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
Week note #2 : W45
I’m a couple of days late writing this, but I did say that it might not be as regular as my other writing. I have an excuse: I’ve been travelling. Moving around time zones plays havoc with writing and thinking about writing.
But the worst for me, and what exacerbates the discombobulation, is that I’m not a great sleeper on planes, and long-haul flights generally mean that I lose a whole night’s sleep as I sit (usually uncomfortably) in a metal tube transporting me over an ocean. I’ll nod off for a couple of minutes, maybe even fifteen, but I never get to sleep for a few hours. I’m so jealous of those who have that ability. On this flight, we were two in a 3-seat row. This makes quite a difference to the feeling of not being trapped. My companion on this flight who was a total stranger to me. He sat down, wolfed down his dinner in a couple of minutes as soon as it was served (whilst starting a movie on the in-flight screen), lay back, and then proceeded to sleep for pretty much the entire flight. He didn’t get past the first 30 minutes of the film before snoozing off. That’s a superpower that I don’t possess, but I’d like to have. Sadly, I do not, so I’m constrained to find entertainment and diversion for upwards of eight hours. It’s not an easy task when you have ADHD.
My strategy this time, as pretty much every time, is to load up on a good couple of podcasts —the more narrative, the better— and to read books/papers.
I recently found out about the Dimsdale website, which has links to archived episodes from BBC Radio (only BBC? I need to check), and one particular series stood out to me. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I knew the TV series and had read all five books in the series —“a trilogy in five parts”— and thoroughly enjoyed them. I’d heard snippets of the original radio series broadcast in 1978 but never the entire series. Thirty-three downloads later, I had enough to listen to for several hours. I listened to seven of them.
To fully benefit from the entertainment and not get distracted by the surroundings, I have a pair of AirPods Pro 2. They have decent noise cancellation technology and sound reasonable, so I tend to use them for podcasts and general listening. To listen to music, I have a pair of Focal Bathys over-ear headphones with decent noise cancellation technology, too, and they are an order of magnitude better for music than the AirPods.
Lastly, I tend to read a lot during a flight, even marking up a couple of papers on AI that I wanted to finish and take some notes from. The engagement of reading and writing a couple of notes prevents me from getting too bored and helps the time pass well. I finished two papers and have many notes I want to explore and turn into a couple of posts about the subject.
I’ve tried all the digital note-taking wonkery, but I’ve not had anything stick for reasons I can’t explain. To help me, I’ve gone back to pen and paper, which, for some reason, is just much better for me to get notes written about what I’m reading. I’ve started printing documents and articles for that express purpose. Mindful of the environmental impact, I print double-sided and in booklet form. I get four pages on one A4 sheet which cuts down on paper used. It’s a bit small, but not uncomfortable to read a long article, and it leaves just enough space to write some notes in the margins. My notes are short and direct, which works out great for me.
After over eight hours on the direct flight, I arrive at my destination and then try to get a full day’s work/reading/relaxing to set my internal clock to the new timezone. It’s the best way I’ve found to help me adjust quickly, but I’m not particularly productive for the first few hours.
10 November 2024 — French West Indies
Week note #1 : W44
I haven’t been posting much here for reasons I can’t quite explain. But as it’s not a commercial adventure and really only a personal space to put down ideas, reflections and other thoughts, I don’t think it matters too much.
Looking through the archives, there’s a lot of stuff here, and I didn’t realise just how much I had written over the years. Some of it is good, and I’d still stand by it, and other posts… perhaps not so much.
But I think that’s what blogging is about. It’s not publishing. It’s not static media like newspapers and magazines, even if the articles don’t generally change (at least mine, as I don’t go back to edit them). Blogging is more of a stream of consciousness than deeply researched and thought-out articles.
So, to get me writing more here, I wanted to try something different, even if it is not that different from what we see on the Internet, or at least the indie web. I’m thinking of writing this more regularly and loosely in the “week note” format.
I haven’t quite found the format yet, so it’ll take time to settle down, I guess. Plus, I might blog the odd post now and again that is outside that format. I’ll see.
My idea is to go over a couple of things that affected me in the previous week and a couple of other links to articles or other things I’ve been doing.
A note on PII. Despite writing here for the entire connected world to see (if they so choose), I’m pretty private, so I’ll unlikely leave too much PII in the articles. Names will be changed, as will places, times, and dates. Particularly where they directly concern me. If I do publish something personal, it’ll most likely be delayed, as I don’t think it is wise to publish live feeds of where you are to the world. Also, while I’m on the topic, you should understand that this site uses no tracking, so I have no idea who, when, or how many times this site has been read. I’m more than OK with this. It was one of the reasons I decided to use the micro.blog platform in the first place.
I’m not sure when I’ll post them either. I write a regular —and longer— article on Sundays, editing and tweaking them on Monday, ready for the email system to post them as a newsletter on Tuesday mornings. So, writing twice the amount on the same day is out of the question. Given my schedule, it leaves my Thursdays a little freer than other days in the week, so I think I will try to post them on Thursday evenings.
This is the first (although not quite the format I will use yet).
I hope I get something out of it, and I hope you do too, so reach out and say hi or reply (⬇). I’d be happy to hear from you.
31 October 2024 — French West Indies
I finally bought a decent coffee grinder after months of unsuccessfully trying to find one on the island.
People will hype them as “game-changing,” and while they make a noticeable difference, “game-changing” is more hyperbole than reality.
28 September 2024 — French West Indies
BBC: Met Police launch plans to be “truly anti-racist and inclusive”.
Yeah sure. We believe you this time.
28 September 2024 — French West Indies
I’m trying to figure out where I was when the memo was passed around asking everyone to use the word “obligated” rather than the existing, perfectly fit-for-purpose word “obliged.”
While I’m on the topic, WTF does the word “colorway” add over and above the word colour/color?
16 September 2024 — French West Indies
Facebook continues insisting on being an awful Internet citizen.
Surreptitiously scraping data to train its AI models since 2017unless legislation existed to prevent this.
This company’s moral compass is not even misaligned; it isn’t working at all.
11 September 2024 — French West Indies
What a wonderful sunset we had tonight.
I was tempted to get the camera out and take a picture postcard photo.
But something told me to sit, relax, and just enjoy it.
Not everything needs to be photographed and shared.
5 September 2024 — French West Indies
Please stop using the word content, as in “content creator”, “creative content”, or “content”.
You are commoditising your work, your time, and your skill. You are being exploited by devaluing its worth.
You don’t make “content”. You make art. You make music. You make films. You make blogs, articles, reports, and other beautiful things that enhance this existence.
You make value. Don’t let anyone steal it.
6 August 2024 — French West Indies
I’m currently reading Number Go Up by Zeke Faux.
Anyone who is deep into, holds, uses or otherwise is connected to the running of this “industry” is complicit in murder, slavery, torture, and organised crime, not to mention the destruction of the climate.
You rotten people.
5 August 2024 — French West Indies
Despite the discussion about LLM training data and the rights to train this data, a fundamental question about consent is often ignored. Much of the tech industry has flipped over into a non-consensual model: Take, then defend/contest later.
They are coming up against resistance in the form of regulation, particularly in the EU. But they have no idea just how bad it will get for them if the general public gets on board with resistance.
It is going to be, at the very least, interesting to see how this plays out. I don’t give much of a chance to the tech firms in the long term.
15 July 2024 — French West Indies
With news that Threads has reached 175 MAUs, this is an interesting waypoint in its life worth keeping an eye on.
Currently, Thread is an ad-free and watered-down attempt at building a Twitter replacement, but that is about change when Meta decides to turn on ads, as they have alluded to in recent interviews with the tech press.
This will only incentivise the worst behaviour from both Meta and its real customers, the advertisers. The enshitiffication cycle has started.
Watch carefully and you will see it unfold in clarity.
Social Media and general online commentary are about to get even more vacuous, irrational, wrong and just plain stupid.
With around 50% of new iPhone sales being the Pro model and therefore potentially able to produce Apple LLM-generated slop, from text to images (🤢), the Internet will be dirtier than the rivers the water companies are deliberately polluting.
Not exactly the most positive thought for the day, but that’s how I feel.
The long-term outcomes and the impacts on the economy, society, and politics clearly show that neoliberalism has failed. It has been a disaster and a complete abdication of responsibility by the political class and the wealthy.
From the point of view of the rich, everything is fine. They’re even more well off. From the point of view of the rest of us, times are as hard as they’ve ever been with no respite in sight.
This is the calm before the storm unless things change fundamentally.
And no, “giving them a go” (referring to the right, extreme right and ultra-right) is not the answer. The violence and suffering that that would cause will be of a magnitude not seen since the last world wars.
In other words, Threads likely wants to be a monetization center for online creators and eventually compete with Patreon.
Human Generated Content: Patreon Belongs in the Fediverse
Embrace, extend and extinguish. This will not turn out to the benefit of artists.
Heads up. Here’s the real reason the Caribbean cannot dig itself out of the hole that it has been forced into for over 400 years:
SIDS drowning in debt and ‘running on empty’, warns Guterres in Antigua
We can talk all we like about innovation, technology, SDGs, entrepreneurship. It’s all bullshit until the region can live without the shackles of debt that is destroying generation after generation of potential.
Never forget.
Cory Doctrow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr), writing on pluralistic.net:
Together, they represent a multi-front war on the very idea that four billion people should have their digital lives controlled by an unaccountable billionaire man-child whose major technological achievement was making a website where he and his creepy friends could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of their fellow Harvard undergrads.
3 May 2024 — French West Indies
Blogrolls are cool again
I’ve tried blogging on and off for years, possibly decades. It has never stuck. These last couple of years or so, I have been more consistent and blogged a lot more.
I’ve had to move platforms, so much of the old stuff is badly linked these days, and I even had a post promoted by a software house mere days before I moved platforms again, rendering their link to my blog useless 😰 —I didn’t have the heart to ask them to update the link.
One thing that stuck out in the later stages of the earlier blogging period was a list of recommended blogs that bloggers would share on their posts/pages. It got a bit nepotistic eventually, but the idea was solid —You like my blog, why not try these?
They died out when microblogging sites like Twitter and other social media walled gardens railroaded the Internet. The algorithm replaced the recommendations, not to help you find more interesting things to read and learn about, but to monetise you through invasive and often illegal advertising malpractice.
But blogging is making a comeback. People are starting to feel the real harm social media is doing to us. And yes, I know there are studies that say there’s nothing wrong with social media, and others that feel it is literal digital cancer. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, or at least more nuanced than those arguments —that are, by the way, very “social media” in construction by being as binary as that.
And so with (real) blogging making a comeback, so are blogrolls. These are the real algorithms of the Internet. One’s that are much better, much saner, less clickbait-y… more human, and humane.
Long live blogrolls. Mine is a work-in-progress, and you can find it from the menu.
2 May 2024 — French West Indies
Au revoir Apple Watch
I’ve bought three Apple Watches since its introduction, spending a total of around 1000 € not including a few bands that I bought to change things when wearing it for sleep, sport or out for dinner.
I may be a little slow in realising this, but I’ve just purchased a mid-range Swiss movement automatic watch for quite a bit less than I spent on Apple Watches over the last 9 years. My current Apple Watch doesn’t a whole day any more as the battery is hosed. Although I could replace the battery —in theory— it requires even more money thrown at a watch that will be declared obsolete shortly, and then become a contribution to the world’s ever-growing pile of eWaste because a corporate manager has ordained it so. I’m not that comfortable with that prospect.
My new watch will last decades and will be something I can pass down to my son in years to come, unlike an obsolete wrist computer with a swollen fire hazard battery. And it’ll still tell the time as wells it did when I bought all those years ago.
I don’t think I’ll buy a new Apple Watch anytime soon.
However, it is an “au revoir” because I’m still going to use the Apple Watch for exercise and sleep tracking, or if I know I’m going to have a particularly active day. But I don’t see myself re-spending the kinds of sums required just ot have the time on my wrist and a couple of notifications.
I’ll be looking into other options for sports and sleep.
27 April 2024 — French West Indies