Blog
It’s only going to get worse
According to the Guardian, “Cheating in professional exams is still a ‘live’ issue at the UK’s biggest audit firms, the accountancy watchdog warned.”
Just wait till ChatGPT or its successor gets good.
I’m a teacher, and I’m already trying to find ways to understand how to test that makes it harder for AI models like ChatGPT to provide coherent answers. I fear I may be losing that battle.
21 December 2022 — French West Indies
Another “End of Era”: Terry Hall
His voice and the Specials were part of the sound when we were growing up.
Saddened to hear of his passing.
The story behind Gangsters is interesting and totally Terry Hall.
Enjoy.
19 December 2022 — French West Indies
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