s06e07: Probably Not Gutless
0.0 Sitrep
Thursday afternoon, 6 September. The plan is for this episode to be a short one: all I really want to get out in this is that I'm at the XOXO Festival from tomorrow through the end of the weekend and if you'd like to say hi, then I look a bit like this and in the grand scheme of things despite all the catastrophizing and anxiety, *in general* talking to people isn't such a terrible thing.
A bit of housekeeping for new readers. I used to point out that this newsletter isn't really for you, it's for me: a place for me to do a bunch of writing and see where that leads me because I'd figured out that I do my thinking through talking. Sometimes I don't get to be around enough people to talk with, so it turns out the next best thing is to write stream-of-consciousness and pretend I'm talking to myself, at which point I don't really want to think about my internal society of mind.
All of which is to say: the only thing that ties this newsletter together is that it is written by me, about things* that have caught my attention. Some people appear to like it and find it valuable! Some don't! Both are totally fine by me.
* specifically, those "things" are *anything* that has caught my attention. It's more about the "caught my attention" part. And I'm pretty indiscriminate about what's caught my attention, so the topics here have varied from anything from, quite frankly, too-deep analysis of the technical and economic infrastructure of the Star Trek: Next Generation universe, to opinions about Digital Transformation In Government, to What The Hell Is Digital Advertising Anyway, to empathy in design and, well. If I didn't know any better, I'd say I was doing a good impression of a middle-class straight white dude having opinions about things.
1.0 Things that have caught my attention
1.1 But really, social media
I wrote before that I have Thoughts about Mastodon and they are more along the lines of: what if it's not particularly meaningful, or that as a species we're not quite ready for a "global networked community"? Look, yes, there's all the stuff about the Dunbar number. But I feel like Facebook and Twitter - with things like global search and Person Discovery, are... maybe not good things? Or maybe, what would it be like if we didn't have them? I was talking with friends last night about what feels like another (privileged?) early adopter move from Twitter to Mastodon, and one of the issues we talked about was "hey, Mastodon doesn't have the ability to find people in the way Twitter does" and my response was: well, maybe that's okay? I mean, I like to think I'm self-aware enough to know that having a bunch of followers on Twitter who "engage with my content" is quite externally validating and that says more about me, and maybe I should work on not needing that? What would it be like if it were harder to arbitrarily find someone and start interacting with them? What would it be like if there were more friction in general, or, at least, for people to have more control about the barriers and friction in their lives?
One thought I did have was that the friction involved in moving from Twitter to Mastodon could be thought of as a firebreak. Maybe you don't want it to be easy. Maybe you want people to have to work to re-create social graphs mindfully, rather than arbitrarily importing a whole bunch of followers over.
1.2 Seriously though, social media
... and another conversation with another friend about how it would be nice, during XOXO (sorry) to create a whole bunch of micro-locations (e.g. *this* particular tabletop game, *this* corner of this room) and to check into them without having to broadcast to the entire world or DM each other to make it easier for friends to find each other and hang out without, as it were, "interrupting each other".
The joke here is that Swarm, a privately social network for sharing your location with friends, would be a viable replacement for Twitter (a privately run social network for proving the point about what happens when leadership steadfastly refuse to do the hard work of having a point of view on conduct and community standards), because the former doesn't have a bunch of Nazis on it yet. In fact, goes the joke, Swarm might even be pretty useful because then you could mute the Nazis using it by... *not going to the places where the Nazis were*. Which apparently is not a thing you can really do with Twitter! Huh!
1.3 A list of things
* via Deb Chachra I was reminded of the inspiring National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe, which includes images of gas giant dwelling aliens that I was looking for a few weeks ago in order to prove a point to my partner about the fact that some people think there could be life dwelling in gas giant planets.
* Wired did a story about geology being "like augmented reality for the planet" which... makes sense if you've ever looked at sedimentary layers? Anyway, I completely missed the point of the story and instead the quote that got me was this: "Most humans are chronophobes. We worry about where the time has gone, whether we’re spending it wisely, how much of it we have left." and now I love the word CHRONOPHOBE.
* So there's a whole bunch of internet connected devices like routers and so on in peoples' houses and because they run software, they are inherently insecure and get co-opted by people who can use lots of devices to do things like denial of service attacks. And then people do it again with internet-connected cameras. It should therefore come as no surprise whatsoever that "thousands of [3d printers]" are accessible over the web with no authentication and I do not need to tell you what sort of Star Trek episode about replicators this might remind me of. On the other hand, loads of printers are accessible over the web also and... there's not a lot of drive-by printing? (this is not a defense in any way of insecure 3d printers being connected to networks)
* Oh look, the UK's National Health Service has a digital service manual.
* I really enjoyed this master's thesis on the aesthetics of science fiction spaceship design and not only because it has a great flowchart on how to decide whether a given science fictional spaceship is human (e.g. looks like it was manufactured, is grey or blue) or is alien (organic, looks frankly evil). Bonus points etc for pointing out the used-future aesthetic from the Alien franchise of movies. It is only a hop-skip-and-a-jump to thinking about the aesthetics of fictional user interfaces, but none of us need yet another article about minority report-style interfaces.
* I have a joke about not knowing what it is to be a bat, but instead knowing what it is like to see like a LIDAR. More seriously, the explanation of what's happening with this hardware also, unsurprisingly these days, involves applying a bunch of deep learning which, AGAIN, feels like incorporating top-down predictions to inform perception and I am *not entirely sure* if this is going to be a great thing given what we know about the failure modes of predictive processing in human beings (spoiler: the failure modes include things like optical illusions, which are less optical illusions and more like zero-day unpatched hacks pointing out vulnerabilities in our perception systems)
* This overcoming bias blog post (Robin Hanson, an economist) observes that "good backroom IT" in businesses looks like a natural monopoly and that one of the ways of dealing with the secondary effects of a business having "good backroom IT" (such a secondary effect being so good at execution that you wipe out all the competition) might be... compulsory licensing of backroom IT? This is such a bizarre view! It is good to see that IT professionals have weighed in on the blog post pointing out that backroom IT isn't really portable from one business to another and if anyone has ever had any experience with SAP or other ERP systems then I rest my case. ONE THING that is interesting though is that I remembered SpaceX and Tesla run a custom-built Windows-based ERP following the general principle that for some things, it's probably faster and cheaper (and more... useful?) to build something that meets your exact needs than to configure something that says it can do everything. The corollary to this is that if you do want to build your own ERP, then you need to be good at software, and being good at software is a business in its own right. So to come back to Hanson's point, it feels like the economists haven't realized or haven't read enough pmarca to understand that *you need good software to operate in this world* and good software is (can be?) such a ridiculous differentiator that economists start thinking that compulsory licensing might fix things. Again, stated that way, the position feels like a harder pill for the software industry to swallow than, say, regulation in the interests of security and public safety.
* I had a spare 30 minutes so I wrote about (More) Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know. In the meantime, thank you for reading This Is A Think Piece. My experiment with the Medium paywall continues; This Is A Think Piece earned an estimated 70(!) dollars in its first week, without any promotion from Medium. Amusingly, I am not a paid Medium Member.
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OK I guess "short" actually means about 1,600 words. Sorry.
And finally, a reminder for any of you who might be at XOXO, I'm probably the person who looks like they're avoiding people.
Best,
Dan