ways.</p>
<p>In the early years, Uber was the latest poster child for the "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley tech bro attitude. Sure, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/europe/france-paris-uberpop-protests/index.html">Parisian taxi drivers rioted and set Uber cars on fire</a>, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/26/uber-pop-italy-order-discontinue-unfair-competition-taxi">Italian taxi drivers managed to get UberX (known locally as Uber Pop — don't ask) banned</a>, but in most places, Uber triumphed, mainly because the service was genuinely so much better than the status quo: you could summon a car right to your location, and when you arrived at your destination, you just got out and strolled off, no haggling or searching for the right currency.</p>
<p>So much for the short term. In the longer term, all that moving fast and breaking things caught up with Travis and his company, as VCs got tired of subsidising the true cost of Uber rides, making them far less competitive with actual licensed taxis. However, in the mean time, something interesting happened: the previously somnolent local taxi industries in every city suddenly woke up to this new existential threat. They had been used to being monopolies, so they could set their own rules and control the number of entrants. Uber (and Lyft, Grab, et al) upended that cozy status quo — but after some flailing, and some bonfiring of Uber cars, they woke up to the threat, and addressed it in the best way: by going straight to the root of what customers had demonstrated they wanted.</p>
<p>Now, I can rock up in almost any decent-sized city in Europe, and with an app called <a href="https://www.free-now.com/">Free Now</a>, I can summon a car to my location, pay with a stored credit card, and hop out at my destination without worrying about currency conversion or losing a printed receipt. It sounds a lot like Uber, with a crucial distinction: the cars are locally-licensed taxis, subject to all the standard licensing checks.</p>
<p>Uber is still a going concern, to be clear, but it's <a href="https://seekingalpha.com/article/4513690-uber-a-value-trap">struggling</a> as its costs rise and the negative externalities come home to roost. The investment case for Uber was always based on them securing either a monopoly on the ride-hailing market, or alternatively a breakthrough in self-driving technology that would let them do away with their highest cost: the pesky human element, the actual drivers.</p>
<p>I think it's inarguable that this original investment case has not worked out, and a lot of the shine has come off Uber as the investor subsidy goes away and prices rise to reflect actual costs.</p>
<h1>From Four Wheels To Two</h1>
<p>Now, the same mechanisms are playing out in the <a href="https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/scooter-startups-vc-public-market-lime-brds/">dockless scooter</a> — aka "micromobility" — market:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Today, a scooter rental ride hardly seems like a bargain. At typical rates, which include an upfront and per-minute fee, a 20-minute ride would cost about $6. That’s more than a quick bus or subway ride in places that offer those options.</p>
<p>Still, last-mile transportation remains a tricky niche to fill in urban networks, and scooters do have a place in the mix. We’re not done with them yet. Just don’t expect the days—or valuations—of the peak scooter era to return any time soon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6d1bbd92-026c-e537-5a08-15d4e240f619/28f46a3e-e5db-d478-40e0-0454fe801d1f.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>I have <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/micromobility-at-macro-scale">used</a> these services, and broadly speaking, I'm a fan. They are not worth bazillions of CURRENCY_UNITS because they are obviously terrible markets for the purpose: low barriers to entry, and operating costs that scale linearly with network size. </p>
<p>As it happens, both of these issues can be addressed with some good old-fashioned regulation — the sort of thing that happens in maturing markets. Now that the public has expressed interest in these new options, each city can choose how the services should operate. In my small hometown, a single vendor has been approved, with a cap on the number of vehicles and on speed in the centre of town (GPS-enforced, natch). Crucially, the scooters are not just abandoned wherever, getting in people's way; they live in specific "parking lots" (repurposed car parking spots). Paris has taken a similar approach, requiring riders to photograph where they left their ride to ensure it's not placed somewhere it shouldn't be, and fining or barring riders who do not park correctly.</p>
<p>I just hope that we can reach the same result as Uber — all of the good aspects of the service, without the horrible VC-inflated bits. I <em>like</em> that I can rock up in a strange city, pull out my phone, and within a minute or two be on an e-bike. It's not often practical to travel with my own bike, so these rental services have a real potential.</p>
<p>Moses did not get to see the Promised Land. Uber and Lime are still with us, but with rather diminished ambitions. But as long as we get to that promised land of a fully-integrated and ubiquitous transport network, the creative destruction was worth it, and we travellers will be happy.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@austindistel">Austin Distel</a> and <a href="https://unsplash.com/@helloimnik">Hello I'm Nik</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>Systems of Operationhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/systems-of-operation2023-12-17T16:37:03.565000Z2022-07-17T16:10:10ZDominic<p>I have, to misquote J. R. R. Tolkien, a <a href="https://askmiddlearth.tumblr.com/post/93871332606/tolkien-wrote-i-cordially-dislike-allegory-cordial">cordial dislike</a> of overly rigid classification systems. The fewer the dimensions, the worse they tend to be. The classic two-by-two grid, so beloved of management consultants, is a frequent offender. I suspect I am not alone, as most such systems quickly get complicated by the addition of precise placement along each axis, devolving into far more granular coordinate systems on at least one plane, rather than the original four simple boxes. But surely the worst of the lot are simple binary choices, this or that, no gradations on the spectrum allowed.</p>
<p>We have perhaps more than our fair share of these divisions in tech — or perhaps it makes sense that we have more than other fields? (That's a joke, because binary) <em>Anyway</em>, one of the recurring binary splits is the one between development and operations. That it is obviously a false binary is clear by the fact that these days, the grey area at the intersection — DevOps — gets far more consideration than either extreme. And yet, as it is with metaphors and allegories (back to JRRT!), so it is with classifications: all of them are wrong, but some of them are <em>useful</em>.</p>
<p>The Dev/Ops dichotomy is a real one, no matter how blurred the intersection has got, because it is based in a larger division. People tend to prefer either the work of <em>creation</em>, architecting and building, or the work of <em>maintaining</em>, running and repairing. The first group get visibility and recognition, so certain personality traits cluster at this end of the spectrum — flashy and extrovert, dismissive of existing constraints. At the opposite end, we find people who value understanding a situation deeply, including how it came to be a certain way, and who act within it to achieve their goals.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/5870501c-2020-8299-a75c-2380547c8539/0323bd8e-e9a4-1347-c09c-564a96392f48.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:224; --en-naturalHeight:346;"/></p>
<p>I am trying to avoid value judgments, but I think it is already clear where my own sympathies lie. Someone I have worked with for a long time subscribes to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox">Isaiah Berlin's analogy</a>: the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. I am an unashamed fox: I know a little about a lot, I love accumulating knowledge even if I do not have an immediate obvious use for it, and I never saw a classification system I did not immediately question and find the corner-cases of. These traits set me up to be a maintainer and an extender rather than a creator. </p>
<p>I value the work of maintenance; designing a new thing starting with a clean sheet is an indulgence, while working within the constraints of an existing situation and past choices to reach my objectives is a discipline that requires understanding both of my own goals and those of others who have worked on the same thing in the past. In particular, good maintainers extend their predecessors the grace of assuming good intent. Even if a particular choice seems counter-intuitive or sub-optimal, this attitude does the courtesy of assuming there was a good and valid reason for making it, or a constraint which prevented the more obvious choice.</p>
<h1>Embrace Failure — But Not Too Tightly</h1>
<p>There are many consequences to this attitude. One is embracing failure as an opportunity for learning. The best way to learn how something works is often to break it and then fix it — but please don't blame me if you break prod! Putting something back together is the best way to truly understand how different components fit one another and interact with one another in ways that may or may not be planned in the original design. It is also often a way of finding unexpected capabilities and new ways of assembling the same bits into something new. I did both back when I was a sysadmin — broke prod (only the once) and learned from fixing things that were broken.</p>
<p>Embracing failure also does not mean that we should allow it to happen; in fact the maintainer mindset assumes failure and values redundancy over efficiency or elegance of design. Healthy systems are redundant, both to tolerate failure and to enable maintenance. I had a car with a known failure mode, but unfortunately the fix was an engine-out job, making preventative maintenance uneconomical. The efficiency of the design choice to use plastic tubing and route it in a hot spot under the engine ultimately came back to bite me in the shape of a late-night call to roadside assistance and an eye-watering bill.</p>
<h1>Hyperobjects In Time</h1>
<p>There is one negative aspect to the maintainer mindset, beyond the lack of personal recognition; people get awards for the initial design, not for keeping it operating afterwards. Lack of maintenance (or of the right sort of maintenance) is not immediately obvious, especially to hedgehog types. It is not the sort of one big thing that they tend to focus on. Instead, it is more of a hyperobject, visible only if you take a step back and add a time dimension. Don't clean the kitchen floor for a day, it's probably fine. Leave it for a week, it's nasty, and probably attracting pests. I know this from my own student days, when my flatmates explored the boundaries of entropy with enthusiasm.</p>
<p>Hyperobjects extend through additional dimensions beyond the usual three. In the same way that a cube is a three-dimensional object whose faces are two-dimensional squares, a hypercube or tesseract is a four-dimensional object whose faces are all three-dimensional cubes. This sort of thing can give you a headache to think about, but does make for cool screensaver visualisations. In this particular formulation, the fourth dimension is time; deferred maintenance is visible only by looking at its extent in time, while its projection into our everyday dimensions seems small and inconsequential when viewed in isolation.</p>
<p>These sorts of hyperobjects are difficult for hedgehogs to reason about precisely because they do not fit neatly into their two-by-two grids and one big thing. They can even sneak up on foxes because there is always something else going on, so the issues can remain undetected, hidden by other things, until some sort of failure mode is encountered. If that failure can be averted or at least minimised, maintainer foxes can learn something from it and modify the system so that it can be maintained more easily and avoid the failure recurring.</p>
<p>All of these reflections are grounded in my day job. I own a large and expanding library of content, which is continuously aging and becoming obsolete, and must be constantly maintained to remain useful. Leave one document untouched for a month or so, and it's probably fine; the drift is minimal, a note here or there. Leave it for a year, and it's basically as much work to bring it back up to date as it would be to rewrite it entirely. It's easy to forget this factor in the constant rush of everyday work, so it's important to have systems to remind us of the true extent of problems left unaddressed.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/5870501c-2020-8299-a75c-2380547c8539/589a0b79-b83e-3611-57c9-75f95450ba76.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:640; --en-naturalHeight:480;"/></p>
<p>In my case, all of this rapidly-obsolescing content is research about competitors. This is also where the intellectual honesty comes in: it's important to recognise that creators of competing technology may have had good reasons for making the choices they made, even when they result in trade-offs that seem obviously worse. In the same way, someone who adopted a different technology probably did so for reasons that were good and valid for their time and place, and dismissing those reasons as irrelevant will not help to persuade them to consider a change. This is known as "calling someone's baby ugly", and tends to provoke similar negative emotional reactions as insulting someone’s actual offspring. </p>
<p>Good competitive positioning is not about pitching the One True Way and explaining all the ways in which other approaches are Wrong. Instead, it's about trying to understand what the ultimate goal is or was for all of the other participants in the conversation, and engaging with those goals honestly. Of course I have an agenda, I'm not just going to surrender because someone made a choice years ago — but I can put my agenda into effect more easily by understanding how it fits with someone else's agenda, by working with the existing complicated system as it is, rather than trying to raze it to the ground and start again to build a more perfect design, whatever the people who rely on the existing system might think.</p>
<p>I value the work of maintainers, the people who keep the lights on, at least as much as that of the initial designers. And I know that every maintainer is also a little bit of a designer, in the same way that every good designer is also thinking at least a little bit about maintenance. Maybe that is my One Big Thing?</p>From Provincial Italy To London — And Back Againhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/from-provincial-italy-to-london-and-back-again2023-12-17T16:32:59.116000Z2022-05-08T09:25:42ZDominic<h1>More reflections on remote work</h1>
<p>Well, I'm back to travelling, and in a pretty big way — as in, I'm already to the point of having to back out of one trip because I was getting overloaded! I've been on the road for the past couple of weeks, in London and New York, and in fact I will be back in New York in a month.</p>
<p>It has honestly been great to see people, and so productive too. Even though I was mostly meeting the same people I speak to week in, week out via Zoom, it was different to all be in the same room together. This was also the first time I was able to get my whole team together since its inception: I hired everyone remotely, and while I have managed to meet up with each of them individually, none of the people on the team had actually met each other in person… We had an amazingly productive whiteboarding session, where we knocked out some planning in a couple of hours that might otherwise have taken weeks, and probably justified a chunk of the cost of the trip on its own.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6c1bfb05-50cd-dea6-6b7a-1d5fcd16f41d/604c8db3-ff76-2c87-3430-86ea5f781814.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>This mechanism also showed up in an interesting study in <em>Nature</em>, entitled <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04643-y"><em>Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation</em></a>. The study shows that remote meetings are better for some things and worse for others. Basically, if the meeting has a fixed agenda and clear outcomes, a remote meeting is a more efficient way of banging through those items. However, when it comes to ideation and creativity, in-person meetings are better than remote ones. </p>
<p>As with all the best studies, this result tallies with my experience and reinforces my prejudices. I have been remote for a long time, way before the recent unpleasantness, but I always combined remote work with regular in-person catch-up meetings. You do the ideation and planning when you can all gather together around the whiteboard — not to mention reinforcing personal ties by gathering around a table in a restaurant or a bar! Then that planning and those personal ties take you through the rest of the quarter, with regular check-ins for tactical day-to-day actions to implement the strategic goals decided at the in-person meeting.</p>
<h1>Leaving London</h1>
<p>Something else that was interesting about my recent trips was meeting a whole lot of people who were curious about my living situation in Italy — how I came to be there, and what it was like to work a global role from provincial Italy, rather than from one of the usual global nerve centres. Telling the story in New York, coming fresh from my trip to London, led me to reflect back on how come I left London and whether it was the right call (spoiler: it totally was).</p>
<p>The London connection also showed up in a pair of articles by Marie Le Conte, who recently <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2022/02/forget-the-pension-plan-im-blowing-my-savings-on-a-trip-to-venice">spent a couple of months in Venice</a> before <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/society/2022/05/why-cant-the-uk-get-over-its-hatred-of-london">returning to London</a>. It has been long enough since I left London that I no longer worry about whether prices in my favourite haunts will be different, but whether any of them are still there or still recognisable — and sadly, most of them are not. But then again, this is London we are talking about, so I have new favourites, and find a new one almost every trip.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6c1bfb05-50cd-dea6-6b7a-1d5fcd16f41d/baeb6e93-898b-0641-9adf-e2a3eccf8793.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:1067;"/></p>
<p>Leaving London was a wrench: it was the first place I lived after university, and I enjoyed it to the hilt. Of course I had to share a flat, and I drove ancient unreliable cars<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>. But we were out and about all the time, in bars and theatres, eating out and meeting up and just enjoying the place.</p>
<p>However, over the following years most of my London friends moved away in turn, either leaving the UK outright or moving out to the commuter belt. The latter choice never quite made sense to me: why live somewhere nearly as expensive as London (especially when you factor in the cost of that commute), which offers none of the benefits of being in actual London, and still has awful traffic and so on? But as my friends started to settle down and want to raise families and so on, they could no longer afford London prices. Those prices get especially hard to justify once you could no longer balance them out by enjoying everything London has to offer — because you're at home with the kids, who also need to be near a decent school, and get back and forth from sports and activities, and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>My friends and I experienced the same London in our twenties that Marie Le Conte did: it didn't matter if you "rent half a shoebox in a block of flats where nothing really worked", because "there was always something to do". But if you're not out doing all the things, and you need more than half a shoebox to put kids in, London requires a serious financial commitment for not much return.</p>
<h1>But why commute to the office at all?</h1>
<p>Even before the pandemic, remote work allowed many of us to square that circle. We could live in places that were congenial to us, way outside commuting range of any office we might nominally be attached to, but travel regularly for those all-important ideation sessions that guided and drove the regular day-to-day work.</p>
<p>The pandemic has opened the eyes of many more people and companies to the possibilities of remote work. Airbnb notably <a href="https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-new-remote-work-policy-hybrid-work.html">committed to a full remote-work approach</a>, which of course makes particular sense to Airbnb, expecially the bit about "flexibility to live and work in 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location". I admit they are an extreme case, but other companies have an opportunity to implement the parts of that model that make sense for them.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6c1bfb05-50cd-dea6-6b7a-1d5fcd16f41d/b1d5a7f0-a06c-7901-cef9-420bd3b3eb5c.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>Certain functions benefit from being in the office all the time, so they require permanent space. This means both individual desks and meeting rooms. Meanwhile, remote workers will need to come in regularly, but when they do, they will have different needs. They will absolutely require meeting rooms, and large, well-equipped ones at that, and those are on top of whatever the baseline needs are for the in-office teams. On the other hand, the out-of-towners will spend most of their time in meetings (or, frankly, out socialising), and so they do not need huge numbers of hot desks — just a few for catching up with emails in gaps between meetings.</p>
<p>If you rotate the in-office meetings so you don't have the place bursting at the seams one week and empty the rest of the time, this starts to look like a rather different office setup than what most companies have now. You can even start thinking of cloud-computing analogies, no longer provisioning office space for peak utilisation, but instead spreading work to take advantage of unused capacity, and maybe bursting by renting external capacity as needed (WeWork<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> et al).</p>
<p>If you go further down the Airbnb route and go fully remote, you might even start thinking more about where you put that office. Does it need to be in a downtown office core, or can it be in a more fun part of town — or in a different city entirely? Maybe it can even be in a resort-type location, as long as it has good transport links. Hey, a guy can dream…</p>
<p>But in the mean time, remote work unlocks the ability for many more people to make better choices about where to live. Raising a family is hard enough; doing it when both parents work is basically impossible without a strong local support network. Maybe the model should be something like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa">Amish Rumspringa</a>, where young Amish go spend time out in the world before going back home and committing to the Amish way of life. Enjoy your twenties in the big city, get started on your career with the sort of hands-on guidance that is hard to get remotely, and then move back home near parents and friends when it's time to settle down, switching to remote working models — with careful scheduling to avoid both parents being away at once.</p>
<p>Once you start looking at it like that, provincial Italy is hard to beat. Quality of life is top-notch, with the sort of lifestyle that would require an extra zero on the salary in London or NYC. If you combine that with regular visits to the big cities, it's honestly pretty great.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://kaleidico.com/">Kaleidico</a> and <a href="https://unsplash.com/es/@jasongoodman_youxventures">Jason Goodman</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a>; London photograph author’s own (the view from my hotel room on my most recent London trip).</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I only had a car in the first place because I commuted out of London, to a place not well-served by trains; I never drove into central London if I could avoid it, even before the congestion charge was introduced. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Just because WeWork is a terrible company doesn't mean that the fundamental idea is wrong. See also Uber: while Uber-the-company is obviously unsustainable and has a number of terrible side-effects, it has forced into existence a ride-hailing market that almost certainly would not exist absent Uber. Free Now gives me an Uber-like experience (summon a car from my phone in most cities, pay with a stored card), but using regular licensed taxis and without the horrible exploitative Uber model. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Old Views For Today's Newshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/old-views-for-today-s-news2023-12-17T16:35:22.190000Z2022-03-27T09:33:11ZDominic<p>Here's a blog post I wrote back in 2015 for my then-employer that I was reminded of while recording <a href="https://anchor.fm/roll-for-enterprise/episodes/S3E12-Oktapoppin-e1gaubm">the latest episode</a> of the <em><a href="http://www.rollforenterprise.com">Roll For Enterprise</a></em> podcast. Since the original post no longer seems to be available via the BMC web site, I assume they won't mind me reposting it here, with some updated commentary.<br />
<img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/80d4104a-2660-9620-a24a-d6c08a04e7b1/db7fc576-db2e-5dfa-237e-91d6c13920b8.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:578; --en-naturalHeight:263;" alt="cia.png" height="autopx"/></p>
<p><a href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cia.png" title="It was their main recruiting poster, hung nearly ten feet up a wall! This means the hackers have LADDER technology! Are we headed for a future where everyone has to pay $50 for one of those locked plexiglass poster covers? More after the break ...">xkcd, CIA</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There has been a certain amount of excitement in the news media, as someone purportedly associated with ISIL has taken over and defaced US Central Command's Twitter account. The juxtaposition with recent US government pronouncements on "cyber security" (ack) is obvious: <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/01/centcoms-twitter-hack/" title="Central Command’s Twitter Account Hacked…As Obama Speaks on Cybersecurity">Central Command’s Twitter Account Hacked…As Obama Speaks on Cybersecurity</a>. </p>
<p>The problem here is the usual confusion around IT in general, and IT security in particular. See for instance <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/12/politics/centcom-twitter-hacked-suspended/" title="CENTCOM Twitter account hacked, suspended">CNN</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was suspended Monday after it was hacked by ISIS sympathizers -- but no classified information was obtained and no military networks were compromised, defense officials said.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To an IT professional, even without specific security background, this is kind of obvious. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/80d4104a-2660-9620-a24a-d6c08a04e7b1/5b67eb66-3736-e341-853e-2d6b8c68326e.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:1050; --en-naturalHeight:526;" alt="shucking-a-tutorial.jpg" height="autopx"/><a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16">Penny Arcade, Brains With Urgent Appointments</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>However, there is a real problem here. IT professionals also have a blind spot here: they don't think of things like Twitter accounts when they are securing IT infrastructure. This oversight can expose organisations to serious problems. </p>
<p>One way this can happen is credential re-use and leaking in general. Well-run organisations will use secure password-sharing services such as LastPass, but many times without IT guidance teams might instead opt for storing credentials in a spreadsheet, as we now know happened at Sony. If someone got their hands on even one set of credentials, what other services might they be able to unlock? </p>
<p>The wider issue is the notion of <strong>perimeter defence</strong>. IT security to date has been all about securing the perimeter - firewalls, DMZs, NAT, and so on. Today, though, what is the perimeter? End-user services like Dropbox, iCloud, or Google Docs, as well as multi-tier enterprise applications, span back and forth across the firewall, with data stored and code executed both locally and remotely.</p>
<p>I don't mean to pick on Sony in particular - they are just the most recent victims - but their experience has shown once and for all that focusing only on the perimeter is no longer sufficient. The walls are porous enough that it is no longer possible to assume that bad guys are only outside. Systems and procedures are needed to detect anomalous activity <strong>inside</strong> the network, and once that occurs, to handle it rapidly and effectively. </p>
<p>This cannot happen if IT is still operating as "the department of NO", reflexively refusing user requests out of fear or potential consequences. If the IT department tries to ban everything, users will figure out a way to go around the restrictions to achieve their goals. The risk then is that they make choices which put the entire organisation and even its customers at risk. Instead, IT needs to engage with those users and find creative, novel ways to deliver on their requirements without compromising on their mandate to protect the organisation. </p>
<p>While corporate IT cannot be held responsible for the security of services such as Twitter, they can and should advise social-media teams and end-users in general on how to protect all of their services, inside and outside the perimeter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are a still a lot of areas where IT is focused on perimeter defence. Adopting Okta or another SSO service is not a panacea; you still do need to consider what would happen when (not if) someone gets inside the first layer of defence. How would you detect them? How would you stop them?</p>
<p><a href="https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/28/this-is-mandiants-timeline-for-the-okta-lapsus-breach-according-to-a-researcher/">The Okta breach</a> has also helpfully provided an example of another important factor in security breaches: comms. Okta's comms discipline has not been great, reacting late, making broad denials that they later had to walk back, and generally adding to the confusion rather than reducing it. Legislation is being written around the world (with the EU as usual taking the lead) to mandate disclosure in situations like these, which may focus minds — but really, if you're not sufficiently embarrassed as a security provider that a bunch of teenagers were apparently running around your network for at least two weeks without you detecting them, you deserve all the fines you're going to get.</p>
<p>These are no longer purely tech problems. Once you get messy humans in the mix, the conversation changes from "how many bits of entropy does the encryption algorithm need" to "what is the correct trade-off between letting people get their jobs done and ensuring a reasonable level of security, given our particular threat model". Working with humans means communicating with them, so you’d better have a plan ready to go for what to say in a given situation. Hint: blanket denials early on are generally a bad idea, leaving hostages to fortune unnecessarily. </p>
<p>Have a plan ready to go for what you will say in a given situation (including what you may be legally mandated to disclose, and on what timeframe), and avoid losing your customers’ trust. Believe me, that’s one sort of zero trust that you don’t want!</p>Kidshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/kids2023-12-17T16:34:15.537000Z2022-03-26T17:46:14ZDominic<div>Make no mistake: having kids is messy, stressful, and expensive. You should absolutely not have kids if you like having free time, disposable income, or any say in what to watch on TV. But there are also those moments when you walk into a room and you are greeted by an excitable small human who was unable to roll over an eyeblink ago, but now is gabbling on about the amazing castle they built with their wooden blocks, and who lives behind this door or in that tower, and what they will do next, and it all seems worth it. Well, at least until it's time to clear up…</div>
Help, I'm Being Personalised!https://findthethread.postach.io/post/help-i-m-being-personalised2023-09-13T16:03:58.894000Z2022-03-16T15:00:59ZDominic<p>As the token European among the <a href="http://rollforenterprise.com">Roll For Enterprise</a> hosts, I'm the one who is always raising the topic of privacy. My interest in privacy is partly scarring from an early career as a sysadmin, when I saw just how much information is easily available to the people who run the networks and systems we rely on, without them even being particularly nosy.</p>
<p>Because of that history, I am always instantly suspicious of talk of "personalising the customer experience", even if we make the charitable assumption that the reality of this profiling is more than just <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304458604577488822667325882" title="On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels">raising prices until enough people balk</a>. I know that the data is unquestionably out there; my doubts are about the motivations of the people analysing it, and about their competence to do so correctly.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/0a9eece5-3f82-4004-7e63-83c925c80d2b/8ab040e5-476b-2939-1d68-2e8d23f2040e.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>Let's take a step back to explain what I mean. I used to be a big fan of Amazon's various recommendations, for products often bought with the product you are looking at, or by the people who looked at the same product. Back in the antediluvian days when Amazon was still all about (physical) books, I discovered many a new book or author through these mechanisms. </p>
<p>One of my favourite aspects of Amazon's recommendation engine was that it didn't try to do it all. If I bought a book for my then-girlfriend, who had (and indeed still has, although she is now my wife) rather different tastes from me, this would throw the recommendations all out of whack. However, the system was transparent and user-serviceable. Amazon would show me transparently why it had recommended Book X, usually because I had purchased Book Y. Beyond showing me, it would also let me go back into my purchase history and tell it <em>not</em> to use Book Y for recommendations (because it was not actually bought for me), thereby restoring balance to my feed. This made us both happy: I got higher-quality recommendations, and Amazon got a more accurate profile of me, that it could use to sell me more books — something it did very successfully.</p>
<p>Forget doing anything like that nowadays! If you watch Netflix on more than one device, especially if you ever watch anything offline, you'll have hit that situation where you've watched something but Netflix doesn't realise it or won't admit it. And can you mark it as watched, like we used to do with local files? (insert hollow laughter here) No, you'll have that "unwatched" episode cluttering up your "Up next" queue forever.</p>
<p>This is an example of the sort of behaviour that John Siracusa decried in his recent blog post, <a href="https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/17/streaming-app-sentiments">Streaming App Sentiments</a>. This post gathers responses to his earlier <a href="https://hypercritical.co/2022/02/15/streaming-apps">unsolicited streaming app spec</a>, where he discussed people's reactions to these sorts of "helpful" features.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>People don’t feel like they are in control of their "data," such as it is. The apps make bad guesses or forget things they should remember, and the user has no way to correct them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We see the same problem with <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/10/22970043/twitter-product-leadership-interview">Twitter's plans for ever greater personalisation</a>. Twitter defaulted to an algorithmic timeline a long time ago, justifying the switch away from a simple chronological feed with the entirely true fact that there was too much volume for anyone to be a Twitter completist any more, so bringing popular tweets to the surface was actually a better experience for people. To repeat myself, this is all <em>true</em>; the problem is that Twitter did not give users any input into the process. Also, sometimes I actually do want to take the temperature of the Twitter hive mind <em>right now</em>, in this moment, without random twenty-hour-old tweets popping up out of sequence. The obvious solution of giving users actual <em>choice</em> was of course rejected out of hand, forcing Twitter into ever more ridiculous gyrations.</p>
<p>The latest turn is that for a brief shining moment they got it mostly right, but hilariously and ironically, completely misinterpreted user feedback and reversed course. So much for learning from the data… What happened is that Twitter briefly gave users the option of adding a "Latest Tweets" tab with chronological listing alongside the algorithmic default "Home" tab. Of course such an obviously sensible solution could not last, for the dispiriting reason that unless you used lists, the tabbed interface was new and (apparently) confusing. Another update therefore followed rapidly on the heels of the good one, which forced users to choose between "Latest Tweets" or "Home", instead of simply being able to have both options one tap apart.</p>
<p>Here's what it boils down to: to build one of these "personalisation" systems, you have to believe one of two things (okay, or maybe some combination):</p>
<ul>
<li>You can deliver a better experience than (most) users can achieve for themselves</li>
<li>Controlling your users' experience benefits you in some way that is sufficiently important to outweigh the aggravation they might experience</li>
</ul>
<p>The first is simply not true. It <em>is</em> true that it is important to deliver a high-quality default that works well for most users, and I am not opposed in principle to that default being algorithmically-generated. Back when, Twitter used to have "While you were away" section which would show you the most relevant tweets since you last checked the app. I found it a very valuable feature — except for the fact that I could not access it at will. It would appear at random in my timeline, or then again, perhaps not. There was no way to trigger it manually, or any place where it would appear reliably and predictably. You just had to hope — and then, instead of making it easier to access on demand, Twitter killed the entire feature in an update. The algorithmic default was promising, but it needed just a bit more control to make it actually good.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">On the other hand, I quite like “while you were away” and wish I could access it on demand, instead of being reduced to hoping it shows up, like a peasant praying for rain.</p>— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️🌈 (@dwellington) <a href="https://twitter.com/dwellington/status/1409779654022606850?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 29, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</p>
<p>This leads us directly to the second problem: why <em>not</em> show the "While you were away" section on demand? Why would Netflix not give me an easy way to resume watching what I was watching before? They don't say, but the assumption is that the operators of these services have metrics showing higher engagement with their apps when they deny users control. Presumably what they fear is that, if users can just go straight to the tweets they missed or the show they were watching, they will not spend as much time exploring the app, discovering other tweets or videos that they might enjoy.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/0a9eece5-3f82-4004-7e63-83c925c80d2b/743f9b4d-a9a1-d7ce-f53f-e2d1f950b5be.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:534;"/></p>
<p>What is forgotten is that "engagement" just happens to be one metric that is easy to measure — but the ease of measurement does not necessarily make it the most important dimension, especially in isolation. If that engagement is me scrolling irritably around Twitter or Netflix, getting increasingly frustrated because I can't find what I want, my opinion of those platforms is actually becoming more corroded with every additional second of "engagement".</p>
<p>There is a common unstated assumption behind both of the factors above, which is that whatever system is driving the personalisation is <em>perfect</em>, both unbreakable in its functioning and without corner cases that may deliver sub-optimal results even when the algorithm is working as designed. One of the problems with black-box systems is that when (not if!) they break, users have no way to understand why they broke, nor to prevent them breaking again in the future. If the Twitter algorithm keeps recommending something to me, I can (for now) still go into my settings, find the list of interests that Twitter has somehow assembled for me, and delete entries until I get back to more sensible recommendations. With Netflix, there is no way for me to tell it to stop recommending something — presumably because they have determined that a sufficient proportion of their users will be worn down over time, and, I don't know, whatever the end goal is — watch Netflix original content instead of something they have to pay to license from outside.</p>
<p>All of this comes back to my oft-repeated point about privacy: what is it that I am giving up my personal data in exchange for, in the end? The promise is that all these systems will deliver content (and ads)(really it's the ads) that are relevant to my interests. Defenders of surveillance capitalism will point out that profiling as a concept is hardly new. The reason you find different ads in Top Gear Magazine, in Home & Garden, and in Monocle, is that the profile for the readership is different for each publication. But the results speak for themselves: when I read Monocle, I find the ads relevant, and (given only the budget) I would like to buy the products featured. The sort of ads that follow me around online, despite a wealth of profile information generated at every click, correlated across the entire internet, and going back *mumble* years or more, are utterly, risibly, incomprehensibly irrelevant. Why? Some combination of that "we know better" attitude, algorithmic profiling systems delivering less than perfect results, and of course, good old <a href="http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-inescapable-logic-of-ad-fraud.html">fraud in the adtech ecosystem</a>.</p>
<h1>So why are we doing this, exactly?</h1>
<p>It comes back to the same issue as with engagement: because something is easy to measure and chart, it will have goals set against it. Our lives online generate stupendous volumes of data; it seems incredible that the profiles created from those megabytes if not gigabytes of tracking data have worse results than the single-bit signal of "is reading the <em>Financial Times</em>". There is also the ever-present spectre of "I know half of my ad spending is wasted, I just don't know which half". Online advertising with its built-in surveillance mechanisms holds out the promise of perfect attribution, of knowing precisely which ad it was which caused the customer to buy.</p>
<p>And yet, here we are. Now, <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2021-0499_EN.html">legislators in the EU</a>, in China, and elsewhere around the world are taking issue with these systems, and either banning them outright or demanding they be made transparent in their operation. Me, I'm hoping for the control that Amazon used to give me. My dream is to be able to tell YouTube that I have no interest in crypto, and then never see a crypto ad again. Here, advertisers, I'll give you a freebie: I'm in the market for some nice winter socks. Show me some ads for those sometime, and I might even buy yours. Or, if you keep pushing stuff in my face that I don't want, I'll go read a (paper) book instead. See what that does for engagement.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://instagram.com/hyoshining">Hyoshin Choi</a> and <a href="https://instagram.com/syinq">Susan Q Yin</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>App Stores & Missing Perspectiveshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/app-stores-missing-perspectives2023-12-17T16:30:52.824000Z2022-02-14T09:37:04ZDominic<p>In Apple-watching circles, there has long been some significant frustration about Apple's App Store policies. Whether it's the opaque approvals process, the swingeing 30% cut that Apple takes out of any purchase, or the restrictions on what types of apps and pricing models are even allowed, developers are not happy.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6720671e-b228-263a-3167-126d90a93d03/852a1c16-18c6-b933-f760-7e5f5603e7a9.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:400; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>It was not always this way: when the iPhone first launched, there <em>was</em> no App Store. Everying was supposed to be done with web apps. Developers being developers, people quickly worked out how to "jailbreak" their iPhones to install their own apps, and a thriving unofficial marketplace for apps sprang up. Apple, seeing this development taking place out of their control, relented and launched an official App Store. The benefit of the App Store was that it would do everything for developers: hosting, payment process, a searchable catalogue, everything. Remember, the App Store launched in 2008, when all of that was quite a bit harder than it is today, and would have required developers to make up-front investments before even knowing whether their apps would take off — without even thinking about free apps.</p>
<p>With the addition of in-app purchase (IAP) the next year, and subscriptions a couple of years after that, most of the ingredients were in place for the App Store as we know it today. The App Store was a massive success, trumpeted by Apple at every opportunity. In January, <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/01/apple-services-enrich-peoples-lives-throughout-the-year/">Apple said</a> that it paid developers $60 billion in 2021, and $260 billion since the App Store launched in 2008. Apple also reduced its cut from 30% to 15%, initially for the second year of subscriptions, but later for any developer making less than $1M per year in the App Store.</p>
<h1>What's Not To Like?</h1>
<p>This all sounds very fine, but developers are up in arms over Apple's perceived high-handed or even downright rapacious behaviour when it comes to the App Store. Particular sticking points are requirements that apps in the App Store use only Apple's payment system, and that apple’s own in-app purchasing mechanism be used for any digital experience offered to groups of people. The first requirement touched off a lawsuit from Epic, who basically wanted to have their own private store for in-game purchases, and the second resulted in <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/22/apple-extends-in-app-purchase-event-requirement/">some bad press</a> early in the pandemic when Apple started doing things like chasing fitness instructors who were providing remote classes while they were unable to offer face-to-face sessions. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that many of these transactions simply do not have a 30% margin in the first place, let alone the ability to still make any profit after giving Apple a 30% (or even a 15%) cut. This might seem to be a problem for developers, but not really for anyone else — but what gave this issue resonance beyond the narrow market of iOS developers is that the world has moved on since 2008.</p>
<p>Hosting an app and setting up payment for it is easy and cheap these days, thanks to the likes of AWS and Stripe. Meanwhile, App Store review is capricious, while also allowing through all sorts of scams, generally based on subscriptions — what is becoming known as <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-fleeceware-protect-yourself/">fleeceware</a>.</p>
<p>The long and the short of it is that public opinion has shifted against Apple, with proceedings not just in the US, but in Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands too. Apple are being, well, Apple, and refusing to budge except in the most minor and grudging ways.</p>
<p>Here is my concern, though: this situation is being looked at as a simple conflict between Apple and developers. In all the brouhaha, nobody ever mentions another very important perspective: what do <strong>users</strong> want?</p>
<h1>Won't Somebody Think Of The Users?</h1>
<p>Developers rightly point out that the $260B that Apple trumpeted having paid them was money generated by their apps, not Apple's generosity, and that a big part of the reason users buy Apple's devices is the apps in the App Store. However, that money was originally paid <em>by users</em>, and we also have opinions about how the App Store should work for our needs and purposes.</p>
<p>First of all, I want all of the things that developers hate. I want Apple's App Store to be the only way of getting apps on iPhones, I want all subscriptions to be in the App Store, and I want Apple's IAP to be the only payment method. These are the factors that make users confident in downloading apps in the first place! Back when I had a Windows machine, it was just accepted that every twelve months or so, you'd have to blow away your operating system and reinstall it from scratch. Even if you were careful and avoided outright malware, bloat and cruft would take over and slow everything to a crawl — and good luck ever removing anything. Imagine a garden that you weed with a flamethrower.</p>
<p>The moment Apple relaxed any of the restrictions on app installation and payment, shady developers would stampede through — led by <a href="https://www.engadget.com/apple-epic-app-store-account-212948667.html">Epic</a> and <a href="https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/30/apple-has-revoked-facebooks-enterprise-developer-certificates-after-sideload-violations">Facebook</a>, who both have form when it comes to dodgy sideloading. It doesn't matter what sort of warnings Apple put into iOS; if that were to become how people get their Fortnight or their WhatsApp, they would tap through any number of dialogues without reading them, just as fast as they can tap. And once that happens, all bets are off. Subscriptions to Epic's games or to whatever dodgy thing in Facebook's platform would not be visible in users' App Store profiles, making it all too easy for money to be drained out, through forgetfulness and invisibility if not outright scams.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/6720671e-b228-263a-3167-126d90a93d03/9520404b-e815-f127-1ed9-d2a8263fbc70.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<h1>Other Examples: The Mac</h1>
<p>People sometimes bring up the topic of the Mac App Store, which operates along the same notional lines as the iOS (and iPadOS) App Store, but without the same problems. The Mac App Store is actually a great example, but not for the reasons its proponents think. On the Mac, side-loading — deploying apps without going through the Mac App Store — is very much a thing, and in fact it is a much bigger delivery channel than the Mac App Store itself. The problem is that it is also correspondingly harder to figure out what is running on a Mac, or to remove every trace of an app that the user no longer wants. It's nowhere near as bad as Windows, to be clear, but it's also not as clean-cut as iOS, where deleting an app's icon means that app is <strong>gone</strong>, no question about it.</p>
<p>On the Mac, technical users have all sorts of tools to manage this situation, and that extra flexibility also has many other benefits, making the Mac a much more capable platform than iOS (and iPadOS — sigh). But many more people own iPhones and iPads than own Macs, and they are comfortable using those devices precisely because of the sandboxed<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> nature of the experience. My own mother, who used to invite me to lunch and then casually mention that she had a couple of things she needed me to do on the computer, is fully independent on her iPad, down to and including updates to the operating system. This is because the lack of accessible complexity gives her confidence that she can't mess something up by accident.</p>
<h1>More Examples: Google</h1>
<p>Over the pandemic, I have had the experience of comparing Google's and Apple's family controls, as my kids have required their own devices for the first time for remote schooling. We have a new Chromebook and some assorted handed-down iPads and iPhones (without SIM cards). The Google controls are ridiculously coarse-grained and easily bypassed — that is, when they are not actively conflicting with each other: disabling access to YouTube breaks the Google login flow… In contrast, Apple lets me be extremely granular in what is allowed, when it is allowed, and for how long. Once again, this is possible because of Apple's end-to-end control: I can see what apps are associated with each kid's account, and approve or decline them, enforce limits, and so on. I don't want to have to worry that they will subscribe to a TikTok creator or something, outside the App Store, and drain my credit card, possibly with no way to cancel or get a refund.</p>
<h1>What Now?</h1>
<p>Good developers like Marco Arment want to build a closer relationship with customers and manage that process themselves. I do trust Marco to use those tools ethically — but I don't trust Mark Zuckerberg with the same tools, and this is an all-or-nothing decision. If it's the price it takes to keep Mark Zuckerberg out of my business, then I'd rather have the status quo.</p>
<p>All of that said, I do think Apple are making things harder on themselves. Their unbending attitude in the face of developers' complaints is not serving them well, whether in the court of public opinion or in the court of law. I do hope that someone at Apple can figure out a way to give enough to developers to reduce the noise — cut the App Store take, make app review more transparent, enable more pricing models, perhaps even refunds with more developer input, whatever it takes. There are also areas where the interests of developers and users are perfectly aligned: search ads in the App Store are gross, especially when they are allowed against actual app names. It's one thing (albeit still icky) to allow developers to pay to increase their ranking against generic terms, like "podcast player"; it's quite another to allow competing podcast players to advertise against each other by name. Nobody is served by that.</p>
<p>If Apple does not clear up this mess themselves, the risk is that lawmakers will attempt to clear it up for them. This could go wrong in so many ways, whether it's specific bad policies (sideloading enforced by law), or a patchwork of different regulations around the world, further balcanising the experience of users based on where they happen to live. </p>
<p>Everyone — Apple, developers, and users — want these platforms to (continue to) succeed. For that to happen, Apple and developers need to talk — and users' concerns must be heard too.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@neilsoniphotography">Neil Soni</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Yes, I am fully aware that the sandboxing is at the OS level and technically not affected by any App Store changes, but it's part of a continuum of experience, and I would rather not rely on the last line of defence in the OS; I would prefer a continuum between the OS and the App Store to give me joined-up management. In fact, I would like the integration to go even further, such that if I delete an app that has an active subscription, iOS prompts me to cancel the subscription too. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>2022 Predictionshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/2022-predictions2023-12-17T16:30:13.914000Z2022-01-04T13:37:50ZDominic<h1>A Textual Podcast</h1>
<p>Welcome back to Roll For Enterprise, the podcast described as the squishy heart at the centre of enterprise IT. Because all four hosts were off having fun over the holidays, we couldn’t quite figure out the logistics of getting us all online at the same time to record an audio episode – so instead we put together this textual podcast, since it worked well as an asynchronous way of bouncing ideas around <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/textual-podcast">last time we had trouble recording together</a>.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/43b19c92-61fc-3714-465f-fd82d5ca3dd3/b3ee4706-c2d9-bc22-d41f-387591e6922b.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>In <a href="https://anchor.fm/roll-for-enterprise/episodes/S2E51-Year-In-Review-e1c3clc">the last (audio) episode</a> we went over the major themes of 2021, so now it’s time for our 2022 predictions. Sometimes we struggled a bit to keep the two separate while we were recording, so we simply decided to double down and list the major themes of 2021 that we discussed – because we think all of these will continue to be major features of 2022:</p>
<ul>
<li>Semiconductor shortages and architecture turnover</li>
<li>Outages and incidents </li>
<li>Security in general (attacks, ransomware, etc)</li>
<li>No-code/Low-Code and the shifting definition of architects</li>
<li>Mental health and the change in employment landscapes </li>
<li>The Great Resignation</li>
<li>The year the employees took it all back</li>
</ul>
<p>Semiconductor shortages are an easy call; all the projections forecast these disruptions to continue into mid-2022 at the very least, even if the rest of the world returns to normal. The same goes for the architecture turnover: the shift to ARM is still underway, and this year will see the software ecosystem begin to catch up with that hardware shift. More and more Mac apps now support the M1 architecture natively, and as AWS rolls out more and more Graviton-powered instance types, the same shift is happening in server software. In both cases, the performance benefits make it more than worth while to do the work of porting software to these ARM-based architectures.</p>
<p>As Dominic said in the last episode, outages and incidents are pretty much inevitable as long as fallible humans are in charge of systems whose complexity is at the very limit of what we can reason about. The good news is that cloud outages are short, and software can be architected to be resilient to outages of individual availability zones or even entire cloud providers. Therefore, while there may be a temptation born of frustration to blame the big cloud providers for outages that are not your fault, overall you’re still better off relying on them and the vast resources they can throw at their systems and processes. One development we do expect is a greater insistence from customers on transparency by the big providers: what went wrong, and what will be done to prevent such a failure from recurring in the future. AWS sets a good standard in public post-mortems, for instance, and others will be expected to live up to it.</p>
<p>The same goes for security incidents; the complexity that leads to the possibility of a fat-fingered config causing an outage also leads to the possibility of a security breach. We are not looking at any particular step-change here, just an ongoing recognition that, especially as we all continue working from home, there is no longer any validity to the idea of a network having an "inside" and an "outside". Perimeter defence is dead; defence in depth is the only way. I do expect an increase in security issues around NFTs, which will highlight the issues of decentralised architectures – and the fact that what exists today in that space is well on its way to centralising around a small number of big players.</p>
<p>Is this the year of low-code and no-code? Perhaps, but probably not; it’s a slow-building wave as we get more and more components in place to make these approaches fully-integrated parts of an enterprise IT stack, as opposed to weird stuff off to the side that "isn’t really IT". Partly this shift is about platform capabilities to allow for must-have functionality such as backup, versioning, or auditing. Equally it’s a cultural shift, recognising the validity and importance of these approaches as more than "toy programming". The real Year of Low-Code will come when there is an explosion of new capabilities built on these tools, built by people other than our traditional conception of developers. Right now, what we have mainly fits into existing categories. Tableau is the poster child here, but it mainly replaces Excel rather than enabling something new. That’s not nothing, but it’s not yet an industry-shifting move either.</p>
<p>Finally, the factors enabling the Great Resignation are still very much with us, so their consequences will continue to play out in 2022. Right now, there is a massive imbalance in large parts of IT, with new job offers coming with salaries that are several multiples of what people are coming from. This disparity is driving massive job churn, especially because companies have not changed their retention practices significantly. If your choice is between a single-digit percentage cost-of-living increase where you are, versus perhaps a triple-digit percentage increase elsewhere, the outcome is pretty obvious. If this trend continues, companies will need to get serious about retention, in part by taking factors like mental health more seriously. As we have been saying on the podcast all along, this is not a normal time. People are stressed out, tired out, and burned out by new factors and expectations, and companies need to respond to that by changing their own expectations in return. Maybe that massive raise will be much less attractive if it comes from a company with a culture of presenteeism, requiring a gruelling commute and long hours in an office with people whose health status you are not entirely sure of. That calculus becomes even easier if the company you are currently working at shows that it cares for employees by being flexible about working hours and attentive to the factors that affect peoples’ lives outside work (their own health, caring for others, home schooling, and so on).</p>
<hr />
<p>Perhaps we close the year with a verse, with apologies <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/334858-if-we-shadows-have-offended-think-but-this-and-all">to the Bard</a>… </p>
<p><em>If we podcasters have offended<br />
Think but this and all is mended<br />
That you have commuted here<br />
While our voices filled your ears<br />
And our odd, unhinged debate<br />
Won't predict our world’s fate<br />
Listeners, do not unsubscribe<br />
Do enjoy our diatribes<br />
And, as I am a fair Lilac<br />
If we’ve earned your candid flack<br />
Now, to edit themes and form<br />
Improvement shall become our norm<br />
Else the Mike, a liar call<br />
Or Zack incites a verbal brawl<br />
Lend us your ears, if we be friends<br />
And Dominic shall restore amends</em></p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://claybanks.info">Clay Banks</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>How I Work From Homehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/how-i-work-from-home2023-12-17T16:33:32.121000Z2021-12-23T08:19:51ZDominic<p>Even though travel is (gradually) opening up, I still opted to invest in my home office setup, and I think you should too. Here’s why.</p>
<p>I have been fully-remote for fifteen years now, with only brief interruptions. By that I mean that I have not had a team-mate, let alone a manager, in the same country, and frequently not even in the same time-zone, for that entire time. It’s true that for most of it I have had colleagues in-country, and even offices of varying dimensions and permanence, but they were always in adjacent functions: sales, services, field marketing, and all the back-office functions required to keep an international enterprise functioning.</p>
<p>This means that I am very used to going into an office only rarely, and a setup that lets me work from home has been a requirement for that entire time. The details of my setup have evolved and improved over the years, with increased resources available, and increased permanence to plan for. </p>
<p>The biggest recent change has been recognition that the home office is now a much more permanent part of life. In the Before Times, I would spend a good 50% of my time (if not more) on the road, so the home office was for occasional work. Now, it’s where everything happens, so it had better work well, be comfortable, and look good in the background of Zoom calls.</p>
<p>Here is the current state of the art.</p>
<h1>Deep Underground</h1>
<p>When we moved into my current place, I earmarked the "tavernetta" for my home office. A "tavernetta" is a uniquely Italian phenomenon: think a US-style basement family room, except that it’s under a block of flats. Several of the flats in my building come with these spaces, but most are only used for storage; a couple are fitted out to be habitable, and mine even includes the luxury of an en-suite bathroom, so I don’t even need to go upstairs to the main family home for that.</p>
<p>There was, however, one minor issue: all of the fittings date back to the Sixties, when this block was originally built. Worse, the flat actually belonged to my wife’s grandmother — so the "tavernetta" is also where my wife and all her cousins held their teenage parties, not to mention her mother and aunts… Out of sight and (more importantly) earshot, but within reach if needed. Anyway, without going into detail, and even though the statute of limitations has long since expired, let’s just say that the furniture and carpets had suffered somewhat over the years of parties.</p>
<p>Over the past summer, therefore, we tore up all the cigarette-burned fitted carpets, ripped out and replaced the ancient and horrible plumbing, and repainted the walls a nice clean white. An electrician was summoned, took one look, sucked his teeth and muttered "vintage", and promptly added a zero to the painful end of his estimate. On the other hand, I do have a lot of electronics plugged in down here, so it’s worth doing it right.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e35836cf-f811-9b27-0ab9-f7030973fddb/c7dd0471-a555-6c5c-d4e6-efc06a44836b.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:640; --en-naturalHeight:480;"/></p>
<h1>It’s So Bright, I Need Sunglasses</h1>
<p>Packing up my desk to make space for all this work was an enormous pain, but I took the opportunity to streamline my setup quite a bit. I was using an ancient Iiyama panel that must be at least a dozen years old; it’s full-HD and was a pretty good screen at the time, but the state of the art has moved on, and the Iiyama is now woefully dim and low-resolution. Worse, it sat between my MacBook Pro and its Retina screen, and a <a href="https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/monitors/professional/61afgar1us">Lenovo 27" panel</a> that I got from work as part of a programme to help employees get set up for work-from-home. The Lenovo has a halfway-house resolution that sits between HD and 4k, but it’s sharp and bright; I run it in portrait (vertical) orientation to look at reference material beside the main screen that I’m working on. </p>
<p>Between those two bright and sharp displays, the Iiyama really suffered by comparison. What I really wanted was a Retina screen to match the MacBook, but Apple only make the monstrous XDR, which is lovely, but costs more than my first several cars — especially once you add <em>a grand’s worth of stand</em>! I put off making a decision, hoping that Apple would finally do what everyone was begging them to and release the 5k panel that they already have in their iMacs as a standalone monitor without a whole computer attached. Apple, in their wisdom, opted not to do this, and offered as a substitute the LG UltraFine. This is supposedly that same panel – but the LG enclosure is ugly as sin, and reports soon surfaced of quality problems: drooping support stands, unreliable USB connections, and even flaky displays. Since the UltraFine is hardly inexpensive, and is also hardly ever in stock, everyone took the hopeful assumption that all these issues meant that surely, soon, Apple would do it right. And so we waited. And waited. And waited.</p>
<p>When last October’s Apple event rolled around with the announcement of the new MacBook Pros, which would have been <em>the</em> obvious time to release a screen to plug the new laptops into, and Apple still didn’t — that was when I snapped. I went out and bought an <a href="https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-34WK95U-W-ultrawide-monitor">LG 5k2k Ultrawide</a> panel. The diagonal is a huge 34", but it’s actually only the height of a 27", just stretched out wiiiiide. The picture is sharp, the screen is bright, and the increase in real estate is incredible. As with most "tavernette", mine is partly below street level, and my desk is in the back of the room (it’s fixed to the wall and can’t move), so more light is very welcome. I also added an LED strip above the monitor, and my webcam (a <a href="https://www.razer.com/streaming-cameras/razer-kiyo">Razer Kiyo</a> mounted on the shelf above the desk) has a ring light, so I think my SAD countermeasures are sufficient for now.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e35836cf-f811-9b27-0ab9-f7030973fddb/670de5a2-3029-30d6-d875-32b5f878b660.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:640; --en-naturalHeight:480;"/></p>
<p>That desk is my working desk, so the only thing that gets plugged in there with any regularity is the MacBook Pro I get from work. I have it on a stand so that it’s at the level of my sight line, and aligned to the monitors too. Before, I had a combo USB hub, USB-C power pass-through, and HDMI adapter Velcro’d to one of the legs of the laptop riser, and that went into one USB-C port, while a second USB-C cable fed the Lenovo. I then had a bunch of USB-A peripherals depending either from that hub or from the USB hub in the back of the Lenovo: keyboard, webcam, microphone, audio device, Ethernet adapter and <a href="https://muteme.com/">MuteMe hardware mute button</a>.</p>
<p>I was never super happy with this setup, and with the advent of the monster LG panel, I had an opportunity to redo it properly. Now, I have a single Thunderbolt cable coming out of the MacBook Pro, that takes care of power and all data connections. That cable goes into a <a href="https://www.caldigit.com/ts3-plus/">CalDigit TS3-Plus</a> dock that feeds everything else: DisplayPort to the LG, Mini DisplayPort to the Lenovo, (gigabit) Ethernet, SPDIF for audio, and powered USB-A for keyboard, webcam, microphone, and MuteMe button — with several more ports still available.</p>
<p>I favour a <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/microsoft-ergonomic-keyboard/93841ngdwr1h">Microsoft Natural ergonomic keyboard</a>. This is a split keyboard; the benefit is that your wrists do not bend while using it, as they do for straight keyboards such as the ones built in to laptops. It took a little while to get used to, but it’s very comfortable, and I could never go back. It works fine with a Mac, especially once you use <a href="https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/">Karabiner-Elements</a> to remap some important keys. </p>
<p>My setup is also ambi-moustrous: I have an Apple Magic Mouse on the right of the keyboard — and a Magic Trackpad on the left. This setup lets me alternate my pointing hand to avoid stressing my right hand and wrist, as well as opening up the possibility of trackpad gestures without having to reach up to the MacBook’s trackpad, which is elevated some way off the desk and not exactly natural to use.</p>
<h1>Make Some Noise</h1>
<p>The audio situation is also worth touching on for a moment. Previously I was running a CambridgeWorks 4+1 speaker setup that I got with a Soundblaster Live! card more than twenty years ago. They were fine for what they are, but Macs never properly understood them, even with a dedicated USB audio interface that has separate front and rear audio outputs. (The system’s audio setup utility can play test audio through each of the four speakers, but in actual usage, the rear pair make only the faintest noise.) On the other hand, I did like having a physical volume knob on my desk, so I could crank it all the way to the left and be certain that nothing was going to make noise, no matter what.</p>
<p>I replaced these with an Edifier 2+1 set of bookshelf speakers with a monster subwoofer — seriously, the sub is bigger than both speakers together, and by a substantial margin (you can just about see it under the desk in the pic above). They are fed by an optical fibre cable from the CalDigit dock, and sound absolutely fantastic! They also have their own remote, which still lets me mute them without having to trust that some piece of software won’t decide that it’s important to unmute for some reason.</p>
<p>I also have my podcasting setup: a <a href="https://www.rode.com/microphones/nt-usb">Røde NT-USB</a> microphone that plugs into the CalDigit dock, and a pair of <a href="https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/ath-m40x">audio-technica headphones</a> that plug into the Røde. The mic is on a spring arm so that I can fold it out of the way when I’m not using it, and the headphones have their own stand to keep them out of mischief.</p>
<p>This is the best setup for me: a single cable to plug in, and the MacBook is docked to all of this setup — and when it’s time to go, one cable unplugged and I’m ready. I keep go-bags of cables and power bricks in both of the bags I use when I leave the house, so I just need to make sure the actual laptop is in there and I’m good to go.</p>
<h1>Away From Keyboard</h1>
<p>Beyond what is on the desk, my home office includes a few more amenities. There is a mini-fridge under my desk with drinks — mainly sparkling water (tap water plus Sodastream bubbles), but also a few fruit juices and the like for when I fancy something different, and a couple of beers in case of particularly convivial Friday afternoon meetings (although it’s been a while since I’ve had occasion to drink one). I also have an electric Bialetti moka coffee pot for when it’s stimulation that I need rather than relaxation.</p>
<p>Yes, there is a printer down here! After some unpleasant experiences with inkjets, I lived the paperless lifestyle for a long time, but finally caved and bought a laser printer in 2019. At the time I assumed it would remain largely unused, and if I’m honest, I only bought it to placate my wife — who was of course very soon proved to be not only Right (again), but scarily prescient, as we spent much of 2020 in home-schooling mode, printing reams of paper every day. Utilisation has died back down a bit now, but the benefit of laser printers is that they don’t dry up and gunk up their print heads if you don’t print every five minutes.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e35836cf-f811-9b27-0ab9-f7030973fddb/b0abc806-1d1e-a461-3ebb-9b0324fd1262.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:480; --en-naturalHeight:640;"/></p>
<p>Moving away from the desk area, I also have a TV down here with a rowing machine in front of it. The TV is passed down from when the main living room TV got upgraded to 4k, but it’s still perfectly serviceable. It’s not connected to an actual TV antenna down here; instead, I have an AppleTV device plugged into it, which means I can AirPlay content to it from my MacBook. How this plays out is that when I am attending a webinar or any sort of camera-off passive presentation, I stream that to the TV screen (without having to disconnect from the desk), and follow the webinar from my rowing machine, getting an education and a workout at the same time.</p>
<h1>Make Space</h1>
<p>With remote work and work-from-home becoming normalised, at least part-time, I would recommend to everyone that they invest in their home-office setup. I am very conscious that not everyone has the luxury of a dedicated room — but remember, I have been building up to this dream setup for a long time. If you are able to set yourself up with even a desk in a corner, that will help to confine work to that space. The physical separation gives "I am going to work" and "I am leaving work" rhythm to your day. There’s also a practical benefit to having somewhere to leave work in progress, notes, or whatever without that stuff cluttering up space you need for other purposes (a table you need to eat meals off).</p>
<p>You should also do the best you can in terms of height of desk, chair, keyboard, and screen. Yes, those last two are separate; laptops are an ergonomic nightmare if you are going to be using them all day, every day. Investments in your working environment will pay substantial dividends in terms of physical and mental well-being. It doesn’t have to be a huge expense, either; IKEA stuff is pretty good.</p>
<p>Don’t be put off by the thought that this is all nerd nonsense. Remember, programmers and gamers care deeply about the ergonomics of their computers because they spend a lot of time using them. These days, that describes most of us in white-collar jobs. Leaving aside some of the questionable choices gamers especially might make in terms of the aesthetics of their rigs, there is a lot to learn from those groups. Big screens, comfortable keyboards and mice, and some attention paid to how those devices are laid out in relation to one another, will all make your work life much less painful.</p>
<p>If you don’t have room for a rowing machine — or a Peloton, or a treadmill, or whatever — you may be able to simply exercise in front of your computer screen, depending on personality and the sort of exercise you favour, without needing special equipment and the room to set it up. I would definitely suggest making time for physical exercise, though; a walk around the block before sitting down to work, a run between meetings, or a sneaky bike ride over a lunch break — whatever works for you. I got into the habit of taking a mental-health day every couple of weeks when I was otherwise not leaving the house, and getting on my bike and just disappearing up into the hills. Your precise needs may vary, but try to make room for <em>something</em> in your routine.</p>
<p>And here’s hoping that we get to vary the work-from-home routine with some (safe) in-person interaction in 2022.</p>Spending Tim Cook's Moneyhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/spending-tim-cook-s-money2023-12-17T16:36:53.107000Z2021-12-20T09:50:45ZDominic<p>Mark Gurman has had many scoops in his time covering Apple, and they have led him to a perch at <em>Bloomberg</em> that includes a weekly opinion column. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-12-19/apple-aapl-should-sell-bigger-ipad-for-smart-home-amazon-echo-show-15-review-kxdm6h21">This week's column</a> is about how Apple is losing the home, and it struck a chord with me for a few reasons.</p>
<p>First of all, we have to get one thing out of the way. There is a long and inglorious history of pundits crying that Apple must make some particular device or risk ultimate doom. I mean, Apple must be just livid at missing out on that attractive netbook market, right? Oh right, no, that whole market went away, and Apple is doing just fine selling MacBook Airs and iPads.</p>
<p>That said, the reason this particular issue struck home is that I have been trying to get stuff done around the house, and really felt the absence of what feel like some obvious gap-filling devices from Apple. As long as we are spending Tim Cook's money, here are some suggestions of my own — and no, there are no U2 albums on this list!</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f9f17e35-c883-8782-2bee-4ed77d785ac9/1b9880d6-1e90-ce8f-abf0-5dea4f8abf3f.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<h1>Can You See Me Now?</h1>
<p>FaceTime is amazing, it is by far the most pleasant video-chat software to use. Adding Center Stage on the iPad Pro makes it even better. It has the potential to be a game-changer for group calls — not the Zoom calls where each person is in their own box, but calls where several people are in one place, trying to talk to several people in another place. Examples are families with the kids lined up on the couch, or trying to play board or card games with distant friends. What I really want in those situations is a TV-size screen, but the Apple TV doesn't support any sort of camera. Yes, you can sort of fudge it by mirroring the screen of a smaller device onto the TV via AirPlay, but it's a mess and still doesn't work right. In particular, your eye is still drawn to the motion on the smaller screen, plus you have to find a perch for the smaller device somewhere close enough to the TV that you are "looking at" the people on the other end. </p>
<p>What I want is a good camera, at least HD if not 4k, that can perch somewhere around the TV screen and talk to the AppleTV directly so that we can do a FaceTime call from the biggest screen in the house. Ideally, this device would also support Center Stage so that it could focus in on the speaker. In reverse, the AppleTV should be able to use positional audio to make the voice of speakers on the far end come from the right place in your sound stage.</p>
<h1>Can You Hear Me?</h1>
<p>This leads me to the next question: I have dropped increasingly less subtle hints about getting a Home Pod Mini for Christmas, but if people decide against that (some people just don't like buying technology as a gift), I will probably buy at least one for myself. However, the existence of a Home Pod <strong>Mini</strong> implies the existence of Home Pod <strong>Regular</strong> and perhaps even a Home Pod <strong>Pro</strong> — but since the killing of the original-no-qualifiers Home Pod, the Mini is the only product in its family. Big speakers are one of those things that are worth spending money on in my opinion, but Apple simply does not want to take my money in this regard. Maybe they have one in the pipeline for 2022 and I will regret buying the Mini, but right now I can only talk about what's in the current line-up.</p>
<h1>Me, I Disconnect From You</h1>
<p>This lack of interest in speakers intersects with the same disinterest when it comes to wifi. I loved my old AirPort base station, and the only reason I retired it is that I wanted a mesh network that had some more sophisticated management options. If we are going to put wifi-connected smart speakers all over our homes, why not make them also act as repeaters of that same wifi signal? And they should also work as AirPlay receivers for external, passive speakers, for people who already have good speakers and just want them to be smart.</p>
<h1>People Have Families</h1>
<p>These additions to Apple's line-up would do a lot more to help Apple "win the home" than Mark Gurman's suggestion of a big static iPad that lives in the kitchen. Apart from the cost of such a thing, it would also require Apple to think much more seriously about multi-user capabilities than they ever have with i(Pad)OS, so that the screen recognises me and shows me my reminders, not my wife's.</p>
<p>Something Apple could do today in the multi-user space is to improve CarPlay. My iPhone remembers where I parked my car and puts a pin in the map. This is actually useful, because (especially these days) I drive my car infrequently enough that I often genuinely do have to think for a moment about where I left it. Sometimes though I drive my wife's car, and then it helpfully updates that "parked car" pin, over-writing the location where I parked my car with the last location of my wife's car — which is generally the garage under the building we live in… The iPhone knows that they are two different cars and lets me maintain car-specific preferences; it just doesn't track them separately in Maps. As long as we are wishing, it would be even better if, when my wife drives her car and leaves it somewhere, if the pin could update in my phone too, since we are all members of the same iCloud Family.</p>
<p>This would be a first step to a better understanding of families and other units of multiple people who share (some) devices, and the sorts of features that they require.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photo by <a href="https://www.howardbouchevereau.fr/">Howard Bouchevereau</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>Generalising Wildlyhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/generalising-wildly-22023-12-17T16:33:04.319000Z2021-09-02T02:33:55ZDominic<p>To make a wild generalisation, specialists are made, but generalists are born. </p>
<p>There is any amount of material out there to help people to specialise in a particular subject, ranging in formality from a quick YouTube video to entire academic fields of study. If your question is "how do I get better at X", someone is out there who can help you answer it. From that point on, it’s more of a question of the time, resources, and effort you dedicate to the pursuit — the <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/23/20828597/the-10000-hour-rule-debunked">now-debunked ten thousand hours of practice</a>.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/c4722c33-962c-4db8-8d9f-6ffe0fc289d8/bf167682-3c7d-4361-9ae5-77e21fc76b54.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>The result of this process of specialisation is (more or less) deep understanding of a particular field — but that understanding is restricted to that one field. Generalists, on the other hand, have an understanding of individual fields that is almost always shallower than that of specialists in that field, but they compensate by spreading their study across many different fields. The value that a generalist brings is the unexpected insight based on correlation or analogy with a different field.</p>
<p>One problem is that there are very few job descriptions out there that call for generalists. I’ve hired a few, but that’s always been on the basis of me being given the opportunity to create roles for myself as a generalist, and then the roles expanding to the point that I needed to build teams to keep up with demand. However, if you go on LinkedIn or whatever and look for openings, most of the job descriptions are looking for pretty narrowly specified skill sets: ten years of experience in this, certification in that, or documented contributions to the other. </p>
<p>Almost by definition, there is no single course of study that will produce generalists; you have to pick and choose between many options. It has not been possible since the actual Renaissance to be a "Renaissance (hu)man", with at least a passing familiarity with the entire corpus of human knowledge and thought. This is of course a Good Thing, driven as it is by a vast expansion in that corpus, but it can make it hard for specialists in different domains to communicate effectively with each other and share insights. It also makes for a lack of formal recognition for roles that are <em>not</em> based on deep specialisation in different fields.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/c4722c33-962c-4db8-8d9f-6ffe0fc289d8/df279e43-bc4d-483a-9adc-8e6bfa903398.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:534;"/></p>
<p>This lack of visibility can be disheartening to generalists or would-be generalists, on top of the impostor syndrome that can come from talking about a particular subject to people who have specialised deeply in it and therefore know it far better. However, generalists are enormously valuable to organisations in a couple of different ways.</p>
<p>One benefit is to prevent the situation where specialists get "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", to quote Dr Ian Malcolm. Generalists are well placed to keep specialists grounded, to be the person in the room saying <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/the-vp-of-nope">nope</a>. Maybe they have experienced similar situations in other domains, maybe they are more aware of the constraints that apply to other aspects of the problem space, or maybe they simply don’t get so wrapped up in the elegance of possible solutions.</p>
<p>Another benefit generalists can bring is to be the Swiss Army knife for the organisation. They might not be the best at any one thing, but they can do a lot of things at the drop of a hat without retraining. This is admittedly the sort of benefit that becomes easier to bring to bear after a few years of experience, with some gravitas to lend credibility in the absence of formal certifications. Generalists can be parachuted into developing situations and plug gaps until specialists can be deployed to tackle more permanent solutions.</p>
<p>I’m a <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/intersections">generalist</a>, partly as a deliberate career choice, and partly out of circumstance. My university degree is in Computing Science<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>, but I came to it via a high school that focused very strongly on the humanities. I had more hours of Latin and Greek than of maths or other scientific subjects, about the same as history and philosophy. My original plan had been to specialise in sysadmin work, which done right is a pretty generalist role in its own right. What actually happened is that I ended up spanning between technical and human aspects, translating business requirements into technical specs and explaining technical constraints and possibilities in business terms. This sort of thing works well when you have a lot of different experience to call upon, including from different fields, so you don’t get too narrowly blinkered and end up proposing the same one-size-fits-all solution to every problem you are presented with.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/c4722c33-962c-4db8-8d9f-6ffe0fc289d8/74007f6a-44e1-4265-aa27-aa2d0d62d312.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>To make this concrete, here are some of the skills I have accumulated in my magpie fashion over the years:</p>
<ul>
<li>Graphic design</li>
<li>Web design (including accessibility)</li>
<li>UI & UX</li>
<li>Presentation design</li>
<li>Public speaking</li>
<li>Writing (technical and otherwise)</li>
<li>Translation</li>
<li>Programming (I’ve learned over a dozen languages, and while I’m not great or even good at any of them, I can pick something up and hack at it until it works)</li>
<li>Software localisation and internationalisation (l10n and i18n)</li>
<li>Availability and performance monitoring and observability</li>
<li>System deployment, configuration, and maintenance</li>
<li>Network design and admin</li>
<li>Database design and admin</li>
<li>Cloud stuff ranging from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS</li>
<li>RoI and business case development</li>
<li>User survey and interview</li>
<li>Competitive analysis (both tech and GTM)</li>
<li>Training and enablement (development and delivery)</li>
</ul>
<p>And I can do all of that and more in three to five (human) languages, depending on how formal I have to get. </p>
<p>Some of these I’m only barely competent in, but I can at least have a reasonable conversation with an actual specialist where we understand each other, and I have the basis to go deeper if I ever have a need to. <em>All</em> of these skills have come in handy as parts of paid jobs where they absolutely were not part of the job spec, and several times a skill that was way outside my job description has saved someone’s bacon — mine, a colleague’s, a customer’s, or my employer’s.</p>
<p>Don’t underestimate generalists — and if you’re a generalist, or thinking about branching outside of your specialisation, don’t underestimate yourself.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="http://thoughtcatalog.com/">Thought Catalog</a>, <a href="https://www.hp-gauster.name/">Hans-Peter Gauster</a> and <a href="http://youtube.com/impatrickt">Patrick Tomasso</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Yes, Comput<em>ing</em>, not Comput<em>er</em>; at my university, those were two separate courses, but one was basically straight-up software engineering, while the other also included a grounding in networks, databases, neural networks (in the late 90s this was cutting-edge stuff!) and even human interface design. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Textual Podcasthttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/textual-podcast2023-12-17T16:37:13.404000Z2021-07-21T16:51:36ZDominic<p>In lieu of a normal episode of our <a href="https://rollforenterprise.com"><em>Roll for Enterprise</em></a> podcast this week, which was thwarted by myriad technical difficulties, we are trying to take our witty banter to text. Let’s see how this goes - thank you for taking the ride with us. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/111f8675-fc53-1491-5e25-9e81259de3d4/915f76a8-5358-1361-ea2e-2d3951d2326e.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:1000; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>Mike starts us off with a bang, picking up on the release of the new <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/15/ipv6_istilli_510_years_away/">Gartner Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking</a> (don’t worry, the link is to The Register, you don’t need a Gartner account to read it):</p>
<p><strong>Mike</strong>: The reason I don’t trust most market research is that I am pretty sure vendors are writing it …</p>
<p><strong>Dominic</strong>: I wish! </p>
<p><strong>Lilac</strong>: Surely not. There are many capable people inside Forrester and possibly even Gartner. But, half the job is sorting through the embellishments of the vendors they do meet. </p>
<p><strong>Dominic</strong>: I think this is an important point though. Many people have the impression that analysts are "pay to play", and while there are some out there that might fit that description, most of the big reputable analyst firms that you have heard of don’t work that way. There is one sense in which it is true: as a vendor, if you are a paying client of Gartner, Forrester, or whoever, you get more time with analysts, which translates to more opportunities to make your case to them. However, even in that sort of context, the good individual analysts are the ones who will pull you up if you make some sort of wild claim and demand proof, or tell you they are not hearing that type of request from individual practitioners, or whatever. These people tend to develop a personal reputation over and above that of the firm that employs them, because they provide an extremely valuable service. </p>
<p>To vendors, they act as a reality check, and give us an opportunity to refine our messaging and product plans in a semi-private setting rather than having to make corrections in the harsh glare of the public market. </p>
<p>Meanwhile to practitioners these analysts provide a validated starting point for their own investigations. For instance, if you are building a shortlist for a vendor selection, you might use the Gartner Magic Quadrant or the Forrester Wave for that market segment to double-check that you had made sensible selections. However, once again, the individual analysts leading the compilation of a particular Wave or MQ will make a big difference to the result, bringing their own experience and biases to bear, so it’s rarely as simple as just picking the vendor that’s furthest up and to the right.</p>
<p><strong>Lilac</strong>: Totally agree. That has been my experience, Dominic - though we should hear from Zack here. I have been at large vendors with deep pockets that were panned by analysts - and small vendors with minuscule budgets that were lauded. Honesty, clarity, sanity … are both more valuable and harder to come by than contract dollars. </p>
<p><strong>Zack</strong>: I have to be careful how I answer this question, but there aren't any surprises. Dominic’s point about vendor briefings is valid although you typically must be a paying client to schedule inquiries. Speaking from experience, a briefing is "supposed" to be one-way communication so you can update the analysts but you can’t ask questions about market landscapes or have conversations outside of the briefing. I would be more concerned about "real-world" experience as opposed to research exclusively. There are indeed some analysts that have never stepped foot in a data center although they’re basing their experience on multiple data points such as customer interactions, typically hundreds and across multiple analysts, vendor briefings & inquiries, and hands on labs in some cases, and research, but is that sufficient to form a conclusion? It might be, but as someone who spent many nights in a data center, there is nothing that takes the place of "real-world" experience. As with anything, people should use any analysts feedback as another data point in their quest to make a decision. </p>
<p><strong>Dominic</strong>: Exactly – and the Hype Cycle is a perfect example, because people have a tendency to take it as predictive, assuming that every technology will eventually emerge on the Plateau of Productivity. In actual fact though there is a Pit of Oblivion somewhere at the bottom of the Trough of Disillusionment, which is where all the once-promising tech that never emerges goes to die. What is amazing about this particular Hype Cycle graphic is that IPv6 is still on it, and still in 5-to-10-years-out category!</p>
<p><strong>Lilac</strong>: or VDI! It’s always the year for VDI. It’s going to be amazing. </p>
<p>The analysts aren’t giving you answers. They are giving you input. Things to consider. Independent checkpoints outside your organization. This isn’t a surgical specialist giving you the best answer. It’s a real estate agent, guiding you through options. </p>
<p>But then.. why do vendors seem to take the word of these analysts as validation and gospel? I never understood. </p>
<p><strong>Dominic</strong>: At the risk of getting excessively philosophical, the answer is the same as it is for many things in grown-up life: because even with all the flaws, this is the least bad way we have found yet that is remotely practical. Right now I am sitting on both sides of different tables – wait, that metaphor sounds wrong. Swivelling my chair back and forth between two tables? Anyway. I am both running a procurement exercise which involves comparing different vendors, and participating as a vendor in a market survey. </p>
<p>At the customer table, I don’t have time to evaluate every vendor in even a relatively niche market, so I use analyst opinion as one of my tools to whittle down the list. Once I got to two, I took the time to talk to each one, and also talked to current customers, started figuring out pricing models, all of that – but all of that takes a lot of time. </p>
<p>This is kind of what I imagine readers are doing with the reports my employers participate in: not taking them as gospel, but as one input into their selection process. Getting philosophical again, it tends to be people furthest from the process who get most excited about the results – but it’s understandable: it’s one of the few results that are uncritically good. I get weirded out by vendors who trumpet their profitability, because that’s a short step to "I’m being overcharged!". Meanwhile, being certified as top of your particular field by a (supposedly) objective observer is pretty great.</p>
<p>But I still see no sign of IPv6 catching on anywhere. Even the hysteria about IPv4 address space running out seems to have died down.</p>
<h1>Recommendations</h1>
<h2>Dominic</h2>
<p>I want to recommend the latest book by Becky Chambers, <em>A Psalm for the Wild-Built</em>. If you’ve read her <em>Wayfarers</em> books (which I also recommend), you know what you are in for, even if this is a completely different setting. If you haven’t, the dedication should give you an idea: "For anybody who could use a break". It’s a delightful little SF novella that packs a lot into its short length.</p>
<h2>Lilac</h2>
<p><a href="https://lifehacker.com/use-the-organizational-bullshit-perception-scale-to-dec-1847304104">Use the 'Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale' to Decide If You Should Quit Your Job</a></p>
<hr />
<p>Thanks for sticking with us! Normal service should be resumed next week. We hadn't missed an episode yet, thanks our innovative podcast architecture, which is based on a redundant array of independent co-hosts, and while it's a shame we couldn't keep the streak going, this is at least something. Apparently <a href="https://www.amplifimedia.com/blogstein/why-there-really-arent-2-million-podcasts">26% of podcasts only ever produce a single episode</a>, while we got to 62 before this hiccough.</p>
<p>Follow the show on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/Roll4Enterprise">@Roll4Enterprise</a> or on our <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/roll-for-enterprise/">LinkedIn page</a>. Please <a href="https://rollforenterprise.com">subscribe to the show</a>, and do send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!</p>Long Way Up, Short Way Downhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/long-way-up-short-way-down2023-12-17T16:34:30.807000Z2021-07-02T09:01:10ZDominic<p>Here are some more pictures from my adventures on the trails of Finale Ligure.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/5c913f1a-ca21-8b38-6311-7d29f7aab1b3/c90c331b-e800-33c7-3a0e-e286cc6eb970.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:960; --en-naturalHeight:1280;"/>This is my faithful steed in the square of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgio_Verezzi">Borgio Verezzi</a>. Don't be fooled by the Wikipedia entry claiming elevation of only ten metres above sea level; that measurement must be from the railway station, down at the bottom of the hill. There is a lot more info on the <a href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgio_Verezzi">Italian-language wikipedia page</a>. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/5c913f1a-ca21-8b38-6311-7d29f7aab1b3/1f5a9e65-0e36-f7d7-76ae-82acdfa4a33a.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:960; --en-naturalHeight:1280;"/>The actual town of Borgio is a medieval hilltop knot of houses, of a type that is popular all along this coast: far enough up to be out of easy reach for pirates or other attackers, with a confusing inside-outside architecture designed to disorient them if they did decide to invest their time in climbing all the way up here.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/5c913f1a-ca21-8b38-6311-7d29f7aab1b3/982ae080-953a-8875-7d05-e346c271eb08.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:960; --en-naturalHeight:1280;"/>After a bit more climbing, we finally reach the church of San Martino, a full 271 metres from sea level, where I started pedalling. It's best to do this climb early in the day!</p>
<p>From here there are any number of trails across the top of the rocky spur known locally as the Caprazoppa ("the lame goat"). The most famous is the <a href="https://www.trailforks.com/trails/bondi/">Bondi</a>, named for a local hero who still operates a bike shop in the centre of Finalborgo. This, plus the more technical <a href="https://www.trailforks.com/trails/xmen-82618/">X-Men</a> trail, make up the drop back down to sea level, just in time to hit the bakery for warm focaccia fresh from the oven. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/5c913f1a-ca21-8b38-6311-7d29f7aab1b3/dc695efa-e2cd-12c8-fc8f-caf7dd38d578.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:1280; --en-naturalHeight:960;"/>The locals are sometimes bemused by MTB antics.</p>A Long-Expected Holidayhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/a-long-expected-holiday2023-12-17T16:30:23.949000Z2021-06-28T06:56:27ZDominic<p>Well, I’m <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/post/an-unexpected-holiday">back in Finale Ligure</a>. In contrast to last year, this time around we were fairly sure we’d be able to come out here. A year and a half of no travel, plus a pretty stressful end to the kids’ school year, meant that I was looking forward to the trip much more than normal. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/07c7cc29-d5bc-e0f8-bd8c-aff657219293/42802e93-a37d-ca16-0c66-8f2c4e4c5098.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:1280; --en-naturalHeight:960;"/></p>
<p>The views are spectacular… </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/07c7cc29-d5bc-e0f8-bd8c-aff657219293/98d6f423-4b74-5074-ee2a-6060747b9a8c.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:960; --en-naturalHeight:1280;"/></p>
<p>…but you earn them with some pretty brutal climbs. A few of those rock steps are fine to hop up, but pull after pull of them is something else. Of course they are much more fun to roll over coming downhill!</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/07c7cc29-d5bc-e0f8-bd8c-aff657219293/640a8654-18ca-bb07-5041-7b1f3c70dbde.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:1280; --en-naturalHeight:960;"/></p>
<p>This year I was testing out a full-face helmet with removable chin guard. I didn’t need the chin guard’s protection (yet), although I did bonk a tree branch pretty hard with the top of my head — but a normal helmet would have been fine there too.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">🚵♂️ Signs of a successful <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MTB?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MTB</a> excursion:<br>- My legs have simply given up<br>- I have twigs & leaves in my hair, even though I was wearing a helmet (?!?)<br>- Scrapes on one arm from a cactus that neatly threaded the gap between T-shirt & elbow pad (impressive, & also painful)</p>— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️🌈 (@dwellington) <a href="https://twitter.com/dwellington/status/1409178996605075457?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 27, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/07c7cc29-d5bc-e0f8-bd8c-aff657219293/52c91c89-5a94-20e4-e6d1-576f1be97fc8.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:1280; --en-naturalHeight:960;"/></p>
<p>Top of the climb, ready to head down?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/07c7cc29-d5bc-e0f8-bd8c-aff657219293/097d7c22-3365-bf1e-6510-97561ff484ce.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:960; --en-naturalHeight:1280;"/></p>
<p>This was a nice flowing bit of trail, but the builders around here have a great love for switchbacks where there is exactly one correct line, and if you put a wheel wrong… well, if you’re lucky, there’s a tree to catch you, and if you’re not, it’s a looong way down!</p>
<p><a href="https://www.finaleoutdoor.com/poi/flow">My guide for Sunday, Martino</a> (highly recommended, incidentally) was one of the local trail builders, though, and was able to show me the right line through some of the more technical areas.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/07c7cc29-d5bc-e0f8-bd8c-aff657219293/1e65481e-ae24-07c1-8868-5003b44df250.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:1280; --en-naturalHeight:960;"/></p>
<p>Bikers’ repose. This is not the sort of scene most people have in mind when they think of Liguria! <a href="http://www.rifugiopiandellebosse.it/">Pian delle Bosse</a> is a proper Alpine-style mountain refuge, white with red shutters, the whole works — and on a summer’s day, the lawn is just covered with dusty mountain bikes while their tired riders refuel.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/07c7cc29-d5bc-e0f8-bd8c-aff657219293/977ef77a-cc87-bd3b-adfe-fa2c56f799dc.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:960; --en-naturalHeight:1280;"/></p>
<p>Buon appetito!</p>Rebirthhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/rebirth2023-12-17T16:36:09.658000Z2021-06-21T14:00:04ZDominic<p>What I will always remember from the spring of 2020 is the silence. Everything simply stopped, and the only noise to be heard was the sound of sirens as ambulances criss-crossed the city, all day and all night. </p>
<p>Piacenza was the Italian city with the greatest number of victims by population. We were all at home, trying to understand what had happened to us. We were the lucky ones who got to worry about jobs or school. Too many were not so lucky. </p>
<p>This video was shown at the first reopening of the <a href="https://operastreaming.com/piacenza-municipal-theater/">Teatro Municipale</a> in 2021, before <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJskKrPDosQ">Verdi’s <em>Messa da Requiem</em>, directed by Plácido Domingo</a>.</p>
<p><div class="responsive-embed embed-16by9"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vAeD01BzsvQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen title="Coronavirus Italia. Dal dramma alla rinascita"></iframe></div></p>
<p>In March of 2020 we concentrated on small things — Zoom parties, which webcam to buy for all the video meetings — to take our minds off the terror that was stalking the silent streets. Even the small taste of a return to all of that last winter was too much. I don’t want any more lockdowns to be needed.</p>
<p>Get vaccinated.</p>The Hard Work Of Successhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/the-hard-work-of-success2023-12-17T16:37:28.719000Z2021-06-15T07:54:00ZDominic<p>There's a pattern to successful outcomes of IT projects — and it's not about who works the longest hours, or has the most robust infrastructure, or the most fashionable programming language.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/2b6f8cab-56a5-4a1f-71bc-f8faf44dda2b/314070c0-133b-4b17-535d-2b96d5712443.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>Here is a recent specific example, which came to my attention specifically because it mentions my current employer — although the trend is a general one: <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/14/how-nationwide-taps-kafka-mongodb-to-guide-financial-decisions/">How Nationwide taps Kafka, MongoDB to guide financial decisions</a>. And here is the key part that I am talking about:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A lot of organizations try and go for a big data approach — let’s throw everything into a data lake and try and capture everything and then work out what we’re going to do with it. It’s interesting, but actually it doesn’t solve the problem. And therefore, the approach we’ve taken is to start at the other end. Let’s look at the business problem that we’re trying to solve, rather than trying to solve the mess of data that organizations are typically trying to untangle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is indeed a common pitfall in IT to start with the technology first. You hear about some cool new thing, and you want to try it out in practice, so you go casting around for an excuse to do that. You'll notice, however, that very few of these decisions lead to the sort of success stories that get profiled in the media. The more probable outcome is that the project either dies a quiet death in a corner when it turns out that the shiny new tech wasn't quite ready for prime time, or if the business stakeholders are important/loud enough, it gets a vastly expensive emergency rewrite at the 11th hour into something more traditional.</p>
<p>Meanwhile all the success stories start with a concrete business requirement. Somebody needs to get something done, so they work out what their desired outcome is, and how they will know when it has been achieved. Only then do you start coding, or procuring services, or whatever it is you were planning to do.</p>
<p>This is not to say that it's not worth experimenting with the new tech. It's just that "playing around with new toys" is its own thing, a proof of concept or whatever. You absolutely should be running these sorts of investigations, so that when the business need arises, you will have enough basic familiarity with the various possibilities to pick one that has a decent chance of working out for you. To take the specific example of what Nationwide was doing, data lakes are indeed enormously useful things, and once you have one in place, new ways of using it will almost certainly emerge — but your first use case, the one that justifies starting the project at all, should be able to stand on its own, without hand-waving or references to a nebulous future.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Re idiotic “we should teach kids coding in school” takes: if we start in elementary school — what are the odds of the specific stack they learn still being around two decades later when kids are entering the job market? I learned Turbo Pascal in school; very very dead now. <a href="https://t.co/YSJNGIY1Fv">https://t.co/YSJNGIY1Fv</a></p>— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️🌈 (@dwellington) <a href="https://twitter.com/dwellington/status/1404460626622271488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 14, 2021</a></blockquote>
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<p>This is also why it's probably not a good idea to tie yourself too closely to a specific technology, in business let alone in education. You don't know what the requirements are going to look like in the future, so being overly specific now is to leave gratuitous hostages to fortune. Instead, focus on a requirement you have right now. </p>
<p>Nationwide is facing competition from fintechs and other non-traditional players in banking, and one of the axes of competition is giving customers better insight into their spending. The use case Nationwide have picked is to help users achieve their financial goals: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We’re looking at how we create insight for our members that we can then expose to them through the app. So you’ll see this through some of the challenger banks that will show you how you’ve spent your money. Well, that’s interesting — we can do that today. But it isn’t quite as interesting as a bit of insight that says, "If you actually want to hit your savings target for the holiday that you want next year, then perhaps you could do better if you didn’t spend it on these things."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once this capability is in place, other use cases will no doubt emerge. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/2b6f8cab-56a5-4a1f-71bc-f8faf44dda2b/22c4e4cf-7ec1-f650-0eee-e24696a0d625.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:450;"/></p>
<p>But what is the education equivalent of this thinking? Saying "let's teach kids Python in school!" is not useful. Python is in vogue right now, but kids starting elementary school this September will emerge from university fifteen or twenty years from now. I am willing to place quite a large bet that, while Python will certainly still be around, something else, maybe even several somethings, will have eclipsed its current importance.</p>
<p>We should not focus narrowly on teaching coding, let alone specific programming languages — not least because the curriculum is already very packed. <em>What are we dropping to make room for Python?</em></p>
<p>And another question: how are we actually going to deliver the instruction? In theory, my high school curriculum included Basic (no, not Visual; just plain Basic). In practice, it was taught by the maths and physics teacher, and those subjects (rightly!) took precedence. I think we got maybe half a dozen hours a year of Basic instruction, and it may well have been less; it's been a while since high school.</p>
<p>The current flare-up of the conversation about teaching IT skills at school has this in common with failed projects in business: it's been dreamed up in isolation by technologists, with no reference to anyone in actual education, whether teachers, students, or parents. None of these groups operate at Silicon Valley pace, but that's fine; this is not a problem that can be solved with a quick hackathon or a quarter-end sprint. Very few worthwhile problems can be, or they would not remain unsolved.</p>
<p>Don't confuse today's needs with universal requirements, and don't think that the tools you have on the shelf today are the only ones anyone will ever need. Take the time to think through what the actual requirement is, and make sure to include the people doing the work today in your planning.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="http://alvaroreyes.design">Alvaro Reyes</a> and <a href="https://instagram.com/ivalexphoto">Ivan Aleksic</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>Easy Like A Sunday Morninghttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/easy-like-a-sunday-morning2023-12-17T16:32:28.795000Z2021-05-30T09:42:36ZDominic<p>This Sunday morning was not a time for epic rides, not least because it's the day after a good friend's wedding… I took a 90-minute loop from my front door, up into the foothills and back down. This landscape has not changed much since Roman times, and probably before; people were tilling the land and making wine around here before the Romans showed up, at least <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terramare_culture">back into the Bronze Age</a>.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/7432aae4-d87b-436d-0f41-26cb9b87fd83/f23334f4-fb4e-bdf8-f650-b8a927771ba0.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:1024; --en-naturalHeight:768;"/></p>
<p>This is the gate of <a href="https://www.rivalta-trebbia.it/castle/">Rivalta</a>, on the bank of the river Trebbia.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/7432aae4-d87b-436d-0f41-26cb9b87fd83/48658274-6c1c-35b4-7d60-7ec06900f34f.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:809; --en-naturalHeight:970;"/></p>
<p>If the name of the river Trebbia is ringing a bell, you may be thinking of your classical history. This was the site of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Trebia">major battle of the Second Punic War</a>, in which Hannibal defeated the Romans. The battle is commemorated today by a statue of one of Hannibal's war elephants.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/7432aae4-d87b-436d-0f41-26cb9b87fd83/195fb2c2-4696-b5fb-41ae-eda250e1fad1.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:834; --en-naturalHeight:941;"/></p>
<p>People never believe me when I tell them of the wildlife I encounter on my rides: rabbits, deer… elephants?</p>Living in the Pasthttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/living-in-the-past2023-12-17T16:34:27.904000Z2021-05-20T13:22:32ZDominic<p>In Piacenza, near where I used to live, there is an old building that looks like an abandoned garage or something along those lines. The area is right on the border between the upper town, with the palaces of the various noble families, and the lower town, which was historically more working-class.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/33aa038a-7949-5269-329a-9d5af2ff6a64/aa61b2b8-9e2a-a376-c893-4e437c13c9c7.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:851; --en-naturalHeight:469;" alt="Muntà di Rat, l'anima fluviale di Piacenza. La seconda ..."/>This is a historical photo of the Muntà di Rat, courtesy of the local newspaper, <em><a href="https://www.liberta.it/luoghi/piacenza/2018/07/17/munta-di-rat-lanima-fluviale-di-piacenza-la-seconda-puntata-di-memorie-piacentine/">Libertà</a></em>. As you can see, "lower" is not a metaphor! I used to live on the street at the bottom, at a right angle to the focus of this photograph. While the area no longer floods, everything else is almost exactly the same.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/33aa038a-7949-5269-329a-9d5af2ff6a64/406afd4b-a25f-8209-dbc1-143b5c67ca54.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:768; --en-naturalHeight:1024;"/></p>
<p>Here is a more recent photo, this one taken by me. The Muntà di Rat is at the end of the street, while the mysterious old garage-like structure is on the left, where the lady is walking. I had always idly wondered what it was, and how come it was left abandoned in the middle of town — but then again, it was in good company. Between generational turnover and changes in the real-estate market, there were several abandoned buildings in the area. Some were parts of well-known, soap-opera-style tales of multigenerational family intrigue and inheritance disputes, while others were more prosaic stories of light industry moving out of a residential area.</p>
<p>Now <a href="https://www.liberta.it/news/cronaca/2021/05/20/magazzino-coloniale-in-balia-di-topi-e-degrado-bonetti-cade-a-pezzi/">a story in the <em>Libertà</em></a> finally resolves the mystery: it's an old depot for commercial products imported from Italy's colonies in Libya, Ethiopia, and Somalia. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/33aa038a-7949-5269-329a-9d5af2ff6a64/0f4b3210-fbb5-9e0a-7c95-f73fbe056def.jpg" style="--en-naturalWidth:1280; --en-naturalHeight:960;" height="960px" width="1280px"/></p>
<p>Reading something like that is a punch in the gut. Italy had such a relatively minor history of colonisation in the 20th century that it is often entirely forgotten. In fact, many Italians consider themselves to have been "good guys", not like those <em>other</em> colonisers, despite some <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/30/as-europe-reckons-with-racism-italy-still-wont-confront-its-colonial-past/">equally shameful actions</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s estimated that during the 60 years of Italian colonialism, almost 1 million people died due to war, deportations, and internment. In the 1920s, when the Italian Army started a military campaign to recapture the Libyan territories controlled by rebels, they resorted to widespread summary executions, torture, and mass incarceration. To crush the Libyan resistance, in 1930 the Italian general Rodolfo Graziani, nicknamed "the butcher of Fezzan," put the civilian population in concentration camps. In Ethiopia, the Fascists deployed chemical attacks. When Ethiopian rebels tried to kill him, in 1937, Graziani had 19,000 Ethiopian civilians executed in retaliation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Italians understandably prefer to refer back to the glories of Rome, or perhaps the Renaissance. Anything from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_unification">unification of Italy</a> (which only occurred in 1871!) onwards is brushed over in school and rarely referred to afterwards. The Fascist period is known, of course, and outside of some unfortunate fringes, still a taboo subject. </p>
<p>But colonies? That's something <em>other</em> countries did.</p>
<p>A small example: there is a bar in Milan, unironically called the Colonial. It's meant to evoke a certain type of South-East Asian decor, perhaps along the lines of Raffles Hotel in Singapore — and evidently nobody ever thought twice about that name.</p>
<p>All of this forgetting was possible because Italy had never been a nation of immigrants, but rather of emigrants. The <a href="http://www.scalabrinians.org">Scalabrinians</a> are a religious order that was founded right here in Piacenza at around the same time as Italy was beginning its colonial adventure. The order's mission was specifically to support Italians emigrating to North and South America. Other emigrants went to France or to the coal-fields in Belgium, and to this day the summers see the roads in the hills fill back up with cars with French and Belgian number plates. If anyone in Italy thought of immigration in the mid- to late 20th century, it was in the context of people from Southern Italy moving to work in the factories of the North.</p>
<p>In the 90s, people started coming to Italy from Africa — and many of them settled down, and started having families. Now their children, the second generation, are here. They were born here, they went to school here, they speak correct and unaccented Italian<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>, and they demand to be acknowledged.</p>
<p>It's not possible to ignore these proud new Italians, when we are surrounded by reminders that they did not manifest out of thin air, and that instead there is a long intertwined history. Now Italy finds itself wrestling with questions of identity — what does it mean to be Italian — which were already difficult in such a diverse<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> and politically young country, and just got a whole lot more complicated.</p>
<p>That old warehouse stands (only just) as a reminder of the places and people that were broken so that cheap goods could be shipped to a depot in the centre of town. The past is not dead; it's barely even past yet.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Or rather, Italian with the specific local accent; in this case, a distinctive soft z and r, paired with closed vowels. It used to be possible to tell town and country apart, or one valley from another, but at least my ear can’t really do it, although some local Professor Higgins may still be able to. That’s the homogenising effect of Italian, as opposed to dialect, for you. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>If you think "Italian" is a homogeneous identity, let me introduce you to the Italian word <em>campanilismo</em>, which means the belief that everything within the sound of the bells of the church you attend is the best. Italians will have hours-long arguments about the layers of historical insults in the mere existence of a different recipe for a favourite food, maybe twenty kilometres away. Italians only feel truly Italian among foreigners; at home, they are citizens of their own town — unless the national football team is playing, of course. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Lessons in Hiringhttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/lessons-in-hiring2023-12-17T16:34:24.742000Z2021-05-20T08:44:46ZDominic<p>Some of the most <a href="https://www.macworld.com/article/346788/macalope-apple-facebook-hiring-fiasco-antonio-garcia-martinez-inclusion-privacy-controversy.html">insightful and succinct commentary</a> on the whole Antonio Garcìa Martìnez debacle comes from an ungulate with a Classic Mac for a head:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Macalope believes Apple should not have hired García Martínez only to fire him. He believe it never should have hired him in the first place.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm not going to go over all of the many (many, many) red flags about this person's opinions that should have at the very least triggered some additional scrutiny before hiring him. The reaction from Apple employees was entirely predictable and correct. Even if the misogynistic opinions expressed in his public writing were exaggerated for effect, as he now claims, there would always be a question mark around his interactions with female employees or those from minority backgrounds. At the very least, that would be enormously disruptive to the organisation.</p>
<p>Leaving that aspect aside for a moment: even if this had been someone with the most milquetoast opinions possible (and no NYT bestselling book in which to trumpet them), it's still not great that Apple was looking for someone with his specific professional experience — honed at Facebook.</p>
<p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This to me is the most concerning part of the Apple ads situation. That they would even consider recruiting someone like Antonio García Martínez is very concerning for the future of Apple’s platform. I pay a premium price for Apple products for a pleasant experience, not ads. <a href="https://t.co/gt6tHP51TQ">pic.twitter.com/gt6tHP51TQ</a></p>— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️🌈 (@dwellington) <a href="https://twitter.com/dwellington/status/1393565343403159553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 15, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</p>
<p>This particular hire blew up in Apple's face — but it's extremely concerning for Apple users that they were actively recruiting for this type of experience in the first place. </p>
<p>I'll lay my cards on the table: I dislike the idea of search ads as a category, especially in the App Store. We can argue the merits of allowing apps to "jump the queue" of results for generic searches, but as it is today, you can buy yourself into a position ahead of your competitor even for direct searches on that competitor app's name. Where is the value to users in that?</p>
<p>Display ads in Apple News or Stocks, which are the other two Apple properties discussed, might be acceptable — as long as they are not too intrusive. I don't have as much of a philosophical issue as some do with Apple using first-party tracking data within iOS, precisely because those data are not available to other parties or to other platforms. It's easy to opt out of Apple's tracking, simply by not using those apps, and ads from there won't follow me around the rest of the web.</p>
<p>The lesson I hope that Apple takes away from this whole situation is not "don't hire people with big public profiles" but "users really hate sleazy adtech". I would hate for Apple to go the way of YouTube, which is becoming unusable due to ad load. I understand that Apple is trying to boost its Services revenue, and App Store search ads are a way to do that, but if it makes my user experience worse, that's a problem. Apple products command a premium in large part because of how <em>nice</em> they are for users; anything that undermines that niceness weakens the rationale for staying in the Apple camp.</p>Midweek Ride Through The Shirehttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/midweek-ride-through-the-shire2023-12-17T16:34:50.944000Z2021-05-05T16:33:36ZDominic<p>I took a mental health day off and rode a (metric) century up into the hills. Unfortunately the more spectacular scenery was a) tiring to ride, so I didn't want to stop, and b) on a main road, so there wasn't always a good place to stop even if I had wanted to. These shots are from the earlier, flatter part of the ride.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/b329d57c-6dbf-4c99-86ae-1458544e5238/c9bfe228-a3f8-358c-f596-88fa1c336678.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:2048; --en-naturalHeight:1536;"/></p>
<p>Riding up the bank of the river Nure (on the left behind the trees)</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/b329d57c-6dbf-4c99-86ae-1458544e5238/e5d14435-9533-9457-89e6-59ad307f24e6.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:2277; --en-naturalHeight:1380;"/></p>
<p>Crossing the <a href="https://www.archistart.net/portfolio-item/piacenza-bettola-agriway-reconnecting-valnure-through-the-old-railway-and-urban-agriculture/">old railway</a> bridge at Ponte dell'Olio</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/b329d57c-6dbf-4c99-86ae-1458544e5238/527779fb-24d6-7206-33c0-7df35324b643.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:2048; --en-naturalHeight:1536;"/></p>
<p>Old lime kilns at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_dell%27Olio">Ponte dell'Olio</a></p>Interoperable Friendshiphttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/interoperable-friendship2023-12-17T16:34:02.632000Z2021-04-17T07:35:32ZDominic<p>Whenever the gravitational pull of social networks comes up, there is a tendency to offer a quick fix by "just" letting them integrate with each other, or offer export/import capability. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-competitive-compatibility">Cory Doctorow tells an emotional tale in <em>Wired</em></a> about his grandmother's difficult decision to leave all of her family and friends behind in the USSR, and concludes with this impassioned appeal:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Network effects are why my grandmother's family stayed behind in the USSR. Low switching costs are why I was able to roam freely around the world, moving to the places where it seemed like I could thrive.</p>
<p>Network effects are a big deal, but it's switching costs that really matter. Facebook will tell you that it wants to keep bad guys out – not keep users in. Funnily enough, that's the same thing East Germany's politburo claimed about the Berlin Wall: it was there to keep the teeming hordes of the west out of the socialist worker's paradise, not to lock in the people of East Germany.</p>
<p>Mr Zuckerberg, tear down that wall.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As appealing as that vision is, here is why interoperability won't and can't work.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f49e5146-6407-397f-3267-bae29fa79518/398a81d9-3712-3155-77e1-68dcd33071ce.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:533;"/></p>
<p>Let's take our good friends <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob">Alice and Bob</a>, from every cryptography example ever. Alice and Bob are friends on one social network, let's call it Facester. They chat, they share photos, they enter a bunch of valuable personal information. So far so good; information about each user is stored in a database, and it's pretty trivial to export user information, chat logs, and photographs from the system.</p>
<p>Here's the problem: the account data is not the only thing that is valuable. You also want the <strong>relationships</strong> between users. If Alice wants to join a new network, let's call it Twitbook, being able to prepopulate it with her name and profile picture is the least of her issues. She is now faced with an empty Twitbook feed, because she isn't friends with anyone there yet.<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Alice and Bob's relationship on Facester is stored in a data structure called a <em>graph</em>; each link between nodes in the graph is called an <em>edge</em>. While this structure can be exported in purely technical terms, this is where things start getting complicated.</p>
<p>What if Alice and Bob's sworn enemy, Eve, registers on Twitbook with Bob's name? Or maybe there's simply more than one Bob in the world. How can Twitbook meaningfully import that relationship from Facester?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f49e5146-6407-397f-3267-bae29fa79518/a7503224-336c-8213-b53f-a42bea1bd74a.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<p>There are various policies that you could come up with, ranging from terrible to more terrible. </p>
<p>If both Alice and Bob go to a certain amount of effort, entering their Facester profile info on Twitbook and vice versa, the export and reimport will be able to reconcile the data that way — but that's a lot of work and potential for error. What happens if even one of your friends hasn't done this, or gets it wrong? Should the import stop or continue? And does the destination network get to keep that dangling edge? Here in what we still call the real world, Facebook already creates "ghost profiles" for people who do not use its services, but whose existence they have inferred from their surveillance-driven adtech. These user records have value to FB because they can still be used for targeting and can have ads sold against them.</p>
<p>Alice and Bob's common friend Charlie has chosen not to register for Twitbook because they dislike that service's privacy policy. However, if either Alice or Bob imports their data from Facester into Twitbook, Charlie could still end up with one of these ghost profiles against their wishes. Contact data are not the property of the person who holds them. Back to the real world again, this is the problem that people have with the likes of Signal or <a href="https://findthethread.postach.io/tag/clubhouse">Clubhouse</a>, that prompt users to import their whole address book and then spam all of those people. This functionality is not just irritating, it's also actively dangerous as a vector for abuse.</p>
<p>Another terrible policy is to have some kind of global unique identifier for users, whether this means mandating the use of government-assigned real names, or some global register of user IDs. Real names are problematic for all sorts of reasons, whether it's for people who prefer to use pseudonyms or nicknames, or people who change their name legitimately. Facebook got into all sorts of trouble with their own attempt at a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_controversy">real-name policy</a>, and that was just for one network; you could still be pseudonymous on Twitter, precisely because the two networks are not linked.</p>
<p>People do want to partition off different parts of their identity. Maybe on Facester Alice presents as a buttoned-up suburban housewife, but on Twitbook she lets her hair down and focuses on her death metal fandom. She would prefer not to have to discuss some of the imagery and lyrics that go with that music at the PTA, so she doesn't use the same name and keeps these two aspects of her personality on separate networks. Full interoperability between Facester and Twitbook would collapse these different identities, whatever Alice's feelings on the matter.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/f49e5146-6407-397f-3267-bae29fa79518/245240b3-140b-e1f3-60ce-5b7da106e04a.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:534;"/></p>
<p>Some are invoking the <a href="https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/right-to-data-portability/">right to data portability that is enshrined in GDPR</a>, but this legislation has the same problem with definitions: whose data are we talking about, exactly?</p>
<p>The GDPR states (emphasis mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The right to data portability allows individuals to obtain and reuse <strong>their personal data</strong> for their own purposes across different services.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Applying this requirement to social networks becomes complicated, though, because Alice's "personal data" also encompasses data about her relationships with Bob and Charlie. Who exactly does that data belong to? Who can give consent to its processing? </p>
<p>GDPR does not really address the question of how or whether Alice should be allowed to obtain and reuse data about Bob and Charlie; it focuses only on the responsibility of Facester and Twitbook as data controllers in this scenario. Here are its suggestions about third parties’ data:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What happens if the personal data includes information about others?</p>
<p>If the requested information includes information about others (eg third party data) you need to consider whether transmitting that data would adversely affect the rights and freedoms of those third parties.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, providing third party data to the individual making the portability request should not be a problem, assuming that the requestor provided this data to you within their information in the first place. However, you should always consider whether there will be an adverse effect on the rights and freedoms of third parties, in particular when you are transmitting data directly to another controller.</p>
<p>If the requested data has been provided to you by multiple data subjects (eg a joint bank account) you need to be satisfied that all parties agree to the portability request. This means that you may have to seek agreement from all the parties involved.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, all of this is pretty vague and does not impose any actual requirements. People have tens if not hundreds of connections within social networks; it is not realistic that everybody get on board with each request, in the way that would work for the GDPR's example of a joint bank account, which usually involves only two people. If this regulation were to become the model for regulation of import/export functionality of social networks, I think it's a safe bet that preemptive consent would be buried somewhere in the terms and conditions, and that would be that.</p>
<p>Tearing down the walls between social networks would do more harm than good. It's true that social networks rely on the gravity of the data they have about users and their connections to build their power, but even if the goal is tearing down that power, interoperability is not the way to do it.</p>
<hr />
<p>UPDATE: Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing me at <a href="https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy">this EFF white paper</a> after I tagged him on Twitter. As you might expect, it goes into a lot more detail about how interoperability should work than either a short <em>Wired</em> article or this blog post do. However, I do not feel it covers the specific point about the sort of explicit consent that is required between users before sharing each others' data with the social networks, and the sorts of information leaks and context collapse that such sharing engenders.</p>
<hr />
<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="http://creativemarket.com/nordwood">NordWood Themes</a>, <a href="http://alexiby.com">Alex Iby</a>, and <a href="http://homajob.com">Scott Graham</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Or she doesn't follow anyone, or whatever the construct is. Let's assume for the sake of this argument that the relationships are fungible across different social networks — which is of course not the case in the real world: my LinkedIn connections are not the same people I follow on Twitter. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
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</div>The Changing Value Of Mistakeshttps://findthethread.postach.io/post/the-changing-value-of-mistakes2023-12-17T16:37:20.176000Z2021-04-11T06:20:25ZDominic<p>The simplest possible definition of experience would equate it to <strong>mistakes</strong>. In other words, experience means having made many mistakes — and with any luck, learned from them.</p>
<p>This transubstantiation of mistakes into experience does rely on one hidden assumption, though, which is that the environment does not change too much. Experience is only valid as long as the environment in which the mistakes are made remains fairly similar to the current one. If the environment changes enough, the experience learned from those mistakes becomes obsolete, and new mistakes need to be made in the changed conditions in order to build up experience that is valid in that situation.</p>
<p>This reflection is important because there is a cultural misunderstanding of Ops and SRE that I see over and over — twice just this morning, hence this post. </p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e5911a2c-e73a-4056-b426-c3564ddfe82b/afc176fb-a76b-6667-81f3-b534c0f4429e.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:534;"/></p>
<h1>I Come Not To Bury Ops, But To Praise It</h1>
<p>Criticising Ops people for timidity or lack of courage because they are unwilling to introduce change into the environment they are responsible for is to miss that they have a built-in cultural bias towards stability. Their role is as advocates against risk — and change is inherently risky. Ops people made mistakes as juniors, preferably but not always in test environments, and would rather not throw out all that hard-earned experience to start making mistakes all over again. The ultimate Ops nightmare is to do something that turns your employer into front-page news.<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>If you’re selling or marketing a product that requires Ops buy-in, you need to approach that audience with an understanding of their mindset. Get Ops on-side by de-risking your proposal, which includes helping them to understand it to a point where they are comfortable with it. </p>
<p>And don’t expect them to be proactive on your behalf; the best you can expect is permission and maybe an introduction. On the other hand, they will be extremely credible champions after your proposal goes into production — assuming, of course, that it does what you claim it does!</p>
<p>Let's break down how that process plays out.</p>
<h1>Moving On From The Way Things Were Always Done</h1>
<p>A stable, mature way of doing things is widely accepted and deployed. The team in charge of it understand it intimately — both how it works, and crucially, how it fails. Understanding the failure modes of a system is key to diagnosing inevitable failures quickly, after all, as well as to mitigating their impact.</p>
<p>A new alternative emerges that may be better, but is not proven yet. The experts in the existing system scoff at the limitations of the new system, and refuse to adopt it until forced to.</p>
<p>On the one hand, this is a healthy mechanism. It’s not a good idea to go undermining something that’s working just to jump on the latest bandwagon. When you already have something in place that does what you need it to do, anyone suggesting changes has got to promise big benefits, and ideally bring some proof too. The Ops team are not (just) being curmudgeonly stick-in-the-muds; you are asking them to devalue a lot of their hard-won experience and expose themselves to mistakes while they learn the new system. You have to bring a lot of value, and prove your promises too, in order to make that trade-off worth their while.</p>
<p>The problem is when this healthy immune response is taken too far, and the resistance continues even once the new approach has proven itself. Excessive resistance to change leads inevitably downwards into obsolescence and stasis. There's an old joke in IT circles that the system is perfect, if it weren't for all those pesky users. After all, every failure involves user action, so it follows logically that if only there were no users, there would be no failures — right? Unfortunately a system without users is also not particularly useful.</p>
<p>The reason why resistance to change can continue too long is precisely because the Ops' team's experience is the product of mistakes made over time. With each mistake that we make, we learn to avoid that particular mistake in the future. The experience that we gain this way is valuable precisely because it means that we are not constantly making mistakes – or at least, not the same obvious ones.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e5911a2c-e73a-4056-b426-c3564ddfe82b/336bc97b-84af-2731-6a02-d0fc416fc481.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:538;"/></p>
<h1>Learning By Making Mistakes</h1>
<p>When I was still a wet-behind-the-ears sysadmin, I took the case off a running server to check something. I was used to PC-class hardware, where this sort of thing is not an issue. This time however, the whole machine shut down very abruptly, and the senior admin was not happy to have to spend a chunk of his time recovering the various databases that had been running on that machine. On the plus side, I never did it again…</p>
<p>We look for experts to run critical systems precisely because they have made mistakes elsewhere, earlier in their careers, and know to avoid them now. If we take an expert in one system and sit them down in front of a different system, however, they will have to make those early mistakes all over again before they can build their expertise back up.</p>
<p>Change devalues expertise because it creates scope for new mistakes that have not been experienced before, and which people have not yet learned to avoid.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e5911a2c-e73a-4056-b426-c3564ddfe82b/e9eb76fc-2b6e-07ad-5d94-5c1df3506e16.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:600;"/></p>
<h1>Run The Book</h1>
<p>Ops teams build runbooks for known situations. These are distillations of the team's experience, so that if a particular situation occurs, whoever is there when it all goes down does not have to start their diagnosis from first principles. They also don't need to call up the one lone expert on that particular system or component. Instead, they can rely on the runbook. </p>
<p>Historically, a runbook would have been a literal book: a big binder with printed instructions for all sorts of situations. These days, those instructions are probably automated scripts, but the idea is the same: the runbook is based on the experience of the team and their understanding of the system, and if the system changes enough, the runbook will have to be thrown out and re-written from scratch.</p>
<p>So how to square this circle and enable adoption of new approaches in a safe way that does not compromise the stability of running systems?</p>
<h1>Make Small Mistakes</h1>
<p>The best approach these days centres on <strong>agility</strong>, working around many small projects rather than single big-bang multi-year monsters. This agile approach enables mistakes to be made – and learned from – on a small scale, with limited consequences. The idea is to limit the blast radius of those mistakes, building experience before moving up to the big business-critical systems that absolutely cannot fail.</p>
<p>New technologies and processes these days embrace this agility, enabling that staged adoption with easy self-serve evaluations, small starting commitments, and consumption-based models. This way, people can try out the new proposed approaches, understand what benefits they offer, and make their own decisions about when to make a more wholesale move to a new system.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images.postach.io/9575d472-9b91-4087-9ea7-ce9ad1064b8a/e5911a2c-e73a-4056-b426-c3564ddfe82b/19010c37-b56d-04ef-210d-e7fb691aadb4.png" style="--en-naturalWidth:800; --en-naturalHeight:500;"/></p>
<h1>Small Mistakes Enable Big Changes</h1>
<p>The positive consequences of this piecemeal approach are not just limited to the intrinsic benefits of the new system – faster, easier, cheaper, or some combination of the three. There are also indirect benefits: by working with cutting-edge systems instead of old legacy technology, it will also become easier to recruit people who are eager to develop their own careers. Old systems are harder to make new mistakes in, so it's also harder to build experience. Lots of experts in mature technologies have already maxed out their XP and are camping the top rungs of the career ladder, so there's not much scope for growth there — but large-scale change resets the game.</p>
<p>On top of that, technological agility leads to organisation agility. These days, processes are implemented in software, and the speed with which software can move is a very large component in the delivery of new offerings. Any increase in the agility of IT delivery is directly connected to an increase in business agility – launching new offerings faster, expending more quickly into new markets, responding to changing conditions. </p>
<p>Those business benefits also change the technological calculus: when all the mainframe did was billing, that was important, but doing it a little bit better than the next firm was not a game-changer. When software is literally running the entire business, even a small percentage increase in speed and agility there maps to major business-level differentiation.</p>
<p>Experience is learning from mistakes, but if the environment changes, new mistakes have to be made in order to learn. Agile processes and systems help minimise the impact of those changes, delivering the benefits of constant evolution. </p>
<p>Stasis on the technology side leads to stasis in the organisation. Don’t let natural caution turn into resistance to change for its own sake.</p>
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<p>🖼️ Photos by <a href="http://danielaholzer.me">Daniela Holzer</a>, <a href="https://unsplash.com/@santabarbara77">Varvara Grabova</a>, <a href="https://unsplash.com/@seargreyson">Sear Greyson</a> and <a href="https://unsplash.com/@john_cameron">John Cameron</a> on <a href="https://www.unsplash.com">Unsplash</a></p>
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<p>On the other hand, blaming such front-page news on "human error" is also a cop-out. Major failures are not the fault of an individual operator who fat-fingered one command: they are the ultimate outcome of strategic failures in process and system design that enabled that one mistake to have such strategic consequences. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
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