According to the WSJ, Apple is planning on releasing a journaling app that competes with existing apps:

The software will compete in a category of so-called journaling apps, such as Day One, which lets users track and record their activities and thoughts. The new Apple product underscores the company's growing interest in mental health.

The Apple journaling app, code-named Jurassic, is designed to help users keep track of their daily lives, according to the documents describing the software. The app will analyze the users' behavior to determine what a typical day is like, including how much time is spent at home compared with elsewhere, and whether a certain day included something outside the norm, according to the documents.

I’m genuinely interested to discover what this will look and work like.

I’ve used the excellent journaling app called Day One for several years. I like and use it because of its simplicity, syncing, and availability on iPhone, Mac and iPad. However, because of the poor support for the specificities of the iPad, I think Apple has an opportunity to provide the basics and go beyond what Day One delivers. The iPad is a pencil-supporting device; in this respect, I think Day One has consistently missed something. It offers basic Scribble and drawing support but leaves you wanting more.¹

When you look at journaling as a practice, there is much worth in writing by hand. Studies that look at learning show that people tend to remember more and for longer when they have written their notes using pen and paper.² There is just something connecting the brain and the information through the writing process.³

Apple should Implement something akin to current functionality in Notes or Freeform, although less clunky, please. What is needed is an unencumbered combination of digital text, handwriting, drawings, and scribbles, all free from constraint and really easy to use. Some of the most personal journals include handwriting, doodles and other markings that can signify something to the writer and possibly the posthumous reader of the future. Limiting a journal to markdown or rich text is too reductive for journaling.

I’d love the Apple app to have the ability to do either, or more precisely, both. There are days I’d like to handwrite and days I’m happy sitting at my desk writing through the keyboard. With this setup, it would be easier to journal when not at the office or possessing only an iPad —the typing experience of the on-screen keyboard on an iPad is less than optimal, and I’m being very charitable.

Microsoft produced a demo of something similar to this idea over ten years ago called Courier.⁴ Microsoft’s concept goes way beyond what is needed and wanted. But it gives you an idea of an entirely open-ended journal, just like paper, only digital, replicated, backed up and encrypted for privacy.

3 May 2023 — French West Indies

1. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/apple-pencil-and-scribble ↩
2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210319080820.htm ↩
3. Incidentally, handwriting on a tablet, whilst better than typing, performed slightly worse than pen and paper. ↩
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier ↩

I, for one, will not be pledging allegiance to “the King”.

Royalty is essentially a criminal enterprise and always has been. The gangs of the past successfully killed, terrorised, pillaged and set up elaborate rent-seeking schemes to consolidate enough power that still permeates to this day.

This current incarnation got rich off the backs of enslaved people and has so far refused to acknowledge such and do something meaningful to apologise and repair.

The ceremony itself is a silly fantastical ritual of Disney proportions for a well-connected, dubiously super-rich man having a metal hat —decorated with stolen diamonds— placed on his head.

And we’re supposed to bow down to this?

I don’t believe one strand of human DNA is more important than another’s.

Take your coronation and shove it.

30 April 2023 — French West Indies

From the Guardian: Not the kind of endorsement that I’d be comfortable with —more of an indication of just how far right the UK has shifted in recent times.

This will not end well.

28 April 2023 — French West Indies

From BBC News 24/04/2023:

Also, from the same day:

Both of these presenters got fired. Sacked. Booted out.

I’ll leave it up to you to spot the difference in treatment and the possible reason.

It’s so tiring.

24 April 2023 — French West Indies

With the current news cycle being dominated by all things ChatGPT and AI, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit a book I first read in 1997/1998, the year it was released.

The book is “HALs Legacy - 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality”. It was issued by MIT Press in 1997 and was edited by David G. Stork. You may find a secondhand hard copy, but no ebook exists as far as I can tell.

It contains a forward by one of my favourite Science Fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke, who you will no doubt know was the writer of the original novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This paragraph in Chapter 1 struck me :

Marvin Minsky (who, incidentally, nearly lost his life consulting on 2001.) argues (in chapter 2) that the field made such good progress in its early days that researchers became overconfident and moved on prematurely to more immediate or practical problems —for example, chess and speech recognition. They left undone the central work of understanding the general computational principles —learning, reasoning and creativity— that underlie intelligence. Without these, he believes, we will end up with a growing collection of dumb experts and will never achieve Al.

I can’t help thinking about the parallels to this new rush of AI deployment, and it feels as though we are falling into the same trap once again. The various ChatX machine learning algorithms impress on one level but are brutally stupid and over-confident simultaneously on another. The risks are multiple, some benign and others too frightening to ponder.

What is it that we say about the past and the future?

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana

6 April 2023 — French West Indies

In a Bloomberg article by Nick Baker called An NFT Just Sold for $532 Million, But Didn’t Really Sell at All, we see that transactions on blockchains were there, but no one understood what the hell was going on… to the tune of more than half a billion dollars!

The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39.

About an hour and a half later, 0x8e39 sold the NFT to an address starting with 0x9b5a for 124,457 Ether -- equal to $532 million -- all of it borrowed from three sources, primarily Compound.

To pay for the trade, the buyer shipped the Ether tokens to the CryptoPunk’s smart contract, which transferred them to the seller -- normal stuff, a buyer settling up with a seller. But the seller then sent the 124,457 Ether back to the buyer, who repaid the loans.

And then the last step: the avatar was given back to the original address, 0xef76, and offered up for sale again for 250,000 Ether, or more than $1 billion.

It is discussed in more detail in DSHR's Blog: How Bubbles Are Blown.

This is a great example of how one of the central ideas of openness and transparency on the blockchain is, in fact, complete bullshit.

If anyone tells you that the blockchain is “open” and therefore anyone can see what’s going on, ask them to show you how. Practically. In simple steps. Not just a parroting of the crypto-bro indoctrination mutterings.

If they can’t, then show them this article about how those manipulations play out in plain sight precisely because it is indecipherable to most.

Fraudola.

5 April 2023 — French West Indies

From the Wall Street Journal.

Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to let European users of Facebook and Instagram opt out of certain highly personalized ads as part of plans to limit the impact of a European Union privacy order, according to people familiar with the planning.

What this proves, beyond doubt, is that Meta will only respect your privacy when it is legislated to do so.

Note also the “opt-out” rather than the “opt-in” that is desired.

Why else wouldn’t they roll this out to the entire world?

It seems to me that Meta is on the wrong side of worldwide public opinion. At some point, this will present a serious enough risk for the company —either through data mishandling (selling some data to unscrupulous brokers) or being the target of a massive breach (it is only a matter of time) —for them to act on it fundamentally.

From what we know, most “digital marketing” is smoke and mirrors, providing no real value to advertisers over and above Media/TV/Radio and billboards. The value chain has been hijacked to introduce these gatekeepers that squeeze profits from both sides, making most small businesses poorer.

From the European Commission’s Study on the impact of recent developments in digital advertising on privacy, publishers and advertisers:

The most widely used products in digital advertising rely on large amounts of personal data and profiling of individuals. However, there is limited evidence to suggest that the efficiency and efficacy gains to advertisers and publishers outweigh the societal impact of these products. There is a lack of independent analysis to assess the benefits of using personal data and profiling in advertising. The few studies that do exist fail to take into account important considerations such as the impact of fraud and buyer expectations.

I thoroughly recommend the report.

30 March 2023 — French West Indies

What was I saying about that Silicon Valley mantra again?

From Platformer:

Some members of the team pushed back. “I'm going to be bold enough to ask you to please reconsider this decision,” one employee said on the call. “While I understand there are business issues at play … what this team has always been deeply concerned about is how we impact society and the negative impacts that we've had. And they are significant.”

Montgomery declined. “Can I reconsider? I don't think I will,” he said. “Cause unfortunately the pressures remain the same. You don't have the view that I have, and probably you can be thankful for that. There's a lot of stuff being ground up into the sausage.”

Commercial pressures trump societal damage limitation, it seems.

Who the fuck do these people think they are?

14 March 2023 — French West Indies

While I’m on the topic of bullshit and the onanistic nature of Silicon Valley, it seems the “metaverse” is dying on its arse.

Fucking good riddance to it, too.

It’s a solution looking for a problem. That is nothing new, and most people have instinctively felt that from when it first burst onto the news cycle. Some of us were sceptical (stating it politely), and others saw the grit opportunity it afforded.

But what is new is that it is a solution to a problem created by the same tech companies that have worked hard to break society and monetise human interaction by being the gatekeepers and mediators.

They have driven human interaction to a transaction that (shitty and racist) advertising can piggyback—in turn, driving a wedge in human interaction, leaving at least one generation inadequate or incapable of having normal relationships with themselves and, therefore, with others.

13 March 2023 — French West Indies

It’s been the mantra for some time now in the valley. Everyone benefits by moving fast and breaking a couple of things because we move faster at a quicker pace. But is that true?

My take: It’s bullshit and always has been.

On inspection, this mantra should actually be:

Break things and move fast.

Silicon Valley and all the poor copycats dotted around the planet are causing untold harm on a social level, let alone on an economic one.

Don’t believe me or think that I’m being alarmist?

Have a read of this article from Jon Haidt.

Conclusion: Social Media Is a Major Cause of Mental Illness in Girls, Not Just a Tiny Correlate

On the financial side.

FTX, SVB. I could go on.

As for “move fast”, that really means “run away” and blame others or deny responsibility.

13 March 2023 — French West Indies

As reported by 9to5 Mac from an article in the New York Post —I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that— Facebook seems to have been conducting A/B testing that can drain the battery on your smartphone.

They raise important points about safety and transparency, as well as moral issues confirming that Facebook continues to show that it is morally corrupt (link).

But there’s another aspect.

This might seem picky and a little silly, but this is deliberate damage to a device. Accidental damage, we can all pass off; it happens. A drop or an app that goes haywire through some random bug. No real problem.

But deliberately draining the battery, which has a finite lifespan of around 500 charges to 80% of the battery capacity, is intentionally damaging the battery, ensuring the affected users will have to either replace their phones or their phone batteries before it can be reasonably expected.

The tests might be limited and, therefore, not affect too many people, so this is a small-scale panic. Still, Facebook should be absolutely upfront about this and offer compensation for those affected.

What they should have done, as responsible citizens (which they are not currently), is contact users requesting authorisation to be included in the test, guaranteeing batteries would be replaced free of charge.

What a shitty company, through and through.

2 February 2023 — French West Indies

From ia.net.

Soon, you won’t need to write much anymore. Artificial Intelligence will do it for you. With all the free time we will have, we could try to rethink how we learn, work, and how we communicate.

An excellent blog post from the developer of a fantastic writing application. One that requires good old sweat and tears. None of this prompted 12-year-old-level gibberish produced by Open AI’s latest baby.

30 January 2023 — French West Indies

Ever since the horrendous attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the airlines and various states’ security organisations trusted with guaranteeing security have gone into overdrive to enshittify air travel.

From condescending orders barked at you by barely-trained staff with no interest in making their job easier on themselves to the already frustratingly-long queues to get past that hurdle of show and tell. A burden that was already astonishingly tedious, usually as a direct result of a passenger not understanding that metal detectors detect … wait for it … metal!

A Swiss hacker reports that he/she/they discovered a file containing all the names and other information on the US Government’s “No Fly List”. A list that, like the first rule of fight club, no one talks about.

If that wasn’t bad enough, consider that on that list, there are children as young as four years old, according to those that have seen the list.

But here we reach a new low.

The name of the “database” of names?

NoFly.csv

Yep, you got that right. A fucking comma-separated file.

Words cannot describe the level at which this is unacceptable, regardless of circumstances.

… but wait. It does get worse.

I’ll let you read on through the Techdirt article for more analysis.

24 January 2023 — French West Indies

In an article on Apple Insider, a couple of Air Canada passengers followed their luggage after it was lost for several days.

To their surprise, the luggage took quite a detour, proving all the communications from Air Canada were either wilfully incorrect or ineptly incorrect. Either way, it shows how frail baggage systems can be. As one might imagine, those systems are not 100% robotised and computer-controlled. They rely on several steps operated entirely by humans.

And what can humans be, if not stupid? Corrupt. Just look hereand here.

I write about this personally, having had a similar incident while travelling with Air Canada. Flying out of the French West Indies to get to Toronto, we have to fly to Montreal, then hop over to Toronto. Arriving at Montreal, given that it is the entry point, we must collect the bag and then go through customs and immigration. Unfortunately, my bag wasn’t there, and I was told to go to Toronto anyway, as they’d find my bag and deliver it to me at my hotel. So off I went after filling in the requisite lost luggage forms.

To cut a long story short, I got my bag with, as far as I can tell, everything in it, but given that I flew in on Sunday night and my bag was delivered on Wednesday evening, I had to purchase some new clothes to tie me over, not knowing if or when the bag would arrive.

I have a theory about what happened, as the bag went to Paris before winding its way across the Atlantic several days later. Drugs.

I’m pretty convinced that there are baggage handlers or others in the chain of operations that select bags and then divert them to other airports for them to be recovered and sent to the actual destination days later, thus providing a decent cover for the transport of drugs and arms to and fro.

It’s pretty easy to open a suitcase or a bag, even with a lock, thanks to security legislation after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Every lock has a back door —a TSA-compatible key. Finding one for each lock type is trivial. And it grants unimpeded access to every piece of luggage passing through the basement of an airport. A basement that offers plenty of opportunity to conduct this kind of illicit business.

Technology offers us a view into the depths when we use it for good. Who knows, It might make it harder for illicit activity to proliferate.

I, for one, am investigating picking up a couple of AirTags for when I next travel, checking in luggage. I try to fly light, ensuring I only have cabin luggage, but that is not always feasible.

20 January 2023 — French West Indies

From The Information:

A senior Twitter manager told employees that the company’s daily revenue on Tuesday was 40% lower than the same day a year ago, underscoring the crisis facing its core ads business, according to a person with direct knowledge.

In a staff meeting on Tuesday, Siddharth Rao, an engineering manager overseeing the engineers working on Twitter’s ad business, also told employees in a presentation that more than 500 of Twitter’s top advertisers have paused spending on Twitter since Elon Musk took over in October.

I fear for the poor engineers that —outside of their control— are suffering and will suffer job losses due to Elmo’s stupidity and revolting attitude.

I only hope that it affects Elmo’s pocket even more.

18 January 2023 — French West Indies

I’ve been having a lot of fun curating a playlist of songs and the corresponding tracks they sampled from. Well, that’s not entirely fair. Some of the tracks are inspirations or plain remakes.

Much of it is hip-hop, unsurprising for any fans of the genre. Hip-hop pretty much defined sampling, getting the biggest artists and labels into trouble back then. Things have changed, and declarations and authorisations are required to be granted before a track is released. There is a perverse net negative result to that for the artists, but that can wait for another day.

I’ve been a hip-hop fan since I first heard some early tracks in 1980/1981 when I got deep in the weeds of hip-hop for more than 15 years. To this day, it has a special place in my heart.

So when a friend recently told me about a playlist on Spotify (I’m not a subscriber), I asked him to export the tracklist so I could manually recreate it using Apple Music.

That playlist was featured in a New York Times article, giving me inspiration for my own take on the idea.

My list is currently a work in progress with 49 songs and lasts 4:19 hours, although that is likely to grow. It features several types of music, from Rap, Jazz, Reggae and Ska. The goal is to have one or more original tracks directly before the track that uses its samples from the previous track(s).

It’s called, The Before. I described it as:

Many popular tracks stand on the shoulders of previous songs. This playlist gives you the originals before they were sampled, covered, or otherwise copied.

If you want the playlist, let me know.

16 January 2023 — French West Indies

Via Ars Technica:

On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person's voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone.

The possibilities for this technology are pretty endless. Good and bad.

As we move forward deploying and using these products, I don’t think we place enough emphasis and what the bad could be. I’m reminded of that quote from Jurassic Park

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

I’m convinced there’s plenty of good to come from this and similar technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, but I’m equally convinced that the bad stuff might be so bad that its effects on society could be disastrous.

This is why I believe regulation should be one of the first priorities for the world’s governments surrounding the use of these tools.

Regulation is coming, but too little and too late. Governments need to work to internet assumptions, not 20th Century ones as they currently do.

14 January 2023 — French West Indies

The term “low-hanging fruit” tends to invoke a particular disdain from me, given that it has been overused throughout the tech bro sphere.

Still, I can’t see a more fitting term in this case. From Gizmodo:

An AI-based legal advisor is set to play the role of a lawyer in an actual court case for the first time. Via an earpiece, the artificial intelligence will coach a courtroom defendant on what to say to get out of the associated fines and consequences of a speeding charge, AI-company (sic) DoNotPay has claimed in a report initially from New Scientist and confirmed by Gizmodo.

From the website of DoNotPay:

DoNotPay utilizes artificial intelligence to help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and suing robocallers.

DoNotPay’s goal is to level the playing field and make legal information and self-help accessible to everyone.

Low-level lawyers and legal advisors should probably start looking to move up the stack in the coming years.

This is a theme of AI, and much like the automation of assembly lines, AI is coming for the low-hanging fruit.

11 January 2023 — French West Indies

I’m wondering if this is a turning point for Social Media. There’s a confluence of factors that are starting to bite. And it doesn’t look like it will ease up anytime soon.

Firstly, regulation and accountability. Governments and Civil Society are interested in making platforms more accountable for the outputs of the various algorithms used by the latter. It’s no longer enough to wave their hands and say, “look over there” people want real analysis and accountability.

For example, look at this lawsuit as reported by Ars Technica.

"Research tells us that excessive and problematic use of social media is harmful to the mental, behavioural, and emotional health of youth and is associated with increased rates of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders, and suicide."

Secondly, the ownership and centralisation of Social Media have come to the fore through the abject stupidity of how Elmo handled the Twitter takeover and subsequent (mis)management.

It was firing many people that provided, albeit limited, accountability and balance had nearly disastrous consequences, echoing much of the popular delusion that sparked the January 6 storming of the Capitol. There is much scrutiny around what role Social Media played in this.

This has provoked a mass exodus of technology journalists, enthusiasts, experts and academics to invest more time and effort in Mastodon. It remains to be seen if it reaches critical mass to ensure its survival in this new form. For the record, Mastodon will continue regardless, but it may return to being a modern-day equivalent of the BBS of yore.

Thirdly, the polarised populations are now becoming poorer through global economic mismanagement and exploitation by populism that has ripened the world for autocrats and extremists to seize their opportunity to amass decisive power. See above.

Recent reports suggest Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election and likely others, but the analysis is too little too late. It does, however, suggest deeper scrutiny is on the horizon. I would guess that newer tools will make this quicker and simpler to use, to the point where near real-time analysis of the effects of Social Media is possible. Those best placed for this are the Social Media companies themselves. Not in any “police the police” sense. More being compelled and scrutinised by an independent body. Facebook’s Oversight Board is a start but pathetically reductive and free from real scrutiny.

But most importantly, and possibly one of the only easy-to-implement chances we have to correct this path, cutting off the oxygen to these platforms. Ad money. Unregulated and uncontrolled advertising poisons everything.

Advertisers are starting to wake up to this and are wincing at the things they and their products are being associated with algorithmically and uncontrollably. And they’re not happy.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/126219c4-5ac0-4c8b-996c-307c24a4cd61 (Paywalled)

I think we can look forward to greater scrutiny and a wholesale effort to reign in these platforms.

10 January 2023 — French West Indies

From The Verge:

Like Superman III

8 January 2023 — French West Indies