Blog
- Reduced Instruction Set Computer ↩
- Complex Instruction Set Computer ↩
- Taken from the Rosetta Stone that enabled historians and scientists to understand 3 languages, as the stone contained translations of Green, Demotic and Hieroglyphic ↩
- The instruction set determines how the processors calculates the code it is fed. Both RISC and CISC have their advantages and disadvantages ↩
End of an era: The final Boeing 747 is delivered after 50 years of production
Reduced to a cargo plane today, this was probably the most important plane ever designed, developed and put into production.
I flew on one once, maybe twice.
It was first produced before I was born and flown commercially in the year of my birth. Its production has stopped, with the last plane being shipped to Atlas Air as a cargo plane.
One thousand five hundred seventy-four planes were produced, and less than 4% were lost in accidents or incidents that put them beyond repair—a formidable record.
Of the 61 lost, only 32 resulted in a loss of life. Less than 2%. That’s a lot of safe air miles.
Sadly, however, when they did crash, it usually ended in significant losses of life. Holding the record for the highest death toll of any civil aviation accident, the highest death toll of any single aeroplane accident, and the highest death toll of a midair collision simultaneously, we’re unlikely to see another plane like it.
So long, 747.
19 December 2022 — French West Indies
Freedom
For a specific class, freedom always means freedom to do and say what they want, not what anyone else does or says.
As the owner of a private platform, Elon Musk is free to do as he pleases, but he cannot escape the consequences.
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
As of today (Sunday, 18/12/22), the platform violates two important GDPR provisions and is under warning from the EU regarding the de-platforming of journalists.
The unmasking of Elon as a far-right apologist and activist is not that surprising.
You can find me on mastodon.social.
18 December 2022 — French West Indies
The Same Old Logical Conclusion
Despite the odd way it works —and the new, sometimes, infantile terminology— Mastodon feels a lot like Twitter when I first joined in 2009, but I can’t shake the feeling that it will go south quickly as more get on the app.
It’s a small community (really stretching that definition, but hey 🤷♂️) with civil discourse and a genuine will to keep it that way.
It won’t last.
It never does.
There is only one logical conclusion with Social Media, regardless of the business model. And that result is a cesspool of the worst of humanity intertwined with pure gold.
Happy Holidays.
15 December 2022 — French West Indies
The Line I Will Not Cross
Yesterday I wrote about how I’d likely dial-down Twitter use, but not leave the platform. Then this:
Forcing me to give my location AND opt-in to personalised ads is a line that I won’t cross. I’m confident that many people will not do so either for all sorts of reasons, from personal privacy to personal (physical) safety from nefarious actors. Because location information is data, it can be breached and used to profile and locate people physically on the planet. Twitter is not immune to being hacked. Gaining access to this type of data is becoming easier, with one-stop shops for buying and selling hacked data easily accessible, which means almost anyone can do it.
I suspect this is not legal with the GDPR and could not be successfully implemented in Europe and European countries.
14 December 2022 — French West Indies
Not particularly social
According to Insider Intelligence, as reported in the Grauniad, Twitter will likely lose 30 million users over the next two years. To put that into perspective, Twitter’s Q2 2022 DAUs were in the region of 238 million.
Ad revenue is in free-fall to boot.
I, for one, am looking at alternatives, and the recent uptick in posting is partly to do with that.
For the moment, I’m still on Twitter, but I’m no longer engaging, not that I did much previously. I only use an automated bot to post updates on this blog, something that will eventually get turned off I suspect.
I’m on Mastodon, and besides the really quirky way it works, I’m beginning to see more activity from the topics and people I tend to enjoy reading. I anxiously await a decent client and an API for WordPress and other systems to post automatically.
13 December 2022 — French West Indies
Crypto or Criminal?
It is getting harder to tell whether Crypto actually means “Criminal”.
Take this Reuters article, for instance (emphasis mine):
The charges under investigation are unlicensed money transmission, money laundering conspiracy and criminal sanctions violations, the four people said. No final charging decisions have been made, though prosecutors consider Zhao and some other executives to be subjects of the investigation, one source familiar with the situation said.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that Proof of Work Waste blockchains should be considered criminal when considering the substantial environmental impacts. But hey, as long as you have your “unique” profile pic or your magic beans, who cares, right?
12 December 2022 — French West Indies
Experiences and Timelines
I had an odd experience last night. I say odd, but that’s making it sound more dramatic than it is on closer inspection.
I’m an ex-pat and have been for approximately two-thirds of my life. Some years ago, I passed the threshold of living outside my birthplace for more years than in. Some years ago, I passed the threshold of living more years with my mother no longer alive than alive. These are arbitrary datelines, but they have meaning and significance when you are the person directly living them.
Last night, I passed one of those arbitrary thresholds. Through circumstances irrelevant —a birthday party— I caught up with someone I hadn’t seen in more than 15 years. I’ve now crossed the threshold of having acquaintances from long ago in my relatively new life in the French West Indies.
If this had happened whilst I was still in the UK, meeting someone from ten or twenty years ago, I wouldn’t remark upon it. But it happened here, in my adopted home of over 18 years, making life’s timeline more intriguing to me.
11 December 2022 — French West Indies
Hold my beer
The world: “Surely it can’t get much worse than this now?”
SBF: “Hold my beer…”
https://www.axios.com/2022/12/09/bankman-fried-funded-crypto-news-site-block
10 December 2022 — French West Indies
Themes
If you listen to many podcasts in the tech space, particularly where a lot of Apple discussion takes place, you won’t have missed a podcast called Cortex.
It is hosted by Myke Hurley and CGP Grey and touches on several topics where tech has an influence.
One episode I look forward to every year is the Themes episode. This year is no different.
I don’t go all in on the theme journaling they promote —they even sell a physical journaling notebook based on the theme system. It just doesn’t work for my brain that well.
However, the idea of having a theme every year is interesting and does have some slight effect on how I do things during the year.
I’ll let you discover the podcast and how the yearly theme works, but I sometimes find the nudging of it helpful.
Every year I place an all-year calendar event in a dedicated calendar called surprisingly Theme, which runs from the 1st of January to the 31st of December.
The way my brain works, if it’s not visible, it doesn’t exist. It is a simple reminder to keep me on track with a little nudge in the right direction.
Have a listen, and you might find it helpful too.
9 December 2022 — French West Indies
Design is how things work. Not how they look.
In a New York Times article in 2003, Steve Jobs was quoted as saying:
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. ”People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
It is something that seems to have been lost in some architectural design over the last 20 years or so.
According to the British Trust for Ornithology, 100 million birds slam into glass façades of buildings in cities across the UK, with a death rate of approximately 33%.
33 million birds die every year because there’s a building!
The local authorities haven’t conducted risk assessments to determine if this is unavoidable.
I feel that we are innovating ourselves to extinction.
8 December 2022 — French West Indies
Marketing problem
Science doesn’t have an execution problem. Science has a marketing problem.
Conspiracies and fake news don’t have a marketing problem. Conspiracies and fake news have an execution problem.
15 April 2021 — French West Indies
Internet fanboy
I’ve been an internet fanboy for as long as I can remember —at least, as long as I learnt there was a big network of computers that we could all use, connecting us closer together.
It was fun in the 90s. I had to connect from the university network, JANET, to NIST (National Institue of Standards and Technology), then out to the big bad world of what was still essentially ARPANET.
The World Wide Web was still in an experimental state in CERN. I hadn’t even heard of it at that point. We used the Internet like animals; terminal commands, long waits, FTP, Gopher, WAIS, and Usenet, none of the graphically oriented interfaces that we see today.
As I fell in love with the Internet and I stumbled upon an early copy of Wired Magazine in 1993, imported into my native UK. I fully bought into the idea that the Internet was nothing but good for the world.
It would connect us, it would open our eyes to other things, would educate us, and it would even feed us. It would completely revolutionise the way the world works, for the better.
I had no idea at the time that the very fact that the world became more and more connected, it actually drives us more and more apart.
We, as humans, can comfortably ingest, process, and analyse only a few cognitively demanding elements simultaneously. At school, you would have only a handful of friends, and only one or two you could call best friend. If, like me, you were in a large secondary school of around a thousand pupils, it was overwhelming to be in general assembly (with the whole school in one room). The morning going to school, with its never-ending procession of pupils arriving, break time with the crowd pilling out of the building to run around on the playground. All these people surrounding us are too much for one human to get to know, either intimately or on a cursory level.
The Internet completely explodes that model, and we are confronted with tens of thousands, if not millions on possible interactions constantly whilst connected. Twitter, Facebook, Clubhouse, and their indifference to their capacity to overwhelm us is creating a different type of human culture that is, in my view, detrimental to the world. Polarisation, populism, immediacy of need. These are all consequences that are not propice for the sain development of the world.
I wish I had understood this when I was first becoming charmed with the Internet. Perhaps I could have contributed to doing something to protect us from its inevitable negative consequences.
Funnily enough, it was all there then for us to see. Re-read Neuromancer, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
15 April 2021 — French West Indies
M1 Happy
Oh, my! I’m so happy with the new MacBook Air M1. It is everything that everyone said it was. The processor, the speed, the weight. The quality is outstanding.
But the one thing I appreciate the most? The inverted ’T’ arrows keys.
I fucking hated, hated that piece of crap design on those butterfly keyboards, and I am so glad to see the back of it.
I have no beef with the keyboard itself. Sure it was a little clunky and mistyped now and again. But I forgave it. I could never forgive the abomination of the rectangle arrow keys.
Good. Fucking. Riddance.
13 April 2021 — French West Indies
It’s always them
There’s and old saying in the Information Technology industry to describe the situation when the network is not working properly.
It’s the DNS. It’s always DNS.
I think we now have an Internet equivalent.
It’s Facebook. It’s always Facebook.
8 April 2021 — French West Indies
On talking about Apple Music
The app is an absolute unadulterated piece of shit. It’s buggy. It’s slow. Furthermore, it has a mind its own. Likewise, it manages virtually nothing in your library apart from managing to screw up your files, organisation and cover art.
It really needs a big overhaul to get even the basics right.
5 April 2021 — French West Indies
Less is most likely more
The answer to the problems created by technology is almost certainly not more technology. The likes of Facebook would have you believe that more Facebook is the answer to Facebook’s problems. But it is looking increasingly likely to those who research and read about the platform, that the real solution is most likely less Facebook.
4 April 2021 — French West Indies
A missed opportunity for Apple and Apple Music 🤷♂️
Despite being criticised, and rightly so for some products, much hi-fi equipment is far from being snake oil. It tends to follow the laws of diminishing returns, for sure, but looking at that from the starting end of the graph, it means that spending just a little more will yield large returns on investment in sound quality. It generally follows that build quality and robustness also follow when you increase the budget of your hi-fi equipment.
Sadly, that world is full of promises and downright fraudulent claims, particularly in the cable market. But on the whole, a decent small-batch hi-fi manufacturer providing reasonably priced components will prove a wise strategy to get the best out of recorded music for you.
And that world is becoming more affordable as sources, components, and reproduction are all moving to digital. Looking at the middle-to-high end —brands like Naim Audio and Linn— are providing digital systems of the all-in-one design. Some model lack speakers, which is likely to capture a large chunk of the budget, but other models are true all-in-one systems conceived for the digital age. These systems are capable of producing remarkable sound for their size and budget. But the music industry has had a harder time convincing users of the benefits of higher definition audio.
Some of that has to do with the fact that some people just cannot hear the difference, others pretend they can and scientific experiments have all but proven that the benefits of high definition audio sources are only marginal. The human’s average hearing range is well inside the bandwidth of high definition audio, so it is difficult to prove the benefit to listeners.
That hasn’t stopped online streaming services like Tidal and Spotify from offering those products to their users. In fact, Tidal’s business model was predicated on the promise that it had the best sounding streams on the planet.
To play these sources as well as locally ripped or produced high definition sources, there are more products on the market adapted to this trend. One such product is the Buchardt Audio A500. It is a 4000€ speaker + hub package (delivered worldwide incl.) that negates the need for any other component in your system. You plug the speakers in, link them to the hub, and you can start streaming in less than ten minutes. The product goes much further, but that’s not the remit of this blog. Take a look at someone like DarkAudio for a better review.
But yes, this 4000€ product is out of the range of most listeners, either by wealth or by value perceived. And this is where I think Apple has a fantastic opportunity on two fronts to make the ultimate “everyday man’s” dream hi-fi system.
We’ve seen and heard what two HomePods in paired mode can produce in sound quality, and it is mightily impressive. Even two HomePod minis sound superb for $200 when paired! But the original HomePod was a floored design initially. It was Apple-only (through Apple Music) and could stream through AirPlay (an Apple proprietary streaming protocol). They worked very well but only suited those heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem.
Apple subsequently added the possibility for its AppleTV set-top box to use them as the default output device, but this only worked sporadically and relied on good wi-fi and internet. Most people use a variety of TV boxes and TV sets, and in those circumstances the go-to solution was to buy an AV amplifier and speakers —sometimes 8 (7+1)!
Where I think Apple could meaningfully contribute to the market, a market that is self-proclaimed to be significant to Apple, is on one hand provide a high definition streaming plan to the Apple Music subscription. An extra $5 or so a month would be picked up by a sizeable market, I believe (whether they hear the difference or not!). Let’s call it Apple Music+.
The second prong of the strategy would be to produce a device in the vein of the Buchardt Hub. A small set-top box that has AppleTV built in, inputs for line (both RCA and Minijack), USB and HDMI. The device would take the input, either wired or wireless through AirPlay, and output quality stereo sound to the two linked speakers using the same communications as the existing HomePods. With a little more work, it may be possible to even add additional speakers to the mix, providing the immersive all-round sound film buffs tend to favour.
The price of the package could be $500-$700 and would sell like hot cakes I would guess.
Think about a small, easy to set up, great-sounding all-in-one package that could replace the hi-fi, the AV amp and god-awful ugly speakers.
I’d go for that.
31 March 2021 — French West Indies
It’s the little things
No, scrap that. It’s the major things that make a difference.
It is an absolute pleasure to no longer think about the battery drain of a powerful laptop. I’m the owner of a new MacBook Air M1, and I couldn’t be happier with its value proposition.
Small, light, great screen, excellent trackpad, good keyboard and attractive industrial design. But, my word, the battery life is an absolute game-changer.
Can’t wait for the next generation and beyond.
31 March 2021 — French West Indies
Thoughts on Clubhouse
I got on to Clubhouse, so you don’t have to. It is actually a fascinating idea but one I can’t quite adhere to fully for numerous reasons, some of which I’ll dive into here.
But first, whenever I jump into a room on Clubhouse, there is literally nothing that couldn’t be better served in podcast format. The ability to stop/start when you like, the offline capability and the accompanying show notes that often point you to supporting materials, are all clearly missing from Clubhouse. This has been confirmed by the fact that many presenters are actually recording and publishing their “talks” through podcasts and YouTube post-room.
In fact, that’s the primary reason I got on the platform, to try to understand its relation to podcasts and to see if it would disrupt them as so many have been predicting. I’m happy to say that no, Clubhouse will not put a nail in the coffin of podcasts any time soon. If anything it is more like to become the model on which conference panel discussions get digitalised (and subsequently marginalised in value). There’s scope for the democratisation and digitalisation of many of the panels that are hosted around the world. COVID-19 has accelerated the acceptance of that reality. As a panel host/guest speaker invested in that market, i.e., if it’s your main job, I’d be worried about where well-paid work will come from in the next couple of years.
In fact, I’d go as far to say that if the platform becomes very popular, it could decouple live panel discussions from conferences and even kill off local discussion in-person forums. And like any platform on the internet at internet scale, the problem quickly becomes discovery. How do you find out about those interesting and informative conversations? How do you stop from getting placed in a social bubble (remember you’re linked to your contacts)? What part does moderation play in this?
But what is Clubhouse? I think a good way think about it is a cross between a phone-in radio show from a small town, populated by procrastinators, narcissists, and grifters. Its sudden popularity has meant that it is the latest target for dollar store wisdom mongers, snake oil merchants and outright fraudsters. That is not to say that there aren’t any interesting and enlightening discussions taking place on the platform, of course there are, just like we’ve seen on TED. But boy, there’s a lot of absolute crap out there too! If you do join, just beware of the VCBS and the pathetic rich-splaining like ‘Ooh look at me, I’m a millionaire’ or “Get More Clients in 2021”. I think I’ve said enough.
From an analytical point of view, I can see it as an ancillary service in digital conferencing —something that despite trying, we still haven’t cracked meaningfully, particularly the conference-goer interaction space. You’ve all been there, when the filthy mic gets passed around the hall in the Q&A session. You’ve probably all spent time in a Zoom-like conference wanting to get to talk to the panel/presenter and couldn’t because the tools don’t allow for that yet. Using Clubhouse as a digital alternative might possibly be very compelling.
The big question, of course, is how is Clubhouse going to monetise. I’ll put that to bed immediately because there is only one proven solution to qualitative tools on the Internet. Ads. Only businesses pay for quality (ahem) software. Consumers wilfully (or ignorantly) allow spying to be performed on their footsteps in cyberspace for that to be monetised later using some flaky and downright fraudulent claims on accuracy and ROI. And so it will pass. Clubhouse will become Clubhouse + ads. The funding round mostly from A16z practically guarantees this. They have bet big and will want big returns or nothing.
There is also a technical and practical dilemma for Clubhouse too. How it can interject adverts without the speakers announcing “This room is sponsored by …” —something I’m not even sure is possible in the T&Cs. (Note to self: Check the terms for advertising clauses). If it is audio, i.e., the primary reason you get on the platform, then having your favourite show interrupted by an advert about a website builder or better yet, the next “hot” Clubhouse room is so user hostile that I can only imagine adverts inserted as you enter or leave a room. Interstitial adds are super agressive and frictional to the point that many of us might reduce the use of the app. The other option is visual ads either static of video-based. Again, this is a tricky prospect as many people open the app, join a room and turn the screen off listening on headphones, the phone’s speaker or AirPlay-ing it to the voice in the box. I mean, where’s the moat? How is this different from live-feed podcast?
As it stands today, Clubhouse is just a feature waiting to be copied by the big boys in the classroom. Twitter and Facebook have started doing just that. They’re unlikely to stop until they can kill off the disruptor before it gets a foothold or be told to stop by legislation. It’ll most likely be achieved through two strategies; using their already hard-won networks and graphs, and out-featuring the features of the product for nothing more than is little more personal data.
I wrote this passage a few weeks ago as I was taking notes using Clubhouse:
Just as an aside, a note about building the network. Clubhouse requires, yes requires, you to upload your entire contacts list if you want to invite someone to the party. You get two invites when you’re successfully integrated. If you store contact details on any European citizen (regardless of where you like), you are defect breaking GDPR laws unless you’ve got permission from the person being invited. I make no judgement, I inform. Think about that for a minute. I currently have 1346 contact cards on my Mac (some are old or defunct), but Clubhouse wants 1300+ just to send two invites. I suspect around 800 or more of those contacts are EU citizens; therefore I’d be breaking the law over 800 times.
That paragraph is meaningless today, as the app has been updated to allow an invitation to be sent to individual phone numbers thus avoiding the wrath of the EU for now. Who knows if they’ll go after those who have already broken the law. 🤷♂️ For them, Clubhouse has provided means by which you can delete the contacts you uploaded. Looks a bit like shredding the papers before the inspectors to me. As far as I’m aware, French authorities have opened an investigation to determine if there was indeed a breach of law by Clubhouse.
I doubt much will come of it, though. But it is a sign of the very different times in which startups in the tech industry are trying to get off the ground, of which they will be no doubt acutely aware.
30 March 2021 — French West Indies
The origins of Rosetta(2) probably lie in a little-known technology from 1996 called FX!32
Unless you’re a hermit or not in any way linked to the tech industry, you’ll be aware that Apple has released its in-house designed processors to replace the current Intel-supplied ones used in the low-end line of Apple’s computers; the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro 13” and the Mac Mini.
Upon reception, people have been benchmarking these processors with nothing short of absolutely stunning results. They are that good it seems. Everything from switching resolutions —which is, by the way, instantaneous with no blanking or delay— to running Apple M1 optimised tasks at over three times the speed for some functions, as compared to even the fastest of the Intel family.
But I’ve been most interested in this transition to RISC1 from CISC2, or to put it differently, from Intel to Apple arm-based processors, for one reason. Rosetta.3 A Apple officially calls it Rosetta, but we all know it as Rosetta 2 because its original outing was in 2006. Back then Apple was embarking on its first major transition from the PowerPC line of processors to Intel’s x86 line. Rosetta, at that time, provided the bridge between the older PowerPC applications and the newer operating system that was running entirely on the Intel instruction set.4 Rosetta was an emulation software that took PowerPC-based commands and turned them into equivalent Intel-based commands, allowing the application to run, albeit slowly. There is an overhead that is not negligible to run as an emulation. At the elementary level, the processor has to do at least twice the work than an application running natively.
Rosetta 2 does things a little differently, and as a result, substantially reduces the time required to run the translated applications. The word ‘translate’ is the key to understanding Rosetta 2.
Back in 1996 during the precipitous misfortune of digital, a major computer company from Maynard, Massachusetts, digital had designed, built and implemented a RISC-based architecture processor called Alpha. The move to RISC was seen as the way forward and was —rightly so, if what we’re seeing today from Apple— projected to be the future of processor design.
At the time, there was a belief that RISC-based microprocessors were likely to replace x86-based microprocessors, due to a more efficient and simplified implementation that could reach higher clock frequencies.
(FX!32 - Wikipedia. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!3...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32))
There was, however, one snag, and that was application compatibility with the growing x86 application base that had taken hold at the time, through PCs running various flavours of Windows. One interesting version had been commercialised for a few years, NT or New Technology, and was quickly outdoing the established Unix workstation operating systems, like digital’s own AXP.
To remove this sticking point, Raymond J. Hookway and Mark A. Herdeg led a team of engineers in developing a much better solution to the CISC ➔ RISC problem than simple emulation. Released in 1996 and discussed in detail in this 1997 Digital Technical Journal article, DIGITAL FX!32 provided the means for the binaries to be “translated” from x86 to Alpha. FX!32 took native x86 binaries and created alpha DLLs, or Dynamic Linked Libraries, and ensured that these ran in the place of the original x86 binaries.
FX!32 allowed two things to happen. One, FX!32 let non-native x86 code run on the Alpha processors with a much smaller speed penalty than emulation. Version 1.0 reportedly ran at 40-50% of the speed of native Alpha code. It was way faster than emulator software that typically ran at a tenth (or slower) of native speed. Subsequent versions and other optimisations allowed the code to run at over 70% of the native Alpha processors speed. Being that the alpha processor was the fastest processor on the market at the time, this allowed complex applications like Microsoft Office, to run at very useable speeds on Alpha workstations running NT 3.51.
Secondly, the work done to translate the binary was not lost and re-expended every time the required application was run, as it was in emulation. FX!32 optimised the binaries in the background and stored the translated libraries on-disk which enabled the second-run experience to be virtually unnoticeable. The background translation ran without user interaction and allowed the processor to choose the best possible optimisations in terms of computational resources enabling the user to start the application and get to work after a short delay. Modules not yet used in the application were optimised in the background and on the first run, were fast and responsive.
The primary goals of the project were to provide 1) transparent execution of x86 applications and 2) to achieve approximately the same performance as a high-end x86 platform. FX!32 achieved both these goals.
That brings us to Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology. Wikipedia’s entry for Rosetta 2 is two sentences:
Rosetta 2 is included starting with macOS Big Sur to aid in the Mac transition to Apple Silicon from Intel processors. In addition to the just-in-time (JIT) translation support available in Rosetta, Rosetta 2 includes support for translating an application at installation time.
Technical information is scarce, as Apple typically shields these types of technical documents. The page dedicated to Rosetta on developer.apple.com is scant in technical detail too. But I suspect the origins of the technology lie in FX!32, updated to run x86 64bit instructions. The difference between now and then, is that Apple’s M1 is so fast that even the 20-30% speed hit allows these computers to run Intel code faster than Intel itself can (on the line of processors Apple is replacing).
Just. Stunning.
20 November 2020 — French West Indies