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Apollo and Wonderment

As a child in the 80s, I used to stare at the moon and struggled to grasp the fact that people had landed and walked on it. That people had considered having a serious go at it, and had succeeded.

It is one of the few emotions that remain unchanged to this day, as a grown-ass adult.

In fact the wonder and thrill is greater still, with photos from the Mars rover Curiosity, and the Cassini and Juno and New Horizons missions, and learning about the planetary slingshots used by Voyager 1 and 2 (which sounded like straight-up science fiction).

It makes me believe humanity, even in its current stage of evolution, is capable of most endeavours it can imagine, through science, creativity and organisation, if only it can learn to unite.

This optimism is tempered by E O Wilson’s quote “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology”.

Today I’m spending the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing in conscious enthralment, glad that I can still experience the same feeling I did as a child.

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Autonomous F1 racing

I am reading the autobiography ‘How to build a car’ by the designer Adrian Newey. Quite absorbing and fast-paced, and mid-sized at about 400 pages.

Although it’s common knowledge, I’m only now really grasping how much of a role tech plays in today’s races, compared to the driver, who are the ones idolised.

It made me wonder if autonomous car racing is a thing yet. It’d be the ultimate engineering sport – the existing hardware and software of F1 with the new hardware of cameras/sensors and software of AI.

Turns out there is Roborace, which uses a standardised car and sensors across teams, and so the differentiator is only the algorithms. They’re organising races across Europe and the US this year. And there is F1Tenth, which uses scale cars, where both hardware and software differs between teams.

It’s going to be a while before they even get to Formala E levels of popularity, forget Formula 1, but it’s inevitable, and it’s going to be a lot of fun from an engineering standpoint.

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The East India Company business model

This article I came across on Reddit describes how colonial Britain subsidised its industrialisation:

 The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain’s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.

Ingenious. And devastating. The clear incentive was to invest Indian goods into Britain, not the colony. According to the study the article refers to, “Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938” – that is over 17 times the GDP of India and the UK today.

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“It feels fragile because of the Internet”

This blog post about using a 14-year-old PowerPC Mac Mini running 12-year-old OS X Leopard has this musing towards the end:

Something about using this feels very fragile, and not because of the machine itself, the operating system, or even the interface. It feels fragile because of the internet.

The internet has so aggressively taken over our lives that we can’t imagine a computing experience without it. And when it’s no longer there on a platform that didn’t really work properly without it, it becomes impossible to use in many ways. One has the feeling that even older operating systems won’t feel this broken in retrospect, because their experiences are otherwise separate from the internet and work without it being at the center of the experience.

I remember this period of “even older” operating systems in the 90s, of coaxing my Pentium desktop PC to run Red Hat Linux 5 and work on it for a whole day – tinkering, programming, writing, simple gaming – without connecting to the internet, or for that matter without any part of the OS being internet-first. I’d “go online” by dialling the modem via a shell script, look up what I wanted to all at once, then disconnect. The internet was like a trip to the library instead of being the environment itself. No chat client ran perennially, no mail client polled for new email. No iCloud Drive synchronised silently with the Cloud (the term didn’t exist then) in the background.

It wasn’t necessarily a better or worse time, just that it definitely was different.

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My 2018 talk on crypto tokens is now online

This was before the 2018 crypto winter, when ICOs were still being launched every week for projects that hadn’t even gotten of the ground (many of the high-profile ones still haven’t, in mid 2019), and ads still ran for tokens that guaranteed returns. I described what made it more likely that a token-based project would be successful.

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Libra makes P2P exchange of securities possible

This article brings up some great points about Facebook’s Libra that I have also been thinking about.

That since the underlying basket includes short term securities, that Libra is also a security, not a currency as FB describes it. It behaves more like a (stable) ETF, and so a transfer is a buy/sell transaction that should attract (minsicule) capital gains.

Using securities as a means of exchange is quite existing. My colleagues and I in the fin-tech space have often discussed idly how it would be useful to simply transfer mutual fund, ETF or stock units from one to another, P2P, instead of via an exchange. Transferring liquid fund units is as close to making fiat payments as possible – bypass the bank account altogether.

Perhaps this is what banks and the US Congress should be worried about. Not that Libra as a currency will supplant the dollar. It won’t be a unit of account since it’s backed by fiat instruments and measures is stability by such. But that it makes P2P buying and selling of securities possible, keeping large amounts of capital outside of the banking system.

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Raspberry Pis as low-footprint single-purpose machines

I’m excited about the new, more powerful Raspberry Pi. This Hacker News thread describes several interesting hardware projects that the people have used the Pi for. And the Raspberry Pi website positions the new, more powerful Pi 4 as a Linux desktop machine.

I’m interested in its use as a low-power, low-footprint single-purpose machine, and having a few of them across the house.

For instance I have a privacy-focused Pi that’s physically tied to my router and serves as a network-wide ad- and tracker- blocker via pi-hole. It also runs cloudflared to encrypt my DNS lookups over HTTPS. I’m also setting it up as an OpenVPN server.

Another one is about to enter service as a XBMC/Kodi machine for movies and TV shows. This lives behind the TV. I’m also considering a third to serve as a Time Machine via netatalk and general-purpose backup machine via Syncthing. This will probably be behind my desk.

Taken together they’ll draw less power and run quieter than a desktop machine that does everything, and will be near-invisible too. It’s a new class of personal computer.

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On declaring your social media presence in a visa application

Someone asked me my opinion on US visa applications now asking for social media handles:

“It’s complicated, and a lot depends on execution and timely review.

If there were a 9/11 style attack planned in the future, you can be sure the attackers would have some evidence of their ideologies on their public social media.

Similarly if you’re looking for a long-term visa but have an publicly anti-american philosophy, you’re probably going to be more trouble than it’s worth. There are probably other cases not obvious to us.

  • But the potential for misuse is vast. The system is opaque to the applicant and there is little/no way to appeal:
  • You could be prevented from traveling to participate in a protest if you have publicly written about it
  • Or from speaking at a conference on a topic the current administration does not encourage (climate change?) if it’s found you’re a better-known person in the community than is commonly known
  • Or you could be a victim of insensitivity about cultures. I can easily imagine someone who publicly posts ayats about life/temperance from the Quran, maybe typing in nastaliq, that to the average low-pay ICE employee look like extremist ideology even after translation
  • Similarly, if you’re a rockets/space enthusiast and post your photos of PSLV/GSLV launches because you’ve travelled there to watch the lift-off, you could be mistaken for a dangerous nutjob
  • Worse still is that lack of a social media presence (I don’t have Facebook or Instagram accounts) could be grounds for rejection. There have been cases of people who have wiped their phones because they did not want to hand over their passwords and their photos at the US border, who were detained for hours and pressured to hand everything over. There are tools made just for this and they invite more trouble than they solve.

It’s conceivable that there are regular review processes within the Homeland Security department for rejections, but the broader the review is (ie public) the better it will be. I certainly know that the DHS has incredibly powerful tools at its disposal, including Palantir.

But because I don’t know anything about the actual technologies and review policies, I don’t have a position on this.

  • ps:
    • The most common argument in favour of these is that if you don’t have anything to hide why do you have anything to fear. This is easily refutable: because I don’t know how you will judge me. My browsing history, my credit card purchases, my salary, my movements around the city on a given day – they’re all secret because there are real world consequences to people around me – my employer, my friends, the police – and in this case the DHS – knowing about them even if I have not broken laws.”
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    Owning your data, offline

    Google’s services including Gmail, Drive etc went down for over 4 hours. I did not even know about this until now, nearly 24 hours after the incident; most of my documents are available offline, including email. Which made me articulate what I have long realised:

    This incident should be a wakeup call for owning your data and certainly having offline access to it. If you can’t even ‘reach’ your data because it’s in the Cloud, having perfect sync between all your devices does not mean much. Even if it’s a rare event – what if you need your own information right then?

    The other risk of having all your data on the Cloud without a pure-offline copy (such that files are first-class citizen – offline google docs files that need the docs.google.com Chrome client or app to open, do not count) is that you could be locked out of your own account. The journalist Mat Honan had his accounts broken into and held hostage/wiped out in 2012. Even if you’re not digitally attacked, it’s easy to be locked out.

    Maybe it’s worth giving up cross-device syncing and moving to a single-device setup like Jason Fried of Basecamp all the way back in 2010. He does not have a work computer and a home computer:

    > One powerful, portable, fast, machine with a high-rez screen and a clean desktop. I don’t really believe in dreams when it comes to hardware. These are the tools you use to do your job – you should have the best you can afford.

    If you must have multiple machines, sync them peer-to-peer using something like Resilio Sync, or its open source alternative SyncThing, both based on BitTorrent. Back up using Time Machine (if you’ve got Macs) or if you are even slightly technically inclined, via unidirectional rsync to an external hard drive connected to your machine.

    Above all, keep your data in open formats. Using a single backed up machine is no use if all your files live in, say, Evernote or OneNote. Can your files be read natively by open-source equivalents? Can they be _conveniently_ exported in bulk? There is no shortage of open formats for multiple types of data: CalDAV, CardDAV, Markdown, ogg, mobi, PDF, mbox – even Microsoft Office is a mostly known format. Do you store your data in a simple folder-tree structure instead of in a proprietary library – your photos may all be PNG but they may be in Apple Photos’ binary library format.

    You’ll give up the glamour and some ease of cloud-based, real-time collaborative, unstructured write-anywhere apps, but what you’ll gain is a lot more valuable – the ability to have anytime anywhere access to your own data, for years on end, worry-free. No one will be able to force you to continue using their software, pay a subscription, lock you out from your own files, leak them in a security breach, or ‘go down’ in an outage.

    When it comes to your files, your memories, your life, sticking to the basics is a good idea.

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    Email Newsletters I like

    As someone who has never really gotten used to an algorithmic feed (not on Facebook or Instagram or Flipboard or Pocket; rarely on Twitter; never logged in to Google or Chrome), I’ve always liked my RSS feed of blogs and sites, now grown and pruned over nearly fifteen years, and, over the past five or so years, email newsletters.

    Newsletters and RSS feeds are great for Sunday-afternoon browsing and bookmarking to Instapaper, and I will then (hope to) read them over the week on the iPad, or on the Kindle, where my Instapaper account sends a daily digest. What a fantastic toolset of apps and devices we have.

    Here are some of my favourite newsletters:

    Tech

    Exponential View (Azeem Azhar; weekly): a “Weekly Wondermissive [on] Future, Tech & Society”. Lots of focus on AI and cleantech.

    1confirmation (fortnightly): a fund’s newsletter. Blockchain and allied topics

    VeradiVerdict (Paul Veradittakit; weekly): Blockchain and allied topics)

    a16z monthly (Andreessen Horowitz; monthly): the fund’s newsletter. Broad range of software topics


    The Amazon Chronicles (Tim Carmody; weekly): All things Amazon. Currrently on hiatus because of Tim’s shoulder problems.

    Charged (Owen Williams; weekly): consumer tech

    Business

    Morning Brew (daily)

    CB Insights (Anand Samwal and others; daily)

    NonTech

    The Newsbury (fellow IIMK alumna Binal Doshi; weekdays): a fantastic roundup of India happenings.

    Recomendo (Kevin Kelly and others; weekly): “6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff”

    NextDraft (Dave Pell): “The day’s moste fascinating news”

    Roden Explorers (Craig Mod; occasional): personal explorations; topicless