Month: August 2020

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RG.org

Making it Happen

This spoke to me. Derek Sivers on Making It Happen:

When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”

Someone else did it. You didn’t.

They fought the resistance. You gave in to distractions.

They made it top priority. You said you’d get to it some day.

They took the time. You meant to.

When this happens, you can take it two ways:

You could let that part of you give up. “Oh well. Now I don’t need to make that anymore.”

Or you could do something about that jealous pain. Shut off your phone, kill the distractions, make it top priority, and spend the time.

It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort. 

In a small way, I made this transition from comfort to discomfort when I restarted regularly publishing on this site in December last year. But it’s another thing when someone who is clearly successful, like Sivers is, articulates it so plainly.

Categories
Data Custody Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto

Use cases for real world crypto

This bit an interview with the founder of the ecommerce checkout system Fast:

Most of what people have predicted with cryptocurrency hasn’t happened. They’ve identified the right problems – payments need to be easier, identification needs to be better, we need to remove friction – but cryptocurrency isn’t the right technology for that. Part of the reason is the solution needs to be formed within the sphere of existing regulations and government identification.

It’s a strikingly different take and it’s articulated clearly what I have felt for so long. Blockchain-based alternatives to existing regulated use cases will have to fight a series of uphill battles to get traction. With regulators and governments, as the founder Allison points out. With entrenched interests and incumbents, and their vendors/suppliers. And with customers, who’re used to known processes and norms.

This is why tokenized real estate offered as investment has not taken off. Ditto with tokenized financial instruments such as ETFs. Or KYC on-the-blockchain. Or why Facebook’s Libra is highly unlikely to make it in its original avataar. All are great ideas, but there are too many entities that militate against them.

However. There are other problems that have no good solution today. Online trust is a problem that, as Facebook’s story has shown, is far too valuable to place in the hands of a single entity. Just yesterday we saw how in the news media, new institutions may emerge that become custodians of online reputation. Of brokering trustless relationships between source and publisher, between producer and writer.

DLT is also uniquely suited to solve issues with non-repudiation. Some weeks ago a consultant had reached out asking about a potential blockhain-based solution to problems of data access within a client company. It turned out that the problem was one of non-repudiation, and I suggested a fairly simple framework around an existing workflow that could have used either private or public blockchain (explaining the pros and cons of each). It was simple precisely because non-repudiation is inherent to DLT.

I also see provenance, or similar problems in supply chains, as an opportunity where the value of DLT hasn’t yet been captured by an company. This is not for lack of trying; it’s just very hard for all participants in a supply chain to sign up for it, both technically and because it disrupts special interests. It’s likely it’ll take off in a relatively self-contained subsection of a supply chain, and expand from there outwards. Perhaps it’ll even be this trial that the port of Rotterdam recently kicked off.

DLT – real world crypto – is a paradigm shift in the truest sense of that overused term. For instance solutions to the problem of online identity have so far tried to create improved versions of physical-world implementations, but because DLT makes possible trustless transactions, if obviates the need for verifiable identity itself for many use cases.

The killer app for Blockchain isn’t going to be an app that has killed before.

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Real-World Crypto

From trust in institutions to trust in individuals – Part 2

(Part 1)

Like we saw in the series on Linear Commerce and communities, we are in the early stages of emergence of thousands of people, each a trusted source in their niche area of interest. When this comes to news, we’re going to see the golden era of independent journalism, where the person, not the institution, is the brand, is where trust resides.

The problem with this is one of longevity. Simply: institutions outlive individuals.

The person who you end up trusting for information and insight into an area that matters to you could take a break, come down with illness, retire or pass away. They are the brand. The trust you repose in that brand isn’t transferable, even to the staff they work with.

A small example of this is Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles newsletter. It was ambitious, and it delivered. His introduction:

There’s no shortage of good Amazon stories, and good Amazon coverage… I think stories like this are just as important and just as interesting (more so, actually) as the latest on Jeff Bezos’s sex life or speculation about Amazon’s earnings and stock price. I like stories that help me see how a company like Amazon, with its tangled web of services and products, entwines itself into our lives, both consumer and commercial… But who is going to gather stories like these and help put them into context? Who, really, is able to take the time to get the big picture when it comes to what’s intermittently the biggest and most influential company in the world?

Also—it’s been a while, so I’ll forgive you if you don’t remember—I was a damned good Amazon reporter. At Wired and The Verge, I wrote stories about Amazon, its reach, and its ambition before it was clear to everyone that Amazon was going to be AMAZON. I’m proud of those stories. It was my favorite beat. I missed it, and wanted to find a way to cover it again.

– Statement of Purpose

The less than two dozen posts between Jan and August 2019 were each some of the best writing I have read on the matter.

But sometime last year, Tim underwent a shoulder replacement surgery and put the newsletter “on hiatus”. He brought it back for a couple more months later in the year, but the last post on was 1st August. He also seems to be off social media so the status of the newsletter is unclear.

This would be different if it were set up and run as a media operation. There’d be other cons, for sure, and perhaps Tim himself wouldn’t have liked to run it as one. But it would be about more than one person, with some provisions for continuity.

Institutions vs individuals also reminds me of the book Sapiens, which in one chapter discusses how humans’ ability to think in the abstract as a group meant they could create virtual entities vastly more powerful than themselves. As this review states:

Yuval uses the example of Peugeot, a limited liability corporation intersubjective. You could kill every employee and stakeholder in Peugeot, but the corporate entity would still exist. The building isn’t Peugeot — it can move offices. Peugeot could make planes rather than cars, so it isn’t what they do that defines them. The only thing that makes Peugeot Peugeot is everyone’s agreement that Peugeot exists, duly noted in the papers of some lawyer.

Yuval also goes on to state how a judge could decree Peugeot disbanded and the company would cease to exist, despite the factory, employees, supply chain exactly as they were before the judgement. The point is that institutions aren’t subject to human limitations: they can’t fall physically sick, there are no physical constraints on their growth, no natural caps on their lifespans.

I think that the shift of trust from institutions to individuals, while real, welcome and exciting, is a pendulum that’ll soon swing back towards institutions, although of a different kind. It may be that some of these new institutions are custodians of reputations of individual publishers, of social norms that define reputation. That trust may reside on a distributed ledger; those social norms codified in a contract. Other institutions that solve the problem of discovery of online publishers may emerge. Their mechanisms of discovery too may be published on blockchains. Still others will broker trustless cooperation between these tens of thousands (more?) of independent publishers – again using DLT.

This is going to be fascinating to watch.

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation

From trust in institutions to trust in individuals – Part 1

It’s worth writing about this single question and its answer from an interview with Casey Newton, a writer for the online publication the Verge, and who also runs his own newsletter (that I am subscribed to).

The question itself frames the problem well:

People often say that “people who can tell stories rule the world”. It seems to me that we’re at one of those historical inflection points where the ability to speak convincingly about what is going on and how we ought to feel about it are shifting towards an entirely new kind of competency and expertise on the part of the storyteller. The world (including the tech world we live in) is getting super complex!  So on the one hand, this compounding complexity makes it harder for journalists, PR people, salespeople, storytellers of all kinds, to actually have a complete understanding of what they’re talking about. But on the other hand, that very same complexity gives their stories more power: people need a narrative; they need explanations that make sense to them…

The writer Casey answers well too. Some excerpts:

I think it’s been hard on average citizens and news consumers. There is much more high-quality information available to them at their fingertips, often for free, than there ever has been before. But there’s also an incalculable amount of bullshit all around them — much of it being pushed by those influencers and content marketers and PR people. There are now six PR people for every working journalist in the United States, by the way, and it feels like most of them are in my inbox daily.

The rise of content marketers and influencers have given [founders] friendly new channels to promote their work — ones that won’t ask the more difficult questions that journalists will. 

A weird phenomenon in our current era is that while trust in institutions is generally declining, trust in individuals is increasing. A journalist can become of those trusted individuals — either by gaining access to a big platform perch (anchoring a CNN show, say) or by developing deep expertise on a subject of growing importance. Either way, there are new ways to win now.

See also: the series we did on 21st Century Media.

(Part 2 – what about long-term trust?)

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The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Feedback and motivation, app edition – Part 2

(Part 1)

Another app I use in my routine that makes good use of feedback for motivation is Apple Books (formerly iBooks).

You can set a daily reading goal – I’ve set it to twenty minutes, even though I will get a little more done every day. The app then tracks this as you read over the day, and sends you a notification when you’re hit it.

The app then logs streaks for the number of days that you’ve hit this goal. You can see this in the large screenshot at the top. For me, streaks are highly motivating [1]

Books also syncs daily reading across iOS devices. I could read in the balcony on my iPad, pace around reading on my iPhone when I’m winding down, and both will count towards a single reading goal. I’ll get the achievement notification on whatever device I happen to be using at the time.

Finally, you can also set a goal for the number of books you’d like to read in a year, and as you finish a book the app will add the cover to a virtual bookshelf. You can see this at the bottom of the large screenshot. While it’s certainly one way to get me to read more books on Apple Books than any other, it’s never going to cover all the books I read – some will be paper books, others audiobooks. I will, though, read books that I have bought on the Amazon Kindle bookstore in Apple Books (deDRM + Calibre) – to re-iterate, this is for books I’ve paid for.

These simple mechanisms promote good habits in a lightweight, low-stakes way. It’s a refreshing contrast to the dark patterns common throughout the internet.

[1] That works two ways. Because I find streaks a good motivator, I also find negative feedback, especially guilt, highly off-putting. A big reason I gave up learning a language on Duolingo was because it was highly streak-oriented, which was great, but if you missed a streak the app would surface icons and text stating how I’d made the Duolingo bird sad. For me, positivity works, negativity not at all.

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Data Custody Product Management The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Feedback and motivation, app edition – Part 1

We saw yesterday that I moved my Fitbit app to the home screen. This placement of the app is solely for me to log my water intake, available as a home screen quick action:

I have ended up using this despite me creating my own iOS Shortcut. Even though my shortcut is easy to launch, offers a menu of sizes instead of having to type an amount, and stores my intake and timestamp in an open plaintext format. This was puzzling to me.

When I reflected on this, I understood that the Ftibit app gave me a view of my progress towards the day’s goal (which I had set), and compared it with previous days’. My Shortcut logged data with less friction, but I have yet to build in any feedback about the day’s total intake.

That little gap, that failure to close the loop – led me to unconsciously gravitate towards something less elegant and more time-consuming. There’s a little bit of the Hooked framework at play here:

Trigger, Action and Investment are self-explanatory in this context. The reward here is not variable in the way checking for new email and for Instagram likes is, but it’s good to know how close I am to my daily intake goal – I’ve forgotten from the last time I logged my water intake and checked.

Understanding this has helped me be aware of how much I’m influenced by such signals. I’ll be more deliberate in building these into systems I create for myself, and to watch out for such patterns in systems I interact with, beyond obvious ones like badgers and notifications.

(Part 2 – another app in my routine that incorporates feedback and motivation)

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The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, August 2020

What’s changed this month over July:

  • I’ve begun using the Drafts app to quickly capture text. It’s been on my radar for years now. I love their tagline Where Text Starts, and I see now how the design’s been optimised to quickly capture and then process text. At this time I don’t need the Pro version, which has a subscription. In fact, I am going to explore using Copied as a replacement for Drafts. Copied is a clipboard manager on the iPhone, iPad and the Mac that I already extensively use many times a day, but only to clip text and images from reader apps and Safari, not yet to create new notes. So my use of Drafts may not be that long-lived.
  • Speaking of Safari, my move to Firefox on iOS was short-lived. The app is simply not as frictionless as Safari at little things, including opening a new tab and sharing web pages. The deal-breaker: some of my Shortcuts expect Safari Web Pages as input, as opposed to just URLs, so they break in Firefox. This is not Firefox’s fault, but that is the way iOS is.
  • I’ve begun relying more on Microsoft’s Todo app to manage different non-day-job projects I’m working on, as well as to remind myself of maintenance tasks around the house. It’s made it to my dock.
  • Finally, in its place on my home screen is the Fitbit app. We’ve seen me talk more about my use of the wearable lately, as I use it more regularly. However, the placement of the app is for me to log my water intake, available as a home screen quick action.

Categories
The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Wind-down

On the website Morning Routines, I found the evening wind-down routine of Arianna Huffington most interesting

First, I turn off all my electronic devices and gently escort them out of my bedroom. Then, I take a hot bath with epsom salts and a candle flickering nearby; a bath that I prolong if I’m feeling anxious or worried about something. I don’t sleep in my workout clothes as I used to (think of the mixed message that sends to our brains) but have pajamas, nightdresses, and even T-shirts dedicated to sleep. Sometimes I have a cup of chamomile or lavender tea if I want something warm and comforting before going to bed. I love reading real, physical books, especially poetry, novels, and books that have nothing to do with work.

We’ve seen me use the Fitbit wearable to track a baseline level of activity while home-bound, and how getting adequate, quality sleep is a part of that. The piece above interested me because I’ve found that deliberately designing my activities prior to turning in have an effect on the quality of sleep – specifically, how often I awaken at night where I’m conscious.

You can see in the comparison between these two sleep graphs that the upper one has extremely short periods of wakefulness, not enough for me to remember them; the lower one has larger gaps.

It’s probably too much to optimise beyond a certain point what activities in what order have the most beneficial effect (controlling for bedtime, the evening meal and what kind of workday I have had), but the following seems to help:

  • Twenty minutes of browsing low-stimulation subreddits
  • Twenty minutes reading whatever book I’m on, on the iPad, where you can set a daily reading goal. I do this while pacing up and down, which is approximately 1500 steps and me wind down. Night Shift on the iPad is on and set to full, and the room has low-brightness warm lighting
  • Twenty minutes of solitude
  • Before any of these, I down a cup of chamomile tea. I’m a skeptic and remain so at the time of this writing, but I’m giving it a try because the US National Institute of Health published this 2010 review of the effect of the herb on, among other things, sleep:

Chamomile is widely regarded as a mild tranquillizer and sleep-inducer. Sedative effects may be due to the flavonoid, apigenin that binds to benzodiazepine receptors in the brain (68). Studies in preclinical models have shown anticonvulsant and CNS depressant effects respectively… Compounds, other than apigenin, present in extracts of chamomile can also bind BDZ and GABA receptors in the brain and might be responsible for some sedative effect; however, many of these compounds are as yet unidentified.

The whole thing takes an hour, but with it is contained my daily reddit and book reading, and a significant part of my step goal. With the benefit of good sleep and a refreshed start to the following morning, the return on that hour might be one of the highest in my day.

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality

Yet another smart device rendered useless

More news about an Internet-connected hardware product being rendered unusable as a result of a business decision: “Canadian smart glasses going ‘offline’ weeks after company bought by Google“

North said Focals 1.0, its first generation of smart glasses released last year, will be discontinued. The wearables company also said it has cancelled any plans to ship its second-generation Focals 2.0.

“Focals smart glasses and its services are being discontinued and will no longer be available after July 31, 2020. You won’t be able to connect your glasses through the app or use any features, abilities, or experiments from your glasses,” the statement read.

As of Saturday, users will no longer be able to log into the Focals app and its support services will be discontinued. The app will also be removed from Google Play and the Apple App Store.

We have seen many examples of this happening before: “Smart devices are services, not products”, “More on the inherent temporariness of internet-connected devices“.

If your device or appliance requires an Internet connection to the manufacturer to function, it’s a big risk. Be very conscious of this when you make purchases. Consider devices that work with the open source home automation framework OpenHAB, as an alternative and invest the time needed to make it work – it’s not an out of the box experience but now you alone get to decide how long your device lasts.

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Uncategorized

An identity of one’s own

In my opinion, the most important bit from this article “I quit my job at the start of the pandemic to launch a company. Here’s what I’ve learned in the first 90 days.‘

You are most powerful when your identity is tied to your own name.

You know when you’re at a party, and someone asks you, “So, what do you do?” And then you respond with your most impressive identity. Like most people, my identity was always wrapped around something external. I was a “student,” a “college newspaper editor,” and later, a “journalist.”

And for the last five years, “Polina Marinova, writer and editor at Fortune magazine” sounded pretty damn good. But I wasn’t in control of that identity. If I ever got fired, there goes my entire self-worth — and losing that is a recipe for psychological disaster. The best thing I did for myself is start The Profile in 2017 because it gave me another identity — one that allowed me to be 100% myself.

Start a newsletter, a passion project, or a new venture that lets you tie your identity to something that actually matters — your own name. Nothing is more liberating.

While we have talked before about owning your identity, this goes hand in hand – an identity that is one’s own.