This is haunting, beautiful, and spooky. And it’s from 2013, but I’ve only just discovered it.
It’s by Vienna Teng, and it’s most fun to watch her introduce it live:
But if you want the lyrics more clearly, someone’s done a nice transcription.
I have had an epiphany. Living on a small boat with four strangers for five days is a great way to discover many things (including, in my case, what good company they were). One of the less aquatic things I learned, though, was probably very obvious and I should have realised it years ago.
One day, we were sharing photos of our adventures, and I sent a few of mine to a fellow shipmate. “Oh!”, she said. “You’ve sent them by text! You can use WhatsApp if that’s easier.” To which I responded that I had recently deleted my WhatsApp account.
This casual announcement, to my surprise, was met with blank astonishment.
Deleted WhatsApp?! Why on earth would you do that? I explained that I wanted to distance myself a bit more from Facebook (for reasons I would have hoped were reasonably obvious by now) and, having not missed my FB account since binning it a few years ago, I had decided to do the same with WhatsApp. They were kind and considerate, but I was clearly regarded as something of an oddity; much more so, say, than if I had announced I was a vegan. And it wasn’t until just after the trip, that I realised why.
You see, I, and almost everybody I communicate with regularly, are Apple users, and so for the last decade or so we’ve had access to iMessage, the chat service behind the ‘Messages’ app (formerly known as iChat).
For those not in this world, Messages basically provides a chat interface which sends and receives SMS text messages if your recipient isn’t an Apple user, but seamlessly switches to using internet-based messaging if they are. You use the same app, but SMS texts are shown in green whereas internet-based iMessages are shown in blue. As well as being completely free, of course, the latter allows Messages to provide group messaging, to work seamlessly across all my Apple devices, to provide delivery confirmation, and so forth.
So when WhatsApp arrived, I didn’t really see the point of it. I installed it, yes, because I had a few friends and family who used it, but it always seemed an inferior solution; in particular, it didn’t really work well on my desktop machine, laptop or iPad. You could do it, but this was clearly a botched afterthought and involved regular re-confirmation using your phone. Why, I wondered, would you want to type text-based messages on a little phone keyboard if you were sitting at a desk with a better one? Why would you want to make a Faustian pact with Mark Zuckerberg simply to send chat messages? And so on.
Here’s the thing, you see: never having used Android, I had just assumed there was some equivalent service built in to that system. After all, ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger were long gone, so I just assumed that Android had always included an iMessage-like system of its own that everybody else was using. It probably had a Windows interface too, but I hadn’t really used Windows this millennium either, so didn’t know what people did there. I just assumed the the Microsoft/Google fans had some Android Chat system of their own, and only used WhatsApp because it picked up their Facebook contacts or something. In contrast, if I want to start a group discussion with, say, my mother, wife, and niece, I just use the same app as if I were sending them an individual text. It’s built-in, it’s the default, and they all have it on all of their machines and could answer anywhere.
So enlightenment only struck when I found myself on this boat and in the unusual situation, for me, of being in the minority as an iPhone user. I may even have been in a minority of one. So when I sent them all a message full of photos as a group, they all got it as SMS texts, and had no way of replying to the group, or even of knowing that they hadn’t each been the only recipient. (SMS messages have a Bcc-like facility, but not a Cc-like facility.) So it’s no wonder they all used and relied on WhatsApp: the poor things didn’t really have anything else! And it’s no wonder they were all astonished at my giving it up. As far as I can gather, it has done for Android users what iMessage started doing for Apple users all those years before (though still, it seems to me, in a markedly inferior way).
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m ignorant of other messaging systems. I used AIM, ICQ, and then Skype chat for years, Slack for a while, and I currently use Zulip and Signal every day to communicate with other groups of friends and work colleagues. Even Teams, when I have to. I love chat systems. I just hadn’t realised that Android didn’t have a default group-messaging solution built in, or that you had to choose between sending texts and doing something radically different on a third-party app for free messaging or for groups. Now I know, and I understand better why WhatsApp is so much more compelling for others than it ever was for me.
I could, of course, have just emailed them, and that would probably have been the best solution, but I think email has one key disadvantage: it’s still slightly less convenient to share your email address with someone than it is your phone number. If all email addresses were 11-digit numbers, it would be easy to call them out to somebody on the other side of the deck in a stiff breeze, and for the recipient to type them in on a simple numeric keypad while hanging onto a halyard with the other hand. Perhaps the solution, these days, is just to have my email address in a QR code stuck to the back of my phone, which anybody could scan quickly if they wanted to communicate with me…
In the meantime, if you do want to use an end-to-end-encrypted messaging system which supports groups, is based on phone numbers but works nicely on machines with keyboards, works on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and Linux, and doesn’t involve selling your soul, I’ve been finding Signal to work very well.
A few more peaceful images for your Sunday morning… (click for larger versions)
Boats on the swinging moorings at the Royal Harwich Yacht Club wait for the day to begin, and the tide to come in.
A cormorant dries his wings as the sun makes its appearance. But the fields are still shrouded in mist.
We head out in our little boat to see what the day will hold.
At Harwich, a row of lightships is moored in a line across the estuary. I wonder why they’re there; they aren’t even lit at night. It turns out they are brought here, from all over the country, for servicing. This is the MOT bay. Men go across from the white ship and change the lightbulbs.
Radio Caroline. No longer rocking. But still gently rolling.
That evening, the sun goes down over Harwich church.
A view from the gents’ loo at Shotley Marina.
All night, a gentle whirring and clunking reaches across the water, as the port of Felixstowe does its best to keep supplies coming into the country. (And exports going out.)
At dawn the following morning, the work is still going on.
Passers-by, just off the Essex coast.
I’ve just spent five days living on a small boat, in order to gain a certificate from the Royal Yachting Association that describes me as ‘Competent Crew’. I guess this is the modern equivalent of ‘Able Seaman’.
It was a splendid experience, which I’ll write about soon, when life is less hectic. In the meantime, I offer a couple of soothing pictures.
The Road Home: This the channel out of Bradwell Marina, just after dawn. A very East-Anglian sight at low tide. About 20 minutes later we had enough depth to creep out.
“Model railways”, someone once told me, “are a lot like breasts. They’re meant to be there for the children, but it’s always the men who want to play with them.”
Well, though I’ve always liked and admired them, they’re not something I ever went in for very much myself. Model railways, I mean.
It must be much more fun these days, though, since I gather you can get engines with cameras in them, giving a driver’s-eye view of your carefully-constructed world. I’d love to see one of those in action!
But, lest you should think that model trains are purely frivolous, Tom Scott’s latest video shows that they can have serious uses too.
Now that must have been great fun to build! And, as Tom mentions, and as some of my colleagues in the Computer Lab discovered a few years back, users exhibit a lot more engagement with something if there’s likely to be a physical crash when they get it wrong or lose concentration. Even if that crash only involves a model, it’s a great deal more compelling than a simulator on a screen.
I don’t think, by the way, that I’ve ever seen one of Tom’s YouTube videos that wasn’t worth watching. Subscription definitely recommended.
Strange thought this morning: I bought an electric car and everyone else in the UK has range anxiety!
Two quick random thoughts this morning related to cars…
The UK’s petrol stations are having supply problems, because there aren’t enough lorry drivers. (There’s a training and testing backlog as a result of Covid, and many drivers departed for better conditions elsewhere post-Brexit.) So, because some places are running out, people are panic-buying, and the pumps are emptying faster than they can be refilled.
Having driven electric vehicles for the last six years now, I’m able to take a more detached view of this, but I’m interested that, amidst the discussions of drafting in the army etc, I haven’t heard much talk of simply putting the prices up dramatically and temporarily. That, after all, is the usual way of regulating demand to match supply. I guess the problem is that fossil fuel is seen as an essential supply, so you are deemed to be disproportionately penalising the poor if you put the price up for everybody.
But, if many customers are just buying more than they need in the short term, I wonder if petrol pump manufacturers might now look at software updates to allow more flexible pricing should this happen again. For example, imagine that your first 20 litres were at the normal price, and anything over that cost twice as much. Would that work? Comments welcome below.
OK, second transport-related note for the day. I’m generally a fan (though an infrequent user) of services like Uber and Lyft, and we also have a decent local taxi service around here (who have had to get their act together in recent years as a result of the modern competition and so have things like a pretty-decent app too).
But I’ve never bought into the idea that car ownership will soon be a thing of the past and that we’ll all soon just summon vehicles at need, whether driven by humans or robots. Yes, we’ll see more of that happening eventually, but I suspect they’ll take the form of a large number of small cheap autonomous electric pods hanging around near the village green and in the supermarket car park, to be summoned quickly and at low cost. And that’s a few years away yet.
In the meantime, therefore, I was interested in this study from Carnegie Mellon which suggests that ridesourcing options like Lyft, Uber and your local taxi company may not be the best solution for society. The abstract:
On-demand ridesourcing services from transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft, have reshaped urban travel and changed externality costs from vehicle emissions, congestion, crashes, and noise. To quantify these changes, we simulate replacing private vehicle travel with TNCs in six U.S. cities. On average, we find a 50–60% decline in air pollutant emission externalities from NOx, PM2.5, and VOCs due to avoided “cold starts” and relatively newer, lower-emitting TNC vehicles. However, increased vehicle travel from deadheading creates a ∼20% increase in fuel consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions and a ∼60% increase in external costs from congestion, crashes, and noise. Overall, shifting private travel to TNCs increases external costs by 30–35% (adding 32–37 ¢ of external costs per trip, on average). This change in externalities increases threefold when TNCs displace transit or active transport, drops by 16–17% when TNC vehicles are zero-emission electric, and potentially results in reduced externalities when TNC rides are pooled.
The abstract even has an elevator-pitch graphic:
So the quick summary, which I guess is reasonably obvious: to benefit society, use a train, bus, or bike rather than a taxi-type service… or even your own car, especially if it doesn’t use that dinosaur juice that everyone else is queuing up to buy.
A couple of days ago, in my post about Sir Clive Sinclair, I mentioned the entertaining BBC drama “Micro Men“, which covered the exhilarating race between Sinclair, Acorn and others to corner the home computing market in the early 80s. Any Cambridge friends who are interested in computing and haven’t seen it should certainly take a look!
Those who know any of the people (or machines) concerned, or who enjoy watching the ‘Special features’ section of DVDs, may want to take it a bit further. I’ve discovered that, 10 years after the film came out, the Centre for Computing History got together Steve Furber, Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry for a viewing of the film, to get their take on how it recorded the events.
And also a revealing discussion which followed the film:
If, like me, you wondered why, for example, the Acorn Electron was not the commercial success it should have been, given its technical merits, this informal chat will tell you.
Are there any stores that you like to go into, but rather hope that you won’t be spotted there by anybody you know, because it would be a bit embarrassing? One of these, for me, is Edinburgh Woollen Mills, which seems to have, as its target market, old-age pensioners with little sense of taste or fashion. On the other hand, when I have crept in there over the last few decades wearing my false moustache and dark glasses, I’ve always found their plain woollen sweaters (and a few of their other less-tartaned items) to be excellent value, well-fitting and very hard wearing (which is good, because I then don’t need to visit too often and risk being spotted).
Well, I had a similar desire to conceal my location yesterday, when I was invited onto Radio 5 Live at very short notice to talk about the passing of Sir Clive Sinclair, his influence on the UK’s computer industry, and the importance of having a culture of invention. That was what the text said, anyway, but in fact they ran out of time and so, I think, slotted me in to the last few mins of the show, just to be polite, and join in whatever discussion was ongoing. With the result that we said nothing about Sinclair, almost nothing about computing, and in fact discussed time travel and whether butterflies could fart. (Don’t ask.) It wasn’t the high point of my broadcasting career. The good news is that I suspect there are even fewer of my acquaintances who listen to Radio 5 Live than who shop at Edinburgh Woollen Mills.
I never met Clive Sinclair, though he had a big influence on my life, having produced, in 1981, the first computer that our family could actually own. The BBC’s enjoyable 2009 dramatisation ‘Micro Men’ portrayed him as a bit of a comedic monster, as I remember, and I’m not sure how fair a representation that is. The programme is now available on YouTube, and I must watch it again, because it does depict several people I do know, and generally does them quite well, so perhaps it was accurate. Recommended viewing for all British geeks of a certain age, anyway.
But it is sad, in a way, that Sir Clive is often remembered for the C5 — his low-slung electric tricycle — which was a dismal market failure in 1985, and the butt of much humour, including from me (though as a techy teenager I would secretly have loved one!)
What did impress me, though, as I was making notes for the interview, was the relentless rate at which Sinclair released products:
That’s quite a list for a small company over one decade!
The failure of the C5 basically killed Sinclair Research, and the Sinclair brand was sold to Amstrad in 1986, which is why the Z88 was released under the Cambridge Computer name.
This failure was notable, though, because it followed the great successes of the previous years, which had made Sinclair a household name, and, by deploying affordable, programmable machines into vast numbers of British homes, played a big part in kick-starting the UK’s technology industry. It certainly kick-started my own hobby and eventual career in computing, which is also a good thing for the nation, because otherwise I might have tried to go into broadcasting.
So I would like, if I may, to propose an epitaph for Sir Clive Sinclair:
It is better to have invented and failed, than to never have invented at all.
We’re on holiday this week, renting a cottage in a ridiculously pretty village in the Cotswolds (Bisley, near Stroud). After spending almost all of the last year and a half in East Anglia, it’s lovely to get back to a place with some proper hills!
For the first half of the week, we had temperatures more reminiscent of southern Italy, and sought out shady spots in which to enjoy a cool glass of rosé.
This mediterranean feeling was enhanced by the fact that many of the local shops close at 2pm. (They just don’t reopen after the siesta!).
We relished the woodland stretches of our walks…
…as well as the breezes that can best be found on top of high Roman forts.
On an excursion to the Severn Estuary, we lunched at a seafood cafe while watching boats bobbing on the sparkling water of the marina, and then enjoyed a very refreshing G&T sorbet at the end of the beautifully-restored Clevedon Pier.
And then yesterday the weather changed, and we had some downpours of which East Anglia is not normally capable, and gently-falling mists at other times. We still managed to greatly enjoy a visit to Sudeley Castle. Recommended in any weather, and if you go, don’t miss the Pheasantry.
We’re definitely back in England now, though… and that’s also rather nice.
This is also the first longish trip in years where I haven’t had my laptop with me. My new iPad with its attached keyboard is exceedingly capable and I can basically do everything I want with it… but some things involve a bit more friction. (Though I imagine most of that is just a matter of habit.) So I haven’t been processing many of the images from my decent camera, for example; most of the pictures here are just snaps taken with my phone.
Well, except this one. My selfie stick isn’t quite this long. This requires a camera with propellors.
If I were giving advice to somebody considering buying a Tesla at the moment, it would be (a) buy it and (b) don’t believe the ‘full self-driving’ hype… yet.
You’ll be getting a car that is great fun to drive, has amazing range, a splendid safety record, a brilliant charging network, etc… and, in the standard included ‘autopilot’, has a really good cruise control and lane-keeping facility. One thing I’ve noticed when comparing it to the smart cruise control on my previous car, for example, is that it’s much better at handling the situation where somebody overtakes and then pulls into the lane just in front of you. Systems that are primarily concerned with keeping your distance from the car in front have difficult decisions to make at that point: how much and how suddenly should they back off to maintain the preferred gap. The Tesla, in contrast, is constantly tracking all the vehicles around you, and has therefore been following that car and its speed relative to yours for some time, so can react much more smoothly.
The dubiously-named ‘Full Self-Driving’ package is an expensive optional extra which you can buy at the time of purchase or add on later with a couple of clicks in the app. At the moment, it doesn’t give you very much more: the extra functionality (especially outside the US) hasn’t been worth the money. If you purchase it now, you’re primarily buying into the promise of what it will offer in the future, and the hope that this will provide you with significant benefits in the time between now and when you sell the car!
But at sometime in the not-too-distant future, the new version –currently known as the ‘FSD Beta’ — will be released more widely to the general public. ‘Full Self Driving’ will then still be a misnomer, but will be quite a bit closer to the truth. YouTube is awash with videos of the FSD Beta doing some amazing things: people with a 45-minute California commute essentially being driven door-to-door, for example, while just resting their hands lightly on the steering wheel… and also with a few examples of it doing some pretty scary things. It seems clear, though, that it’s improving very fast, and will be genuinely valuable on highways, especially American highways, before too long, but also that it’s likely to be useless on the typical British country road or high street for a very long time!
What Tesla has, to a much greater degree than other companies, is the ability to gather data from its existing vehicles out on the road in order to improve the training of its neural nets. The more cars there are running the software, the better it should become. But the back-at-base process of training the machine learning models on vast amounts of video data (to produce the parameters which are then sent out to all the cars) is computationally very expensive, and the speed of an organisation’s innovation, and how fast it can distribute the results to the world, depends significantly on how fast it can do this.
Last week, Tesla held their ‘AI Day’, where Elon Musk got up on stage and, in his usual way, mumbled a few disjointed sentences. Did nobody ever tell the man that it’s worth actually preparing before you get up on a stage, especially the world stage?
However, between these slightly embarrassing moments are some amazing talks by the Tesla team, going into enormous detail about how they architect their neural nets, the challenges of the driving task, the incredible chips they are building and rolling out to build what may be the fastest ML-training installation in the world, and the systems they’re building around all this new stuff.
For most people, this will be too much technical detail and will make little sense. For those with a smattering of knowledge about machine learning, you can sit back and enjoy the ride. There are lots of pictures and video clips amidst the details! And for those with a deeper interest in AI/ML systems, I would say this is well-worth watching.
There are two key things that struck me during the talks.
First, as my friend Pilgrim pointed out, it’s amazing how open they’re being. Perhaps, he suggested, they can safely assume that the competition is so far behind that they’re not a threat!
Secondly, it suddenly occurred to me — half way through the discussions of petaflop-speed calculations — that I was watching a video from a motor manufacturer! An automobile company! If you’re considering buying a Tesla, this is a part of what you’re buying into, and it’s astonishingly different from anything you’d ever see from any other car-maker. Full self-driving is a very difficult problem. But this kind of thing goes a long way to convincing me that if anybody is going to get there, it will be Tesla.
You may or may not ever pay for the full FSD package, but it’s safe to assume much of the output of these endeavours will be incorporated into other parts of the system. So, at the very least, you should eventually get one hell of a cruise control!
The livestream is here, and the interesting stuff actually starts about 46 minutes in.
I had an interesting start to the day. Regular readers of this blog will probably have heard quite enough about webcams and coffee pots, but that’s apparently not true for everybody in the world…
Thirty years ago today, Sir Tim turned on his first public webserver, which means that this is one of the days that people have chosen to label as the 30th anniversary of the Web. As it happens, we’re also not too far from the 30th anniversary of the day when we turned on the Trojan Room coffee pot camera, which would be connected to the web a couple of years later and so become the first webcam.
Anyway, I sometimes get wheeled out as a suitable relic to display from this era, and I had an email yesterday from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire asking if I was willing to be on the Louise Hulland show first thing this morning. I said yes, and they were going to contact me with further details… but I heard nothing more, so presumed it wasn’t going ahead. Until, that is, I emerged from my shower this morning, draped in my dressing gown but dripping slightly, to hear my phone ringing… and answered it only to be dropped into a live interview. However much I like networked video, there are times when audio really is the best medium! Anyway, it’s here, for the record.
Perhaps better is an interview that was actually recorded quite some time ago by Jim Boulton for the Centre for Computing History, but which they first published today as part of the local Web@30 event. In it, I am (a) slightly more compos mentis, since it was recorded later in the day and I had consumed more coffee, and (b) rather better attired.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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