Month: May 2020

The Indian government’s location-based coronavirus contact-tracing app has been used to identify potential future hotspots:

“The Aarogya Setu App alerted the government about more than 650 hotspots across the country and over 300 emerging hotspots which could have been missed otherwise. It gives accurate forecast of hotspots and it is also preventing the origin of newer hotspots. The engine has generated incredible insights and impact with precise projections of locality, direction and velocity of the spread of infection,”

Very encouraging. The NITI CEO also claims the app has seen extensive adoption, although nowhere close to universal, unrealistic in India:

69 million people have taken the self-assessment test, an adoption rate of more than 71 per cent, out of which, over 3.4 million people have self-declared themselves as unwell since they were showing one or more than three symptoms. 

Incidentally, the ‘security issues‘ that an ethical hacker claims to have uncovered in the app should in fact be a feature in the app. He was able to set his location to an arbitrary point in India and, like any person who was actually at that location, retrieve an aggregate count of people unwell and infected in a radius around that point. Both out of curiosity as well as concern for my friend and (potentially elderly) family, I’d like to look up stats for locations other than my own.

Years ago, Larry Tesler, then a vice president of Apple, argued that the total complexity of a system is a constant: as you make the person’s interaction simpler, the hidden complexity behind the scenes increases. Make one part of the system simpler, said Tesler, and the rest of the system gets more complex. This principle is known today as “Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity.” Tesler described it as a tradeoff: making things easier for the user means making it more difficult for the designer or engineer.”

– Don Norman, Living with Complexity, quoted in this blog post.

The recent mass adoption of video-calling has reminded people of David Foster Wallace’s otherworldly tale of “videophony” in the then-near-future in the book Infinite Jest. This is from Jason Kottke’s blog post referencing the book when FaceTime was announced:

… even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.

[…] Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed.

My favourite part is in the continuation of this, when people moved to wearing “form-fitting polybutylene-resin masks” in order to improve how they found themselves looking on video phone calls, but which then had unintended consequences:

“consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person”

so much so that

“enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers’ phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup.”

which led to the abandonment of masks altogether in favour of

“”…a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number, the photo’s face focused attentively in the direction of the video-phonic camera from amid the sumptuous but not ostentatious appointments of the sort of room that best reflected the image of yourself you wanted to transmit”

which eventually led to some people returning back to audio-only telephony, only now as a “status-symbol of anti-vanity“, a form of virtue-signalling.

DFW may have been an oddball, but he understood human nature better than most, and was able to describe it as no one else could.

I believe there are two ways to spend the occasional moments of down time during the day.

1. You can do something that will “slow down” time and creates a restful pause.

2. You can do something that will speed time up. Something that gets you lost into a black hole where you emerge on the other side not knowing how long you were out of it.

Shawn Blanc describes, simply, his deliberation in spending the extra time he finds at home during the shelter-in-place.

Whether out of boredom or avoidance, many of us indulge in time-sinks. As Shawn describes, we can lose hours, even the major part of a day watching streaming shows or scrolling endlessly through social sites, living in a constantly distracted state. Then it becomes a habit, and one’s default state of awakeness.

This makes for two problems.

One, the mind does its best to bring reality into our consciousness. If you’re distracting yourself from being bored, occasionally you might find your mind suddenly blank, or suddenly aware of a hole. If you’re avoiding, it might emerge as a vague recurring thought during the day or in some garbled form in a dream/nightmare. Either way, it’s not something you can will away.

Two, the constant low-effort entertainment strengthens reward pathways in your brain, leading to what is essentially an addiction. This is well-known by now:

But it also means that your brain will find it difficult to focus, whether at work or during a conversation. Your lowered self-control will make it that much more difficult to, say, resist over-indulging in food or drink. This is hard to reverse because the deliberation that will be needed itself requires attention.

Excluding the case of people who distract themselves to avoid facing trauma, we will have to learn/re-learn being okay again with the passing of time one second every second, not worm-holing our way through our days. Our very quality of life depends on it.

From George Gilder’s ‘Life After Google’, about Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion hedge fund:

With more than $65 billion currently under management, Mercer’s team relies on racks of Renaissance workstations linked to form supercomputers. They parse immense Markov chains of ordered data to find filigree “ghosts” of tradable correlation. Like Google’s PageRank and its Deep Learning successes with language translation and games, like IBM’s earlier speech-recognition breakthroughs, and like “Watson,” IBM’s supercomputing master of Jeopardy searches and chess strategies, it is founded on ever-faster processing of pure statistics from ever-larger databases.

As James Simons explained in a speech in 1999, “Efficient market theory is correct in that there are no gross inefficiencies. But we look at anomalies that may be small in size and brief in time. . .. We’re always in and out and out and in. So were dependent on [intense] activity to make money.’!! Their strategy is based on round-the-clock processing of terabytes of data in search of correlations that yield profit opportunities. “Some of the signals that we have been trading on without interruption for fifteen years make no ‘sense. Otherwise someone else would have found them,’ Mercer acknowledges. “But there is no question from a statistical point of view that they work”

What’s notable about this is that the fund algorithms were created and are tuned by people with no financial or trading background:

Relying on its world-leading complement of mathematicians and physicists, Renaissance “avoids hiring anyone with even the slightest whiff of Wall Street bona fides,”… Instead, it takes in vast troves of information [which] enables the Markovian system to ignore human intentions and purposes.

Contrast with this take from January 2020 on about algorithmic trading having driven down the ‘alpha’ from value investing down to nearly zero, leaving growth investing to lead returns.

The problem with tools such as Notion is that

Judged as a standalone tool, e.g. a project backlog, Notion is simply not well designed for that task. It’s almost undesigned due to its forced genericness. Everything is a compromise. Everything becomes its lowest common denominator. Nothing has purpose or is easy to scan visually. Being generic forces generic design onto everything.

– Notion encourages busywork and I’m tired of it

Notion takes the idea of general-purpose tool to the extreme. Evernote, with which it is frequently compared, is a note-capture and search tool. As is Microsoft’s OneNote. Mediawiki and other wikis are shared document management systems. Asana is primarily a task-management tool. All of them optimise for a particular primary use case – they’re great at that one job and substandard at others.

And that is the problem with general-purpose tools. They are better than substandard at many use cases, but just not good enough for any. You have to mangle your own management layer atop it. Twenty years ago, Excel was such a tool. You could use it as a business ledger. Or a task management service. Or a CRM. Or a sales commission calculator. It required you to massage it to get it to serve each of those functions and it still wouldn’t make you happy compared to a well-designed single-purpose tool.

What I like about information management frameworks like PARA is that you can use all your favourite single-purpose tools – simply replicate the same management structure inside each of them. This screenshot from the PARA creator’s website describes it:

End note: reading about these do-everything tools always reminds me of Alex Payne’s timeless ‘Rules for Computing Happiness’. Among them:

Use as little software as possible.

Use software that does one thing well.

Do not use software that does many things poorly.

A longform exploration of new startups for a new online audience built around new interpretations and packaging of an old, in fact the oldest information format: text. Here is part of the introduction:

The text renaissance is an actual renaissance. It’s a story of history-inspired renewal in a very fundamental way: exciting recent developments are due in part to a new generation of young product visionaries circling back to the early history of digital text, rediscovering old, abandoned ideas, and reimagining the bleeding edge in terms of the unexplored adjacent possible of the 80s and 90s.

This will take you at least thirty minutes to consume well, and longer to digest.

I am thrilled of course by the renewed interest in and innovation around text for its inherent archivability, portability and exportability – given my support of open data formats and data ownership.

Although the writer does not explore memexes, I’m intrigued by new services like Notion that are text-oriented but not limited to text. Should they also count as part of the renaissance.

I came across the Twitter Collections iOS app Charm a couple of weeks ago. Think of Collections as multiple Bookmarks lists, so Charm is a great way of bookmarking tweets for different interest areas/themes.

Charm hasn’t been updated since 2016. The creator used to work at Twitter, but made clear that it was a hobby. So the app hasn’t been optimised for post-iPhone-X resolutions, and the iPad display is a stretched-out iPhone app.

But it works. It was well-designed when it was created. It has charming artwork, extensive support for Collections including rearranging tweets. I love it.

More than anything, the creator has not implemented their own authentication, user management, storage, encryption – it’s all built around Twitter. You log in using Twitter, you create, save Collections straight to Twitter. There are no custom extensions to Collections. And Apple hosts and manages the app itself. Ben the creator can move on, even outright abandon the project but Charm will run as long as Twitter supports Collections and Apple supports the iTunes App Store. This is similar to yesterday’s app Nomie that relies on Blockstack’s authentication and storage.