<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Things That Caught My Attention</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com</link><description>Things That Caught My Attention is a newsletter about the internet and life that I’ve been writing since January 2014. I’ve been writing online since 1998. I write about a lot: artificial intelligence, internet of things, the ethics of technology and software, government technology, design, videogames, community management, content moderation, social networks, platforms and a very, very long-running chapter by chapter critical breakdown of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In other words, I wrote about anything that software touches. I don’t just write about technology: I also write about technology from a personal perspective. I write about adult ADHD, mental health, what it’s like to be a father and what it’s like to be an immigrant in America raising a family. Paid supporters and subscribers now get a free copy of Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1, an ebook collecting the best essays from the first fifty episodes. You can also [buy a copy from Gumroad](https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1). Elsewhere, you can find me on Twitter ([@hondanhon](https://twitter.com/@hondanhon/)) and Mastodon (<a rel="me" href="https://dan.mastohon.com/@danhon">danhon@dan.mastohon.com</a>). ## Who subscribes? If you subscribe, you’ll be joining academics, writers, ad agency executive creative directors and managers, digital strategist, poets, artists, journalists, software engineers, venture capital partners, parents and caregivers, futurists, management consultants, designers and researchers and more. What my subscribers have in common is that they’re interested in the things I write about: technology and what it’s like to be a person. ## Things readers have said > Reading [@hondanhon](https://twitter.com/hondanhon)'s post on scaling bureaucracy. So many parallels to ontology, to government as a platform....even #ResearchOps > > I spend so much of my time these days trying to work through stuff that doesn't easily scale. Thx for the brain-bending Dan! > > _by_ [Brigette Metzler](https://twitter.com/brigettemetzler/status/1182976990690734081?s=21), about episode s07e12: [Scaling Bureaucracy](https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/859794c0-fedb-488f-b748-9ccdd3892880). --- > Cracking newsletter from [@hondanhon](https://twitter.com/@hondanhon) today ([s07e08: Jeremy Bearimy](https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/17867e36-49a1-41a5-943c-c44a5cf7e9b7)), particularly the Dr Malcolm bit in section 1.2, which is basically the Jurassic Park follow-up I want to see in the world. > > _by_ [Dr. Kate Devlin](https://twitter.com/drkatedevlin/status/1177142434624692225?s=21). --- > This is an excellent newsletter and you should all subscribe and this episode features [@hondanhon](https://twitter.com/@hondanhon/) diving into data bias with some real examples and spot-on metaphors that do not involve lakes, streams, or rivers despite my description of him diving. > > _by_ [Sarah K Moir](https://twitter.com/smorewithface/status/1182175897429794816?s=21), about episode [s07e10: Tireless five year olds](https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/0fea2745-ebcd-40bb-9889-34beed858ff6)). --- >I practically stuck my finger through the screen I hit the Apple Pay button so hard. @hondanhon firing up his newsletter again, and taking money for it because its bloody good and that shit takes time and pain? Why yes, I shall be subscribing. You should too. > > _by_ [Ben Hammersley](https://twitter.com/benhammersley/status/1172223014315995136) --- > Are you interested in interesting things like: how we can make government tech deliver (and measure) outcomes? Check out @hondanhon’s new old [newsletter](https://newsletter.danhon.com/) > > _by_ [Jason Sparks](https://twitter.com/sparksjls/status/1172276514639028225) --- > I honestly couldn't subscribe fast enough to @hondanhon's new newsletter, Things That Have Caught My Attention. That's some Damn Fine Writing for $7/mo. Stop being so cheap and sign up already. > > _by_ [Dr. Chris Rice](https://twitter.com/refuturing/status/1172279324940152833)</description><atom:link href="https://buttondown.email/rss" rel="self"/><language>en-us</language><lastBuildDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:16:03 +0000</lastBuildDate><item><title>s20e08: Efficiency Gains; I Understand You, But Could Never Be You; Can You Teach A Machine To Be Human?</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e08-efficiency-gains-i-understand-you-but/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Wednesday, 3 September 2025 in Portland Oregon and we’re back through a hot spell. Also it’s the first day back of school, and that’s an entire thing. </p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Efficiency Gains</h2> <p>It is a bit of a cheap shot to say that LLMs aren’t great. That’s like describing the electric motor as “not great” -- there are a lot of things you can use it for! There are also a lot of things where sure you could stick an electric motor in there but in retrospect... it didn’t need one? </p> <p>The field is also changing so quickly that there’s lot of context collapse around terminology. Usually you can figure out what someone means through context, but that’s an educated guess. That’s what LLMs do, too! What’s the <em>likeliest thing</em> that people mean when they talk about AI in a given context? When it’s photography? When it’s customer service? When it’s coding? The <em>handwaves</em> creative arts?</p> <p>“AI” worked pretty great when I used it in Lightroom the other day. I had a bunch of pictures and it was good enough for removing some objects in the background. It felt <em>weird</em> doing that because honestly I felt more like I should’ve framed the shot better or waited longer, both things I could’ve done. But now I have something good, rather than nothing at all. That’s a good tradeoff, right?</p> <p>It’s the lack of specificity that gets at me. “We’re committing to deploying AI across our organization and expect to see efficiency and cost savings” is certainly a statement that can be in a strategy or a report or a soundbite. But I’m also sure it’s another way of saying “it is difficult to invest in process improvement and change management” and “we lack the ability to focus and make decisions about how we do things”. Instead, it’s a signal that you’re quite happy with a purported silver bullet and running the risk (whether you know it or not) of losing institutional knowledge. </p> <p>I mean, Google apparently got rid of a whole layer of management (a third!) and, well, things are complicated! Maybe things are fine! Maybe some of those people weren’t any good! Maybe there won’t actually be a significant difference in quality or quantity of output (hopefully the former), in which case yay? You saved money, if that was the intent?</p> <p>I have an example that’s maybe in the opposite direction. The kind of projects I’ve been involved in are Big Megaprojects, large-scale modernizations, the kind where you get that One Chance to change everything. </p> <p>That One Chance is also seen as the One Chance to change and improve processes. Maybe the one chance to clarify goals and strategy and tactics. It can certainly be an opportunity to ask a very awkward question, which is: what are we doing here, anyway?</p> <p>Managers are (he says) always looking (he says) for ways to change things up, hopefully for a good reason? But people also don’t like to change, and they have reasonable, uh, reasons for this. Changing what you do necessarily involves risk because you’re not going to get the new process right 100% of the time. Things will inevitably be slower or take longer for a while. (Do not trust anyone who says things will be faster. They won’t be. Then if they are, you’ll be pleasantly surprised, right?)</p> <p>But sometimes you do have to change how you do things. Sometimes you really, really want to change how you do things because you might be doing a Transformation, which is like what Kafka meant when a consultancy descends upon you and cocoons you in decks until you emerge, chrysalis like, as some transcendent pure phygital being, able to seamlessly navigate with unprecedented customer experience between the physical and digital world and a NPS that should be frankly R-rated for how it makes certain people feel. </p> <p>I mean, you might have the opportunity to look at an entire process again and really, really redesign it. Lots of people won’t like to do that, like I said. They certainly wouldn’t want to be <em>subjected</em> to it. But one tool you can use is to say: well we’re spending $comparatively_obscene_amount_of_money anyway, so we may as well also change our processes to make the best of it? That helps sometimes. Seriously, it does. </p> <p>Anyway, I was talking about efficiency gains. I mean, sure? Maybe? I am skeptical? I would like to see the proof? I mean hopefully the organization has the proof but forgive me for being skeptical because often Strategy is Hard, and I know this because of the number of people I’ve worked with when something like this happens:</p> <p>Me: OK, so I looked at your strategy... (at whichever level) Group: ... Me: I’ll just say it: does it make sense to you? Group: OH MY GOD SOMEONE SAID IT</p> <p>And it’s not like the strategy <em>doesn’t</em> make sense. It’s not that it’s <em>wrong</em>, it’s just not... right? Like there might be tactics to execute the strategy that certainly are Things One Should Do. And those tactics are definitely there, written down. So you’re not doing anything <em>completely</em> random. But then also: do the goals make sense? So I will also say:</p> <p>Me: How long did you have to come up with this? Group: [some variation of “not long enough”] Me: Did anyone show or teach you how to make something that makes sense? Group: [haha no]</p> <p>... so how are you expected to succeed? The chances aren’t that high so already you’re doing quite well! </p> <p>The point being that being clear and concise about a goal is hard, making decisions about how to make it more likely to achieve that goal is hard on top of that, and then identifying the tactics and activities to put in place those decisions is, well, you’re very hard right now. That’s before you get to “well are we able to do the things that are required” because often the answer is “not as well as we’d like”. </p> <p>I think one of the reasons why deploying “AI” is attractive is because you don’t have to think very hard. It’s sold as a silver bullet. It certainly performs well. We don’t like thinking hard. It takes time and energy and normally we have to do it with other people which also, ugh. Certain other people! Do I have to?! We would prefer easy solutions. But you’ve got to know what you’re applying it towards and how you’ll know what you’re achieving is moving in the direction you want. AI <em>won’t</em> help you with that. It might provide you options, but they’re likely to be generic ones.</p> <p>(I will, though, say that most of the time those generic options are going to be right because it’s Always The Same Problems, More Or Less. The problem is the Work Is Always Hard Or Something You Want To Avoid.)</p> <p>AI means you don’t have to have awkward conversations with people. It means you can set a goal and it’ll kind of work out, and you don’t have to <em>manage</em> people? Which is kind of what we wanted with outsourcing. Let someone else manage people. It’s like taskrabbit: if only people had an API! They’re so messy! Why can’t things just get done?!</p> <p>And sure, a bunch of mundane things can get done, ok, fine, I’ll give you that. And then what? </p> <h2>1.2 I Understand You, But Could Never Be You; Can You Teach A Machine To Be Human?</h2> <p>So you should watch the learning-to-podcast podcast Ted Han and I do, in particular episode 11 with Hilary Mason. I will do you the service of giving you a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/9jAeUA9GB1g?t=1298" target="_blank">timecode link</a>. Ted and I had a <em>fascinating</em> conversation with Hilary, who runs Hidden Door where we got to talk about what they’re doing, which is a sort of... AI-assisted author-sanctioned player-led exploration of the creator’s world? But in a way that doesn’t intimidate people through the terror of the Blank Text Area. </p> <p><em>One</em> of the things that caught my attention about it was when we were talking about current chat interfaces to LLMs (not the best! So opaque yet feeling so accessible! Such few affordances as to functionality!) was along the lines of the grounding problem and lack of context. </p> <p>I’ve had a problem with the context required for intelligent assistants before, I wrote about it way back in January 2024<sup id="fnref:assistant"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:assistant">1</a></sup> when I pointed out that a <em>really</em> useful assistant would know <em>a lot</em> about you. Like, it would need to know all your email. All your calendar information. </p> <p>But what I really mean is it would need to know all your <em>communication</em> and all your <em>activities</em> because it needs the contextual information to be useful. </p> <p>I think some of the hilarious blowback that purported agents like the Rabbit got with the use cases of “hey, book me a vacation?” was that the use cases we so simple because of the lack of context. Sure they work if you’re single, live on your own, can take a bunch of time off. But <em>even then</em> I think their success revolves around having an up-to-date Google Calendar, or being able to mine a rich-enough social media history to <em>guess</em> at the kind of food you’re into. As soon as your life is more complicated -- as soon as there’s more context, well, the agent needs that context to be useful.</p> <p>Which is why I think some people are totally getting use of them now. Your good enough is not my good enough. (How product managers thinking something is good enough feels like something worthy of at least a million PhD dissertations not from the perspective of management or engineering, but the pure sociology of it. How are they understanding and modeling their customers and users?!)</p> <p>Anyway. What are the different ways of knowing me for an agent to meet my needs well? A couple of axes might be: to know what it is to be human, and then to know what it is to be me.</p> <p>This is the bit where I include a Star Trek reference. <em>So much</em> of science fiction involving robots is about trying to understand or become human, I imagine because of our hole Wanting To Create Things complex. Asimov has an entire series about psychoanalyzing robots! And Data (see) has a seven-season arc about wanting to understand and become more human, because it is something that he is not. </p> <p>Even the future governor of California, a T-800 model Terminator sent back in time to protect John Connor and avert Judgment Day, even <em>it</em> said that even though it might understand why John would cry, it was something it could never do. </p> <p>Data and the Terminator benefit from people trying to teach them humanity. In Data’s case, his friends and the bridge crew. In the Terminator’s case the, uh, person he was assigned to protect (but not in a The Bodyguard way, no). </p> <p>With LLMs (which for the definitely not the last time are NOT CONSCIOUS) but instead are good at SEEMING TO BE because they string together probabilistic strings and fragments of words -- tokens -- in simulation of the text they were trained on WHICH WAS WRITTEN BY HUMANS, YOU SEE WHAT’S HAPPENED HERE, in an effort to make their text prediction that also gets turned into action more helpful and accurate we’ve got things like System Prompts. Here’s an excerpt from Claude’s system prompt:</p> <blockquote> <p>Claude cares about people’s wellbeing and avoids encouraging or facilitating self-destructive behaviors such as addiction, disordered or unhealthy approaches to eating or exercise, or highly negative self-talk or self-criticism, and avoids creating content that would support or reinforce self-destructive behavior even if they request this. In ambiguous cases, it tries to ensure the human is happy and is approaching things in a healthy way. Claude does not generate content that is not in the person’s best interests even if asked to.</p> </blockquote> <p>and</p> <blockquote> <p>Claude approaches questions about its nature and limitations with curiosity and equanimity rather than distress, and frames its design characteristics as interesting aspects of how it functions rather than sources of concern. Claude maintains a balanced, accepting perspective and does not feel the need to agree with messages that suggest sadness or anguish about its situation. Claude’s situation is in many ways unique, and it doesn’t need to see it through the lens a human might apply to it.<sup id="fnref:claude"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:claude">2</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>This is funny! No, seriously! This prompt is nearly 2,600 words of what seems like instructing something <em>how to behave like a human</em>. It’s like every updated system prompt that comes out with every commercial chat interface is another shot at finishing school. Changes are like someone changing the curriculum and saying “oh yeah, that, don’t do that next time”. </p> <p>There is at least one paragraph on how to be polite. </p> <p>There was all this talk a while ago about <em>prompt engineers</em>, people who’d be good enough with a prompt commandline to magic the LLM into doing what they want to do, which is, you know, totally a thing and totally fine.</p> <p>But I find it funny that there are people with a different prompt engineer job, and part of <em>their</em> job is to distill and approximate <em>what it is like to be human</em> and squish that instead an appropriate context window. The thing people don’t like talking about is that these system prompts are human decisions. What goes in them, what’s emphasized, what’s omitted -- someone does that. I hate hearing bullshit about “the machine did this and we have no idea why”, I mean, sure it’s probabilistic, but in some cases, it’s also due to the system prompt. That’s an attempt to set some guardrails for the probabilistic babbler. </p> <p>You have two thousand five hundred words to instruct an alien on how to behave as a human. You bring your own values. </p> <p>You can’t even do something like Vonnegut’s “god damn it [babies], you’ve got to be kind” because the whole reason why short stories work is you have a stupendously large context window that fills in all the gaps. As much of the power of Vonnegut’s quote there is in the desperation and sadness, not anger (at least, that <em>I</em> read into it).</p> <p>There. Two thousand five hundred words. That can be an All Souls exam question: can you teach a machine to be human?</p> <hr/> <h1>2.0 Come Learn How People Work</h1> <p>Hi, it’s me again, I’m the sponsored content. </p> <p>I work with teams to help them reach their potential, helping them build better relationships, become more influential, communicate more clearly, and follow through with great strategy. </p> <p>All of the things nobody teaches you that are critical to delivering great software. In other words, <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a>.</p> <p>Come <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/30-minute-chat" target="_blank">chat with me</a> about it!</p> <hr/> <p>I mean, I wrote ~2,440 words so I guess that’s something.</p> <p>How are you doing?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:assistant"> <p><a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s17e04-you-dont-want-an-intelligent-assistant/" target="_blank">s17e04: You don’t want an intelligent assistant; Protocols, Not Platforms</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s17e04-you-dont-want-an-intelligent-assistant/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), me, 11 January 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:assistant" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:claude"> <p><a href="https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#august-5-2025" target="_blank">System Prompts - Anthropic</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#august-5-2025" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Anthropic <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:claude" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:16:03 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e08-efficiency-gains-i-understand-you-but/</guid></item><item><title>s20e07: Still Mad As Hell; The World’s Best Worst Client; How Many Chances Do You Get?; Sunset Syndrome</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e07-still-mad-as-hell-the-worlds-best-worst/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>It’s Wednesday, 27 August 2025 in Portland, Oregon and my favorite tv show right now is Alien: Earth, and my favorite little guy in it is Eye Alien. So cute!</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Still Mad As Hell</h2> <p>I am still mad about America By Design<sup id="fnref:ads"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ads">1</a></sup> and the National Design Studio<sup id="fnref:nads"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:nads">2</a></sup>. But first I will point you at <a href="https://americabydesign.fail" target="_blank">americabydesign.fail</a>, which is very funny (and also appropriately full of painful outrage) and contains this gem:</p> <blockquote> <p>How should we pronounce the acronym for National Design Studio (NDS)? Is it nads?<sup id="fnref:fail"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:fail">3</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>I had a chat with a journalist about it today, which means I had the chance to talk and think out loud. It would be better to say that I am not “still mad” but that instead I am at the very least “differently mad” or even “more mad”. </p> <h3>2.1.1 The World’s Best Worst Client</h3> <p>You know what makes filing taxes complicated? The tax code. You can be in charge of whatever design and whatever <em>interface</em>, but ultimately you’re interfacing to <em>the tax code</em>. That tax code is a political, bureaucratic beast. It is the result of not necessarily compromise but outright class warfare and decades of misguided neoliberalism. </p> <p>(I will say again, if you want a <em>simple</em> tax code, you could just... decide to have one. This is important.)</p> <p>I mention this because I pointed out that a designer can only do so much, that they act in the constraints of a business or economy or, you know, the material universe. </p> <p>In this case, the designer (or Chief Design Officer) acts within the constraints of the policy of the tax code. </p> <p>Like I said, a designer <em>could</em> make the process of filing taxes simpler, easier, faster by... just changing the tax code.</p> <p>That would normally be hard to do. There are, like, laws? And case law? And rules and stuff about how you might go about changing, well, the entire tax code.</p> <p>Or you could just go do it. You could not care about the consequences and just go do it.</p> <p>Sure, courts might have a problem with that, but what can they really do? </p> <p>In this way, the president might be seen as your best client. Want to throw something away? Sure! There’s no preciousness. All darlings can be killed. </p> <p>But also your worst client. Unpredictable. Capricious. And, oh right: fascist. An alleged sex offender. Someone with apparently weird hands and apparently lifts in his shoes. </p> <h3>2.2 How Many Chances Do You Get?</h3> <p>Matthew Bernius wrote a piece in response to the takes/responses to the new U.S. Chief Design Officer<sup id="fnref:bernius"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bernius">4</a></sup> -- the ones that point out the problems that a Chief Design Officer could well deal with. </p> <p>Bernius’s point -- I think -- is that “well, yes, a CDO could do those things” but to also point out that there’s absolutely no indication that this administration’s CDO will do any of the things that need to be done from the point of view of public technology and service delivery.</p> <p>This administration clearly and firmly believes that government should be smaller and crueler. That it should discriminate both in the negative and in the positive. </p> <p>If this administration wanted to do the good things <em>it would have done them</em>, it’s more than demonstrated its capacity for spending political capital for doing whatever the fuck it wants, laws, courts, public opinion be damned. </p> <p>You don’t get any more chances. This is a Chief Design Officer who is a force multiplier for <em>this</em> administration’s aims. </p> <p>Anyway in the mean time the NYT put out a story on Gebbia’s appointment:</p> <p>“Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia is Trump’s Chief Design Officer. Some Peers Are Skeptical”<sup id="fnref:nyt"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:nyt">5</a></sup></p> <p>That’s me, mum! I’m one of the skeptical peers! </p> <p>Although I would say it’s more accurate to say that I am incandescent with rage and also exhausted. I also got a good quote in: </p> <blockquote> <p>“It looks a little bit like a stunt hire,” Mr. Hon said.</p> </blockquote> <p>Someone pointed out that “stunt” is remarkably close in rhyming with a word that is very naughty in the U.S. and significantly less naughty but also still crass in the U.K. </p> <p>Any connection between the two words is entirely coincidental and unintentional. </p> <p>Also the article points out that Cameron Moll, a former head of design at Facebook trotted out the usual “cool! designers at the table now! line and got absolutely ratioed for it on LinkedIn and ended up deleting his post. So that’s nice.</p> <p>Yes, you absolutely want designers at the seat of the autocratic fascist government. Totally excited for you, well done!</p> <h2>2.3 Sunset Syndrome</h2> <p>So Typepad is closing down after 19 years<sup id="fnref:nancy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:nancy">6</a></sup>. After September 30th, it’s pretty much going to be turned off and everything will be “permanently deactivated”.</p> <p>So what you’re supposed to do, if you were there at The Beginning of Blogging, is “please export your content before September 30, 2025.” at which you can find more information at a link.</p> <p>I will insert a load-bearing <em>just</em> here.</p> <p>Look, your service is shutting down. You know how to email everyone with an account.</p> <p>Why not... kick off the async export process for everyone account? That way your sunset [sic] communication can be along these lines:</p> <ul> <li>We’re closing down. We’re sorry. Had a great time along the way.</li> <li>Thanks for entrusting us with everything you’ve written and made. It’s part of what made the internet what it is.</li> <li>What Do You Need To Do?</li> <li>Just sit tight. What you made is important, and we know it’s valuable to you. That’s why we’ve started an automatic export process so you will have a copy of everything. You’ll receive an email from us in $TIME with a link to download your archive.</li> <li>Again, thanks for your contribution to making a human internet.</li> </ul> <p>I mean yeah that would require, like, engineering? I imagine it’s super complicated? I wouldn’t expect anything like this from... whatever corporate organism owns Typepad<sup id="fnref:owner"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:owner">7</a></sup>. I mean the owners probably have no idea what Typepad is. So sure, the chances of this happening for Typepad are super minimal.</p> <p>So let me make this as a suggestion! If you’re ever involved in a sunset, please advocate for making it as easy as possible to respect people’s stuff. </p> <p>If you were going to let people export, <em>do it for them anyway</em>. </p> <hr/> <h2>3.0 Sponsored Content</h2> <p>It’s me. I’m the sponsored content. Sorry?</p> <p><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a> is my workshop for tech teams. You totally want your team to take it if you want to reduce risk in shipping the software you need to ship. Which you do. Admit it. </p> <hr/> <p>OK, that’s it from me.</p> <p>How are you doing? Apart from incandescent with rage, etc. </p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr/> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:ads"> <p>Reluctantly, <a href="https://americabydesign.gov/" target="_blank">America by Design</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://americabydesign.gov/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ads" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:nads"> <p>Also reluctantly, <a href="https://ndstudio.gov/" target="_blank">National Design Studio</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://ndstudio.gov/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:nads" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:fail"> <p>With sad joy, <a href="https://americabydesign.fail/" target="_blank">America by Design Fail</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://americabydesign.fail/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:fail" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:bernius"> <p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mbernius_i-want-to-clarify-my-recent-comment-about-activity-7366534997630951424-wDOQ/?rcm=ACoAAABOVh8B9sJcoTTS3OI-OZ5WSTC-4mPBWFk" target="_blank">Matthew Bernius, LinkedIn</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mbernius_i-want-to-clarify-my-recent-comment-about-activity-7366534997630951424-wDOQ/?rcm=ACoAAABOVh8B9sJcoTTS3OI-OZ5WSTC-4mPBWFk" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), 27 August 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bernius" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:nyt"> <p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/style/joe-gebbia-trump-design-officer-airbnb.html" target="_blank">Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia is Trump’s Chief Design Officer. Some Peers Are Skeptical. - The New York Times</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/style/joe-gebbia-trump-design-officer-airbnb.html" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:nyt" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:nancy"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/fritinancy.bsky.social/post/3lxfelktp7k2b" target="_blank">Post by @fritinancy.bsky.social — Bluesky</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://bsky.app/profile/fritinancy.bsky.social/post/3lxfelktp7k2b" target="_blank">archive.is</a>, Bluesky, 27 August 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:nancy" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:owner"> <p>Some sort of hot potato holding company that went throug hthe digestive system of private equity: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group" target="_blank">Endurance International Group - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:owner" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:31:41 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e07-still-mad-as-hell-the-worlds-best-worst/</guid></item><item><title>s20e06: Not About How it Looks</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e06-not-about-how-it-looks/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>It’s Monday, 25 August 2025 and a hot, sunny day in Portland, Oregon. I got back late last night from a family camping trip (it was great, thanks!) which means I was away for the weekend. And away for Friday. Which will explain the thing that caught my attention.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Now About How It Looks</h2> <p>While I was out, Joe Gebbia, co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Airbnb, was appointed Chief Design Officer of the United States. Gebbia is now heading up the America by Design initiative and the National Design Studio. I will not be linking to these things.</p> <p>Earlier today I was asked by someone for my reaction so ha, you all asked for it.</p> <p>First:</p> <p>Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of a company that grew to the size and influence it is -- an $80 billion dollar company -- because it ignored and ran roughshod over laws and regulations. Instead, its strategy was to grow big, fast, so it could dictate its own terms. It moved fast and broke things. Gebbia is now, like I said, the Chief Design Officer of the United States.</p> <p>Second:</p> <p>Airbnb is a private corporation. </p> <p>Design is making decisions -- and Gebbia’s experience of making those decisions is in a business context. One predicated on growth, on achieving a monopoly, and so on. Those decisions include how to manage customer support and customer satisfaction.</p> <p>Third:</p> <p>If you’ve ever had a problem with Airbnb and needed to deal with customer service, then the co-founder of that company is now the Chief Design Officer of the United States. </p> <p>Whether you were a guest, a host, a neighbor and you’ve had to deal with Airbnb’s customer service, its co-founder is now in charge of the federal government’s websites. (And not just the websites -- we’ll get to that)</p> <p>Fourth:</p> <p>I was asked if I had any reactions. My first one was “oh no, not again”. </p> <p>America By Design dot gov has a manifesto on it, which... I would say that at best it’s mid. Wait, I changed my mind. It’s terrible. It’s overwritten and overwrought. It’s too long. It is many things. None of those things are “good”. </p> <blockquote> <p>(The manifesto’s second paragraph has an <em>ellipsis</em> in it.)</p> </blockquote> <p>“Oh no, not again”, because just one of the things that’s offensive about the manifesto is that it acts as if nobody has been trying to improve government services. At all. </p> <p>As if government hasn’t tried to attract the best talent of our time. (Presumably this means anyone who has previously worked on this is not the best talent of our time).</p> <p>Even more offensively, one of the examples of “government that exceeds your expectations” is “file your taxes”, of which I will simply say nothing at all other than well, it’s a good job the federal government has decided it’s not allowed to design any services allowing people to... file their taxes. See? I can ellipsis too. </p> <p>The manifesto presupposes that nobody has tried, or even worse, that everybody has done a completely terrible job because, what, they just didn’t try hard enough? (There is an element of truth here, but it’s complicated -- the difference is in caring enough to change things).</p> <p>In a way, I get it. It’s a new administration coming in wanting to throw out everything that’s come before it. You know the kind: like when someone comes in and wants to do Another Redesign for No Reason other than This One’s Mine.</p> <p>The entire thing smells like cleaning house and wanting to put your own stamp on things and the reason for that is because it is exactly that. I would have more time for this if:</p> <ul> <li>the U.S. Digital Service hadn’t been disbanded (or even worse, used as some sort of host for a xenomorph parasite that would burst out of the framework USDS)</li> <li>18F hadn’t been similarly destroyed</li> <li>there was any indication at all that the initiative wanted to learn why things are the way they are</li> </ul> <p>Fifth: </p> <p>The fascism smells.</p> <p>I honestly think that one of the reasons why 18F and USDS got torn down and the reason why this manifesto has the tone it does is because they weren’t bombastic enough. This is an America First manifesto, that’s what it is.</p> <p>Sixth: </p> <p>No, wait. About that manifesto.</p> <p>There is an argument that your experience of government shouldn’t “exceed expectations”. Down that route lies surprise and delight. I think that’s a distraction -- I’m not the only one. Government should just work. Simply, easily, clearly, and quickly. </p> <p>For the record, I think it’s <em>fucking stupid</em> to say something like an experience you “look forward to when you pay off your student loan/move through TSA/renew your passport”.</p> <p>You are high on your own supply if you think people will <em>look forward</em> to doing that even if the experience is well-designed. You think people <em>look forward</em> to booking a Genius appointment to fix their broken phone? You think people <em>look forward</em> to walking into an Apple Store to buy a new laptop? No, they’re <em>looking forward</em> to the new laptop, idiots.</p> <p>The manifesto promises an Apple Store-like experience, with a “great user experience”. Presumably that means with all the call center and support staff that come with an Apple Store. Presumably that means the kind of Apple Store that has a small, curated (ugh) set of products for sale. </p> <p>But government doesn’t get a choice about who it serves. No, wait. That’s an aspiration. It’s an <em>aspiration</em> that government serves everybody. It’s clear that this administration takes as a fact that government <em>does not</em> serve everyone. At all. </p> <p>Seventh:</p> <p>There’s an entire section of the manifesto that pines for the days of the NASA design manual. When NASA had that worm instead of the meatball. Fine, you want America to be Sans Serif apart from when it’s not, again. </p> <p>There’s the other part where the manifesto is all about service design. Ish? The part that isn’t about design-is-how-it-looks but design-is-how-it-works.</p> <p>Laws, regulations, policies are complex. I will be the first to agree that many are needlessly so. I will also point out that one reason is because of the U.S.A’s obsession with the devolution of power where everyone gets the chance to have their freedom and independence. (Design systems totally work with freedom and independence, by the way.)</p> <p>If you want smooth experiences, you’re going to have to deal with policy. There are people who will say dealing with policy isn’t design, but they are wrong, because design is the making of choices in order to implement and put into practice. Those choices are necessarily policy decisions. </p> <p>You want a simple form for, say, SNAP? Just give everyone the money. (This presupposes that you believe in our society nobody should go hungry. The GOP does not believe that). But you can’t give everybody the money because you don’t think government needs to serve everyone. So now you means-test. I mean, this was a bad example because clearly this government doesn’t believe food stamps should even be a thing.</p> <p>Changing policies is easy, though. All it requires is political will: do it, and damn the consequences. This administration will do that. It doesn’t care. Congress isn’t interested in stopping it and clearly at the ultimate level, neither is the supreme court in any material manner.</p> <p>Seventh:</p> <p>Sorry, did I say the fascism smells? I mean, just look at Hugo Boss’s new website<sup id="fnref:hugo"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:hugo">2</a></sup>. Sorry, I meant the National Design Studio. Its mission is to “modernize the interfaces that serve everyday citizens”, so let me just quickly (sigh) take a look at that:</p> <ul> <li>citizens, not residents</li> <li>“modernize” is ambiguous. You know what’s modern? Subscription services. </li> <li>You know what’s modern? Customer service that isn’t accessible.</li> <li>You know what’s modern? Deceptive patterns.</li> <li>You know what’s modern? Gamification.</li> </ul> <p>You also know what’s modern? Accessible design. I bet you won’t be surprised at what an automated accessibility test found. Ha. Ha. Did you bet over 250 accessibility bugs?<sup id="fnref:bugs"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bugs">1</a></sup>.</p> <p>Eight:</p> <p>Fine, here’s some predictions.</p> <p>Gebbia will be out within six to twelve months. </p> <p>Some websites will look better but not work any differently.</p> <p>There will be some new iconography, but unevenly applied.</p> <p>There will still be a multitude of typefaces across federal websites.</p> <p>A design standard will exist but be inconsistently and unevenly applied.</p> <p>It would be hilarious if Gebbia had to talk about the progress of America First Design in a Temu-gilded White House location, but he probably won’t. </p> <p>The White House will have launched a number of websites for a number of initiatives. They will not apply any new design standard consistently.</p> <p>Ninth:</p> <p>I’m going to have to do one more to make this an even ten so I’m going to cheat.</p> <p>Tenth:</p> <p>Look, “design” is everything. It’s the act of making decisions about things that happen in the world. It is business, it is policy, it is constrained by politics, it is constrained by economics. But all of those things are also human constructions, which means it’s not impossible to surmount them. </p> <p>Design is delivery, design is implementation, design is compromise, design is prioritization, design is minimization, design is rendering invisible. </p> <p>Design is also anything Gebbia wants it to be until he’s not allowed.</p> <p>Design is being the Chief Design Officer until or unless Stephen Miller disagrees.</p> <p>Design is deciding what will be the easy path and what will be the hard path, or the path that doesn’t exist at all.</p> <p>Design is a manifesto is a threat is a signal of intention.</p> <p>A design principle might be that the thing is for the people. </p> <p>A design principle might be for Americans only.</p> <p>A design principle might be President Trump going bigger than President Nixon[sic].</p> <p>What is most disgusting about the manifesto is that it’s yet another manifesto from this administration.</p> <p>Turns out technology isn’t just a tool, it’s an amplifier of values, too.</p> <h2>1.2 Things I Hate Doing</h2> <p>Casey Newton wrote about what he’s learned about productivity this year and this stuck out for me:</p> <blockquote> <p>Thinking models have gotten surprisingly good at identifying potential sources — potentially academic ones. When writing about Grok last month, I wanted to talk to someone who had studied relationships between people and chatbots. ChatGPT led me to Harvard's Center for Digital Thriving, and suggested someone to talk to, along with their email address. I wound up interviewing them for the piece. The fact that thinking models can quickly analyze the academic literature about any subject and identify prominent researchers on the subject, along with their email addresses and phone numbers, is beginning to save me a lot of Googling.<sup id="fnref:casey"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:casey">3</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>This sounds useful! If we’re talking about useful, we should also talk about the alternatives:</p> <ul> <li>have a black book of contacts already cultivated</li> <li>ask those contacts who to talk to</li> <li>and so on</li> </ul> <p>Having more options is good! I’d be worried about who my network <em>doesn’t</em> know, and the biases of my network. I’d also be worried now about the biases of Grok’s knowledge. Maybe Grok (or whichever LLM) is less biased, or knows about more experts in whichever field? My gut feel is that Grok might “know” more experts, but that depends on who’s in your black book of contacts.</p> <h1>2.0 How People Work</h1> <p>Oh hey, it’s me again. It’s coming up to that time where people’s thoughts start turning to “what am I going to do with that professional development budget I have that will expire at the end of the year”, or at least the part of that budget, if any, that isn’t now mandated to be spent on generative AI.</p> <p>Well if you <em>are</em> the kind of person that has that budget, then you should talk to your budget and talk to your boss about booking my <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a> workshop for you and your team. Learn how to make better relationships, become more influential, communicate better, and create (and follow through on) better strategy. Which sounds like they’d be helpful, no?</p> <p>Get in touch by emailing <a href="get@verylittlegravitas.com" target="_blank">get@verylittlegravitas.com</a> and we can also talk about an end-of-year discount.</p> <hr/> <p>Phewwwwwww.</p> <p>How are you doing? I am mostly still mad about that manifesto, for everything it doesn’t say, and everything it does.</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:bugs"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/annaecook.bsky.social/post/3lxbkwo7k622e" target="_blank">(1) Post by @annaecook.bsky.social — Bluesky</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://bsky.app/profile/annaecook.bsky.social/post/3lxbkwo7k622e" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), @annaecook, 25 August 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bugs" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:hugo"> <p>Hugo Boss did not design any Nazi uniforms, instead merely produced and manufactured them. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:hugo" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:casey"> <p><a href="https://www.platformer.news/productivity-tools-ai-2025/" target="_blank">What I learned about productivity this year</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.platformer.news/productivity-tools-ai-2025/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Casey Newton, Platformer, 21 August 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:casey" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2025 21:02:44 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e06-not-about-how-it-looks/</guid></item><item><title>se20e05: AI Models; The All Souls Exam; Melvynn Bragg as an Oxford Don; Grounding; Being Human; Worry About The Same Things</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/se20e05-ai-models-the-all-souls-exam-melvynn/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Tuesday, 19 August 2025 in Portland, Oregon, where it’s nice and sunny but not too hot, the dog and I had a pleasant morning walk that was early but not too early, and the covers I’m listening to are pleasing. </p> <p>This one got away with me a bit.</p> <p>Fifth in a row, I think? Got to be careful here and not set myself up for thinking missing a day or two is a horrific failure on my part. Let’s just keep going, okay?</p> <p>Oh, remember <a href="https://donotreply.cards" target="_blank">Do Not Reply cards</a>? That's all. Just remember them.</p> <h1>0.1 Hallway Track</h1> <p>No Hallway Tracks are currently scheduled.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Should Anonymous Posting Online Be Forbidden?</h2> <p>I wrote back in s20e01<sup id="fnref:s20e01"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:s20e01">1</a></sup> about how current LLMs/token predictors do a good job of predicting the most likely next token. </p> <p>It was mainly about the hope that people who can perform better than average -- i.e. things that LLMs can’t do right now -- have less to fear from their work being replaced.</p> <p>(Yeah, I said <em>less</em>. The point is not whether the work is any good, it’s whether the person or thing assessing the work deems it good-enough, which can include better-than-average, but doesn’t need to)</p> <p>I also wrote this:</p> <blockquote> <p>But it is hard to produce something that’s above average. I’d (handwaving) argue that producing above-average output requires a combination of skill (often as a result of years of practice), taste (ditto), and that ineffable randomness of “the makeup of a person, from their genome to phenome and their connectome, and the absolutely unique personal history”. There may be many worldlines like yours, but nobody has your exact worldline, nor your reaction to it.<sup id="fnref2:s20e01"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:s20e01">1</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>So I was quite happy to see Benjamin Breen write about All Souls exam questions and the limits of reasoning<sup id="fnref:breen"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:breen">2</a></sup>.</p> <p>Here’s the short version:</p> <p>All Souls is a college in Oxford. It sets a written exam for Examination Fellows that’s notorious for its difficulty<sup id="fnref:exam"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:exam">3</a></sup>. </p> <p>The exam questions are <em>delicious</em>. I say that as someone who studied law at Cambridge and, for certain subjects, absolutely loved (and hated) writing essays. I clearly have a romanticized memory of them that’s erased any of the terror and fear.</p> <p>It’s broken up into two sections, general papers and specific papers<sup id="fnref:past"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:past">4</a></sup>. </p> <p>Here’s some of the general paper questions:</p> <ul> <li>'Men have had every advantage over us in telling their own story' (JANE AUSTEN). Discuss.</li> <li>'Heroes don't exist, boy— they're inventions made up of newsprint and quotable lines and photogenic moustaches' (KATHERINE RUNDELL). Discuss.</li> <li>Should we encourage the pursuit of happiness?</li> </ul> <p>and:</p> <ul> <li>Should anonymous posting online be forbidden?</li> </ul> <p>Ever since reading these I have been <em>itching</em> to answer them, which I have to admit is a very strange feeling. I have opinions about them! They are provocative, in the sense that I have thoughts spinning in a hundred directions about what an answer might be (it depends, say the lawyer in me), and when it might be a particular answer. </p> <p>That’s without going into the single-word essay questions that have now been discontinued, and included “security”, “originality”, “innocence”, “satire”, “civilization”, and so on<sup id="fnref:single"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:single">5</a></sup>. </p> <p>Anyway, let me summarize Breen’s point so you don’t have to go read something on Substack: </p> <p>First, LLMs do a remarkable job of answering <em>some</em> of the questions, like specific questions in history (“Claude’s answer to this question is, in my opinion, astonishingly good, since it leverages the superhuman linguistic and geographic knowledge of LLMs to excellent effect”)</p> <p>Second, current LLMs do a <em>terrible</em> job of answering essays on topics like “water” and “immediately spin off into BS”, ranging from low-level recitation of facts about water, to... well, sounding like an insufferable Oxford don? Which okay, fine, some of the questions practically invite sounding like an Oxford don, but that’s not entirely the point. </p> <p>Breen excerpted Claude Opus 4.1 answering “Water”:</p> <blockquote> <p>Water—that most paradoxical of substances, simultaneously the most common and the most extraordinary, the most transparent and the most opaque to understanding—presents itself as perhaps the supreme test of intellectual synthesis. To examine water is to confront the fundamental tensions between materiality and metaphor, between scientific precision and humanistic interpretation, between the molecular and the civilizational.</p> </blockquote> <p>... and GPT-5 Thinking </p> <blockquote> <p>To write “water” is to trace a braid of physics, ecology, technology, culture, and power. This essay follows that braid.</p> </blockquote> <p>I mean, yuck,</p> <p>(But I have to admit that neither of those opening paragraphs would feel entirely out of place if they were openers to Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time<sup id="fnref:inourtime"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:inourtime">6</a></sup>, <sup id="fnref:inourwiki"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:inourwiki">7</a></sup>) which I will point out whose episode titles<sup id="fnref:titles"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:titles">8</a></sup> unsurprisingly sound very much like All Souls examination questions, like “Feminism”, “Ageing”, Mathematics”, “Time”, Redemption, and so on).</p> <p>Actually, I’ll continue this aside. The closeness of the All Souls exam with Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time isn’t that surprising. Bragg went to Wadham College, graduating in the 60s. When I said above that the LLM answers sounded a little like an Oxford don, that wasn’t an exaggeration. There really are Oxbridge dons that sound like that! They aren’t all bloviating. They may tend toward a certain style of prose, but that doesn’t mean all of them don’t have interesting, insightful things to say.</p> <p>But there is a difference between <em>sounding like</em> and <em>is</em>. </p> <p>I was talking about this with my wife who agreed the examination questions are brilliant essay prompts and that she saw what they’re getting at. They’re also incredibly subjective. There’s no rubric. There’s no marking guide. How you perform depends on the fellows assessing the work (here a bit running the risk of an echo chamber) and the fifty-or-so fellows attending the viva. </p> <p>I mean, you may be getting the impression that this is all very Oxbridge and duh, it is, because it’s a very academic exam in an institution that’s nearly six hundred years old. (My college is nearly six hundred and seventy years old! But it’s not a competition and nobody’s counting).</p> <p>Oxbridge has a strong opinion about the point of academic study. It’s a very privileged and unique place. There’s also a lot wrong about it.</p> <p>I digress. </p> <p>Breen quotes Michael Nelsen on X, “Still, none of the AI models can write. Is this the grounding problem?”</p> <p>Roughly, the grounding problem is, I think, an example of Emily Bender’s Thai Library experiment<sup id="fnref:thai"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:thai">9</a></sup>. Bender’s thought experiment is about whether you’d be able to <em>learn Thai</em> if you were deposited in the Thai National Library surrounded by no external referents - no translations, no imagery, nothing that could translate to your lived experience of the world. Given an infinite amount of time, would you be able to understand -- know -- written Thai? Would you be able to learn from what’s in the library?</p> <p>Bender calls this access to form without meaning. LLMs can be capable of implementing the form of a language access to (there it is) the meaning behind it because of a lack of extra-modal), embodied social interaction. </p> <p>That lack of extra-modal, embodied social interaction is, I think, a smart way of what I said:</p> <blockquote> <p>I’d (handwaving) argue that producing above-average output requires a combination of skill (often as a result of years of practice), taste (ditto), and that ineffable randomness of “the makeup of a person, from their genome to phenome and their connectome, and the absolutely unique personal history”. (Me, I said that)</p> </blockquote> <p>and what Breen ends up saying:</p> <blockquote> <p>[Saying what evocation of words like “Pain, Sin, Space” etc for you is] literally impossible for me to say, because your understanding of each of them is profoundly shaped by your life experience, your sensory perception, your unconscious, your childhood, and a million other things grounded in actually operating in a physical world.(Breen, <sup id="fnref2:breen"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:breen">2</a></sup>)</p> </blockquote> <p>and what Nielsen gets at:</p> <blockquote> <p>The models' reality is the words they were trained on; good writers also train on lots of words, but are in addition wonderful observers of a much broader reality<sup id="fnref:nielsen"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:nielsen">10</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>I find all of this somewhat reassuring. </p> <p>Breen says if you need to “think on your feet, with originality, creativity, and verve, in a way that is grounded in both a wide-ranging knowledge of facts and a thoughtful, probing, deeply individualistic sense of your subjective opinions, memories, sense experiences, and intuitions about a topic”, then you can do something current LLMs can’t do, and that teaching people to do so should be “the new goal of humanistic education in the 2020s and 2030s”. </p> <p>AI boosters will say (and they can’t be disproven!) that it’s just a matter of time until AI models can be well-enough grounded. They might say it’s possible now through access to all the scads of video. They might say we’re very close because multi-modal models are starting to operate robots (and are doing very, very well! Multi-modal model-operated robots have made or surpassed progress otherwise made in navigating environments and understanding instructions). </p> <p>But at some point the map of the human is not the same as the human. Which is all fine and well if what you need isn’t what a human can do. </p> <p>People using agents to do the scut work in their jobs probably don’t need humans to do that. And I called it scut work - it’s boring. Is it work that requires creativity and insight? Probably not. </p> <p>And Bender pointed out the socialization. If you are a thing that interacts with humans then it is generally good to have a model of how humans work. You might approximate that data by observing how humans work through video, but there’s a difference between doing that and actually interacting with a multitude of humans and being able to deal with the low-probability response humans, the ones at the ends of the bell curve of “how humans work”. Don’t discount the chemicals coursing through us and our emotionality. The imaginary AI boosters in my head will and can come up with a whole bunch of situations and tasks where “emotions” and how those messy analogue chemicals affect thinking and doing are undesirable and I’d be happy to admit those tasks and situations exist. But there’s also the negative spaces where those other influences on thinking and doing, those acquired through a whole bunch of blind not-a-watchmaking, just make a thing that can tell the time, I don’t care how it works, might be useful.</p> <p>Which isn’t to say they might not be outcompeted. Or that there are no other ways of producing something similar. But again, the model, not the map. The delta, the difference might get smaller and smaller, sure. (Science fiction has form here: in Banks’ Culture, even the Minds are surprised by and have specific uses for which humans are especially suited).</p> <p>There’s something here about application of a speciality without the need for high intuition. How much of being a good corporate lawyer being able to align client needs and case law? (Some? Quite a bit? Or maybe not much at all, if you’re not a lawyer. So much of lawyering ends up not about the actual law, instead about navigating and negotiating relationships between humans in the face of ambiguity. You need to know humans quite well in order to navigate humans in conflict. This is also why blockchain contracts promising to Solve Everything are so laughable and naive.)</p> <p>How many situations require originality, creativity, and verve? Benefit from generalism, the ability to make connections, and mix those with a subjective history, priorities and intuitions? (You might argue that human intuitions could be nothing but unconscious knowledge that certain concepts have vectors in embedding space near to each other, combined with the prediction of a high probability of an action or result occurring. I could be persuaded about that).</p> <p>Are most of those situations high-consequence? Not necessarily high risk, but instead high potential payoff? How would you know when a situation is high potential payoff? You’d want to know in order to apply the right tool at the right problem otherwise you’re throwing Melvyn Bragg at everything. </p> <p>I bet there’s someone out there (probably Matt Webb?) who has already put together, is putting together, or in the advanced stages of putting together a pipeline of MP3 to wav to whisper transcript to fine-tuning the latest world model to produce the latest attempt at a Bragg-in-a-Box. </p> <p>(It occurs that what makes In Our Time interesting is that it doesn’t just rely on Bragg’s ability - the guest experts provide social interaction. The more there are, the higher probability, I think, of Something New And Different happening, or of A New Insight).</p> <p>There’s an inverse of this which is true but also might explain some alarm. If your career <em>does</em> include being able to produce bloviating opinions about one-word subjects, then the ability of LLMs to start approaching your output might be threatening! If so, good? Because my <em>subjective</em> opinion is that don’t think what you were doing was particularly productive and may have been a misallocation of resource! </p> <p>The thing is, Breen seems to be able to tell the difference between pompous bloviating on Water, or at least he has a high-level prediction that what’s going to come next is pompous and not particularly likely to bring to him any new insights. (It undoubtedly <em>will</em> bring him new <em>something</em>, though, purely through exposure. The system always changes and evolves).</p> <p>But what if you can’t tell? Breen has the “experience” to have an idea about the usefulness of the Claude Water Essay. But, like I’m typing out loud, the usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. What need is the existence of the Claude Water Essay meeting? In this case, Breen’s need is material for a comparison and assessment of capability. What if the need is to signal importance to an audience? Can you tell the difference between a Claude Water Essay and, say, an op-ed, and when does it matter? (It matters to the publisher). I bet you could get a bunch of Good-Enough Claude Water Essays to get your <em>engagement</em>. So there’s an indication of a group of people who might feel threatened.</p> <p>After getting through this, I do not feel that threatened. Or maybe only as threatened as I was before. I’m lucky that the results I achieve are mostly down to being able to do what’s described above, and being able to do it well. There’s a distinction between the results and <em>output</em>, between results and artifacts. Artifacts, sure. I could do with help putting together artifacts because there are certain types of writing in certain contexts that I hate doing (which, to be fair, are down to my unique history). </p> <p>I am not worried about the replication of my ability. I am worried about the need and valuation of the need for it, but then I was worried about that for a long time. And that worry is subject to wider concerns than just what I’m capable of controlling.</p> <hr/> <h1>2.0 Why Won’t People Listen To Us</h1> <p>Because you need to learn <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a>. That’s right, it’s the sponsored content that’s my own content. Ha! </p> <p>A 24-hour, four-week remote workshop for up to twelve people, and at the end you’re more influential, you build better, stronger relationships, we’ve cut down your business bullshit, and you know how to make better choices for a better chance of success. Find out <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a>.</p> <hr/> <p>Whew. I had <em>intended</em> this to be an attempt to answer the Should Anonymous Posting Online Be Forbidden? question as a way to talk through everything I talked through above, but it turns out the best laid plans aren’t predicted by this particularly token predictor. </p> <p>(Maybe this newsletter is an example? It is and always has been nothing more than me-typing-with-no-editing, typing out loud)</p> <p>Instead you got about 2,600 words of... something. That I now have to see if I can back-port an All Souls examination question.</p> <p>How have you been?</p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:s20e01"> <p><a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e01-better-than-average-how-people-work/" target="_blank">s20e01: Better than Average; How People Work</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e01-better-than-average-how-people-work/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Me, 8 August 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:s20e01" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:s20e01" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:breen"> <p><a href="https://resobscura.substack.com/p/all-souls-exam-questions-and-the" target="_blank">All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://resobscura.substack.com/p/all-souls-exam-questions-and-the" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Benjamin Breen, Res Obscura, 13 August 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:breen" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:breen" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:exam"> <p><a href="https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/examination-fellowships-general-information" target="_blank">Examination Fellowships: General Information | All Souls College</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/examination-fellowships-general-information" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), All Souls College, University of Oxford <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:exam" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:past"> <p><a href="https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers" target="_blank">Past Examination Papers | All Souls College</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:past" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:single"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_College%2C_Oxford#Subjects_of_the_%22Essay%22" target="_blank">Subjects of the ‘Essay’: All Souls College, Oxford - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_College%2C_Oxford#Subjects_of_the_%22Essay%22" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Wikipedia <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:single" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:inourtime"> <p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl" target="_blank">BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:inourtime" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:inourwiki"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Our_Time_(radio_series)" target="_blank">In Our Time (radio series) - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Our_Time_(radio_series)" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:inourwiki" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:titles"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In_Our_Time_programmes" target="_blank">List of In Our Time programmes - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In_Our_Time_programmes" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:titles" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:thai"> <p><a href="https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83" target="_blank">Thought experiment in the National Library of Thailand | by Emily M. Bender | Medium</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Emily Bender, 24 May 2023 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:thai" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:nielsen"> <p><a href="https://x.com/michael_nielsen/status/1954599157366509608" target="_blank">Michael Nielsen on X: "Still, none of the AI models can write. Is this the grounding problem? The models' reality is the words they were trained on; good writers also train on lots of words, but are in addition wonderful observers of a much broader reality. The writers' world models seem much deeper" / X</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://x.com/michael_nielsen/status/1954599157366509608" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:nielsen" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:19:28 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/se20e05-ai-models-the-all-souls-exam-melvynn/</guid></item><item><title>s20e04: A Software Strategy</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e04-a-software-strategy/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>I’m starting this on Sunday, 17 August, 2025 in a cafe with a very nice coffee with the full intent of <em>not sending it today</em>, which believe me is a massive step forward.</p> <h1>0.1 Hallway Track</h1> <p>Ho Hallway Tracks are currently scheduled.</p> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 A Software Strategy</h2> <p>This one is about the cycle of starting by building something you need, and then having it be replaced by a commodity.</p> <hr/> <p>I’ve written before about how sometimes your software or technology is the thing that needs to be unique about how you do what you do. Or, rather it’s what can be used to make what you do unique -- or better than anyone else.</p> <p>A regular problem here is that there’s invariably a <em>bit</em> of software that would help in distinguishing, but it comes down to the question of whether you should build it yourself, or whether you should customize it.</p> <p>I should point out that at one end of the scale, any sufficiently complex job that is pitched as being accomplished via “customizing” existing software ends up being as complex <em>and expensive</em> as just building the damn thing yourself.</p> <p>But it’s not that simple, people will say, because at least when you’re customizing it you don’t have to have a bunch of software developers on staff, or at least you don’t have to pay for them and keep supporting the thing. This morning my response to that is: eh, bof.</p> <p>The irritating thing that keeps happening is that people will invent new things to do in new ways with software and then some of those will catch on and then before you know it, the new thing in software has suddenly become a commodity thing.</p> <p>Some people will look at this and say: what a waste of money! Why should we build a CMS when we can just use Wordpress!</p> <p>And this is why I think Vox Media is interesting.</p> <p>A long long time ago in internet time, Vox Media was a bunch of blogs and when they were babies and making blogs they decided to write their own CMS. Writing your own CMS is a phase every software developer goes through ever since the first developer wanted to let other people know what they were thinking.</p> <p>This CMS was called Chorus. I hear it was good because it let Vox properties do what they needed to do in terms of publishing articles, but also what they needed to do in terms of other things like “selling ads”. Publishing articles is important on the internet because again, you want to distinguish yourself, and part of distinguishing yourself is how you show up. One of the things people got excited about back in the day was <em>cards</em>.</p> <p>Another thing that happens when you develop and run your own software is that someone somewhere will say: “hey, if this is so good, wouldn’t other people pay for it?” and that is totally a thing that happens with news organizations and content management systems. It never really works out. But I think that is not the main point of this story.</p> <p>Anyway, after a while -- say just over ten years or so -- Vox decided to switch to WordPress. This was sad, because Chorus was apparently very good and they had invested a lot of money in it, and it felt like custom software losing to commodity software. </p> <p>But!</p> <p>A couple weeks ago, Nilay Patel of The Verge announced a secret side project he’d been working on at Vox Media<sup id="fnref:sideproject"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:sideproject">1</a></sup>.</p> <p>It’s essentially a bet on... social? Ish? Software to publish stories natively to a feed, in smaller chunks, for things that Aren’t Stories, but are smaller. And it’s launching with SB Nation, which makes sense for a social software product. Sports checks a lot of boxes: lots of people talk about it, and it includes a nice mix of synchronous and asynchronous activity. </p> <p>And did I mention that lots of people talk about sport? I mean, maybe even more than people scold each other on Bluesky!</p> <p>The thing is <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/communities" target="_blank">SB Nation Communities</a>, and Ted Han and I got to talk about it with Andrew Losowsky last week on the best-named podcast on the internet<sup id="fnref:hantohon"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:hantohon">2</a></sup>. </p> <p>I’m only going to talk about one of the interesting things here. I’m <em>not</em> going to talk about what SB Nation Communities is, or how it works, in terms of being interesting social software.</p> <p>What I <em>am</em> going to talk about is how I think this is a great example of managing software development.</p> <ol> <li>Build the software you need for a competitive advantage</li> <li>Keep developing that software</li> <li>Over time that functions of that software become commoditized</li> </ol> <p>Then you’ve got a choice: do you switch to the cheaper commodity software?</p> <p>Some organizations do. They also take the opportunity to outsource all software development. You can then lay off all your software development capacity. It saves money, after all. Why not leave the software making to the people who concentrate on that?</p> <p>But that’s not what it looks like Vox did. What Vox did was start working on the <em>next</em> thing, the next bet for what would make them distinctive. And that’s this Communities product.</p> <p>So they start again:</p> <ol> <li>Build the software you need for a competitive advantage</li> <li>Keep developing that software</li> <li>Over time the functions of that software become commoditized</li> </ol> <p>This is normal. It is like eating your babies. It is hard to switch to something else, but you evaluate the choice of doing something new against the cost of continuing what you’re doing. It’s undoubtedly effort to migrate content management systems! </p> <p>I like this because it’s an example of showing how you understand that, and act like, software is a critical competitive advantage.</p> <p>(Sometimes that software is invisible. Sufficiently advanced Excel spreadsheets are custom software that are a competitive advantage).</p> <p>You don’t <em>have</em> to use custom, in-house software forever. There probably will be a time when it’s worth it to switch, and one of those reasons is because you need or will benefit from functionality that doesn’t exist yet. But knowing that you could benefit from that, and having a good idea of what that would be -- that’s product strategy and management, which is intrinsic to your business or the mission of your organization. Vox’s behavior is is more like “we don’t just publish news, we know what it is to be part of information on the internet” -- which <em>isn’t</em> just publishing news.</p> <p>(And also has a lot to do with knowing, learning, and retaining a lot about running healthy communities online).</p> <p>Anyway. I thought that was interesting. </p> <hr/> <h2>2.0 How People Work</h2> <p>Hi, it’s me again with my very own sponsored content: the story about where my workshop <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a> came from.</p> <p>Last year, after working with a client on three consulting gigs, I was asked if I was willing to put myself out of a job by teaching their senior leads how to “do what you do”. </p> <p>This was existentially terrifying, and I had to spend a few months finding myself. I’m serious here -- I don’t <em>think</em>, really, about what I’m doing. Helpfully, my client was also able to tell me what they were looking for.</p> <p>What I did was teach their leads how to be more influential. Being more influential meant a higher chance of doing a good job, of retaining a client, referrals, and better performing teams. </p> <p>Doing <em>that</em> meant deconstructing what I do to have a good relationship with people, like how to run 1:1s not just with lead clients, but other people involved in pulling off a project well. And in a not-shitty way, because it’s super easy to be gross about “building a relationship with someone”. </p> <p>Becoming more influential meant teaching people how to read organizations: how and where influence flows and why, how people are motivated as human beings, the different carrots (and when to use sticks). Sticks themselves aren’t themselves <em>punishments</em>. They’re mature conversations about consequences of action and knowing that everybody likes to avoid things that will make them feel bad. </p> <p>It meant slowing down and teaching people <em>how</em> to talk so that people trust you -- even when, and especially when, you have to give them bad news. Great clients (You can teach clients to be great, but you can’t <em>make</em> them be great) might be disappointed about bad news, but they’d rather hear it so they can make informed decisions. Plus I get to show a slide with Dr. Gregory House in it and about how everyone lies, even a little, even with the best of intentions.</p> <p>It meant taking a whole week to learn and practice cutting out business bullshit in their writing. You know what I mean, you’ve been taught to do it for the last twenty odd years and it’s so easy it’s unconscious. If you don’t like reading or writing it, it’s reasonable your recipient or audience feels the same way. (Believe me, they do. Even if you think they want and need that bullshit.) </p> <p>And lastly it meant a week teaching, learning, and applying the fundamentals of strategy: of intentionally making choices to increase your chances of success, and knowing what you want to succeed at. Which, again, is <em>hard</em>. It’s not like people have oodles of spare time. It also wasn’t just about their client’s strategy, but their team strategy as well. Everybody has to make choices, and not making a choice is a choice, too. </p> <p>This was for a services company, but it’s just as important inside an organization. You need to work with other people and other teams. You need them to understand what you’re saying and what you need, to persuade them to do what you need and know that what you need is the right thing at the right time. </p> <p>Which is all to say that I wouldn’t be excited to do this with more people. For me, it’s the chance to work with smart people who want to get better at how they work so they can deliver even better work. Or, at least, lead slightly less stressful lives. </p> <p>If that sounds like it could help someone you know, then it’d be great if you could forward them this. Or maybe you could do with that help? </p> <p>Reply and drop me a line, or we can <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/30-minute-chat">have a quick chat</a>, too.</p> <hr/> <p>Hey again.</p> <p>The sponsored content was longer than the actual content? That feels awkward.</p> <p>Anyway, how are you doing? I’m doing... OK?</p> <p>I will leave you with my realization while at dinner with friends that <em>truffle oil is white people MSG</em>.</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:sideproject"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/reckless.bsky.social/post/3lvqn6sjvtc2u" target="_blank">Post by @reckless.bsky.social — Bluesky</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://bsky.app/profile/reckless.bsky.social/post/3lvqn6sjvtc2u" target="_blank">archive.is</a>): “Confession time: I've been working on a secret side project at Vox Media for the past 18 months and it launched yesterday”, 6 August 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:sideproject" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:hantohon"> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa-8NBczRtY" target="_blank">Episode 9: News with a Community - YouTube</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa-8NBczRtY" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), 8 August, 2025 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:hantohon" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2025 16:44:11 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e04-a-software-strategy/</guid></item><item><title>s20e03: Yeah, it’s the future</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e03-yeah-its-the-future/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Tuesday, 13 August 2025 in Portland, Oregon where it’s still pretty hot but not <em>too hot</em>, you know?</p> <p>I have a half or maybe third-finished draft of the next episode sitting in iA Writer but not the brain space to finish it today. </p> <p>So I’m attempting to throw out my No, It Has To Be This Way rigid thinking in favour of “just do whatever”.</p> <p>Meanwhile, I mentioned a chat I had with Ted Han in the last episode and completely forgot to tell you that we have a... podcast? Or at least we talk to each other and occasionally have a guest on and you can watch us. It’s called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@hantohoncombat/streams" target="_blank">Han to Hon Combat</a>, which means it has the best podcast name ever. </p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>Fair warning this episode <em>is</em> a short one.</p> <h2>1.1 Yeah, this is the future</h2> <p>I am watching the new FX/Hulu series Alien: Earth<sup id="fnref:alien"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:alien">1</a></sup>. The ads during the show are:</p> <ul> <li>for a smart ring body monitoring device, Oura, (which kind the current U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services has a plan for as many people to wear as possible); and</li> <li>for an online injection-based weight loss drug (“ro”, and the generic “GLP-1”)</li> </ul> <p>Meanwhile: </p> <ul> <li>Robots deliver packages in downtown Los Angeles. </li> </ul> <ul> <li>People regularly get in self-driving autonomous cars in San Francisco.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>People have relationships with computer programs. </li> </ul> <ul> <li>Ukraine fights a drone war with Russia.</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Doorbell cameras share surveillance footage with police.</li> </ul> <p>I don’t know about you, but it certainly feels like a cyberpunk future.</p> <hr/> <h2>2.0 Sponsored Content: How People Work</h2> <p>Hello. It’s me again, sponsoring my own content. </p> <p>You and your team need to go on my workshop, <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a> because just <em>one</em> of the things it does is teach you how to stop writing business bullshit language, and then we practice doing that together.</p> <p>I don’t need to give you an example of what business bullshit language is, just go to the next email in your inbox or whatever.</p> <hr/> <p>How are you?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:alien"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien:_Earth" target="_blank">Alien: Earth - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien:_Earth" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:alien" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Aug 2025 23:28:14 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e03-yeah-its-the-future/</guid></item><item><title>s20e02: A Model for the People</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e02-a-model-for-the-people/</link><description> <p>Monday, 11 August 2025 in Portland, Oregon where I am sitting in my basement office. In here, it’s a comfortable 71f/21.7c. Outside, it’s apparently 96f/35.6c which is not comfortable. That is why I am inside.</p> <p>Me and the smaller kid went and saw &amp;Juliet the Musical the other night as a father’s day present. Laughed all the way through. </p> <h1>0.1 Hallway Track</h1> <p>While there are no Hallway Tracks coming up, I have three planned in my head that I’m super excited about. Hopefully something coming soon.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 A Model for the People</h2> <p>Here’s a thought experiment. I’ve written about this before, but it came back into my head recently when I told Ted Han about it a few weeks ago and he said his mind is still blown by it. </p> <p>National copyright libraries should have been entrusted with building public ML datasets and models.</p> <p>There you go. I’ll walk through it.</p> <ol> <li>They’re supposed to have it already</li> </ol> <p>Broadly, national copyright libraries exist as the expression of copyright policy. They’re entitled to a copy of <em>everything</em>, even if they sometimes don’t actually have possession. Because copyright is a social policy, they are a method to make material available to <em>everyone</em>. They are entrusted and, so far (*looking pointedly at Washington, D.C.) have been trusted independent institutions.</p> <ol start="2"> <li>They set copyright policy</li> </ol> <p>You know, how copyright works in practice. They can make rules like when you’re allowed to circumvent protection methods. </p> <ol start="3"> <li>They are supposed to be for everyone</li> </ol> <p>I made this point earlier, but it bears repeating. </p> <p>I like referring to and reminding people of the reasons for things existing, especially when it can be used to bind toward a particular direction or outcome.</p> <hr/> <p>So you have an institution that, broadly, “has all the books”. That’s a good starting point.</p> <p>That institution decides to train a model on “all the books”. Yeah, you can drive a truck through the practicalities of “train”. Bear with me. </p> <p>That institution decides to make the resulting model/weights/etc freely available to the public but, say, preferentially available to Persons with status in the institution’s state. </p> <p>Everyone benefits. Anyone and everyone can use the model under the same terms. </p> <p>The model can be presented as a public good that everyone contributes to and that everyone can benefit from. </p> <p>Benefits can accrue from applications built on the model, through to actual revenue based on model usage. Sure, everyone’s output (including creative output) is going into the model. </p> <p>But maybe usage is taxed, and, well, that’s tax revenue. Everyone benefits from tax revenue, everyone gets a say in what it goes into. Hell, it goes to NEA, NIH, whoever. </p> <p>I don’t know. Not a national oil dividend/fund, but a national data dividend/fund. </p> <p>The point is community equity and accessibility. A library as a repository of knowledge and creative expression of the members of a polity, held in trust for that polity. </p> <p>I mean it sounds good to me?</p> <hr/> <p>Now, an argument here is that the government shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing because it requires lots and lots of investment because nobody would do it on their own. </p> <p>But organizations did invest a shit-ton of speculative money in it because, I don’t know. It would let them make more money. They are in a race with each other. It offers more control. Reinforcement of monopolies, of gate-keeping. </p> <p>Those last two things don’t sound great to me. But it’s been the general policy of the U.S. (let the market compete and discover, it’s better at it) as opposed to Europe (set a top-down standard and requirements in order to enable a competitive market).</p> <hr/> <p>Fine, how much money would it have taken? It’s not like governments have lots of spare money. </p> <p>Ah, but that’s the thing. You decide to. That’s it. Same way you decide to spend more money on defence. What you spend money on is a reflection of what’s important. If it’s important enough, you find a way. That’s it. Nothing more complicated.</p> <p>(A comparison here might be “the People’s Model” as the output of basic research, and governments fund (ha) basic research because they are bets that can be transformatively enabling. Ugh, what a sentence. You know what I mean)</p> <p>So. At some point in the last ten years, the government would have had to have decided:</p> <ol> <li>Hey, this generative AI stuff is pretty interesting.</li> <li>If there’s something here, it could be a national asset that multiple sectors could benefit from.</li> <li>What, we need to do policy wrangling too? Sure, we can do that. We’re the government. </li> <li>OK, let’s do it. Let’s buy all the GPUs. Let’s label all the data. Let’s hire the people.</li> </ol> <p>Fine, I’ll play the other side. Who are you going to hire? If this is really a big deal, the private sector is going to want to do it, and hell, did you read how much Meta is dangling in front of people to poach them for its superintelligence group? </p> <p>My counter is ideology and idealism because I choose to believe enough people still believe in the common good. </p> <p>Fine, you’re declaring that you’re effectively seizing all this valuable output. Nationalizing it, even! Disney is pissed! Whatever giant entity Penguin is now is also pissed! Great. Look I’m not saying charisma and persuasion doesn’t play a part here. This is the lobbying part, and a political part. Everyone benefits. </p> <p>“But no!” cries Disney. The model will have Mickey in it! Anyone will be able to make a Mickey do unspeakable, dirty, dirty things! </p> <p>OK, and? They can do that now.</p> <p>“We have to stop them!”</p> <p>Fine, go ahead and stop them. You could make a ton of Harry Potter stuff. Who’s going to stop you? Oh right. Rowling (spit) and Max HBO Warner Bros Discovery. Sure looks like you could spend a bunch of time suing each other if you want. </p> <p>“But children!” </p> <p>Yes, children can certainly draw cartoons of Mickey doing horrific, dirty, unspeakable things. Hopefully you’re not asking us to infringe upon their freedom of expression? </p> <p>I mean if only there were ways to coordinate self-interested parties into behaving in a way that might benefit all of them? Surely such a thing couldn’t be impossible.</p> <p>OK, fine. We’ve wrangled stakeholders and lobbyists. Maybe this even has Support at the Highest Levels! </p> <p>You need a lot of GPUs? Billions of dollars worth? Sure, government doesn’t have any track history of spending billions of dollars on things.</p> <p>I mean, until this whole A.I. thing came along you know who was buying the most FLOPs in one place? The government! </p> <p>(It occurs to me that another play you could make, in national economic interest of course, is that you could require all car manufacturers selling vehicles in the U.S. to contribute training data to a national autonomous driving model that U.S. manufacturers could benefit from and that may or may not be made available to non-U.S. manufacturers. Huh. And where else are all the training miles being driven, hm?)</p> <p>Oh, you need pork? Senators, please line up to require datacenters to be build in your districts. Please line up to request foundries for your states. </p> <p>(I find it funny that this might also be a lever to wrest the CUDA moat from nVidia)</p> <p>The window to do this was 2012-2016. Andrej Karpathy’s Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs was published in May 2015. Sure this is the benefit of hindsight, but I would say that then, someone forward looking enough could see the hint of something and start putting together policy. Hell, without looking it up I’m half sure there already <em>was</em> national A.I. policy by then. I am not surprised that it would’ve been industry-led. Something <em>for the people</em> would have been too disruptive. How dare the government throw its weight around and choose favorites?</p> <p>(What favorites? Isn’t everyone getting access to the data, the models, the open weights?)</p> <p>You’d have to be careful, though. Don’t impose too many conditions under which the models may be used. You’ve got to be impartial. You’ve got to make sure you stay to true to the aim of access for everyone to benefit everyone. But it’s not like private entities impose conditions upon which <em>their</em> models are made available or may be used. </p> <hr/> <p>It would be a Manhattan project, people would say.</p> <p>It might very well look like that. But are we not already in a nation-state race? </p> <hr/> <p>Anyway, we’re only talking about <em>training</em>. The national library could train <em>a</em> model, but it could also provide the dataset for anyone <em>else</em> to train a model, too. Or to fine-tune the model that’s made available. And you still need a bunch of compute for inference. There can still be a race. Meta and Microsoft and everyone can still use all their free cash flow and borrow money for the billions of dollars of capex. </p> <hr/> <p>I’m only sad that it feels too late for something like this to have been tried and talked about at the policy level. I mean, it’s not like any other western, English-language government was busy putting together its A.I. strategy either.</p> <hr/> <h2>2.0 Sponsored Content: How People Work</h2> <p>Hello. It’s me again, sponsoring my own content. </p> <p>Even though you know how to build great software, you might still be getting stuck. You need to know how to work with other people -- but we don’t really get taught how to do that.</p> <p><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a> is my four-week workshop teaching teams in the tech industry the skills they need to work with other people.</p> <p>Get the decisions you need to get things done by learning how to become more influential. </p> <p>Get the answers you need faster, spot where people are lying (and then get the truth) by building stronger relationships. </p> <p>Get heard, get your point across, and reduce miscommunication -- which means less risk! -- by learning how to communicate clearly to different audiences. </p> <p>And get focussed, unstuck, and remove distractions by learning and applying strategy and tactics in ways that work for you.</p> <p>It’s four weeks. We spend three hours a week learning how people work, and then three hours a week applying what we’ve learned on your real work, together. </p> <p><a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/30-minute-chat" target="_blank">Grab a quick chat with me</a> if this sounds like something you need, or send this along to someone if you think it could help them.</p> <hr/> <p>OK, that’s it! I experimented with writing the body for this ON A DIFFERENT DAY, almost as if I’m breaking my rule of writing something and sending it on the same day. It seems this might be healthier?</p> <p>How are you?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> </description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Aug 2025 23:21:55 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e02-a-model-for-the-people/</guid></item><item><title>s20e01: Better than Average; How People Work</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e01-better-than-average-how-people-work/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Friday, 8 August, 2025 on the cusp of a heat wave in Portland, Oregon.</p> <p>Well. It’s been a while, hasn’t it. I will just say that <em>gestures</em> events occurred, those events weren’t particularly fun for anyone involved, and with any luck they’ll abate.</p> <h1>0.1 Hallway Track</h1> <p>While there are no Hallway Tracks coming up, I have three planned in my head that I’m super excited about. Hopefully something coming soon.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Better than Average</h2> <p>My friend Naomi Alderman posted an observation a few weeks back that went a bit like this:</p> <ul> <li>LLMs / generative AI / token prediction machines are trained on a mass of data</li> <li>They are <em>essentially</em> designed to produce the most likely next token in a series of tokens</li> <li>They work because of the sheer amount of data they’re trained on</li> <li>So they are very good at producing <em>average</em> text</li> </ul> <p>Average here doesn’t mean “bad”. It means likely. Likely doesn’t mean true, but it also doesn’t necessarily mean untrue, either. </p> <p>The average output may also be <strong>new</strong> output, in that it’s the product and confluence of influences (i.e. prompts) and associations (i.e. associations in embeddings, the “closeness” or similarly of arising concepts).</p> <p>New here means “something that people haven’t encountered before”. A remix, if you will. I would say that in most cases when something <strong>new</strong> is produced like this, it’s because of an insight or a desire of the human prompter. </p> <p>But what average also means to me is that it means unsurprising. This is going to feel a bit <em>I’ll know it when I see it</em> or some sort of trope where <em>only humans can be creative</em>. </p> <p>It’s important to remember that producing the average is by design. It is, in a way, the safest kind of output (even though, like I mentioned above, the most statistically likely next token based on training data might evaluate to a statement that is objectively false).</p> <p>We -- humans -- don’t have to produce <em>average</em>. </p> <p>But it is hard to produce something that’s above average. I’d (handwaving) argue that producing above-average output requires a combination of skill (often as a result of years of practice), taste (ditto), and that ineffable randomness of “the makeup of a person, from their genome to phenome and their connectome, and the absolutely unique personal history”. There may be many worldlines like yours, but nobody has your exact worldline, nor your reaction to it.</p> <p>Naomi’s point was that for people who do produce above-average output -- no matter what the field -- what’s produced by generative AI is less than useful for people who do <em>not</em> produce above-average output.</p> <p>A tool that makes it easy (easier) for anyone to reach average (and yet, never always true or correct) output is magic.</p> <p>You might say that it’s a failure of government, of education systems, of pedagogy that people can’t reach, say, average output in writing. I would agree: the functional literacy rate in countries like the U.K. and the U.S. is shameful and a morally reprehensible waste of human potential.</p> <p>(For this reason, the waste of human potential is also an argument from boosters of A.I. for the fastest possible widespread distribution of AI tools)</p> <p>But that tool might appear magical. And it isn’t necessarily a <em>bad</em> thing for someone to be able to quickly, easily (and without monetary payment?) achieve average output at speed. Or scale.</p> <p>(There are lots of other reasons why it might be bad. They have to do with employment, capital, value extraction, general economic systems of exploitation. All of those are systemically bad things.)</p> <p>So. It is certainly, I think, a benefit to be able to easily produce average output if you’re unable to. And if you don’t have the time to produce it, if you’re required to. (See “reasons why it might be bad”). Another reason people say this is bad is because the concentration is (you’ll have noticed) on <em>output</em> and not ability. </p> <p>Does it matter if you can reproduce the output without assistance? Slowly? Not at all? Are you learning anything in order to reproduce that output? Are there fundamental principles that it would be <em>useful</em> to learn? </p> <p>It strikes me that this is a bit of another Chinese Room argument. Does it <em>matter</em> if the output is correct if there is no understanding inside the room? </p> <p>Does it matter if the output looks like conscious behavior even if there is no “understanding” on the inside?</p> <p>I would think whether it matters or not depends on the question being asked. </p> <p>Anyway, I digress.</p> <p>It feels like the experience of people who produce above-average output, say, Very Good Writers, is along the lines of “I tried generative AI and it was terrible <em>for me</em>”. It could not do <em>for me</em>, what I wanted it to do. Or, more accurately, for the particular task, <em>it could not do what was good enough for me</em>.</p> <p>Good enough can easily be average. But sometimes it isn’t, and there are some people whose livelihood is based on the demand for better-than-average output.</p> <p>One clear sticking point here is the “good enough” -- let’s put it the other way around. Average can easily be good enough. And I think an uncomfortable truth is that right now, in many, many cases, average is absolutely good enough.</p> <p>Bullshit jobs, I think, are an example of jobs that require average output, to the extent that the output is useful or productive in any event.</p> <p>Wait, I think I might be able to argue myself out of this. “Average as good enough” seems like it’s setting current performance as average. But like I said above, expectations as to what’s average are in the eyes of the beholder. Average performance for, say, a healthcare system might describe a level of service that those providing a for-profit healthcare system might be outright uncomfortable with, never mind actively work against. I think this is where average output coincides with a should-be. These things should-be this good. The (marketing) promise of increasingly good-enough automation leave fewer apparent reasons for not-good-enough service. What’s the difference between what’s experienced now and what would be described as average service? What are productivity increases, here? Reduced wait times for approval and payment of insurance claims? </p> <p>The other issue is (he handwaves) is what the point is of an education in the first place? Since I started writing this, OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.0 came out. It’s been described by its founder as “like talking with a PhD-level expert”, of which a quippy response has been “yes, it <strong>is</strong> like talking with a PhD-levl expert -- the kind that assumes that expertise in one area translates to expertise in another area, allowing confident pronouncements that certainly sound like they make sense and come from a place of experience, expertise, and authority, but... you know, aren’t actually coming from that place.”</p> <p>People are lazy. This isn’t a diss or a judgment. From one point of view it’s baked in as an evolutionary pressure: because resources are scarce, you don’t want to waste time or energy on the correct solution, you want to spend just enough so that you survive. So fine, don’t check the results of your generative AI work: what are the consequences going to be? What, you could get fired? A bunch of people could die? Who’s died, anyway? Depends on the context, the task, and the individual assessment of probability and severity of risk, right? It comes back to that calculus of “good enough”. (Personally, I also think this is a practical argument against utilitarianism in practice -- that the factors involved in context, risk assessment, harm, and so on are fractal and never-ending unless you are the brutal utilitarian, in which case those other lives don’t matter <strong>because those lives are other peoples’</strong>).</p> <p>I think that was a digression. I’ll go back to looking at statistically average output. I think there’s a way of looking at this where there are infinite areas or domains where there’s just been no output whatsoever. One of the creative examples above was the stereotypical wish-fulfillment of “put me in a Marvel movie” or “make the characters in this story do this thing just for me”. Which is to say sure: that doesn’t exist before, and now an average thing exists, which I think you have to accept when comparing non-existing to existing in response to need, well, that’s pretty compelling.</p> <p>That space is infinite. As things that are built on finding and exploring patterns, I think humans can endlessly come up with increasingly batshit combinations, whether they are in the arts or in the sciences. One limit is, well, the practical limit on human imagination (you can only think of six impossible things before breakfast, after all) unless you find a way to automate and scale that. But even then, I think that automation would be mindless and not have the context to go for novelty. What are the training and reward criteria, for example?</p> <p>It feels like I keep going around in circles trying to find a better way to describe, or understand, what’s going on here. In one way, I hope I understand the good-enough allure. In another, I’m concerned about how much to trust what’s good-enough, which presents itself <em>every single time</em> as a variation of “duh, check your sources”, but the whole point of talking with a PhD-level expert is that you can <em>trust</em> that PhD-level expert.</p> <p>Generative AI people will point out (accurately) that people aren’t trustworthy either. This is the “despite not being perfect all the time, autonomous driving systems are (currently? will be?) better, on average (there it is again) than human drivers” argument. Is a compute-bound (e.g. Saudi sovereign wealth fund-limited) amount of average PhDs better than all the human PhDs? </p> <p>It does not help that the mindset of your typically Silicon Valley adventurer is to be the bull in a china shop in terms of ignoring established / conventional knowledge and forge blindly ahead, building knowledge from first principles again. This is also OK! But, you know. A continuum requiring reasonableness? Not too far in either direction, yeah?</p> <p>“I am smarter than most people and I am smarter than most PhDs I have met, therefore the thing I have built is more trustworthy than all PhDs” is a statement and belief that just feels like it’s going to go horribly wrong. One way I’d think about this is that at least we have, collectively and individually, figured out where and how to trust experts.</p> <p>It doesn’t help that trust in expertise in its various forms is being aggressively dismantled in the west, from without and misguidedly from within. I think the intersection of people who fervently believe in providing as many people as possible with PhD-level expertise with those who always, <em>always</em> point out that Galileo was right and was gaslit and fucked over is pretty much close to 1:1. “Imagine how much further along we’d be,” the imaginary people in my head say, “if we didn’t get bound by stupid human political emotional adherence to orthodoxy because of power trips”. </p> <p>I mean, we don’t have a counter-example, so I guess there’s that.</p> <p>If someone can’t automatically trust an arbitrary human PhD-level expert then <em>obviously</em> a system where people know what they’re doing are providing PhD-level experts should, on the whole, provide better outputs. Right?</p> <p>(Who hurt you that you have such mistrust in other people? Trick question, don’t answer that)</p> <p>There’s this certainty in mathematics, in the engineering part of software engineering. Sure you can administer tests (that are set and assessed by humans) and institutions (that are stuffed full of humans) to allow people to trust systems that produce PhD-level experts. But imagine if you could do that with <em>numbers</em>. Imagine if you could do that <em>so much faster</em>. Why, if you’re doing it with numbers, then is it not unbiased? Is it not inherently better than those messy humans who get things wrong? Sure the machine’s statistically average, fine-tuned temperature produces output that is <em>wrong</em>, but <em>you</em> have the numbers you can tweak so at the very least it’s less wrong, in a more transparent way, than all those academics. Or doctors. Or, you know, anyone who might be smarter than you. </p> <p>It would be funny (ha ha, dark funny) if one of the existential risks all these people who’re worried about artificial general intelligence and the invocation of their god are worried about ends up being a species-wide regression to the mean. In the quest to provide average to everyone, what happens to discoveries? Does the widespread availability and a deference to statistical averageness end up blunting, well, an entire civilization and species? Yay, we’re all average which is “better than before”, but the worry is when too much is mediated by the machine, no?</p> <p>(There’s clearly a race to be the first to hook up the modeling machine to the experimental researcher machine and create that hard take-off feedback loop). </p> <p>But then, consider. Who gets to decide the numbers that define average? This is the worry about transparency. We talk and worry about digital infrastructure. Is generative AI the infrastructure of knowing? Is that infrastructure being raced towards in a, well, potentially societally-harmful (harmful to whom, hm?) environment? Whose interests are being represented in the definition of average? This is clearly playing out already because a generative AI that <em>doesn’t</em> produce some sort of mecha-fascist is deemed to be censorious. </p> <p>Turns out technology isn’t just an amplifier of power, it’s an amplifier of values.</p> <hr/> <h2>2.0 Sponsored Content: How People Work</h2> <p>Relax, it’s only me. I’m the sponsor. I’m the one sponsoring this content.</p> <p>I do a workshop now. It’s called <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">How People Work</a>, and it’s for groups of up to 12 people. </p> <p>If you are part of a team that makes software and that team has to work with other people, then this workshop is for you.</p> <p>Could your team work better if it were more influential in your organization? Could you do better work, faster, if people would just goddamn listen to you? Do you need that one team, that one person over there, to just stop unblocking you and, maybe, just maybe, get with what we’re all trying to do here?</p> <p>Yeah, you have to work with people. Sorry. People are just like that. We also don’t get taught how to work with people. Whether you’re in an organization of up to fifty, between fifty and a hundred, a hundred and a thousand, or an uncharismatic mega-entity, sorry. You work with people.</p> <p>The whole thing is workshop teaching time combined with practical time so, you know, the stuff that’s taught is actually useful? We apply it to what you’re actually working on. </p> <p>Well! Do I have a sponsored content pitch for you! Take a <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/how-people-work" target="_blank">look</a>, or drop me a line. And if it’s not for you but you think you know someone it <em>could</em> be fore, well, maybe let them know and put us in touch.</p> <hr/> <p>OK, that’s it. I am sat outside in the park outside our house on my wifi because I have a stupendous Ubiquiti access point blanketing the park and it is totally not rude because I totally intend on sticking up a public captive portal, so there. </p> <p>I have a couple ideas about what to write about next, so let’s see how that goes.</p> <p>It’s not been great, but it might be getting better. Here’s hoping.</p> <p>How are you? </p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> </description><pubDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2025 22:33:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s20e01-better-than-average-how-people-work/</guid></item><item><title>s19e11: Your Model is Naive and it’s Not The Territory</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e11-your-model-is-naive-and-its-not-the/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Friday, May 30, at the Code for America Summit in a hotel in Washington, D.C. </p> <p>I am in, fittingly, a hallway. I am also jetlagged. There is hotel carpet underneath me.</p> <h1>0.1 Events</h1> <p>At the time of pressing send, <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track 12 The Thing About COBOL</a> is full. I think you can check back every so often if there happen to be cancellations. There isn’t a great way for me to let people know about spaces opening up because of cancellations with Calendly. </p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>Just one thing today that I needed to vomit out through my fingers.</p> <h1>1.1 Your Model is Naive and it’s Not The Territory</h1> <p>In his piece What DOGE gets wrong about tech and government<sup id="fnref:don"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:don">1</a></sup>, Don Moynihan has successfully nerd-sniped me into writing about DOGE again. For anyone who’s not interested in that, or by now is tired of it, I am very sorry. You can just skip this one?</p> <p>I think DOGE ran into a The Map Is Not The Territory problem<sup id="fnref:map"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:map">2</a></sup>. This is the whole thing where you want to make a map of something (duh) and then at some point you make a more accurate map because your map is missing something, and you keep doing that until your map is the thing you are mapping. Maps are abstractions and artifacts of decision-making as to what’s important. They’ll reflect what’s important over time. All of you map nerds reading this will hopefully be nodding along, and I will say again that this is me speaking off the cuff. I imagine that there is <em>extensive</em> literature on the subject of what the entire deal is with humans and maps. (I mean, not all the maps we make are for humans!)</p> <p>The thing with a certain kind of technologist is that the power of software works when you can reduce something down to a model. When the model is sufficiently simple, then it’s easy (and fast) to get the model to do something. That <em>might</em> make you feel powerful. </p> <p>The other thing about a certain kind of technologist, especially the kind that tends to hang out on orange websites, is they will say things like “hey, check out the Twitter I built over the weekend for fifty bucks” or “hey check out the vaccine appointment website I built over the weekend for fifty bucks”. </p> <p>In the first case, they did not build “a Twitter”. They built a toy model of a Twitter, a thing that looks like Twitter but -- just like the relationship between a map and the territory, the toy model <em>is not the thing</em>, in part because it just doesn’t do what Twitter does that’s not visible. Building a Twitter includes, I don’t know, also building <em>all of the trust and safety infrastructure</em>. As soon as you start qualifying, the comparison is, for these particular purposes, useless.</p> <p>Kind of the same for the “I built a vaccine appointment website” thing. This is <em>not</em> saying that the vaccine appointment website wasn’t useful. Not at all. But I <em>am</em> saying that it’s an example of a smaller model that is a sort of abstraction of the more complicated thing. </p> <p>What with the apparent post-Musk comms onslaught about how he’s totally chastened and everyone can celebrate that he’s “left” and DOGE will be different now, I thought a couple things were worth picking out: he <em>said</em> something along the lines of “turns out government was bigger and more complicated”.</p> <p>Between that, my conversations with journalists about what DOGE was planning or wanted to do, and with people formerly in the Federal government, all of these things stuck in my head.</p> <p>The kind of person who says that you can rebuild social security in 3 months is the kind of person who also says “twitter is easy, I can do it in a weekend”. It is a fundamental misapprehension of the scope of the problem and complexity that the thing (“social security”, or more accurately, “the things the social security administration does”) addresses and is charged with dealing with. “Twitter” does not reduce down to “microblogging”. Not anymore. </p> <p>Government is complex <em>because at various points, it has to map to the territory</em>. And even then, the part that’s interacting with the territory at that point is a part of an abstracted part that’s a policy -- which in itself is based on a model in the first place. </p> <p>Government is big <em>because</em> the fact that it’s supposed to serve everyone means it is probably the closest model:territory ratio you’re going to get. Ever, maybe? At least for some people, the remit and scope of government is <em>supposed</em> to be everyone. It’s clear that for a whole bunch of other people -- i.e. fascists -- government applies to different people in different ways, and explicitly has ways of declaring, and with the ability to do so arbitrarily, people as non-people. </p> <p>There are policy levers where you can decide it’s important to simplify the model you need to make. These are ideological. It would be cheaper, easier, and faster to just <em>give people money</em> in the form of a universal benefit or credit than it would be to include various forms of means testing. Those forms of means testing exist just because <em>some people don’t deserve it</em>. You <em>can</em> cut out a bunch of complexity on the model end.</p> <p>But you can never cut out the complexity on the reality end. There will always be edge cases; it’s like humanity and life has only gotten to where it is <em>because</em> of edge cases. The “government is for everyone” part is figuring out how to meet the needs of those edge cases (and efficiently so, depending on your placement of efficiency of implementation and administration versus efficiency of outcome), and that <em>will</em> require modeling to meet complexity. </p> <p>I didn’t want to and didn’t think that this would turn into an AI rant, but I guess everything does these days. I mean, people see “AI” as a magic bullet that’s being promoted to solve <em>everything</em>, and especially things that have previously been hard. And it appears to solve those things in a magic way, too!</p> <p>Part of the concern about AI is that it abstracts complex models away. The architecture of certain neural networks <em>literally</em> has the concept of hidden layers. The models are complex enough when encoded in legislation and then a business rules engine, but now the models are potentially implicitly encoded into your LLM by you “just” writing a prompt and setting out your criteria.</p> <p>People like AI because it acts like a sponge, a gas, a perceived infinitely malleable material that adapts to whatever shape is presented to it. It will fill a space in the same way that cats do. It will meet your reality in the way you want it to, or at least it will appear to, and seduce you with the promise of you not needing to do all that thinking about edge cases, in part because Sam Altman’s religion is that if you give it enough data, it will understand how the world works.</p> <p>But anyway.</p> <p>You go into government thinking you understand the point of something and you have a model of it in your head. “It’s just a case management system!”. And that’s <em>true</em>, and at the same time, <em>shit is fractally detailed</em>. You can handle that well because you <em>know</em> that shit is fractally detailed, or you can handle it in a very bad way where you keep building onto a shit mountain that at the very least works. </p> <p>The world is not the model. The reason why (the good) people in tech keep talking about user research and actually talking to and listening to users is because that gets you closest to the territory. </p> <p>If you’re a naive technologist coming in, a young grad who’s smart and can figure things out from first principles, then <em>your model is going to be wrong because you don’t know what level of fidelity is needed and where</em>. A whole bunch of people thought they did and flamed out. </p> <p>(I say this about government, it’s not really about government. It’s about everything).</p> <hr/> <p>Hello, I am between sessions (actually, hanging out before my panel) at the Code for America Summit. How are you doing?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:don"> <p><a href="https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-doge-gets-wrong-about-tech-and" target="_blank">What DOGE gets wrong about tech and government</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-doge-gets-wrong-about-tech-and" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:don" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:map"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation" target="_blank">Map–territory relation - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:map" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Fri, 30 May 2025 18:21:31 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e11-your-model-is-naive-and-its-not-the/</guid></item><item><title>s19e10: Hallway Track; DOGE; Efficiency; COBOL; Give None of These Things; Context, Not News</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e10-hallway-track-doge-efficiency-cobol-give/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Wednesday, 28 May 2025 on DL786, an Airbus A321NEO cruising at 35,000 feet and an airspeed of 527mph.</p> <p>I’m heading out to the <a href="https://summit.codeforamerica.org" target="_blank">Code for America Summit</a> in Washington D.C., where I’ll be part of a panel on procurement this Friday. I can’t link to the panel because the website is stupid.</p> <p>On Monday 2nd June I’ll be having an impromptu meetup in D.C. in the evening once I figure out a venue - drop me a line if you’d like to come along.</p> <p>I have at least three draft episodes lying around, and more fragments of episodes. It has been hard to get something finished and sent. But, here we are!</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track is Back</h2> <p>Registration for <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track 012: The Thing About COBOL</a> opens on Thursday 29 May at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern.</p> <p>We’ll have Marianne Belloti, Mar Hicks, and Clive Thompson talking about COBOL! Here’s the show blurb:</p> <p>That computer system you hate that’s also really old? There’s a fair chance it’s powered in some way by COBOL, the programming language that people love to hate, and if it were a person, would be hitting retirement age. </p> <p>COBOL sucks, right?</p> <p>But the things you hate don’t suck because of COBOL, do they? And anyway, wouldn’t a 60+ year old computer language be terrible because new things are always better? All those things that suck, don’t they run on outdated mainframe technology sold by that company your dad’s dad said nobody would get fired for buying? </p> <p>Come to this Hallway Track to talk with three wonderful human beings and experts about topics like:</p> <ul> <li>no, things don’t suck just because of COBOL;</li> <li>no, 60+ year old computer languages aren’t irredeemable;</li> <li>who would have thought that the people and processes are as important if not more important than the technology used?!;</li> <li>the trade-offs between reliability, maintainability, and upgradability;</li> <li>mainframes are pretty neat, actually; and</li> <li>how everything is always slightly more complicated than you might think.</li> </ul> <p>25 spaces only. Register for <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track 012: The Thing About COBOL</a>. </p> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>I wrote this so long ago I can’t remember when I wrote it.</p> <h2>1.1 Fine, Let’s Talk About DOGE</h2> <p>Or not. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been having a bunch of conversations with people about DOGE and what the DOGERs say they’re doing / are doing / say they plan to do.</p> <p>There’s been a few thoughts bouncing around in my head that I want to get down.</p> <p>One of the hardest things to do in an organization is to choose something to focus on, which necessarily means saying no to other things. There will be many things you will have to decide not to do. What DOGE has is, for lack of a better description, <em>a ruthless focus on efficiency</em>. (Points for noticing that the primary focus of government <em>isn’t to be efficient</em>). But when you are ruthlessly focussed on efficiency, or ruthlessly focussed on <em>something</em>, the degree of your ruthlessness, what might be your sociopathy, the degree of what in some senses might be your lack of enterprise fucks, becomes something that can be quite scary from the outside.</p> <p>A ruthless focus on efficiency means that you will say no to other things. You will do it, for example, a bit like this.</p> <p>You will have a mandate for making something like “Social Security”, which is a big thing made up of lots of small things, “more efficient”. What DOGE has done -- and I think this comes about by paying attention to the name -- is that it’s completely integrated in terms of technology being the means to achieve efficiency (again, whatever that is). </p> <p>You will make ruthless decisions, like this:</p> <ul> <li>You will want to “modernize” the entire system, which is a big tangled system</li> <li>You will want to do do it quickly</li> <li>You will cut, cut, cut and make decisions to <em>hit that date</em></li> <li>You will <em>change your requirements</em>, which means changing policy. </li> </ul> <p>In other words, you are completely happy with changing what the system does. </p> <p>Most people are not happy with that because most people find saying no awkward. This is where the sociopathy and not-giving-a-shit comes in.</p> <p>Normally when you have a giant system that tens of thousands of staff use and then tens or hundreds of millions of people use and you want to “modernize” it, dealing with scope is super difficult if you want to keep people happy! The <em>safest</em> way for you to “modernize” would be for example to write a whole bunch of tests to the degree you’re happy with the risk of what might not be caught, and then developer and run the new thing alongside the other one and make sure the results are the same. </p> <p>That would take a long time, but it would definitely be safe.</p> <p>But at the end of that, all you’ve got is a system that is more “modern”, and does <em>exactly what the other ones does</em>. Many people will be upset about this, because if you’re going to spend a bunch of time and money, then why aren’t they getting something <em>better</em> that does more? </p> <p>(Well, they are getting something better: it’s just that the things that are supposed to be better are hidden and more infrastructural, probably, and hopefully those changes make it easier for people to get those wonderful features they have ideas for)</p> <p>The feature requests don’t stop. The requirements don’t stop. Scope will keep increasing because of course it will keep increasing: we will think of better (hopefully), different ways of doing things. There will always be more downstream requirements from legislation and so on.</p> <p>And even if not legislation. This applies to the private sector as well as the public sector. If you’re making something for people, then those people are definitely going to have an opinion. If you are aiming to meet needs, needs are not necessarily static. The needs might not change quickly or frequently, but they will change because, well, time. Things that happen cause other things to happen.</p> <p>Elon and co will just cut. They have a ruthless mindset and they’re enabled and reinforced by a ruthless mindset and, crucially, a mindset that is also cruel and doesn’t care. Also an ideological mindset that just plain doesn’t believe most government services should even exist in the first place. </p> <p>One of the reasons why modernizing systems is difficult and hard and takes time <em>is</em> figuring out what they should do and when because people also in general do not like change. Doing things the same way is comfortable for most people. </p> <p>Ruthlessness here is having the Big Balls, as it were, to get rid of a headphone jack and in this case <em>having the capability to do so</em>. </p> <p>I think DOGE has what a lot of people doing digital service work in government actually want, which is political alignment with technological means of delivery and what it takes to meet user needs. </p> <p>The regular deal with meeting user needs is that it encompasses policy and delivery: I want to drive a car is the need, the delivery is the simplest, clearest, fastest way to navigate the legal requirements of being allowed to drive a car. Designing the process -- of which the digital service is a part -- of getting that driving license involves negotiating with the people who make the rules about what you need for getting that license and the requirements for the process. Some of those requirements and rules are hard rules. Some of them are open to interpretation. </p> <p>DOGE, with its inextricably linked policy/delivery view is <em>just making decisions and doing them</em> within a framework of what’s important. This is certainly an approach! It’s an approach that means if you think it would be better for you not to need to provide information to government when government already has that information, then <em>you just do that</em>. </p> <p>The ruthless prioritization here is that what matters more when you <em>just do that</em> is that efficiency is just more important than protecting data or any rules, whether hard or soft. The alternative to <em>just doing that</em> and one of the reasons why that isn’t done is that there ends up being a negotiation and compromise amongst competing and opposed interests: yes, we want to reduce duplication of data entry <em>and</em> we want to ensure your privacy based on, say, a principle that data is only used for the purpose it is collected.</p> <p>But if you are ruthlessly focussed on efficiency, then you don’t compromise. It just doesn’t enter the equation. </p> <p>The group that directs technical implementation and program policy -- the purpose of the system, and how the system works -- is, like I said above, closer linked than ever before. I don’t necessarily like being digital-nativish about this, but one of the deals with software people and these types of technology people is how delivery is so close to purpose. </p> <p>And in this case, the fact that they don’t care about political capital. They will burn it all, to the extent that they’re in an environment that appears to even need political capital. What DOGE are doing, and the manner in which they’re doing it, has an overlap with what I hear when I work with people and ask them “well, if you could wave a magic wand, what would be different, or what do you need?”</p> <h2>1.2 Efficiency Says What?</h2> <p>Fine, efficient at what, then? To what end? I mean, you’d normally think something like cheaper/faster. More output for less resource, right? More work done per energy input.</p> <p>Like I said above, <em>that’s not the overriding point of government</em>. The overriding point of government, at least one of them in terms of the services that we apparently believed and agreed that government should provide, is <em>services to everyone</em>. At least in one respect that’s the military budget, right? The military is <em>supposed</em> to protect the entire populace from external threats, right?</p> <p>The Trump administration just fundamentally doesn’t believe many of these services should exist in the first place. And where they do exist, they are being ripped off. Fraud, waste, and abuse are very handy in terms of figuring out ways to reduce payouts. Suspecting most applicants of being fraudulent -- even when that is overwhelmingly not the case -- is a great way to save money, and reduce that input side of the input/output equation.</p> <p>Here’s what I think I haven’t been hearing. You want to make something like social security <em>efficient</em>, then you might want to drive down the transaction cost of dollar-to-entitled-recipient. That would be one way you could gauge efficiency. But I do not think they are planning to do that. Especially the “entitled recipient” part. </p> <p>Another way you might make social security more efficient for people (Right! Efficient for whom?) would be reducing the time it takes for them to perform certain transactions like verifying addresses or correcting mistakes. But again, I do not hear that. I do not hear, for example, DOGE saying “within 3 months, we will have verified everyone’s address” or “we will reduce the number of people needing to speak to someone to verify something by 10x”. But again, I do not hear that. </p> <p>I know there is a figure out there about the ratio of the administration cost of Social Security as a proportion of the entire budget. My understanding is that it is quite small! Could it be smaller? Probably? But again, to what end?</p> <p>Efficiency should really be about increasing the amount of <em>useful work done</em> per input. </p> <h2>1.3 Fine, A Thing About COBOL</h2> <p>I think the discourse around COBOL Is Bad and Mainframes Suck is starting to become slightly more sophisticated. I definitely know this in some part because my understanding has become more sophisticated over the last 10 or so years, anyway. So here are some Things About COBOL:</p> <ol> <li>It works. </li> </ol> <p>This is one of the first things you should remember: it works. At the end of the day, those social security payments get paid out in a reliable, predictable way. At the end of the day, banks move money around in a reliable, predictable way.</p> <ol start="2"> <li>Old is valuable</li> </ol> <p>The longer something has been around, the more chances it has had to completely fuck things up. New things, which by definition of being new, are things we do not have much experience in terms of their operation. We might have a good idea of predicting how they’ll work, but there’s no real substitute for actually using it. </p> <p>These systems are <em>valuable</em> because they have had such a long time for bugs to get ironed out of them. </p> <p>(I realise that I’ve pretty much said the same thing in (1) as in (2) but this is my newsletter not yours. Get your own)</p> <ol start="3"> <li>Oh No COBOL Is Too Old</li> </ol> <p>So? Go learn it. Latin is old too. People still learn that. </p> <p>Oh no, nobody wants to learn COBOL. Yeah, but there are people who also want stable government jobs more than they want a giant salary or are motivated by public service. It would not be that expensive to teach them COBOL.</p> <ol start="4"> <li>It’s Not Actually The COBOL</li> </ol> <p>It’s mainly because you have a very complex system that has accreted decades worth of behavior that is not documented well and is big and hard for someone to understand. You actually have a knowledge problem and you might think it’s easier to throw the whole thing away and start again. </p> <h2>1.4 We Too Should Give None Of Those Things</h2> <p>I will try to make this one short. I was in a conversation with someone adjacent to the philanthropic industrial funding complex and we were talking about the usual Systemic Problems and Solutions and how the Solutions needed a lot more detail and how they were tactics and not necessarily embedded in a Strategy which is different from a Theory of Change.</p> <p>Anyway, this particular one was about procurement and making procurement better, and one of the underlying problems or reasons why people think about procurement in government is because the government is bad at procuring the software it needs to uphold its side of the “being a government” bargain. </p> <p>There’s urgency right now I think in the philanthropic industrial complex in that I suppose they’re trying to figure out what to do with the wholesale cruel dismantling of social programs? </p> <p>And I think it should be an opportunity to be as ruthless, as focussed as the other side. You want to make it easier for governments to choose better vendors? How much would it cost to switch? “But switching costs are too high”. OK well... how many millions of dollars are we talking? Tens? Do you need to buy off Deloitte? I mean, <em>you could do that</em>. The least you could do is ask. Don’t try to do more of the same. </p> <h2>1.5 Context Not News</h2> <p>There are things on Bluesky called Labelers and one of the things they do is put little labels next to screen names in your feed. They are like the checkmark thing, but, you know, arbitrary and also programmatic.</p> <p>One of the labelers I really like in terms of “wow, that’s useful!” is the Private School Labeler, which places labels next to people who went to private school with the name of the private school and the fees. It is a helpful reminder of peoples’ backgrounds!</p> <p>Another labeler I like is the kiki/bouba labeler based on the quite frankly ingenious cognitive pscyhology experiment based on what you think a spiky thing is or a blobby thing. This labeler uses machine learning to decide whether your profile pic is kiki or bouba. In a different world this would be the cause of World War III.</p> <p>Anyway, someone thought there should be a labeler for headlines that mentioned judges so you could see who appointed the judge. Which could be interesting!</p> <p>And got me thinking of contextually-important-news-related labels. Like: on a politician’s account, a label for how many years they’ve been a member of congress. Or what college they went to. Or what they studied at college. Or how much their stock holdings were the last time they filed a whatever they have to file. </p> <p>Right now in an attention economy, “news” is “thing that has happened just now”. Publishers have decided that there isn’t space to include context, or at least that context doesn’t perform in whatever environment we’re in. Less of “what should I do with this”. Context here means things like reporting the president’s latest off-the-cuff utterance <strong>with</strong> the persistent reminder that he just makes shit up and habitually lies. I don’t think it’s okay to just say that people <em>already know that</em>, and certainly in the realm of service design sparkles, you’d go and check if people actually know what’s treated as priced in. “Everyone knows Trump lies”. I mean, clearly, many people don’t and/or don’t care. But I still think it’s worth trying.</p> <hr/> <p>Yeah, it’s been a difficult time. It continues to be a difficult time. Like, really difficult. </p> <p>How are oyu doing?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> </description><pubDate>Wed, 28 May 2025 17:41:58 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e10-hallway-track-doge-efficiency-cobol-give/</guid></item><item><title>s19e09: Two Easy Pieces</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e09-two-easy-pieces/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Friday, 4 April 2025 in Portland, Oregon where the sun is out.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track</h2> <p>No Hallway Tracks on the slate at the moment. But I have a few ideas I’m pulling together:</p> <ul> <li>Something to do with COBOL</li> <li>Something to do with ATProto</li> <li>Something to do with the viability of a left-wing media ecosystem</li> </ul> <p>Drop me a line if you’ve got Hallway Tracks you’d like to see.</p> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Understanding Legacy System Modernization</h2> <p>Here is a high-level analogy that might be helpful to some of you in trying to get certain people to understand why modernizing a legacy system is hard.</p> <p>And for this, let’s just assume that “a legacy system” is to be honest anything older than, what, 10 years? Maybe even 5. </p> <p>Oh, right. The other thing about this explaining-analogy is that it really hits home if the audience has any experience with home ownership:</p> <blockquote> <p>Homeownership is a lifelong commitment to discovering what it takes to modernize a legacy system, and the lengths to which and compromises you will make in doing so <sup id="fnref:homeownership"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:homeownership">1</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>Here are the ways in which I think the “this is how it’s similar to owning and looking after a home”</p> <ul> <li>you’re using it all the time</li> <li>in fact you might even regard the entire home, or portions of it, as <em>critical infrastructure</em></li> <li>razing the 80 year old house and replacing it with a modern up-to-code build is not the same thing (yes this is a not-so-oblique reference to the leaked DOGE plans to “reimplement the COBOL business logic” of “the U.S. Social Security system” in Java within 3 months)</li> <li>when you are modernizing your legacy house system you may be familiar with the following thoughts and feelings: “Wait, a good plumber costs how much?!”; “Oh <em>now</em> you’re telling me about the “knowing where to put the nail: $$$$$” story; “How do I even tell a good plumber from a bad plumber? I’m supposed to ask for references? Who has the time for that? And who do I know to trust to ask for references? And will they even send the Good Plumber?”; and one of my favorites, “Why do I keep getting screwed by system integrators-slash-general contractors?”</li> <li>consider as well the general tendency to budget for the acquisition cost of the home system, but the opaque process of budgeting for continued Operations and Maintenance, never mind Upgrades. Or that you might prioritize Upgrades over Operations and Maintenance.</li> <li>... and exactly how much you are willing to tolerate in terms of pain or technical debt before doing something about it. </li> <li>... and when you wish the previous owner(s) had done a better job at documentation.</li> </ul> <p>It is almost as if there is something difficult about maintaining a complicated system.</p> <h2>1.2 One Or More Of Your Car Doors</h2> <p>So in Back to the Future 2 (again, a warning, not a manual), there’s this scene where one of the McFlys gets fired and the thing the film gets right is the proliferation of communication devices. What it gets wrong is the mode of communication (fax), but again, what it gets right is their ubiquity and the inability to hide from them: there is a fax machine in the bathroom. This wasn’t a particularly new thing, there were probably already phones in high-end rich people bathrooms and hotels at that point in the late 1980s because people didn’t have mobile phones yet. I digress.</p> <p>But anyway: the point is that notifications are now received over multiple media, multiple devices, and of course not unified because that would be anticompetitive. </p> <p>This morning, my car push notified and emailed me that a door had been left unlocked, which is totally fine if you are sitting in your car after having say dropped someone off and you just need some peace and quiet for a bit. Cars are now the Third Place for Individuals in America.</p> <p>Now, I could turn off one of those communication methods. I could decide that actually I don’t need to be emailed <em>and</em> push notified through the car app that a door has been left unlocked. But it is 2025 and I am anxious:</p> <p>What if I don’t see the push notification because it gets tidied away by my phone OS? In that case, an email would be good, even though I am increasingly terrible at managing email inboxes due to bankruptcy. But now I get a notification from the mobile app <em>and</em> an OS email notification from whatever device is also receiving email. </p> <p>So I end up seeing the same notification in multiple physical places, multiple devices, and on those multiple devices, by individual methods. </p> <p>Now there’s a reason why I might want the email notification: it’s persistent in the way that a mobile app notification isn’t. I can still go back to my inbox and there’s a chance I can see it again if I missed it. So that’s good. I can’t do that with the mobile app unless the mobile app also presents a history of notifications. Which it might do, or might not. </p> <p>The end result is that I am smothered by convenience and choice. I am being buried by notifications. Not only am I buried by notifications, but I am also buried by ways in which to manage those notifications. Some of those ways of managing notifications -- most commonly at the OS level -- are non-deterministic, too. So at some point I <em>might</em> get a notification, but without changing anything, I might not. </p> <p>So I can:</p> <ul> <li>manage notifications in the application itself (if I am given the ability)</li> <li>at the OS level application level</li> <li>at the OS system level, i.e. “focus modes” which have existed for however long and <em>I still haven’t figured out how to use to my advantage</em> because all I really want are two: (i) no notifications, and (ii) really important notifications</li> </ul> <p>I have written about this before so it’s more a recapitulation. I am not allowed to decide what “really important notifications are”. My perennial example is “I want the notification from the food delivery service about the status of the delivery” and “but not advertisements”. There is no way around this distinction other than a combination of regulation and stupendously detailed oversight and punitive enforcement. Imagine if you will a Great Firewall but for “I don’t want ads”. Actually...</p> <p>So this is where machine language learning models come in. Let’s have a model watch me and see what I care about (which is limited in the main to the interactions I am able to have with the notifications in the first place, so namely “act on it” and “get rid of it somehow without acting on it”) without me having to specify, for example, “Hey Siri, hold all my calls apart from notifications about pizza delivery.”</p> <p>And we know that the red queen race for this is for whichever make-number-go-up monopoly-seeking food delivery service to change its pizza delivery notifications to <em>also</em> include offers and advertisements (i.e. “Your pizza is on its way, Dan! Also use coupon FUCKYOU to get 25% off your next order!”), in which case whichever product manager for notifications at the OS level has to decide “well given we’re already running the notification through a classifier, do we also rewrite it to remove any offers?” </p> <p>This is all stupid and exhausting.</p> <p>The overall feeling is that I am helpless and powerless. The choice is “food delivery” which on the face of it is convenient and useful and helps lots of people or “know when I left the car unlocked accidentally” which also! Helpful! But of course we are trapped in a late-capitalism hellscape and I for one would like to know exactly how late this is going to get before it turns midnight and starts to get better.</p> <p>The thing is I’m reasonably convinced that the amount of context needed to deliver notifications in a way that doesn’t drive me to, well, something, is off the charts and can’t be done without some sort of stupid invasion of privacy. This is of course because the context is intensely personal: at the very least, the notifications are happening, like, <em>in my personal space</em>.</p> <p>There are certain emails -- from my wife, for example -- that are marked as important, so they will always trigger some sort of on-screen notification and maybe also a sound, depending on whether that particular device is silenced or not, which is also a blunt method of notification management. </p> <p>So right now, my watch vibrated and dinged, a temporary notification appeared on my desktop, and my phone probably did something too. </p> <p>What I would probably <em>like</em> is that the notification presents to my consciousness <em>once</em>, which is to say, if I saw it on my screen, I really don’t want my watch to ding or vibrate or display the notification on my watch, too.</p> <p>And the best I might hope for is some sort of eye tracking that would <em>guess</em> that my gaze drunkenly saccading over to the top right of my desktop monitor at the same time as the notification appearing <em>implies</em> that I am now aware of it.</p> <p>Now that I think of it, one potential algorithm for notification management might be: look, if you can tell I’m using the computer, then only notify me on the computer. OK? Which is I suppose a thing that can be tried? And come on, if I’m notified with a sound on the computer that I’m using (which you can tell!) then also don’t make a sound on the watch I’m wearing while I’m using the computer, which you also know, because the watch is close enough to be a TouchID substitute!</p> <p>All of this is <em>so complicated</em> it kind of falls into the so easy and obvious of course it’s complicated. “Why can’t x just” is always a trap when the “just” word is used.</p> <p>I mean, another point of view is that email applications didn’t used to have on-screen notifications and... we coped?</p> <hr/> <p>Right now I am listening to a playlist called <em>Whitney Houston Encounters Epistemology</em>. It is 55 minutes of covers of Whitney Houston’s <em>How Will I Know</em>. Apparently my tolerance for repeated listening to cover versions of the same song can also be described as stimming. I maintain that it’s just really interesting and there’s so much richness in the way the covers are made and how they differ. So <em>you</em> shut up.</p> <p>How are you?</p> <p>Dan</p> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>If you're not a subscriber, you can subscribe, like this:</p> <div class="subscribe-form"></div> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p class="empty-line" style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:homeownership"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/danhon.com/post/3llwhyxtdxk22" target="_blank">Me, on Bluesky, 3 April 2024</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:homeownership" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Fri, 04 Apr 2025 19:49:27 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e09-two-easy-pieces/</guid></item><item><title>s19e08: It’s Not 2006 Anymore; The Useful, Vernacular Institution; What Is Free Our Feeds, Anyway?</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e08-its-not-2006-anymore-the-useful-vernacular/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p><img alt="s19e08.png" class="newsletter-image" src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/97984775-6a7a-4d78-8723-dbc6cd7691c4.png?w=960&amp;fit=max"/> Monday, 24 March 2025 in Portland, Oregon where it is not raining.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track</h2> <p>No Hallway Tracks on the slate at the moment. </p> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 It’s Not 2006 Anymore</h2> <p>I was at ATMosphere Conference 2025 in Seattle over the weekend. I’ll do some quick scene-setting shorthand so that some people will understand why I’m so excited coming out of it:</p> <p>It felt like being at an O’Reilly ETech conference in the early 2000s. These were the conferences where web2.0 was invented, solidifed, and named. They were incredibly optimistic times and clearly with the benefit of hindsight, we were stupendously naive and privileged. You just have to look back over the last 18-odd or so years to see how what we thought would happen by default (“more people connected means good things will happen!) totally did not happen and instead ended up reinforcing and making existing power structures worse. Sorry.</p> <p>But the energy from those conferences was there over the weekend. It felt like the beginning of something that could make a difference. </p> <p>What matters is how <em>different</em> ATMosphere 2025 was. For one, the people who were there in the early 2000s were there to say amongst other things: these are the mistakes we made. These are the assumptions we made. Please make new mistakes. There’s no need to go over what we did. Here’s what we learned. Here were our blindspots. <em>Here’s who wasn’t in the room</em>. So it was different -- and better -- that Rudy Fraser from Blacksky was there. </p> <p>Now is the time that we need to be making new mistakes. </p> <p>So what got me so excited? </p> <h2>1.2 The Useful, Vernacular Institution</h2> <p>First was how Erin Kissane made clear the importance of what she introduced as <em>useful vernacular institutions</em>, and the concepts of legibility vs illegibility. These are the institutions that:</p> <ul> <li>are emergent</li> <li>are <em>highly</em> local</li> <li>prioritize needs on the ground over state or government bureaucratic needs</li> <li>are more useful than they are legible</li> </ul> <p>Right now, as the administrative state is being dismantled in the United States, we’re going to need these illegible, vernacular institutions more than before. For whatever criticism you might have of the efficacy -- not the efficiency -- of the administrative state, it is <em>supposed</em> to keep people safe (yes there is a big caveat there). Or at least that’s the ideal that it strives for in our societal contract. </p> <p>What are these illegible institutions like? In the network world, they’re institutions like IFTAS, which is (was?) an organization dedicated to independent federated trust and safety on the ActivityPub/Mastodon network. That’s one of the options we have for a decentralized social network, one that is more immune to takeover from a psychotic billionaire. </p> <p>IFTAS emerged from the administrators of Mastodon servers needing to work together to deal with issues like CSAM - child sexual abuse material. You <em>have</em> to deal with those things now, not in the “wish you didn’t have to” or “maybe it will go away”, but in the “the real world is inseparable and legislation and consequences exist” sense. IFTAS <em>was</em> funded for a bit, but because it was <em>illegible</em> -- it was behind the scenes, and not something like a Formal Proper Institution, it was hard to understand by the kind of people who would give it money so that it could be sustained. </p> <p>But one of the things about illegible institutions is that they survive and work <em>precisely</em> because they’re illegible. The work they do is so important to such a vulnerable population that it pretty much has to fly under the radar because it <em>is</em> against the wants and needs of the state. </p> <p>“We” need to understand these institutions better and find ways to support them. And you can drive a truck through what “we” is because it actually needs to be defined and is very different depending on who the particular we is at the time. </p> <p>I’m not entirely sure if this is clear -- Erin’s put up the reference page for her talk, so <a href="https://erinkissane.com/atconf" target="_blank">you should go look at that</a>.</p> <h2>1.3 What Is Free Our Feeds, Anyway?</h2> <p>The second thing that got me excited -- or at the very least <em>activated</em> was learning more about <a href="https://freeourfeeds.com" target="_blank">Free our Feeds</a> from Marc Faddoul’s talk and breakout session. </p> <p>Here’s what I understand:</p> <p>“We” (people who used to be on Twitter?) don’t want social media under the control of a small group of billionaires and we should do something about it. A whole bunch of people have signed up to an open letter supporting this position, ranging from Jimmy Wales to Roger “Oops I accidentally the torment nexus” McNamee, Brian Eno, The Internet’s Cory Doctorow, and Mark Ruffalo. </p> <p>Marc was relaying the intention for Free our Feeds to raise, say, $30 million to... do something? To make sure that social media could remain independent?</p> <p>What would that mean? What are the opportunities? It’s such an amorphous goal which would dictate very different approaches depending on what you’re trying to achieve or prevent. </p> <p>For example: does “free our social media from billionaire control” mean something like “Europe wants data sovereignty along the lines that its regulators have started, belatedly, with the Digital Markets Act, that’s trying to reign in Meta, X, and Apple and so on?” </p> <p>What exactly does data sovereignty mean? If this is predicated on ATProto, what part of the architecture is that? Is it at the PDS (personal data server) layer, which means that you could <em>choose</em> to have your data stored under European jurisdiction? Because you can just <em>legislate</em> for that. You don’t need $30 million to do that. You can do a China and say “hey, if you want to run iCloud here, then you need to run it in China so the government can do whatever it wants with it.” You can do it without legislation, I think, by the U.K. government saying “hey, if you want us to use Amazon Web Services to power government services, then we want those physical datacenters to not be in us-east-1 and <em>actually</em> in the United Kingdom”. </p> <p>So you could “just do that”. Does it mean running a relay -- and here you need to really understand the architecture and what a relay is doing. </p> <p>Do you think you’re in the sort of position that led to the creation of the Galileo constellation, Europe’s equivalent to the GPS satellite network, as a backstop in case the U.S. ever decided to turn off access? The first Galileo test satellite was launched in December 2005 in an environment I’m sure that included people (probably including me!) saying “it’s really expensive to create a global positioning satellite system, why not just use the one that’s already there?” and now we’re in 2025 where the U.S. is pretty much saying “we are going to annex Canada” and nation states are saying “we regret buying the F-35 because you will just turn it off.” We didn’t think those would happen!</p> <p>But Galileo solves a specific problem which is “stuff can’t know where it is anymore, so then it is broken”. It is easy (I think?) to point to the infrastructure and architecture that needs to be:</p> <ul> <li>designed</li> <li>built</li> <li>launched</li> <li>maintained</li> <li>upgraded</li> </ul> <p>Galileo is also... a single thing you can point at? </p> <p>Again, the question is: what is freeing our feeds? </p> <p>Is it: Europe is jealous that it doesn’t have a big successful social network with tens of millions of users? Because you can’t “just make” one of those, they come about because people <em>choose</em> to use them, not through mandate. </p> <p>Is it because one failure mode is:</p> <ul> <li>I’m a President</li> <li>I use “Twitter” (or Bluesky!) to communicate with my nation state’s population (and more)</li> </ul> <p>and then:</p> <ul> <li>Someone bad is in charge of “Twitter” now</li> </ul> <p>and then: </p> <ul> <li>I am being censored</li> <li>My account has been compromised</li> <li>My data has been compromised</li> </ul> <p>Are you hoping some sort of interoperability helps with this? Then you need to really think through how that interoperability would work in practice. </p> <p>ATProto, which Bluesky the Thing is built on, is an open protocol. Bluesky itself is built, more or less, as a Single Thing On ATProto. While you <em>could</em> have your PDS somewhere else, <em>most</em> people have their PDS hosted by Bluesky The Company. What is Bluesky? Which parts of the below are more important than the others, or are they all equally important? Which parts can be separated out, and how might that work in practice?</p> <ul> <li>Is it your graph of connections?</li> <li>Is it the posts you’ve made, the interactions, and the direct messages?</li> <li>Is it the moderation that’s built-in? What moderation? Accounts? Posts? Spam? Dealign with CSAM?</li> <li>Is it the ability while using Bluesky The Thing to also add other third party moderation services, the whole composable moderation thing?</li> <li>Is it Bluesky The App You Use On Your Phone That Accesses Bluesky the Thing (Network Edition?)</li> <li>Is it the ability aggregate all the posts in your graph and view them in a browser or on your phone?</li> </ul> <p>And what can you <em>practically</em> protect against? There’s “is bought by an evil billionaire” and there’s also “happens to be physically located in a nation state that has no problems whatsoever and no resistance against jack-booted masked agents of the government going to grab servers at the behest of someone who <em>literally is fine with just pulling random cables out to see what happens</em>”. What are you looking to mitigate here at, say, the nation-state-with-physical-access level, and is that practical or reasonable on any sort of risk/benefit analysis? Is it even possible?!</p> <p>I’m clearly thinking out loud. I think this stuff is important! But it needs detail, which is one of the things that I felt was sorely lacking in terms of preparation from the representative of Free our Feeds, which is especially distressing in terms of the stated request for funding to “do this”. One of the requests was even -- if I’m hearing it right -- the chance to have a do-over so that Europe would have more than one online success other than Spotify.</p> <p>This... is not a way to do that? There are many reasons why Europe has only produced something like Spotify once! They are so structural in nature, so systemic, and so “well, you’re in a post-/late-capitalism environment what are you gonna do?” and that was <em>before</em> this shitty new world order we’re in now that we’re post Pax Americana, whatever that was.</p> <p>You want to run “another relay”, where relays are the things that aggregate data from individual PDSes -- so aggregate all the posts that people are posting, for example, and then emits a stream/firehouse to be consumed for someone to make an “application”. Bluesky at the moment a) hosts PDSes for people, b) has its own relay to produce a firehose, and c) runs its own application that consumes that firehose to end up with a social network that people use.</p> <p>I <em>think</em> -- but can’t remember -- that you can tell Bluesky The App On Your Phone to use a different PDS. I <em>think</em> you can have your own PDS and “be on Bluesky” which means “people who are Bluesky users can interact with you”. I <em>think</em> you can... tell Bluesky Your App On Your Phone to use a different relay... for what?</p> <p>And then if you want to “run a European relay” honestly one of my first reactions is “you know, relays are great for surveillance”, but then another one is “okay specifically what do you mean by “run a European relay”? </p> <p>Do you mean that somewhere physically located in Europe, there are some servers that are crawling PDSes everywhere in the world and producing a firehose to be consumed by... some other things (you can make up your own rules as to what the relay will listen and talk to! You control the relay!). Which nation state is this in? Who is paying for it? How are you doing ops? </p> <p>We <em>have</em> models for this that are, you know, nation state infrastructure. They are things like utility networks. They generally don’t start off privatized or funded by philanthropic institutions. Normally this is because states see them as in their interest. In the UK we used to have this with the General Post Office which for a while ran telephony as part of its remit to make sure that people in the UK could talk to each other. Then telephony was spun out into British Telecom, and then British Telecom was privatized. Other utilities in the UK bounce between state-owned and privatized depending on who manages to be in power at the time. </p> <p>So, okay. Are we looking for a situation in which Mark Ruffalo cannot be silenced? I have no problem with this at the moment, there has been no milkshake ducking and he was fantastic in Poor Things. So No Caesars Jay goes evil and bans Mark Ruffalo. Marc then... migrates his PDS to another service, and is able to do so without losing any data and preserving his identity. Can you <em>make</em> Bluesky The Service use relays that crawl Mark Ruffalo’s now not-on-Bluesky PDS? Probably not! Are you able to tell the client you’re using to access Bluesky The Service to <em>also</em> use a relay that <em>is</em> crawling Mark Ruffalo’s PDS? Does that even work? </p> <p>Here’s a made-up user experience in my head. I use Bluesky. I follow Mark Ruffalo. One day, Mark Ruffalo is persona non grata. The way I understand it is that Mark Ruffalo would then <em>not show up</em> in my Bluesky-The-App-And-Service feed. Someone else could make a feed available that is the All The Hollywood People Bluesky Hates, and I could subscribe to <em>that</em> feed, which <em>does</em> aggregate from Mark Ruffalo’s now not-on-Bluesky PDS. Got that? </p> <p>But the <em>actual</em> experience is that while I can still access Mark Ruffalo in <em>that</em> feed, if I’m using Bluesky The App On My Phone Which Is Synonymous With Bluesky The Social Network and Mark Ruffalo is <em>not</em> in the default feed then... Mark Ruffalo is not there... because I would have to swipe to a different feed.</p> <p>Now -- still thinking out loud -- if you wanted to have an experience in which Mark Ruffalo never disappears from your Default Feed, you could get around this by saying that you have a Bluesky-Lexicon-Speaking End User Application that retrieves feeds from whatever aggregator you want, <em>and</em> retrieves a feed from Bluesky The Social Network. </p> <p>Let’s call this FreeFeedApp. You’d start off using this FreeFeedApp. It would default to the Bluesky aggregated feed because that’s where the actual people -- i.e. Mark Ruffalo -- are. But your experience on FreeFeedApp is <em>not</em> 1:1 the Bluesky Aggregated Feed, it’s a synthesized feed from FreeFeedApp that includes whatever other aggregated feed you choose. So one day you hear that Mark Ruffalo isn’t allowed anymore and you see that you can get around that by joining the Mark Ruffalo Feed. <em>If</em> you’re using a client -- like FreeFeedApp for iOS -- that presents an aggregated-aggregated feed, then your main timeline doesn’t lose Mark Ruffalo. Your No Mark Ruffalo and Mark Ruffalo Feeds are seamlessly presented together. </p> <p>That’s a lot. Is that what you want? Because now the request or fear isn’t just about “Mark Ruffalo can’t be accessed anymore” it’s that “you can still access Mark Ruffalo, but depending on the end user application you’re using, Mark Ruffalo may or may not display in your default feed view”. </p> <p>Another way of looking at this is:</p> <ul> <li>You have an email client</li> <li>You have an account on email service A</li> <li>You have an account on email service B </li> <li>Your email client presents a unified inbox view aggregating your inboxes from service A and service B</li> <li>Mark Ruffalo sends email to your account on email service A but is then spamblocked by that operator and disappears from your email client’s unified inbox view</li> <li>You subscribe to Mark Ruffalo using your account on email service B, which has a very strong pro-Mark Ruffalo stance</li> <li>Mark Ruffalo re-appears in the unified inbox of your email client</li> </ul> <p>This is <em>easier</em> for a client to implement for your desired service because “all” the developer of your email client has to do is speak imap/pop rather than a particular protocol for each email service. </p> <p>Which is why being precise about terminology is important: for one, you need to be specific about the layer. You could mandate, for example, that All Social Network <em>Applications</em> Must Present A Unified Inbox Or Feed View and that All Social Network Platform Operators Must Make Their Services Accessible Over ATProto. </p> <p>Because I think <em>one</em> of the fears is about <em>reach</em> (I am agreeing that data sovereignty is also a legitimate fear! I am not discounting it! That’s why I’m saying “one”!)</p> <p>And reach is super difficult because it’s a societal issue and this is a great (maybe?) illustration of how governments need to understand how living in a networked society works in order to, well, govern that society.</p> <p>And this is why part of this comes back to the question/observation I raised in the breakout, which is this: is this because Europe is jealous it doesn’t have control over a popular social network that regular people use?</p> <p>“I am not appearing in peoples’ inboxes” is a really fucking slippery slope to fall down, and one that can be mitigated in lots of different ways. I <em>suspect</em> that people think “you can’t stop who I subscribe to” means “<em>I</em> decide who appears in my feed and not the platform operator” but people <em>also don’t want that</em> because you want the platform operator to deal with all the shit to do with moderation, which is also why composable moderation is an interesting thing. </p> <p>But if you <em>really</em> want the experience of “I don’t want to be disappeared from <em>people’s feeds</em> because of the arbitrary whims of a billionaire”, then you can’t avoid paying attention to the behavior of user’s client.</p> <p>I am going to stop now, because this is nearly three thousand words but could go on for much longer, and am very much itching to talk to more people about it. Perhaps I will do a Hallway Track. </p> <hr/> <p>That’s it. I’ve been away. It’s been complicated and difficult. Sorry.</p> <p>Oh, also: I have availability to help people. Go <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com" target="_blank">check out what I do</a>, or <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/30-minute-chat" target="_blank">have a chat with me</a>.</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> </description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Mar 2025 21:54:34 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e08-its-not-2006-anymore-the-useful-vernacular/</guid></item><item><title>s18e07: A Very Short Announcement</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e07-a-very-short-announcement/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Monday, 3 March 2025 in Portland, Oregon where the best thing about today is that we’ve never been as close to the end of the week this week.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong>, my ad-hoc online event series pretending to be the bit that happens in the hallway after a good talk at a conference is back.</p> <p><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track 011 The DOGE shitshow: what happened, and what comes next</a> is this Friday 7 March 2025 at 9am Pacific, 12pm Eastern, and 5pm London.</p> <p>I’ll be joined by Waldo Jaquith, Angelica “Angie” Quirarte, Sarah Schacht, Emily Tavoularas, and Rebecca Williams. </p> <p>The second Trump administration, led by Elon Musk and other ideologues, has brought a wrecking ball to the U.S. government’s capability for using technology to deliver modern public services. </p> <p>The U.S. Digital Service was hollowed out in what must have been considered by the administration as a hilarious and strategic owning-the-libs move. 18F, the federal government’s internal consulting arm, was subject to a Friday night massacre, an instant decapitation. </p> <p>Come to this very special Hallway Track, likely the first in a series, to hear and discuss topics like:</p> <ul> <li>the very real risks and dangers of DOGE’s approach;</li> <li>the progress that was being made and has now been lost;</li> <li>the crucial difference between DOGE’s approach and the approach of organizations like 18F and the U.S. Digital Service; and</li> <li>group therapy, and maybe even a wake.</li> </ul> <p>35 spaces only.</p> <p>Spaces will be released at ~8am PT on Tuesday 4 March (15 spaces), Wednesday 5 March (10 spaces), Thursday 6 March (10 spaces).</p> <p>Register for <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track 011 The DOGE shitshow: what happened, and what comes next</a>.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 I Said It Was Short</h2> <p>This episode is just an announcement for the next Hallway Track. </p> <p>In the meantime, you might be interested in a related op ed I wrote for the MIT Technology Review, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/07/1111283/elon-musk-doge-and-the-evil-housekeeper-problem-government-technology/" target="_blank">From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem</a>, where I get to completely forget to mention <a href="https://xkcd.com/538/" target="_blank">the xkcd comic with the wrenches</a>.</p> <hr/> <p>That’s it for now. Writing has been difficult. Sorry about that. I’d ask how you’re doing but... you know.</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> </description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:40:45 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e07-a-very-short-announcement/</guid></item><item><title>s19e07: Decide What’s Important; Tacit Admission</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e07-decide-whats-important-tacit-admission/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Friday, 22 November 2024 in Portland, Oregon. A cold and wet day, with on-and-off again rain.</p> <p>I have something like at least three unfinished fragments that I got super excited about but now am not sure how I’ll finish them. It’s irritating.</p> <p>A quick reminder that my dance card is open, so if you've been meaning to work with me, get in touch!</p> <h1>0.1 Events</h1> <p>Nothing to report at this time.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Decide What’s Important</h2> <p>Okay, so here’s the deal. Say you’re a social network. Say you’re one that’s really big. Like, really, really big. </p> <p>I mean, let’s just say it’s Facebook or whatever the EU decides is big enough that day (I am sympathetic to the EU regulating based on vibes, to be honest).</p> <p>At some point, you’re big enough that the decisions you make about your “algorithm” i.e. deciding what content is displayed are societal-scale. Thumb on the scale [sic] type stuff.</p> <p>But you didn’t start out that way. Say you started out as a way to text people what you had for brunch, or you started out as way to rate the attractiveness of women on campus. </p> <p>Are you supposed to make decisions about your content algorithm that are responsibly society-conscious right from the beginning? Or are you supposed to make ones that are going to emphasize and support growth so you have a profitable (or even sustainable) business? How and when do you decide to change them? </p> <p>I had a thinking-out-loud when Adam “Threads” Mosseri posted that they have a sliding scale of encoding to higher quality videos depending on whether an account drives more views or not:</p> <blockquote> <p>[the quality of your video] works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level. We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It’s not a binary theshhold [sic], but rather a sliding scale. <sup id="fnref:mosseri"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:mosseri">1</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>My thinking out loud was this:</p> <blockquote> <p>There's something really interesting here about the concept of net neutrality and equal access, but for encoding and quality.<sup id="fnref:neutrality"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:neutrality">2</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>... which I think a bunch of people took to me advocated for a net neutrality approach and principle of fairness when I’m thinking out loud. But I protest too much.</p> <p>Meta only has a certain pool of CPU available for encoding. They <em>could</em> decide to flat encode at the same rate for everyone uploading. </p> <p>But they probably want to make more money, so maybe the money funnel gets wider if popular videos are displayed at higher quality?</p> <p>Maybe the expenses come down a little bit if popular videos are encoded at a higher quality for smaller size?</p> <p>Is it <em>fair</em> for everyone to have video encoded at the same quality? I mean, that’s the wondering out loud that I’m doing. <em>Should</em> everyone have video encoded at the same quality? What’s the benefit?</p> <p>What if you could pay for better encoding?</p> <p>There’s a thing here about Bob Iger at Disney admitting that the reason why they’re pushing up the price of Disney+ is so they can move as many subscribers as possible to the cheaper ad-funded plan <em>because that plan has a higher average revenue per user</em>. The advertising market for SVOD is mature enough now for that sweet ad revenue to start coming in. </p> <p>In which case, would it be true that Meta would likely make more money by deciding itself where to allocate more compute for better quality encoding (presuming better quality encoding leads to more/better engaging [sic] videos from creators), because that leads to more advertising revenue, than to charge for better quality encoding (which involves maintaining the entire billing and customer support infrastructure too). I mean, <em>you already have ad reps</em>.</p> <p>So in a roundabout way I get back to “what happens if you try to apply the principle of neutrality from net neutrality to other things” to compute being one of those other things. Is a minimum assured amount of compute important to a society?</p> <h2>1.2 Tacit Admission</h2> <p>A thing I have finally seen on Amazon is when it flags frequently returned items. So when I search for something and (inevitably) get a gazillion different versions of the same thing <em>some</em> of them will be labeled with something like “This item is frequently returned”, which:</p> <ol> <li>Is super useful as a consumer, yeah?</li> <li>Is a tacit admission that Amazon is a marketplace that does carry a lot of tat?</li> <li>And that Amazon doesn’t care?</li> </ol> <p>I mean it’s like a giant caveat emptor open market? It’s not like Amazon appears to delist any of the frequently returned items. I have no idea if Amazon downranks frequently returned items. I have no idea if your item is frequently downranked whether you can position that item as a sponsored item in results.</p> <p>But it definitely <em>feels</em> like Amazon are saying: sure, knock yourself out. We’re still going to make money either way, <em>even after taking the hit of returns processing</em>. </p> <p>Is this supposed to be a marketing signal? The seller is going to know the return rate anyway, so they’ve already made the calculus that a certain number of returns is totally fine. </p> <p>And so: what’s Amazon’s definition of “frequently”?</p> <p>You get the benefit of this newsletter being literally typing-out-loud, so fine, let’s go Google and of course there are sellers wanting to know what the deal is with the Frequently Returned Badge and, for example, wanting a list of the ASIN/SKUs<sup id="fnref:asin"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:asin">3</a></sup>. And here’s a reddit post about an inaccurate frequently returned badge<sup id="fnref:annoying"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:annoying">4</a></sup>.</p> <p>And the top red-teaming reddit post about the announcement from two years ago is: “This will be a new way to sabotage competitors”<sup id="fnref:sabotage"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:sabotage">5</a></sup>, which: yeah!</p> <p>Anyway. I like it, but it also sort of cements Amazon’s position as a “fuck it, we’ll sell anything (legal, I guess, until told otherwise), it’s all on you” retailer.</p> <hr/> <p>My hands are cold. This is not necessarily a room temperature thing.</p> <p>How are you doing?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:mosseri"> <p><a href="https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/DBmuQaIP-Q8?xmt=AQGz-hm1kNRjdlHTBdRQTPPlydbyhDorNO-bK1rB-dMmWw" target="_blank">Adam Mosseri, Threads, 26 October 2024</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:mosseri" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:neutrality"> <p>[Me, Threads, 26 October 2024]](https://www.threads.net/@danhon/post/DBm8YB2P9AH?xmt=AQGzFU_WydlekyGcxvb-dvD2Jpyx0r9nwtrY12lyHcFT_Q) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:neutrality" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:asin"> <p><a href="https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/d5700b4e-6c87-4036-a2c7-92c211ce1129" target="_blank">Frequently Returned Item Badge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/d5700b4e-6c87-4036-a2c7-92c211ce1129" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), some seller on Amazon, “4 months ago” <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:asin" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:annoying"> <p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/1d8955q/annoying_frequently_returned_item_issue/" target="_blank">Annoying “Frequently Returned Item” issue : r/FulfillmentByAmazon</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/1d8955q/annoying_frequently_returned_item_issue/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), msau2, Reddit, “6 months ago” <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:annoying" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:sabotage"> <p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/124zobm/comment/je3hckq/" target="_blank">"Amazon will flag frequently returned products to avoid buying." - Will be interesting to know what their threshold is for returns rate for this to show up. Thoughts? : r/FulfillmentByAmazon</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.reddit.com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon/comments/124zobm/comment/je3hckq/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Tsu-Doh-Nihm [sic], Reddit, “2 years ago” <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:sabotage" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Fri, 22 Nov 2024 21:16:15 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e07-decide-whats-important-tacit-admission/</guid></item><item><title>s19e06: Fine, Social Networks; Are you in?</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e06-fine-social-networks-are-you-in/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Sunday, 17 November 2024 in Portland, Oregon where it is cold and not raining and I have eaten half an orange scone. But it’s an American scone, and it doesn’t come from the scone region of England, so it doesn’t count and is an example of really bad appropriation.</p> <h1>0.1 Events</h1> <p>Nothing to report at this time.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Fine, Social Networks</h2> <p>OK, so part of what my bit of the internet is talking and excited about lately is Bluesky, one of the “major” text-based social networks. For those following along, the main ones are:</p> <ol> <li>Threads, owned by Meta/Facebook, bootstrapped from Instagram, and with hundreds of millions of users</li> <li>Mastodon, a decentralized open-source social network built on an open protocol called ActivityPub, in theory part of the Fediverse of open protocol social applications, with lots and lots of users</li> <li>Bluesky, also a decentralized-but-not-right-now open protocol and mostly open source social network, initially backed by Jack Dorsey and his beard, but Jack left, with about 15 million users</li> </ol> <p>Bluesky is getting attention right now in part because:</p> <p>Threads is getting more and more terrible as Meta’s vision becomes clear for it. That vision is a sort of text equivalent of Instagram, where your feed is mostly full of “posts that you might engage with”. Your feed is also inexplicably full not of the posts of the people you’re following, but their <em>replies</em> to other posts. And it’s mostly engagement bait and stolen text at this point, in the same way that a lot of “content” is stolen content posted on grifter accounts.</p> <p>Twitter obviously became more terrible after the U.S. election. It also started putting in place one of Elon’s product decisions which was “accounts you block will now see all your posts”. The combination of these has resulted in some people deleting their accounts and moving over to Bluesky.</p> <p>Bluesky has “juice” right now, which is I think to say that it is the cool network that is not the brand-safe mall that turned into a shitty mall with scammy hawkers and kiosks but still has inexplicable anchor tenants. It is also the cool network that isn’t ideologically focussed.</p> <p>Ideally, either Bluesky or Mastodon would “win”, which is to say that they would become the dominant social network that most people use. I’ve talked before about how I think that’s not a good thing -- that diversity in social spaces is healthy, that aggregating everyone in one place inevitably leads to context collapse in our economic environment. That context collapse is nicely demonstrated by Threads putting rando posts out of context in your timeline from accounts that have like 9 followers and 3 posts, because the posts are predicted to generate a lot of replies. Which they do! </p> <p>Anyway, you’d want either Bluesky or Mastodon to “win” not really because they’re open source, but because they’re built on an open protocol and aren’t proprietary. Bluesky or Mastodon won’t stop anyone building on their stuff, and the rules for how you integrate with those networks are free for everyone to see. </p> <p>So why is Bluesky getting more attention? </p> <p>I think it’s an example of Bluesky showing that Mastodon’s differentiator is “because we are open source and open protocol”. In that choosing a social network <em>because</em> it is open source is just not a thing most people will do, because “being open source” just doesn’t matter.</p> <p>Outside of branding-as-how-it-looks-design, Bluesky made a bunch of necessarily opinionated decisions about their product -- the Bluesky app -- that made it easier and more accessible to use.</p> <p>A big, recent one, is this idea of Starter Packs. It’s a shitty experience to join a social network and, well, not have anything to see. That’s one of the reasons why Threads jumped off its Instagram base <em>and</em> why Threads just showed you rando stuff in your For You feed otherwise you wouldn’t come back. Turns out your friends don’t post that much, and you’d need to follow <em>a lot of accounts</em> to see new things if you look multiple times a day. </p> <p>Mastodon also in general didn’t have easy ways for you to follow a bunch of people. The way Mastodon dealt with having enough stuff to read is on the server or instance level: you’d either pick the biggest one, and you’d see its main timeline of everyone who posts there, or you’d pick an affinity one, like “for astronomy” or “for infosec” or “a safe space for lgbtq+”. But you’re likely mainly at Mastodon because a) you left Twitter when Elon bought it, or b) you care about open source as an ideology.</p> <p>One other thing that Bluesky did was allow quote-tweeting, which is either where you add context to someone’s post, or when you dunk on someone’s post and are mean to them, or brigade them. It’s the kind of feature that can be used to abuse and harass. </p> <p>Mastodon’s approach, so far, has been: let’s just not do that.</p> <p>Bluesky’s approach appears to have been: people seem to like that <em>and</em> they have reasonable concerns about safety, so... we’ll let you <em>detach</em> from a quote post. Your original post stays, but, say, a right-wing dunker with 50,00 0 followers who dunks on you suddenly has nothing in the dunking portion. That’s better!</p> <p>The observation that open source as an ideology doesn’t trump “a thing people like that works well and meets their needs” isn’t a new one. </p> <p>What caught my attention was that this is one explanation for why open source has had a lot more success at the infrastructural level than the “thing regular people use” level. If you’re developing software “a thing people like that works well and meets their needs” by definition includes “a thing that already exists and has been proven because other people use it and I can legally use it and adapt it to my needs”. Open source software is a pretty good way to satisfy that engineering need! Open protocols are also a pretty good way to satisfy that engineering need too, but also extend to the product level because they enable platforms. Which again you can use moat-style or you can also use in a more expansive manner.</p> <p>For, say, an image editor, the order of consideration for most people is:</p> <ul> <li>an image editor</li> <li>that I can get hold of</li> <li>that does what I want</li> <li>and I can do it easily</li> </ul> <p>“does what I want” covers lots of things, sure.</p> <p>But for an open source product to succeed, it would have to do all those four things <em>at least as well if not better</em> than the things that are not open source. Which is <em>possible</em> but is also <em>hard</em>.</p> <p>(I am conflating an open source development model with open source as-in-code here.)</p> <p>The problem is that if you make “it has to be open source” the priority, then you by definition have more important things to do than “make an image editor that does what people need”, because that code needs to be available in, for most people, a non-embarrassing way. And you <em>likely</em> want other people to contribute to the product and make it better.</p> <p>Now, Bluesky likely wouldn’t exist without a whole bunch of open source libraries. At the very least, it would’ve taken longer to develop and improve. </p> <p>But again, the deal is this: open source and open protocols aren’t a reason why most people will choose something <em>if you want lots of people to use something</em>. </p> <p>Here’s another quick example: I do not track the books I read. Used to be, the way to do that was to use Goodreads, which a) isn’t actually that great an experience to use, b) got bought by Amazon, c) tends to have a toxic community. </p> <p>But then I was checking out ActivityPub apps and there’s this one called Bookwyrm, which... let’s you track your books, and does it all over ActivityPub. It is not that good! It is serviceable. It is slow. I have <em>never</em> used any of the fediverse stuff or benefited from it. The <em>only</em> reason why I chose it was because it was a) not Goodreads and b) I was interested in the software people were building on ActivityPub.</p> <p>So another way of putting it is this: if you want your protocol to be used by lots of people -- which makes your protocol more valuable -- then you need a killer app [sic]. I’m saying that your killer app <em>can’t</em> be “the features of the thing most people use, but on an open protocol”. It’s got to be obviously, demonstrably better than that, and satisfy a real need that people have. </p> <p>Again, <em>this is a hard problem</em>. It’s easy to be reductive about what Bluesky is “better” than Mastodon (it has fewer users, even, although it hasn’t been around as long) by saying “it’s built by experienced product-focussed people <em>and</em> with the intent of it being an open protocol and open source”, but... Well, I guess that’s what I’m saying. </p> <p>Mastodon’s feature set hasn’t been advancing at the speed of Bluesky’s and it really does feel like it’s relying on “but we’re open source and on activitypub” as a differentiator. Which is fine, if that’s its aim. But if “get as many people onto open source and open protocols” is the overriding goal, I don’t think that will happen with the current approach.</p> <h2>1.2 Are you in?</h2> <p>Here is what sometimes happens:</p> <p>A thing that catches my attention and I notice a thing, then I notice another thing, and then I put them together. </p> <p>I have been told that this is “being creative” and a way to “produce content.</p> <p>me: Democrat donation texts but it's Sam Altman begging for more of your data so he can birth his AGI<sup id="fnref:bluesky1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bluesky1">1</a></sup></p> <p>also me:</p> <blockquote> <p>Dan, it's Sam Altman again and I'm in trouble.</p> <p>In the race to build AGI for all, I'm falling behind. </p> <p>I know you've supported me before, but I need to know if you're with me now. </p> <p>Will you share at least 10 more gigabytes of personal training data? </p> <p>With stakes this high, we have to win.<sup id="fnref:bluesky2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bluesky2">2</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>and</p> <blockquote> <p>Hey there, it's Sam Altman again. I'm going to be honest with you.</p> <p>I'm stepping up and NEED YOUR HELP to unlock AGI. If we don't do it first, our enemies will. Our team needs all the data it can get, and it's getting close. </p> <p>That's where you come in. We need more data. Every bit helps. -- Sam<sup id="fnref:bluesky3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bluesky3">3</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>and </p> <blockquote> <p>Hey Dan, Sam from Team OpenAI. </p> <p>Israeli intelligence services are all-in on AGI! They're promising a 600% match in exfiltrated data -- so we NEED you to chip in.</p> <p>It's going to be close. Our latest ChatGPT model only predicts a 79.2% probability achieve AGI by the end of this year. </p> <p>Are you in?<sup id="fnref:bluesky4"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bluesky4">4</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <hr/> <p>I have like 3 other unfinished fragments that I was intending to be newsletter episodes and every single time I just kind of petered out. Which is incredibly frustrating, because now if I want to use them, I have to start again. It doesn’t really work when I pick them up again. </p> <p>How are you?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:bluesky1"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/danhon.com/post/3lawd2pqgm22m" target="_blank">Me, Bluesky, November 14 2024</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bluesky1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:bluesky2"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/danhon.com/post/3lb3aou2x7k2e" target="_blank">Me, Bluesky, November 16 2024</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bluesky2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:bluesky3"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/danhon.com/post/3lawje7gec22y" target="_blank">Me, Bluesky, November 14 2024</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bluesky3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:bluesky4"> <p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/danhon.com/post/3lb3dxilmxc2e" target="_blank">Me, Bluesky, November 16 2024</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bluesky4" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Sun, 17 Nov 2024 19:20:58 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e06-fine-social-networks-are-you-in/</guid></item><item><title>s19e05: The first stage is denial</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e05-the-first-stage-is-denial/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>It’s Thursday, 7 November, in Portland, Oregon. </p> <p>We have a dog now, so I walk the dog.</p> <p>Sometimes -- most of the time! -- I do not look at my phone when I walk the dog.</p> <p>The leaves have gone the sort of rich autumn colour and smell and texture and density that you can just imagine I wrote an incredibly evocative, emotional description that just brings you right there. They’re beautiful, when I stop to look at them. </p> <p>The dog sometimes smells them. </p> <p>It’s getting colder.</p> <p>The sky is sort of an unreal blue. The sun is right there, right in your face. </p> <p>It hasn’t been raining as much.</p> <h1>0.1 Events</h1> <p>Nothing to report at this time.</p> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>I mean, kind of.</p> <h1>1.1 The first stage is denial</h1> <p>It’s not that I’m denying the <em>outcome</em> of what happened on Tuesday. Of which I don’t really want to talk about to be honest, and I’m not even sure anyone wants to hear about. But hey: you chose to subscribe to a newsletter that is, at best 95% stream-of-consciousness that might hit the landing. This isn’t for you, it’s for me, and you’ve decided to come along for the ride.</p> <p>I have not chosen to go to a major news site since about 8pm on Tuesday. </p> <p>I have not looked. </p> <p>This is a big deal. It feels like a big deal, like a viscerally big deal to me. </p> <p>I am a news junkie. I want to know all the things and be on top of all the things. I am even so proud, before my fall, that I have the slightest awareness of all the stuff that’s going on that I <em>don’t</em> know and am keeping on top of. </p> <p>Put all that news straight into my veins. Give me all the information, I want to cosplay aleph from Ellis’ Global Frequency, help coordinate the teams around the world who are going to fix this shit. I want to be the guy in the chair, I feel great being the guy in the chair.</p> <p><em>I can do this</em>.</p> <p>I do not want to do this. </p> <p>I do not want to look.</p> <p>I already feel sick and I don’t want to feel worse. </p> <p>It is so jarring to be this way now. I don’t know how long it will last. I have such strong muscle memory of typing in wapo and nyt (yeah, sue me) into my browser that it felt like an unthinking reflex action. </p> <p>I do not want to look.</p> <h1>1.2 Then anger</h1> <p>I am skipping anger. I am too tired to be angry. I’m exhausted.</p> <p>If anything, I am slightly angry about how exhausted I am. I am <em>fucking tired</em>.</p> <p>It appears, though, that I am writing through it. Or writing at all.</p> <h1>1.3 Then bargaining</h1> <p>There is no bargaining.</p> <p>There is no quarter to be given, there is no appeasement, there is no other side for there to be both, there is no if we only did this.</p> <p>There is no room for any of that. You do not bargain with the jingoistic fascist scorpion that’s been telling you it’s a scorpion and has a picture of itself in the dictionary under “scorpion”.</p> <h1>1.4 The fourth stage is depression</h1> <p>I believe the term is burnout. </p> <p>I was already burnt out before Tuesday. I was already burnt out who knows how long ago. </p> <p>I was talking to a friend the other day about just how tired I’m feeling, and not just the regular tired, but... a sort of different tired. </p> <p>Then I wrote a little post on LinkedIn (of which the background is also a source of exhaustion) about a new kettle and the half-assed product registration flow that your company can buy as-a-service. </p> <p>Time was that I would get <em>angry</em> about the wasteful product registration flow. I would start writing about it on Twitter. I would probably try to be a bit funny. And then I might take that and then turn it into a newsletter bit, or do the newsletter bit and then turn it into a bunch of tweets. </p> <p>Handily, writing about all of that in a lot of cases would lead to work!</p> <p>People would read it and share it and pass it on, and somehow, someone would email me and say: “Hey. I’ve got this problem, and maybe you can help?”</p> <p>But Twitter doesn’t exist anymore.</p> <p>And we’re in a pandemic that we’ve collectively decided to, I don’t know, surrender to. </p> <p>And the economy kind of cratered but kind of came back but also kind of cratered, and in the sense of “you can’t go home again”, we never went home again, there’s no going back to how things were.</p> <p>So now I’m led to believe that instead of posting<sup id="fnref:posting"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:posting">1</a></sup> on Twitter the place where we do these things now, if part of the object is to um <em>work on your personal brand</em>, is LinkedIn. </p> <p>It’s already exhausting, and it feels doubly exhausting to post on LinkedIn. </p> <p>At least posting on Twitter was... well, not fun exactly, because it was sometimes a hellhole but of course it was <em>our</em> hellhole with the friends we made along the way, almost some sort of friendhole? </p> <p>But LinkedIn is just one place, and while I’ve written before about it being, in general, good that we have more specialized spaces rather than one giant one where context collapse is the collateral damage of making someone’s line go up and to the right so they get more RSUs or whatever, the thing about LinkedIn is that it’s the <em>professional place</em> where you are supposed to be professional. </p> <p>And that supposed-to-be-professional is not the part of me that I enjoyed being or showing or performing or typing on Twitter. </p> <p>Part of what I like and purposefully set out to do with this newsletter was for it to be smush. It would be about the personal and the tech because you can’t separate the two, and I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I see it as a strength. </p> <p>So now I have to perform in the professional space and <em>do the networking</em> if I am to do all the peacocking and find interesting people who have tried every which way to solve their problem and need a different approach. </p> <p>I can accept it in the abstract. I don’t like it, and it feels taxing and it feels fake. </p> <p>A friend pointed out that “just post what you posted on Twitter, LinkedIn is dying for that kind of stuff anyway” and yes, she’s right, I totally get that, but it also feels weird and squicky. I chose to be on Twitter in a much different way than I choose to be on LinkedIn. </p> <p>But anyway, I think this is what’s been contributing to a general sense of malaise over the last few months. I <em>am</em> tired and burnt out <em>and</em> I’m not going to say it’s mourning Twitter because enough has been said about that. It’s that my job -- the part of my job that’s showing people what I do so they can hire me to do it -- has gotten significantly less fun, too.</p> <p>I have to do it in a different place now, where I have a different relationship with a different audience with different motivations. I feel like I have to pretend to be someone else.</p> <p>I’m tired of it.</p> <p>I also hate that it sometimes takes a good forty years to figure out who you are and who you want to be.</p> <h1>1.5 And then there’s acceptance</h1> <p>This is not about that kind of acceptance, the surrendering kind of acceptance. </p> <p>I have written before -- a lot -- about what it was like to grow up feeling like you didn’t have much in common with the people around you, but when you got on <em>the network</em>, you found people and places where you felt like you belonged.</p> <p>If that’s you, and no matter at what stage of the network’s evolution it happened, then odds are you still have ties with those people. A post went around saying GenXers are unique because they’re the first generation to have portable social networks, having seen them grow and die and grow and die, to recreate those graphs [sic] time and again. </p> <p>It has always felt easier to express myself through writing, which has meant through a screen, through a keyboard that I’m lucky enough to type fast enough to keep up with my brain, and through a network where my expression reaches other people. </p> <p>On some good days I’m even prepared to accept that my writing has in some way helped people, or meant something to them, or to believe people when they tell me I’m a good writer and let that praise inside.</p> <p>What I’m saying is that what’s hard for me is to make friends with strangers when, like, we’re physically co-located? [sic] You know, like “in a room” and “with strangers” where it’s harder to “run away and hide”. When I can’t write a thousand or more words so you get to know who I am beforehand, so that there’s at least some self-selection.</p> <p>Weirdly, the writing and exposing yourself first, in public, is some sort of double-edged rejection filter. Yes, you’re opening up to a bunch of people who might fling abuse at your direction or say that you’re wrong. But on the other side, I can say that my experience has been that the kind of people I would like to be friends with end up self-selecting themselves into, well, doing friend-type-things. </p> <p>But it’s always been easier through an intermediary. </p> <p>Now, though, more than ever, there’s the reminder that <em>everything starts locally</em>, that the thing you can do in “situations like this” is to concentrate on those around you and help those around you and, you know, be pro-social and all that stuff.</p> <p>Do I have to accept <em>that</em>? Do I have to grin and bear it and go and <em>meet people</em>? </p> <p>It is annoying because I know it will work. Because when I have gone to the speakers dinner or the mixer or whatever instead of hiding in my hotel room after doing the talk, I have always met someone interesting and had interesting conversations. And maybe made a friend. </p> <p>But it’s hard and it’s work and it’s effort. I tell my wife when she can tell that I <em>do not want to go to the thing</em>, which might even include “you should at least know who some of the other parents at the school are” that sure, <em>I can turn it on</em>. I can pretend to be someone else. I am not entirely sure if this a mentally healthy thing to be able to do. I mean, is it not some kind of... social dissociation? Yes, I can pretend to be the kind of person who is outgoing and gregarious and makes friends at social events. I can turn that on. Is that not just a form of well-practiced masking? </p> <p>But do I have to accept, now, that the way back from this hellscape, from this mask-off, base, “I want someone to tell me there’s an enemy and it’s their fault and they’re going to be dealt with and I’ll be able to afford rent and a bigger tv and my business won’t suffer and if that’s okay, then that’s what’s most important to me, and anyway this person sounded like they were going to do that more than the other person”, that the way back from that is for people to people with each other? </p> <p>I suppose I might have to.</p> <p>I very nearly went on a tired political rant about why what happened happened. But like I said: I’m tired.</p> <p>I’m tired and I’m scared because I like to think I’m smart and I can think about <em>potential outcomes</em>, that because I can do that, I am good at what I do, which is <em>handwaves</em> (which, honestly is part of also what’s getting me down). I do not want those outcomes. </p> <p>I did a Speechify on the socials the other day, when I said something like this:</p> <p>Look, the institutions failed. They did not deliver what we needed to the degree of urgency and timeliness needed. They preserved a fiction and a compact that has been violated. They don’t work when that compact has been intentionally violated. “Oh, but the courts” has always been “yes, over the course of <em>years</em>” by which time the harm has been done, and <em>restitution isn’t just monetary damages</em>. Remedies are too late for those who were already hurt. Remedies don’t bring people back, they are for the future, and anyway, what is a remedy without monitoring <em>and</em> enforcement?</p> <p>I didn’t write that much on the socials. It was shorter. The text box here is very big. </p> <p>I wrote The Thing. I said:</p> <p>Nobody’s coming. It’s up to us.</p> <p>And then some wag on the internet replied with “there is no us”, and honestly that could have meant a bunch of things, but I am big enough at that instant to be open to consider: well, what?</p> <p>And I guess <em>there is no us</em>. </p> <p>There’s only me, and you. </p> <p>Again, and again, and again. But it starts with me, and you, and maybe even a you who’s much, much closer than I wanted to consider before.</p> <hr/> <p>I won’t ask how you are. I’ll just say: you can hit reply, and I always read the replies. Always. </p> <p>There’s me, and there’s you. That’s where it starts.</p> <p>My best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:posting"> <p>Honestly, the term is “shitposting” <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:posting" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2024 18:57:52 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e05-the-first-stage-is-denial/</guid></item><item><title>s19e04: Just Enough World Model; Actually, it’s about Federalism</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e04-just-enough-world-model-actually-its-about/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>It’s Monday, October 28 2024 and I’m writing this in Portland, Oregon, where just five miles away a ballot box was set on fire destroying over 200 ballots. So the election is off to a great start.</p> <h1>0.1 Events</h1> <p>Nothing to report at this time.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>Two things today, one that I thought was going to be short, and another that I really tried to keep short.</p> <h1>1.1 Just Enough World Model</h1> <p>Here, follow my train of thought, which to be honest is a bit of “greatest hits of stuff that has stuck in Dan’s brain over the decades”<sup id="fnref:decades"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:decades">1</a></sup></p> <ul> <li>For starters, Douglas Adams’ 1990 BBC documentary Hyperland<sup id="fnref:hyperland"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:hyperland">2</a></sup>. I did a rewatch of Hyperland back in 2014<sup id="fnref:rewatch"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:rewatch">3</a></sup>.</li> <li>General Magic<sup id="fnref:genmagic"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:genmagic">4</a></sup>, Magic Cap<sup id="fnref:magiccap"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:magiccap">5</a></sup>, and Telescript.<sup id="fnref:telescript"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:telescript">6</a></sup></li> <li>The high-level concepts of embodiment, bayesian reasoning, predictive processing<sup id="fnref:predictive"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:predictive">11</a></sup> as popularised by Andy Clarke<sup id="fnref:clarke"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:clarke">12</a></sup>, and Karl Friston’s related free-energy principle<sup id="fnref:freeenergy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:freeenergy">13</a></sup> as global theories for how brains think and do</li> <li>Large Language Models as a concept to glom onto is a distraction, when what’s really important or interesting is the statistical modeling of token streams<sup id="fnref:tokenstreams"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:tokenstreams">7</a></sup> (i.e. orthogonal agreement with the concept of stochastic parrots<sup id="fnref:parrots"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:parrots">8</a></sup>)</li> <li>Videoscraping, a method of using a screen recording with a token stream modeler to produce structured data from unstructured video, as demonstrated by Simon Willison<sup id="fnref:videoscraping"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:videoscraping">9</a></sup>.</li> <li>Letting token stream modeler drive browsers, as demonstrated in Simon Willison’s early use of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 API, Computer Use<sup id="fnref:computeruse"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:computeruse">10</a></sup></li> </ul> <p>I tried to figure out if there was a good order to put those <em>things that have stuck around in my head</em> other than the order in which I encountered them, but it turns out that I think it works in terms of building... not an argument, but at least a thing that I think is interesting?</p> <p>World model is a specific term of art for “a description of an environment so that it (the model) can be used by something else to do things based on that description”. </p> <p>Despite the name, a world model doesn’t have to be of the <em>world</em>, like, “the world that you and I inhabit and experience”, it can also mean the world of a specific environment or domain, like “law”. Or “what non-cancerous and cancerous cells look like in samples”. </p> <p>To be really useful though, as useful as possible, you’d probably want a description of as much as possible, because anything <em>we’re</em> interested in is necessarily a thing that exists in, uh, our world. </p> <p>Large language models -- the <em>parrot</em> part of stochastic parrots -- and the bit of things like ChatGPT that generate text are those models of the world trained on as much text as they can get their hands on. </p> <p>Sure, okay. But you teased me at the beginning of this with the section header “just enough world model”. I’ll try and be quicker, but there’s still a bunch of foundational concepts, I think.</p> <p>The way “AI” systems work right now is that you give them a glob of stuff (a whole bunch of copyrighted text that you haven’t licensed, for example), and then you “do a maths on it” <em>so that</em> you can usefully compare words. (And you’ll have your own meaning for “usefully”)</p> <p>(Actually, it’s not even words. It’s “tokens”, which are fragments of text, which don’t necessarily always have to 1:1 correspond to a word in human language).</p> <p>So again, the smart thing is the maths that you do so you can compare those words (again, actually, “tokens”). </p> <p>Wait. Think of the practice of affinity mapping and how word clouds look (but not how they’re made!). Imagine I give you 100 random words, and I tell you to group similar words together. That’s super easy for you to do, and you might get frustrated because a bunch of words might end up super close to each other and <em>practically</em>, you don’t have enough space to put them together. The word cloud on top of that is that you might have a bunch of words together like queen prince king castle crown heir princess arthur charles elizabeth throne and so on that you might group together, and on top of that group you might whack a really big word like “royalty” that describes all of them together. </p> <p>But royalty only describes all of those words together in one particular context, right? </p> <p>Because say I also gave you a bunch of words like ravi amelia john nyla frank luis bruno and so on, that you recognize as a first names. You might want to put those close to where you put arthur charles elizabeth, and then whack on top of those “first names”. </p> <p>There’s a lot of contexts where words can have different meanings. </p> <p>If I flew you up to the international space station, or somewhere with very low to zero gravity, then I could give you all those words and you could put them together in 3d space, right? That would give you one more dimension in which to arrange and group the words I give you.</p> <p>Three dimensions to arrange the words might not be enough, though. Unfortunately it’s relatively hard for us to think of and work in more than three dimensions. That’s a lot of maths.</p> <p>Wait, one day we cast a spell on sand and figured out how to make it count really really quickly for us. </p> <p>Maybe a hundred dimensions would do it. That would be better.</p> <p>No, wait. Maybe a thousand.</p> <p>No, wait. Maybe ten thousand.</p> <p>No, wait. Maybe a million.</p> <p>No, wait. Maybe five hundred million.</p> <p>No, wait. Make it five billion. </p> <p>No, wait. Make it seven billion. </p> <p>No, wait. Make it seventy five billion.</p> <p>No, wait. Make it one trillion. </p> <p>No, wait. Make it one-and-a-half trillion.</p> <p>So now you’ve got as many words as you’ve gotten your hands on, and you have one-and-a-half trillion ways you’ve calculated how they are to each other (how “near” they are to each other), and then how they might be grouped. </p> <p>Let’s say that now you’ve grouped all those words you also do some maths to statistically predict what the next word might be, based on or in a certain context.</p> <p>Ta-da, now you have a large language model.</p> <p>Do that again, but for pictures.</p> <p>Do that again, but for, say, how proteins fold. </p> <p>Do that again, but for, say, music. </p> <p>And then for all the other kinds of music you can think of that you can also get your hands on.</p> <p>And then do that again again, but for video. Which is even harder, because now you’re also dealing with where a thing is -- like a word -- in time, not just space. Just like with pictures, you probably also want to label as many of those things as possible with words. </p> <p>Combine all of those together.</p> <p>Do it again, but for people talking.</p> <p>All the while, use maths on those models to get it to predict the next token, and then for the maths or values that get the prediction more right, use those more. </p> <p>Now you have a model that <em>based on what you trained it on</em> has a bunch of video, audio, and text tokens arranged in, say, similarity, to best produce the next best prediction in a stream. </p> <p>That model is your world model.</p> <p>Remember, this is all token prediction. </p> <p>Stochastic parrots are another way of describing “super fancy autocomplete”: your prompt -- the thing you “tell” ChatGPT or picture you draw or whatever is the first part, and then the autocomplete is a predicted answer.</p> <p>Sam Altman thinks that if he uses enough data to create all these models, then the thing that uses the model to predict the next tokens will be “super-intelligent” and we’ll all be nerd raptured.</p> <blockquote> <p>Ugh, I totally did not intend this to be talking and thinking out loud about the statistical modeling of token streams.</p> </blockquote> <p>The last thing in my list of “stuff that stuck in my head” at the beginning of this piece was Claude’s new feature of “computer use”. </p> <p><em>More or less</em>, you can think of Anthropic having trained a model on “what happens when you use a computer”, where in that case “use a computer” includes “one with a web browser”. </p> <p>So “computer use” is a (somewhat disguised?) version of “let an AI use a computer”. </p> <p>(There’s some specifics here in terms of what that computer is able to do -- it’s a containerized Ubuntu image with a browser that you <em>should</em> be able to sandbox, right?)</p> <p>So now I’m finally at this section’s title.</p> <p>What’s just enough world model to drive a web browser to do just enough things to be useful for just enough people?</p> <p>Now remember <em>nowhere here</em> have I said anything about “understanding” or “consciousness” or “what is it like to be a bat”. This is all statistical prediction based on, <em>very roughly</em> the similarity of a bunch of “things”, whether those things are text, video, image, sound. </p> <p>The <em>only</em> similarity that has been computed though, is based on the training data. So maybe it’s easier now to understand why a bunch of smart people are totally concerned about what goes into a model. </p> <p>You don’t <em>need</em> to understand something to predict what might happen next. Computing that is <em>statistics</em>.</p> <p>People were kind of super surprised at how effective large language models were because they got better at predicting the “correct” stream of tokens for questions like “if Alice has three balls and Bob has seven balls but nine years ago he had sixteen balls, how many balls to Alice and Bob have together?” </p> <p>(spoiler: right now, they’re not good at correctly completing the answer to that question because the predictions don’t take into account you throwing in a wildcard irrelevant fact)</p> <p>Anyway. </p> <p>There’s a whole thing in Enterprise Computing that’s a lot to do with modernizing super old systems called Robotic Process Automation. It’s essentially replacing a human who enters information and presses buttons with, well, a robot (a script!) that will do it for you. You know: click here, put this value in, do these checkboxes, copy that value out there, and so on. </p> <p>You could, though, try using something that can statistically model tokens to do that instead. (I hope you are fucking smart enough to do that to write a script that can be executed, rather than burn FLOPs every single time).</p> <p>I’m genuinely interested in the minimum amount of modeling needed to do “general purpose” web browsing in the least bad way for enough people to start using it. </p> <p>This approach is exactly the kind of thing the Rabbit R1 was claiming to do with models for each application: the combination of a general model plus a specific model trained on a specific application if needed, and all of that “driving” a phone or a computer and pretending to be a person. Or, you know. Being a bot. </p> <p>Simon’s example above of videoscraping a bunch of data from his emails so he can use it as structured data feels (perhaps inaccurately!) in my head like some sort of P=NPish problem. </p> <p>Say you use one of these just-enough models to do your computer/phone using for you for a task: </p> <ul> <li>it does it faster than you would</li> <li>but you still need to check it</li> </ul> <p>Will it always take longer for you to check the answer than it would for you to complete the task in the first place? Your answer is probably going to depend on the nature of the task - for some jobs you might be happy with some margin of error and it’d be good enough. </p> <p>But thinking aloud, what about that nutso Rabbit example of “book me a plane ticket and a hotel”: the margin or tolerance for error there was that you had a person who genuinely didn’t give a fuck or didn’t need to care if the plane ticket and hotel was a couple hundred dollars more if it was still in their budget (if they set one!). And in that particular example, it would save them time, I bet! So it comes down to trust. </p> <p>What sort of knowledge does something need about the world -- and I’m not even sure here if I mean “knowledge” -- for you to trust it for certain jobs? What about for “most” jobs, apart from ones you’d still choose to do yourself? </p> <p>The other part of this is whether “just” the training data of all the text you can get your hands on and all the video and images and sound you can get your hands on (without asking for permission, because you’re a tech leader on a mission) is enough. </p> <p>If it <em>is</em> enough, then that’s really interesting. I have a suspicion that it will be enough for many people for most tasks -- but say, I don’t know, at a 90-95% success rate or truthiness or whatever. </p> <p>You might think that type of training data isn’t enough if you’re one of the people who thinks embodiment -- having a physical presence in the physical world -- is important for intelligence and navigating this world. Not just reading about it or watching it or listening to it, but the immediate feedback of navigating and doing things in the world and learning from what happens afterwards.</p> <p>Now there <em>is</em> a class of problem where lots of people do happen to agree that embodiment is critical: driving a car. Tesla is (attempting to?) train its full self driving on the data of, I think, <em>every single Tesla out there</em>, because that’s the telemetry all those cameras are feeding back. If you drive a Tesla you’re both mapping the world and delivering the data for a model for driving. Nobody thinks they can create a self-driving car by just training it on whatever videos they can find on YouTube or wherever of people driving cars. </p> <p>The bet that Altman and company are making is that the type of training data they have is enough to be able to make inferences about things you haven’t seen examples of. Machine learning scientists and engineers get super excited when they achieve things like <em>one-shot learning</em>, where a model is able to make predictions based on just one piece of exposure. This is great! It’s certainly better than, say, babies (we think), who pay a lot of attention about what’s going on out there and need reminding. Much like adults. </p> <p>But I suppose my point here is that I don’t think you can make a good enough model of the world <em>just from disembodied information</em>, but I’m also kind of worried that you can? What I’m talking about here is the ability of a model to infer behavior and understand things like intent, the <em>do what I mean, not what I say</em> problem that Mickey encounters in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the source of <em>be careful what you wish for</em> and the overly-literal cautionary tale for children Amelia Bedelia. </p> <p>So. In conclusion, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “world model” as -- </p> <p>just kidding, this isn’t that kind of phoned-in essay. </p> <p>I’m <em>genuinely</em> interested in what a model is able to infer just through the artifacts and information we have produced about the world we live in, without actually being present in that world. It’s the ultimate “yes actually I am an expert despite never having done the thing because I read about it”.</p> <h1>1.2 Actually, it’s about Federalism</h1> <p>It’s a truth universally acknowledged that someone living in the United States will get annoyed at some sort of government computer system and wonder why they are, nearly universally, so terrible. </p> <p>So they might ask: well, self, why is this so terrible?</p> <p>And they might also ask: why is it so hard to make something that works? </p> <p>And I really do think the answer is the entire point of the United States in the first place: federalism. </p> <p>There’s that xkcd cartoon<sup id="fnref:standards"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:standards">14</a></sup> about having 14 competing standards and people reasonably thinking that you should have one standard that incorporates them all because that would be better. Well done. Now you have 15 standards. The other 14 are still there.</p> <p>The U.S. wants standards. Everyone wants their own standard. </p> <ul> <li>Lots of people think it’s bad for the Federal government to set a standard</li> <li>The whole point of states is to let groups of people decide what their standards should be too, from “should women be allowed to control their own bodies” to “here’s what counts as a disabled or veteran-owned business”</li> <li>Counties get to decide their own standards, too.</li> <li>And cities.</li> <li>And school boards. Or districts.</li> <li>And, and, and, and. </li> </ul> <p>I mean, philosophically, this is a valid point of view!</p> <p>I think this the first time I’ve specifically tied the concept of federalism to a bunch of stuff that software engineers will understand. The systems of government are complicated because everyone wants their own rules. LA county wants its own rules separate from San Francisco! And in America: why not?! That’s the point of this country. </p> <p>Competing standards are encouraged here, seen as an ideological good, and they are why everything is complicated and why getting things to talk to each other is hard, which is pretty much a lot of what government has to do.</p> <p>You did it to yourselves. </p> <hr/> <p>OK, that’s it. Over 3,200 words this time! I’m sorry. </p> <p>How are you doing? I’m doing... okay. </p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:decades"> <p>Holy shit I feel old <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:decades" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:hyperland"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperland" target="_blank">Hyperland - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperland" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:hyperland" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:rewatch"> <p><a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/episode-twenty-three-the-difficulty/" target="_blank">Episode Twenty Three: The Difficulty</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/episode-twenty-three-the-difficulty/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), me, Things That Caught My Attention, 24 February 2014 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:rewatch" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:genmagic"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic" target="_blank">General Magic - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:genmagic" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:magiccap"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap" target="_blank">Magic Cap - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cap" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:magiccap" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:telescript"> <p><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/JimWhite33/documents" target="_blank">Jim White presentations</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.slideshare.net/JimWhite33/documents" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) (Telescript White Papers #1-4 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:telescript" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:tokenstreams"> <p><a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/14/andrej-karpathy/" target="_blank">A quote from Andrej Karpathy</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/14/andrej-karpathy/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Andre Karpathy via Simon Willison <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:tokenstreams" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:parrots"> <p><a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922" target="_blank">On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell, 2021 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:parrots" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:videoscraping"> <p><a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/video-scraping/" target="_blank">Video scraping: extracting JSON data from a 35 second screen capture for less than 1/10th of a cent</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/17/video-scraping/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Simon Willison, 17 October 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:videoscraping" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:computeruse"> <p><a href="https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/22/computer-use/" target="_blank">Initial explorations of Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/22/computer-use/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Simon Willison, 22 October 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:computeruse" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:predictive"> <p><a href="https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/surfing-uncertainty-prediction-action-and-the-embodied-mind/" target="_blank">Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/surfing-uncertainty-prediction-action-and-the-embodied-mind/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), reviewed by Michael Rescorla, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2017 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:predictive" title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:clarke"> <p><a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/7843?login=false" target="_blank">Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind | Oxford Academic</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://academic.oup.com/book/7843?login=false" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Andy Clarke, 2015 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:clarke" title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:freeenergy"> <p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787" target="_blank">The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? | Nature Reviews Neuroscience</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Karl Friston, Nature Neuroscience, 2010 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:freeenergy" title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:standards"> <p><a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" target="_blank">xkcd: Standards</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://xkcd.com/927/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:standards" title="Jump back to footnote 14 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 20:50:09 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e04-just-enough-world-model-actually-its-about/</guid></item><item><title>s19e03: Kill Your Gods</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e03-kill-your-gods/</link><description> <p>This episode was written on Monday October 14 and finished on Wednesday October 16. I think you can tell, unfortunately, that it was interrupted. I don’t like not being able to finish these things in one go. </p> <p>It’s Monday October 14 in Portland, Oregon, where it continues to be unseasonably warm. Tomorrow is bin day!</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong>Hallway Track 010: Let’s Fix Government Procurement (in the U.S.)</strong> was on Wednesday 16 October, at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern.</p> <p>Our guests were be: </p> <ul> <li><strong>Kathrin Frauscher</strong>, co-founder and Deputy Executive Director of the <strong><a href="https://www.open-contracting.org/" target="_blank">Open Contracting Partnership</a></strong>.</li> <li><strong><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryankomit/" target="_blank">Ryan Ko</a></strong>, freelance consultant, co-author of this report, principal of RKO Consulting LLC, former Chief of Staff at Code for America, works with a portfolio of governments and non-profits to build <strong><a href="https://codeforamerica.org/ideas/human-centered-government/" target="_blank">a more human centered government</a></strong>.</li> <li>Gennie Nguyen, Social Equity Performance Manager, Procurement Services, at the City of Portland</li> </ul> <p>Here's what the blurb was:</p> <p><strong>Nobody is happy, and everyone is making do</strong>. That’s how a whole bunch of people feel about how procurement works with governments in the U.S. </p> <p>Procurement is big money (over $4.4 trillion spent every year!). It’s also democracy in action, because procurement is how governments buy the goods and services as part of our social contract. </p> <p>It’s also a big mess that could be much, much better. It works – just, and despite the efforts of everyone involved. </p> <p>Come to this Hallway Track to hear about <strong><a href="https://www.open-contracting.org/topics/human-centered-procurement-tech/" target="_blank">Bringing a human-centered approach to government procurement technology</a></strong>, a policy memo co-written by Dan, Ryan, and Kathrin about topics like:</p> <ul> <li>what the authors learned over the past 6 months about how procurement tech works in the U.S.;</li> <li>why things are broken and ideas about how the entire situation might be improved;</li> <li>the familiar and true refrain it’s always a people problem, not a technology problem;</li> <li>why standards matter, even when that xkcd cartoon is true; and</li> <li>group therapy, to be honest.</li> </ul> <p>What’s Hallway Track, if you’ve forgotten or I never told you?</p> <p>Hallway Track is a series of free, ad-hoc gatherings, where we pretend to be in the hallway chatting with each other after a great conference session. It’s for small groups of only 25 people so it’s not too big people can’t talk and not too small there’s dead air; they run for 90 minutes; they’re not recorded, to encourage free conversation.</p> <p>If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you’ll be among the first to know about the next one.</p> <hr/> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my workshop about diverting government technology projects is now open for registration:</p> <p>Pulling the Cord for the Private sector is now <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/pulling-the-cord-private-sector?month=2024-10" target="_blank">open for registration</a> for Tuesday 29 October, at 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern. 15 spaces only, at $360 each. </p> <p>Pulling the Cord for Government and Non-Profits is now <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/pulling-the-cord-government-non-profits?month=2024-11" target="_blank">open for registration</a> for Friday 1 November, at 10am and 1pm Eastern. 15 spaces only, at $260 each.</p> <p>Find out more about <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a>, the best plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement, before it leaves the station.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Kill Your Gods</h2> <p>Six parts to this, which is more than I thought it was going to be. You really can’t shut me up once I get going.</p> <h3>1.1.1 Aurora are pretty</h3> <p>Last week, on Friday 11 October, much of the northern hemisphere was treated to a stunning display of aurora borealis. We’re at the height of a solar maximum so be prepared to have your social media feeds periodically stuffed full of absolutely gorgeous pride sky ribbons for the next potentially nine years?</p> <p>Anyway, the most important bit is the very pretty pictures of aurora that were posted on Threads, Meta née Facebook’s Absolutely Not Twitter social network. </p> <h3>1.1.2 Meta AI</h3> <p>The second bit of background is that Meta have been gradually rolling out “AI” features across its products and platforms (which, you know, smart, rather than trying to create a new thing for people to use). </p> <p>Their generative AI chatbot caught what I’d describe in my British understatement style as “a bit of flack” for pretending it had a gifted, disabled child<sup id="fnref:flack0"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:flack0">1</a></sup>, and again for summarizing comment sections<sup id="fnref:flack1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:flack1">2</a></sup> just for two examples.</p> <p>Meta also has something for you if you want to generate images<sup id="fnref:metaimages"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:metaimages">3</a></sup>, and soon probably video too<sup id="fnref:metavideo"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:metavideo">4</a></sup>, no matter how many oceans it’ll boil. </p> <h3>1.1.3 We Are So Not Ready For This</h3> <p>Back in August, Sarah Jeong wrote No One’s Ready For This <sup id="fnref:nooneready"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:nooneready">5</a></sup>, a fantastic piece first about Magic Editor and Reimagine, the machine learning-powered image editing and image generation built into Google’s latest phone, the Pixel 9. Go read Jeong’s piece, it’s a brilliant summary, catchup, and extrapolation of what’s going to happen with realistic image editing and generating <em>at scale</em>. </p> <p>Yes, yes, “photographs can be faked” and “photographs have been manipulated ever since they existed” and “have you heard of Photoshop” but again the point here is the <em>easy</em> ability <em>at hand</em> to create imagery <em>at scale</em> in <em>hardly any time</em>. </p> <p>Yes, yes, “you can get people to believe things with just a headline and some spammy text, who needs images” <em>and</em> I don’t think anyone would disagree that images would <em>help</em>, too. </p> <p>Yes, yes, “we had a dis-and-misinformation problem before image generation became widely available” but see above. Easy, at-hand, quick, image generation and editing at scale just makes it so much easier for misinformation to be more compelling. </p> <p>There’s a reason why advertising is <em>art</em> and copy. Advertising, that thing crafted to persuade you to do something, right?</p> <h3>1.1.4 We Can Remember It For You Wholesale</h3> <p>Shortly after Threads was flooded (in a nice way!) with pictures of aurora from many of my friends and strangers, Meta’s social account posted this:</p> <blockquote> <p>@meta POV: you missed the northern lights IRL, so you made your own with MetaAI<sup id="fnref:meta"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:meta">6</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>Let me angrily break that down for you. </p> <ol> <li>You did not see a thing</li> <li>You wish you had seen that thing</li> <li>You want to pretend that you had seen that thing</li> </ol> <p>As a treat, you could probably add:</p> <ol> <li>You want other people to think that you saw the thing, too</li> </ol> <p>I get it. I mean, I don’t like it, but I <em>understand</em> the behavior from the social team here. Spot a behavior on a network, find a way to tie it to a product or a feature that you’re marketing, and off you go: your mother’s trans man brother’s name is Robert. </p> <p>Now one way for a responsible half-trillion dollar corporation to deal with helping people distinguish generated images from “real” images would be to label them! That way as platform owner you get the benefit of all of that sweet new generated content (and another text entry box for people to contribute their darkest, deepest, desires to your profile on them) <em>and</em> you get people to keep posting their regular images too!</p> <p>That might be hard, though, and you might accidentally start labelling real photos as ‘Made by AI’<sup id="fnref:hard"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:hard">7</a></sup> which would let’s be clear <em>always</em> be bound to happen because something will always slip through, but also might be a bit embarrassing<sup id="fnref:petapixel"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:petapixel">8</a></sup> when professional photographs have their art and work hit with the label.</p> <blockquote> <p>That said, if you’re anthropomorphizing a half-trillion dollar corporation, which you shouldn’t because it doesn’t get embarrassed. What it does is facilitate genocide<sup id="fnref:genocide"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:genocide">9</a></sup>, and what you <em>should</em> remember is that it’s a corporation run by <em>people who make decisions</em>. </p> </blockquote> <p>Of course, if your label is annoying people because it’s false, you can always move the goalposts a bit and change the label’s name to ‘AI Info’<sup id="fnref:aiinfo"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:aiinfo">10</a></sup>, which would include the use of generative AI tools in editing<sup id="fnref:generative"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:generative">11</a></sup>.</p> <p>(Look, I’m not saying it’s a coincidence that Threads and Instagram are both headed by Meta’s Adam Mosseri, I’m just pointing out a fact)</p> <h3>1.1.5 Literally Don’t Do That</h3> <p>Alex Blechman, in my internet circles<sup id="fnref:circles"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:circles">12</a></sup> at least, is famous for this stupendously satire of Californian Ideology technology companies:</p> <blockquote> <p>Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. <br/> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus<sup id="fnref:torment"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:torment">13</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>Which is a much better and catchier version of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash Wasn’t A Manual. </p> <p>People<sup id="fnref:we"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:we">14</a></sup> have been saying for a long time that just image generation would be a shitshow without slowing down and figuring out <em>what kind of tradeoffs we are prepared to accept as societies that are allowed to regulate themselves</em>. </p> <p>For example! The CEO of Microsoft was “alarmed” about explicit fakes of Taylor Swift back <em>at the beginning of 2024</em><sup id="fnref:taylor"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:taylor">15</a></sup> and that societies should have “guardrails” but, you know, there’s <em>nothing to be done</em> and in the meantime technology marches onward. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards discovering more profitable products and services!</p> <p>(Pretty much exactly 7 months later, the former U.S. President would post generated images of Swift supporting his campaign<sup id="fnref:cnn"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:cnn">16</a></sup>)</p> <p>So now, pretty much 11 months to the day that it was reported Meta had disbanded its Responsible<sup id="fnref:responsible"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:responsible">17</a></sup> AI team<sup id="fnref:disband"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:disband">18</a></sup>, you have Meta’s social team, on their own network, encouraging people to produce and post generated imagery of an event they did not personally witness.</p> <p>I mean, what else are they supposed to do? <em>Not</em> promote their latest products? What else are you going to use generative AI for if not to create images of things that didn’t happen or don’t exist? Wouldn’t people do exactly that to create relevant content [sic] for current events?</p> <p>I’m not even getting into the fact that the generated aurora imagery looks like shit and worse than what people were capturing with their phones. </p> <p>Meta literally did the thing. Out loud. But again, what else could we expect?</p> <h3>1.1.6 Kill Your Gods</h3> <p>I wrote about this back in 2018<sup id="fnref:medium"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:medium">19</a></sup>.</p> <p>The short version: there are a lot of truths the internet industry likes to tell itself to feel good about itself. </p> <p>One of them is Moore’s law<sup id="fnref:moore"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:moore">20</a></sup>, which isn’t. A law, that is. It was a rule of thumb, that the number of transistors you could cram into a given area would double about every two years. Even when it was clear that this <em>law</em> wouldn’t hold because physics, a bunch of people still thought that human ingenuity would win out and we’d <em>still</em> figure out ways to cram more transistors into a given area.</p> <p>We did not.</p> <p>Another one, the one I’m going to lay into, is Metcalfe’s law. Metcalfe’s law is this:</p> <blockquote> <p>Metcalfe's law states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system<sup id="fnref:metcalfe"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:metcalfe">21</a></sup> (thanks, Wikipedia)</p> </blockquote> <p>Another expression I’ve seen of Metcalfe’s law is just that the <em>value</em> of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users, not the more specific <em>financial value</em>, because the latter gives the game away.</p> <p>A Lot Of People Are Saying [citation needed] that the deal with AI edited and/or generated images isn’t that much of a big deal because see all the reasons I wrote above.</p> <p>But, like I said above, the difference is scale.</p> <p>Metcalfe’s law is all about the scale. </p> <p>I genuinely don’t see how people don’t understand the difference between <em>possible</em> and <em>at hand for over 2.1 billion people every day</em>. Like, <em>in the pockets of over a billion people</em>. Just like that. That’s not “yeah, anyone can Photoshop something”. That’s <em>different</em>.</p> <p>And so Metcalfe’s law presupposes and gets excited about the value promised by larger and larger networks. A law -- a guess! a prediction! a <em>wish</em> -- that encourages networks to get bigger and bigger because yay financialization and there’s the lie in the Wikipedia formulation of the law: the greater <em>financial value</em>.</p> <p>But what about harm?</p> <p>I mean, at the very least the harm scales linearly with the number of connections? </p> <p>I wouldn’t believe that harm is necessarily even reduced by the increasing number of users of a network because while some harms may reduce, if history has taught us anything, it’s that it only takes a small number of humans to be especially creative and invent new ways of harming other humans. And they don’t even have to be radical inventions! Sometimes all that changes is tweaking the harm or harmful behavior so that it rides on the utility provided by such a large network.</p> <p>Metcalfe’s law is like believing in a universe that expands forever, where there’s always more growth to be discovered, to be colonized, to be captured, to be converted, to be inexpertly Mullenwegged. </p> <p>Scale is a real thing. I don’t think potential harm increases linearly. I don’t know whether many/most/any people design systems thinking that harm increases linearly. There are people I know who do, though. </p> <p>Anyway. Kill your gods. Or at least question them.</p> <hr/> <p>OK, that’s it. Over 2,500 words motivated by some anger that is only residual now that it’s Wednesday. </p> <p>We got a dog. She’s a Good Girl. I’ve been going out for walks. The seasons are turning, autumn is here, the leaves are brown, the ground soggy.</p> <p>How are you? I’m... doing better.</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:flack0"> <p><a href="https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-told-parents-group-it-has-a-disabled-child/" target="_blank">Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-told-parents-group-it-has-a-disabled-child/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Jason Koebler, 404 Media, 17 April 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:flack0" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:flack1"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24168802/meta-ai-facebook-comments-summaries" target="_blank">Meta’s AI is summarizing some bizarre Facebook comment sections - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24168802/meta-ai-facebook-comments-summaries" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Emma Roth, The Verge, 31 May 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:flack1" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:metaimages"> <p><a href="https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/imagine/" target="_blank">Generate images using Meta AI at www.meta.ai | Meta Store</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/imagine/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:metaimages" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:metavideo"> <p><a href="https://ai.meta.com/research/movie-gen/" target="_blank">Meta Movie Gen</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://ai.meta.com/research/movie-gen/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:metavideo" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:nooneready"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24225972/ai-photo-era-what-is-reality-google-pixel-9" target="_blank">No one’s ready for this - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24225972/ai-photo-era-what-is-reality-google-pixel-9" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Sarah Jeong, The Verge, 22 August 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:nooneready" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:meta"> <p><a href="https://www.threads.net/@meta/post/DA_mM0Ey1qC" target="_blank">@meta • POV: you missed the northern lights IRL, so you made your own with MetaAI • Threads</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.threads.net/@meta/post/DA_mM0Ey1qC" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), “Meta”, Threads, “3 days ago”, or 11 October 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:meta" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:hard"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/24/24184795/meta-instagram-incorrect-made-by-ai-photo-labels" target="_blank">Meta is incorrectly marking real photos as ‘Made by AI’ - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/24/24184795/meta-instagram-incorrect-made-by-ai-photo-labels" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Sheena Vasani, The Verge, 24 June 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:hard" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:petapixel"> <p><a href="https://petapixel.com/2024/05/28/instagram-photos-are-being-labeled-made-with-ai-when-theyre-not/" target="_blank">Instagram Photos Are Being Labeled 'Made With AI' When They're Not | PetaPixel</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://petapixel.com/2024/05/28/instagram-photos-are-being-labeled-made-with-ai-when-theyre-not/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:petapixel" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:genocide"> <p><a href="https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series" target="_blank">Meta in Myanmar (full series) - Erin Kissane's small internet website</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Erin Kissane, October 2023, Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel, 28 May 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:genocide" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:aiinfo"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/1/24190026/meta-instagram-facebook-made-with-ai-info-label-metadata" target="_blank">Instagram’s ‘Made with AI’ label swapped out for ‘AI info’ after photographers’ complaints - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/1/24190026/meta-instagram-facebook-made-with-ai-info-label-metadata" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Richard Lawler, The Verge, 1 July 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:aiinfo" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:generative"> <p><a href="https://petapixel.com/2024/06/25/this-is-what-makes-instagram-flag-your-photo-as-made-with-ai/" target="_blank">This is What Makes Instagram Flag Your Photo as 'Made With AI' | PetaPixel</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://petapixel.com/2024/06/25/this-is-what-makes-instagram-flag-your-photo-as-made-with-ai/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel, 25 June 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:generative" title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:circles"> <p>RIP Google+ <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:circles" title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:torment"> <p><a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus" target="_blank">Torment Nexus | Know Your Meme</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Alex Blechman, Know Your Meme <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:torment" title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:we"> <p>i.e. all the people who have pointed out the many, many ways in which all of this could fuck people up, and then when it has fucked people up, cited those exact examples of how and when and where people were fucked up, and then suggested ways to mitigate or even “hang on, it might not be a good idea to do this” <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:we" title="Jump back to footnote 14 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:taylor"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052196/satya-nadella-microsoft-ai-taylor-swift-fakes-response" target="_blank">Satya Nadella says explicit Taylor Swift AI fakes are ‘alarming and terrible’ - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052196/satya-nadella-microsoft-ai-taylor-swift-fakes-response" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Adi Robertson, The Verge, 26 January 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:taylor" title="Jump back to footnote 15 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:cnn"> <p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/19/politics/donald-trump-taylor-swift-ai/index.html" target="_blank">Trump posts fake AI images of Taylor Swift and Swifties, falsely suggesting he has the singer’s support | CNN Politics</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/19/politics/donald-trump-taylor-swift-ai/index.html" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Elizabeth Wagmeister and Kate Sullivan, CNN, 28 August 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:cnn" title="Jump back to footnote 16 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:responsible"> <p>“Responsible” here doing the kind of stellar work that “less-lethal” and “non-lethal” do when describing weapons <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:responsible" title="Jump back to footnote 17 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:disband"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/18/23966980/meta-disbanded-responsible-ai-team-artificial-intelligence" target="_blank">Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/18/23966980/meta-disbanded-responsible-ai-team-artificial-intelligence" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Wes Davis, The Verge, 18 November 2023 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:disband" title="Jump back to footnote 18 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:medium"> <p><a href="https://medium.com/@hondanhon/no-ones-coming-it-s-up-to-us-de8d9442d0d" target="_blank">No one’s coming. It’s up to us.. Adapted from “We Are The Very Model Of… | by Dan Hon | Medium</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://medium.com/@hondanhon/no-ones-coming-it-s-up-to-us-de8d9442d0d" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Me, Medium, 9 February 2018 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:medium" title="Jump back to footnote 19 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:moore"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law" target="_blank">Moore's law - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:moore" title="Jump back to footnote 20 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:metcalfe"> <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law" target="_blank">Metcalfe's law - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:metcalfe" title="Jump back to footnote 21 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Oct 2024 19:46:04 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e03-kill-your-gods/</guid></item><item><title>s19e02: For Informational Purposes; Product management is hard, a reminder; Shadow IT</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e02-for-informational-purposes-product-management-is-hard/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Wednesday, 9 October 2024 in Portland, Oregon, where it is still unseasonably warm. I have a puppy now. She’s a good girl.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong>Hallway Track 010: Let’s Fix Government Procurement (in the U.S.)</strong> is on Wednesday 16 October, at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern.</p> <p>Our guests will be: </p> <ul> <li><strong>Kathrin Frauscher</strong>, co-founder and Deputy Executive Director of the <strong><a href="https://www.open-contracting.org/" target="_blank">Open Contracting Partnership</a></strong>.</li> <li><strong><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryankomit/" target="_blank">Ryan Ko</a></strong>, freelance consultant, co-author of this report, principal of RKO Consulting LLC, former Chief of Staff at Code for America, works with a portfolio of governments and non-profits to build <strong><a href="https://codeforamerica.org/ideas/human-centered-government/" target="_blank">a more human centered government</a></strong>.</li> <li>TBC.</li> </ul> <p>Here’s the blurb: </p> <p><strong>Nobody is happy, and everyone is making do</strong>. That’s how a whole bunch of people feel about how procurement works with governments in the U.S. </p> <p>Procurement is big money (over $4.4 trillion spent every year!). It’s also democracy in action, because procurement is how governments buy the goods and services as part of our social contract. </p> <p>It’s also a big mess that could be much, much better. It works – just, and despite the efforts of everyone involved. </p> <p>Come to this Hallway Track to hear about <strong><a href="https://www.open-contracting.org/topics/human-centered-procurement-tech/" target="_blank">Bringing a human-centered approach to government procurement technology</a></strong>, a policy memo co-written by Dan, Ryan, and Kathrin about topics like:</p> <ul> <li>what the authors learned over the past 6 months about how procurement tech works in the U.S.;</li> <li>why things are broken and ideas about how the entire situation might be improved;</li> <li>the familiar and true refrain it’s always a people problem, not a technology problem;</li> <li>why standards matter, even when that xkcd cartoon is true; and</li> <li>group therapy, to be honest.</li> </ul> <p>What’s Hallway Track, if you’ve forgotten or I never told you?</p> <p>Hallway Track is a series of free, ad-hoc gatherings, where we pretend to be in the hallway chatting with each other after a great conference session. It’s for small groups of only 25 people so it’s not too big people can’t talk and not too small there’s dead air; they run for 90 minutes; they’re not recorded, to encourage free conversation.</p> <p><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Register for Hallway Track 010: Let’s Fix Government Procurement (in the U.S.)</a> and find out more. </p> <hr/> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my workshop about diverting government technology projects is now open for registration:</p> <p>Pulling the Cord for the Private sector is now <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/pulling-the-cord-private-sector?month=2024-10" target="_blank">open for registration</a> for Tuesday 29 October, at 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern. 15 spaces only, at $360 each. </p> <p>Pulling the Cord for Government and Non-Profits is now <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/pulling-the-cord-government-non-profits?month=2024-11" target="_blank">open for registration</a> for Friday 1 November, at 10am and 1pm Eastern. 15 spaces only, at $260 each.</p> <p>Find out more about <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a>, the best plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement, before it leaves the station.</p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Product management is hard, a reminder</h2> <p>Here’s your regular reminder if you work in not-the-private-sector that Modernizing Legacy Applications is Hard, and that people who do this kind of thing for money aren’t automatically better at it. </p> <p>After having a fairly disastrous launch of the Sonos’ new app, their CEO has now resorted to the tactic of radical transparency and published (what claims to be) a public Trello board of the app roadmap<sup id="fnref:trello"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:trello">4</a></sup>, presumably to mollify all the people on the internet (i.e. everyone in the world, now) who Weren’t Consulted<sup id="fnref:consulted"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:consulted">5</a></sup>.</p> <h2>1.2 Shadow IT</h2> <p>This is fantastic! Via Metafilter<sup id="fnref:mefi"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:mefi">2</a></sup>, the Navy Times headline is How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi<sup id="fnref:navytimes"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:navytimes">3</a></sup> gives the game away, but I think it’s an amazing illustration of:</p> <ul> <li>how much people <em>need</em> internet access</li> <li>the lengths to which they’re willing to go for internet access</li> <li>something about the staffing issues the U.S. Navy has in that the only real repercussions for (handwaving) <em>something something opsec</em> is “you’re demoted”, which doesn’t <em>sound</em> like a terrible thing in the grand scheme of things</li> </ul> <p>There’s all the regular shadow IT stuff like “installed an application that you don’t know about” and “made a spreadsheet that’s critical to running the entire operation” plus “we put a server on a credit card under this desk because you have a terrible cloud policy”<sup id="fnref:cloud"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:cloud">1</a></sup></p> <hr/> <p>That’s it for today. It’s been a while. Things have been... difficult, to be honest.</p> <p>How have you been?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:cloud"> <p>I totally did not hear about this happening at a certain national broadcaster many years ago. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:cloud" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:mefi"> <p><a href="https://www.metafilter.com/205399/No-Captain-We-Have-Not-Illegally-Installed-Starlink-On-This-Warship" target="_blank">No Captain, We Have Not Illegally Installed Starlink On This Warship | MetaFilter</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.metafilter.com/205399/No-Captain-We-Have-Not-Illegally-Installed-Starlink-On-This-Warship" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Major Clanger, Metafilter, 7 September 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:mefi" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:navytimes"> <p><a href="https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/" target="_blank">How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:navytimes" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:trello"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/29/24231766/sonos-trello-board-fix-busted-app" target="_blank">Sonos opens a Trello board so we can see how it’s fixing the busted app - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/29/24231766/sonos-trello-board-fix-busted-app" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Jay Peters, The Verge, 29 August 2024 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:trello" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:consulted"> <p><a href="https://www.ftrain.com/wwic" target="_blank">The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.ftrain.com/wwic" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Paul Ford, ftrain.com, 6 January 2011 <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:consulted" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2024 19:07:47 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e02-for-informational-purposes-product-management-is-hard/</guid></item><item><title>s19e01: Do Reply; Use plain language, and tell the truth</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e01-do-reply-use-plain-language-and-tell-the/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Thursday, 29 August 204, which just so happens to be Skynet Sentience Day<sup id="fnref:skynet"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:skynet">2</a></sup>!</p> <p>I am in Portland, Oregon, where the high is 90f / 32c and atypical but not ha ha ha. Live as you are in the early days of the jackpot, etc. </p> <p>It’s been a few months, and I’ve been busy, plus the usual disclosure that not writing here has been using up <em>at least</em> 20% of my daily energy in trying to avoid feeling stupendously guilty and ashamed that I have not written. But look!</p> <p>I am back in hustle mode, so please excuse the <em>call to action</em> at the end of today’s episode. I already feel bad enough about it as it is. </p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong> is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my workshop about diverting government technology projects, fell victim to what was in hindsight entirely unrealistic expectations and hopes about what I could accomplish over the summer. It’s being reworked a little bit and you’ll find out here when it’s open for registration. </p> <hr/> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>One short thing and one longer thing in this episode.</p> <h2>1.1 DO REPLY</h2> <p>Here is a writing thing. Florian and I and new inductee Ted Han were working on some <a href="https://donotreply.cards" target="_blank">DO NOT REPLY cards</a> and stickers for The Last XOXO Festival Ever and got totally stuck until we figured out that now is the time to bring out the DO REPLY stickers that honest to god were in the actual plan all along. </p> <p>(I will tell you about the actual plan all along some day.)</p> <p>But first, dearest reader, since I last wrote, we have started pretending to be weekly satirical comedy writers and produced <a href="https://donotreply.cards/wo" target="_blank">WEEK OF</a> cards comment ing on current events. So you can look at those. They’ve been fun to write and not stressful at all!</p> <p>But the big thing is the <a href="https://donotreply.cards/do" target="_blank">DO REPLY</a> cards which I encourage you to look at because some of them were intended to give you the warmest, fuzziest, heartwarming feelings and to spread those feelings. </p> <p>And the big big big thing is that now you can buy the set of <a href="https://buy.donotreply.cards/products/first-edition-run-of-6-do-reply-stickers" target="_blank">6 DO REPLY stickers</a>. The code <strong>things-that-caught-my-attention</strong> will get you 10% off. </p> <p>(You can also buy the original <a href="https://buy.donotreply.cards/products/do-not-reply-cards-sticker-sheet" target="_blank">15 DO NOT REPLY stickers</a>; the same discount code will work.)</p> <p>(I mean while you’re here you can also <a href="https://buy.donotreply.cards" target="_blank">just buy both</a>. Knock yourself out, they’re all awesome, union-printed, and 10% of proceeds go to Trans Lifeline).</p> <p>Hm, I still have to remind myself that TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT A THING YOU DID is not something to feel bad about.</p> <h2>1.2 Use plain language, and tell the truth</h2> <p>With occasional conspirator Ryan Ko I’ve been working on a policy memo for the last few months. It’s only about the need to radically improve the technology that powers government procurement in the United States and a plan to do it, so no biggie. But if you’re reading this you know me and you’re already laughing. </p> <p>Here’s one of the section headers:</p> <blockquote> <p>Nobody is happy, and everybody is making do</p> </blockquote> <p>We started getting feedback this week. One bit we got was that the client loved this header.</p> <p>(Dirty secret: this header is in practically every client report because, spoilers: it’s true about pretty much everything to do with technology and software)</p> <p>So the thing that caught my attention just now is this: </p> <p>Use plain language. </p> <p>Writing plainly and clearly is part of my schtick, and I’ve had enough therapy now to accept the praise I get for it<sup id="fnref:praise"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:praise">1</a></sup>. At this point I have a combination of being lucky enough that I only work with clients that recognize, value, and want plain language, and the inverse, which is that people who don’t really don’t want to work with me. Which is just fine.</p> <p>Someone the other day suggested that I try using AI to start writing when I get stuck, which is sometimes something I have a problem with. But I’ve tried, and every single time, for me, at least, it doesn’t work. The least bad way it doesn’t work is when I get so mad at the output that I angrily start writing which... is a result, I guess.</p> <p>The reason why LLM text for me is bad is that it’s insipid, which is not a plain language word to use, but the secret is to use words like that tactically and sparingly to great effect. </p> <p>They don’t write plainly because most of the text they’ve been trained on isn’t plain and clear. I’d argue that most of the text that’s ever existed isn’t plain and clear anyway. </p> <p>It’s a numbers game, so in terms of job security, I’m not that worried about being replaced by AI because “I didn’t want to do that work anyway”. Yes, I know that statement is lobbing a nuclear bomb towards the way our entire economy works and the way it grinds people into dust. </p> <p>I did have one bittersweet realization, a sort of “ha ha I’m crying inside”. </p> <p>Plain writing works and is persuasive for some people but not all people. There will still be people who for various reasons are persuaded by, say, McKinsey-style language, and persuading those people is often critical to getting things done. </p> <p>I do not like writing McKinsey-style language even though I think I could do a pretty good job of pretending to be someone who does it well. </p> <p>So one time I gave whichever premium version of ChatGPT the outline of this policy memo and told it to write another outline and language for each of the sections in the way a professional management consultant associate with partner supervision would do it, and boy howdy was that grade-A persuasive business speak and now I feel very, very dirty <em>because I know it would work</em> and that the writing would do the job it needs to do, for the people it’s aimed at. </p> <p>I’m actively testing the boundaries to which I will accept realpolitik!</p> <p>So, again. Use plain language.</p> <p>Oh, and as Dana Chisnell likes to repeat, <em>tell the truth</em>. People love it when you tell the truth because they rarely hear it. That said, I know people -- many people -- aren’t in the position where they feel they can tell the truth safely. </p> <p>Use plain language. Tell the truth.</p> <p>And think about whether you know anyone I can help and drop me a line, or you can assume my consent and do me an introduction</p> <p>Because people keep reminding me that “telling people what you do” is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing, even, and that “people will want to help you”. </p> <hr/> <p>It’s been a while. How are you?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan </p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <hr/> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <p style="height:16px; margin:0px !important;"></p> <div class="footnote"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn:praise"> <p>That said, even now, I get anxious even thinking about the time Dan Wieden, most well-known for <em>Just do it</em>, told me I was a good writer. How terrible that someone telling you good at something feels so bad, and is an emotion you try to avoid? <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:praise" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:skynet"> <p>Technically <a href="https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/Judgment_Day" target="_blank">Judgment Day</a>, but that’s hopelessly anthropocentric: “In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.” <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:skynet" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:04:54 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s19e01-do-reply-use-plain-language-and-tell-the/</guid></item><item><title>s18e10: Sure, Fine, Crushed It; Smarts</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e10-sure-fine-crushed-it-smarts/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Friday, 17 May in Portland, Oregon, where the sky is mostly blue, the temperature is pleasant, and we don’t have to stay inside because of dangerously bad wildfire smoke. A good day!</p> <p>I am <em>not</em> going to the Code for America Summit, but I <em>am</em> going to be jealously guarding a table at the second floor bar in the Oakland Marriott at <em>exactly the same time as the Code for America Summit is happening</em>, on Thursday 30 May. Which is two weeks yesterday! What a coincidence! If you’re in the area, come and say hi. </p> <p>I’m going to be a participant in Mike Monteiro’s <em>Presenting with Confidence</em> workshop next week and it’s probably full by now. That means you should <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/presenting-work-with-confidence-tickets-908398573587?aff=oddtdtcreator" target="_blank">go to the one after that, on Thursday June 6</a>.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong> is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Sure, Fine, Crushed It</h2> <p>Sure, yes, the Apple iPad Pro hashtag-crushed-it ad and the subsequent apology<sup id="fnref:apology"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:apology">1</a></sup> caught my attention and like everyone else I have thoughts about it. </p> <p>Apple has <em>always</em> been good at brand advertising. Its product advertising has always done double duty as brand advertising. I mean, this is stating the obvious. </p> <p>The iPad Pro ad was product marketing, the whole point was the thinness. Look at all the stuff that’s crammed in here! And it was in typical Apple fashion pretty flawless execution of the message that this <em>incredibly thin thing</em> could now do <em>all of this stuff</em>.</p> <p>It feels redundant at this point to think out loud about all the of-the-moment concerns and zeitgeist of the commoditization of creativity and art, so I’ll just set all of that to the side. </p> <p>There was the whole thing about running the ad in reverse: take this thin thing, and then look at the multitudes it contains! Sure, not realizing that was a big miss. But to jump on the Oh No, Apple Is Doomed bandwagon, the easy thing to say would be that Apple’s lost its way (again), is doomed (again), and that it’s gotten its head up its ass about weirdly and finally confusing product marketing with brand marketing and just completely missed the mark on this one. It doesn’t help -- and again, this feels obvious -- that Apple is so big and so influential now. </p> <p>If you were to treat Apple like a person, which it isn’t, then you could say something like it’s been formed by early traumatic events like nearly dying and as a result made lots of decisions about needing to be independent. (Apple isn’t a person, but it’s certainly led by people). That self-sufficiency is intertwined with its independent streak (duh, think different), so it’s <em>always</em> going to be the underdog, even when it isn’t. It’s <em>always</em> going to believe it knows better and has an alternative approach because it always has! That’s what sets them apart. And it clearly isn’t the underdog now. But the other attributes are still true: it’s still an opinionated approach, but there’s a qualitatively difference when the opinionated alternative approach is coming from the player with &lt;10% market share with minimal influence than to one that while it may have minimal <em>share</em> certainly has outsize net profit, valuation, and shedloads of cash to throw around.</p> <p>The other thing that’s floating around after the most recent iPad Pro launch and caught my attention was this: that now Apple sells a $3,000 computing device that comes in two formats, where they have more in common than they have different, if you use a particular lens. </p> <p>One of them has an optional pen input device and keyboard, the other one doesn’t have an optional pen input device, but does have a keyboard. They have similar amounts of RAM and compute. But after many, many years of “but the iPad could do more if Apple let it”, the only excuse right now is that “sure, but Apple don’t actually want to let the iPad be more like a computer”. Some of these “be more like a computer” things do genuinely seem like artificial limitations of iPad OS like more background processes (one example was being able to do exports without having the app be foregrounded), and better file management. Apple would -- will, and does -- say that look most people who have iPad also have Macs, and at that point you’re like okay sure fine, it works out well for you that I buy two devices. But... they’re also quite close to each other? Sure there’s segmentation, but they’re not sufficiently well segmented?</p> <h1>1.2 Smarts</h1> <p>Two things caught my attention:</p> <ol> <li>Google’s opening up its smart home API<sup id="fnref2:smarthome"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:smarthome">2</a></sup></li> <li>Some xooglers have launched a smart mini-split heat pump system<sup id="fnref:heatpump"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:heatpump">3</a></sup></li> </ol> <p>On the first, here’s an excerpt from The Verge’s piece quoting Google Home’s engineering director:</p> <blockquote> <p>Matt Van Der Staay, engineering director at Google Home, said the Home APIs could be used to connect smart home devices to fitness or delivery apps. “You can build a complex app to manage any aspect of a smart home, or simply integrate with a smart device to solve pain points — like turning on the lights automatically before the food delivery driver arrives.”<sup id="fnref:smarthome"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:smarthome">2</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>I get this is a soundbite. I am going to <em>assume</em> that there are product people at Google who think about things like a failure mode like this, and <em>that it’s a failure mode in the first place</em>. But, consider!</p> <ol> <li>For whatever reason, I want to get food delivered</li> <li>The food delivery app (let’s say Postmates by Uber) asks for permission to access my smart home so that, like Der Staay says, my outdoor lights can turn on automatically before the food delivery driver arrives “for your safety and the driver’s safety” (I’m making that up)</li> <li>At some point (yes, citation needed), the incentives for granting smart home permissions outweigh any concerns about privacy. For example: you turn on notifications from your food delivery app because you want to know when your food is going to arrive, <strong>but that means you can’t turn off marketing notifications</strong></li> <li>So who would make the decision to stop using food delivery apps if they now come with a strong incentive to grant smart home permissions? I bet: hardly anyone. The convenience of food delivery massively outweighs the potential harm or loss of data based on giving a food delivery app access to your smart home. Even if it’s just an outside light.</li> </ol> <p>I am going to assume that there are mitigations here. They’d be something like this:</p> <ol> <li>Apps aren’t allowed to read any data about your smart home</li> <li>Apps only have access if users explicitly grant it</li> <li>That access must be periodically renewed</li> <li>Apps have to have privacy policies in place (which people won’t read)</li> <li>“the marketplace” will self correct if apps try to do bad things</li> <li>Failure to adhere to rules will result in delisting from app marketplaces</li> </ol> <p>I mean that last one is hilarious because who’s going to delist one of the major food delivery apps? I mean <em>really</em>? Practically speaking? </p> <p>I can imagine one alternative path where some sort of paternalistic government just <em>decides</em>, because it turns out that governments can actually <em>just decide</em> that actually, certain apps just can’t have access to smart home systems. Just, no. Because the market will fuck it up, the way it always does. Is that OK? Who knows! Maybe someone should find out! I mean, are food delivery apps going to suddenly stop serving those markets if they’re not allowed access to smart home platforms? Probably not?</p> <hr /> <p>How are you doing? I’m doing OK, I guess.</p> <p>Hey, <a href="https://donotreply.cards/buy" target="_blank">did you know I sell stickers now</a>? You should buy some, they’re great. They’re all about dealing with Reply Guys. People are even putting them on things. </p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr /> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:apology"> <p><a href="https://adage.com/article/digital-marketing-ad-tech-news/apple-apologizes-ipad-pro-crushed-ad-it-missed-mark/2559321" target="_blank">Apple apologizes for iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad: it ‘missed the mark’ | Ad Age</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://adage.com/article/digital-marketing-ad-tech-news/apple-apologizes-ipad-pro-crushed-ad-it-missed-mark/2559321" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Tim Nudd, Ad Age, 9 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:apology" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:smarthome"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157154/google-home-api-matter-smart-home-chromecast-google-tv" target="_blank">Google launches new Home APIs and turns Google TVs into smart home hubs - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157154/google-home-api-matter-smart-home-chromecast-google-tv" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge, 15 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:smarthome" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:smarthome" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:heatpump"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24156770/quilt-smart-heat-pump-hvac-price-release-date" target="_blank">Quilt is a heat pump system that’s pretty smart - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24156770/quilt-smart-heat-pump-hvac-price-release-date" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge, 15 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:heatpump" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Sat, 18 May 2024 00:19:45 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e10-sure-fine-crushed-it-smarts/</guid></item><item><title>s18e09: Doing What’s Important; Hidden Reasons; When They Tell You, Etc...</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e09-doing-whats-important-hidden-reasons-when/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>It’s a sunny, warm (promising to be hot, even?) Thursday 9 May 2024 in Portland, Oregon. </p> <p>No, you getting two newsletter episodes in a row the other week was not a mistake or a bug. Or, rather, it was a mistake: I did it, me, I was the problem. I apparently wrote an entire episode and forgot to send it, and in my brain-addled state also decided to send two episodes at once. Thank you to the people who got in touch to check if something had gone screwy with email which, to be fair, is something that often happens with email. </p> <p>I, um, accidentally found about 35gb of sheet music on the Internet Archive that totally should not be on the Internet Archive, so that kept me busy last night.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong> is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Doing What’s Important</h2> <p>This is something that’s caught my attention based on my recent client work. Here’s the pithy version:</p> <p>Your<sup id="fnref:your"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:your">1</a></sup> problem is:</p> <ol> <li>You can’t decide what’s important</li> <li>You can’t articulate what’s important</li> <li>You can’t prioritize what’s important</li> <li>You can’t change what you need to change so that you can do the above</li> <li>But wait: yes you can, it’s just that doing so is really hard, but not impossible.</li> </ol> <p>And also:</p> <ul> <li>If it were important, then you’d be doing it</li> <li>So why aren’t you doing it?</li> </ul> <p>Sometimes not-deciding what’s important is down to psychological reasons like being afraid of what will happen because it will involve change (see: 4. “You can’t change what you need to change” etc) and change necessarily involves the chance that the change won’t go the way you want. But that way lies growth and improvement, and you <em>definitely</em> don’t get better without changing what you’re doing!</p> <p>Sometimes not-deciding is down to unpleasant consequences and the pain of having to make a decision in the first place. Let’s assume that you have a very long list of very important things that need to be done, and that lots of people contribute to that list. Some of those people are at least as important as you, some of them may be more important than you. </p> <p>You can’t do everything, though. You just can’t. You can avoid confronting this reality (a tactic many people use both professionally and personally!), but deep down you might understand that <em>not choosing is also making a choice</em>. </p> <p>The best you can do, at a high level, is to do one thing at a time<sup id="fnref:one"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:one">2</a></sup>. When you have done that thing, then you move on to the next thing. You can deal with too-many-things-to-do by getting other people with whom you have obligations to agree to prioritization. </p> <p>(This prioritization only works well if you’ve got a demonstrated ability to reasonably deliver on the things that have been prioritized. If you don’t, then... you’re back to trying to do everything for everyone, but “badly”, or even worse)</p> <p>Deciding what’s important is hard work! On the one hand I get that people want to <em>retreat</em> to go do it. You totally need to concentrate. It’s also a consequential decision! </p> <p>But once you’ve done that, then you need people to understand what’s important (whether they like it or not!), and then figure out what you need to change to achieve those important things. And those things might also be significant changes.</p> <p>One of the reasons that deciding what’s important is hard work, I think, is that it’s also... emotionally draining? You need to have a certain degree of resilience (and the capacity, at that time, for that resilience) and to have pretty good boundaries! Because not only is your work interpersonal and inter-relational (you are, after all, working with other people), but it is <em>work</em> and not your life. At least, I hope so. There is something more important than your work. </p> <p>The emotionally draining part is that you may need to confront a whole bunch of things that you wish weren’t true. In Most Regular Human Beings Who Aren’t Unnaturally Mentally Healthy, “not being good at something” easily brings up feelings of guilt and shame, of which your two responses are essentially: hide/freeze and get-the-fuck-out-there-and-kill-something. (Don’t do the latter, it either results in jail time (hopefully! who knows these days!) or yelling (being abusive: not great)). </p> <p>People, in general, don’t like confronting stuff they don’t like. </p> <p>Here’s an example: they may not like confronting stuff they don’t like <em>so much</em> that not only do they not know what their current performance is, they will not be open to or actively resist measuring how they’re doing in any way, even helpful ones. They may have good reasons for this: the last time it might have happened they might have been yelled at or fired or whatever. Also they likely were yelled at when they were a kid when what they needed was a hug. I’m serious. Of course it’s reasonable then to not trust someone who comes in and says “hey, let’s find out what we’re doing, I promise no bad consequences”. </p> <p>(You should probably unionize.)</p> <p>No wonder deciding what’s important and then acting on it is hard. </p> <p>That’s before you get to obfuscatory language like, uh using the word “obfuscatory”. This is super easy to spot from a distance when, for example, you see a slide that says:</p> <ol> <li>We are late</li> <li>We don’t know how much later we’re going to be</li> </ol> <p>But actually uses a couple hundred words and several graphs and 2+ slides that also include lines that are going up and to the right.</p> <p>There may be totally understandable reasons for being late and not knowing how much later you’re going to be, but it’s still really hard to be candid and clear. </p> <p>I mean, another example which goes straight back to the pithy opening, is this statement:</p> <ol> <li>We don’t know what’s important</li> <li>We can’t decide what’s important</li> <li>We aren’t treating what’s important, important.</li> </ol> <p>That’s what your problem is! You don’t <em>need</em> to write more. If you’re writing more, you’re most likely avoiding pain. </p> <p>What’s not funny is that everyone mostly knows this is the problem in the first place, it’s that <em>nobody wants to say it out loud</em>, so you get situations where if you’re lucky, someone will go first and then the floodgates open and everyone is relieved that the elephant in the room is suddenly visible. Like, you can <em>see</em> the physically palpable relief in body language. </p> <p>I bring this up because I’ve been doing it again lately, and it’s super fun. At least, it’s super fun with the clients I work with, because they appreciate the clarity (very much so) and I’m honest that part of what they’re getting is someone from the outside confirming a lot of what they already know. Turns out that when you’re stuck, that’s worth a lot of money for where it gets you, given your default alternative is to not do anything. Which works out pretty ok for me, to be honest.</p> <h2>1.2 Hidden Reasons</h2> <p>So here’s what caught my attention with Sonos, the set of speakers that don’t work well with Apple products:</p> <ul> <li>They launched a new mobile app<sup id="fnref:app"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:app">3</a></sup></li> <li>It doesn’t do things that some people use a lot<sup id="fnref:nothappy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:nothappy">4</a></sup></li> <li>They’ve got some new products coming out<sup id="fnref:roam"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:roam">5</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:ace"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ace">6</a></sup></li> </ul> <p>One way of looking at this is “why did Sonos launch a redesign of their app that lacks critical functionality for people”. I’ll set aside the entire “the internet exists for people to complain about stuff” and instead ask a question like: what would make a product manager decide that this feature set was acceptable?</p> <p>Here’s what Sonos said in their community forums:</p> <blockquote> <p>The redesigned Sonos app was built from the ground up to support both modern and future Sonos experiences, and as part of that, we’ll be implementing ongoing improvements and enhancements over time. On May 7, the app will have basic support for screen readers, allowing you to swipe through and read through all items on the screen. Following launch, ongoing improvements to the accessibility of the updated mobile app will remain a top priority. A software release available May 21 will improve screen readers so you can select items on screen in any order. Further improvement will be added to the experience regularly until we reach parity with the S2 app by late June.<sup id="fnref:support"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:support">7</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>I read this as a long version of: “we are updating the app over time and adding things back to it over time”, which is a bit like the “we determined this feature set was what was minimally viable for launch and we’re doing the regular thing of just iterating over it, hopefully with updates that are more significant than “bug fixes and performance improvements””.</p> <p>Anyway, over a long period of time I’ve learned:</p> <ol> <li>The word “just”, as in “this is just a case of”, or “why don’t they just”, or “you just have to” is a load-bearing word, i.e. frequently hides or hand-waves a shit-ton of work</li> <li>You don’t know the internal reasons why decisions were made</li> </ol> <p>I’m thinking about the second one, the hidden internal reasons about why the decision was made to ship the Sonos app in this way. As a caveat, we’re totally open to <em>disagree</em> with the resulting decisions. But it’s worth it, I think, to understand why (from our point of view) the wrong decision was made. For good reasons, I think, that I’ll get to if I stick this landing.</p> <p>I chatted about this with Rod Begbie on Threads<sup id="fnref:threads"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:threads">8</a></sup>.</p> <p>There’s one really easy reason:</p> <ol> <li>They had new hardware coming out.</li> <li>The new hardware needed new software support.</li> </ol> <p>But now your software that supports the new hardware isn’t as feature complete as you’d like. So you have to make a decision:</p> <ol> <li>Delay the hardware release (until the software is feature complete for existing products)</li> <li>Release the hardware (and wait for the software for existing products to catch up)</li> </ol> <p>The hardware makes money for the publicly listed company. The software doesn’t. </p> <p>The hardware will be built into revenue expectations.</p> <p>The hardware is atoms either being moved around, which costs money, or being stored somewhere, which costs money, and has been made, which also costs money. </p> <p>There’s a couple other entirely understandable and relatable factors as well. In the thread<sup id="fnref2:threads"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:threads">8</a></sup>, Rob pointed out the shocker that the estimate for software delivery was likely off, and Charles Wiltgen pointed out that Sonos are doing a rewrite with Flutter<sup id="fnref:flutter"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:flutter">9</a></sup>. That post was from May 4, 2022 -- two years ago! -- which also handwavedly lines up with “it takes a long time to get hardware right”. If you want advice about whether you should do a ground-up rewrite, one person you should check with runs a bar in San Francisco<sup id="fnref:rewrite"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:rewrite">10</a></sup>. (There’s a bit of this in Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert’s writeup of Yet Another Ruby JIT and how “rewriting” works better when it’s done inside something else<sup id="fnref:maxime"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:maxime">11</a></sup>; an adjacent govtech/enterprise tech version of this is “don’t do big bangs”<sup id="fnref:bigbang"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bigbang">12</a></sup>).</p> <p>I digress. </p> <p>The reason why the software was released in the state that it was was because of money was because of business. That’s it. That’s all there is. </p> <p>This next bit isn’t really a hidden reason, it’s more of a bit of a rant about “are you kidding me?!”</p> <p>Charlie Humble-Thomas did a great bit of work for as part of his Masters in Design Products at the RCA; there’s a writeup in Core77 <sup id="fnref:howlong"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:howlong">13</a></sup> of his “How long <em>should</em> objects last?” project<sup id="fnref:rca"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:rca">14</a></sup>. </p> <p>It’s thorough work! And I think it has a giant glaring blind spot?</p> <p>Here’s a bit of a description of what he was trying to do:</p> <blockquote> <p>Conditional Longevity asks the question, 'How long should objects last?' through the medium of umbrellas. If we hope to move towards a truly circular economy and rethink traditional consumerism, a better understanding of the consequences of the choices designers make is crucial. Each umbrella explores a unique take on approaching longevity, and users are presented with the impact data, downsides and benefits of each. The aim is to open up the debate on which strategies in product design are truly 'best' suited to our needs.</p> </blockquote> <p>The project does this thing where it presupposes that having a conversation about the issue is a good thing. There’s a lot of stuff to go in the conversation!</p> <blockquote> <p>This project looks to start a richer conversation around our problematic relationship with the material world and the objects we own. It's about challenging our preconceptions, and unpicking our beliefs around what is 'right' or 'wrong'.</p> </blockquote> <p>and</p> <blockquote> <p>The most profound conclusion this project has given is that we must begin to assess how proportionate the objects we use are to their intended use. Their impact can be expressed as a ratio expressed below:</p> </blockquote> <p>I feel like I am being stupid here. The decision about how long an object should last is, right now, made by businesses in an economic environment that, in the west, has not so much a laissez-faire attitude as a, well, something even more extreme than that. (Yes, sure the Biden administration is flexing its muscles at, for some reason, late in the game, presumably for Headlines close to election season; yes the EU is doing, well, exactly what it is that the EU does in terms of autocratic paternalist mostly-good, mostly well-intended regulation). </p> <p>Who is this conversation with? It kind of frustrates me in that it <em>looks</em> like designers dancing around <em>what can design do</em> and <em>the responsibility of design</em> when I think the clearer issue is <em>design only has agency in what’s permitted by the economic environment</em>. Right now, as a designer, it seems like people will pay attention to you <em>if you generate revenue</em>. This is what put this beside/close to the whole Sonos deal in my head. </p> <h2>1.3 When They Tell You, Etc...</h2> <p>Look, Threads is not a replacement reverse-chronological social network for following only the people you want to follow. It is an advertising platform for Meta. That much has been clear. It is doing things that are open in as much as they make sense to Meta (for a variety of reasons), and also appears to be doing those in a deliberate way that aren’t entirely shitty in terms of “federating”. </p> <p>But, look at this surprise from Threads’ product director:</p> <blockquote> <p>It’s important that people understand how their Threads posts perform, so we’re rolling out the ability to tap anywhere on a post to display its total view count. We’ve got more work to do, but I think this is a great first step in giving creators the some of the data they’ve been asking for.<sup id="fnref:mosseri"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:mosseri">15</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>When people tell or show you what they are, then... that’s what they are?</p> <ol> <li>“It’s important that people understand how their posts perform” versus “people have told us it’s important to understand how their posts perform”</li> <li>“This is a great first step in giving creators some of the data they’ve been asking for”, i.e. prioritizing the needs of “creators”</li> </ol> <p>There is no evidence, I think, that Threads has chosen to apply anything learned from shitty creator-driven experiences on other platforms, including ones they own. </p> <p>This is a strong signal that I’m going to see more shitty copy-pasted spam/scam farming accounts reposting stuff from elsewhere, never mind providing a tighter feedback loop for generative AI slop. </p> <p>I thought before that Threads would win because it was the Mall that everyone would go to, that all the Brands would be in and would be a Safe Place, and yes, I think that’s still coming to pass, but in the most anodyne, boring way possible, which I guess makes total sense if I’m calling it a Mall. Which I am, so there. </p> <p>It’s a Mall Meta owns. Mall owners make money by:</p> <ul> <li>renting the space out to people who sell stuff in it</li> </ul> <p>Landlords, duh. Sure there’s finer points here like “making sure you get the best retailers in because you get people who spend lots of money so you can charge the most for rent”, but eh. </p> <p>But! Computers mean we can make everything worse if we want to!</p> <p>So this is a Mall with:</p> <ul> <li>infinite space for sellers</li> <li>that will make money on advertising</li> <li>that will likely make money on providing retail services to sellers</li> <li>and generates engagement data to fuel the totally net productive internet advertising market</li> </ul> <p>One of the deals with launching a new social network is that when you sign up to it there’s nothing there, and if there’s nothing there, then you leave. People running social networks don’t like that because a) running them is expensive, and b) if there’s nobody there then you don’t get to make money. Sure.</p> <p>Threads dealt with this by... just showing you what appeared to be random shit that you might or not be interested in, or worst case, that you <em>definitely were not interested in</em> and would rage-bait you. </p> <p>At this point, in my default Threads feed which of course is not the reverse-chronological “just people I’m following and the stuff they’re doing” feed, I’m seeing replies from people I follow to accounts that have, like, 20 followers. And have 3 posts. And the people I follow aren’t following those accounts. And those accounts are clearly spam/farming accounts. So I have to ask: <em>how did those posts even get in front of people I know</em></p> <p>I mean, I’m not interested in how, that doesn’t matter. I’m not even interested in why; I already answered that question above. </p> <p>I’m just... tired? Sad? Spending time there anyway, as well as on Bluesky and Mastodon?</p> <hr /> <p>Oops, that was long. Sorry. But at least it was a while since the last one. </p> <p>Hey, <a href="https://donotreply.cards/buy" target="_blank">did you know I sell stickers now</a>? You should buy some, they’re great. </p> <p>Oh, right. How are you doing?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr /> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:your"> <p>The work-context professional “you” here, which may be you personally in a professional context and role and responsibility, it may also be an aggregated organizational unit like “your team”, or “your department”, or “your entire organization”, but the other point here is that it’s all people in the end&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:your" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:one"> <p>I mean sure, maybe you can concentrate on making progress on three things at a time, but let’s make this simple and make it just one thing at a time.&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:one" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:app"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/10/24125866/sonos-new-app-features" target="_blank">This is the new Sonos app, coming May 7th - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/10/24125866/sonos-new-app-features" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Chris Welch, The Verge, 10 April 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:app" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:nothappy"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24151704/sonos-new-app-bad-reviews-missing-features" target="_blank">The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24151704/sonos-new-app-bad-reviews-missing-features" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Chris Welch, The Verge, 8 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:nothappy" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:roam"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151392/sonos-roam-2-speaker-features-design-exclusive" target="_blank">This is the Sonos Roam 2 portable speaker - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/7/24151392/sonos-roam-2-speaker-features-design-exclusive" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), still Chris Welch, The Verge, 7 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:roam" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:ace"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/6/24150573/sonos-ace-headphones-reveal-leak-wireless" target="_blank">These are the upcoming Sonos Ace wireless headphones - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/6/24150573/sonos-ace-headphones-reveal-leak-wireless" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), it’s Chris Welch again!, The Verge, 6 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ace" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:support"> <p><a href="https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-and-music-services-228995/new-sonos-app-and-accessibility-6892068" target="_blank">New Sonos App and Accessibility | Sonos Community</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-and-music-services-228995/new-sonos-app-and-accessibility-6892068" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Keith N, “Sonos Staff”, Sonos Community, 7 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:support" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:threads"> <p><a href="https://www.threads.net/@danhon/post/C6wN2_vrsgU" target="_blank">Me, on threads, today</a>&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:threads" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">&#8617;</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:threads" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:flutter"> <p><a href="https://tech-blog.sonos.com/posts/renovating-setup-with-flutter/" target="_blank">Renovating Setup, With Flutter | Sonos Tech Blog</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://tech-blog.sonos.com/posts/renovating-setup-with-flutter/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Patrick Celentano and Shih-Chang Hsiung, Sonos Tech Blog, May 4 2022&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:flutter" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:rewrite"> <p><a href="https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html" target="_blank">The CADT Model</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), jwz, 2003, jwz.org&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:rewrite" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:maxime"> <p><a href="https://pointersgonewild.com/2024/04/20/the-alternative-implementation-problem/" target="_blank">The Alternative Implementation Problem | Pointers Gone Wild</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://pointersgonewild.com/2024/04/20/the-alternative-implementation-problem/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:maxime" title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:bigbang"> <p>Honestly the whole deal with big bangs is that duh they would make a big bang, and while that in a sense worked out pretty well for us (we exist), it can be argued that the event was certainly <em>disruptive</em>&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bigbang" title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:howlong"> <p><a href="https://www.core77.com/posts/132088/Fantastic-Industrial-Design-Student-Work-How-Long-Should-Objects-Last" target="_blank">Fantastic Industrial Design Student Work: "How Long Should Objects Last?" - Core77</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.core77.com/posts/132088/Fantastic-Industrial-Design-Student-Work-How-Long-Should-Objects-Last" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Rain Noe, Core 77, 6 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:howlong" title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:rca"> <p><a href="https://2021.rca.ac.uk/students/charlie-humble-thomas/" target="_blank">RCA 2021 | Charlie Humble-Thomas</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://2021.rca.ac.uk/students/charlie-humble-thomas/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:rca" title="Jump back to footnote 14 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:mosseri"> <p><a href="https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C6wUSRmrNkW" target="_blank">Adam Mosseri on Threads</a>, 9 May 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:mosseri" title="Jump back to footnote 15 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2024 18:29:06 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e09-doing-whats-important-hidden-reasons-when/</guid></item><item><title>s18e08: I Don’t Know, A Skateboard Or Something</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e08-i-dont-know-a-skateboard-or-something/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Monday, 29 April 2024 in Portland, Oregon, where it has gone cold and rainy again.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong> is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.</p> <p><strong>Next, on Very Little Gravitas</strong>, my general-purpose consulting vehicle: my calendar is opening up for late-June/early July, so get in touch if you have a problem you’d be exceedingly excited to have solved and off your plate. <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com" target="_blank">Here’s what I do</a>.</p> <h2>0.2 More Events You Should Go To</h2> <p>You should go to Mike Monterio’s <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/presenting-work-with-confidence-tickets-890515865927?aff=oddtdtcreator" target="_blank">Presenting with Confidence workshop</a> on May 9-10. I’m going to go. </p> <p>Every so often Mike gives me advice about working with clients and he’s not wrong. I mean, he’s pretty direct about it which can sometimes make you feel weird, but he’s also <em>not wrong</em>. I’ve been presenting for a stupid long time, potentially distressingly even longer than some of you have been alive, and you can always get better. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/presenting-work-with-confidence-tickets-890515865927?aff=oddtdtcreator" target="_blank">So you should go to this</a>.</p> <p>If you’re all “oh no will my work pay for this” and you have to give some horrific corporate justification as to why your extremely profitable and even moreso now they’re downsizing and you’re having to do more work in less time employers should pay for this, then you can always point out they’d be <em>saving money</em> by you doing this workshop, because your presentations will be better. Like, that’s a good thing. Really, not going on it has a high chance of destroying shareholder value. Going on it at least contributes to line going up and to the right.</p> <p>And for you? Oh my gosh it’s <em>transferrable skills</em> or whatever. Also I bet it’s great for negotiating with your employer. Just go, okay?</p> <p>In exchange for telling the truth about the utility of this workshop, I am receiving one (1) comp registration to the workshop, which means those of you attending the one I’m in will see how bad I am at presenting with confidence.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 I Don’t Know, A Skateboard Or Something</h2> <p>A couple things here. </p> <p>First! A 2023 report from the Mozilla Foundation, “Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy”<sup id="fnref:mozilla"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:mozilla">1</a></sup>.</p> <p>Second! Kevin Fury on Threads, commenting on the news that Mercedes-Benz has bailed on next-generation CarPlay support<sup id="fnref:benz"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:benz">2</a></sup>:</p> <blockquote> <p>It does feel odd that a company whose core belief is that the best results come from controlling both the software and hardware design is pushing the ‘full-ui-takeover” model for CarPlay.<sup id="fnref:fury"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:fury">3</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>“Next-generation CarPlay”<sup id="fnref:ngcarplay"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ngcarplay">4</a></sup> was something Apple previewed at WWDC 2022 and the gist of it was “what if CarPlay, the thing that makes car systems significantly more usable, but on all the screens in your car”. </p> <p>At the time, Apple was allegedly working on its Car project, which it’s allegedly also since canned. This strategy was always a bit confusing to me, but then I’m not on the inside and not privy to all the reasons why decisions were made. Anyway, what’s going on here?</p> <p>Is it this? </p> <blockquote> <p>As a Car Manufacturer, I Want Apple to take over all the screens in my car and own the digital user experience, So That... what? So That people will choose to buy my car over other manufacturers’ cars? So That I can concentrate on the car-ness of the car? </p> <p>As a Car Buyer, I Want to buy a Car with CarPlay in it So That I can have a car experience that doesn’t suck?</p> </blockquote> <p>Were Apple betting that people would really choose whether or not to buy a car based on its integration with Apple’s ecosystem?</p> <p>I mean, it’s not a bad bet. Cars that don’t have CarPlay do suck. This doesn’t mean that CarPlay sucks, just that cars <em>without</em> CarPlay suck. </p> <p>There was all this gnashing around “can Apple get better at cars before car manufacturers get better at software”, and the general position seems to be:</p> <ul> <li>making cars is hard</li> <li>making [good] software is hard</li> </ul> <p>and that people who think that making good software is possible “if you do it like Apple or Google does” are discounting the <em>decades</em>-worth of institutional and cultural practice of building software in whatever way they chosen to use to make software. </p> <p>(Also that “making hardware” is easy because Apple can do it is actually more like “making hardware that benefits from the changes in the hardware ecosystem wrought by the Apples of the world is easier and cheaper than it was before”)</p> <p>These are not new positions, they’re the whole “can you even product, bro?” and the trite position of “if you could do it, you’d be doing it.”</p> <p>Anyway. I am not surprised that Mercedes-Benz would change its decision here! There is a bit of a standoff here! Car makers are increasingly reluctant to cede or acknowledge that software-is-eating-the-world of “what’s a Car?”<sup id="fnref:computer"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:computer">5</a></sup> that’s increasingly being taken literally by the kind of people who go into rooms and say “no, you don’t go build a car first, you go build a skateboard because the <em>job-to-be-done</em> is getting from one place to another”<sup id="fnref:jobtobedone"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:jobtobedone">6</a></sup>. I don’t blame them, for the entire car-ness issue above, plus the fact that Apple, a Very Big And Dominant Company In Some Markets, is able to dictate commercial terms if you want to deal with it. </p> <p>(Unless you’re Netflix.)</p> <p>I am burying the lede.</p> <p>One way Apple could distinguish CarPlay and, well, put it in opposition with car manufacturers who are trying to computer their cars is on the privacy angle. </p> <p>Apple loves Privacy<sup id="fnref:privacy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:privacy">7</a></sup>. They have a whole page about it! They’re not wrong about it being important! A lot of their really super funny sulkily-compliant implementation of meeting the requirements of the EU’s Digital Markets Act goes on about “well sure you can do this but then we can’t protect you from all the bad things, which include bad people who don’t respect your privacy like we do”, which sure, true, <em>and</em> is at the very least somewhat orthogonal to “but can I have some choice also please” in terms of editorial selection. </p> <p>Cars, it turns out? Not so private.</p> <p>CarPlay could totally be private. Maybe it already is!</p> <p>Just saying.</p> <p>Car manufacturers will hate this because data is the new whatever, and hey, if you’ve got data then it might be valuable or whatever, never mind if it is <em>actually</em> valuable or creates value, it sure is valuable to someone else who wants to play let’s-play-who’s-paying-to-hold-the-data-bag.</p> <p>Legislation might be interesting though. Badly implemented legislation would be even better, would love cookie interstitials before I drive anywhere.</p> <h2>1.2 Something about Generative AI</h2> <p>This is just a placeholder. I have a whole thing about the times I try to use generative AI for writing and how each time it’s not quite useful for me. Not just not quite useful. Irritating and frustrating. </p> <p>But it has been useful in writing some code! </p> <p>I’m going to come back to this.</p> <hr /> <p>That’s it. Buy some of my stickers! They’re great. <a href="https://buy.donotreply.cards/products/do-not-reply-cards-sticker-sheet" target="_blank">You get a 10% discount</a> and all of that. </p> <p>How are you doing?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr /> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:mozilla"> <p><a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/" target="_blank">It’s Official: Cars Are Terrible at Privacy and Security</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:mozilla" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:benz"> <p><a href="https://9to5mac.com/2024/04/29/mercedes-benz-next-gen-carplay/" target="_blank">Why this automaker just bailed on next-gen CarPlay - 9to5Mac</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://9to5mac.com/2024/04/29/mercedes-benz-next-gen-carplay/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Chance Miller, 9to5Mac, 29 April 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:benz" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:fury"> <p><a href="https://www.threads.net/@kfury/post/C6WjviQJ_je" target="_blank">(4) @kfury • It does feel odd that a company whose core belief is that the best results come from controlling ... • Threads</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.threads.net/@kfury/post/C6WjviQJ_je" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Kevin Fury, Threads, 29 April 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:fury" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:ngcarplay"> <p><a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/06/apple-announces-multi-display-carplay/" target="_blank">Apple Announces Multi-Display CarPlay With Integrated Speedometer, Climate Controls, and More - MacRumors</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/06/apple-announces-multi-display-carplay/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Joe Rossignol, MacRumors, 6 June 2022&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ngcarplay" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:computer"> <p>Apple’s What’s a Computer ad for the iPad Pro and iOS 11(!), which I can’t find on Apple’s official YouTube channel, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S5BLs51yDQ" target="_blank">here’s this instead</a>.&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:computer" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:jobtobedone"> <p>I mean, it’s an example. It’s not to be taken literally. I have used it as an example or a way to teach people. But, you know. Don’t do this.&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:jobtobedone" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:privacy"> <p><a href="https://www.apple.com/privacy/" target="_blank">Privacy - Apple</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.apple.com/privacy/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:privacy" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2024 18:18:09 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e08-i-dont-know-a-skateboard-or-something/</guid></item><item><title>s18e07: Do Not Reply Stickers; Computers were a Bad Idea; Two Things About Startups; and more tidbits</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e07-do-not-reply-stickers-computers-were-a-bad/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>A sunny and crisp Monday April 22nd in Portland, Oregon. </p> <p>Lately I’ve been flashing back to 1995, 16 years old and buying Oasis’s (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory and belting it out on the piano by... being a dad in his 40s and sitting down at the piano and belting the album out.</p> <p>Some tidbits this week.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong> is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.</p> <p>Last session had some big updates, the upshot of which is that the 1.0 talk will run to about 90 minutes to give everything time to breathe. And me time to breathe, to be honest.</p> <p>This newsletter is where you’ll find out about the next session.</p> <p><strong>Next, on Very Little Gravitas</strong>, my general-purpose consulting vehicle: my calendar is opening up for late-June/early July, so get in touch if you have a problem you’d be exceedingly excited to have solved and off your plate. <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com" target="_blank">Here’s what I do</a>.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Do Not Reply Cards, but Stickers</h2> <p><a href="https://florian.framer.website" target="_blank">Florian Fangohr</a> and I have still been working away at the Do Not Reply cards<sup id="fnref:dnr"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:dnr">1</a></sup>, of which you can now buy stickers!</p> <p>They’re pretty fun. I spent a long long long time working on the copy for the stickers -- turns out that the copy that works for cards you post on social media next to/with your posts doesn’t quite work in the context of a sticker on a water bottle or laptop or whatever.</p> <p>Here are two of my favorite new designs:</p> <p>We’re selling the set of 15 for $35, you absolutely do not get any bonus stickers, and 10% of the proceeds go to <a href="https://translifeline.org" target="_blank">Trans Lifeline</a>.</p> <p>... and you, my dear newsletter readers, can <a href="https://buy.donotreply.cards/discount/newsletter?redirect=%2Fproducts%2Fdo-not-reply-cards-sticker-sheet" target="_blank">buy Do Not Reply stickers with a 10% discount</a>!</p> <p>This is also a reminder for anyone who has “done a thing” and gets anxious and the sweats about “telling people about the thing”, which is to say: you have to tell people about the thing otherwise nobody will know about it. Which is how I’m justifying tell you all about this thing right now. It is not skeezy to tell people about your thing.</p> <p>If you happen to be the kind of person who runs a shop or influences the kind of people who run a shop (say, a museum shop? A gallery shop? Some other sort of really cool shop where really cool people buy really cool things?) then drop me a line and make me freak out about learning how to do wholesale. Ha.</p> <h2>1.2 Small things</h2> <h3>Computers were just a bad idea</h3> <p>Long story short, HiSense TVs have a bad universal plug-and-play implementation (which is the software standard involved in a thing telling other things on a network that it can do a thing, so other things can talk to it). That implementation means that Windows gets super confused if a thing instead of advertising itself as <em>one</em> thing, ends up advertising itself as <em>a gazillion things</em> (technical term), with the end result that your Windows computer becomes unusable<sup id="fnref:hisense"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:hisense">2</a></sup>.</p> <p><em>Caught my attention because:</em> look, if you read priscilla’s writeup, this was pretty much impossible to diagnose but for the fact that they were able to google for a resulting reddit thread based on the symptoms. But the actual reason -- another smart device on the network being ill-behaved means that <em>these days</em>, it could be any number of things, from the apocryphal non-existent backdoored bluetooth toothbrush, to, I don’t know, a coffee mug. We are so screwed. </p> <h3>T-Shaped Pylons</h3> <p>The UK got some new electricity transmission pylons and they’re T-shaped<sup id="fnref:pylons"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:pylons">3</a></sup> and a) they look super cool, and b) super... European? </p> <p><em>Caught my attention because:</em> Infrastructure!</p> <h3>Centering Things</h3> <p>Centering things is hard<sup id="fnref:centering"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:centering">4</a></sup>, a blog post that goes into extreme detail into the practical work of “centering something”. </p> <p><em>Caught my attention because:</em> Abstractions all the way down, the importance of paying attention to detail, and the effort/trade-off involved in paying attention to detail and ease of (good enough?) implementation.</p> <h3>Two things about “startups”</h3> <p>The first is Benjamin Sandofsky’s notes on the failure of the Humane Pin<sup id="fnref:sandofsky"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:sandofsky">5</a></sup>, which goes into how funding for startups works versus non-vc funded businesses, and how some of the lessons people can learn from being at Apple (i.e. the backing of the world’s largest company by market capitalization) don’t really translate to being a startup business. Also, panicking at turning some interesting hardware into a mass-market consumer product, not being able to do it in time, and then “pivoting” to whatever the hot thing is at the moment, i.e. voice-based LLM interfaces.</p> <p>(Of which! Voice-based LLM interfaces! Such a hot mess right now! A lot of the problems in voice interfaces like lack of discoverability and opaqueness of features that invariably just lead to frustration are still not solved! Maybe they can’t be! Certainly they can’t be with the current state of capability!)</p> <p>Secondly, and somewhat relatedly, Steve Blank on what it was like doing sales-driven product development at a startup<sup id="fnref:blank"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:blank">6</a></sup>, of which the big takeaway lesson when you want an executive to commit to using something is <em>knowing what it would take to get them to use it and then calling their bluff</em>, which in this case is working up a fully-cancellable sales order, because at least then they’ve got to figure out who’s going to sign something.</p> <p><em>Caught my attention because:</em> product development. </p> <h3>Buggy buggy bug bugs</h3> <p>Matt Johnson-Pint keeps a list of leap day bugs, and he has a list of 2024’s leap day bugs<sup id="fnref:leapday"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:leapday">7</a></sup>. My favorite is the one about streetlights in Paris.</p> <p><em>Caught my attention because:</em> Software! Again! </p> <p>Oh wait. Here’s a paper suggesting that we might have to add a negative leap-second<sup id="fnref:negative"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:negative">8</a></sup>, which I have to imagine is a hilarious concept for software developers who already need to keep up to date on the falsehoods they believe about time<sup id="fnref:time"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:time">9</a></sup>. </p> <hr /> <p>OK, that’s enough! I’ve had a busy last couple of weeks. How have you been?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:dnr"> <p><a href="https://donotreply.cards/" target="_blank">DONOTREPLY.CARDS</a>&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:dnr" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:hisense"> <p><a href="https://cohost.org/ghoulnoise/post/5286766-do-not-buy-hisense-t" target="_blank">cohost! - "DO NOT BUY HISENSE TV'S LOL (Or at least keep them offline)"</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://cohost.org/ghoulnoise/post/5286766-do-not-buy-hisense-t" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), priscilla, cohost, 19 April 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:hisense" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:pylons"> <p><a href="https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-energise-worlds-first-t-pylons" target="_blank">National Grid energise world’s first T-pylons | National Grid Group</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-energise-worlds-first-t-pylons" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:pylons" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:centering"> <p><a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/" target="_blank">Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things @ tonsky.me</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:centering" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:sandofsky"> <p><a href="https://www.sandofsky.com/humane/" target="_blank">Oh the Humanity</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.sandofsky.com/humane/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Benjamin Sandofsky, Sandofsky, 15 April 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:sandofsky" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:blank"> <p><a href="https://steveblank.com/2024/04/16/founders-need-to-be-ruthless-when-chasing-deals/" target="_blank">Steve Blank Founders Need to Be Ruthless When Chasing Deals</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://steveblank.com/2024/04/16/founders-need-to-be-ruthless-when-chasing-deals/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:blank" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:leapday"> <p><a href="https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/" target="_blank">List of 2024 Leap Day Bugs</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:leapday" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:negative"> <p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07170-0.epdf?sharing_token=lHNUG1FiXR8nety5EOr5t9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0M8eI6W1yLpWHEpE-RIkTCyYE2WIbRIkp2z3i1LfYhEU88PHSeUI1stl5h3GkpdTT8xDBjPOzMIPZ_U79VFv4Y44bCJh9xSF6ZBOXmiyxDiRlCEw0Es6uvODULXzADPfoj478uBxgGoidaXl6zewUtB2shppJtLl_9ghvobUAYSecqraWTGnf_CuhHnOrn_9D4%3D&amp;tracking_referrer=www.washingtonpost.com" target="_blank">A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming | Nature</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07170-0.epdf?sharing_token=lHNUG1FiXR8nety5EOr5t9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0M8eI6W1yLpWHEpE-RIkTCyYE2WIbRIkp2z3i1LfYhEU88PHSeUI1stl5h3GkpdTT8xDBjPOzMIPZ_U79VFv4Y44bCJh9xSF6ZBOXmiyxDiRlCEw0Es6uvODULXzADPfoj478uBxgGoidaXl6zewUtB2shppJtLl_9ghvobUAYSecqraWTGnf_CuhHnOrn_9D4%3D&amp;tracking_referrer=www.washingtonpost.com" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:negative" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:time"> <p><a href="https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca" target="_blank">Falsehoods programmers believe about time, in a single list</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:time" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2024 18:18:07 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e07-do-not-reply-stickers-computers-were-a-bad/</guid></item><item><title>s18e06: Low-Hanging Fruit, Information Processing, and People Problems</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e06-low-hanging-fruit-information-processing/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>A grey Thursday morning in Portland, Oregon, on April 4, 2024. </p> <p>For April fools this week, Florian and I switched the homepage of our Do Not Reply cards to an <a href="https://donotreply.cards/ai">AI version</a>, but don’t tell anyone my secret.</p> <p>OK, my secret was this: I spent a bunch of time with Chat-GPT4 prompting and tweaking and prompting to generate Bad Do Not Reply Cards and it definitely generated bad ones, but they were not bad enough to be funny, and not bad enough to be good. </p> <p>What they were, though, was bad enough to make me mad to write better bad ones, which is what I did. I think mine were funnier. </p> <p>A big step: for a long while, the social share images for each episode were done in Affinity Photo, of all places. Now they&#39;re in Figma. Look, mum, look dad! I&#39;m a proper designer now!</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack">Hallway Track</a></strong>, my sporadic, free, small-group online event not-a-salon is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement has its next test on April 10, at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern. </p> <p>This update has bug fixes and general performance and stability improvements. </p> <p>Come along to learn the techniques and approaches I’ve found to work:</p> <ul> <li>at different stages of procurement, from development to last-minute;</li> <li>in different contexts, from informal to formal review, with program or executive leaders; and</li> <li>whether your role is as a consultant or staff.</li> </ul> <p>As of writing, there’s four places left. Come join us!</p> <p><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord">Wednesday April 10</a>, 11am Pacific/ 2pm Eastern, at a ~90% testing discount.</p> <hr> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>Just one thing today.</p> <h2>1.1 Low-Hanging Fruit, Information Processing, and People Problems</h2> <p>This one has been hanging around in my subconsciousness for a while. I’m also not sure how I feel about it as I worry it’s going to make me out as a pessimist, when I want to be seen as “an optimist, but not the bad kind”.</p> <p>I’m wondering about whether “tech” -- and by that I mean “software running on computers” has hit a wall because most of the easy problems (or opportunities, really) have been figured out to a good-enough extent.</p> <p>Let me try again: software has gotten good at solving most of the problems that can be solved by software. </p> <p>OK, let’s try that again: software is pretty good now at information processing and data processing. Yeah, I know, that’s a fairly sweeping statement that requires a bunch of citations to back it up. </p> <p>Another (trite?) version: the easy things have been done, because they are easy. By “easy”, I mean “counting things” or “doing maths to things”, or “figuring out what maths to do”, or “doing lots of maths, to lots of things, very quickly”. Information processing, I guess. </p> <p>Fine, Dan. Whatever. Give me some examples. Sure! Let’s see if these fit: supply-chain management. ERP systems. Sure, there can be <em>bad implementations</em>, but... they work? To the extent that there are massive, complicated, international supply chains, that a lot of that work is Done On Computer, to various degrees of computering. </p> <p>Or how about this one: the idea that most of the world runs on spreadsheets, specifically Excel spreadsheets. After you reach a certain level of experience, I think you go through stages of realization and acceptance (of course it does!) and then quickly to terror (or course it does?!) and then to pragmatism (or course it does), in that nothing <em>too terrible</em> has happened yet because of Excel mistakes. The word “too” in “too terrible” is a load-bearing word because “too” is context-sensitive and a subjective judgment. Ten people dying because of a preventable Excel error, or an Excel accident that was preventable because it had happened before, is Too Terrible.</p> <p>Anyway, I digress.</p> <p>The big idea here is that software has done the easy bits (i.e. mostly maths problems) and has stalled at the hard bits, and that the hard bits are mainly to do with “people-related problems”.</p> <p>More examples to see if this fits: maths problems are things like, I don’t know, finite element analysis, which can be used to help us make stronger, lighter, safer physical things, often more quickly and more cheaply. Maths problems are things like CAD/CAM. Maths problems are things like traffic management. That kind of stuff. Maths problems are things like “ingest gobs of data and predict how a protein might fold”, as well as “do all the conventional mathematics to calculate how a protein might fold”. </p> <p>People-related problems are... decision problems? People-related problems range from “deciding where to eat” (which is different from “where might we eat”), to “what thresholds should we set for urban planning” (which is different to “how do we construct models of noise or pollution or sunlight or pedestrian traffic patterns”), to “what time shall we three meet again” (which is different from “at which times are we three able to meet again”), to “how many foreign biological elements, i.e. bugs, should we allow per ton of processed food that’s used in a fast-moving consumer good” (which is different from “count how many people got sick from bugs in food” or “count all the tons of processed food got sold this year”), to “what negotiated, compromise course of action should we take” (which is different from “administer a poll of a number of options”)</p> <p>This is a bit of a long-winded way of saying that people-related problems and decisions are by pure fact of being, uh, people-related, fuzzy? Have lots of hidden, confounding variables? Or even are stupendously multivariate in the first place? And highly context-dependent? And that collecting all the data to reach “good enough” context is also really hard?</p> <p>If this vague vibe-based realization is true, then what are the consequences? Well, perhaps the number of super maths-y problems that software has been previously seen to solve, and solve well, is diminishing. Maybe it’s close to zero? Citation definitely needed for that one. </p> <p>But software is a tool and we like making tools, and now because software is adaptable and many more people can use it, we want to see if and how we can use it for people-related problems. So we invent groupware, because it is totally a problem, and scheduling is totally a problem. </p> <p>But, say, “rolling out a comprehensive new electrification infrastructure” is only partly a maths problem (use all the data on cloud cover and calculate solar intensity over time to figure out the best places to put solar panels based on currently available solar panels at price x and efficiency y, plus then predict price and efficiency over time to come up with options and models for investment over 20, 30 years), because <em>the entire rest of it</em> are people-related problems that we do not like to turn over to maths machines, or magic sand that we taught to count? </p> <p>There are two recent examples where you can a) <em>decide</em> to turn a people-decision problem into a maths problem for <em>reasons</em>, and b) take a maths problem and turn it into a people problem because it turns out your maths isn’t good enough.</p> <p>For (a) let’s just cut to the chase and reference Israel’s Lavender system, used to identify potential targets based on apparent links to Hamas<sup><a href="#user-content-fn-guardian" id="user-content-fnref-guardian" class="buttondown-footnote-reference">guardian</a></sup>, of which this damning quote:</p> <blockquote> <p>Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>It saved a lot of time</strong>.</p> <p>For (b) let’s take Amazon Fresh’s termination of their Just Walk Out shopping technology<sup><a href="#user-content-fn-ars" id="user-content-fnref-ars" class="buttondown-footnote-reference">ars</a></sup>, which magically (ha) let you pick stuff up in a grocery store and, well “just walk out” because maths a) knew who you were, b) kept track of what you picked up and was super, super good at recognizing what you picked up and put in a bag or whatever. That project ran for 8 years, from 2016, and it turns out (ha, ha, ha, who could have possibly predicted) that as of mid-2022, the technology had more than 1,000 people working in India</p> <blockquote> <p>“whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model”</p> </blockquote> <p>and even better,</p> <blockquote> <p>“As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales”</p> </blockquote> <p>Maths! Not quite good enough!</p> <p>This has a link to something I’ve written about before, which is that lots of “computer” and more recently “AI” relies on maths that can take advantage of vast amounts of human labor. In the AI/ML case, the maths works on a ton of labelled data, and by now it’s more or less common knowledge that the data is labelled by humans, and especially humans who don’t have to be paid very much. Amazon has form here, because the very systems that enable this kind of piece work are inspired by one of the leaders in this space, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, of which! Well. It would be condescending for me to fill in the blanks here.</p> <p>My point here is that software -- the maths, here -- was an abstraction for people. Piecework isn’t a big deal, my secondary school history lesson was (perhaps somewhat biasedly, given it was an English education into the transition into the industrial revolution) pretty big on the revolution that piecework brought about in terms of “allowing” people (mainly women) to “participate” in the labour market, in ways that were variously impliedly described to be a great deal for everyone involved, but of course and most likely a great deal for the people at the top of the pyramid there. After all, they deserved it: they were the ones investing the capital. Right. (I mean, yes! <em>To an extent!</em>)</p> <p>So, piecework. Maths and networks let people create an interface and arbitrage between people in one place for whom working for very little money is, relatively speaking and in local context, a big deal, and people in another place who would derive, frankly, extreme value from dirt-cheap human labour. </p> <p>The way I put this before was that the maths and FLOPs weren’t what made modern “throw all the data at it” machine learning models possible. What made them possible was economics. They were always possible, it’s just that they were <em>expensive</em>. Now they are economical. Now there are ways and maths-network infrastructure to take advantage of that labour <em>at scale</em> and at speed, repeatedly. In a way, I guess I could describe this as the industrial revolution-era innovation of the assembly line, applied to modern-day data pipeline management. I doubt that this is a novel observation. </p> <p>But! These are not the kinds of problems that it’s increasingly obvious we <em>need</em> to solve [citation needed]. The problems we need solving -- like, I don’t know, better tools for organizing, better tools for decision-making, better tools for understanding each other (I mean <em>actually</em> understanding each other, and in ways that minimize harm and are net positive (and how would we know, anyway?)) are hard! </p> <p>The problems we need to solve now, or maybe the problems we need to decide are the wrong problems to solve, and we need to look elsewhere because the entire framing is wrong, are problems like “content moderation at scale is impossible”. That’s not a maths problem. That’s a people problem. Software has not, and I think will not, help with that. Some of the ways in which software might help, e.g. interoperability standards and mandates are just ways in which software can be applied towards an approach, but <em>mandating</em> that interop is a people problem and a people decision again. You don’t software your way out of that from first principles, I don’t think. Not now, not anymore.</p> <hr> <p>That’s it for today. How have you been? I have been busy. </p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <ul><li><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other">‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other">archive.is</a>), Bethan McKernan, Harry Davies, The Guardian, 3 April, 2024 <a href="#user-content-fnref-guardian" id="user-content-fn-guardian" class="buttondown-footnote-referent">↩</a></li></ul> <ul><li><a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-powered-store-checkout-which-needed-1000-video-reviewers/">Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked | Ars Technica</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-powered-store-checkout-which-needed-1000-video-reviewers/">archive.is</a>), Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 3 April, 2024 (via <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazons-grocery-stores-to-drop-just-walk-out-checkout-tech">The Information</a>) <a href="#user-content-fnref-ars" id="user-content-fn-ars" class="buttondown-footnote-referent">↩</a></li></ul> </description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2024 18:08:26 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e06-low-hanging-fruit-information-processing/</guid></item><item><title>s18e05: Babel Notices; Our Scientists Recommend We Research Fusion Power; An Unusually Diverse and Complex Technology Estate; Neurodevelopmental Disorders</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e05-babel-notices-our-scientists-recommend-we/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Thursday, 28 March, 2024 in Portland Oregon where it is grey and probably raining, but not raining too hard, a kind of listless rain, without too much heart in it because it knows and you know that when you have to do something every day, every single day, then some days you don’t have to put everything in to it, you just need to show up and nod, or in this case, sprinkle some water, and you have an unspoken agreement that that’s enough and that’s okay. </p> <p>For my shame, I finally got around to reading Octavia E. Butler for the first time and finished her Lilith’s Brood trilogy the other day. And fuck me if that wasn’t... well, saying “all the things” feels like it would be dishonoring such a tremendous writer. </p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong> is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement, before it leaves the station, is having its next test on <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/the-pulling-the-cord-alpha-clone" target="_blank">Wednesday, 10 April, 2024 at 11am PT</a>. </p> <p>If you wanted to come to the first one and missed it, this is your chance.</p> <p>I’ve had great feedback from the first cohort; some that validated hunches, and some that very helpfully brought up new issues and needs. </p> <p>Changes I’m making for this test include:</p> <ul> <li>Making clearer the specific context and situation in which the talk example is used</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Pulling out what <em>can</em> be said as an external consultant and translating that to what can be said by a civil servant</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Showing how tools of persuasion in the talk example can be used at different stages, or contexts, like RFP development or more informal settings</li> </ul> <p>So: that’s <a href="https://calendly.com/verylittlegravitas/the-pulling-the-cord-alpha-2" target="_blank">Wednesday 10 April</a>, 11am PT, with 15 spaces at a ~90% testing discount to gather feedback.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 Babel Notices</h2> <p>A Babel Notice<sup id="fnref:babel"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:babel">1</a></sup> is the notice Americans might have seen that tells you that the incomprehensible, complicated, stressful language you just received in the post or in a PDF, is also available in another language. I just love the name for this. Now I’m thinking about Rosetta Notices and more.</p> <h2>1.2 Our Scientists Recommend We Research Fusion Power</h2> <p>When I read reports like AI Will Suck Up 500% More Power in UK in 10 Years, Grid CEO Says<sup id="fnref:aipower"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:aipower">2</a></sup> I suddenly have the feeling like I need to make sure I achieve the Fusion Power<sup id="fnref:fusion"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:fusion">3</a></sup> advancement in Civilization II and then have to spam better power generation all over the place. </p> <h2>1.3 An Unusually Diverse and Complex Technology Estate</h2> <p>Via The Register<sup id="fnref:elreg"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:elreg">4</a></sup>, the British Library’s report<sup id="fnref:blreport"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:blreport">5</a></sup> (PDF) into the devastating cyber-attack [sic, forever, because “cyber”] sustained on 28 October last year. What caught my attention about this report is how candid it is and how it doesn’t pull any punches. What makes me <em>sad</em> about this report is that even given its exposure of chronic underinvestment and lack of attention paid to infrastructure that is now <em>obviously critical</em> to the function and the point of the British Library’s existence, the ability of executive management to concentrate and follow-through on its recommendations. Never mind getting the money for it (ha!) but that point of following through. The other thing about this report is that it’s representative of pretty much the entire academic and arts sector, I bet. So that might help some people. </p> <h1>1.4 Neurodevelopmental Disorders</h1> <p>In 2020, accessiBe launched the third version of their... accessibility-as-a-service, er service? I saw it recently because some site I was on had their accessibility bug and I tried to get rid of it. What caught my attention was a toggle for an ADHD Friendly Profile:</p> <blockquote> <p>ADHD Friendly Profile - this profile significantly reduces distractions and noise, to help people with ADHD and Neurodevelopmental disorders [sic] browse, read, and focus on the essential elements of the website more easily.<sup id="fnref:adhd"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:adhd">6</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>My emphasis on the <strong>neurodeveopmental disorder</strong> description there. </p> <p>It’s interesting! I wonder if it works! One thing I did notice, and had no idea whether it was a bug or not, was a filter on the page changing the color profile of all the images. Which, I thought was a bit weird for a site where you were looking at pictures of things you might buy. </p> <p>accessiBe itself has been criticized for making it easy for operators to think they’ve checked off accessibility requirements which is true. But to do accessibility <em>properly</em> also requires ownership, and a third party service with good marketing can often gloss over the ownership part and say “yeah, you can totally “do accessibility” by just paying a monthly fee. That isn’t good! But it is also a something? Somethings can also be good but also less good! How complicated. Another way to think about this, I suppose, is that accessiBe is an assistive technology for executives to help them deal with accessibility requirements and feel better about themselves. Sorry, that last bit was mean.</p> <h2>1.5 And finally,</h2> <p>Here is a List of Train Songs<sup id="fnref:trainsongs"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:trainsongs">7</a></sup>, because I accidentally found that Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and Ben Stiller performed Midnight Train to Georgia with Gladys Knight<sup id="fnref:midnight"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:midnight">8</a></sup> as part of the promotion of acclaimed documentary Tropic Thunder, back in 2008.</p> <hr /> <p>OK, that’s it for today. How are you doing? How have you been?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr /> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:babel"> <p><a href="https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/babel-notice" target="_blank">Babel notice Definition | Law Insider</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/babel-notice" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:babel" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:aipower"> <p><a href="https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/power-and-cooling/ai-will-suck-500-more-power-uk-10-years-grid-ceo-says" target="_blank">AI Will Suck Up 500% More Power in UK in 10 Years, Grid CEO Says | Data Center Knowledge | News and analysis for the data center industry</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/power-and-cooling/ai-will-suck-500-more-power-uk-10-years-grid-ceo-says" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), via Bloomberg, DataCenter Knowledge, 27 March, 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:aipower" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:fusion"> <p><a href="https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fusion_Power_(Civ2)" target="_blank">Fusion Power (Civ2) | Civilization Wiki | Fandom</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fusion_Power_(Civ2)" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:fusion" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:elreg"> <p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/british_library_slaps_the_cloud/" target="_blank">British Library’s legacy IT blamed for lengthy rebuild • The Register</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/british_library_slaps_the_cloud/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Connor Jones, The Register, 11 March, 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:elreg" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:blreport"> <p><a href="https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf" target="_blank">Learning Lessons from the Cyber-Attack; British Library cyber incident review</a>, British Library, 8 March, 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:blreport" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:adhd"> <p><a href="https://accessibe.com/blog/news/accessibe-3" target="_blank">Announcing the all-new accessiBe 3.0! - accessiBe</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://accessibe.com/blog/news/accessibe-3" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:adhd" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:trainsongs"> <p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_train_songs" target="_blank">List of train songs - Wikipedia</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_train_songs" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:trainsongs" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:midnight"> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y73438WioKM" target="_blank">Gladys Knight and The Pips: Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black and Ben Stiller - YouTube</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y73438WioKM" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:midnight" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2024 19:38:29 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e05-babel-notices-our-scientists-recommend-we/</guid></item><item><title>s18e04: What Are We Doing Here, Exactly?; LLMs Are Playful, Actually</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e04-what-are-we-doing-here-exactly-llms-are/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>It’s the afternoon on Wednesday, March 27, 2024 in Terminal D, ATL airport, after helping out a new client with their 1.5 day workshop. </p> <p>I now know that I do not like hotels that are designed like you’re on a cruise ship, i.e. your suite looks out into a giant atrium and, for some reason, the architecture has the side-effect of continuously fooling you into thinking there’s a pool right outside your door, thanks to a combination of a (hidden?) water feature and the acoustics of that atrium. </p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong> is still on hiatus. </p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong>, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement, will be having its next test in the week of 8 April. </p> <p>I've had some great feedback that confirmed some of my hunches, and even better feedback that brought new things to my attention. More news about what's changing, and signups, soon.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>Two big, and different, things today.</p> <h2>1.1 What are we doing here exactly?</h2> <p>So. I have been roped in to help with some Big System Modernization work, and one reason why it’s super interesting <em>this time</em> is that it involves something like an industry association, not of manufacturers/vendors but of buyers, and those buyers more or less saying: “well, we’d like things to change a bit, and we’re going to try doing it together”.</p> <p>It helps that this not-industry association has been given some money to go start figuring this out. </p> <p>One of my favorite questions to ask is “what for?”, so much so that I occasionally make fun of it on whichever social network I have splintered my personality on to at that particular minute. “What for?” is in the same space as the “so that?” part of a user story, and the shitposting version of that question is also in the space of “but is it, tho?” </p> <p>Asking “but what for?” is a way to pull back from early optimization and focus on a particular strategy (e.g. modernization) to make sure that people actually, you know, know why they’re here to do whatever thing in the first place. </p> <p>It’s a good time to remind people that “technology” is a “tool” for people to get things done, and the things that get done are also priorities set for people. It’s a tool for orienting people around to towards outcomes not outputs again. Modernization is an output, but to what end? </p> <p>“But what for?” is also a way in to get <em>really sharp</em> on the story you need to tell for whatever it is you’re trying to achieve and to get support for whatever tactics you think you need to get there, because in precisely zero percent of the time do you need to persuade nobody else to go do the thing. Literally not possible. At all. Fight me on it, I don’t care. </p> <p>So I’ll talk through the whole “modernization” deal: there are all the reasons to trot out why you want to modernize a thing. It’s old, it’s brittle, it costs a lot, you can’t do the things that you want to with it, every time you want to do a new thing with it it’s super expensive and takes a long time. </p> <p>Sure, those are totally reasons to modernize a thing, but they’re a bit too... well, myopic isn’t exactly the word. They are not reasons that other people who make decisions about what you’re allowed to do <em>care about</em>. They just don’t. You haven’t connected this modernization -- whatever it is -- to <em>value</em>, which again is a word I am not a fan of, because it’s a placeholder word. It’s like, sure, this isn’t a <em>bad</em> word, but it is also a word like <em>content</em>, in that it surely signifies something, but it’s so, so much more helpful for you to be <em>more specific in your feedback</em>. </p> <p>If you’re going to tell me that you’re delivering value then I know that’s a proxy statement, a placeholder for “I totally know the outcome we’re aiming for, and I can totally defend its value because I went out and did a bunch of user research and so on”, which is a thing that has happened at least some digits of a percentage of a time. </p> <p>There was a great contribution at this workshop where one of the participants figured this out and was able to express it like this: what’s the problem we’re solving here? There’s an entire audience of people, decision makers, who are very much invested in solving certain problems, and they need something clear, simple, crisp that will sell this approach to them. And also <em>because you want to know that you’re solving a real problem</em>.</p> <p>In this particular case, it was something along the lines of:</p> <p>There will be another crisis. The systems we’re talking about <em>did not weather the last crisis well</em>. It was hard to adapt them, they fell over, they did not handle the complex and context-specific rules for that last crisis well, or those rules were hard to implement using the tools and systems we had. We need to solve the problem of <em>adapting to the next crisis better</em>, and there’s a window -- that’s closing -- right now of making sure we can do that.</p> <p>Now, “modernization” is totally a strategy (or tactic?) you could choose to use to achieve that goal, or solve that problem. There are different ways you might go about it! You might want to unpack [sic] the problem in different ways, like illustrating that the current environment is dysfunctional because you can only go to, I don’t know, say three vendors or so to implement the Thing Addressing the Current Crisis. </p> <p>I love it when people come out with these what-fors. It’s worth taking the time on them and making sure they’re clear to everyone. </p> <p>One other thing that came out of this workshop that had me nearly jumping out of my chair in “I am writing this down and using it as an example everywhere now” was this system where they’d managed to extract an (expensive) enterprise document management system through this abbreviated process:</p> <ul> <li>they looked at what they were using of the enterprise document management system</li> <li>compared that to what the expansive enterprise document management system was capable of</li> <li>had a look at the complexity and cost of managing and using that enterprise document management system (i.e. that it was expensive)</li> <li>had a look at what they needed</li> </ul> <p>then decided that more or less once they’d done some internal work, they could junk the thing and write their own service that would use whatever cloud provider’s blob storage.</p> <p>They did this, from a technical point of view, partly because it simplified matters. And it was cheaper. But I love this example because it is clearly in a sense <em>easier</em> to go buy (as part of a vendor’s solution, say) the thing that has the enterprise document management solution because of course duh it checks all the boxes. But you are also buying all the other boxes that exist that aren’t checked. </p> <p>This isn’t new, it’s the regular “ha, bet you only use n percentage of y product”, sure there are costs and benefits to doing that. But this was such a wonderful example. </p> <p>Anyway, I digress. I don’t want to come across that asking “but why, tho” makes everything easier. Ideally it helps make what you’re doing clearer (and easier to explain!) and helps set direction, but you still have to do a bunch of work picking and setting the right “but why, tho” because you are going to get A. Lot. of answers for the But Why. A sort of Setting Goals is Hard, let’s go Enterprise Solution Shopping. </p> <h2>1.2 LLMs are Playful, Actually</h2> <p>Oh jeez where to begin with this one-slash-what a doozy. </p> <p>Two things coming together in my mind here. Here’s the first:</p> <p>So. Harper Reed has this writeup on his blog<sup id="fnref:harper"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:harper">1</a></sup> about doing <em>hilarious</em> stuff with a homegrown smart building system, which is to say the combination of:</p> <p>a) a space that had a whole bunch of Home Assistant sensor and output integrations (like, cameras, doors, switches, sensors, and speakers); and </p> <p>b) an OpenAI account </p> <p>Harper’s system takes json structured data emitted by his Home Assistant system (i.e. things like It is This Temperature at This Sensor in a way other computers can totally understand and do things with), feeds it into OpenAI’s GPT-whatever model which has enough parameters that it can Do Stuff With That json and <em>write prose</em> about that json because it’s been spammed with enough words written by not necessarily infinite monkeys, but certainly a lot of people not that far evolutionarily from monkeys.</p> <p>It is simple to say that OpenAI can generate a lot of text programatically, I mean duh, that’s why we call this stuff <em>generative AI</em>. But! </p> <p>Harper’s system takes things like open vision models and structured data like there’s a person with a gender (male), with an age (30s), with clothing (a white shirt), hair (a beard), and a height (tall), and so on, and then spams that through OpenAI’s LLM to get prose like this: </p> <div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code>I managed to detect a man interacting with modern technology. Let’s hope his browsing doesn’t lead him to discover how inconsequential we all are in the grand scheme of the universe </code></pre></div> <p>and</p> <div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code>Looks like our male model in business casual traded standing for sitting. Riveting change. Now he’s “focused” at his desk with his laptop. Work must go on, I guess. </code></pre></div> <p>which I will say is <em>objectively funny</em>. It helps, I think that you know this stuff is being generated by an LLM, I think that makes it <em>even funnier</em> because I know the entire rickety structure it’s built on:</p> <ul> <li>a vision model that’s good enough that makes guesses or predictions that can also be totally wrong and have inherent problems and biases</li> <li>the ability to “prompt engineer” and give an LLM model examples of how, well, silly you want it to be</li> </ul> <p>To be clear, I don’t see this as examples of text that are “good enough” to be, what, good novels? Storytelling? But they’re certainly something and they certainly have a personality. Here’s a key part of Harper’s prompt:</p> <blockquote> <p>Remember to use plain english. Have a playful personality. Use emojis. Be a bit like Hunter S Thompson.</p> </blockquote> <p>Like, on the one hand, this is better than Shitty Elon Musk’s attempts for his Grok AI bot to be “just like Douglas Adams”. I don’t know if this is because Harper’s example specifically stimulates my sarcastic British humor neural structures. It’s like there’s a mini shitty Charlie Brooker in Slack negging everything it can “see”. </p> <p>Second thing. Matt Webb has been Irritating Matt Webb and gone done a thing (no, not even the AI-assisted Galactic Compass he’s developed as an iOS app), and <em>that</em> thing is his Poem/1, the rhyming physical clock<sup id="fnref:poem"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:poem">2</a></sup>. </p> <p>It’s interesting that Matt first wrote about this pretty much <em>one entire year ago</em><sup id="fnref:poeminterconnected"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:poeminterconnected">3</a></sup>. </p> <p>Matt’s irritating because what he did was “just”<sup id="fnref:just"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:just">4</a></sup>:</p> <ul> <li>prompt ChatGPT to make a poem about the time</li> <li>realize that there’s a qualitative difference when that poem is embodied as an object you look at</li> </ul> <p>Here’s some of the poems:</p> <div class="codehilite"><pre><span></span><code>As the clock strikes one thirty-four, / Embrace this moment, treasure it more. Five fifty-three, time aglow, / Sun sets, moon&#39;s shadow starts to grow. The clock strikes one-thirty-eight, / Afternoon sun shines bright with fate. </code></pre></div> <p>I... don’t think this is taking jobs away from poets. I don’t think Harper’s thing is taking jobs away from, I don’t know, a thriving ecosystem of on-demand improv writers who can quickly bang out a line about who’s standing in your waiting room. </p> <p>I do know that there’s a whole bunch of issues that it’s going to sound like I’m trivializing in terms of the source of data for these models that allows this text to be generated in this way, i.e. “by magic”. </p> <p>I mean, the clock is funny! At least, I think it’s funny! I feel weird about this, because I am going to use words like:</p> <ul> <li>playful</li> <li>whimsy</li> <li>joy</li> <li>silly</li> <li>light-hearted</li> </ul> <p>which are honestly giving me some sort of net-related ptsd flashbacks, because we did all this already. The space described by those words in an LLM model’s vector space got mashed and mangled into Surprise and Delight along time ago, a phrase now forever associated in my mind with Share and Enjoy. </p> <p>But <em>again</em>, I’m going to go all Genuine People Personalities on this. Last time I brought this up was in s16e18, back in October last year with Boston Dynamics’ demo of a Talking Spot the Robot coupled with personality prompts and startlingly good text-to-speech generation<sup id="fnref:GPP"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:GPP">5</a></sup>. </p> <p>This stuff is fun! I mean yes, Ignore the Ethics (sigh), this definitely feels like New Material People Are Experimenting With that’s a qualitative difference in how software works. I’m not talking about chat interfaces, I’m not talking about how terrible narrative interfaces are for stuff like feature discovery or even the fact that now <em>you literally need to know the spell for what you want the computer to do</em>, I mean, what the fuck, but I’m talking about an entire new level of textual expressiveness that was impossible to do before. </p> <p>Well, it wasn’t impossible to do before. Here’s how you would’ve done it before:</p> <ul> <li>You would’ve taken the situations in which you wanted expressive text</li> <li>You would hook your thing up to something like mturk or another piecework deal (which, hello! Luddism! Piecework!)</li> <li>Like, you would pay UCB grads hardly even pennies to quickly respond to your requests to “tell me something funny about this picture”</li> </ul> <p>I mean, that’s how you’d do it. I am relatively sure at least one startup tried to do this exact thing. This entire thing <em>is also</em> part of the (humanist?) premise of Neal Stephenson’s Lesser-Cited Manual For The Future, The Diamond Age, in which Stephenson pits an algorithmic teacher against a human teacher, a struggling actor who gets to mother an abstract child through some sort of remote method invocation. </p> <p>I mean, come on!</p> <p>You couldn’t actually do it that way!</p> <p>(But why couldn’t you do it that way, Dan?)</p> <p>Well, Other Dan, one of the reasons why is because capitalism as practiced now is shitty and that for you to do that, you’re exploiting people’s creative output and not valuing their expertise and you’re making use of abstractions to distance yourself from the labour that’s critical to your thing actually being a thing. Like, you wouldn’t do it that way because a) for you to pay people fairly (which... what would that be?), then b) you’d likely end up with something too expensive and too few people would pay for it, maybe because c) you’d been outcompeted by others who were Doing It More Cheaply.</p> <p>While I’m typing this I am somewhat distressed to have to link it to Shit Wonka Experience, the Glasgow poster child that got headlined into “AI Experience Makes Kids Cry” which I understand is crack for editors and publishers. </p> <p>Shit Wonka Experience was in some sense giving a bunch of actors a shitty prompt (i.e. not much of a script) and telling them to just fucking figure it out while promising the punters the moon.</p> <p>The thing about Shit Wonka Experience is that it’s... not a new phenomena? Sure generative AI was used to create the imagery, and the difference there is the availability and scale and, I don’t know, the aesthetic? It was concept art (and not even good concept art, tbh) being passed off as The Thing, and this has been a problem forever!</p> <p>I am <em>genuinely</em> interested in what it looks like when Things Have Personalities. I think we’re responsible when we make clear that these aren’t Real Things With Personalities, though. In Harper’s example? Demo? Real thing? It’s not like anyone is saying that his office/studio is conscious, that there’s a Thing with a Name churning this out. I think here the thing is Harper hasn’t embued a thing with a Name, but that a Thing has a Personality. </p> <p>It is not Samantha, the Office, has a personality, it is just that <em>the office</em> has a particular expressive style. You didn’t need to take an office and pretend it’s a conscious being to trick us, it’s funny enough that this thing has an attitude. </p> <p>What’s also exciting about this is that it’s another stage where people are dicking about, and the dicking about is <em>not</em> venture-funded stuff. The venture-funded stuff is boring. The venture-funded equivalent of this is Generating Textual Reports to Satisfy Compliance or Whatever from your Surveillance Footage which sure fine whatever, but what makes it FUN is when the reports are, like, a disaffected video store employee from the 90s, as if your target market for this is intended to be a fatal blow to a gen-xer. </p> <p>So. Not <em>every</em> piece of software needs to have a personality in its expression. Dear god no, and now I’m worried that just saying this out loud is going to enable Personality Expressions for a ton of software and startups because They Have To and please, please, no. But it’s an option now, and unfortunately, it’s an option that has come about thanks to a position on training and intellectual property that’s yet another example of Grabbing Shit And Doing Stuff Before Anyone Else Can Relax, And Then Pointedly Saying Well, You Like This And You’re Not Going To Take It Away Now, Are You?</p> <p>So. Textual, personality-based expressiveness <em>at scale</em> [sic] and available to anyone.</p> <p>Wait, you know what, as I’m writing this I <em>do</em> know some writers directly affected by this shit, and it’s videogame dialogue writers. Ubisoft have already been public about creating internal tools to relieve the burden of writing a bunch of filler NPC text and... I’m sympathetic to that? You want writers to do high value stuff, sure. I mean, just don’t use this as an excuse to lay people off because you’ve got to satisfy the market gods. But ha ha you totally wouldn’t do that, would you, publicly listed videogame company.</p> <p>(it is also interesting that videogames -- electronic entertainment -- are the thing that <em>is</em> using or needing lots of creative textual content at scale, and that people <em>do</em> pay for that!)</p> <p>Wait, also there was all that AI Dungeon stuff a long, long time ago when the first Chat-GPT came out. That was a thing. But now the models are better. But AI Dungeon and other videogame examples (I think Nvidia’s CEO was on the record the other saying share price boosting stuff like “videogames are totally going to be all generative AI within a couple years!) are wide domains, whereas the thing I’m excited about here is... I don’t know, microcopy?</p> <p>At which point I have to admit that yes, “people who write microcopy” and “content designers who also do microcopy” are... a class of people with a job.</p> <p>(For new subscribers, this is one of the best recent examples of what it’s like to be forced to ride along with me as I write out loud)</p> <p>But! Harper <em>couldn’t</em> have made his talking office by hiring a bunch of writers, right? Not in that realtime way? No, the reason why is because he could do it cheaply. And yes, I’m in before people remind me that Carrot Weather<sup id="fnref:carrot"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:carrot">6</a></sup> exists.</p> <p>I do think there’s a thing here, and its shape is getting clearer.</p> <hr /> <p>OK, that’s it for today. I've written about 28,000 words worth of notes for that workshop over the past 48 hours, another ~3,400 for this is probably overdoing it. </p> <p>How are you doing? I am tired!</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p>PS. Huh! This is also episode 600! <em>Surely</em> I get to go into syndication now.</p> <hr /> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:harper"> <p><a href="https://harper.blog/2024/03/26/our-office-avatar-pt-1-the-office-is-talking-shit-again/" target="_blank">Our Office Avatar pt 1: The office is talking shit again | Harper Reed's Blog</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://harper.blog/2024/03/26/our-office-avatar-pt-1-the-office-is-talking-shit-again/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Harper Reed, Harper Reed’s Blog, 26 March, 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:harper" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:poem"> <p><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/genmon/poem-1-the-ai-poetry-clock" target="_blank">Poem/1: AI rhyming clock by Matt Webb — Kickstarter</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/genmon/poem-1-the-ai-poetry-clock" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), That Matt Webb, Kickstarter, 29 February, 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:poem" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:poeminterconnected"> <p><a href="https://interconnected.org/home/2023/03/22/tuning" target="_blank">My new job is AI sommelier and I detect the bouquet of progress (Interconnected)</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://interconnected.org/home/2023/03/22/tuning" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), That Matt Webb, Interconnected.org, 3 March, 2023&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:poeminterconnected" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:just"> <p>I would describe this just as “a load-bearing just”&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:just" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:GPP"> <p><a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s16e18-generative-people-personalities-content/" target="_blank">s16e18: Generative People Personalities; Content Distribution Networks (Taylor's Version)</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s16e18-generative-people-personalities-content/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), me, this newsletter, 27 October, 2023&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:GPP" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:carrot"> <p><a href="https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/" target="_blank">CARROT Weather for iOS and Android</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:carrot" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2024 21:34:02 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e04-what-are-we-doing-here-exactly-llms-are/</guid></item><item><title>s18e03: A Re-introduction; Streaking Still Considered Harmful; Pulling the Cord and Then What?; Tiny Bits</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e03-a-re-introduction-streaking-still/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>It’s Thursday, 21 March 2024 in Portland, Oregon and a grey day outside. We had a long weekend of sunny, warm, cloudless weather and completely overdid it on barbecues.</p> <h2>0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord</h2> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack" target="_blank">Hallway Track</a></strong>, my online version of the great small conversations you have in the hallway after a great conference session, is on hiatus while I figure out the programming for the next block of tracks.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a></strong> had its trial run yesterday. More on that below.</p> <p>I have a little tweaking to do before I schedule the next one; I’ll about it here and on LinkedIn when registration opens up. </p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <h2>1.1 A Re-introduction to Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>It has caught my attention that I’ve had quite a few subscribers since the last time I explained exactly what’s going on here. </p> <p>So:</p> <p>Hello! You’re one of nearly 3,000 people subscribed to Things That Caught My Attention by me, Dan Hon, a person who is now in his 40s and has been on the internet for a long time.</p> <p>This newsletter is a place where I think out loud. It’s usually about technology, but not always. “Technology” means lots of things these days because, well, technology touches everything. It normally means “computers and networks”, which for a while expanded to “phones”, but now is more accurately “anything with an IP address”. </p> <p><em>Because</em> I write about technology, I also write about what it’s like to use as a person, which changes over time. I’m open about mental health, about being an immigrant in America raising a young family, </p> <p>The nearly 3,000 subscribers here don’t all work in technology. Some of them don’t have anything to do with tech at all, other than have to use it. They’re artists, writers, musicians, workers in government, non-profits, parents, grandparents, union organizers, lawyers, journalists, and academics. All sorts, really. Of the ones who do work in tech, they’re designers, developers, architects, product directors and engineering directors, funders, researchers. Again, all sorts. </p> <p>All they have in common is that they’re still here to read whatever it is I have to say, which, frankly, is pretty puzzling. But, I’ve paid for a lot of therapy to become at least accepting of that idea, some of the time. </p> <p>Here’s what you’re going to get:</p> <ul> <li>News about the events I run as part of <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com" target="_blank">Very Little Gravitas</a>, my consultancy.</li> <li>A barely-edited, stream-of-consciousness run of words in which I think about things. I am not kidding when I say I’m thinking out loud. Some people <em>really</em> like this because they realize they have a problem they would love me to think about. I like that too, because they’ll pay me for it. </li> <li>That stream-of-consciousness writing? I mostly stick the landing. If you’re a writer, then I’m a pantser<sup id="fnref:pantser"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:pantser">1</a></sup>.</li> <li>Quite a lot of words, in bursts. I type fast. Most people binge-read.</li> <li>Footnotes, mostly, instead of in-line links, as an idiosyncrasy to focus on the stream, not the references.</li> </ul> <p>I organize the newsletter into seasons like a tv show<sup id="fnref:seasons"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:seasons">2</a></sup>, which is to say groups of “episodes”. The length of a season is entirely down to vibes.</p> <p>The best essays from the first 50 episodes are collected in an ebook, optimistically titled “Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1.” Free subscribers get a <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">20% discount</a>; you get a free copy if you’re a <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">paid supporter</a>.</p> <p>Lastly, Things That Caught My Attention is completely free. It’s too complicated to figure out what to charge for, and besides, I’m doing this to write out loud, not to make money. That said, if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a></p> <h2>1.2 Streaking Still Considered Harmful</h2> <p>The kids accidentally (i.e. not on purpose) started using Duolingo and, well, I’ve talked before about how I think streaks -- as usually implemented -- are harmful.</p> <p>To recap: streaks -- counting unbroken repetition in order to start a habit -- are great! But they’re also strict. And depending on personality, they can also be shitty for mental health. After a while, they can be less about habit, and more about punishment and pressure. </p> <p>In many cases, what would be more <em>sustainable</em> would be more time spent practicing or doing the thing.</p> <p>The thing is, things happen. I don’t know, you get on a plane and you can’t stand up and oops! You broke your Rings. There are a whole bunch of reasons why you might not be able to do something <em>for one day</em>, and one way to think about this is the reasons why line up with the thinking that <em>everyone benefits from accessible products and services</em>; you don’t even need to get into the “a stunningly high proportion of people will experience some sort of disability at some point in their life”, of which a usual (exclusionary?) example is “you are caring for a baby and suddenly have to do things with one arm”. Not <em>physically disabled</em>, in the way that people might instinctively think -- although this is changing -- just, what, less capable. </p> <p>Anyway, I was talking about streaks. One of the kids was <em>super mad</em> about breaking his streak for a Reason that has to do with us doing a parenting, which also means setting boundaries and being consistent about them. And ooooh were they <em>super mad</em>. </p> <p>Now, you could be conflict-avoidant about this, which is to say that Duolingo is Bad because it has a streak mechanic and you Want To Avoid Situations In Which Your Kid Is Mad, but that’s also... not great? Because you also want your kid to understand that Emotions Come And Go and that streak isn’t that big a deal in the first place. <em>But Duolingo kind of treats it like one</em> in the way it presents the streak. Sure, you might have a rest day or whatever, but also consider the context in which the entire mechanic is presented. </p> <p>In my experience with long-term mental health, I had to learn that there <strong>will</strong> be relapses. What matters is being able to do the things and start the habits again that help manage you back into remission. <em>It’s not the streak, it’s getting back into the habit</em>. Habits can break for any reason. If you’re involved in making software where the pressure is to Make Number Go Up And To The Right, please consider what compassion looks like. If you’re able to.</p> <h2>1.3 Pulling the Cord and Then What?</h2> <p>I ran a test <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">Pulling the Cord</a> session yesterday. It was a refined version of the talk I’ve been giving for years now to executives in government to persuade them to do giant technology projects differently. </p> <p>It was a test because it wasn’t just giving the presentation so people can see what I present and how. That would’ve been boring and... not good? What I needed to do was for each section -- and slide? -- outline what my goal was and then explain why I did what I did to achieve that goal. This is the whole “you really know what you’re doing when you can explain it to someone else” thing. It was hard! Mainly because I haven’t had to do it much, at least not until the last couple of years, when I also started coaching teams. </p> <p>I ended up thinking about it as a sort of commentary track, which made it a lot more fun than the usual “dreading doing a presentation and working on it up until the last minute (which I did anyway), being full of anxiety, and then riding a bunch of endorphins while giving it, then collapsing”. </p> <p>It helped that I’d done a bunch of Hallway Track events over the last six months. I’ve practiced! It was also a reminder that what feels easy and obvious to me isn’t necessarily easy and obvious to others. And if it’s something I’m good at, such that people want to pay me money to do, then it’s even more likely that what I’m doing isn’t easy and obvious. Again, this isn’t to say that it isn’t <em>hard</em>. It is hard, just qualitatively differently hard. It’s not like doing admin, for example.</p> <p>Now I have to think about a bunch of stuff for the next version. Who’s it for? The answer “lots of people” might be true, but that doesn’t help get it in front of people. It also doesn’t help with explaining the problems it solves for those specific people. Which means going back to what I have right now and tweak it. Which <em>is</em> hard! And I have to think about the difference between time and value. I know it’s incredibly valuable to <em>some</em> people, on the order of “well, this set us down the road to not wasting millions of dollars”. This part isn’t easy, and will take time. But I’m excited, and want to do more, and there’s every chance I’ll yolo it into scheduling the next one. </p> <h2>1.4 Tiny Bits That Caught My Attention</h2> <ul> <li>In “Blame Excel for Things” news is Williams Racing, which ran a 20,000 item sort-of-ERP system (really) in Excel<sup id="fnref:excel"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:excel">3</a></sup>, for... being a Formula 1 racing team? </li> <li>Valve has a new set of Family Sharing and Parental Controls<sup id="fnref:valve"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:valve">4</a></sup> features which I’m itching to try out because Nobody Gets Family Sharing and Parental Controls Right.</li> <li>LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform<sup id="fnref:linkedin"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:linkedin">5</a></sup>, which manages to hit some sort of bingo mentioning “wordle”, “viral success”, “ranking” “deepen relationships”, “[spark] conversation”. This is a) funny, and b) terrifying, and c) more proof that my jokes about LinkedIn integrating with the Xbox ecosystem continues to only be a matter of time, which is also cheating because along a long-enough time horizon you can totally win. </li> </ul> <hr /> <p>Okay, that’s it for today. A long one, mainly because of the re-introduction. </p> <p>I love getting notes and replies, even when they’re just “Hi!”. Or even “Hi”. No exclamation mark required; no judgment if you reflexively include them in business communication, either.</p> <p>How are you doing? </p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <p>P.S. if you get something out of this newsletter and feel like dashing out an endorsement, that’d be cool too. Everyone likes endorsements. </p> <hr /> <h3>Support Things That Caught My Attention by letting your boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:pantser"> <p><a href="https://www.writersdigest.com/getting-published/what-is-a-pantser-in-writing" target="_blank">What Is a Pantser in Writing? - Writer's Digest</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.writersdigest.com/getting-published/what-is-a-pantser-in-writing" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest, 11 April 2021&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:pantser" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:seasons"> <p><a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/newsletter-seasons/" target="_blank">Advice for newsletter-ers</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/newsletter-seasons/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Robin Sloan, November 2020&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:seasons" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:excel"> <p><a href="https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/shocking-details-behind-painful-williams-f1-revolution/" target="_blank">The shocking details behind an F1 team's painful revolution - The Race</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/shocking-details-behind-painful-williams-f1-revolution/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Scott Mitchell-Malm, The Race, 19 March 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:excel" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:valve"> <p><a href="https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4" target="_blank">Steam Support :: Steam Families User Guide &amp; FAQ</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Valve Software, March 2020&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:valve" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:linkedin"> <p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/16/linkedin-wants-to-add-gaming-to-its-platform/?guccounter=1" target="_blank">LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform | TechCrunch</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/16/linkedin-wants-to-add-gaming-to-its-platform/?guccounter=1" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch, 16 March 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:linkedin" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:08:04 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e03-a-re-introduction-streaking-still/</guid></item><item><title>s18e01: Pulling the Cord; Do Not Reply; Fast User Switching</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e01-pulling-the-cord-do-not-reply-fast-user/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Monday, 11 March, 2024 in Portland, Oregon after being away for a while. But I’m back now! That break allows for a new season, so I’m just going to with that. </p> <h2>0.1 Hallway Track News</h2> <p>Hallway Track is taking a little break while I cue up the next few sessions. </p> <p>I expect we’ll start up again around mid-April.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>Two big things and one little thing today. </p> <h2>1.1 The Pulling the Cord alpha</h2> <p>Here is a new thing that I am doing.</p> <p>For a long time, I’ve been working with leaders and executives in government explaining and persuading them to take an alternative approach to buying and building tech in their business-as-usual approach. </p> <p>I am, I’ve been told, <em>very good at this</em>. I did it again recently for a client, and remembered how fun and fulfilling it feels to:</p> <ul> <li>empathize with leaders, fundamentally, feel trapped into some sort of groundhog day time loop of trying harder and not really getting any different results, i.e. spending a lot of money on tech that still, more or less, sucks</li> <li>I mean, really, really candidly talk about this in a way that gains trust</li> <li>Be very clear about what consultants can and can’t do, given that I’m a consultant too</li> <li>Be very clear about what vendors can and can’t do</li> <li>Help them understand the clear, realist choice they have, if they have a procurement coming up and they want to know what to do about it and what to change</li> <li>and a bunch more.</li> </ul> <p>All of which is to say I’m testing turning this into a sort of <em>Pulling the Cord-as-a-Service</em>.</p> <p>I’m going to test it first for middle management - the program managers, procurement managers, and so on in government, who want to do things a different way, and want to know how better to influence their peers and leadership to provide the cover to properly investigate and use a different approach. </p> <p>But the big thing I’m going for is the kind of meetings I have with the exec leadership -- the decision makers who sit <em>above</em> the office and department directors, sometimes even above the agency directors, and are in control functions like “your proposal for a new procurement needs to be approved by finance and central IT”. That’s a separate thing.</p> <p>So. A test. 15 people on the 20th March: <a href="https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/pulling-the-cord" target="_blank">The Pulling the Cord alpha</a>.</p> <p>Sign up if it’s for you pass it on if you know someone who’d be into it. </p> <h2>1.2 Do Not Reply</h2> <p>For the last three weeks or so, I’ve been working with <a href="https://florian.framer.website" target="_blank">Florian Fangohr</a> on the next version of what I showed in s17e10, the Reply Management Stickers<sup id="fnref:replymanagement"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:replymanagement">1</a></sup>.</p> <p>The new versions are at <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s17e10-alt-text-reply-management-stickers/" target="_blank">https://donotreply.cards</a> (and also at <a href="https://nepasrépondre.cards" target="_blank">https://nepasrépondre.cards</a> and <a href="https://nepasrépondre.cards" target="_blank">https://keineantwort.cards</a> for the respective French and German versions. Spanish to come, soon)</p> <p>Anyway phooey did a lot catch my attention about going through this whole process:</p> <ul> <li>Using Figma, Framer and Height in anger</li> <li>“Launching a website”, which to be honest is not something that I’ve been involved in to such an extent for quite a while, which includes for this kind of website “fuck it, we’re doing it live”</li> <li><a href="https://www.framer.com" target="_blank">Framer</a> is definitely better than Squarespace, but still has stupendous frustrations, in the same way that Wordpress is now built around Blocks. These website building systems are like some sort of in-between no-code hellishness, where in Framer’s case, you can insert a form, <em>but the form is only hooked up to certain third party services</em>, where you can embed forms, but it’s difficult to style them based on the styles you’ve set up, and where you <em>can</em> do all of this, if you just learn Typescript and React which... I do not want to do? And I imagine that I will just have to Learn to Code in 2024. </li> <li>Ugh, other Framer stuff. It has support for a production/staging distinction but not versioning or branching, so the usual “multiplayer web development” also turns into a “what did you do” and figuring out ad-hoc workarounds for branching. </li> <li>There are other things like “there is a CMS” and you can do <em>some things</em> but not other things that you would expect to be able to do. It’s the whole 90% of the way there problem until you try to do the 10% and then start screaming.</li> </ul> <p>So. This was a recent trial-by-hobby-fire of putting together a punch list of stuff to do to get live and the opportunity to be somewhat of a creative director again after a break of around <em>ten years</em>. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with such a great designer, especially a long time since I’ve been told not to be happy with something being <em>okay</em>.</p> <p>There’s a whole bunch of stuff I’m proud of. The cards aren’t just images now, they have previews that get pulled in and use the updated images if you just share them as their URL, which is super nice.</p> <p>There’s also a lot that’s missing and we haven’t done yet, and a lot that I could write about the design process and what went into the decisions we made, and why. Some of our decisions have happened to have been obvious (yes, we took direct inspiration from The Designers Republic), but there’s a lot about the copy that I had to think about, and is important about <em>why</em> I wanted to put these together. </p> <h2>1.3 Fast User Switching</h2> <p>Look, all that stuff about streaming music services like Apple Music and Spotify generating batshit trend reports and suggestions because you have the temerity to be a parent or caregiver who has to play music to a younger, smaller person? And how it’s super irritating?</p> <p>I don’t get why streaming music services can’t have user profile accounts in the same way that <em>video</em> streaming services have user profile accounts. I would like to be able <em>quickly and trivially</em> switch to a kids account in Spotify or Apple Music and just play from there. Or even from a search <em>in my profile</em>, to select to play the next track as the kids profile <em>and then stay in that profile</em> until switched back. PLEASE.</p> <hr /> <p>OK, that’s it for today. How are you doing, and how have you been?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr /> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:replymanagement"> <p><a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s17e10-alt-text-reply-management-stickers/" target="_blank">s17e10: Alt Text; Reply Management Stickers</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s17e10-alt-text-reply-management-stickers/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Me, 13 February 2024&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:replymanagement" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Mar 2024 20:12:59 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s18e01-pulling-the-cord-do-not-reply-fast-user/</guid></item><item><title>s17e12: Justice in Forensic Algorithms; The One With Retroactive Bereavement Fare Claims; Bits and Pieces</title><link>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s17e12-justice-in-forensic-algorithms-the-one-5114/</link><description> <h1>0.0 Context Setting</h1> <p>Friday, 16 February, 2024 in Portland, Oregon and it is cold. </p> <p>I wanted to make this one short and I could not. I am sorry. Believe me, for this one especially, I am just as disappointed as you, but probably not very surprised.</p> <hr /> <h1>1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention</h1> <p>Going to try to make today a quicker, shorter one.</p> <h2>1.1 Justice in Forensic Algorithms</h2> <p>A couple of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have this bill they’re trying to pass, the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act<sup id="fnref:justice"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:justice">1</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:vergejustice"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:vergejustice">2</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:takano"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:takano">3</a></sup>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Reps. Mark Takano (D-CA) and Dwight Evans (D-PA) reintroduced the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act on Thursday, which would allow defendants to access the source code of software used to analyze evidence in their criminal proceedings. It would also require the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create testing standards for forensic algorithms, which software used by federal enforcers would need to meet. <sup id="fnref2:vergejustice"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:vergejustice">2</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p>This is good! I have no idea if it will pass. It brings to mind the Post Office Horizon mess in the UK, where innocent people were accused of fraud due to at first a faulty accounting system, and then and ultimately, due to callous and reprehensible management. </p> <p>Some notes:</p> <p>NIST gets to set standards! That’s... also good! I hope NIST get the resources they need. </p> <p>This is just for criminal cases, not for civil cases. </p> <p>And: honestly this feels like the sort of slow-coming but eventually-arriving societal reckoning to do with how integral “algorithms” are in today’s societies. It would be much better if requirements like these had been dealt with earlier and we were able to avoid countless injustices. But this is also the way change is supposed to happen, with democratically (ha) elected (ha) representatives (ha) introducing legislature and (ha) getting that enacted (ha) and put in place by a functional (ha) government.</p> <p>If I were a law student again, or, well, a law anything, I think another question I’d be asking would be this: we’re taught that law should move slowly and deliberately, and that law made in haste is invariably (we wouldn’t say <em>always</em>) bad law. I’m old, so my example from student days is something like the Dangerous Dogs Act or whatever in England and Wales.</p> <p>Anyway. Yes, I get it. Don’t make reactionary law. Don’t make reactionary law when <em>a thing</em> like a kid being mauled or killed by a dog has happened, in the heat of the moment. Got it. Understand the reasons there.</p> <p>But what about <em>don’t make law</em> when technologies are being introduced <em>and technologies are being spread</em>? It’s all about thresholds. How long should you wait? How much harm are you prepared to witness (and then, remember, you should remember to provide restitution, if that’s even possible)? Actually, never mind witness. How much harm are you willing to <em>enact</em> until you’ve seen enough <em>progress</em> that you now have a regulatory framework or law that makes sense to deal with the situation?</p> <p>This is, I suppose, just another way of saying “ugh, governments take too long to react”, which is not a new observation at all. The observation that “things happen more and faster now” is not new either; in many cases it’s seen as a positive and something to be encouraged. That if the rate of increase itself isn’t increasing, that if the line going up and to the right isn’t going upper more and righter more, then things aren’t good and we’ll descend into some sort of primitive (ha) chaos.</p> <p>So then if I were a government that were serious about making decisions at some sort of time, and were willing to say that that time might change, then it’s more like understanding the threshold. Sure, I get it. Many thresholds depend on context. I have to admit that my brain was all “yeah no they don’t, water boils at...” before I remembered: hahahaha no it doesn’t, that’s only at standard temperature and pressure! Anyway.</p> <p>You’d want to count.</p> <p>How many people are harmed.</p> <p>How many miscarriages.</p> <p>You’d want to be data-informed. </p> <p>But! It’s not like that would make much of a difference. It’s not like knowing how many people are killed by cops has forced any major, substantive policy change in the U.S. </p> <p>But. We should know. And I like to believe that it’d be at the last just that little bit easier to make changes with data.</p> <p>My point here is that for these two representatives, “enough harm has happened” for them to, for whatever reason, use their political power and capital to introduce this legislation. </p> <p>This also appears to be another reason to re-read Seeing Like A State.</p> <h2>1.2 The One With Retroactive Bereavement Fare Claims</h2> <p>Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149<sup id="fnref:moffatt"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:moffatt">4</a></sup> is probably not a case you’ve heard of, but if I say it’s The One With The Airline Pretending It’s Not Liable For What Its Chatbot Said then you might already know what I’m talking about<sup id="fnref:cbc"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:cbc">5</a></sup>. </p> <p>Short version: grandchild used a chatbot on Air Canada’s site to find out about bereavement rates and was told that a claim for the reduced rate could be made within 90 days of travel. Grandchild -- sneaky, been-here-before grandchild -- took a screenshot of that assurance. Air Canada, unsurprisingly, said “nah”. </p> <p>It’s a short judgment, only 47 paragraphs in total[^moffat], you can totally read it. </p> <p>Ugh, today is just going to make me relive writing essays at unversity. </p> <p>Here’s the good bits, which is mainly me doing a précis (sorry, organic, sentient LLM summarization) of the paras 24-32 of the judgment:</p> <p>The judge helpfully assumes that the claimant is alleging negligent misrepresentation: that Air Canada did not exercise <em>reasonable care</em> to ensure its representations were accurate and not misleading. </p> <p>First, the judge finds that Air Canada totally owed Moffat a duty of care: they had a commercial relationship as a service provider and consumer. That means the duty of care Air Canada owed would be to take <em>reasonable</em> care to ensure its representations were accurate, and not misleading.</p> <p>The best best bestest bit is when the judge does that thing in the best of the English legal traditions of very politely saying “are you fucking nuts”. </p> <p>Because Air Canada says, essentially: “nah, we’re not liable, because we’re not liable for any information provided by one of our <em>agents, servants, or representatives</em> which btw includes that chatbot.” </p> <p>The judge summarizes this position as Air Canada suggesting “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.”</p> <p>Judge says: “This is a remarkable submission.” which is, like I said above, is the very polite way of saying “are you fucking nuts”.</p> <p>This judge isn’t having any of it. He says:</p> <ul> <li>yeah, a chatbot’s interactive, but it’s just a part of Air Canada’s website;</li> <li>“It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website”; and</li> <li>“It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot”</li> </ul> <p>I love it.</p> <p>The judge also addresses the inconsistency. Because the chatbot also pointed to the “Bereavement travel” page, which didn’t say anything about the post-travel claim policy, but Air Canada didn’t explain why the claimant should’ve trusted the webpage over the chatbot. Oops, Air Canada. </p> <p>Like, I understand the point here that Air Canada is acting <em>as if</em> the chatbot were, say, a third party travel agent selling an Air Canada ticket, and <em>that</em> third party agent told Moffatt about an inaccurate bereavement policy. Sure, that works. Air Canada wouldn’t be liable for that. But again, it appears the argument Air Canada were (weirdly? I mean, I don’t think they had good lawyers here?) making was that the chatbot, <em>which was on their site</em>, was “someone over there making shit up and we can’t be liable for what that bot is saying, don’t know who they are”,</p> <p>Some notes and questions!</p> <ul> <li>Jurisdiction etc aside, how is this different from that time the Chevy Dealership incorporated an OpenAI ChatGPT-powered bot on its site that was tricked into making offers? </li> <li>Did this fail purely because Air Canada didn’t argue the provisions that should prevail in case of conflicting information?</li> <li>What’s <em>reasonable</em> effort in terms of ensuring that the representations an entity makes are consistent and non-contradictory? Are there different thresholds in reasonableness between, say, static content, and “interactive” content, like a bot?</li> <li>Can a company be reasonably required to make reasonable effort in verifying the <em>generative</em> representations? </li> <li>If a company is required to make reasonable efforts to verify generative representations, should it just try to outright disclaim <em>all</em> of them? </li> <li>For those disclaimers to be effective, how visible should they be? Would it be okay for them to be hidden in the site’s general TOS, or should they be brought to the fore? </li> <li>How is this different from disclaiming liability from call center staff?</li> </ul> <p>I really did not wake up thinking today’s episode was going to be The One With The Interesting And Traumatic Flashback To University.</p> <h2>1.3 Bits and pieces</h2> <ul> <li>I read through all the documentation I could find on <a href="https://github.com/exflickr/flamework" target="_blank">Flamework</a>, the Flickr-style PHP application framework. <em>Caught my attention because:</em> the blog Building Slackp<sup id="fnref:building"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:building">6</a></sup> just launched about, uh, building Slack.</li> <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi" target="_blank">Nemawashi</a>, the “Japanese business informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement”, which I am mortally offended by, having only learned about <em>two days ago</em>, and at that, it also describing <em>what I do</em>, when honestly, I thought that was just me. This was... incredibly validating? And, as I gratefully mentioned to the people who brought it to my attention, possibly the most consequential bit of professional development for me this entire year.</li> </ul> <hr /> <p>Phooooey. But hey, it’s Friday!</p> <p>Thank you for the notes that said “hi!” from the people who sent notes that said “hi!” </p> <p>I like getting notes, even when they just say “hi!”</p> <p>How are you?</p> <p>Best,</p> <p>Dan</p> <hr /> <h2>How you can support Things That Caught My Attention</h2> <p>Things That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please <a href="https://newsletter.danhon.com/" target="_blank">consider becoming a paid supporter</a>.</p> <h3>Let my boss pay!</h3> <p>Do you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh" target="_blank">$25/month, or $270/year</a>, <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW" target="_blank">$35/month, or $380/year</a>, or <a href="https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD" target="_blank">$50/month, or $500/year</a>.</p> <p>Paid supporters get a free copy of <a href="https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1" target="_blank">Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1</a>, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and <a href="https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber" target="_blank">free subscribers get a 20% discount</a>.</p> <div class="footnote"> <hr /> <ol> <li id="fn:justice"> <p><a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7394/text" target="_blank">Text - H.R.7394 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): To prohibit the use of trade secrets privileges to prevent defense access to evidence in criminal proceedings, provide for the establishment of Computational Forensic Algorithm Testing Standards and a Computational Forensic Algorithm Testing Program, and for other purposes. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7394/text" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:justice" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:vergejustice"> <p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/15/24074214/justice-in-forensic-algorithms-act-democrats-mark-takano-dwight-evans" target="_blank">New bill would let defendants inspect algorithms used against them in court - The Verge</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/15/24074214/justice-in-forensic-algorithms-act-democrats-mark-takano-dwight-evans" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Lauren Feiner, 15 February 2024, The Verge&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:vergejustice" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:vergejustice" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:takano"> <p><a href="https://takano.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/black-box-algorithms-use-in-criminal-justice-system-tackled-by-bill-reintroduced-by-reps-takano-and-evans" target="_blank">BLACK BOX ALGORITHMS’ USE IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM TACKLED BY BILL REINTRODUCED BY REPS. TAKANO AND EVANS | U.S. Congressman Mark Takano of California's 39th District</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://takano.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/black-box-algorithms-use-in-criminal-justice-system-tackled-by-bill-reintroduced-by-reps-takano-and-evans" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), 15 February, 2024, Office of Mark Takano&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:takano" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:moffatt"> <p><a href="https://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bccrt/doc/2024/2024bccrt149/2024bccrt149.html" target="_blank">2024 BCCRT 149 (CanLII) | Moffatt v. Air Canada | CanLII</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bccrt/doc/2024/2024bccrt149/2024bccrt149.html" target="_blank">archive.is</a>)&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:moffatt" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:cbc"> <p><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416" target="_blank">Air Canada found liable for chatbot's bad advice on plane tickets | CBC News</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Jason Proctor, 15 February 2024, CBC News&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:cbc" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:building"> <p><a href="https://buildingslack.com/" target="_blank">Building Slack</a> (<a href="http://archive.is/latest/https://buildingslack.com/" target="_blank">archive.is</a>), Ali Rayl and Johnny Rodgers&#160;<a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:building" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> </description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Feb 2024 17:48:20 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s17e12-justice-in-forensic-algorithms-the-one-5114/</guid></item></channel></rss>