s09e14: Get a cozy Data Tiny House, Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive People
0.0 Context Setting
It’s Friday April 9, 2021.
Yesterday morning, I became a first-dose vaccinated member of hashtag-team-Pfizer, which is not the same as hashtag-team-Feisar. Hooray for science, logistics and human civilization.
I’ve been trying to write this episode for around the last week now, so let’s see if this attempt sticks.
Speaking of which, writing, it feels puts on Church of England cosplay outfit, is a little like playing award-winning videogame Hades. How is that, you might ask?
For one, I have been playing Hades. It’s what’s known as a roguelike, which these days just means that the levels/environment are randomly generated each time you play the game. One aspect of roguelikes is that you get to play them again and again and again, because the random level generation lends itself to a continually new and surprising challenge each time. In Hades, the conceit is that you’re Zagreus, trying to escape the house of Hades. It is very hard! You die a lot. You see how the setting of the game matches the mechanic here. The eternal challenge of attempting to escape the underworld!
And, well, that’s like writing for me right now. A struggle to sit down in front of an empty text file, fending off a whole bunch of procedurally generated distractions, every so often a boss battle on Twitter, and all those tiny emails that peck away at you.
Writing. It’s super fun. Highly recommended.
I am listening to Last and First Men, by Johann Johannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman. I have Cameo Wood to thank for this, who sent me a teaser trailer to the accompanying film of the same name.
1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention
British places that don't sound like how they're spelled
You may be aware if you are a) American, or b) not American — e.g. British — and grew up reading lots of books in your head, that there are words that are not pronounced the way they are spelled!
To help you (I was in my thirties before I learned that Featherstone-Waugh is actually pronounced like fanshaw), Wikipedia has a helpful (non-exhaustive, I might add) list of [irregularly spelt places in the United Kingdom] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_irregularly_spelt_places_in_the_United_Kingdom)
Meanwhile, I’m reminded of when I trained a neural network to generate British place names And British place names nearly 4 years ago.
Explicitly scammy technical infrastructure
Two things that feel like they fit together:
First, there's April 3, 2021 New York Times story about How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations. One note:
“Officials at multiple financial institutions who dealt with complaints estimated WinRed was, at peak, 1-3% of volume — a figured confirmed by one of the nation’s largest credit-card issuers. That’s huge, considering size of U.S. credit card economy” Shane Goldmacher
The story is the usual one about dark patterns - in their worst cases, tricks designed you to do something against your own intentions, or deliberately obfuscating what will happen.
But this isn’t about those dark patterns. Mike Monteiro said this, about the recent Non-Fungible Token bubble/burgeoning scene/digital financialization and art speculation:
Believing the crypto edgelords would build anything for anyone’s benefit but their own — much less artist’s benefit — means ignoring everything they’ve done so far. Don’t believe the hype. Mike Monteiro
Take those two together and mash them up a bit, and what you get is some thoughts around explicitly scammy technical infrastructure. Phone calls in the U.S. are totally spammy/scammy now, and my gut feeling [citation needed] is that this is partly down to VOIP (Voice over IP) bringing a) the cost of calling down to not-very-much, but also b) turning making voice calls into something that’s API-able/automatable, which in the end means c) scaleable. Scaleable and cheap means spammy.
So I’m wondering: what does explicitly scammy technical infrastructure look like? Where the majority or main use of the technology is solely for scams or used in dark patterns? The trendy thing to think of right now is bitcoin/cryptocurrency because the whole thing feels like a ponzi-pile-on-speculation scam (which isn’t entirely untrue?). And, you know, the NFT-not-a-bubble-honest, which has apparently slumped by 70% [The Art Newspaper].
If one were to look at, say, a list of confidence tricks and then figure out what new software or technology could exist for them (and mostly for them), what might they be? Sure, “technology” isn’t neutral and reflects the creator and so on, so what do does scammy infrastructure look like, how and where might you find it, and then, what might you want to do about it?
Caught my attention because: (not entirely facetiously) what is infrastructure, anyway? Part of what defines infrastructure is that it’s needed to operate at scale? What do people use and create software for, can you imagine the user stories, and it reminds me about how El Chapo was in part taken down by “a Columbian I.T. Guy” [yes, the New York Times, again, in El Chapo Trial: How a Colombian I.T. Guy Helped U.S. Authorities Take Down the Kingpin], and it’s always fun to imagine all of the different kinds of IT systems that must exist.
Get a cozy Data Tiny House
So, there’s data warehouses, data lakes (a relative of the milk lake and butter mountain, I presume), and now of course there are data lakehouses, which is a) what happens when someone wants to be sold something that is kind of a data warehouse and kind of a data lake, but you know, location location location or whatever, and b) what happens because people use the English language.
There’s also SQLite, which is a tiny (yet powerful!) SQL database that doesn’t need a server and just… sits there and stores your data and lets you query it. It’s pretty awesome! Lots of things use it (the SQLite website says there are probably over one trillion SQLite database in active use.
I like being silly and use it as an excuse to try mixing different concepts in my head to see if anything new or interesting comes out. And so: the exciting rebrand of SQLite as the Data Tiny House [tweet].
What’s a tiny house? Why, there’s a whole tiny-house movement which is more or less about concepts like domestic cozy. Things are smaller, there are fewer things, they are more artisan, they are less sprawling, they are more human-sized. They are, in other words, the opposite of large inhuman things like warehouses and lakes and certainly not unaffordable bourgeoise lakehouses. I mean, who has a lakehouse, anyway?
So you take your giant AWS managed PostgreSQL database or your Oracle Enterprise Whatever, and instead you get a nice little (but reliable!) database you can even run on your phone. Multiple instances of it on your phone. Not a big footprint. Keep your data where you can see it. So cozy!
You can’t have a fake database product without print ads, though. So I um made some print ads.
Here's one of my favorites:
Actually it was really hard to choose one, they’re all my favorite. But why did this catch my attention?
Caught my attention because: Gosh there’s so much here.
- There’s a whole aesthetic to late 80s/early 90s computer magazine print ads. For starters: there were magazines, and secondly, people advertised computers and software in them. Can you imagine!
- Reader service cards were a thing where a precocious child could go through, say, all of the interesting ads in an issue of Byte magazine (I don’t know, maybe the well-thumbed November 1998 issue reviewing the NeXT computer) circle all the numbers for the relevant ads and, get this, the businesses would have no idea how old you were so they would be forced to send you, frequently by international mail, glossy sales materials for hardware and software that you had neither the intention nor wherewithal to purchase because does math you were nine years old.
- Writing the copy was just so fun in that take-inspiration-from sense, but also being a bit cheeky. Parts that I enjoyed writing included:
What’s more, the Library of Congress even recommends the technology that powers Data TinyHouse as the best way to preserve precious digital content. And what’s cozier than a library?
- Figuring out all the references was super fun, too. The Cozily compatible, from the 80s to the 2020s uses a Windows 3.1 BMP tiled background wallpaper, and makes references to 80s/early 90s databases as well as Datasette.
- ... and perhaps the dumbest/silliest one is We won't let you get trapped in a data hotel. going perhaps too far on the data [building] metaphor, if only because it's a very unsubtle reference to The Overlook Hotel.
- The serif font was a deliberate choice, too in the style of double page spread ads like this 1993 Compaq one, this 1987 ad for an AST Premium/386, this 1992 ad for Computer Associates' dBFAST, this 1989 ad for Windows, or this 1992 ad for an Apple Macintosh computer. Actually, you can tell that I'm just geeking out over nostalgic computer ads, right?
Shorter caught my attention reasons: copying/riffing off styles is fun, taking something old and mixing it with something new is fun, taking something for culture like tiny houses and mixing it with database technology is also fun.
Redundant arrays
Glenn Fleishmann wrote that
I once thought the gig economy could benefit workers and companies, providing a third path between employment and vendor-based contracting. I was wrong. It’s been a race to the bottom, to wring as much value out of people the companies see as disposable and interchangeable. [Tweet]
which caught my attention because one of my first reactions was "it was always going to be an API for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive People"
Other reasons why this was interesting:
- the Redundant Array of Inexpensive People is a play on RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. RAIDs are basically when people figured out you could use some software to use a bunch of cheaper disks to pretend to be a bigger, more reliable disk. Because they're software pretending to be one disk, there's a bunch of stuff you can do, like: turn all the cheap disks into one big disk; write multiple copies of the same data across more than one disk so your data is more reliable; write the same data across multiple disks in a different way, so different parts of the data are stored on different disks, and so on.
- In my head, RAIDs are an example of a larger class of thing, which is "using software to abstract away a more complicated underlying physical reality and provide a simpler interface". You write the RAID software once, and then you can build a whole bunch of stuff on top of it that you couldn't build before. APIs are like this in that they provide an interface to... other stuff that more things can use. Building blocks, right?
- This collides with, I don't know, financialization and optimization and process management and more abstraction because what you end up with gig workers and zero-hours contract workers whose shift patterns and tasks are determined by software is, essentially... people abstracted away by new interfaces that treat people as interchangeable. Hence: redundant array of inexpensive people.
- This looks great to some people because you don't have to worry about a whole bunch of people stuff and, well, there's distance, right? You don't have to worry about them complaining about finding somewhere to pee, or about them being exposed to frankly objectionable and traumatic material because there's no place for it in the interface. Tell me, Mr. Anderson, how are you going to provide feedback or be consulted if there's no method for you to provide feedback?
- There's another connection in here which is that some of my earlier criticism of Facebook and stuff like Facebook's 2013 Graph Search, which was an early Facebook effort to let you use search on the platform like a database query: "Friends who like Donuts", which I joked about as "a much easier way for Mark Zuckerberg to find out what to get people for Christmas parents without having to actually do all the messy stuff of asking them".
- Anyway. There's lots here that caught my attention.
From the archives
This time, s3e06: Portions Of This Consciousness Are Copyrighted from March 30, 2016, which had predictions about what computers might be able to do for you by 2017, including:
- suggest the cutest cat picture to you
- press the shutter for you on your camera
- suggest which headshot is the best for you
... and a riff on an ad agency announcing the world's first AI creative director (ha. ha. ha.).
OK, that's it. I'm calling it. Around 2,150 words this time which is really time to stop. I should go outside. My non-dominant arm hurts. It's hard to process thoughts and emotions about having my first dose of the COVID vaccine.
How are you doing?
Best,
Dan