April 8, 2022

s11e29: A Short Conversation About NATO

0.0 Context setting

It’s Friday April 8, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and yesterday we had freak warm weather! It was, like, 72 degrees Fahrenheit here which is too warm for the beginning of April?

I have to tell you, the experiential marketing around the IPCC Report Launch is getting a bit much.

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A quick reminder: Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1 collecting the 50 best essays from episodes 1-50 is out now. You, my three thousand-odd subscribers, can get a copy with 20% off.

Paid supporters and subscribers get a free copy, so imagine I wrote an upsell here that wasn’t cheesey and maybe become a paid supporter/subscriber.

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1.0 Some things that caught my attention

You’ll Switch Credit Cards For This, Continued

Some quick notes on yesterday’s episode that included the “your credit card offers to cancel or schedule cancelling a subscription” idea:

First, let’s assume credit companies aren’t dumb and there must be reasons why this doesn’t exist. I had a chat with a friend who pointed out that credit card companies can’t just unilaterally cancel your agreements with billers because… they’re not a party to your subscription agreement. And besides, I presume that if credit card companies just started to unilaterally stop payments to billers that would be some sort of upset to the global consumer credit finance industry. But, you know, when have rules and contracts and so on ever stopped people from disrupting things, he says, narrowing his eyes.

If you go down the “just stop paying them” route, then, you know, you’re in potential breach of your subscription agreement. This is one of those “you’re dealing with the symptom, not the cause” issues, where you want to cancel your gym membership and in the end you just cancel your credit card because that’s easier than jumping through the cancellation process, or the membership agreement was written to extract maximum pain from you, your descendants and their descendants until the heat death of the universe.

So, you know, the best way would be for your credit card company or bank to actually have a way to cancel the subscription agreement without doing the consumer credit version of setting the place on fire and walking away, and maybe there’s a way of doing that in a mutually beneficial business relationship that, I don’t know, involves something like handwaves subscriber retention.

But anyway I buried the lede: Capital One has Eno, an “assistant” (don’t say chatbot, I guess?), clearly named for renaissance man Brian Eno (no, not really). You might be forgiven for thinking that Eno is a Shit Chatbot, but apparently Eno will spot (some) free trials and maybe even remind you before those trials end:

Get a heads up.
Eno reaches out if a free trial is spotted* and can even send you a reminder before it ends — letting you choose whether to start a new subscription or cancel

And here’s the copy Capital One uses as an example on their page:

Keep tabs on your free trial.

Hi there,

It looks like you started a 30-day free trial with Streaming+.

Want an email reminder the day before this trial ends?

I mean, this is good!

There’s the usual caveat: some free trials, and they link out to the provider to cancel. Which is good, but everyone knows that Conan says the best life is one-click to cancel

… Which led me to the interesting thought of If We Can Have A One-Click (buy) Patent from Amazon then Why Don’t We Have A One Click Unsubscribe Version? And we all know the answer to why we don’t.

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Don’t listen to the bad man, DALL·E

DALL·E is the latest machine learning tool/experiment/bit of the future hurled backward into the past from OpenAI, the great great great great grandchild iteration of Google’s DeepDream¹ (now 7 years old!). It takes a text description of something and generates an image of it. Another recent example is midjourney on Twitter.

Anyway, people are super impressed about the quality of images that DALL·E is able to generate to the extent that there’s a panic about it putting artists out of business and destroying the human spirit by automating creativity and the discipline of creating visual art and I guess they’re not entirely wrong, but also at the same time wrong in the sense that putting a camera in billions of peoples’ hands hasn’t put commercial/professional photographers out of business. I mean it probably put some of them out of business, but maybe they weren’t that good? Or they had a captive market? I digress, that was not the point of what caught my attention.

No, what caught my attention was being silly and writing pretend prompts like:

• “An image designed to crash the human visual system and put the viewer into a coma”

Yes, yes. It’s the Langford Basilisk, the funniest joke in the world, the Crucifix Glitch, Snow Crash from the novel Snow Crash Was Not A Manual, and so on, that thing from Infinite Jest that I don’t know because I haven’t read David Foster Wallace.

There’s more silly prompts, in the vein of “well, it would be interesting if these actually worked”²:

• “The text of a patent claiming the ability to selectively toggle consciousness in human subjects”
• “The schematics and parts list for a cheap and easy to produce home fusion reactor in the style of IKEA assembly instructions”

There’s nothing conceptually different here, I think, than when a bunch of researchers used a drug discovery model that took into account toxicity and “told it” to optimize for toxicity instead of, well, not-toxicity. This is why I feel many so-called AI right now are like Amelia Bedelias: young, literal, frequently misunderstanding of the world (or not even understanding what they do or don’t understand of the world).

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A Short Conversation With NATO

This is another silly bit where I take a perfectly reasonable thing and then apply some other thing to it and potentially highlight/open up the opportunity for a useful insight:

You: Finland is officially preparing to join NATO!

Me: Yeah but can you imagine what the online forms are like for “joining NATO”

You: but… NATO is a treaty organization. It’s for nation states and includes a process for accession–

Me: what do you reckon, mostly .docx, .pdfs, .xlsx or bits of dead tree with squiggles on them and maybe even bits of wax?

You: You’re seriously committing to this?

Me: I mean, I wonder if there’s forms online or if you have to call the NATO Applications and Eligibility Office during working hours–

You: Please stop–

Me: –and when you go to the NATO website to look up their phone number it says “during working hours” but it’s NATO and you’re not sure what timezone “working hours” is–

You: –just–

Me: I mean, what if your local NATO office is in France or Italy? And it’s the summer?

You: –that’s not how it–

Me: Okay great, I found the Membership Action Plan

You: The what?

Me: The membership action plan. It’s like, I dunno, a checklist for getting all your stuff in order for turning up for your NATO accession interview?

You: There’s no NATO accession interview, it’s presumably a complex process involving ambassadors and bureaucratic negotiators–

Me: –and another thing! This is going to be terrible for when we have millions of DAOs vying for microwave transmission-enabled micro-sovereignty for low-latency limited liability corporation spin-up and tear-down, because unless NATO has a robust digital transformation plan for online membership application, eligibility determination and accession process–

You: You just had to bring the blockchain into it didn’t you

Me: Better to do it now than later

You: Well, it’s hard to argue with that. Anyway, it’s not so bad, Finland could have its application for membership filed in a few weeks.

Me: Yeah well maybe they will but has anybody looked at the processing backlog for NATO membership applications, I mean does NATO even have the administrative capacity to deal with this in a timely manner–

You: Look it really doesn’t work like this at all–

Me: –and this just highlights the problem! If Finland, a nation state with a GDP of USD 315 billion (about two AAPLs, or 1,852 Reddits) and a population of 5.525 million (about 145 AAPLs, or one tenth of a Reddit), takes a few weeks to just get all its paperwork ready for applying to become a member of NATO then what chance does a low-latency web4 pico-sovereignty planck-time DAO stand?

You: That’s not what NATO’s for and you know it, stop this silliness right now.

Me: Well NATO’s just going to be disrupted, then.

You: I’m terminating this conversation.

Me: Wait

You: What?

Me: You don’t want to wait for the punchline?

You: There’s a punchline?

Me: Yes

You: And?

Me: It’s NATO’s Digital Transformation Strategy.

(Here’s the earlier, improvised Twitter version).

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Shorter bits:

• A good thread deconstructing how the UK’s newly-announced energy strategy is a no-good, bad, terrible, horrible energy strategy
• Megan Fox’s thread on LEGO’s partnership with Epic to create a Kids Metaverse has filled several buffers worth of Thoughts Because It Caught My Attention that I do not have space for here
• Likewise work towards embodied AI in a direction I did not think of by, of all things, merging explanatory language models and using it to produce plans(!) that are in effect pseudocode-style instructions to robotics models(!!)
• It’s many splintered in that horrible Twitter way of broken threads, but this is a pretty good discussion about Doing Product that starts from “it’s not that requirements change, it’s that you thought you understood them but it’s your understanding that’s evolving over time, not requirements” (scroll up, etc)

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Well I have to admit when I started writing this I did not anticipate ending where I ended up, but that’s how brains work ¯\(ツ)/¯.

Okay. It’s Friday! How are you?

Best,

Dan