Spotted this nice xkcd item on Bluesky today. It’s tempting to think it’s significant, but it is, of course, a coincidence.
(People who like this might also like this elderly post and its comments.)
Author Archives: qsf
Making ‘social’ social again?
Back in about 1996, I was attending a conference in San Francisco. As we walked into the Moscone centre to register, we were all given not only the usual branded bag and bits of paper, but something much more exciting: a box containing what was to become my first true pocket-sized mobile device, the recently-released Palm Pilot.
I don’t know whose idea it was to give these to everybody attending the conference, or how the finances worked, but it was a brilliant move. Not only was it an exciting surprise, but we immediately had an application for it: the conference proceedings were available on it, and you could slip it into your back pocket; something you certainly couldn’t do with the paper equivalent. And there was something more important, which I’ll come back to in a moment.
But for those less ancient than me, I should perhaps explain that what was brilliant about the Palm Pilot was the things it didn’t try to do. It had been preceeded a couple of years before by the Apple Newton, for example, which was a lovely device, but just tried to do too much and was thus expensive, large and heavy on power. The Palm guys realised that what people really wanted was just a cache, in their pocket, of the stuff they had on their PC. (Laptops were heavy, and expensive, with a short battery life, and you had to wait for Windows to boot up before you could check someone’s address. You might have one in your hotel room, but you probably wouldn’t carry it around.)
With the Palm devices, though, you would create and manage most of the content on your computer, which had a proper keyboard and screen. When you got back to your desk, you’d plug the device into its cradle, press the sync button, and any changes would zip to and fro, after which you could unplug it and put it back in your pocket. If you had migrated away from paper diaries and address books to keeping data on your PC, this allowed you to have that information back in your pocket again.
But you did have to plug it in to its cradle periodically, where it could talk to the PC using an RS-232 serial port. This was before 802.11 (the standard which, several years later, would become known as ‘WiFi’) and the Palm Pilot had no other networking. Well, almost none.
And that was, I think, really important.
You see, the lack of WiFi meant that it couldn’t distract you all the time with incoming messages. You could read email on it, but only the email that had been received on your PC when you last plugged the two together. So you would actually listen to what was being said at the conference: something almost unheard of these days!
But the device did have one further trick up its sleeve: it had infrared capabilites. It could exchange information with other Palm Pilots (and later with some other devices), using the same kind of line-of-sight connection that TV remotes used. That meant that for me to get your address and you to get mine, we needed actually to have met and collaborated in the exchange. I could send you my contact details across a conference table or while having a drink at a bar, in much the same way I could give you a business card, but it was so much more convenient because there was no need to transcribe the information afterwards if you wanted it in digital form.
This did require both of us to have Palm Pilots, of course, so what better way to kick this off than to make sure that, at a few key tech conferences, almost everybody you bumped into, for several days, would have one in their pocket?
~
Back in the early days of LinkedIn, there was a similar culture of only linking to people you actually knew; in fact, not only knew, but endorsed. I joined the beta release back in early 2004, and to this day I normally only link to people I’ve at least actually met, though in more recent years I’ve extended that to include ‘met on a video call’ or ‘had really quite a long phone call with’.
Nowadays, I do sometimes wonder why I’m still on LinkedIn, since it’s the source of more spam in my inbox than anything else. I’m not really out hunting for jobs. I’ve always joked — and it’s almost true — that I’ve never got any job I applied for and I’ve never applied for any job I got. And I’m not recruiting people either at present. LinkedIn is very much a work-related system, but having dropped in to the website just now for the first time in ages, I must confess that there was more interesting content on there than I expected, perhaps because it is linked to people I actually know in real life.
(Increasingly, social networks are things I visit in the same way I might visit parties; drop in for a while, see what the atmosphere is like, leave if it doesn’t appeal, but maybe visit again a few weeks later. I’ve just deleted the Twitter app from all my devices because I realised I could still drop in there using the web if wanted, but I didn’t need its content, or its notifications, delivered to my pocket.)
~
Anyway, I was thinking about all of this as I read Ev Williams’ article, Making “Social” Social Again, in which he announces the launch of Mozi. This is meant to be a social network to help you with your actual social life (and not a ‘social media’ platform). It’s about getting and maintaining up-to-date contact information for your friends, and knowing about their travels so you could meet up with them.
I don’t know whether it’ll succeed. There’s always the problem of bootstrapping a network when you can’t, say, give several hundred people a sexy new device that they’ll all be carrying around in their pockets for a few days. But it would be good to have something that is primarily about contacts rather than content, and yet isn’t primarily about work.
And he reminded me about Plaxo:
As I was making my birthday list, another, more practical, thing struck me: I had no go-to source for knowing who I knew. No online social network reflected my real-life relationships. The closest thing, by far, was the contacts app on my phone.
And, boy, was that a mess. I’m guessing, yours is too.
Why?
Twenty years ago, there was an internet company called Plaxo. There have been others like it, but Plaxo was the first big online address book. I remember thinking it was one of those simple but profound twists on an old product that was now possible because of the internet, i.e.: Why do I have to keep details up to date for hundreds of people in my address book? Now that we have the internet, you can update your address in my address book, and I only have to keep mine updated.
It was an obvious idea. And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of partial, duplicate, and outdated information.
Anyone encountering the same problem while writing Christmas cards?
The problem with Plaxo was that it required you to upload your address book to their servers, and I always felt uncomfortable with that. When someone gives you their details, their is an element of trust involved. They might not want you to broadcast their home address to the world, and they’re kind of assuming you won’t.
But nowadays, most people do this anyway, they just often don’t know that they’re doing it. It’s one of the reasons that, for a long time, I didn’t want to have anything to do with WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. But I abandoned my principles last year when I realised that all those friends I was trying to protect were already using those services and so all of their contact information was there anyway. And, because of them, so was mine. GDPR, eat your heart out!
Signal, in contrast, has a much better system which allows them to discover whether your contacts are on Signal without actually uploading your address book. In a world where we have these kind of techniques, and end-to-end encryption, and protocols for sending contact information, why is it that I can’t give you the permission to update your entry in my address book without my address book being stored on someone else’s servers?
I don’t know if Mozi will enable that. If they do, then I’ll believe we’ve made some progress from last millennium, when I could send you my current information with a couple of clicks and a beam of infrared.
The FreshWash Clip – Every home should have one!
This afternoon I went into our little utility room, made some measurements, and created this beautiful work of art on my iPad:
I then went upstairs and opened up my CAD program, where I was able to turn it into this:
And extrude it into three dimensions, so it looked like this:
whence I could 3D-print it, to get this:
Now, as most of you stand amazed, there may yet be some readers for whom its use isn’t immediately obvious, so I should explain.
If, like us, you don’t have kids, and therefore don’t need your washing machine to be running 24×7, the seals and the inside of the drum stay fresher and nicer if you can prop the door open and let them dry between washes.
And so I created the FreshWash Clip™️.
It works perfectly, and I get a deep, if childish, satisfaction from it. The hole on the top makes a bit of a handle so it’s easier to clip on and off, and can also be used to hang it on a hook on the wall.
This particular model is sized precisely for our elderly and out-of-production model of John Lewis washing machine, so I doubt I’ll be producing it en masse, but no doubt Chinese entrepreneurs will seize the opportunity to prove a whole range of different sizes and colours, and on Etsy you’ll soon find artisanal variants lovingly crafted from bamboo.
And as FreshWash Clip mania takes hold, and no home can be considered complete without one, please remember that you saw it here first!
Wisdom of the crowds, or lowest common denominator?
I liked this:
People have too inflated sense of what it means to “ask an AI” about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of “asking an AI”, think of it more as “asking the average data labeler” on the internet.
…
But roughly speaking (and today), you’re not asking some magical AI. You’re asking a human data labeler. Whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful of course. Post triggered by someone suggesting we ask an AI how to run the government etc. TLDR you’re not asking an AI, you’re asking some mashup spirit of its average data labeler.
Thanks to Simon Willison for the link.
Five years before the iPhone
Trying to organise some of my old video footage recently, I came across a little demo I recorded of the AT&T Broadband Phone, a project we started in 1999 but which, sadly, died, along with the research lab that had created it, in 2002.
Looking back at it now, I notice how slow-paced it is compared to the typical YouTube video of today! So if you watch it, you might need a little patience! Nonetheless, it’s quite fun to see some of the ideas we were considering back then, five or six years before the launch of the iPhone… things like the suggestion that streamed music “might be a service offered by a record company, where you pay a small amount for each track”, for example…
(P.S. I had an idea I had written about this here before… and indeed discovered that I had… but not since 2008, about eighteen months after the iPhone was launched.)
We’re not in Lake Wobegon any more, Toto
For those struggling to understand the US election results, I can only offer the following statistical observations:
- Roughly half of the world are of below-average intelligence.
- Roughly half of the world are of above-average gullibility.
- More than half of the world are on social media.
Sometimes these combine in unfortunate ways.
For those not familiar with the Lake Wobegon stories… Each monologue would end with, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
A glooming light this morning with it brings
A sombre mood here in our half-American household. The phrase that keeps running through my head is…
Elect me once, shame on me.
Elect me twice…
In the footsteps, and wake, of the Swallows and Amazons
Coniston Water with Bank Ground Farm in the foreground, and the village and the Old Man Of Coniston behind.
(Click images for larger versions.)
Coniston Water, in the English Lake District, is one of my favourite places on Earth. That’s partly because it’s so beautiful, and partly because it brings back so many memories of happy childhood holidays.
My parents had an elderly caravan which we would often tow 300 miles or so from Hertfordshire, and a favourite spot to park it was at Pier Cottage, the small site roughly in the middle of the photo above on the far side of the lake. On the roof of the car, we would have either our little Mirror sailing dinghy, or a couple of kayaks. Sometimes we even managed to get a couple of bicycles in the caravan too. Most pitches there have a little bit of shoreline, and the distance from the van to the water was about 10 metres.
I remember early one slightly misty morning, my brother and I balanced our bowls of cereal on the front of our kayaks, and paddled out to have breakfast in the middle of the lake, which we had pretty much to ourselves.
I am fortunate to have had a very happy childhood filled with great experiences, but this is seared into my memory as one of the best moments. Other fun activities available from the caravan door included walking around the lake (about 12 miles) or climbing the Old Man of Coniston: the hill in the background (about 2500ft). Only much later did I realise that my parents also probably encouraged such activities so that they could have a bit of time to themselves!
Looking southward down Coniston Water.
I still return to the Lake District most years, but last month, for the first time since my childhood, we were once again taking a sailing dinghy to Coniston. This time it was our Tideway 12, named Shingebis. We weren’t, however, camping; we were staying at Bank Ground Farm, on the eastern side of the lake.
Bank Ground Farm
The farm is famous for being “Holly Howe” in the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome — also an important part of my childhood — and we’ve been rediscovering the books as adults… chiefly through the unabridged audiobook versions expertly narrated by Gareth Armstrong. When we’re on a long journey, especially towards a nautical destination, they help make the motorways much more enjoyable, and instill a suitable sense of adventure in our travels!
So, on this trip, we were in a very Ransomesque mood, in which I will unashamedly indulge for the remainder of this post, with apologies to those who have not grown up with the same enthusiasms! If you explore the books as an adult, you need to remember that they were written for youngish children, about a century ago, and approach Swallows and Amazons as you might The Railway Children or The Phoenix and the Carpet. If it seems a little tame to you, then try my favourite, We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea, which is a wonderful adventure with real jeopardy.
(And if you’re unfortunate enough only to have seen the dreadful 2016 film version, then reformat your brain, install a new operating system, and start from scratch. It is universally agreed among the cognoscenti that the 1974 film, starring Ronald Fraser and Virginia McKenna, is greatly superior.)
Swallows and Amazons, like many of the later books, is set on and around a ‘lake in the north’, which is a blend of Coniston and Windermere. We were meeting up on Coniston to sail with our friends from the Tideway Owners’ Association (TOA), most of whom share our enthusiasm for the books, so we could revel in our escapism!
The Walker children arrive at ‘Holly Howe’ and are staying there when their adventure begins. At the start of the film you see them running across the field, down to the lake, where, once they have paternal approval, they are able to set sail for their adventures in the Swallow. We were staying in a small lodge next to the farm, which is at the top of that same field, and took the same route down to the pontoon where we moored our own boat, Shingebis, for the week, next to the boathouse that once housed Swallow.
Rose and Shingebis at Bank Ground Farm
Many of the places, and vessels, and some of the people mentioned in the books were real, though often given new names in their fictional form. Amazon, for example, is based on a boat originally named Mavis, which can still be seen in a local museum. But this blurring of fiction and reality is quite fun if you’re interested in finding the locations. An excellent introduction, and a good present for any Ransome fans, is Christina Hardyment’s “Arthur Ransome & Captain Flint’s Trunk“.
Anyway, if you’re setting sail from Holly Howe, one of the first things you have to do, of course, is go and visit ‘Wild Cat Island’, which is actually a blend of Blake Holme, an island on Windermere, and Peel Island, towards the southern end of Coniston. The famous ‘Secret Harbour’ is definitely on Peel Island though, and is just as described.
Tilly stops off for a drink in the Secret Harbour.
The view south from Wild Cat Island.
If you carry on to the south end of the lake, you get to ‘Swainson’s Farm’, which really was owned by a family named Swainson who were friends of Ransome’s. And here’s where the mapping between factual and fictional geography gets a little blurred, because this is where the Amazon’s boathouse is, and the river that ought to flow into the lake actually flows out, but it does take you to Allan Tarn, which fans will know as ‘Octopus Lagoon’.
Down the Amazon River to Octopus Lagoon.
The Amazon’s crew, of course, lived at “Beckfoot”, which, to the extent it exists at all, is probably at the far end of the lake, and possibly actually on Windermere. One can’t take these locations too… ahem… literally!
When we returned to the lake, we dropped our anchor in a little bay for a picnic lunch, and then headed back to Holly Howe. There was almost no wind, and so we were adopting a technique I call e-sailing. This is analogous to riding an e-bike, and involves making use of natural power with some assistance from a battery — in our case, to get us over each glassy patch of still water to the next spot where the light wind was ruffling the surface. This was just as well, since the lake is about 5 miles long and it would have been a long row!
~
A couple of days later, we continued in the footsteps of Ransome’s characters. Hidden up in the woods on the east side of the lake is an old stone hut, which you would never stumble across unless you knew where to look. It featured in The Picts and the Martyrs as the ‘Dog’s Home”, where Dick and Dorothea had to camp for a week and a half to avoid being seen by the Amazons’ Great Aunt. Though the surrounding clearing is now somewhat overgrown, as Nancy observed a century ago, “It hasn’t tumbled down yet”.
We then went in search of locations from Swallowdale. At the south end of the lake, we crossed the ‘Amazon river’ we had previously explored by boat and reached the little hamlet of Water Yeat, where we parked and walked up a lovely road past the prettily-situated Greenholm Farm. The road became a track, and eventually took us to Beacon Tarn. We know from Ransome’s notes that this was where Roger caught his trout in the book, and so became ‘Trout Tarn’. Nearby, there was a vary plausible candidate for the ‘Lookout Rock’. In the distance we could see the peak of The Old Man of Coniston, which I have climbed many times. The children in the book christen it ‘Kanchenjunga’, and they set out from Swallowdale across ‘High Moor’ to climb it. We took the more relaxed option of sitting beside the tarn enjoying a picnic, but as we did so, some of our more energetic TOA friends had just reached the summit.
The Ship’s Dog at ‘Trout Tarn’, with ‘Kanchenjunga’ in the distance.
A true location for the little valley named ‘Swallowdale’ has never really been established. It is meant to be on the beck flowing out of the tarn, but no such spot exists here. Ransome once said, tantalisingly, that all the places in the books exist somewhere, but this he must have transported from another location. Still, as readers will know, one of the primary attractions of Swallowdale was that it was almost impossible to find!
~
The following days held more sailing and walking with friends, and, given that the Lake District is one of the rainiest places in Britain, we got to the end of our trip astonished that we’d had an entire week there in September without any precipitation and, in fact, requiring the application of a considerable amount of sun cream! We’d also had a splendid time exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction, between childhood and adulthood.
As we fastened the cover over Shingebis on her trailer, ready for the drive home, raindrops started to fall, and the entire journey thereafter was in a downpour: a curtain through which we passed as we left that magical world and returned to reality.
But we can easily go back again in the future. Perhaps even just by picking up a book.
Martin’s law of meetings, and the ‘national conversation’
I’m slightly amused by all the news reports this week that the government wants a ‘national conversation’ on the future of the NHS. While this is a laudable idea which will appeal to the punters, I doubt it’s actually very practical.
My late friend Martin King used to say that the ease of making any decision is inversely proportional to the number of people involved in making it. So trying to have a committee of 70 million people might be counterproductive? Anyway, Martin’s theory was that you shouldn’t, in general, try to make any decisions in meetings; you should only use them to ratify decisions you have already made!
A wise man, in many ways.
My own view of how to fix the NHS, for what it’s worth (and I admit it’s not worth very much, probably!) is as follows:
Firstly, it needs to be more tightly integrated with social care (so people can get out of hospitals quickly), secondly, it needs much better ways of rewarding efficient and effective workers and getting rid of others (because of the often amazing administrative inefficiency and incompetence of many otherwise lovely and well-meaning people), and thirdly, of course, it always needs more funding. (Oh, and fourthly, we should re-join the EU, but I’m not holding out much hope there…)
So let’s talk about funding. We should be completely open with the public about how much more funding is needed. My guess, based on the cost of private healthcare plans, is about £1-2k more per person per year. We currently spend just under £4k/person/year on healthcare.
I wrote more about this topic a couple of years ago. Note that, despite much common rhetoric, the NHS has never actually had any cuts in funding, except once, when the increased spending during Covid returned to its normal levels after the pandemic. But the rate of growth in spending has varied under different governments. This interesting page from the BMA suggests that, under the Conservative government, there has been an cumulative ‘underspend’ of £446bn, which they base on the fact that the longer-term historical rate of growth (a pretty substantial 3.8% in real terms) hasn’t been maintained at the same rate in the last decade and a half. If it had, they would have had that much more.
It sounds like a terrifying figure, but it’s only £6K per person, or £400 for each of those years, to recover all of it. Another interesting observation is that we spend the same proportion of GDP on healthcare as most other comparable countries. It’s just that our GDP hasn’t been doing very well lately! (So I guess the counter-argument would be that we get the NHS we can reasonably afford, and we need to fix the economy to get a better one.) But let’s assume, for the purposes of argument, that we want to fix the NHS and we can’t immediately fix the economy.
We should then simply propose adding whatever amount is really needed to income tax or NI. There are far too many people who complain that the NHS is underfunded but assume that the funding is going to come from somebody other than themselves!
For people to accept this, these funds should be ring-fenced, so they really can’t be spent on anything else. Then we should just make people vote on whether they really want it, based on the extra x% of tax it’s going to cost them, either through a referendum or as a manifesto at the next general election. (Count me in, for all reasonable values of x!)
Actually, a referendum would allow the extraction of real numbers for x. Imagine going to your polling station and being presented with just one multiple choice question; something like this:
How much should the government raise the current standard rates of income tax for the exclusive purpose of further funding the NHS and Social Care systems? (choose one answer)
- Not at all
- 1%
- 2%
- 3%
- 4%
- 5%
Then you do the maths and give people the NHS they’re willing to pay for. The ballot box, I would suggest, may be the only way to make a decision when the participants in your ‘conversation’ are truly ‘national’ in their numbers!
Otherwise, Martin’s law applies.
P.S. I do know that some of the above is over-simplistic. Historically, raising overall tax rates hasn’t usually actually raised overall revenues for any length of time, for example, but I think raising them for this explicit purpose, and then cutting them elsewhere if you want to, would prove popular. However, I’m not an economist, and you should feel free not to vote for any government proposing to appoint me as Chancellor or Health Secretary,
Stereo required
I hadn’t come across the singer ‘Madelline’ before, but I’ve been somewhat entranced by her track ‘Dopamine’, not just because it’s a pleasant song, but because of this particular version.
To the same backing track, you hear her singing it in both French and English at the same time.
If you listen through a single phone speaker, it just sounds like a bit of a jumble, but if you have headphones or anything else with decent stereo separation, then the effect of hearing the same person, singing the same song, at the same time, to the same backing, but in your left ear in French and your right ear in English, is quite bizarre, especially if you have reasonable fluency in both.
It does slightly weird things to my brain, but it’s also interesting to see the flexibility in translation needed to get roughly the same concepts into the same lines.
Data management tip of the day
“Nobody wants ‘backup’. Everybody wants ‘restore’.”
— Heard on the Self-Hosted show, one of my favourite tech podcasts.
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.
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