s19e09: Two Easy Pieces
0.0 Context Setting
Friday, 4 April 2025 in Portland, Oregon where the sun is out.
0.1 Events: Hallway Track
No Hallway Tracks on the slate at the moment. But I have a few ideas I’m pulling together:
- Something to do with COBOL
- Something to do with ATProto
- Something to do with the viability of a left-wing media ecosystem
Drop me a line if you’ve got Hallway Tracks you’d like to see.
1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention
1.1 Understanding Legacy System Modernization
Here is a high-level analogy that might be helpful to some of you in trying to get certain people to understand why modernizing a legacy system is hard.
And for this, let’s just assume that “a legacy system” is to be honest anything older than, what, 10 years? Maybe even 5.
Oh, right. The other thing about this explaining-analogy is that it really hits home if the audience has any experience with home ownership:
Homeownership is a lifelong commitment to discovering what it takes to modernize a legacy system, and the lengths to which and compromises you will make in doing so 1
Here are the ways in which I think the “this is how it’s similar to owning and looking after a home”
- you’re using it all the time
- in fact you might even regard the entire home, or portions of it, as critical infrastructure
- razing the 80 year old house and replacing it with a modern up-to-code build is not the same thing (yes this is a not-so-oblique reference to the leaked DOGE plans to “reimplement the COBOL business logic” of “the U.S. Social Security system” in Java within 3 months)
- when you are modernizing your legacy house system you may be familiar with the following thoughts and feelings: “Wait, a good plumber costs how much?!”; “Oh now you’re telling me about the “knowing where to put the nail: $$$$$” story; “How do I even tell a good plumber from a bad plumber? I’m supposed to ask for references? Who has the time for that? And who do I know to trust to ask for references? And will they even send the Good Plumber?”; and one of my favorites, “Why do I keep getting screwed by system integrators-slash-general contractors?”
- consider as well the general tendency to budget for the acquisition cost of the home system, but the opaque process of budgeting for continued Operations and Maintenance, never mind Upgrades. Or that you might prioritize Upgrades over Operations and Maintenance.
- ... and exactly how much you are willing to tolerate in terms of pain or technical debt before doing something about it.
- ... and when you wish the previous owner(s) had done a better job at documentation.
It is almost as if there is something difficult about maintaining a complicated system.
1.2 One Or More Of Your Car Doors
So in Back to the Future 2 (again, a warning, not a manual), there’s this scene where one of the McFlys gets fired and the thing the film gets right is the proliferation of communication devices. What it gets wrong is the mode of communication (fax), but again, what it gets right is their ubiquity and the inability to hide from them: there is a fax machine in the bathroom. This wasn’t a particularly new thing, there were probably already phones in high-end rich people bathrooms and hotels at that point in the late 1980s because people didn’t have mobile phones yet. I digress.
But anyway: the point is that notifications are now received over multiple media, multiple devices, and of course not unified because that would be anticompetitive.
This morning, my car push notified and emailed me that a door had been left unlocked, which is totally fine if you are sitting in your car after having say dropped someone off and you just need some peace and quiet for a bit. Cars are now the Third Place for Individuals in America.
Now, I could turn off one of those communication methods. I could decide that actually I don’t need to be emailed and push notified through the car app that a door has been left unlocked. But it is 2025 and I am anxious:
What if I don’t see the push notification because it gets tidied away by my phone OS? In that case, an email would be good, even though I am increasingly terrible at managing email inboxes due to bankruptcy. But now I get a notification from the mobile app and an OS email notification from whatever device is also receiving email.
So I end up seeing the same notification in multiple physical places, multiple devices, and on those multiple devices, by individual methods.
Now there’s a reason why I might want the email notification: it’s persistent in the way that a mobile app notification isn’t. I can still go back to my inbox and there’s a chance I can see it again if I missed it. So that’s good. I can’t do that with the mobile app unless the mobile app also presents a history of notifications. Which it might do, or might not.
The end result is that I am smothered by convenience and choice. I am being buried by notifications. Not only am I buried by notifications, but I am also buried by ways in which to manage those notifications. Some of those ways of managing notifications -- most commonly at the OS level -- are non-deterministic, too. So at some point I might get a notification, but without changing anything, I might not.
So I can:
- manage notifications in the application itself (if I am given the ability)
- at the OS level application level
- at the OS system level, i.e. “focus modes” which have existed for however long and I still haven’t figured out how to use to my advantage because all I really want are two: (i) no notifications, and (ii) really important notifications
I have written about this before so it’s more a recapitulation. I am not allowed to decide what “really important notifications are”. My perennial example is “I want the notification from the food delivery service about the status of the delivery” and “but not advertisements”. There is no way around this distinction other than a combination of regulation and stupendously detailed oversight and punitive enforcement. Imagine if you will a Great Firewall but for “I don’t want ads”. Actually...
So this is where machine language learning models come in. Let’s have a model watch me and see what I care about (which is limited in the main to the interactions I am able to have with the notifications in the first place, so namely “act on it” and “get rid of it somehow without acting on it”) without me having to specify, for example, “Hey Siri, hold all my calls apart from notifications about pizza delivery.”
And we know that the red queen race for this is for whichever make-number-go-up monopoly-seeking food delivery service to change its pizza delivery notifications to also include offers and advertisements (i.e. “Your pizza is on its way, Dan! Also use coupon FUCKYOU to get 25% off your next order!”), in which case whichever product manager for notifications at the OS level has to decide “well given we’re already running the notification through a classifier, do we also rewrite it to remove any offers?”
This is all stupid and exhausting.
The overall feeling is that I am helpless and powerless. The choice is “food delivery” which on the face of it is convenient and useful and helps lots of people or “know when I left the car unlocked accidentally” which also! Helpful! But of course we are trapped in a late-capitalism hellscape and I for one would like to know exactly how late this is going to get before it turns midnight and starts to get better.
The thing is I’m reasonably convinced that the amount of context needed to deliver notifications in a way that doesn’t drive me to, well, something, is off the charts and can’t be done without some sort of stupid invasion of privacy. This is of course because the context is intensely personal: at the very least, the notifications are happening, like, in my personal space.
There are certain emails -- from my wife, for example -- that are marked as important, so they will always trigger some sort of on-screen notification and maybe also a sound, depending on whether that particular device is silenced or not, which is also a blunt method of notification management.
So right now, my watch vibrated and dinged, a temporary notification appeared on my desktop, and my phone probably did something too.
What I would probably like is that the notification presents to my consciousness once, which is to say, if I saw it on my screen, I really don’t want my watch to ding or vibrate or display the notification on my watch, too.
And the best I might hope for is some sort of eye tracking that would guess that my gaze drunkenly saccading over to the top right of my desktop monitor at the same time as the notification appearing implies that I am now aware of it.
Now that I think of it, one potential algorithm for notification management might be: look, if you can tell I’m using the computer, then only notify me on the computer. OK? Which is I suppose a thing that can be tried? And come on, if I’m notified with a sound on the computer that I’m using (which you can tell!) then also don’t make a sound on the watch I’m wearing while I’m using the computer, which you also know, because the watch is close enough to be a TouchID substitute!
All of this is so complicated it kind of falls into the so easy and obvious of course it’s complicated. “Why can’t x just” is always a trap when the “just” word is used.
I mean, another point of view is that email applications didn’t used to have on-screen notifications and... we coped?
Right now I am listening to a playlist called Whitney Houston Encounters Epistemology. It is 55 minutes of covers of Whitney Houston’s How Will I Know. Apparently my tolerance for repeated listening to cover versions of the same song can also be described as stimming. I maintain that it’s just really interesting and there’s so much richness in the way the covers are made and how they differ. So you shut up.
How are you?
Dan
How you can support Things That Caught My Attention
If you're not a subscriber, you can subscribe, like this:
Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please consider becoming a paid supporter.
Let my boss pay!
Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at $25/month, or $270/year, $35/month, or $380/year, or $50/month, or $500/year.
Paid supporters get a free copy of Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and free subscribers get a 20% discount.