Rebel Alliance
At some point, your scrappy Rebel Alliance gets so big that it becomes the Empire.
7 May 2025 — French West Indies
Meta, as in data
Finally, I’ve changed my mind. Meta is a completely appropriate name for the organisation. Meta, as in metadata.
They are only interested in the metadata around what is on their products. Number must go up.
The minutiae, the details, the wellbeing, the mental health, the privacy, the collapse of democracy, the genocide; these are all things that ‘they’ have no interest in, specifically Mark Zuckerberg and the management team.
It will catch up to them one day. That day cannot come soon enough.
30 April 2025 — French West Indies
Adtech is a cancer. It will eventually eat and destroy a business and more often than not its morals. You will only notice when it is too late.
It is disheartening to hear of a wildly successful business focusing more and more on ads and not on the products that made it a good business in the first place.
It will destroy this company.
19 April 2025 — French West Indies
Any online-only survey on the economy that asks how people are fairing is inherently flawed and cannot be taken too seriously.
The ones suffering are the ones that have no access to the internet and smartphones to be able to take part. So these surveys totally miss possibly the most important cohort in their analysis.
29 March 2025 — French West Indies
Blockchain is still a solution looking for a problem. Why are we still talking about it?
From Ars Technica:
“It feels like a fake technological solution for a problem that doesn’t exist,” she says. “I don’t think we were ever able to find an instance where people were using blockchain where they couldn’t use existing tools.”
From a technology consultant helping large-scale humanitarian organisations adopt technology.
I’ll say it again, blockchain is a slow, wasteful database that at best is a curiosity and not GDPR compliant.
It’s like inventing a “new” combustion engine that is both slower and 100x less efficient.
26 March 2025 — French West Indies
“Ireland is Apple's second home” - Tim Cook
VIa Apple Insider.
When mere mortals have homes, they pay taxes.
Pay your taxes, Tim.
17 March 2025 — French West Indies
In defence of Stage Manager
Judging by public reactions, this is not a popular perspective, but I, for one, am grateful that Stage Manager exists, and I use it almost exclusively. To be clear, I only use it on macOS and don’t go near it on an iPad as it is not fit for purpose on that platform, sadly.
On the Mac, it is a tool that I use to help me with distractions, helping me concentrate on the task at hand and avoiding the distractions of the constantly updating timelines, documents open that require edits, or the myriad of other distractions presented by modern computer interfaces.
With ADHD, it is a constant battle to stay on track and to keep enough focus on the current task alone, that any assistance is helpful. For me at least.
It is not without its problems, however. Some applications don’t behave well. Excel is a good example. If you have two workbooks open in two different Stages, operations like undo jarringly flip you to the other stage and the undo is ignored completely. I’m sure that Microsoft are totally on top of this, and it’ll get fixed in about ten to twenty… years!
For now, I’m sticking with it and I turn it off now and again when I don’t have the need to focus as much.
While I think of it, one good example of this is when I present. Presentations don’t sit well with Stage Manager and simply and quickly turning it off makes the presentation work fine.
There are other improvements that could be made, like remembering groups of apps between sessions and reboots. I’d like to be able to designate what goes with what in which Stage to always open the apps concerned like that.
As I said, in defence of Stage Manager.
17 March 2025 — French West Indies
Until I can switch off Apple Intelligence Smart Replies, this setting is going to remain off.
I’d be happy to give it a go on a couple of things —mostly writing tools— but the fact that it suggests replies for my personal text messages to friends and family and that I can’t turn it off is a line I will not cross.
They are so incredibly poor in quality that it is laughable and something that Apple should be ashamed of, rather than promoting and forcing upon its users.
It is such a lack of respect for its user base and something that hints at the start of its demise as one of the world’s leading computing platforms.
One year check in on Apple Vision Pro.
Incredible technology still looking for a problem to solve.
Something the AI boosters are ignoring and working hard to ignore, is that humas intrinsically don’t like liars.
When they have an interaction with a genai chatbot that patently lies to them because “hallucination”, it deeply degrades their experience and devalues your company, product, or service.
The problem is that there is no fix for this. Telling the model not to lie is useless.
28 January 2025 — French West Indies
You’re standing in line.
Believing the lies.
Bowing down to the flag.
You’ve got a bullet in your head.
Apple users, if you haven’t already done so, you should seriously consider turning on iCloud Advanced Data Protection.
You cannot trust Apple to be good custodians currently.
Share your private key (encrypted and password protected) with a friend, or store in a couple of physical secure locations.
/ #technology #tech #privacy #BigTech #surveillancecapitalism
Mark Zuckerberg has recently said that he’s taking Meta back to its roots.
As one commentator pointed out, presumably that means a platform for rating the fuckability of college girls? Or, perhaps it means how he calls everyone “dumb fucks”.
18 January 2025 — French West Indies
I hear all the time about how Meta’s products allow millions of micro and small businesses develop around the world.
If this is true, then that alone should be reason for this platform not to exist in its current form, given that one man has the power to determine who can and who cannot exist.
He is currently showing that if your business is not ‘with us’ then it’s ‘against us’.
18 January 2025 — French West Indies
I remember when the Internet was good. No. It was amazing.
The first time I used the Internet, we could count the number of nodes on the network as less than a 100 000. The web hadn’t been invented yet and as soon as I experienced it myself, through some scrappy tools running on a university Unix box, I was hooked.
I knew it would change our lives. And it did.
I didn’t anticipate it becoming what it is today.
We’ve got all the stuff we dared to dream about, but naively, we believed it would come with none of the mess that humans seem to bring to the party.
I’m not sure how I feel about the Internet today.
I sometimes think that we should switch it off now and again to reset it.
We can’t, of course. And we won’t.
The Internet might switch us off, however.
16 January 2025 — French West Indies
I turned off Apple Intelligence on my Mac.
It’s poor. Really poor.
Very un-Applelike.
23 December 2024 — French West Indies
Weeknote #4: Week 49
I missed week 48 as I decided to take the time to do something else that needed to be done at home and take some other work that had slipped by during my trip away.
I finally completed all episodes of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio 4 series I downloaded from Dimsdale. I have to say that it holds up really well still. Despite having some of the sensibilities of a past era, the humour is still funny, and the self-reflection on society is as relevant today as it was then. In fact, there are some things that you hear and think about things happening today. I recommend it.
I’ve been listening to the BBC Reith Lectures, as I do every year, and this year’s have not disappointed me. The main topic has been about Violence.
This topic piqued my interest as I have been thinking about the levels of violence in societies I frequent and know about. From my isolated and anecdotal point of view, it does feel like there is more gratuitous violence than I remember. Is it objectively true, though?
The first lecture is entitled “Is violence normal?” and Dr Gwen Adshead —this year’s lecturer— touches on some cold, hard facts about the human condition and about how we, as essentially animals, use violence to express emotions and control our surroundings, both physically and interactively with our peers. Does that mean it is normal? That is the question she tries to answer. She notes that even primates, of which we share 98% of our DNA, have rules about the use of violence. But that 2% difference accounts for major differences in how we interact in relationships and our actions.
I don’t write reviews, so I’ll leave you to listen to the four episodes—all available now if you live in the U.K. If you don’t, the first two have been released. As a bonus, the BBC provides transcripts of the lectures and the conversation before and after. These are very useful for reference and further reading.
I don’t know if my mind is telling me something, but I’ve been listening to another podcast on a similar topic for the last several weeks. It is called Kill List. It charts the story of a journalist and an ethical hacker who broke into a dark web “hitman for hire” website that was a scam and ripped off its customers to the tune of many tens of thousands in Bitcoin.
What is most interesting about this podcast is what they do with that list of targets, how they contact them, how they try to warn them, and the potential victims’ reactions and surprising responses. It is such a well-told series, and I’m enjoying every episode.
We’re getting to the end of the year, and this year has been more frustrating than I had anticipated. I will need to come to terms with this and work on it for the next year.
I try to write a self-review and then work on next year’s priorities, but this year, I haven’t given myself the time to do so yet.
I would hope to do that in the coming weeks and have something structured before the end of the year.
I live and work in a French territory, and the way Bank Holidays work in France is a little strange for an ex-pat. If the day in question falls on a weekend, it isn’t moved to the following Monday like in the U.K. It falls on that day, so if it is a Sunday, so be it, and it is lost.
Christmas Day falls on a Wednesday this year, and France doesn’t have a Boxing Day, so the week will be split into two parts unless I plan to take time off.
I haven’t decided yet.
9 December 2024 — French West Indies
Many say regulation stifles innovation.
I call bullshit.
Look at Formula 1. It is one of the most regulated sports in the world and also one of the most innovative.
It’s almost like regulation promotes innovation.
4 December 2024 — French West Indies
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes the fraternity of Tech Bros as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”
Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Tech Bros as: “A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
With apologies to Douglas Adams (RIP). (Please buy the books and read them.)
Weeknote #3 : Weeks 46 & 47
I’m back after a short break off-island. The break was well-deserved and needed and was something I had been looking forward to for months. I was away for around ten days, with just over two of them taken up with travel and waiting for connections. I’m back home now and returning to a regular routine, picking up where I left off.
It’s funny that nothing can be left to wait too long when you’re in your usual work context. Everything needs to be finished in the given timeframes discussed and agreed upon, but when you’re away —either on holiday or due to illness or similar— everything can wait, and there’s no urgency. As soon as you step back, everything suddenly becomes urgent again. This sense of urgency is completely fabricated, with no actual grounding in reality or the bigger picture of your life’s priorities. I’m glad I tuned out.
As I’d previously written, I loaded up on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio 4 series and listened to fifteen or so episodes of this brilliant series.
Once I’d arrived at my destination, I pretty much switched off the Internet, only keeping up to date with a few bits and bobs of news. I almost entirely ignored my emails and other requests on my time that were not directly related to being on holiday. People talk of a “digital detox”, but this was absolutely nothing of the kind. It was simply taking back control of my time and doing what I wanted when I wanted.
Spending a lot of time on two transatlantic flights, both over 8 hours each, allowed me to read and mark up a couple of papers I’d had in the queue for a while. As I mentioned previously, I printed them out and used my workhorse fountain pen to mark up my notes in the margins directly on the paper. It’s probably a result of my generation, but I find it easier to make meaningful notes like this rather than the several digital note-taking methods I’ve tried.
The notes I collected are slowly being turned into digital notes and stored in a large database that I keep for purposes of research, thinking, and writing. I use DEVONthink as I find it fits my way of thinking and provides me with a powerful search and related-item discovery that other systems don’t. This is going to take a little time, and some of the notes will get expanded and turned into articles or other longer-form writing.
During my time away, an election in the US concluded, and then there was a sudden exodus from Twitter. The social media product that seems to have been the main beneficiary of this is Bluesky. I’d opened a Bluesky account early on and it had been a relative ghost town until a week or so ago.
When I write here, I automatically cross-post to Bluesky for no other reason than that I can. I’m currently reevaluating my media diet and online presence, and although I haven’t made any decisions yet, I’m likely to step back from time online and privilege meaningful time with books and other preoccupations. To that end, I might stop cross-posting altogether and only use this blog and my main blog (my professional look at things) as my main presence online. More thought is needed.
One thing that I seem to think is that I like things when they’re niche, manageable and different from the norm. I generally start to dislike things when they become big and ‘too’ popular. Bluesky is verging on that, and although I think I’ll stay for now, I’ll not post much.
One more note on Bluesky. Many who have come onto the website have remarked on its “nice” and “enjoyable” nature, something that was lost with Twitter several years ago. Whilst this is true for the moment, popularity and population size are about to change that forever. The scum, the cranks, and the fascists will arrive shortly. And whilst the moderation tools are pretty good on the site, they won’t be able to cope with the influx and the sheer scale of the problem, and we’ll be back to square one.
Social media will never be and can never be a truly “nice” place for communication and human interaction. The reason? Sheer scale. Once you pass a certain size, desensitisation and inherent reduction in empathy automatically install themselves, making interactions tokenised data exchanges. This dehumanisation means meaningful exchange and communication are a rarity, not the norm.
We will understand this one day, but I fear it will be too late.
25 November 2024 — French West Indies