Living deliberately is making an active choice in how to spend one’s time – and, over weeks, months and years – one’s life… Fewer hours just slip by. Days begin to look different. Milestones emerge. Memories form. A narrative forms about how we spent October or November. Time crystallises, no longer disappearing through a sieve.
This year – and who knows how much longer – a combination of less structured days and ubiquitous entertainment from our devices means it’s easy to fill up time outside of our commitments via endless consumption. It’s not just easy, it’s the default way we’ll spend our time.
This year the severe curtailing of face-to-face meetings outdoors means that we’ve moved to messaging to keep in touch. With all of its upsides, messaging with a bunch of people all days takes – all day. It’s less efficient than a conversation, it means day-long interruptions via notifications, and unlike a catch-up, has no defined beginning and end.
Added to this, we have an abundance of apps that have been designed to hold our attention: notifications, pull to refresh, gamification with streaks, guilting through use of language, ‘smart’ defaults like auto-loading the next episode, and a myriad of others. It’s hard to say no. The minutes and hours add up: go to either iOS’s Screen Time or Android’s Digital Wellbeing Dashboard to see how long you spend on your devices, and how often you pick them up.
Further layer on top of this the end of any boundary between work time and ‘life’ time. Despite increased flexibility for the most part, not only are we starting work early but are also less and less putting a firm end to it.
The common theme across these is the blurring of boundaries.
The entrepreneur Rajesh Jain on why he writes daily. When I discovered Rajesh’s blog in the early 2000s, he used to publish multiple posts daily. It got me into writing on my site, writing to him, and ultimately working with him for nearly half a decade.
I have reproduced three of his paragraphs as-is – editing does them no justice. Any emphasis is mine:
Writing is a way for me to organise my thinking. I have never bothered about who is reading. I write for myself. But I write publicly – as a sort of record of what I am thinking. I have never deleted or retracted any post that I have written. I have changed my views over time on many topics, but I have let the writings stay. Each post has a context – it is at a date and time. I try and be as candid in my writings as is possible. Because if I cannot be honest, then there is no point in blogging.
I write daily because it inculcates a discipline. I like the idea of short posts daily rather a long essay periodically. There is something new to look forward from me each day! And just maybe, this blog can become a utility in the lives of others – a daily habit. That is what it had become for many in the first decade of my writing.
Writing daily is a process of self-discovery. It makes me think how I should express myself. It makes me clarify my own thought process. It makes me little better each day. And I hope that process continues!
This episode about the takedown and reinstatement of the video-downloading tool youtube-dl (Part 1, Part 2) makes three things clear.
One, centralised platforms like Github are single points of failure. This is especially unfortunate on the Internet, which is decentralised from the ground-up. Maintainers of projects like youtube-dl must invest in building a censorship-resistant presence online.
Two, despite decentralization, we need organizations like the EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, the Tor Project, the Wikipedia Foundation, the Internet Archive. To that end, we must support them monetarily and, if possible, by volunteering. We must also hold them to extremely high standards of ethics and neutrality and keep them from being beholden to, or even the appearance of being beholden to, a government or a particular tech company. If they make bad strategic decisions, we must criticise – constructively. They may not be big, but they are too important to fail.
Three, we must recognise that every one of us needs to be an activist for an open Internet. Our actions and inaction have consequences. If no one had expressed their opinion on this issue online – even merely through blog/Medium posts or tweets – it’d be harder for the EFF’s efforts to have the impact that they did. Think back to other instances where Internet companies have been pressured into reversing decisions due to public opinion: the tussle between Apple and the email app Hey being the most recent one. Hey’s founders have a great many followers they could rally, but it was those followers that made the difference. The greater your online audience your capital, the greater your responsibility to be a good citizen of the Internet.
The youtube-dl takedown notice fell into a more unusual category: anticircumvention—an allegation that the code was designed to circumvent technical measures that control access or copying of copyrighted material, in violation of Section 1201 of the DMCA.
Section 1201 dates back to the late 1990s and did not anticipate the various implications it has for software use today. As a result, Section 1201 makes it illegal to use or distribute technology (including source code) that bypasses technical measures that control access or copying of copyrighted works, even if that technology can be used in a way that would not be copyright infringement. Circumvention was the core claim in the youtube-dl takedown.
Establishing that, the post then goes on to state that in their opinion, the youtube-dl project did not circumvent technical measures:
Although we did initially take the project down, we understand that just because code can be used to access copyrighted works doesn’t mean it can’t also be used to access works in non-infringing ways.
Then, after we received new information that showed the youtube-dl project does not in fact violate the DMCA‘s anticircumvention prohibitions, we concluded that the allegations did not establish a violation of the law.
This new information came through a letter sent by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s attorney [PDF] to GitHub. This is the highlight of the whole story for how well it explains what youtube-dl does and does not do. Quoting from the letter, not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the letter:
when a user requests certain YouTube videos, YouTube’s servers send a small JavaScript program to the user’s browser, embedded in the YouTube player page. That program calculates a number referred to as “sig.” That number then forms part of the Uniform Resource Locator that the user’s browser sends back to YouTube to request the actual video stream. This mechanism is completely visible to the user simply by viewing the source code of the player page. The video stream is not encrypted, and no secret knowledge is required to access the video stream… Importantly, youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies, such as Widevine, that are used by subscription video sites, such as Netflix
We presume that this “signature” code is what RIAA refers to as a “rolling cipher,” although YouTube’s JavaScript code does not contain this phrase. Regardless of what this mechanism is called, youtube-dl does not “circumvent” it as that term is defined in Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because YouTube provides the means of accessing these video streams to anyone who requests them.
To borrow an analogy from literature, travelers come upon a door that has writing in a foreign language. When translated, the writing says “say ‘friend’ and enter.” The travelers say “friend” and the door opens. As with the writing on that door, YouTube presents instructions on accessing video streams to everyone who comes asking for it.
youtube-dl does not violate Section 1201 of the DMCA because it does not “circumvent” any technical protection measures on YouTube videos.
This is wonderfully explained, and the analogy is spot-on.
I do not expect Github’s lawyers to have understood this mechanism when they first received the takedown request from the RIAA, but one would expect them to have discussed this with someone technical at GitHub, who either knew or could have asked the project about this mechanism, and this technical person and the lawyers could have determined that it did not circumvent technical measures. My guess is that in an effort to project neutrality, they did not initially take a stance one way or another. Indeed, the blog post has a short section at the beginning titled “Why did Github process this takedown in the first place?” which doesn’t really address why they went all the way to removing the youtube-dl project if they understood the issue:
As a platform, we must comply with laws—even ones that we don’t think are fair for developers. As we’ve seen, this can lead to situations where GitHub is required to remove code—even if it has a multitude of non-infringing uses—if it is in fact designed to circumvent a TPM. But this is exceedingly rare.
I think it’s the EFF’s advocacy, finally in the form of a legal document, that gave GitHub the confidence – or cover – it needed to do the right thing. That combined with the public outcry against this.
These are powerful findings from a study on the use of social media. In short, the most people interacted with others on social media, the happier they were. The more passively they scrolled, instinctively comparing themselves with others selectively-published lives, the worse they felt.
Wirtz notes that viewing other people’s posts and images while not interacting with them lends itself to comparison without the mood-boosting benefits that ordinarily follow social contact, undermining well-being and reducing self-esteem. “Passive use, scrolling through others’ posts and updates, involves little person-to-person reciprocal interaction while providing ample opportunity for upward comparison.“
The more people used any of these three social media sites, the more negative they reported feeling afterwards. “The three social network sites examined—Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—yielded remarkably convergent findings,”…
Wirtz’s study also included offline interactions with others, either face-to-face or a phone call. Comparing both offline communication with online, he was able to demonstrate that offline social interaction had precisely the opposite effect of using social media, strongly enhancing emotional well-being.
The study was conducted across ten days of social media use. I iwsh I could find what the sample size was. The freely-accessible preview of the paper (link) does not state this.
However the conclusion is clear. If you use social media to stay in touch with people, form new connections, join and try out new communities, you will find it is energising. If you use it as an endless timeline of other people doing things you are not, it’s not hard to see that the experience would leach happiness from you.
I’ve always kept in touch with many friends over messaging apps and email. Anonymous interactions on my Reddit communities have been mostly rich and wholesome. So while I am not on Facebook or such social networks, while I’m on relatively few online groups, and while even before the pandemic I used to meet relatively few people in person, I’ve always felt connected and energized by my social interactions.
I know centi-millionaires and billionaires who are utterly miserable. As Derek Sivers, one of my friends and podcast guests, once said, “If more information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs”… The inescapable fact that if, at best, you tolerate yourself, and more often berate, hate, or criticize yourself, how can you possibly fully engage with others, accept and love them, and find peace of mind and life? I think the answer is you can’t.
To borrow from Tarah Brach, she said to me once, “There was a wise old sage who said, ‘There’s really only one question worth considering and that is: What are you unwilling to feel?’” So I really check in, in the morning and at night. Do you wake up with a sense of foreboding and anxiety and a desire to stay in bed? When you go to bed, is it full of anxiety and worries and preoccupation about what happened, or what’s going to happen the next day? If so, that’s an issue.
A good relationship with yourself is the foundation of thriving at life. The problem almost always is that you can hardly work on cultivating an accepting relationship with someone how you treat with distaste. I dealt with this for a long time – years. I wrote to myself then
“If I treated another person like this they would not survive for even a short period of time… Finally, even meditating on this is difficult. My mind is filled with hate about the person meditating. This means that when awareness returns after my thoughts wander, instead of observing that fact and moving on, there is an eruption of castigation at the meditator’s inability to even hold their own thought.
This is when external counselling helps – it’s an intervention for both of your you-s to talk to each other.
People throw away computers every day because they’re “too slow” to run the latest version of their preferred operating system. Linux (and open source in general) is not immune to this, but I think it’s more immune than proprietary operating systems. Debian only recently dropped official support for Motorola 68K machines; that’s stuff like the Mac IIci that I bought off the clearance rack at Microcenter in 1992. The latest version of Debian still runs on my old PowerPC “G4” Apple laptop, even though the latest version of Apple’s operating system doesn’t. Commercial vendors have a vested interest in upgrading you to the latest and greatest; supporting the old stuff is unglamorous and expensive.
About operating systems,
People think Linux driver support sucks because newer hardware sometimes only works with proprietary Windows drivers. That’s true, but there’s a lot more old hardware in the world than new hardware, and Linux has superior support for older hardware because the community writes and maintains their own drivers. People throw away computer accessories every day because they upgrade their operating system and can’t find functioning drivers… I’m not saying Linux never drops support for older hardware, but the cycle is longer and the incentives are different.
He makes sound arguments about open source application software too, and we have discussed them on this site over many years. But what he ends with has stayed with me ever since:
Where my 20-year plan will most likely fail is not at the operating system or driver level, nor with the existing crop of applications. At some point we will invent an entirely new class of application, like the web browser was an entirely new class of application 20 years ago. This new class of application will naturally be targeted at the “current” hardware of the day, and nobody will bother to backport it to the hardware I have now. Chromium is actually a good example of this, only shifted a few years. It contains a dynamic JavaScript compiler (V8) which requires explicit support for each hardware architecture. There is no Chromium for PowerPC, even though it’s open source, because a central piece of the application only works on x86 and AMD64 architectures. There’s nothing stopping anyone from writing a PowerPC version of V8, but it’s unlikely to happen unless some super-genius hobbyist decides to take it on.
What worries me as much as the end of general-purpose computing for the masses is that so few seem to understand that it is ending. Many are content to use “devices” that are merely stripped-down Internet appliances masquerading as reasonable substitutes for what they have replaced. Has the word “device” been substituted for the word “computer” in an effort to erase even the memory of what we are losing? Many do not understand, because they are too young to ever have used a true general-purpose computer. They have no experience with anything but locked-down platforms–just as 96% of the generation before them knew nothing but Microsoft operating systems. To call this a tragedy is not being overly dramatic.
People find ways around oppressive practices [but] I also know that solutions can sometimes take decades to appear. Whole generations can be lost in the mean time. This is why the trend toward stripped-down, Big-Brother-controlled computers has me genuinely worried. I am not looking forward to a near-term future in which my operating system is so locked down that I cannot install the software I want. Many have already reached this future, perhaps without even having realized it.
One could imagine a worse scenario than restricting the distribution of ‘forbidden’ of binaries: the Mac is the development platform for MacOS, iOS and other Apple operating systems. The toolchain is entirely Apple’s, right down to the compiler/linker. It isn’t far-fetched at all for Apple to identify and refuse the compilation of code – that is, even if you managed to get hold of the youtube-dl source code, your Mac could refuse to turn it into an executable binary for you, even just to run on your own machine.
This is not an outlandish scenario. There have been countless examples of Apple taking software off its App Stores. But Apple has also revoked developer certificates for iOS before, most famously with Facebook. It is not hard to imagine Apple taking this one step further to disallow compilation of what it considers disallowed code.
The two big distinctions between an operating system for a ‘personal computer’ like a desktop or laptop, and one for a phone or tablet are (a) the ability to run arbitrary software on the machine and (b) the ability to build software for the machine on the machine. The freedom to do either on Big Sur for Apple Silicon is severely constrained.
2. The operating system is controlled
The bootloader on Apple Silicon machines will be locked. This means that they will not support booting into other operating systems like Linux.
The Verge also referenced the same section of the podcast in the specific context of Apple’s BootCamp service with which people could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS on Intel Macs:
Apple later confirmed it’s not planning to support Boot Camp on ARM-based Macs in a Daring Fireball podcast. “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.”
Of course I’d like to see a clear statement from Apple than a comment in a podcast, even if it was Federighi who made it.
But this means you also don’t have the option to use just the Mac hardware and install your own software, as people do with Linux (and Windows) on their Macs today. In other words, you cannot install an open source operating system with an open source toolchain to compile and run open-source software on the M1 Macs.
3. The architecture is controlled
The M1 (and all of Apple’s system-on-chips) are not licensed. This means only Apple can manufacture them, and consequently the only machines that can have M1 chips are Apple Macs.
This is as opposed to the thousands of different laptops, desktops, tablets, two-in-ones and other machines that run on x86 and x86_64. Intel, AMD, VIA and other companies typically only manufacture the processor, not entire system-on-chips. So you have computers with different processors, graphics cards, RAM and input-output capability, with different BIOS/UEFIs with support for different bootloaders and, therefore, different operating systems – even more than one on the same computer.
But so in the Apple world there’s no concept of buying an ‘alternative’ M1 machine with an unlocked bootloader so you can install Linux or BSD or another open OS on it.
The lock-down is utter and total.
Summing up
So. MacOS on the Apple M1 Mac computers severely limits what software you can run on it. The locked bootloader prevents the installation of anything other than MacOS. And the proprietary nature of the chip prevents the existence of any alternative M1 computers without locked bootloaders.
For most people – Apple’s customers – these restrictions are all a net positive. They make their computer safer. Developers that make software for ordinary people now have to jump through some additional hoops, but that is in order to make things difficult for malware creators.
But for those who value openness and want control over their software, the M1 machines are closed at every layer of the stack. Look for alternatives.
Update: Point 2 may have changed. Here’s a Reddit discussion that points to a WWDC 2020 video stating that non-signed operating systems can be made to run on M1 Macs. I’m speaking to people to understand this better. If this is true, it also makes Point 3 moot, though not untrue.
