s6e01: The Reboot's Cold Open
0.0 Station Ident
A hotel in Sacramento after a day in a government office doing things like: Product Strategy, Writing User Stories, Thinking About What Makes A Good Choice For A Product and Humoring People Who Come To Me With Requests About Their Gantt Chart In Microsoft Project.
And, also, Not Being On Twitter. It looks like Not Being On Twitter is a thing, now.
I've had two Diet Cokes in about two and a half weeks *and* I'm not having fish-and-chips for dinner in the serviceable hotel restaurant, I'm having a salmon caesar salad. I'm not telling you this to make you feel bad, I'm telling me this to remind myself that hey, I can occasionally do things in my long-term self interest and that choosing the salmon caesar salad at the end of a long day of having opinions about things and even making some decisions is a big middle finger to the ego depletion effect.
1.0 Some things that caught my attention
It's been [3] days since I posted anything to my public Twitter account that wasn't an auto-generated post, and it's been [5] days since I posted something that was longer than a single emoji. These numbers may not be particularly large, but they're my numbers, etc., etc. and the thing I'm experimenting with is whether I'm going to just blow away my account and go back to newslettering and blogging because, cribbing from Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, I think I've reached my limit and "that's fucking enough!".
Anyway. I haven't blown it away yet. But I do want to write. And I feel like I'd like to keep writing here, with you -- you have always been kind to me and listened to me, and you have always been thoughtful in your feedback. My experience with you has been, as others appear to be looking for, like the earlier, smaller days of the internet where, frankly, Nazis weren't pissing in the communal pool.
I like that you aren't Nazis. (Or, to be more specific, I like that none of you have communicated any Nazi-leaning or Nazi-sympathetic views to me.)
So. Some things that have caught my attention:
* Via sha, What You Should Know About Megaprojects And Why: An Overview, which itself was via a public thought-lead Dave Guarino had (sorry Dave) about the tendency for government technology to be Very Big, which is true, and about which I would also have thoughts were I not quite so tired or, in the case of Mr. Guarino, quite so young, sprightly and in good health. This thought also reminded me about the idea of charismatic megafauna[0], which also reminded me of charismatic mega-projects coined (as in, I think he came up with the idea and the phrase) of course by Geoff Manaugh in the New Yorker[1], in which something like a (the?) Hyperloop is an example.
* via foon on Twitter, a power-over-ethernet USB charger, which is exactly the kind of thing I'd imagine an Eddie Furlong-style Young John Connor whipping out of his Jansport backpack at the Cyberdyne datacenter to deal with an embryonic Skynet.
* I don't do fashion or aesthetics because I'm not that kind of person but I definitely *know* people who I imagine would *already know* about Urban Outfitters selling military reflective physical training belts and that this is just the latest iteration of the street appropriating things that are "tactical" for whatever reason but also maybe because we're all totally getting ready for the post-apocalyptic world.
* There's a really nice conversation over on the UK GDS Design System... repo? about the design of task lists. I'm just going to say that it's nice. It's nice to see people talking out loud about a particular problem, going into detail about it and sharing what they've learned. It's a Good Feeling.
* Hidden in this (horrible, tragic) story about untested rape kits (again, horrible) is news of how Ohio started dealing with its rape kit backlog which, with my former Code for America Summit Co-Chair Hat on (the font size for the hat has to be quite small) is interesting. It's interesting because a) the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, did a "week-long hack-a-thon" (I can see your eyes rolling already but STAY WITH ME) where "they revamped each step in the rape kit testing process using Kaizen" (I can see your interest perking up, your eyes un-rolling, but also a self-defensive measure in case this just turns out to be goverment improvement buzzword bingo but look lo and behold how I prime you as to the direction in which this tale shall proceed), also "invested heavily in new robotics to process dozens of samples at once" and "doubled the work they were able to do in five years." Ohio ended up testing nearly 14,000 previously untested rape kits, in the seven years since that hack-a-thon (sic) in 2011, which is 14,000 more than you did, you cynical eye-roller, and identified 300 serial rapist linked to over 1,100 crimes which again, is probably more than you did.
* I have been reading Mr. Nick Harkaway's books *backwards* which, in retrospect, sounds like a pretty Nick Harkaway-character kind of thing to do. I started with Gnomon (2017) because it is Very Relevant To My Interests, immediately jumped to Angelmaker (2013) and most recently finished The Gone-Away World (2009), the latter of which I blame for the long and winding run-on sentences in this newsletter's episode. They were all very good! I do not remember why I haven't read Tigerman (2014) yet, but there must have been a good reason. It might not have been available at my library.
* Anyway, Gnomon was the kind of book where I highlighted many things in the same way that I highlighted many things from Cory Doctorow's walkaway, because describing things in fiction is a very interesting and useful way of looking at things that are happening right now outside your window or, if a window is unavailable, inside (or, more precisely, being displayed on the inside of) the slab of glass you're reading this on. Gnomon felt a lot like a companion to, or in the same genre of (content warning: tvtropes link) set-twenty-minutes-into-the-future contemporary somewhat science fiction that comments on our late-capitalism, pre-Spasm, pre-Jackpot society (of which I acknowledge only part of the world's population is experiencing in this particular manner). I would say that I wish I could write like Harkaway does. Given that I've been trying and failing to write something for the last three years (I haven't even been trying hard enough to the extent that regular forehead bleeding has not been happening) The heartening thing I saw at the end of The Gone-Away World was that Harkaway had "as customary, borrowed from (read "pillaged") every story I had ever loved to write my own" because it makes me feel a lot less bad about trying to do that exact same thing. Only, of course, I feel like Harkaway has done so exceedingly well *and* in doing so, created something that is distinctly Harkawayish.
* Other books I have recently read and enjoyed include: Hannu Rajaniemi's Summerland (2018) of which I can say I wouldn't normally choose to read an alt-history (ie: steampunky) spy thriller that includes ghosts, but I love Rajaniemi's work and Summerland was the kind of book that gets you in trouble with co-workers because it's the reason why you're not paying attention in that morning (or, indeed, afternoon) meeting due to having stayed up to 4am to finish it and you're clearly Not That Young anymore; The Complete Tales of Winnie-The-Pooh (1926, 1928) (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), which I have been reading to Eldest Son having not really read it as a child and may I just say that the ending was horrible, in that I'd rate it about Six of That Scene From Up, You Know The One I Mean. (I have not yet seen Bao, or Incredibles 2); and Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Expert System's Brother (2018), the latest from that writer who did the thing about the portia spider, no not Peter Watts, the other one. The Expert System's Brother was a fun, short (it's a novella) that would pair well with Sue Burke's Semiosis in that it's a story about what a group of people might have to do on a planet that wants to kill them, unlike say, the people in Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora. In that way, The Expert System's Brother is about all the usual stuff: parents wanting a safe future for their children, ridiculously awesome genetic engineering, wasps, voice user interfaces and religious fanatics. See, I've sold you already. I am still making my way through Andy Clarke's Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind (2015) because it keeps blowing my mind about how our (and others') minds might work and it all seems to Make Sense So Far.
* via Leigh Honeywell, the website for Waterfall 2006 (a conference for people who're tired of other people coming in proclaiming "agile this" or "scrum that" and know that they have Real Things to deliver Properly and need to Manage Risk and also Manage Stakeholders) is very funny because it is obviously not a real thing but maybe?
* fucking fax machines (ie: you can send a specially crafted JPEG to a fax machine on a corporate office network and use it to jump off and pwn the rest of the network because OF COURSE YOU CAN, and people think using software for elections is still a good idea.
* DID YOU KNOW that General Electric ovens (not just ovens!) have a Sabbath Mode? I DID NOT! (It is not surprising that I did not because I am not an orthodox Jew and while I have friends who are non-orthodox, I have not spoken to them in a while and seriously I haven't even *brought* a kitchen appliance that requires two people to lift it before). Here's the certification from Star-K! It turns out that it's totally possible to meet user needs! From here it is a mere hop-skip-and-jump to Sabbath Mode for All The Other Things and then we'll all be Spending Time Well.
* If you have access to BBC iPlayer, Handmade is a three-part series that involves long takes, hardly any editing and no commentary, voiceover or music, of people making, by hand, a) a simple glass jug, b) a steel knife, and c) a Windsor chair. Don't tell me I don't make guesses about my audience interests.
* I learned about 'neuropixels' (stop that eye-rolling) which are a new kind of probe that can "dramatically enhance the ability to record from many cells simultaneously" and sound like a stepping stone on the way to those tiny, fine nanowires we'll stick in people (Greg Egan's introdus) before The Unavoidable Spasm to upload them into Heaven.
* In trying to find the Things that caught my attention, I realized that a Thing I'd really like would be some sort of OS-level record of what I've looked at in all the embedded web-views different applications use. This obviously applies to iOS because where else am I spending time in embedded webviews but seriously, the use-case is this: I see stuff in Newsblur, or Twitter, and it's not-quite-interesting-enough for me to send it over to Pinboard at the time but I want to see it later. And I can't. Because the OS isn't just remembering every webpage I look at (which, you know, terrifying).
Anyway, hi again. This is some of what was in my head that I haven't been tweeting.
[0] Charismatic megafauna - Wikipedia
[1] Hypnotized by Elon Musk’s Hyperloop | The New Yorker
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Anyway, hi again. This is some of what was in my head that I haven't been tweeting. How are you? Is the world on fire near you? Parts of the world are literally on fire near to my two Significant Locations, and honestly it's not that great, so if I leave you with anything it is a sincere wish that the immediate vicinity of your Significant Locations are not on fire, metaphorically or literally.
Best,
Dan