Categories
Discovery and Curation

Vicariousness requires the everyman

Does photography as a tourist takes way from the moment? Sure, but

I love capturing the little moments of daily life that happen at street level as I’m wandering around a city, whether it’s a new one an ocean away or my own neighborhood in San Francisco. These are very different from the photos of the Eiffel Tower that every visitor to Paris has somewhere in their phone camera, different from the ones you’ll find on travel guides or city government websites. You can’t easily find the pictures I want on Google Images… The only alternative is to capture them myself.

This reminded me of my own little online rabbit-hole-ing on Google Maps. For some reason, I like looking at places that are at edges, no matter where they are in the world. The most northern or southern points of a country. Borders between countries. Coasts. Foothills.

I zoom in and out, switch from vanilla view to satellite view. Having gotten my fill of the topography, I tap on Photos to sample that experience from the point of view of people, people I’ll never meet and know nothing about.

It’s not only that those are some of the only public photos from those places, but also that they’re photos from everymen and women. They’re unfocused, unfiltered, poorly framed, repeated, obscured by the photographer themself. Regardless, they’re the best – the only – expression of what it’s actually like to be there.

The Kazakh-Uzbek border. Why? Don’t ask.

I have worn out hours and whole iPhone battery cycles on these tours. They wouldn’t seem as real as they do, were it not for the casual, unthinking contributions of thousands of fellow humans.

Categories
Products and Design

Wordle and achieving intuitiveness through good design

From an Ars Technica profile of the creator of the currently popular word-guessing game Wordle. When he first put form to his idea,

Wardle realized something wasn’t right when he dumped a massive list of every possible five-letter word into the app’s random-word pool:

“It turns out that these are all valid five-letter words,” Wardle says while displaying the above image, drawing a laugh from the crowd. After testing the worst outliers in his game, he had a revelation:

When players encounter a word they’ve never heard of or used in common speech, they are left with little rational means of guessing what the next letter might be, even as grays, greens, and yellows accumulate.

“What’s fun about Wordle, I think, is what you can tease out, based on what you know about language,” Wardle says. “What the word should be.”

The design solution came thanks to Wardle’s partner “going through a tough time” and wanting a “mindless game to play.” So he turned her into a human machine-learning model by having her rank every single five-letter word in the dictionary—roughly 13,000 of them—with the following ranking system:

So – Wordle’s balance of challenge and intuitiveness is a result of deliberate design choices. One is this above, excluding unfamiliar yet legitimate words. The other is

the very particular design choice to limit it to one puzzle a day, so that everyone around the world is solving the same Wordle. A strong social facet of a game that has no intrinsic social game-play at all

– RG.org post from February 2022.
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Uncategorized

2019 is on the other side of the watershed

People being asked to return to their workplaces – as the pandemic recedes in the West and Asia – have some new perspective:

“I’m typing this from my office where I’m the only one in my suite and have been all week. More colleagues are physically present across the building but all my work is done on a computer and I have no reason to interact with them in person. It’s just the old logic that you’re not really working if you’re not in the office.

Also on Twitter

This to me is the most significant way in which work will change in the near future. It’s less about the specific technology we use for chat, calls, knowledge gathering or such. And more about what people interact with each other for.

Once companies begin thinking about these, they’ll very quickly need to deal with more fundamental inter-personal matters, about trust and autonomy, about cultural fit, about incentives. All of these will look quite different from today for a company that wants to move beyond the simple binaries or remote/local, home/office.

Finally, the “metaverse” is a term that several companies, notably Facebook, are using to describe a shared immersive space for people to work in while being physically in different places. While it’s early days, it’s telling that the idea of that shared space is, essentially, a low-fidelity replica of a typical office.

This is a snapshot from Facebook’s video from last October introducing what work could look like:

Once again from Facebook, an actual product named Horizon Workrooms.

And some photos of a product from the “virtual office” company Challau.

Having people’s avatars ‘sit’ at an office desk and look at a projected screen, stand before the boss’ table while he/she speak with them doesn’t seem to take advantage of a blank canvas, free of physical constraints. More fundamentally, these designs may reinforce the same obsolete organizational characteristics that we discussed at the beginning of this post.

I think these choices are in part a conscious choice by companies to give people a sense of familiarity as they ‘return’ to office. But it seems to me that truly distributed, global organisations will be structured fundamentally differently and use very different tools.

Decentralised autonomous organisations, or DAOs, seem an interesting experiment. Without getting too deep into their details, governance and incentives for these organizations are typically encoded in ‘smart contracts’, or in code that lives on a blockchain. Per-member rights are weighted by the number of organizational tokens each person holds – as are profits. Projects and tasks are taken up by DAO members because of the incentive of rewards associated with them, making them as close to self organizing as we can imagine today. DAOs transcend national boundaries, and (typically) by existing parallel to existing legal structures, are able to minimize administration.

Now there are cases for which DAOs are suboptimal, or are much too unweildy to operate compared to more traditional organisations. Regardless, they’re interesting examples of trustless, borderless – and maybe limitless – systems for organizing some types of work. For the purposes of this post, the most notable thing about them is just how different they are organised from existing companies.

Whatever the organisations of the future look like, I think the tools they’ll use to collaborate will look very different from Facebook’s office-in-the-metaverse products. Those offices are 2019, and 2019 is decisively on the other side of the watershed.

(ends)

Categories
Uncategorized

Mac Studio is a sealed box – mostly

In continuation of the last post about the trend towards appliance-computers as opposed to general purpose, user-maintainable computers, I just came across this:

https://twitter.com/mkbhd/status/1504551304961695747?s=21

Apple’s recently released desktop computer, the USD 2,000+ Mac Studio, is a closed, sealed box, no different from an iPad.

Update: apparently there are screws to open the case underneath the rubber rim. This YouTube video has a detailed tear-down of the machine. In any case this is a desktop computer that’s clearly not intended to be user-serviceable:

Twenty minutes of unscrewing.

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Uncategorized

The existence of general-purpose computers is not a God-given right

The CEO of the company that makes Raspberry Pi computers said something of tremendous importance in an interview:

…my iPhone 8 is a vastly powerful computer, but it’s not really a computer, it’s an appliance. That trend started, I guess, with the replacement of home computers as a platform for computer gaming, primarily by games consoles. It’s continued over time to a point where the PC and the Mac are the only surviving examples of what used to be the way computers always were.

and

The Chromebook is an interesting example of an appliance that is very successful at replacing a general purpose computer with an appliance computer. The existence of general-purpose computers is not a God-given right. It’s a historical accident, a path-dependent historical accident. What we came to realize is the thing that had absolutely gone away was the cost-effective general purpose computers. There were lots of cost-effective appliances: cheap games, consoles, and mobile phones. But there weren’t any more low-cost general purpose computers. There probably had never been general purpose computers as low-cost as a Raspberry Pi. Really, the idea was that cost had become a barrier to access to devices that might beguile you into being a computer programmer.

This shook me. We have few choices for good, cheap, open general purpose computers, especially among those that are portable.

As readers know, the computer I write this on is an upgradeable and serviceable Mac laptop, but it is ten years old. Newer ones, like those that run on M1 processors, are very close to being appliances: non-upgradeable hardware, locked-down firmware, and an effective monopoly on the software operating system. Even homebrew, the open source package manager, has ported itself and several pieces of software to the new processor, but it has nowhere near the support that the older processors did.

The other choice is the Intel + Windows universe, where, taking a cue from the Mac, there are very few choices for user-serviceable, upgradeable machines. The latest version of Windows itself now needs an internet connection and a Microsoft account to set up.

Finally, the iPad. Just like the Chromebook, it is an excellent appliance-computer, one I use in many contexts every day. But it is still nowhere a general purpose, programmable, open computer, and I find myself logging in via a terminal window to my local Raspberry Pi, which runs Linux, to run software, fetch data that I transfer back to the iPad.

This change has taken place over the last decade or so, which is an aeon in ‘tech’, but a. fraction of a human generation. Therefore, not only are today’s students and young adults not familiar with what we would think are basic computer concepts (drives, files, folders, organizing them), but most adults now have most of their data in siloed programs on their phones, usually tied to subscription-based cloud storage or streaming services. That is, within an appliance. For many people I know, their only general purpose computer is their work issued laptop. We have discussed aspects of this many, many times on this site.

What’s most significant about what the Raspberry Pi CEO said was that open, user-serviceable computers are a conscious design, manufacturing and business choice. If vertically integrated, locked-in, subscription oriented appliances make more business sense, we won’t have computers as we know them anymore, or they will be expensive machinery made for professionals running industry-specific programs.

This interview reminded me of that just a few months ago I remarked to myself that Richard Stallman’s insistence on using free software on his computing setup from the ground-up is important for the world because it sets a high bar from which compromises can be hung. In the absence of Stallman, the steelman argument for user agency over their computing is left to be made by manufacturers themselves.

I hope that reading this makes you more conscious of different aspects of your computing: why a general purpose computer is important. Just how powerful a computer you really need. How much will you need to pay for replacements should something break? Just how much of your data do you need a subscription to access, and how would you store it if you didn’t have that subscription anymore.

I encourage you to do this exercise to be at least aware of your situation and your options.

(ends)

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Uncategorized

Helped a friend breathe life into a 2014 Mac Mini by replacing the spinning-disk hard drive with an SSD. Here it is installing Mac OS on that SSD:

I know my way around the insides of early 2010s Apple laptops: the unibody MacBook Pros (see my post about expanding the RAM and fitting an SSD), the retina MacBook Pros, and the classic pre-retina MacBook Airs. The 2014 Mac Mini was a new experience: components are layered, unlike a MacBook.

I wish modern machines, Macs and otherwise, were more user-serviceable and upgradeable. This same friend has a 2017 MacBook Pro with soldered-on RAM and storage, which can’t be upgraded at all.

As someone who, as a teen, assembled his first PC in the late 1990s and upgraded it steadily for over ten years, the iPadification of computer hardware isn’t welcome – although I do see the benefit of increased security.

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Uncategorized

“It’s somewhat baffling to me how some people focus so much on the technology aspects of something to the point of forgetting that its success is due to the things that it does not do.”

– comment on Hacker News

That reminded me of Zawinski’s Law of Software Envelopment:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

– Jamie Zawinski
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Uncategorized

On mobile & laptop I wish I could add WhatsApp/Telegram msgs, emails or tweets to a ‘reply-later’ queue. For all the times when I’ve read it, but maybe right now I’m outside, or I want to think & reply, or I want to batch-reply.

Mark-as-unread per app doesn’t cut it. On so many levels.

So much innovation in mobile interfaces yet to come.

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Uncategorized

While there are several clones of the popular, simple word-guessing game Wordle, the original retains cachet as the Wordle.

I wonder how much of it flows from its originality (like a piece of art – innumerable copies/derivatives but the original is what is in museums).

And how much of it is the very particular design choice to limit it to one puzzle a day, so that everyone around the world is solving the same Wordle. A strong social facet of a game that has no intrinsic social game-play at all:

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Uncategorized

The Tragedy of the No-Op

An old observation of mine has been that the more powerful and plentiful our devices get, the longer they spend idle. I call it the Tragedy of the No-Op.

(A No-Op or NOP is a machine language instruction that tells the processor to do nothing, an empty cycle).

The processor on a Nokia ‘dumbphone’ spent a greater percentage of its lifetime cycles working for its owner than today’s iPhone. Or iPads, Macs, Echos, routers, smart home switches, TVs, or connected cars.

We own more computers today than ever. And each of those gets more powerful each year – and they stay idle more and more. An Echo mostly just stands there checking “did someone say Alexa?” over and over for well over 99% of its life.

I’m pro-abundance – to coin a term – so I’, reluctant to call this idle computing power a waste. But I do wonder if we can put all this silicon to better use.

For example: Bitcoin mining is now increasingly concentrated among a small set of mining pools because bitcoin now requires miners to run specialised hardware, ASICs, to be competitive earning mining rewards. Ethereum also requires high end graphics-processing-units or GPUs. The demand for GPUs got to the point where in May last year Nvidia designed a graphics card that would cripple its own performance if it detected its use for crypto mining.

It’s the same for storage: most of us have inexpensive hard drives and pen derives, and hundreds of GBs of free space on our laptops and iPads and phones, and yet decentralised storage projects require massive amounts of high-end solid state drives connected to powerful computers to be viable.

So here we all are, with more combined computing resources than ever across all our devices but today’s proof of work/space blockchains are such that they require even *more* hardware, affordable by a very few – far from their ideal of decentralising trust and opportunity and value creation.

What will new blockchains that can run on billions of devices look like? What new use cases will they make possible? What effect will they have on wealth creation? What incentives will they create for low-cost devices and even cheaper, ubiquitous connectivity?

Like with every seemingly intractable problem, this is a massive opportunity. I wonder what tomorrow’s solutions to these will look like.