Surviving the search engine meltdown

  Today, I got yet more evidence that the web is sinking in a world of AI-generated slime.  

Our otherwise-fine Dualit toaster has, after many years, started to have occasional hiccups with its timer… I think the clockwork has become a little dodgy.  So I did a quick search to see if others had the same experience, and I got this page back as one of the top hits:

I quote: “Nowadays, there are so many products of dualit toaster timer keeps sticking in the market and you are wondering to choose a best one.”

There’s a danger that we may soon move past the time of useful online search — Peak Google, if you like — and the alternative approach of trying to ask questions of an AI will only make things worse, since studies have already shown that training AIs on AI-generated content quickly leads to madness (for the AIs, that is, not the users, though that too would probably follow soon afterwards). 

So making the most of online content in the future may depend, more than ever before, on being able to ensure that it comes from a trusted human source.  Who’s old enough to remember when the web was small enough that human-generated indexes were the best way to find things?

But this is also why, as John Naughton nicely reminds us in an Observer piece this weekend, the best human-generated and human-curated content out there is often available via your RSS reader, not your search engine.  (I happen to like News Explorer, and have used it for a few years.)

RSS — a system for telling you when your favourite sites, especially blogs, have been updated without you needing to go and look at each one every day — has existed since long before Facebook and these other trendy things now called ‘social networks’ existed, and I suspect will still be around after they’ve gone.  But if RSS doesn’t appeal for some reason, much of the best content — including, of course, John’s blog and this one — is also available via an even more time-tested channel.  Your email inbox.

 

It’s hard not to like this story…

Regular readers will know that I like electrifying things.  Our car has been electric for nearly a decade now, and we also have a lawnmower, a strimmer, two hedge-trimmers, two bicycles and a range of other devices powered by batteries. We also generate most of our own electricity, and buy the rest overnight at cheap rates from renewable sources.  All very satisfying.

Perhaps my favourite such purchase, though, is our electric outboard motor, which makes powered boating as pleasant as sailing, and has provided us with no end of peaceful enjoyment.  

Larger boats, however, are a problem, when it comes to electrification.  

Though there are some bigger ships and even some car ferries powered by batteries, they tend not to cover very great distances.  Meanwhile, traditional shipping burns vast amounts of fuel, and typically very dirty fuel, because the big diesel engines can make use of far less refined oils than the stuff we use on land.  (And, ironically, something like 40% of all global shipping consists of the transport of fossil fuels themselves to other places that want to burn them!)

I can’t help wondering whether more shipping could be powered by nuclear reactors.  This is, of course, already used for submarines, primarily because nuclear reactors don’t depend on oxygen.  But suppose you want propulsion that doesn’t depend on carbon either?  Still, nuclear fission does have some challenges of its own.

So I think many people are hoping that the big cargo ships of the future will carry hydrogen tanks instead of diesel tanks, and that will be the eventual answer to how we make them cleaner, at least until we have mobile fusion reactors that can extract deuterium from the sea water en route

But there may be another important option, which comes not so much from the future, as from the past.

Last month, for the first time in nearly a century, a large cargo ship set off across the Atlantic powered almost entirely by sail.  (See this Fast Company post for the details.)  These are sailing ships for the modern age, taking advantage of carbon-fibre masts, meteorological forecasts tied to the routing software, and automations that allow them to be sailed by a very modest crew.  Winds are easier to predict than in the past, and spars and sails can be bigger while still being manageable.  TOWT, the French company behind the ships, has two in operation now, and six more on order.

I’ve no idea how significant a part of our future shipping needs could be met this way, but I really hope they can play a substantial part, because, quite apart from everything else, aren’t they beautiful?

The 'Anemos' under sail

Cross-format poetry

Continuing the theme of Good Stuff Spotted on Mastodon, this comes from Natasha Jay:

There was a young man
From Cork who got limericks
And Haikus confused.

The Geek’s Prayer

From Phil Giammattei‘s Mastodon feed…

Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,
the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

(Thanks to Rupert Curwen for reposting.)

A brief trip to the past

I’ve just come back from bobbing about in a small boat on the crystal blue waters of the Greek bit of the Mediterranean – a marvellous excerience!

I’m sitting in the tender here because, as anyone who has tried it will confirm, it’s much easier to land a drone on a boat that doesn’t have any rigging!

But just before I set off in the wake of Odysseus et al, I decided to spend a day in Athens visiting the Parthenon. Should you wish to spend a few minutes in my company doing the same, you can find a short video here.

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Wavelength

I haven’t posted for a while, partly because I’m on a small boat here in the Argolian Gulf, courtesy of my kind friend Philip Sargent. The photo above was taken just a couple of minutes ago.

It’s my first trip to Greece, and I’m loving it. The temperatures well into the 30s are hard to take, but there’s quite a bit of compensation in the fact that if you step off the boat into the turquoise water, as I do a couple of times per day, it cools you pleasantly to its 29C.

I can’t really blame my radio silence on lack of connectivity, though, since absolutely everywhere I’ve been has had excellent 5G coverage, including at this tiny port where we spent last night.

Why can the Greeks manage this when, at home, just a couple of miles from the high-tech hub that is Cambridge, I can only get a poor 4G signal?

Yes, I know, some of it is to do with the fact that they have mountains here, and that a lot of the signals are travelling over water, and so on, but I can’t help feeling that perhaps the gods on Olympus look more favourably on cellphone users than some other deities.

You Raise Me Up

YouTube, at its best, can be a wonderful way to discover real talent.  A little while ago, I came across some songs by the Cotton Pickin Kids – a very talented family from Alabama – and I shared one or two favourites, like this one, with friends and family.

Well, after that, the YouTube algorithm decided I must like groups of talented siblings, and offered me so many of them that I expected I would suddenly be presented with the Von Trapp family’s previously undiscovered channel…

Just as I was thinking that all of this might be a bit too much of a good thing, today I spotted a girl and her two brothers who call themselves ‘Life in 3D‘… for the simple reason that their names are Devon, Daylon and Daura.

Oh well, I thought, let’s give them a try.. and I’ve since been browsing through their songs, and been seriously impressed.  To inject a little positivity into your day, I offer, somewhat at random, the one I discovered first:

(Direct link)

The story they tell on their website is that they used to sing while doing the dishes and other household chores, and when they finished, their parents said, “Hey, don’t stop!”. So a couple of years ago, they bought a proper microphone, recorded themselves, and posted their first video to YouTube.

Man, what a start!

(Direct link)

Not only can they sing, but there are some pretty impressive production values here.  It was listening to them with the volume turned up that made my realise how good the speakers are on my MacBook Pro.  Treat yourself, and don’t just listen to this on a tinny little phone speaker.

If you like what you hear, you might enjoy their fabulous rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, or watch them having fun with U2’s ‘With or without you‘.  

But I’ve enjoyed lots of them, and I hope they improve your day in the same way they did mine!

Two households, both alike in dignity

Two long-established names in the world of journalism are approaching the challenges of AI in very different ways.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI, in an expensive landmark case that the world is watching carefully, because it could have very far-reaching ramifications.

The Atlantic, on the other hand, has just done a deal with them.

This isn’t a subject I normally follow very closely, but in what I found to be an intriguing interview, Nicholas Thompson, the Atlantic‘s CEO, explains how and why they made this decision, and explores areas well beyond the simple issues of copyright and accreditation.  It’s an episode of the Decoder podcast, hosted by The Verge‘s Nilay Patel, who is an excellent and intelligent interviewer.

Recommended listening if you have a car journey, commute, or dog-walk coming up — just search for ‘Decoder’ on your favourite podcast app — or you can get the audio, and/or a transcript, from the link above.

Coffee Pot – The Movie

For a long time, it has both bugged and bemused me that, though the first webcam ran for 10 years taking photos of our departmental coffee pot, there are almost no original images saved from the millions it served up to viewers around the world! I had one or two.

Then, suddenly, in a recent conversation, it occurred to me to check the Internet Archive’s ‘Wayback Machine’, and, sure enough, in the second half of the coffeepot camera’s life — from 1996-2001 — they had captured 28 of its images. I wrote a script to index and download these, and turned them into a slideshow, which you can find in my new and very exciting three-minute video:

Go, Octopus, Go!

One of the surprising things about Octopus, the UK company from whom we purchase our gas and electricity, is that, despite growing to the point where they handle about a quarter of UK households, they continue to innovate.

For a long time, we’ve been on the ‘Octopus Go’ tariff, which means that for the four hours starting from 00:30 each night, we get electricity at less than one-third of the cost of the rest of the day. We make good use of this, charging our home batteries to the point where, combined with our solar, we very seldom use any normal (i.e. peak-rate) power.

We also charge our car during this time, meaning that our ‘fuel’ costs are about 2p per mile, and one of my favourite statistics is that, since it cost me about £600 to replace our car tyres recently after 30,000 miles, we pay almost exactly the same per mile for fuel as we do for tyre rubber.

All of this may sound very impressive, green and economical… just don’t ask me how much I’ve spent to get to this point! Still, I find it very satisfying.

One of the purposes of this post, by the way, is to remind anyone else also on Octopus Go that, from today, the cheap period has been extended to five hours: from 00:30-05:30. So go and reprogram your cars, car chargers, home batteries or whatever now, before you forget! For those of us who have a standard 7kW home charger, that means 35kWh of cheap-rate power per day, which probably translates into about 100-150 miles, depending on your car.

But Octopus also have some interesting features aimed at balancing the load on the grid during times of peak supply or demand. They’ve tried a few variants, and the availability of any particular one will be rather dependent on your postcode, but here we do quite well, as a result, I think, of generating vast amounts of wind power off the East Anglian coast and not yet having all the cabling that’s needed to distribute it effectively to other parts of the country!

One of these schemes is called ‘Saving Sessions‘, where, at times of peak demand, you can get paid surprisingly high rates per kWh for using less than your normal amount of electricity. At first, I ignored this because we use so little daytime grid power anyway that I thought it would be pointless, until a friend pointed out that even if your usage is normally zero, you can be paid for negative usage; in other words, for exporting to the grid.

“Oh ho!”, thought I, “I can do that!” And so, after a bit of programming, my home automation system notices whenever a Saving Session is active and starts discharging my house battery (and any excess solar) to the grid. These sessions only happen in the winter, and not very frequently, but we still managed to export 40kWh between November and March, earning us about £100. Yes, they really do pay as much as £2.50/kWh for energy we might have bought the night before for 9p. On rare occasions even more.

And finally, there are Octopus Power-Ups. When they think supply is going to exceed demand, they need to absorb it, and so they will let you consume as much as you want for free. Since this is primarily down to the weather forecast predicting strong winds, or lots of sunshine, or both, you don’t get very much notice: typically an email the day before or even on the same day. I just plug the times into my system, and when the moment comes, my car starts charging, my batteries start charging, my hot water starts heating, and so on. It costs me nothing, Octopus probably make more money the more I use, and everyone is happy. (Except my envious friends who don’t live in one of the blessed postcodes!) The main challenge was that I had expended so much effort over many months trying to configure the house to draw as little as possible from the grid, and I now had to set all of the components to do precisely the opposite for a short time and then revert! Still, that’s what home automation is for!

Octopus is a large company now, and like all organisations on such a scale, does have plenty of problems too. They suddenly realised at one point in the past, for example, that they had been billing me for gas but not electricity for nearly a year, and I got a very large bill that month. Also, I had smart meters installed for both gas and electricity, and the gas one has never worked, so I still have to go and read it manually. To be fair, this is a technical problem suffered at a lot of UK households by most providers, who didn’t realise that providing the electricity meter with connectivity and assuming that the gas meter could relay its reports through it using Zigbee wasn’t going to work when, as is often the case, the meters are on opposite side of a brick or stone house filled with competing 2.4GHz signals!)

But, in general, I’m a happy customer, and I hope they continue to explore new and interesting ways to optimise supply and demand. Further innovations will, of course, require me to keep tweaking my code, but, hey, everyone needs a hobby!

My thanks to my pal Gareth Marlow, who has a similar set-up and whose Home Assistant configuration helped me make mine much better! Gareth has also done some great YouTube videos analysing the costs and savings resulting from his home solar/battery system; perhaps the best I’ve seen on that topic for UK enthusiasts. Recommended.

Slow time?

Back in the days when I had an analogue watch, rather than a serious computer, strapped to my wrist, I often wondered whether life would be more or less stressful if I removed the minute and second hands, so that I could only tell the time to, say, the nearest 5-10 minutes.  Would I be more likely to be on time for meetings, for example, or would I still try to squeeze other things in right up until the last minute?

Well, it turns out I wasn’t the only one to find this idea at least intriguing.  Enter Slow Watches, who make some rather nice designs with a single hand.  In their case, they chose to make this hand rotate every 24 hours instead of 12, to ‘follow the natural rhythm of the sun’.

20180112 slow 06 1 1 400x400.

Now, that’s quite poetic, and I like the way midnight is at the bottom, so the hand will rise and set in a way that should feel natural, at least if you live in the northern hemisphere.  But it might take longer for you to be able to glance at it and know that it’s roughly half-past two.

I’ve got so used to all the wonderful facilities of my Apple Watch that I find it hard to imagine exchanging it for anything, though there’s no denying that these are more aesthetically appealing.

What do you think?  Would your quality of life improve if you could only tell the time to the nearest 15 mins or so?

Total Recall

The tech news has had a lot of coverage recently of Microsoft’s proposed ‘Recall‘ system, which (as a very rough approximation) takes a screenshot of your display every five seconds, and uses their AI-type Copilot system to allow you to search it. “What was that cafe or restaurant that someone in the call recommended yesterday?”

At first glance, this is a very appealing feature. Back in the 90s, when I was working on human-computer interaction stuff, we used to say things like “the more a secretary knows about you, the more helpful he or she can be”. We were living in a world where your computer knew almost nothing about you except what you typed on your keyboard or clicked with your mouse.

Nowadays, however, users are more often concerned about your computer — or someone with access to your computer — knowing too much about you. The data used by Recall is only stored locally, but in a corporate environment, for example, somebody with admin access to your PC could scroll back to the last time you logged in to your online banking and see screenshots of your bank statements. So, potentially, could a piece of malware running with your access permissions (though that could also probably take snapshots of its own). You can tell the system not to record when you’re using certain apps, or visiting certain websites… as long as you’re using Microsoft’s browser, of course. Or you can opt-out completely… but all of these require you to take action to preserve your privacy – the defaults are for everything to be switched on.

This caused enough of a storm that Microsoft recently switched it from being part of their next general release to being available only through the ‘Windows Insider Program’, pending further discussion.

There’s been enough online debate that I won’t revisit the arguments here about whether such a system could be built securely, whether we’d trust it more if it came from someone other than Microsoft, what the appropriate level of paranoia actually is, and so on.

There are, however, a couple of things I’d like to point out.

The first is that this facility was to be available, in the immediate future at least, only on PCs that meet Microsoft’s ‘CoPilot+’ standard, meaning they had a neural processing unit (NPU) which allowed them to run the necessary neural network models at a sensible speed. And the only machines on the market that currently have that are ARM-based, not powered by AMD and Intel. I find it intriguing that the classic Intel x86 platform which has been so closely tied to Microsoft software for so long is not able to support such a headline feature of Windows. “We are partnering with Intel and AMD to bring Copilot+ PC experiences to PCs with their processors in the future.”

The second is that, ahem, I predicted such a system, right here on this blog, 21 years ago.

Actually, though, my idea wasn’t just based on screenshots. I wanted a jog-wheel that would allow you to rewind or fast-forward through the entire state of your machine’s history: filesystem, configuration and all. One key component for this we didn’t really have then, but it is much more readily available now: filesystems which can save an instantaneous snapshot without using much time or space to do it. As I wrote at the time,

The technology would need a quick way of doing “freeze! – duplicate entire storage! – continue!”.

And that, at least, is now possible with filesystems like ZFS (which I use on my Linux home server), BTRFS (used by my Synology), and APFS (used on my Macs, where such snapshots are a key part of the Time Machine backup system). So one of the key requirements for my wishlist is now on almost all my machines.

And my Linux server is running NixOS, which means that I can, should I so desire, at boot time, select any of the past configurations from the last few months and boot into that — Operating System, applications, configuration and all — instead of the current version.

I haven’t quite got my rewind/fast-forward jog-wheel yet, though. Oh, we do have that AI stuff… all very clever, I’m sure, but I’d rather have my jog-wheel. Let’s give it another 21 years…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser