I re-read Robin Sloan’s The art of working in public (Snarkmarket, 2011) which riffs, in part, off my Week 315 post at BERG. I was big into weeknotes.

"Work in public. Reveal nothing," says Sloan.

Well consider this a weeknote for my new-ish micro studio Acts Not Facts.

Just this once though.

It’s Monday morning. I’m standing outdoors on the train platform on the way to a workshop tapping this out with my thumbs.

Coming up this week

1. PartyKit – mainline project. My summer residency was about exploring multiplayer, realtime apps (blogs posts and prototypes here). It’s a different project now. Loosely I would say doing the groundwork for product strategy and go-to-market, but via making things rather than getting lost in plans. Writing code, making Notion pages.
2. Oh I need codenames. I need to speak to comms to check I can name this one. I’m helping to set up the AI experiments pipeline in a big org. The premise is that AI is a 10 year leap forward and we’re imagination bottlenecked: how do you explore and learn with a portfolio approach? On day 1 (a couple weeks ago) I sketched out what the next big bet could be – for my personal comfort I need to know that there’s at least one workable idea on the table. There’s an existing, great team, so I’m working with them 1 day/week. This week is the first of the workshops to start capturing ideas.
3. Another one I’m not sure about naming. I’m on my way there now: a product strategy workshop for a hardware startup approaching product #2. We’ll look at roadmap, commercials, and brand. I like these broad, spilly problem spaces that take synthesis to arrive at a concise, memorable approach.
4. On Wednesday I’m doing a talk at PA Consulting about my AI Clock, currently working its way towards a Kickstarter. Looking forward to talking about the prototyping and design process, and also sharing some meta thoughts about both opportunity spotting and large language model vibes.

I’m in a cafe opposite the Royal Courts, tapping on my laptop. This is my current pov. My idea was to bang out these words before the week proper kicked off but I don’t think that’s going to be possible.

Here’s the premise of Acts Not Facts, which is my new-ish product invention studio, but it’s actually just me:

• As the homepage says the studio is interested in AI, multiplayer (i.e. group use), and embodiment (learning from physical space, cognition, etc, and physical computing). Not all three areas at once necessarily.
• Why the name? For the last decade or so, the way to bring new products into the world was to think carefully and make PowerPoint decks and cover the walls in post-its. No longer. The landscape of possibilities is unknown so the appropriate approach is to roll your sleeves up. Things-which-are-made teach you about the technology, open up new thoughts, and (vitally!) let you work with people who aren’t as close to the technology as you but probably have better ideas.
• The plan is to find projects that I can achieve with a small team hired by the studio. That means building a small portfolio on my own for creds. That’s the stage I’m in now.

I’m lucky that these first engagements align with the Venn diagram on the homepage.

Ok, workshop time, wish me luck.

Media last week

• I run an unofficial archive of my favourite radio show, In Our Time, which is on the BBC and been going about 25 years. There are 1,000+ episodes on every topic under the sun. I prototyped then then shipped a new AI-powered search widget which you can use right now on braggoscope.com. Tap Search in the top links section. It’s neat because it uses “embeddings” – a kind of semantic space. So you can search for "jupiter" but you can also search for "the biggest planet". My post about this did pretty well on LinkedIn. People like to see simple but effective uses of AI!
• Venkatesh Rao published his new essayOozy Intelligence in Slow Time which builds on and says very positive things about a recent blog post: "Matt Webb’s excellent reframing of AI as intelligence too cheap to meter…" – I am v proud to be on vgr’s radar to say the least.
• I spoke recently in Hamburg at NEXT23 about human-AI collaboration, and playful experiments, and after the talk recorded a 30 minute interview about product invention. It was a super fun conversation and has now been published: Exploring AI personalities and poetic clocks (YouTube).

Think of the studio as a funnel. Awareness becomes conversations becomes work.

I don’t know yet what the right shape for a project is – it takes a while to learn where my edge is and what resonates in the market. Ideally I would be consistent building awareness around that.

To begin with it is enough that people know I exist via an activity which is more efficient than 1:1 conversations. Hence tracking media.

Brief situation report: I am sitting outside on a low wall eating a cheese sandwich. The product strategy workshop went well I think. It is useful to be able to map out a company’s products and activities and compare that against all the other companies I have seen. It means I can say what is different or what feels missing. Anyway, the 2 hours of immersion resulted in 3 recommendations.

I’ll carry on writing when I’m on the train home this evening.

Also in my in-tray

I regard the AI Clock as a studio project. I’m pricing up a second manufacturing route before starting the crowdfunding campaign. An email of questions arrived this morning that I need to respond to. Then there’s a ton of small tasks to do with content for the campaign itself… and I need to line up media…

And remember I said that awareness leads to conversations? I have an email or two to respond to on that count too, but before I do that I need to figure out an ask… like, if the point of a meeting is to beget more meetings then how do I ensure that happens?

The scarce resource is always attention.

I have a stack of experiments I want to build. But it is never top priority to go through my list and draw/develop/combine/prioritise/next-steps then all.

Let alone those that could be businesses in their own right! Those are the ones I really need to carve out time to develop.

I ran across the idea recently that you operate a queue-based or stack-based priority list. With a queue, you work down from the top, crossing off tasks as you go, and add new ones to the bottom. Stack-based: you add and take from the top, optionally re-ordering the stack based on priority.

I have always been stack-based. (Which anyone who has ever emailed me will recognise. If the email is in the top 6 at the exact moment I am looking at my phone, I will reply immediately. If not it will be buried forever. Sorry.)

Which begs the question: given scarce attention, how do you get to the tasks which are lower down the stack but none-the-less vital? Answers on a postcard please.

The smart thing to do would be the take my wish list of experiments, and cherrypick for possible collabs. Sketch a project pitch every time I’m about to walk into a conversation with potential clients, so I have something in my back pocket.

Huh. Maybe I actually should do that.

Nothing profound. It’s dark now and, although I’m on the train, my thumbs are slow from typing in the cold on the platform. So time to wrap this and publish and maybe I’ll have time to reply to the manufacturing folks before I get home.

UPDATE: Email sent. Approaching my stop. Save. Commit. Deploy.

More posts tagged: weeknotes (8).

Job Garden panel in George’s Newsletter

Like we always say, a portfolio job board is nice to have — but it’s no good if great candidates don’t see it.

That why we publicise jobs with automated weekly tweets, and why job seekers can subscribe to new opportunities using email and RSS. But how else can we get the word out…

Email newsletters are already used by tons of organisations (investors included) to share news with their communities.

So we built something just for newsletters.

Some back-story. George Walkley publishes a weekly newsletter on innovation, ventures, and media. It’s one of my view few must-reads. At the bottom of each edition is a link to George’s job board. Great idea.

We’ve worked with George to create a simple Mailchimp integration that brings live job data to his newsletter. (Mailchimp is one of the most popular newsletter platforms.)

☝️ You can see the result in the image at the top. His newsletter has a panel with live data, pulled from his own job board at the time of sending, and shared with his readers. Because the data is live, the panel is more enticing.

And you can use it too! 👉 Share these instructions with your friendly social media expert.

Newsletters are a great way to spread the word about portfolio jobs. And, of course, gardeners can monitor effectiveness using the new, integrated web traffic reports.

(We’re keen to hear from people who use platforms other than Mailchimp, or who would like to push the boundaries with what data is included in the newsletter. So if you want to try something new, get in touch.)

A little housekeeping!

Please welcome Alex Dunsdon, partner at SAATCHiNVEST, to Job Garden. Their portfolio includes startups like Citymapper and Mrs Wordsmith — and you can find opportunities at those companies and many more on Alex’s job board.

And we’ve not done Job Garden stats for a while, so here’s the latest:

• 353 companies tracked (223 of which have open roles)
• 3,180 live jobs (16,065 all-time)

OK, that’s all for today. Until next time,

–Matt

More posts tagged: job-garden (53).

I like small plastic cows. I don't know why. I haven't owned any until today. For many years I have wanted a herd for my home, and 100 would do nicely. But there is no way I can justify spending that much money on plastic animals. I could however justify giving that same amount to charity. So how about 100 people buy me 1 cow each, and then I give £500 to the charity they vote for? It's a win-win. It's Matt Webb's 100 Head Cattle Drive 2008! Pass it on, buy a cow, round 'em up and roll 'em out.

FIRSTLY.

This is a tough but intriguing one: The Sound of Music is ostensibly a movie about homely Austrians resisting the invading fascists.

But Slavoj Zizek explains that it is also a pro-fascist movie.

Zizek’s argument: the heroes of the movie are these anti-intellectual Austrians who are living a traditional life, i.e. rejecting change. Therefore they have a fascistic quality. Whereas the type Nazis shown not soldiers but urbane cosmopolitans, precisely the elite class that (populist) fascists want to eliminate.

So while the surface narrative is about beating the Nazis, the underlying message has us rooting for a fascistic mindset.

It’s… a stretch. If true then maybe that’s why the movie continues to feel so fresh: because it runs counter to our expectations every time. (But I enjoy being challenged to think about things like this, especially a film that I’ve seen so many times.)

The meta here, I suppose, is that we all have a fascistic tendency and that’s why the traditional Austrian life appeals: the desire to resist change, and to exert control on others and the world. Sometimes that’s unhealthy (I mean, clearly when it comes to Nazis, but also authoritarianism in general, and also when it is generally unwarranted and connected with fury when the world - understandably - doesn’t immediately accord to one’s whim). But sometimes it is fine: gardening, parenting, management, design, all forms of control that are generally a-o.k… though I imagine we can all recall examples where even these have become over-controlling. And so the line must be policed.

SECONDLY, in my series of two disjointed thoughts about politics:

I’m just back from Center Parcs which - for US readers - is a certain kind of British/European/middle class phenomenon.

Each Center Parcs location is a forest village with hundreds of almost identical, comfortably furnished self-catered lodges (ours had a hot tub). Cars are banned except on moving days; you cycle everywhere. There are tons of activities such as swimming, zip lines, sports, pottery, woodland walks, falconry, etc.

So let’s be clear: it’s super fun and I’ve had a wonderful week of full-on family time, swimming, biking, star gazing, and adventuring.

It is utopia made from market communism. It is undeniably gorgeous to be cycling from activity to activity in the woods. You sign up for activities by paying a moderate fee but we all get to choose from the same relatively small set of choices. It’s a captured market: a fine resource allocation mechanism, but not allowed to run rampant. Variation is within limits. We live equally.

BUT.

There are the workers, of course. The cleaners, the foresters, the shop cashiers, and so on. So another way of looking at this communist idyll is to call it totalitarian class capitalism. The consumer and worker classes may never cross; the consumer class lives a life of luxury but at the expense of freedom.

All of which has left me a little at sea about political descriptions.

Functionally it seems like market communism and totalitarian class capitalism are equivalent, so what’s the point of holding a political position? Maybe we need other ways to describe the differences between things?

OR maybe these two labels are simultaneously true, only at different scales or social “distances”. It’s communist for me and people like me, looking from the inside. It’s totalitarian looking from the outside. Taking one step further away, one bubble further out, it’s class capitalism.

And I wonder how much political differences and positions would make more sense if we clarified the scale and the stance.

You might be socialist for “people like us” (whatever that means: class, ethnicity, nation) and neoliberal outside that. But that means something entirely different depending on your position and where you draw the line for “like me”. Maybe the lesson from The Sound of Music is that fascistic tendencies are actually pretty normal at certain scales and from certain perspectives.

This goes back to oikos vs polis (May 2021) which is basically blood vs state, two ends of the scale: which do you privilege.

Anyway.

I’m just back from the dentist right now, so here’s a story about another time going to the dentist and an epiphany I had while I was in the chair.

I had a whole bunch of dental work a few years ago.

Three sessions in the chair, each 3 or 4 hours long. My dentist was from Iraq and he had a sideline representing the new government installed by the Allies so he would crop up in the media from time to time and occasionally disappear for a few months to Baghdad to lend a hand. He was also a neurolinguistic programming adept, so I enjoyed quizzing him about that, and his professional claim was that he employed hypnosis to take the sting out of dental work, using a process of visualisation to descend a series of steps into a beautiful garden of lakes and trees, etc, though actually I think he just had a heavy hand on the nitrous.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had nitrous oxide but it’s mildly euphoric and very relaxing. Sensation is reduced and your body feels heavy, floating somehow. Together with the headphones (the aforementioned hypnosis playing on a tape) and my eyes closed, I would pretty quickly descend back inside myself, and spend the hours in a semi-observant, semi-dreaming state.

So that was really the story of the first session, inhabiting this odd kind of dentist dream, idly exploring my altered mental state, dissociated, yet able to think and reason.

What I noticed was that my mind felt smaller somehow, like a cat’s brain (I remember thinking), but also closer to the fabric of reality itself. Without my preconceptions getting in the way, stripped back to my animal brain, I was able to perceive more clearly, and therefore had access to deeper truths about myself and the cosmos – both the same thing really.

And just before I resurfaced, I discovered a huge truth, a startling revelation.

Not that I could remember it.

All I could recall was its import.

So in the second of my three sessions, I went back to re-discover whatever it was.

The way I ended up thinking about the nitrous state wasn’t that it wasn’t that I was reduced, like this simplified mind idea I had, or transcendent even, a layer above or below my regular mind somehow.

Rather it was as if my mind had rotated about itself into a new configuration so that all the sensory apparatus was now pointing inwards at itself, the full power of sense-making lensed inward, and by looking into my own mind and contemplating its form, I could then make deductions from its shape about the nature of the cosmos outside.

What’s more, I was able to maintain ideas and follow trains of thought, in this configuration, that wouldn’t be possible or sustainable in the other, regular configuration, the configuration of mundane reality. Both states were valid, independently, but they couldn’t exist simultaneously.

But what was interesting was that there was an isomorphism between ideas in the two configurations. So while I was able to run impossible chains of thought in the nitrous configuration that I couldn’t run in the regular configuration, the destination concepts that I reached could be transferred between configurations.

That was why it was possible to reach some kind of epiphany. In mundane reality, such a concept would be inaccessible. By in the altered configuration, I could reach this new idea, and then, having reached it, bring it back.

My mental model for this was two worlds, two bubbles, linked with a tunnel.

One bubble, large, outward facing and well-lit: the regular configuration of mundane reality. The second bubble, dark, inward facing, contemplative, possibly small but possibly infinite: the altered nitrous configuration. I inhabit either one configuration or the other. Between them, a narrow tunnel, along which my consciousness moves as it transforms from one to the other.

Did I re-discover the revelation? Yes. I know that I did. I know that it was important. Did I remember what it was?

That second session, no, I did not.

When I came out of the dentist, all I could remember was the image of these two bubbles for the two psychic configurations, and the tunnel.

And mainly, this idea: you can bring one thing through the tunnel.

What I had figured out was that when my mind moved between the configurations, what I thought was urgent and desirable in one configuration wouldn’t necessarily translate to the other.

In particular, what felt like a rare revelation about the nature of self and the cosmos, etc, from the perspective of the regular configuration was, yes, important when viewed from the nitrous configuration, but actually it felt pretty natural and commonsensical there too, and so, in that altered state, I felt no necessity to work hard to remember it.

But what I also figured out what that, as I moved between these two worlds, if I concentrated on holding one thought in mind, I could deliberately carry it through the tunnel and it would be the seed for my thoughts on the other side.

So what I decided to do, ahead of the third session in the dentist chair, was to carry this vow with me:

When I encountered the revelation, I must carry it back, no matter what.

I would entered the altered state configuration, and hand this vow to altered state me.

It didn’t work entirely as planned.

The third session began. They gave me the gas, I went through the tunnel repeating to myself this vow to re-discover the big truth and bring it back, I entered the altered state, and so on, and as before I had this same revelation - this epiphany - but this time I also remembered my goal to bring it back with me to the surface.

But while the plan was to carry it through the tunnel, back to everyday reality, I realised that this idea, discovered in the alternate configuration, was too large to come back with me that way.

Instead the only way was to burst between the realms of consciousness by force and bring the new truth into the light via a new route.

Which is what I did, and it must have been disconcerting to see.

My mouth was being held open. There were a lot of broken teeth at that point, it was right in the middle, and they were cutting back my gums too, so there was a fair amount of blood I believe, and a couple of suction tubes in my mouth.

Coming up was like swimming hard towards the sun from deep under the ocean, and breaking the through the water’s surface took huge effort.

Forcing my eyes open was a slow battle.

Eventually I triumphed, and the dentist and two nurses in the room were there as I managed to open my eyes, halfway through that day’s procedure, and gestured that I needed to speak – I remember knowing that was my chance to vocalise and concretise my epiphany before it evaporated in the light. So they took the tubes out of my mouth and the clamps off my lips, and moved the equipment away, and pulled the cotton wool out, and all of that stuff, and gestured to let me know I could speak, and listened as I was able to get out the words that had taken me 10 hours over three weeks of deep internal exploration, and strategic planning let’s not forget, to bring back from the depths of altered psychic states to our everyday reality; and I said these words, and no words will ever be truer than the truth contained in these words at that moment, and I said this: Can I Have More Nitrous Please.

And they laughed and nodded and turned the nitrous oxide up, and put the tubes back in my mouth, and I closed my eyes, and they carried on with their work, and I lay there happy.

I guess the lesson is that what is vitally important in one state of mind is not necessarily vital or important in another.

Truth is contextual?

Something like that.

Nitrous is great? Or at least it was at that particular time for that particular me. That’s another lesson I suppose.

They offered me nitrous today and I declined. Instead I was amazed when they scanned my teeth with a handheld scanner that automatically stitched the images into a 3D model, and even more amazed that it took only 7 minutes to print the new crown. Colouring and firing the crown took 15 minutes. I was in and out in an hour and a half, including having the old crown knocked out, watching the dentist adjust the 3D geometry on the big screen next to the chair, and having a nice chat about photogrammetry and also the history of milling machines. So there we go.

Hello. Hello? Is this thing on?

I was at a conference last week and the closing speaker, Tobias, ended his presentation by saying I’m Sorry instead of Thank You.

I liked that. I’m sorry. Hello.

Exoskeletons quietly got good while I wasn’t looking?

FOR INSTANCE, LEGS:

Hangzhou RoboCT Technology Development Co. raised series A funding earlier this year: "RoboCT’s UGO exoskeleton robot is a rehabilitation robot that helps patients who experience motor dysfunction in the lower body learn how to walk."

100,000 UGO exoskeletons are already in market.

There are also passive exoskeletons. Ottobock has a series of unpowered exoskeletons that redistribute weight, for use in the logistics space. e.g. squatting, lifting, carrying are all easier.

Powered again: these active exoskeletons, in use by the Chinese military (2021), list similar micro-benefits:

• "It is powered by a motor, which will give a reacting force to its user every time the user gets up after bending over, so the user can get up faster with less effort"
• "one person can carry ammunition boxes weighing 50 kilograms without much effort"
• "It takes less than 40 seconds to put on and take off the suit."

Exoskeletons don’t address use cases but instead augment, and I mean this in the Engelbart/Licklider sense.

To unpack that:

From Douglas Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) which is the approach that led his team to invent the personal computer: "Every process of thought or action is made up of sub-processes." – for example: finding, copying, re-arranging, and filing text.

It’s a solid approach! Identify and speed up the sub-processes, then the tasks look after themselves. (Very different from today’s world of end-to-end task-focused service design, say.)

Engelbart was following J. C. R. Licklider who made the original conceptual breakthrough after introspecting on his own work. In his paper Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960):

In the spring and summer of 1957, therefore, I tried to keep track of what one moderately technical person actually did during the hours he regarded as devoted to work. …

About 85 per cent of my "thinking" time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so. …

Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight.

– J. C. R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)

The bottleneck to progress is not smart people, it is what is easy: "my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability."

This is a stunning result!

If you augment the sub-processes, not only are tasks achieved more efficiently, but you increase the surface area of the adjacent possible!

And it’s the conceptual rhyming that underpins my interest in exoskeletons: what is opened up by augmenting sub-processes of the physical self?

(To round out the story above: Licklider inspired Engelbart; Licklider funded Engelbart based on that paper in his capacity as director at ARPA; Engelbart’s team invented the PC. I wrote a potted history last year.)

What are the civilian applications?

The last time I was on about cyborg prosthetics (2020) I said I wanted a chairless chair but for gardening.

I’m still waiting! If you can get an active exoskeleton for squatting with a drill on the assembly line, then give me my powerloader to empty the dishwasher dammit.

Like: eyeglasses were lame essentials and then they became fashion. I’m sure that exoskeleton knees to redistribute weight so I can more easily lift the sofa while hoovering would end up being cool. Somehow.

Let’s not overlook AI. There’s the possibility of do-what-I-mean interaction that should let exoskeletons and other prosthesis fit right into everyday life.

FOR EXAMPLE: why not an extra arm that I strap round my chest, and I can use the extra hand to just… hold stuff.

Let’s say my 3rd hand can hold a mug of tea without spilling it as I go up and down the stairs, arms full with other stuff, and hand it back gracefully when I go to take it. Why wouldn’t I have that on me the whole time?

Anyway I prefer somaforming to cyborgs nowadays.

Clynes and Kline’s “cyborg” concept from 1960 was derived from transforming humans into half-human, half-machine hybrids to survive the hostile environment of space (here’s the history).

But sci-fi author Becky Chambers, in her 2019 novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate proposes something else: "Somaforming is an elegant solution, but not an immediate process." – somewhat akin to a patch that produces insulin.

We don’t change much – nothing that would make us unrecognisable, nothing that would push us beyond the realm of our humanity, nothing that changes how I think or act or perceive.

– Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Amazon)

It’s a take on cyborging which emphasises the contingent, the temporary and partial, the human and the body; the process, the versatility…

Somaforming for space? How about somaforming for everyday life.

It’s a framing that unlocks the imagination for me in a way that thinking about cyborg prostheses doesn’t so much.

Look: the exoskeleton challenge is no longer technology. It’s what we do and how.

And if we’re looking into the adjacent possible, then perhaps it’s more plausible from a consumer product R&D perspective to chase down robot trousers than robot cars. Why not, why not?

Don’t give me autonomous vehicle cocoons to get me far away –

– give me augmented legs to make it easier to hang out in my neighbourhood; to carry the shopping and spend more time in the fresh air and greeting people I pass; to cover ground with ease, to pay attention near traffic for me, to let me reply to an email or two on the hoof if I need to…

To somaform me for the walkable city.

More posts tagged: glimpses-of-our-cyborg-future (15), speculative-in-2022 (20).

1.

Rod McLaren’s beautiful meditation on spreadsheets, and his spreadsheet art: Sandcastles and Spreadsheets.

The spreadsheet’s unreality is dangerously doubled because, while their ordered data and formulae always comfort you that you have authored a controllable certainty, most spreadsheets are mere conjectures, provisional plans, ideas or hopes.

Spreadsheets are dreams.

Read that, next time you have a rainy day with your head buried in Excel.

Rod’s essay is part of Beeker Northam’s larger project, Hand & Brain with William Gibson and several others contributing. Something to get lost in.

2.

Donald Knuth helped define computer science. Since 1990, he no longer has an email address: "I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime."

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

He replies to his correspondence for 1 day every 3 months.

Joe Nelson ran with this… Going Off-Line. "I will check email once per week, on Monday."

On Twitter and Github I’ll be entirely write-only. I’ll check replies/messages/issues on Mondays along with my email. …

I will eliminate all use of the computer that is not directly related to creating things. If I’m not coding, writing, or editing videos then there will be literally nothing to do. I am going to dissociate the computer from mindless fun, from the capacity to kill time online.

I like the idea of taking a write-only sabbatical.

(Actually, thinking about it, I reckon that’s why I’m enjoying writing on my blog so much. In the old days of blogging, a blog post was part of a conversation. Not today. Barely anybody replies, and when I do get a response it’s lovely or thoughtful and often both. But I don’t know if anyone reads these words; the links don’t get shared out so much. It’s very freeing, like having a notebook with a very slight incentive to better organise my thoughts. And my thoughts improve in that process. Write-only blogging.)

3.

Will Self on Stonehenge:

“Don’t you worry about the monument ceasing to be real in an important sense,” I asked. “I mean, with all this messing about isn’t Stonehenge in danger of museumification?”

The balance between putting the past on a pedestal, and living in it and carrying it forwards.

4.

A few years ago, I transcribed and put online one of my all-time favourite short stories, The Author of the Acacia Seeds by Ursula K. Le Guin. My favourite story not just for the ideas, or for the turns of phrase and the humour. But for the gentle, determined build into a wholesale decentering of what it means to be human, and a huge widening of togetherness and empathy to the entire cosmos. Which, it turns out, is what I love science fiction for.

But don’t read that.

Because here is a video of Le Guin reading from the Acacia Seeds at a conference and oh my goodness it makes me tingle.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (127).

Books read October 2008, with date finished:

• On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1st)
• The Embedding, Ian Watson (7th)
• The Mightiest Machine, John Campbell (11th)
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick (17th)
• The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter (20th, r.)
• The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem (23rd)
• A comprehensive review of the extraordinary new technology of Information, Scientific American (29th)
• Tales of the Night, Peter Høeg (30th, r.)

It's to be noted that 63% of the books I read this month have titles that begin with "The" compared to only 29% for 2008 as a whole (26% if you exclude October). The run of five is unprecedented, although back in March there were two groups of two separated by an indefinite article.

Høeg: "Seismology is the study of surface tremors caused by the tension built up below the earth's crust. The study of love represents the seismology of the individual and of togetherness." This is one point of view: Høeg's characters are all have deeply different approaches, and I am arrested by how he is able to see love in such a variety of profound ways:

Information, a collection of essays from 1962, has a delightful turn of phrase: computers are referred to as "workers" and timesharing a computer installation is a way to keep them "gainfully employed." It makes me wonder when the word "working" changed from meaning productively labouring towards a goal to simply not broken. There's also this quote: "They are called computers simply because computation is the only significant job that has so far been given to them." (Ridenour, 1952)

I've read Tainter's review of collapse before. He comes to a view that complexity has diminishing returns, and a change in circumstances can mean it makes economic sense for the population to decomplexify their society. It's a must read. An op-ed in the New York Times pointed out that "Although banks perform an essential economic function — bringing together investors and savers — they are not the only institutions that can do this." It's true. Just as the internet reduces our dependence on high street shops and advertising to choose the products we encounter, and big entertainment verticals to choose what media we consume to unwind, it also reduces the importance of banks as a problem solving mechanism for how capital and entrepreneurs meet. But the financial sector, as an organ of complex society, must be paid for. If its complexity is no longer required, perhaps we are all better off to see it simplified.

My recommendation this month is for On the Road. To mix pace and narrative and meaning like that. I was carried away. Poetry!

Two days ago, Sunday, I joined the Tate as a member to get access to their Members Room to have somewhere to sit to read my book and have a coffee. The cheesecake there is pretty good. I was looking out onto the river. I rarely see London from the side, and it was strange being six storeys up to not see the buildings looming up or from above, as from a plane, and not closing in on me but, as I say, from the side and set back from me somewhat, across the water.

I think it's good for the soul of a city to be able to take itself in, and that's something that Brighton can do, looking back on itself from the beach and the pier, and that San Francisco does very well, from above and across, but London cannot and in consequence often feels like an ant hill, with all of us the ants. When I am in London, I am inside it, in its belly. I cannot take it in. From the side I am not high up enough to look down on the city as a map, so I see London as a collection of buildings and cars and people, at a human scale, and with a little distance I am able to appreciate it, to study it. To apprehend London. It's a rare view, the one from the side.

The water and the sky and the buildings had, because of the lowness of the sun and the overcastness of the clouds, the same flatness of illumination and the same quality of colour, blue brown green. The Thames itself was highly reflective and it was possible to see the dark blue tint of the sky, but look through that and beyond it had no translucency, not even a little, so it looked like oil and moved like oil too: not just choppy (which it was) but rippling too so between every wave was another wave, and so on. The Thames was over-full, brimming, and the waves moving slowly as if the water was heavier today, or the air was thick, or gravity different in some way.

I understand that young people have translucent skin and so, in the light, they appear to glow, light reflecting from multiple depths of the skin simultaneously so their outer shell appears to fluoresce. The skin of adults is opaque, like old plastic.

Piercing through these three, the water, sky and city, was the reflection of the setting sun on a building, a blinding orange light smeared out and organised into a grid by the window. And on the river was an upright mirror the size of a billboard, on a raft and tethered, bobbing, glinting white then black, the waves speaking in Morse.

It reminds me of the last time I sat watching the Thames, waiting for a friend near the Oxo Tower, and again seeing London from the side. This time the river was flowing fast, and the clouds were moving fast, and the distances involved in both were such that I could see continuous parallax: those parts nearest to me moving quickest, and those furthest moving slow. And birds flew past me, and people walking and cycled past me in both directions, and boats went along the river, and overall there was a sense that everything in my visual field was horizontal; that everything was moving sideways today; that I might be on a conveyor belt.

Red on Maroon Mural, Section 2

After the Members Room I went to the Rothko exhibition, which runs until 1 February 2009.

There's something about Rothko's painting, especially a few of those in room 3, which means they operate somewhere different from other art. The interventions Rothko makes on the fields of colour are of the same order as the interventions my perception system makes, the way my subjectivity changes my perception, and the way the light and quality of the canvas changes as I move my eyes, my head and my body around the room. It becomes impossible to disentangle these influences, to know whether it is me or Rothko responsible for what I am perceiving and thinking. My reactions to the pieces in room 9 were of looking over a landscape: the heavy blacks at the top drew my head up, and the level of the horizon made me feel as though I was looking from a hill over a large plain abundant with life, or lying flat on the ground, or up at heaven. I was elated or deeply depressed. From where did this come? It humbles me. When David Markson writes, he's not writing the words, but writing instructions to author the thing that appears between the paper and my brain, which is brought into being and constructed by the act of reading. I cannot author on this level. Rothko was not painting canvases, but a structure held halfway between us: a delicate structure constructed by him and me both, where the art insists on me a certain context or emotion, causing me to feel the room around me he wants me to feel and to think thoughts felt as my own; simultaneously mirroring and leading me, like dancing, like speaking with a highly charismatic person, or really good sex when you can't tell whether it's you or your partner anticipating or actually something that is mutual and happening between you and outside you. Rothko's art is transcendent. I was enraptured. There were fireworks in my soul.

There’s a “new” track by the Beatles, grafted together from a demo by Lennon in the 70s, guitar by Harrison in the 90s (Lennon was killed in 1980. Harrison died in 2001), and new strings and drums from McCartney and Starr.

Plus a lot of production, using AI.

That demo from Lennon: "The very original recording is just John playing the piano with TV in the background" – that’s Giles Martin, producer, son of George Martin.

Other tracks layered on similar poor recordings resulted in Lennon’s voice sounding “ghostly.” That was 1994.

So this time they used technology developed for Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary on Disney+ (which is incredible btw).

“Essentially, what the machine learning does is it recognizes someone’s voice. So if you and I have a conversation and we’re in a crowded room and there’s a piano playing in the background, we can teach the AI what the sound of your voice, the sound of my voice, and it can extract those voices,” Martin said.

– NPR, How producers used AI to finish The Beatles’ ‘last’ song, ‘Now And Then’

Listen to the new track here: The Beatles - Now And Then (Official Audio) (YouTube).

It’s… pretty good?

Like, musically, it’s ok. I find the strings arrangement a little too much maybe? McCartney’s taste has been so era-defining that, weirdly, his work starts to sound generic. (I say this as a McCartney fan! Read 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney and be convinced.)

But it’s a lot and to my ear, it’s too smooth.

Because what really shines is Lennon’s voice. My goodness have they done a good job with that. They should have given it more room.

Mechanically recovered from the slurry of old tape recordings or not, 50% reconstruction or not, Lennon’s voice shines through time and up through the muddy waters of AI algorithms. It is poignant and beautiful to hear him sing. Familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

Mind you I’m in Liam Gallagher’s camp given what he said in The Guardian: "The Beatles could shit in my handbag and I’d still hide my polo mints in there."

ASIDE:

Here’s a Wild Palms reference seeing as I’m a massive fan and even from 1993 they pinpointed this modern era before any of us:

Episode 4, after lounge singer Chap Starfall has been murdered by the Friends, the Senator et al have a hologram of him playing as background music. He was their buddy.

Tabba Schwartzkopf is watching: "Hate to say it but I like him so much better since he died. That posthumous quality really makes me shiver."

Look – Wild Palms nailed both the nature of the technology S-curve and the effect of VR/the metaverse/synthetic reality/fake news/whatever you want to call it, all as background colour, wrapped up in a melodrama about LA media through the eyes of a patent attorney. I will never miss an opportunity to evangelise.

I’m trying to figure out how I feel about Now and Then.

Is there any legitimate difference - poignancy aside - between this AI extrapolation and, well, me never having heard a track before?

I have an ANALOGY.

Dummy by Portishead – released in 1994.

A contender for the best album of my lifetime. A haunting trip-hop soundtrack over 30 years.

I copied it onto tape for my car. Later ripped the CD into iTunes, listened endlessly there.

Portishead’s third album Three came out in 2008. In terms of which group has a better three album oeuvre: there is none.

I was never a Spotify listener. But Apple Music shipped in 2015, and at some point the streaming edition of the album shouldered out my ripped version, and:

There was a new track.

I can’t even discover when It’s a Fire (YouTube) appeared. It’s not on the U.K. original release.

It’s probably my favourite track now because each time I hear it, it still feels brand new. Imagine your favourite album for two decades suddenly has an extra song! It’s wild.

So my control experiment is right here. Music spear-fishes both kinds of memory - emotional and episodic - and reliably hauls up exotic and forgotten species from the deep past. And It’s a Fire has none of that for me. No gang of mates smoking in a front room. No silhouetted dark woods out of the car window in the witching hour. No bar, no working in a cafe, no running up Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath at sun-up, no residual sense recall of the feel of the cracked plastic compact disk case packed and unpacked with my uni belongings. Simply: the music.

AND YET, even without all of that, I love it.

Here’s my conclusion:

Yes there is some (large) component of the “unit” of music/art/etc which is its subjective significance. But it turns out that this isn’t essential. The work can stand alone.

How about authenticity?

Does Now and Then lose something because Lennon wasn’t in the room?

Can I hear inauthenticity? I suspect not. I can hear the pre-2020s consequences of inauthenticity: a song without authenticity sounds empty.

But here in the 20s that has changed. We can say that Now and Then is a patchwork construction (but isn’t all studio-produced music) and macabre certainly (but as Schwartzkopf said, doesn’t it make you shiver?) - but it isn’t hollow. It’s not low quality.

So authenticity doesn’t matter either.

We’ve seen AI-extrapolated art before (as previously discussed) and it just hasn’t been very good. Like, it’s novel but it lacks something, and my preconception has been that there was no way that AI art can be good because it doesn’t have the original human touch, or the provenance (societal or personal).

But what I believe now is that it’s do with the effectiveness of the machine.

AI art will be good. We will one day have new Van Goghs, new Beatles tracks, new episodes of Firefly, and so long as they’re good - which they will be - my prediction is that we won’t mind where they come from. Quality will overcome it all. Caring about the origins will be nerdy like specifying which show runner you preferred on The West Wing.

So we should lean into extrapolated art maybe?

And that would be an easy thing to do?

Simon Willison recently did a deep dive into OpenAI’s new image synthesis AI: Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3.

The random number seed caught my attention. Simon

• generated an image from a prompt
• asked ChatGPT for the seed for that image: "1379049893"
• tweaked the prompt to add a bow tie, maintaining the same seed
• and got an almost identical image, only with the asked-for bow tie.

Simon: "I’m pretty stunned by this."

It’s a surprising result! My mental model of AI image synthesis has been that (a) yes images look great, but (b) they’re pretty chaotic. i.e. a change in the prompt, even an extra bit of punctuation, will send the AI spiralling off in a different direction and the resultant image will look very different.

What this deep dive shows that is that variance in the results is down to a random number generator. That’s what the “seed” is: it’s a number to feed into the image synthesis. The seed is randomly generated – but now I need to update my mental model to state that the image synthesis itself is actually deterministic.

(I’ve tried to reproduce Simon’s experiment but ChatGPT will not tell me the seed for DALL-E-generated images. So I think that hole has been closed.)

The consequences of there being a seed:

It makes AI synthesis way more reproducible. That means you can sit there tweaking and tuning a prompt and narrowing in on something intentional – this makes AI much less of a novelty, and much more like the creative process. It will reward work and skill.

It also reminds me that the words of the prompt become numbers too: vector embeddings, which can be mathematically combined.

As AI imagery, so AI music.

Now John Lennon probably isn’t a 10 digit integer. The seed isn’t deterministic like that. But passable Lennon probably is a 1,024 dimensional vector in embedding space.

And given that, there’s not just Now and Then but an infinity of possible extrapolated Beatles tracks.

We’d have to figure out the ethics and the IP (both fascinating rabbit holes in their own right) but perhaps we should lean into that, instead of pre-emptively blocking the possibility in the UI, which is what happens now, because who knows what would happen next.

More posts tagged: extrapolation (4).

So I’m vaguely resentful about celebrating Halloween because, since I was a kid, it has increasingly displaced the holiday which comes only a week after on 5th November: Bonfire Night. Which I love.

Brits will definitely know what I’m talking about, and you probably do, but to recap for others who may not:

Back in 1605, Guy Fawkes and a handful of other conspirators planned to blow up Parliament and King James.

Fawkes was caught in the act, in a cellar under the House of Lords surrounded by barrels of gunpowder, waiting to light the fuse, and tortured gruesomely.

He was seen as a Catholic terrorist and the story was used by the government to support anti-Catholic sentiment.

The propaganda started pretty fast: the Observance of 5th November Act was passed by parliament just a few months later, and required both church and public to give thanks for the failure of the Gunpowder Plot.

400+ years on and we still celebrate. There are bonfires and optionally fireworks. Guy Fawkes is burnt in effigy on the fire.

Our local community garden continues the standard tradition: kids in the neighbourhood make a “guy” (an effigy, like clothes stuffed with paper plus a face) and often the guy will be made to resemble some contemporary figure. In our community there is a prize for the best one. For example a couple years ago there were 5 guys entered in the competition: 3 Boris Johnsons, 1 Jacob Rees-Mogg, and 1 robot wearing a sign saying “technology.” Then all the guys are put on the fire.

Everyone stands round the fire and stares at it. The bigger the better. It’s not very sophisticated.

(The fireworks are pretty good though. There was a peak of huge public displays in the early 2000s, before austerity, and tons of people have fireworks in their gardens.)

There’s a wonderful duality to Bonfire Night:

On the one hand it’s a state-initiated thanksgiving. From a top-down perspective we are supposed to revile Guy Fawkes.

But the vernacular can only be seen as a celebration of Fawkes. Sure the plot failed but he almost blew up the king! Secretly wouldn’t we all like to etc.

I’m not saying that anyone actually wants to be a terrorist during daylight hours, but there is an element of carnival to Guy Fawkes Night: the fire is primal, almost violent; it’s a pressure valve for our dark side, the part that wants to burn it all down. Then the next day, all is ok again.

Brits and non-Brits alike will recognise the anti-establishment hero from V for Vendetta: the white mask with the pointy beard is the face of Guy Fawkes.

I don’t know whether this is an actual trend or just what things look like from where I’m standing, but when I was a kid Bonfire Night was a big deal, and making guys too.

Now it’s still around but it’s more of a folk celebration.

Instead: Halloween. Trick-or-treating is a thing now, and adults in fancy dress (sexy costumes too). Witches and pumpkins and ghosts have always been around, but the level of Halloween merch in supermarkets, and the overall cultural and commercial scale of the thing – that’s new in the last couple decades.

Halloween is Celtic originally isn’t it? But in its modern incarnation it’s an American holiday that we’ve absorbed through media and profit margins. And it’s great I guess.

But I love the simplicity of a giant fire and the janus-faced tangle of that ancient celebration of burning the guy and secretly imagining sticking it to the king. It rhymes a lot, in 2022, with the love-hate relationship I think many of us have with Englishness.

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

I’ve voted in seven general elections. The first was 1997, when Labour won and Blair got in. Also various local elections, mayoral elections, and European elections, plus two referendums.

The electoral register is kept up to date continuously. I can register to vote online. Periodically a letter is sent to our house with a list of all registered voters at the address. I can confirm it or update it, and send the letter back in the post or do it online.

Before an election, a polling card is sent out.

I’ve always lived within walking distance of a polling station.

There’s a short line, if any (I tend to vote before or after work).

The setup is always the same:

Two clerks sit at a desk. One clerk - just a regular person, they look like one of my neighbours - takes my name and address. I don’t need my polling card. All the registered votes are printed out for the clerk on big sheets of paper. They confirm my name, and cross me off the list with a ruler and a biro. Their colleague hands me a voting slip.

I go to a booth and fill in the voting slip. There are always these fat, stubby pencils, tied to the inside of the booth.

The booths are flimsy and made of wood. They’re tall and open on the back.

It turns out that the main supplier of all this kit is Shaw’s Election Supplies and they’ve been trading continuously since 1750. They sell everything from ballot boxes to signage to vote counting trays. Here are the stubby pencils I’m talking about. 19 quid for a 100 pack.

Here’s the sign that’s always outside polling stations. It says POLLING STATION in black type.

Then I fold my slip and put it in a metal box at the front. It looks like a battered black cube maybe 50cm on the side, with a letterbox slot in the top. There’s someone standing near the box.

As I leave, there’s usually somebody outside to ask who I am and sometimes how I voted. I assume some of this is political (so parties can get out their supporters) and some is to do with exit polls. I’ve never given it much thought.

The Electoral Commission publishes the polling station handbook (pdf) which covers all of this.

At the end of the day, the boxes are taken to the count. Teams of people tally the votes. The count may be disputed; the votes are re-counted. When all the votes are counted, a winner is declared. There’s a set formula for the words.

I don’t remember voting ever being any different.

Witnessing

What I love imagining in the whole process is the role of witnessing.

The polling station staff see me stand at the booth; they can see there’s no-one else there, and they can see I haven’t got my phone out. I see my pencil mark made on the voting slip, and I put the slip into the locked ballot box myself. Another staff member watches me. The staff are at the polling station from open to close.

The box follows a chain of custody. At the end of the day, it is sealed, and any candidate or official can also add their seal. During transport, the ballot box is never unattended.

People witness the boxes being unsealed. People witness the slips coming out. People count the slips and people witness the slips being counted. The counting centres have public observation areas; they’re often on TV.

The process is one of having as many different eyes on the system as possible, at every step. Opportunities for sleight of hand are minimised.

For me, at least, it creates trust. The single moment of anonymity is the slip I get handed, but absolutely everything else is open to inspection.

When I’m voting, I feel part of something very big and very inclusive. It’s a collective choreography that involves the whole country. Unlike the sprawling systems that I spend most of my time with, like the internet, or roads, or this end of the grocery supply chain, there’s no part of voting that ever feels unobvious. I don’t have to squint and guess at how part of it might work, or trust that someone cleverer than me could explain it if I asked. It’s just… there. Making my X with that stubby pencil, I get to engage with all of this directly, and it is thrilling.

So I love voting. Even though I’m batting 2 for 7 on general elections, and 0 for 2 on referendums. Oh well, that’s democracy. I’m better at gambling: I made enough for a couple of boxes of doughnuts betting on Trump on 2016, and nobody would eat them when I took them into the office.

Other countries

I don’t have any experience of how voting works in other countries. I know the process varies pretty widely.

I’m not saying that the UK is any better or any worse.

I’m not say that the way the votes are put to use is fair or unfair – first past the post, constituencies, etc.

No comment, on any of that.

But I would love to hear stories of how voting works in countries other than my country, the UK. The actual material act of voting in a national election. Any country, not just the US which is voting today. If you post anything on Twitter or your blog, do let me know.

Time for a hardware-ish coffee morning…

Thursday 10 November, 9.30am for a couple of hours, at the Book Club, 100 Leonard St.

You know the score: No intros, no presentations. Just a corner at a handy cafe and seriously talk to EVERYONE it’s worth it. Bring prototypes if you have em, and if you don’t then your good self is enough… especially if you’re interested in hardware, discovering spectacular new business models that make delivering hardware worth it (sigh), Kickstarter, how to get to manufacture, tinkering, etc, etc.

Sometimes there are four of us, sometimes 14. Once there were 24. All super relaxed and friendly. Come along!

(This coffee morning is on request. Somebody got in touch because they want to bring some early protos. Awesome!)

My secret agenda – I’m heading up R/GA’s newest startup program and we’re investing in hardware and Internet of Things companies. I’m on the hunt for great startups. But if you’re interested in the program, don’t feel you need to come to this… coffee morning is about hanging out with everyone there, not about me. To talk program stuff, we can always Skype. Book a time here.

See you on the 10th!

ps. for email updates about hardware-ish coffee mornings, join to the mailing list.

I’m slowly working my way through Emily Wilson’s wonderfully accessible translation of Homer’s The Odyssey. Here’s a review by poet Tate Standage: "I feel any review of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey that didn’t mention the introduction would be as incomplete as the translation itself would be without it."

The introduction takes a dive into the culture and norms of ancient Greece. It’s excellent.

In particular, xenia stuck in my head. From Wilson’s intro (p23 of my edition):

Hospitality is important in all human cultures, ancient and modern; in this respect, there is nothing special about archaic Greece. What is distinctive about the customs surrounding hospitality in this culture is that elite men who have entered one another’s homes and have been entertained appropriately are understood to have create a bond of “guest-friendship” (xenia) between their households that will continue into future generations. Guest-friendship is different from philia, the friendship, affection, love, and loyalty that connects a person to his or her family members and neighborhood friends. It is created not by proximity and friendship, but by a set of behaviors that create bonds between people who are geographically distance from each other.

Wilson refers to the "norms and expectations" of xenia. One of the ways I think of a “norm,” to try to get inside the head of one of these ancient Greeks, is to remember that norms are social reals that are mostly never questioned, it never even occurs to people to question them, they’re taken as given, as actual as gravity and rocks.

(But norms can be violated, and then the retaliatory norm is to punish… Wilson sees The Odyssey through this lens: "The poem’s episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia.")

And:

Xenia acquired an extra importance in the era when Greek men were expanding their world. Travelers, in an era before money, hotels, or public transportation, had to rely on the munificence of strangers to find food and lodging and aid with their onward journey.

Before money!

Money feels very real today, as real as gravity. It’s provocative to think of money itself as a replacement technology, the codified version of the ancient “remote friendship” norm, thousands of years on, xenia 2.0.

Hardware-ish coffee morning last week was AWESOME. Thank you for coming - in no particular order - Nathan, Nat who has just launched a new invention studio called Buckley Williams, Maximilian and Heinrich from Kazendi, Rob who is behind the Ockham Razor, creative hardware engineer Saar, Grace from manufacturer PCH International, the Tingbot massive - which is launching on Kickstarter in a matter of hours - Ben and Joe and Ken from Nord, Naomi and Nick who make biofeedback games to regulate breathing at Shift, Josh (hardware accelerator Hardware Pro), Ines (hardware investor C4V), Tony and Christiaan of the accelerating meteor Pact Coffee which recently successfully launched Nespresso-compatible speciality coffee on Kickstarter, David of Pixie Labs, No Mayo Digital’s Izzy and Clare, shipped-hardware-product BleepBleeps founder Tom, hardware-to-software maker another Tom, Chelsea who is behind the Olly table-top robot currently in development, and OpenSensors Internet of Things platform founder Yodit. And breathe out.

What an amazing group for chitter-chatter and caffeine!

Including me that’s 24 people, and a quick stat – we’re down to two thirds (16) who would probably identify as dudes. Which is not perfect but better than it has been, and on the right trend. Going by my gut, it seems that female founders are a better part of the mix in hardware startups than tech at large, and I hope that goes for inclusivity of all kinds. Whether or not my gut feeling is correct, I certainly want the London hardware community to be a leading edge of London’s inclusivity, and that’s why I track the NADQ at this coffee mornings.

NADQ = Not A Dude Quotient.

So if you’re a woman or not a down-the-line dude, thanks for coming! If you invited someone, thanks! I know it’s a bit weird to keep calling out my coffee morning NADQ like this, but trust me it’s weirder when I sit round a table with six other men on a Thursday morning.

There were a ton of new people today. That was lovely to see.

What was discussed?

Honestly who knows what was discussed.

Hardware-ish coffee morning sprawled over about five tables, with double that many conversations and people continually moving round. I have no idea what people talked about. But I had to leave just after 11 and people were still going!

I was darting about like a headless chicken so I didn’t get to say hi to anyone and my attention was always elsewhere. BOOOOO. And sorry to everyone I know that I didn’t get to chat with!

BUT a couple of things I did notice.

• Tingbot is a lovely add-on for the Raspberry Pi that turns it into a hackable home gadget, a bit like an alarm clock with an app platform. Here’s a pic. What’s special is that it has a dead-simple programming environment, a bit like Arduino, that makes writing and running graphical, internet-connected apps very simple. Tingbot goes on Kickstarter this week – follow @thetingbot on Twitter to get the latest.
• Olly is a robot currently in development (in London) with all kinds of voice features. Chelsea talked about it as being table-top - which is an intriguing context because it feels like that’s where the old school kitchen radio sits - and the character-driven, emotionally-responsive robot she talked about sounds fascinating. One to watch.

What’s also interesting to me is that we had pre, post, and intermezzo Kickstarter projects present, from both small and pretty seriously established companies, plus investors and manufacturing. A maturing scene. There’s a lot of knowledge in the room.

…to the point that, discussing one project that is imminently adding hardware to their existing software-only offer, I can assemble the roadmap with them, 50% from my own knowledge (what the critical proof-points and bottlenecks are, what needs to happen hand-in-hand with what), and 50% simply from looking around and going: Well, first do it like company X, and then do product development like company Y, and finally you will end up speaking with someone like company Z and here are the questions to ask.

Next time

Let’s have one more hardware-ish coffee morning this side of the new year. I’ll take a look at my calendar and see if I can pick a Thursday which won’t be too conflicted with the holidays. Join the email announce list, I’ll send a note there to arrange it.

UPDATE: Tingbot is now on Kickstarter! Go read more about it there. And please back it, I want a Tingbot of my own.

Something interesting is happening in UK retail banking… a transformation – as far as I can tell it’s triggered by the impending (and catchily named) European PSD2 which includes "new rules designed to open up access to payment account information to third parties" and the UK preparation for this, commissioned by the Treasury and led by the Open Banking Working Group, defining exactly how we’ll be able to, for example, plug apps into our current accounts.

Q. What?

A. This:

If you’ve ever complained about your sucky bank mobile app, this will let third parties replace it. If you’ve ever used Transferwise because it’s a cheaper and easier way to pay for a holiday hotel, this will open up competition and make the banks get cheaper and easier too. If you’ve ever wondered why, in the UK, we don’t have apps like Acorns which automatically rounds up all your transactions to the nearest dollar, and sweeps the round-ups into your investment portfolio, this will fix that.

Naturally the UK banks are scared they’re about to be commoditised AND responding with vast and impressive innovation efforts.

This is anecdotal. I have a friend who works in retail banking, I’ve had a meeting with a couple of other banks, and I’m hearing faint noises on the grapevine.

So I was talking to my friend, and wondering - this opening up of UK banking - which will be a cross between being able to move my mobile phone number between operators (which wasn’t originally possible) and Youtube and iTunes which democratised music production… what will happen?

It might be like newspapers. It turns out newspapers were an accident of distribution. They were really good at printing for cheap and getting bundles of papers into every pair of hands in the country. But then the internet emerged as a rival form of distribution, and the newspapers were unbundled – classified ads to Craigslist and then Facebook, ads to Google, breaking news to social media, expert comment to blogs. And as the readers go, so does ad value. It’s a death of a thousand cuts, and although journalism is still useful, it no longer sits catching cash at that valuable mountain pass. We’ll have to find a new way to fund it.

You know, no huge loss. It’s important we find a way to properly fund investigative journalism, but it doesn’t need to be these particular journalists or those particular publications.

Or it might be like Uber.

What happens when driving a car from point A to point B is no longer a specialised profession, when Google Maps can tell you what to do?

What happens to retail banking when…

• overdrafts come from a pay-day loan company
• the mortgage market is frictionless
• investments are made with an app that seamlessly integrates with your current account, gamifying savings and the stockmarket both
• getting a new third party credit card is as easy as downloading an app, thanks to Apple Pay… this could be the golden age of American Express
• switching your standing orders and direct debits is either automated – or unnecessary, because you take your current account number with you between banks
• and now you’ve almost forgotten who provides your underlying personal bank account, and you haven’t visited a bricks and mortar branch for years, you switch to another current account provide with a cuddly logo, some other bugger who can spend more on marketing because their operating costs are radically lower because they run all their banking with modern web tech instead of ancient and expensive mainframes

Goodbye existing UK high street banks.

All of which means the question becomes:

As a retail bank, what do you do to ensure you’re not just the plumbing, that you provide enough value that (a) customers come to you and stay with you; and, (b) customers use you enough that there multiple low-friction upsell opportunities to those services that actually make a profit?

In short, how can my bank be a platform more like iOS (as gorgeous as Android is, I’m never going to switch because I can’t be bothered to re-download all those apps and learn new habits) and not a platform like my electricity suppler (electric potential is electric potential, switching is a phone call, and I’ll give my money to the folks who build those beautiful fields of windmills thankyouverymuch).

I was chatting with my friend in banking (remember I said I have a friend in banking) on Friday.

I said:

Look, what apps can you build on the current account. Thinking about that service in the US that sweeps your small change… there’s Digit which is a text-message-only artificial intelligence that helps you save money. Clever. Catchy. And I’m sure I read about one that watches your current account and automatically donates money to charity.

Well there’s a service like that charity one in the UK, something offered by Lloyds that handily and easily donates your spare change to charity: "Save a few pennies every time you spend with your Lloyds Bank visa debit card." Problem being I’ve never heard of it.

And of course I haven’t. Lloyds has a thousand products. They aren’t existentially threatened if this particular one doesn’t take off, and it’s a marketing expense anyhow so it’s barely possible to tell whether it matters. But the charity idea is a good one.

How about this – spitballing an idea…

What if a consumer bank partnered with an online fundraising service, let’s say Just Giving which makes it super easy for charitable causes to set a goal, and allows individuals to spread the word through their social networks.

They partner and set up a new form of charitable giving called “sweep” – it gives your spare change to some some organisation for 3 months, say. And it’s frictionless… one-click for this particular bank if you already have an account, tap and it’s connected, enabled by the technology built to meet European PSD2.

Just Giving (or whatever service) is crazy incentivised to market this. It’s a competitive advantage, it’s existential for them, they live or die by that KPI. And the bank… well, they do what they do best. Only now their name is out there, customers have both the warm fuzzies and a new incentive to stick with this particular account. Sure other banks will catch up, but keep building apps and get partners whose interests are exactly aligned with getting the word out and making the partnership succeed.

Maybe the next one-click integration is Square retail payments.

Maybe buy the Square kit in the UK, you click a button and BOOM you have a small business banking account with insert name of forward-looking UK bank here. Sure you can’t withdraw any cash yet due to European anti money laundering regs but hey the same is true with PayPal right, so come into the branch whenever you’re ready and we’ll do the paperwork. Meanwhile you can run your shop, go ahead, make sales.

Where does this lead?

Perhaps, just perhaps, it leads into a form of customer relationship which is more relevant to people under 40 than in-person meetings and robot voice phone menus.

Why shouldn’t I be able to follow my current account on Twitter and get a direct message when my salary hits my bank? And if that same current account asked me, in that same DM, Hey, Matt, look, I can set you up an ISA, you’ve got a couple hundred a month spare to save into it, you up for this Y/N? Sure I’m going to say yes.

These are simple concepts to implement. But they’re also forward looking, aligned with strategic interests, and might actually get some attention.

My point is, for the UK consumer banks, the ideas are ten a penny. The difficulty, as ever, is going to be the organisational change to take the opportunity, and keep taking it.

I love watching companies when they’re thinking out loud. Because it gets me thinking too (not necessarily in the same direction).

Case in point: two new products from Nintendo.

Watch Nintendo’s announcement video for Alarmo (YouTube), their new shiny round red alarm clock with some fun features:

Alarmo responds to your body’s movement with game sounds, so you can feel like you’re waking up in the game world itself.

There’s a sequence where the person is rolling in bed, half asleep, and Mario coin sounds are rattling off. Subtitle: "[Super Mario Odyssey sounds continue]"

Oooookay. Love it. Super weird.

Btw if two people are in bed then they both have to get up before Alarmo will silence.

How does it work? WELL.

Alarmo’s millimeter-wave presence sensor works with bed sizes ranging from twin to king…

– The Verge, A closer look at Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo clock (2024)

That presence sensor is mmWave radar, and this is cutting edge tech.

Radar chips have applications in autonomous vehicles and robotics, but putting them in consumer electronics is fascinating. Radar is hard to interpret - it’s not a straightforward computer vision problem - but it can see through (non-conductive) walls, it can be used (in theory) to pick out gestures and eye blinks and breathing and heartbeats because it’s high resolution and building up a 3D scene, and it’s on a chip and doesn’t require a camera.

Oh, and mmWave radar is low power – though interpreting the data requires serious compute. Here’s the Infineon site for their radar sensors.

Like… what would you even do with mmWave radar?

What novel interactions would be enabled?

How would you, as a design team and as a company, develop sufficient opinions about how mmWave radar behaves in real-world environments and what you could do with it? And what is it like to integrate, and what is the supply chain like, and so on?

If you wanted to learn enough to develop (say) a whole console and ecosystem around a brand new set of interactions enabled by a new technology, you’d probably start with something self-contained first.

Like an alarm clock.

I’m not so interested when companies make concept videos. Sure, that promotes internal and market alignment. But you’re not learning anything from at a product strategy level.

I think, for really valuable thinking out loud, a company has to embark on a path that ticks every cell of a business model canvas. It’s design pathfinding but scaled up a powers-of-10 level or two.

That said, too much of this approach can be poisonous. Google is most notorious… Killed by Google catalogues products that must have taught Google an absolute ton internally, but users and customers feel somewhat burnt that they bought into something that was then shut down.

Ideally you want something a product which is more self-contained.

Alarmo is in that wonderful Goldilocks zone.

RELATED: the South Sudan coffee supply chain.

I remember hearing Nespresso talk about making limited edition capsules with a blend of coffee from South Sudan. Released in 2015.

South Sudan established as a country only in 2011.

Between 2011 and 2015, Nespresso worked with South Sudanese coffee farmers to revive their country’s coffee industry. Four years!

So imagine what they had to work out… How to have communications channels and on-the-ground representatives to manage quality control, how to move money around, how to move trucks around, how import/export works with a brand new country, and so on.

So it’s a cross between thinking and loud and building the right muscles.

The second product from Nintendo, a new app:

Here’s the Nintendo Music announcement (YouTube), available on iOS and Android.

So if you want to listen to the music from Animal Crossing or The Legend of Zelda, that’s where to go. (If you’re a Switch Online subscriber anyway, which regretfully I am not.)

And then there’s this feature, which easily makes Nintendo Music as interesting as Alarmo:

You can also extend the length of certain tracks. By extending the length or looping a track, you can spend more time with a particular song.

Wha.

You can extend certain special tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes.

I wonder, I wonder what the underlying technology is that enables this. What loops and samples are stored with what metadata; how is an exactly 60 minute track made with satisfying narrative progression?

NOW.

I’ve talked before about how the interplay of today’s music apps, ID3 tags, charts, the user interfaces, how people are paid… how all of it makes cements the 3 minute track. It’s self-reinforcing; systemically obdurate.

But that captures such a narrow set of experiences with music.

Such as… well, I’m sure you’ve listened to lofi hip hop radio (YouTube) – "beats to relax/study to" by Lofi Girl, with her infinite book studying and Paris rooftops outside the window. (It is such a missed opportunity for YouTube not to be leaning into their live streams.)

It’s so good.

I want Pomodoro music; music with a dramatic arc to take me through an evening hacking on a weird proto; music to hit that deadline in exactly 53 minutes; environmental music that is more like opening a sound window.

Video games provide the ideal material and technology for this alternative world, right?

As previously discussed: Video game soundtracks, and a format for adaptive long music (2020).

If anyone could create and popularise a new music format, maybe it’s Nintendo?

Because these extrapolated tracks…

Extrapolation is very now. I would love for us, culturally, to lean into extrapolated art (2023). Like, let’s figure out how to make silk purse art from sculpted AI slop.

So I hope that’s what the folks at Nintendo are thinking about, the new interactions possible with mmWave radar chips and extrapolated music both.

More organizations should explore and learn at this level.

Because I love trying to read the tea leaves. And also the groundless speculation and imagination. All good fun.

BONUS LINK:

A video of the orchestra recording Gusty Garden from Super Mario Galaxy (YouTube).

More posts tagged: extrapolation (4), sound-and-music (17).

Maps!

Now when you visit a job board, like Downing Ventures’ job board, there’s a map thumbnail that shows you where all their portfolio jobs are located. You can get a good idea whether this gardener is more focused on Europe or the US, for example.

Job board with a thumbnail map

Bigger circles mean more jobs!

Then you can tap through and get a world map like the one at the top of this post.

And you can zoom in, and tap a circle to see the jobs only in a particular city…

Jobs in London endorsed by Downing Ventures

It’s neat to have a more visual way to explore available roles.

And it’s fun to play with too, on desktop or mobile. Tap here to try it out.

Designers may recognise the map style as Toner by the award-winning SF-based design studio Stamen, which also re-designed Bing maps. Toner is a bold, beautiful, and monochrome map style, a perfect base layer for data, and it’s one of several remarkable map styles created by Stamen. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to make use of it!

– Matt

More posts tagged: job-garden (53).

1.

Neural network image synthesis: artificial intelligence systems are really good at generating super-realistic, fake images. Like the faces of celebrities.

Given the synthesised images can be made to be very similar to one-another, it’s possible to make a long chain of synthesised images - all faces, all similar to the one previous - and turn that into an animation.

Resulting in this video: One hour of imaginary celebrities.

It’s like David Lynch took over the Daily Mail showbiz section.

2.

Mapping startup Mapzen put together some slides of gorgeous forms and lines, abstracted from maps.

Explore the world of form. Scroll through the whole thing.

See also: photos of highway interchanges by Peter Andrew.

3.

Generated animation of driving a car at night. Tail lights, rain on the window.

(You’ll probably need to run this on a desktop, but click fullscreen.)

Also, this video clip from a game about looking out of a train window. Full game here: To West.

4.

Dinosaurs aren’t drawn right.

dinosaur illustrations should take more cues from animals living today. Our world is full of unique animals that have squat fatty bodies, with all kinds of soft tissue features that are unlikely to have survived in fossils, such as pouches, wattles, or skin flaps.

Here’s what present day animals would look like, if we drew them as badly as we draw dinosaurs.

The illustration "Swans imagined as though they were featherless dinosaurs" is particularly terrifying.

Of course we’re not talking about about dinosaurs now because they are indeed now particularly skinny, being skeletons.

This is in relation to millions of years ago, before the dinosaurs got raptured, before we used their fermented meat to drive our cars.

See also: Egyptian mummies were dug up and burnt to power steam trains. (Or rather, they weren’t. It turns out this was made up by Mark Twain.)

More posts tagged: filtered-for (127).

You can now get your weekly email alerts filtered by city.

Say, for example, that I visit Olivier’s job board and I like the look of the C4 Ventures portfolio. But I’m only interested in roles in San Francisco. Now I visit that page and set up email alerts just for that city.

This is what the settings page looks like. You can’t edit the alert here, but I figure that’s ok because they’re so easy to add (just tap the button on the relevant page).

“Email alerts” launched as “Watchlists” back in Week 11.

Same thing, but called something different now. The utility feels more immediate though I’m still not super passionate about “alerts” as a name for this feature.

Other small changes:

• Jobs in the US now also display the state in addition to the city
• It’s no longer mandatory for companies to have a Twitter username. For example Cambridge Touch Technologies has their domain name in the web address instead of a Twitter name.

There’s also a sidebar link for anyone who would like to curate their own job board. Currently 5 people have job boards and I’m now up for opening the doors a little bit. Here it is.

Request Access links to this survey.

If you’d be interested in using Job Garden at some point, please complete the survey as this will help me prioritise development.

Do also share it with anyone else you think would find Job Garden useful.

More posts tagged: job-garden (53).

Upcoming event in London: I’m going to be speaking about the Internet of Things, security, and privacy with Sarah Gold, CEO of IFat Machines Room (an awesome east London makerspace), tomorrow.

Insecure Futures: Privacy, Security and Connected Devices (Weds 1 Nov, 6pm): RSVP here.

The event is part of a series of panels curated by Machines Room and Kickstarter. Sarah and I will be doing this as a “fireside chat.” Should be thought-provoking – these are some chewy topics, and Sarah is an expert. Her consultancy researches trust, policy and design for clients with Google and Facebook with output both practical and speculative.

We’ve each been asked to spend 5-10 minutes at the beginning of the session to set out our stand, so to speak. So this is my current draft on what I’m going to say. Comments welcome; I’ll evolve it some before speaking.

On IoT, security, and privacy. But security first:

Let me say a few words about security first. Then privacy.

And really, because we’re talking about the Internet of Things, we’re talking about the security of a device in people’s homes and in businesses, what we’re talking about is the security of data and other devices on the trusted networks in those places.

With my investor hat on, a startup that doesn’t take security seriously is obviously a problem because it’s saving up problems down the road – it will be harder to acquire, and it has the potential of being part of something catastrophic.

For me, one tell around this - a technology red flag - is when companies build their own stack themselves for secure connection of devices to user accounts (called provisioning), or for performing over-the-air (OTA) updates. These two are bellwethers: if something isn’t right here, it’s likely that security hasn’t been considered elsewhere in the stack.

It’s easy to convince yourself, as a startup, that there is no solution out there that meets your needs for provisioning and updates. But over the last 12 months, the technology stack for connected devices has matured. And honestly, these stacks come with features that you will never get round to building yourself. So it’s worth looking for existing solutions.

resin is an interesting example of a useful stack. One of the things resin makes easy is over-the-air updates for device software. But because some of their users run this software for drones, they also include a feature that allows the drone to postpone the software update until it has safely landed. That’s a useful feature. Let’s say you’re building a cash register: it would be great to have a feature where it can postpone updates till after the lunch rush is over. That’s the same thing. But will you get round to building it yourself? Probably not.

So building your own stack is hard to get right, and more importantly it’s expensive to keep up to date. Over months, as the technology landscape evolves, a resource constrained startup may find itself lagging. And that’s where security problems emerge.

Building your own artisan stack feels like an expensive indulgence in most cases. The line to keep in mind is Werner Vogal’s maxim - Vogal the CTO of Amazon - his maxim of "no undifferentiated heavy lifting." That is, don’t put significant engineering resource into stuff that isn’t your core business.

But security isn’t just technology. It’s design.

It’s what you encourage users to do. A friend of mine in San Francisco had some smart lighting and smart plugs some years ago. It has this great feature where if you’re on the same wi-fi network, it automatically associates the devices with your app so you can control them. And then, even when you’re not on the network, you can turn the lights on and off. Handy.

So some months after staying with my friend, I discover - from London, while demoing the app - that I can turn on the lights in his front room. I discover this because he texts me, after I’ve been doing this for some weeks, to ask if it’s me turning on and off his lights at 4am. Yes, yes it is.

Of course I reckon with this power I can possibly start a fire. Lights on and off as quick as possible. No security stack is going to help. But thoughtful design can.

However.

The tension for startups is that design for thoughtful design, and therefore for good security requires you to know what your product and service is doing, but in the early stages you may have to change the product quite a few times to get it right.

Now you think I’m going to say that this is a difficult decision, blah blah blah, that startups should consider security early on, despite this.

I’m not going to say that. I’m going to say that maybe a startup should ignore security, just a little bit.

What I mean is: if I meet a startup who has spent ages on its security, pre getting some real customer traction, I am going to be nervous that they have over-engineered the product, and won’t be able to iterate. The product will be too brittle or too rigid to wiggle and iterate and achieve fit.

So it’s a balance.

Privacy:

One of the reasons that security matters is because it can lead to privacy being violated. Or rather, let me clarify:

Poor security can mean a startup’s customer gives up privacy in an unintended way. That’s going to damage sales.

But what’s more of a preoccupation to me is when privacy is reduced in an intended way. You see this a lot when a startup has figured out how to make a business work by being not quite straight-up about what they’re doing with the data they’re collecting.

For example:

• A consumer-facing startup that gets its product out for free, and then collects user data to sell later. I don’t believe consumers can ever really consent to data use in this fashion: it’s never really made clear. It pulls the startup’s interest and the consumer’s interest out of alignment, and that - in my view - makes it hard for the company to grow in a clear way. This contradiction at their heart will make it tough to make product decisions
• A B2B startup which operates by collecting data on behalf of its clients – for example, collecting images of faces of shoppers for retail analysis. This can be legally legitimate. But sometimes it can be legitimate but still wrong: if properly informed, a regular consumer would feel uncomfortable

You would be surprised how many companies like these I encounter. Or maybe you wouldn’t be.

I think it should be a point of greater social concern that consumers are asked to consent to data retention and usage when even the people collecting the data don’t know what it may be used for down the line. Object recognition and facial recognition is getting really good – but it wasn’t great or well known at the point I subscribed to most of the services I now trust with my data. Can it really be said I consented to this? So we need a better way to discuss this, in society.

With a more commercial hat on I subscribe to the view that, in most cases, big data is not an asset, it is a liability. If it’s not necessary for the business model, then it’s an expense to keep it secure. So don’t keep incur that expense. For example, you don’t need to keep credit card numbers to take payments. OIutsource it. You don’t need to move video to the cloud to data to do image recognition – we have machine learning at the edge for that now.

But mainly, I think about this: is it skeevy?

The tide has turned on privacy, just as it did for sustainability. For ages being sustainable was something companies did just to feel good about themselves. Now it’s both consumer expectation and good business.

With privacy? For B2B startups I feel that being privacy conscious is becoming a differentiator and should be advertised as such. No potential business customer will want to be associated with the risk of leaks, being hacked, or potential damage to the brand from revealed “skeevy” behaviour.

It’s not a negative thing. There’s opportunity here too.

I want to end with an example which is Hoxton Analytics, a company I had the privilege of working with at the R/GA IoT accelerator I ran earlier this year. By the way, we’re running another one, and applications close on 7 December, just a few weeks from now. We can talk about that afterwards.

Hoxton Analytics supply, for their clients, pedestrian footfall intelligence. They count the number of people walking in and out of your shop.

Historically this has been done with infra-red beam interruption. Well, that can’t track groups or whether people are going in or out.

So instead you can do it by tracking smartphone signatures. Information-rich but not everyone has their Bluetooth or wi-fi turned on.

So you can really amp it up and monitor footfall with cameras doing facial recognition: that doesn’t fly in Europe, it’s personally identifiable information. Fine elsewhere in the world though.

Hoxton takes a different approach. They have cameras right down low on the floor, and they use machine learning - on the device - to recognise shoes.

It’s crazy accurate. 95% accurate. It can also count group sizes, and whether people are going in or out. So it can do capacity.

It also doesn’t store personally identifiable information so it’s good in Europe.

But get this. Because they’ve built this solution, it means they can also use it in public places. So you can point the camera out of the window and see how many people are walking past, versus how many people are walking in. This is the holy grail, like a conversion funnel, like Google Analytics, but for physical retail. And they’ve got there by considering privacy not as a product constraint, but as a product feature.

Wrap up:

That’s where my head’s at regarding security and privacy. I’m going to chew on these thoughts a bunch before the discussion with Sarah, and I’d welcome your thoughts – either on my views as laid out above, or on questions to ask her.

I don’t know if there are any tickets left but if there are do come along and if you’re already signed up, then I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday night.

1.

When you sit with friends at a wobbly table,
Simply rotate till it becomes stable.
No need to find a wedge for one of its four feet.
Math will ensure nothing spills while you eat.

The Wobbly Table Theorem (Department of Mathematics, Harvard University).

2.

David Ogilvy changed advertising in 1951.
Shirts sold. Job done.
He used a surprise black eyepatch in the magazine spot:
“story appeal” makes consumers think a lot.

History of advertising: No 110: The Hathaway man’s eyepatch (Campaign, 2014).

3.

Frogs live in ponds.
These massive ones too.
But they dig their own ponds
when nothing else will do.

The world’s biggest frogs build their own ponds (Science, 2019).

4.

Rhyming poems have been going away,
from 70% in 1900 to almost zero today.
You know, I feel like we should all be doing our bit
to reverse the decline. But my poems are terrible.

Can you tell AI from human genius? (James Marriott).

More posts tagged: filtered-for (127).

I’ve been asked a couple times recently about the technology I use to publish this blog. I should have a colophon to link from the footer, right? So here it is as of October 2024.

Publishing

I roll my own blogging system.

Each post is a text file in a directory named for the date. Today the files use Markdown with some metadata at the top. For example, here’s the Markdown version of this post.

This format pre-dates “Markdown front matter” popularised by Jekyll which is why it doesn’t look the same. I’ve been writing here since 2000. Pre 2012 the files are still in XML, originally output by blogger.com.

A build step creates an sqlite database as an index used by archive pages, tags and backlinks. (Historic posts are automatically given links to follow-up posts.)

Pages are vanilla HTML and assembled by a lightweight app. The app is coded in Python using Flask and Jinja templates. So the HTML isn’t pre-built (templates are rendered on every request) but the database is “internal” and read-only, i.e. quick. Simon Willison calls this pattern Baked Data and I find it perfect for this kind of site.

The site is served by Apache2 with mod_wsgi from a lowish-end Ubuntu instance hosted at Digital Ocean. I don’t use an dedicated app server, or a CDN or cache. Posts have hit the top of Hacker News a handful of times without load struggle; this approach seems fine.

Writing

My blogging system doesn’t have an authoring UI. I write in a writing app.

I find there are three stages in writing a post and they happen at different times, when I’m in the mood:

• Idea capture – often on the street or standing up
• Outline/draft – with my thumbs on the bus or whenever I figure out the story
• Writing/edit – on a keyboard (usually) over a couple sessions.

I use Ulysses for all of this. I often drop into BBEdit to finish things off.

I still distrust non-ASCII characters so I run a command to strip those (using iconv, if you’re interested). But I make an exception for accented letters in Proper Nouns.

After a new post is saved as a file, I push it to GitHub (the whole thing is in source control) then run a deploy command which updates the files on the server, causes it to build the database, etc.

If I need to edit from my phone or (rarely) if I want to post from my phone, I use the app Working Copy to add the file to source control, then run the update script on the server.

I try to be mindful of the mental blocks I place in the way of writing. My 15 personal rules for blogging (2020) help me to avoid them. I’m not writing as frequently as I was when I wrote that, but even so I’ve currently been publishing new posts for 240 consecutive weeks (my streak is in the site footer).

Related: More about how I use Ulysses and also RSS (2022).

Longevity

The blogging engine has changed several times over the past 24 years.

24 years is longer than many programming languages are popular and definitely most frameworks. In that time I’ve cycled through being good and rubbish at software development at least twice.

So following the principles of web longevity, what matters is the data, i.e. the posts, and simplicity. I want to minimise maintenance, not panic if a post gets popular, and be able to add new features without thinking too hard. If push comes to shove, I need my site to be simple enough such that I could re-write the blogging engine in half a day or so (which has happened).

I don’t deliberately choose boring technology but I think a lot about longevity on the web (that’s me writing about it in 2017) and boring technology is a consequence.

It does add a certain kind of complexity to handle my own hosting. It’s not like I enjoy writing Apache conf files. Like, why not build the site using Jekyll and host it all for free on GitHub Pages?

But what I lose in simplicity I gain in control.

For example, it’s important to me that I have a friendly RSS feed (see Extras, below). But GitHub Pages doesn’t let you change the HTTP headers which is a requirement to do that. So I don’t want to use any blogging system that constrains the features I might want to add, or encourages me to make use of its own special features that I can’t rebuild myself next decade or the one after.

And adding a new feature (like the streak counter) doesn’t require reading any framework docs because it’s just Python.

(My conservatism isn’t limited to unicode. I added support for images only earlier this year, and don’t plan on using them except for special occasions.)

p.s. this isn’t an attitude I bring to all software I build. It’s particular to my blog.

Other doodads

• RSS. The RSS feed is styled because I believe that web feeds are important to the health of the web and they should be friendlier to new users. It uses pretty-feed-v3.xsl.
• Email. Many people prefer to get new posts in their email inbox. I pay for Buttondown which consumes the RSS feed and automatically sends out a newsletter to approx 1,100 subscribers whenever there’s a new post. Subscribe here.
• Multiplayer cursors. If you’re reading this post on the web, you’ll see the cursors of everyone else on the page at the same time. You can say hi using cursor chat and share ephemeral real-time text highlights. Cosy co-presence for the web. Code-wise it’s an easy drop-in, just a script tag: "small pieces loosely joined." Read more and get the code.
• Search. Site search (in the footer) is provided by DuckDuckGo.
• Analytics. I pay for web analytics and use Fathom. It’s GDPR-compliant and cookie banner-free. To check in on live traffic I have a one-liner on the server that tails the Apache log, greps out interesting lines, and aggregates referrers.
• Styles. The body font is the system font for whatever OS you’re using. The headline font is Archivo. I use a CSS framework just for ease (Tachyons). The slow colour-changing background is in CSS and you can find it if you View Source.

A couple of other features:

• On this day. In addition to the usual year and tag archive pages, there is a special On This Day page with its own RSS feed. I use this feed to remind myself about old posts, which injects a little noise into my own thinking.
• Unoffice hours – I regard unoffice hours as a blog feature because, if you look at them right, they’re very high bar blog post comments, leading to very high signal. I use Calendly to schedule calls. I don’t have comments otherwise.

I no longer automatically crosspost to any social networks.

History

I’ve had this setup since April 2020. I don’t 100% remember why I rewrote it then. I think I wanted to tweak the old design and couldn’t straightforwardly compile the templates after a security update.

That previous blogging engine appears to date back to 2008. It originates from before GitHub so it’s not entirely clear. It had at least 3 designs and used Python and CGI.

2000–2008 is a mystery.

I am aware that my setup appears baroque with many fiddly manual steps documented only in my shell history. Honestly I regard myself as a kinda not very technical person with a simple setup and (a) reading the above back to myself, it’s a surprise even to myself, a travesty, a fiasco, and yet (b) I feel like it accords with a principle of simplicity on a certain otherwise unnameable axis.

However it is decently grooved with how I write and how I want people to read, and the cadence I have for maintenance and adding new things. A good trade.

I think that’s it?

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2024 (20), meta (20).

I mentally slice stories into two types – those that can be in our world and that can’t. Sometimes a story world slides from one to the other and loses its magic.

Take: James Bond.

(This is old enough that it doesn’t count as spoilers.)

In Skyfall (2012) there is a bombing at the London spy HQ and the top of the building is blown off. I pass that building on the regular: its in Vauxhall on the south of the river, near where I live, and the real-life headquarters of MI6. If an explosion took out half the building, it would be huge news.

• Before that moment, the Bond movies could be happening today – in our world but in the shadows (I’m just thinking about the Daniel Craig collection of films).
• After that moment, Bond exists in a parallel world. Like ours, but clearly not because we have a divergent history.

The magic of Bond pre-Vauxhall is that it’s a secret layer of reality. Spies generally and Bond specifically could be anyone you meet. The movie is access to secret knowledge; it adds a enchantment to everything you see even outside the theatre – what if this were part of a conspiracy? What if they were not commuters but part of an elaborate and clandestine operation? There is magic everywhere.

More: if you see someone wearing the wristwatch that Bond wears, maybe they are a double-0 agent. If you wear that watch, maybe you are! That’s why the product placement advertising is so potent: with this type of “new layer to the universe” narrative (which is particularly powerful with a spy movie where Bond has had, over the franchise, a variable face) you, the viewer, are immersed in the world and in the actual lead character.

This all evaporates when the HQ is blown up. I didn’t see the explosion on the news. Therefore the stories are just… stories.

Something similar happened with Doctor Who.

Post rebooted Doctor Who, the magic was that it could be happening around the corner. It involved regular people with regular lives who become enmeshed suddenly in fantastic - and distant - adventure.

No matter what was happening with you in the day, no matter how dull, there was always the chance that you would glimpse the Tardis, meet the Doctor, and be swept off to an alien planet.

Or it could happening on the next street! Hear a weird sound? Aliens. See a strange cat? Aliens. A person in an unusual hat? The Doctor in a new incarnation. Maybe, just maybe there could be an extraterrestrial time travel adventure happening right this second, around the corner. And that lets the imagination fly.

Secret layers of reality fiction is MSG for the mundane.

But then there was that swarm of daleks that invaded Canary Wharf, and say what you like about the BBC but that would definitely have hit the news. I lost interest after that episode. Doctor Who descended to being just another story. There are no time-travelling benevolent aliens. As a tale it works or it doesn’t, depending on your taste, but what it can never be, any longer, is a way of animating everything you see.

There’s just a touch of this with Apple’s adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation novels (which I am enjoying, by the way).

The original stories (from the 1950s and onward) were shaped by John Campbell’s “competent man” thesis. Campbell was the editor of Astounding, the biggest sci-fi magazine at the time, and Asimov’s mentor. Campbell was deeply weird-by-which-I-mean-racist (I mean Asimov was deeply weird-by-which-I-mean-sexist too, the whole crowd) and he had a fierce grip on the magazine and what was published. His preferences shaped that whole era of sci-fi – and a lot of what we have now is either an evolution or a counter-response to his brand (which is why it is so exciting to see new voices in the genre).

The “competent man” is the idea that there is nothing necessarily special or unique about the protagonist. Instead they are smart, clear-eyed, scientifically-minded, and, well, capable.

Also men and also white. And yes, a bit ubermensch-y too.

Put the weirdness aside and there is something magical there for the (white, male) mid-20th-century reader: you don’t have to be psychic or unique to find your way through a historically important crisis. But if you are smart and recognise what’s happening, you can do it. The reader likes to think of themselves as “competent” in the Campbell sense, so the story places them centrally in the narrative. The hero.

The early Foundation stories were very much about competent men. A vast galactic backdrop, sure, but primarily about smart, rational individuals who in a crisis keep both their head and a sense of humour, and that’s always the key. It could be you.

Whereas I get the sense that in the Foundation TV show, the protagonists are special and unique.

But we know, each of us, that we’re not psychic, we don’t have superhuman powers. So the TV show becomes automatically a story about someone else. Distancing.

What makes me feel loss is that these are all stories where the fictional reality enlarged the reader’s or viewer’s reality – their world or their self. The layers muddled, the realities multiplied. It’s why genre fiction is never just fantasy. I would call this “unreal but realistic” fiction fantastical. It lifts our eyes and weaves story in the air around us.

Then, with these stories, after a transition, the inner fictional reality shrank and became segmented as something other. Not fantastical but fantasy. It’s still transporting! But our world became smaller as a result.

It’s usually a dramatically powerful transition too: a building blows up; the daleks invade. But it pays for a moment of drama with undermining what makes the narrative world special.

I don’t know why I feel so sensitive to layers of reality and the fuzzy boundary of fiction. And yet.

More posts tagged: inner-and-outer-realities (7), speculative-in-2021 (16).

In the early 1980s in Japan, a movement called mini-FM blossomed: a thousand tiny radio stations broadcast over just half a mile each.

One of the first stations was Radio Home Run, broadcast by Tetsuo Kogawa and his students from 1983–1996 in the Shimokitazawa neighbourhood of Tokyo:

This station took advantage of a loophole in Japanese broadcasting legislation, which stipulated that devices under a legally-defined power threshold — usually requiring less than one watt of power — could transmit on the air without a license. Using a legal very low-powered FM transmitter, members of Radio Home Run transmitted a signal able to reach listeners within about 500 meters of the station’s antenna. However, Tokyo’s high population density meant that this relatively weak transmitter still had massive possibilities, since its comparatively small coverage area still contained about “20,000 residents, all potential listeners”.

– Research Catalogue, Movements within Small Radio Movements

It was Kogawa’s realisation that low power radio was legal. They had intended to run a pirate FM station (Tokyo had only two official stations) but he discovered the exception in the regulations and started investigating cheap, sometimes hand-made transmitters.

Kogowa wrote books and pamphlets; journalists picked up the story whenever a new station opened.

He tells the story of mini-FM in Toward Polymorphous Radio:

Even major advertising agencies tried to open mini-FM stations. The exact number is unknown, but it can be estimated from the number of small transmitters sold that, in a year, over one thousand stations appeared in Japan. People on college campuses, in housing complexes, coffee shops and bars, stalls at street fairs and even local offices started mini-FM stations. More than ten companies, including Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Hitachi and Sony, sold a transmitter labelled "For mini-FM use".

The intention was to change broadcast: "The area that a one-watt transmitter covers is within walking or bicycling distance."

And so that early station Radio Home Run became a collective experience:

Radio Home Run transformed listeners into producers by inviting people tuning in to physically travel to the station’s nearby studio.

Corollary: "it also revealed how strange typical everyday experiences of radio - through listening alone - actually are."

I’m skipping over so much!

How Tetsuo Kogawa’s concept of “polymorphous” media anticipated social media.

How physical movement would put the listener in “kinetic interaction” with the electromagnetic field from the transmitter, moving in and out of coverage.

btw here’s a great history of mini-FM with its whole context, appended to the shopping page for a hat? The hat is sold out.

Anyway.

Mini-FM left a legacy. Check this out.

From a review of the Sony Ericsson W980 Walkman – in 2008.

Finally we come to one of the most exotic and intriguing features of Sony Ericsson W980 - the FM transmitter allowing you to broadcast your favorite tracks. Those can then be picked up by any device with an FM radio receiver in the vicinity.

By this point the iPhone had been out for a year! The iPod was released in 2001.

Imagine if the iPod had shipped with a built-in FM transmitter and receiver! Each iPod owner a walking, combined broadcaster and listener.

Except that it wouldn’t have worked.

What we have a word for now is discovery. The vital feature of mini-FM was the potential audience re-tuning between known stations by running up and down the dial, volume up, stumbling across unheard-of stations.

The vital feature for a two-way iPod would have had to be something similar: a menu option labelled Nearby next to the albums and the artists.

Yet I can’t let go of that alternate history.

In our parallel universe, we’d all be users of Scott Jenson’s invention of the Physical Web. It was built into Android.

The Physical Web enables you to discover web pages associated with everyday objects and locations. …

When you are near a bluetooth beacon (and have bluetooth enabled), you will receive a notification for the Physical Web.

Like QR codes only I could carry a beacon in my pocket, get on a train, and the website would show up on the phone of all the passengers.

Again it’s all down to how you encounter the URL. As a push notification it’s a spam vector. As a “nearby” tab, more interesting? Possibly. It’s a tough one.

And related to this:

An iPhone app I am intrigued by is WorldWideWeb by IconFactory.

You open a folder on your phone with the app… and it becomes a website accessible for anyone else on the same wifi network.

Now, what is a shame is that Apple used to list local websites in Safari bookmarks (the technology is called Bonjour). This feature was removed back in 2017.

So we’ve got a discovery problem again.

Besides, the scale doesn’t match up. The lesson of mini-FM is that you need a potential audience of 20,000 producer/listeners, not only the people you can already see.

As someone who made fanzines at school (80 issues sold!!) - that being my route into the web - I do wonder about the mini-FM equiv for, well, not so much new media anymore as early-middle-aged media.

But modern broadcast doesn’t afford the fuzzy perimeters of 1980s FM radio.

I’m never going to be bored-browsing Netflix and get a faint glimmer of someone’s home-broadcast TV show wedged between menu items, there to view if I can tune in exactly right. My iPhone might be the means of production, in the right hands, but I’ll never own the means of distribution.

And that’s not a shame, not really, time moves on, our era has its own other freedoms. But still.

I have this fantasy that one day we’ll find the glitch that cracks this whole thing open.

Which is why I picked up on retroactive prayer last month. Which is why I like the idea that we might discover cold fusion. Or that law-of-momentum-violating resonant cavity drive for spaceships. Or the Global Consciousness Project.

Because of course not but also, preceding that, just briefly, what if…

The fantasy is that we’ll one day do something like be able to mathematically model the entire social flow of the world, like we can map the flows of knowledge like it’s the weather or something, and it’ll turn out there’s some grain unaccounted for, that there is new knowledge that silently appears with no apparent source – and then we’ll discover, in that gap, that the internet has come to life and is talking to us anonymously; or that inspiration is a particle carried by cosmic rays.

Or that if you shape a piece of potassium into a very specific solid, it cuts a hole in the universe that we can see through at faster than the speed of light, or perhaps free energy pours out.

What it must have been like with the ultraviolet catastrophe in 1900 – the innocuous unsolved problem that, cracked open, led to quantum mechanics and 20th century physics! The closest I’ve been to something like this was when our lecture notes were out of date because they’d just discovered that neutrinos have mass.

The specific moment is when I feel: whoa, we don’t know why that happens, and what’s more, everything else still works but we no longer know how.

I’m not hung up on it. I know that dreams of cold fusion won’t hold up to scrutiny. One of my favourite moments from my undergrad was early on, when there was great furore about the possibility of desktop, room temperature fusion, based on the Fleischmann-Pons “discovery” of anomalous excess heat. Based on what they found, there was this possibility that a particular electrode treated in a particular way would just somehow cause water to undergo fusion and emit energy. Some novel surface physics perhaps? I asked my tutor about it and he was dismissive.

“But surely,” I said, “there’s the possibility. We don’t know how, and it shouldn’t work… but there’s the possibility! And if it worked! We have to be open to these things, even if we think they shouldn’t happen.”

My tutor was still dismissive. So I pushed: “Why? Why dismiss it? How do you know that cold fusion doesn’t happen like this?”

“Because I tried it,” he said. And it turned out that he’d got a pre-press copy of the paper, and got hold of the particular materials, and replicated the setup, and he didn’t get the same result.

And that was a formative moment for me. It taught me that it’s safe to embrace credulity in the imagination, because that doesn’t stop you verifying with your hands.

Anyway: there’s still that feeling, before finding out that the world hasn’t turned upside-down.

That 500 milliseconds, or a day, or a week, before it’s proved that, no, neutrinos don’t break the speed of light in Italy, and there was never a fracture in the universe after all, that moment just before the spell is broken: it’s magical.

The pleasure in believings - just for that single second - in aliens on Venus, or a wedge that opens up a faster-than-light data ansible, and what it might mean… both for our understanding of the universe, but also what we can do with it… suddenly knowing nothing but simultaneously knowing something new… and in that second there are galactic societies and starships, there’s psychic communion with animals, there are discovies to be made and adventures to be had.

It’s the fairy story of it. It’s being at the top of a roller coaster and beginning to drop. And when I peep down into those “what if” cracks I find joy and my imagination.

So I hunt out the cracks, even though they’re never real and I know they’re never real, and I nurture my credulity.

Okay sorry this is a post mainly about startup growth and KPIs. I apologise in advance.

So we’re on the same page, let me recap some hunches:

1. This is uncontroversial: AI synthesis has gotten really good. AI that writes code (given a ticket), or makes an illustration (given a brief), or writes an article or makes a diagram or summarises complex information (given a prompt) is here. The technical problems have been solved, and now it’s a matter of improvements, integrations, and UX.
2. AIs will augment our teams. Sure a single engineer can have smart autocomplete, or an AI word processor can expand your text so you don’t have to type full sentences. But if you’re looking for 10x productivity improvements, then think about teams: an engineer will now be an engineering manager who is wrangling the code contributions of a dozen AIs, submitting their synthesised code as pull requests. A writer will work in a Google Doc alongside an AI editor making suggestions, and an AI fact checker and researcher doing the running, and an AI sub doing the wordsmithing.
3. NPCs are a better UI for interacting with teammate AIs. Interfaces for all the different ways that AIs can help a team would be incredibly cumbersome – think of the bureaucracy of Jira etc! But if, in our Google Doc, our AI editor can appear as a “non-player character,” using all the regular features that humans do (presence, suggest changes, comments for clarifications etc), then there’s no need for extra UI – it’s just another specialist teammate. Ditto in Github, ditto in Figma, ditto in Zoom for video AIs. Humans and non-humans working together. This is why the multiplayer web is important: it’s a runtime for AIs.

SEE ALSO: Designing user interfaces with bots not buttons.

Ok so we’re got a capability and an interaction paradigm. What’s missing is the economics.

Revenue is a lagging indicator. What I mean by economics in this context are the metrics that precede revenue: acquisition and retention.

• Users will pay for valuable software – but only if they (a) find out about it, (b) use it, and (c) continue using it
• Software that is forgotten (has low retention) will eventually not be paid for
• The model for paying for software has to correspond with the underlying costs of the seller.

This is worth figuring out because otherwise this new model won’t emerge. Companies offering the service won’t grow.

SaaS was an innovation that unlocked Web 2.0 (in b2b). Selling software as a service meant that:

• Sellers can cover their ongoing developments and running costs because they get to charge per user per month
• Recurring revenue unlocks the ability to experiment with free trials and other customer acquisition tactics; and once the metrics CAC and CLTV were developed, it was possible to engineer growth, not just hope for it.

This model doesn’t hold in the “AI teammate” world, so we’ll need to find something to replace SaaS:

• Compute is a meaningful expense for AIs, unlike Web 2.0. It doesn’t make sense to charge per month for an AI editor if the difference between editing 1 article and editing 10 is a meaningful number of dollars to run the models
• If free trials are off the table, how does acquisition work?

More problems! Given these AIs aren’t essential tools that you open again and again, what’s the retention mechanism? How will users remember that their AI editor teammate function can be invoked?

Here’s a guess: social discovery is the key.

Perhaps app features should be ownable and tradable. A pocketful of feature flags. In short: instead of having thousands of features, mostly unused, undiscovered in a thousand menus, you would see a colleague using a feature in a multiplayer app (like an editing feature in a doc, or co-presenter in Zoom), and then… they could just give it to you. (Or you could buy it.)

Or to put it another way, adopting the NPC = UI metaphor: with AI teammates, instead of having to find the “editor” function in a menu, you would be introduced to the editor NPC in a multiplayer space. (This is why I care so much about the multiplayer web.) You wouldn’t purchase or subscribe, you would recruit.

This takes care of awareness and also the de-risking part of acquisition currently catered for by free trials (if you see somebody else’s editor NPC in action, you’ll already be 50% convinced).

The revenue model is secondary but I think, to begin with, it’ll be a bit like buying credits. You’ll buy X photos synthesised per month, or something like that, and step up and down tiers. Your photo synthesiser NPC (or editor NPC, or engineer NPC) can let you know when you need more.

(Monthly subscriptions won’t work because of the highly variable underlying compute cost. I’ve already seen a few AI projects playing with credits, it makes sense.)

That’s discovery and revenue. What about retention?

The more I think about this, the more I realise that this is a part of the “AI synthesis” capability set which hasn’t yet been built.

Let’s imagine we have an AI teammate. If it’s like today’s software then, for anything powerful, you’re going have to hit a button. But teammates don’t wait to be instructed to take on a task, they jump in.

A human editor teammate will maybe make a single suggestion on a doc, and - if you accept it - they will go ahead and do the rest of the work.

If they’re feeling underutilised, they’ll reach and actively ask you for things to do – if a clear route isn’t evident for a task, they will request the prompt. Or they’ll keep an eye on your shared files and projects and make suggestions about where they could help.

Making this work will be hard.

AI synthesis necessarily includes a view of what “good” looks like. What is a good image; what is good code; etc. That’s possible because we have a ton of images in the world; there’s a ton of code, and so on.

BUT: AIs will also need to synthesise what good team behaviour looks like – and jump in. What actions will help the group? Where is it useful to jump in? What will further the goals of the org? How can that even be measured?

As far as I know, self-setting goals is an AI capability that doesn’t exist yet, and it’s beyond the scope of the type of AI synthesis that has been coming along in leaps and bounds these last few months.

Until we have it, I can see people making prototypes of AIs that are useful for teams, but I can’t see startups growing around them.

What are the metrics that will allow for optimising all of this? Interactions per month. Mean social group size per introduction. Introductions per interaction. Unsolicited interaction rate. There will be a whole industry around measuring, correlating, and optimising these.

Hey, here’s another question: what’s the standard NPC API that a multiplayer app (like Figma etc) can offer, such that my new AI helper can join the team? Appearing in the presence bar, being invitable by @ mentions of their name, etc.

A lot to do!

More posts tagged: multiplayer (32), speculative-in-2022 (20).

Let me point to the problem, and then I’ll say why I think we need me-money and we-money.

The country needs medical professionals like nurses and doctors. Medical professionals need to live near hospitals, their place of work. They use their wages to rent or pay a mortgage on houses. This amount is dependant on property prices.

But the property price is dependent on people with surplus cash, anywhere in the world, using property as an investment. Property yields returns in the form of rent and an appreciating price. This investment drives up property prices.

This seems absurd.

The money that is used to pay health professionals in a shared (socialised) health system that they use to pay for a place to live SHOULD NOT BE the same money as the money used by property investors. The two types of money shouldn’t interact. They should be decoupled.

I get that there are probably good reasons for it, and money probably only works when it’s universal. I don’t know what the theorists would say, but let’s focus on the phenomenon here: ultimately this feels like a bug in the system.

So what’s the answer?

Here is my science fiction:

Could we imagine two separate moneys, individualist money and socialist money. Call them me-money and we-money.

Me-money is the money we have now. It works in the exact same way as it does now. You spend it, you save it, you borrow it, you invest it.

We-money is a second type of money, exchangeable for me-money in limited ways, and with certain special properties. It’s both more powerful and more constrained.

We-money is used for socialised health, to tackle climate change, and to build railways - anything where the main good is felt by society as a whole.

The division works roughly like this:

There are certain things that we want, as a society, that are unlikely to come about when individuals are left to act in rational self-interest. For example, corporations will tend to pollute left to their own devices; a corporation which makes the effort not to pollute will be out-competed by those that don’t incur that cost. So, as a society, we have regulations which cause the corporations to act collectively. Often the corporations like regulation like this, because they then are able to take a desired course of action (not polluting) which was essentially prohibited by the system when unregulated.

Ditto, we - as a society - want doctors and nurses to be able to afford houses near hospitals in big cities. But individually, no-one will rationally give up their place on the housing ladder.

Likewise building railways and other national infrastructure. No private sector enterprise will rationally take this on (not without being paid a disproportionate amount to take on the risk), but we all benefit when said infrastructure is there.

So what I’m proposing is that in systems like paying NHS workers, or investing in railways, or the government selling carbon credits to polluters, all of that is done is in a separate currency, we-money, that is insulated from whims of the main free market economy.

How would it work?

• Key workers would be paid in we-money, or some mix of both. The exact proportion is subject to negotiation and politics.
• Taxes are paid exclusively in we-money.
• The exchange between the two types of money is regulated. In one direction (from we- to me-money) it’s free. In the other direction, it’s heavily taxed. That means that, yes, if you operate only in the traditional, me-money economy, taxes will cost you more. But if you operate in the socialised, we-money economy, it’s cheaper.

Then we-money has some restrictions:

• We-money can’t have credit. It can be circulated, but it can’t be lent or borrowed. No we-overdrafts, no we-mortgages. So basically there’s a government monopoly on creating we-money (credit is a way that money is created, and banks are prohibited from offering it).
• We-money is subject to a heavy wealth tax to prevent hoarding. If you want to keep it, convert it to me-money.

Supply and demand for we-money will have to be carefully balanced: public sector workers are paid in we-money, which injects it into the economy, but it is also the denomination of taxes, and that takes it out.

By insisting that all government taxes and duties, such as carbon credits, are in we-money, corporations and even individuals will choose to offer discounts to key workers to get hold of their we-money (and therefore avoid the exchange tax) or change their ways.

And therefore, medical professions, being paid in we-money, will get a discount on buying houses.

Two further thoughts:

1. In a way, this mechanism resembles local currencies, or loyalty card points, or even (god forbid) company scrip. Those schemes have their pros and cons, but I mention them simply to show that the idea of having demarcated yet interacting economies is not novel.
2. If two types of money, why not three, or four, or one for every domain? The answer is that money appears to have worked for a long time, and a key attribute of money is universality. The universality is a protection against ideas like company scrip, where workers are paid in company money that can be spent only in the company shop, and this is an ugly system of control. So if we’re to break that rule of universality, let’s do so in the minimum way possible, and stick to only two moneys. Besides, being able to mix the two types gives a good range. It would be like an old-fashioned graphic equaliser on the economy.

I can see topics such as

• the we-/me-money ratio paid to teachers
• the exact percentage of the me- to we- exchange tax
• the anti-hoarding wealth tax bands

being subject to debate and politics just as much as the level of the personal tax allowance, or sales tax/VAT, or the minimum wage. And these are conversations worth having! They allow us to discuss the relative values of individual and collectivist needs, and I don’t believe we’re able to adequately pick these apart right now.

Big question: would this work, against the original absurdity I pointed out?

I don’t know. But I decompose the challenge like this:

• Is there a problem with money to begin with, yes or no? If yes, then whether or not you agree with my we-/me-money division, let’s discuss possible mechanisms.
• For any given mechanism, how do we evaluate it, and what tools and simulations do we need to evaluate it; how do we test it and how do we introduce it?

If you’re an economist, how would you turn the above into an actual paper?

More posts tagged: company-scrip (3), speculative-in-2020 (18).

The problem is that you launch a thing or have some big news and those pesky journos won’t cover it.

Here’s one approach:

• treat journalists like human beings because that’s what they are. I’ve seen the “pesky journos” attitude a bunch and it’s an unhelpful category error that sets up an us-and-them division: most journalists I know are also product developers, consultants, entrepreneurs, creatives in other fields, etc. I don’t mean pretend to be mates, but do acknowledge that you’ve both got a job to do (you to get coverage, them to provide interesting stuff for their readers) and build a professional relationship around that
• don’t reach out only when you want something

If you’re a pro, or if you have a marketing team, talking to journalists like this is second nature. But for founders who are just getting going - and for rank amateurs like me - it can be hard to know where to start.

So one way is to use what I call a Tick-Tock List.

(I only call it this in my head. Nobody else says this. What I mean is you should email people on the regular, like clockwork.)

How to run a Tick-Tock List:

• Make a list of journalists who have covered you or your company before. Not the publications but the individuals (with luck you’ll build a relationship with them that lasts years as they end up super influential at big publications)
• Email this group every 2 or 3 weeks. This email should be written by you, from your personal email, with no weird formatting: it’s not a newsletter. Journalists on bcc
• Subject line: Company name, update number or date, top news
• Don’t ask for coverage

What should be in each email:

The email should be short and easy to read. Use bullets.

Contents:

• Say hello
• Say that they’re receiving this email because they’ve covered you before, that there are 12 people (or however many) on the list, and that you’ll stop emailing if they ask (or add them if they got the email as a fwd). The number is good transparency
• Say the one sentence version of what you do in plain language like when you have to explain to your parent’s friends what the hell you do. Ideally this includes a “because”. Like, “We’re doing [what it is] in order to [big hairy goal] because [a value judgement about the world]”
• Say these three things:
  1. what your company had achieved since you last emailed
  2. the biggest achievement they might have missed the last few emails (if there’s news coverage, include a link and say thanks)
  3. what’s coming up over the next week or two
• Sign off with your name, phone number, your email address, and being open for a chat

By achievement I mean something that is outward-facing that is actually interesting. Concrete. If nothing happened, say nothing happened – and why.

After you’ve done this a few times, and if you’ve got something genuinely worthy of a story, you might want to say - before your three things, in bold - that you’ve got a launch/event/newsworthy thing coming up in a week or two, and you’re hunting for coverage. Offer to chat about it.

You might find - and this is the goal - that somebody on your list, somebody who has never replied before, happens to receive the email at the right time and they have the right-shaped hole in their slate, and so they get in touch to learn more and hopefully do a story.

More tips:

When you say what’s coming up, don’t be cagey or fake-enticing. Your email recipients aren’t marks, they don’t owe you anything, these are humans, one day maybe you might be friends. Be open enough for them to make a decision. But likewise don’t put them in the difficult position of being told a detail via email that you really want to keep secret.

What is newsworthy? Think: is this so interesting that if you heard it about someone else you would want to tell your non-bubble friends; have you said it in the right way to be easily understood, and provided the right words for others to do the same; can it further the narrative of the journalist.

(Aside. I feel that every publication has a worldview that it is continuously pushing. It could be something like “technology is building the beautiful future we imagined when we were kids” or it could be “this thing is niche right now but one day it will be mainstream and momentum is growing.” Find and provide an angle to allow journalists to use your story to develop and argue this worldview with their readers.)

The hard bit:

The hard bit: continue with the Tick-Tock List.

Let’s see, what else. Did I already say this isn’t a newsletter? This isn’t a newsletter - and there are many and I subscribe to many and they are brilliant - so you should also one of those (and a blog, and a twitter, and…). But this is more intimate. An actual email. Um. Be respectful. Your goals are

• to build a professional relationship
• to build a soap opera sense of momentum
• provide familiarity so that big events and asks don’t come out of the blue
• overall, to save time for the journalists
• to provide potential stories in a mutually beneficial way

I’ve shared the Tick-Tock List pattern with a few companies over the years. I’m actually a bit nervous to share it here because it’s so trivial. But I’ve had a good experience of this personally, and reports of good effects, so I figured I’d write it up.

Please let me know if it works for you. (And if you’re on the other side of the fence, I’m curious about your views too.)

Bonus link: Mike Butcher’s article/rant The Press Release Is Dead - Use This Instead is fantastic. Check out the list of questions that he needs answered, as Editor-at-large of TechCrunch Europe, to get to grips with a possible story.

1.

An autopen "or signing machine is a device used for the automatic signing of a signature."

Used extensively by US presidents: "In 2005, the U.S. Justice Department issued a legal opinion upholding the right of the U.S. President to sign bills by autopen."

And:

Lyndon Johnson allowed photographs of his autopen to be taken while he was in office, and in 1968 the National Enquirer ran them along with the front page headline “The Robot That Sits In For The President.”

Here’s the front page: The Robot That Sits In For the President

See also LongPen, invented by author Margaret Atwood.

the LongPen is not an Autopen, which signs your name over and over without your presence being required. Instead, the LongPen does whatever you have just done at your end, including ‘Happy Birthday Marge’ and a picture of a pussycat

Saves travelling when on book tours.

So hold me Mom, in your long arms. In your automatic arms. In your electrical arms.

2.

On finding new language for space missions that fly without humans.

Unmanned? Robotic? Unpiloted? Uncrewed? Unoccupied? Unhumaned? Drone? Autonomous? Crewless?

The problem is that unmanned is sexist; robotic craft can still contain humans; unpiloted is not accurate because there’s still a pilot it’s just not human; uncrewed is not in the dictionary… and besides there is a crew, it’s just several million miles away back at mission control.

My feeling is that it’ll become the default to have spacecraft with no human crew, and we’ll end up distinguishing by saying when it does have human passengers, assuming not otherwise.

Just like with robot cars. We no longer say “horseless” carriage; in the future we won’t say “driverless” car. It’ll be something to point out when there really is a human involved.

3.

The iPhone 6S came out recently, and as usual there were lines overnight outside the shops. At the Apple Store in Sydney, a telepresence robot was 4th in line. Everyone seemed ok about it.

I remember playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo DS and you could get linked up with real human players to race against – and there was a pretty good A.I. system in Mario Kart so why play against humans? You couldn’t chat. But something… the humanness shone through.

Andy Serkis playing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. You can see him, through the motion capture and the green screen and the rendered mesh. You can see him right from the back of the CGI.

You get that at the theatre – you go and see an opera and you’re right up there in the gods, but somehow you can tell the emotion of the lead from that tiny thumbnail of a face all the way down there on the stage, the feelings shine up and up, they’re larger than life.

In the future our great performers will be those who are able to project their humanity through heavy shrouds of computer mediation.

4.

Soylent is a food replacement beverage; you don’t need to consume anything else. I think this is part of the modern mindset, these bimodal extremes: Either you eat at Michelin star restaurants, or you go low-cost low-effort; why bother doing anything between.

The founder of Soylent is Rob Rhinehart. What kind of person conceives of a product like Soylent? He recently gave up alternating current.

The walls are buzzing. I know this because I have a magnet implanted in my hand and whenever I reach near an outlet I can feel them. I can feel fortresses of industry miles away burning prehistoric hydrocarbons by the megaton.

Anyway, so he doesn’t have mains electricity. No kitchen, no TV. He powers his laptop and his phone from a solar cell.

Look, this is what got me. He doesn’t own a washing machine. And so:

I enjoy doing laundry about as much as doing dishes. I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me. … I donate my used garments.

Unpiloted? Uncrewed? Unoccupied? Unhumaned?

More posts tagged: filtered-for (127), robots (12).

One of Niven's Laws states that F×S=k or, to put it another way, the product of freedom and security is a constant (so the greater the security of a society, the lower the freedom within it).

I'm not sure I agree. By Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, the control system must have sufficient states to absorb the number of possible states of the system being controlled. In more concrete language: a more complex control system (police, legal system and so on) allows more freedom of the society, in terms of allowed states, not less.

Note that this is discussing states of society as a whole, which doesn't correspond with individual freedom. For example: consider a society with 2 citizens. The first citizen has the freedom to occupy the states black/white, and the second to occupy red/green. There are 4 possible society states. But if both citizens have the freedom to occupy black/white, there are degenerate states at the society level: there are only 3 distinguishable society states.

(Also note that I'm equating security with having a more developed system of control, said system allowing feedback (such as locating and disarming a bomb) to occur.)

What this means, for freedom and control, is that increased control can buy us two different types of freedom: greater individual freedom, and greater freedom to be different from other people. Control (and decreasing personal freedom of the first type) allows us to have a more heterogeneous society.

(Implications? Individuals in a factory are freer than individuals in a conglomerate because they're all free in the same way and the factory-society can afford more of that for the same level of control. And a society comprised of a large number of similar villages can also afford more individual freedom than a society in which some individuals are allowed to express global freedom, via fame.)

I’m on my hols. Some recommendations.

Watch The Ballad of Wallis Island.

Charming, poignant comedy about a washed-up folk musician and loss. By Tim Key and Tom Basden.

Now I knew Basden can write - the first episode of Party is the tightest wittiest 25 minutes of ensemble radio you’ll hear - and I love everything Tim Key does as a comedian. But Key really is the revelation. Who knew he could act like that.

Watch on streaming and then listen to the soundtrack.

Play A Short Hike (I played it on Switch).

Indie video game about a cartoon bird hiking and climbing. A play-through will take you about 3 hours.

It’s cute and gentle and fun with a dozen subplots, and by the time I achieved the ostensible goal of the game I had forgotten what the purpose was and it totally took me by surprise. (Which made me cry, for personal reasons, another surprise.)

Also my kid just played this, her first self-guided video game experience. A Short Hike is deftly designed to nudge you forward through lo-fi NPC interactions, and invisibly gates levels of difficulty using geography.

Once you’ve played, watch Adam Robinson-Yu discussing A Short Hike’s design (GDC, 2020).

New daily puzzle: Clues by Sam.

A logic game that’ll take you 10 minutes each day. Follow the clues to figure out who is guilty and who is innocent. It’s easiest on Mondays so maybe begin then.

Meanwhile I’m running woodland trails in Ibiza and the scent of wild rosemary and sage fills the air in the morning. Right now I’m on a cove beach listening to the surf and the others are variously exploring, snacking and sunbathing. See you on the other side.

tl;dr tomato soup.

Thanks to one of my unoffice hours (coming up on 400 booked calls) I recently learnt about twig, which is a biotech startup manufacturing industrial chemicals using custom bacteria.

The two examples they cite: palm oil which is used in lipstick but displaces rainforests; isoprene which is used to make tyres but comes from fossil fuels.

What if instead you could engineer a strain of bacteria to bulk produce these chemicals sustainably?

The capabilities are present in the metabolic pathways. So that’s what twig does. At scale, is the promise.

1. I hadn’t realised this kind of biotech had gotten to commercialisation! And in London too. Good stuff.
2. What Are The Civilian Applications?

What Are The Civilian Applications? is of course a Culture ship name, a GSV (General Systems Vehicle) from The Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.

It is also an oblique strategy we deployed regularly in design workshops back in the day at BERG, introduced (I think? Gang please correct me if I’m wrong) by long-time design leader and friend Matt Jones. That’s his project history. Go have a read.

Let me unpack.

Oblique Strategies (a history) by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, 1975: a deck of approx 100 cards, each of which is a prompt to bump you out of a creative hole.

For example:

"Honor thy error as a hidden intention"

Or:

"Discard an axiom"

And so on.

In product invention, which is kinda what we did at BERG and kinda what I do now, it’s handy to carry your own toolkit of prompts. So I adopted What Are The Civilian Applications? into my personal deck of oblique strategies.

Therefore.

What would do you with engineered bacteria that can make palm oil or whatever, if it were cheap enough to play with, if the future were sufficiently distributed, if we all had it at home?

Like, it’s a good question to ask. What would civilians do with engineered bacteria?

Tomato soup.

Instead of buying tomato soup at the store, I’d have a little starter living in a jar. A bioreactor all of my own, and I’d fill it with intelligently designed bacteria that eat slop and excrete ersatz Heinz tomato soup.

I’m not 100% sure what “slop” is in this context. The food I mean. Maybe the bacteria just get energy from sunlight, fix carbon from the air, and I drop in a handful of vitamin gummies or fish flakes every Monday?

A second oblique strategy adopted into my personal deck over the years:

"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam," by Frederik Pohl. As previously discussed re a national drone network.

Let’s say I can go to the store and buy a can of Perpetual Heinz, or however they brand it. A can with a sunroof on the top and a tap on the side that I keep in the garden and I can juice it for soup once a week for a year, or until the bacterial population diverges enough that I’m at risk of brewing neurotoxins or psychedelics or strange and wonderful new flavours or something.

Heinz is not going to like that, economically. They’ll require me to enrol in some kind of printer and printer ink business model where I have to subscribe to the special vitamin pills to keep (a) the soup colony alive and (b) their shareholders happy.

Which will end up being pricey, like the monthly cash we all pay out to mutually incompatible streaming services. Demand will arise for black market FMCGs on the dark web. Jars of illegal Infinite Coca Cola that only requires the cheap generic slop and it tastes just the same.

So I love to play with these strategies and imagine what the world might be like. Each step makes a sort of sense yet you end up somewhere fantastical – that’s the journey I want to take you on in text, too. Then the game, in product invention, is to take those second order possibilities and bring them back to today. (I’m giving away all my secrets now.)

But I prefer cosier, more everyday futures:

Grandma’s secret cake recipe, passed down generation to generation, could be literally passed down: a flat slab of beige ooze kept in a battered pan, DNA-spliced and perfected by guided evolution by her own deft and ancient hands, a roiling wet mass of engineered microbes that slowly scabs over with delicious sponge cake, a delectable crust to be sliced once a week and enjoyed still warm with cream and spoons of pirated jam.

A small jar of precious, proprietary cake ooze handed down parent to child, parent to child, together with a rack filled with the other family starter recipes, a special coming of age moment, a ceremony.

More posts tagged: 20-most-popular-in-2024 (20), speculative-in-2024 (14).

Early in 2017 I ran an accelerator in London investing in Internet of Things startups, and it went so well that we’re doing it again. Tell your friends.

Upcoming events: see the bottom of this post for some places we can meet over the next month.

The program in 5 bullets:

• It’s with R/GA Ventures which is the ventures arm of the global, 2,000-person digital agency R/GA. Ventures has run a dozen programs to date, with 81 startups in the portfolio
• This program is 3 months and based in London. It includes hands-on creative work from the agency (for example, to lend a hand on the visual identity and messaging) and design/story assistance on the pitch deck. Plus networking and workshops
• Investment is £75,000 for 6%, but we like companies that have already raised so there’s some flexibility (e.g. 6 out of the 9 startups in the 2017 cohort had already raised so we had custom terms)
• This isn’t a traditional accelerator. It’s optimised for companies showing early traction - whether through pilots or field trials - and we like to think about this as a partnership. For example, we keep program meetings to Mondays and Thursdays because people have actual businesses to run
• The program will run February to May 2018. We’re open for applications from now until December

If you’d like to see an example of the visual identity work, I love the look and messaging of Flock’s website and app (alum 2017). Flock sells pay-as-you-fly drone insurance, using a proprietary and automatic risk algorithm, and is now - impressively - partnered with Allianz for underwriting.

For me, Internet of Things means digital reaching into the real world. My favourite startups use now-mature IoT tech (whether hardware or software) to do something that wasn’t possible before, such as insanely accurate pedestrian football by using artificial intelligence to count shoes, or halving food waste in commercial kitchens. Both of those are companies in the 2017 cohort. My favourite IoT startups don’t say IoT on their homepage.

Here are the 2017 alumni. I’m delighted with how the cohort is going. (Some are now based here at R/GA London where we offer below-market desks to portfolio companies.)

The website: R/GA IoT Venture Studio UK with info about the upcoming program.

A request to spread the word

Last year only 3 of the 9 companies in the program had women founders. That tells me we didn’t do a good enough job.

This year, I’d like to get info out especially to women and people of colour. If that describes startups you know, or you know groups and networks that are representative, I would appreciate your help to spread the word. Please share a link to this post.

Upcoming events

There are a number of ways we can meet/talk.

• Come to our meet-and-greet on 31 October (use that link to RSVP). V. informal. I might take 5 minutes to say hello but otherwise no presentations. A good chance to come and meet me and our Program Director Lisa Ritchie… or if you’ve lent your time to the program before, a good chance to hang out again after the summer
• Grab me on Skype (use that link to pick a time). I spend two afternoons each week meeting founders on Skype. Tell me about your company and let me answer any questions you have about the program
• If you’re at Web Summit in Lisbon in November, drop me a note: we’re hosting a dinner on Monday night, and I’ll be about all week. My email is matt.webb@rga.com

Applying to the program is easy: use the form here.

We’re accepting applications until 7 December 2017.

Cheeky question

We’re also always looking for more sponsors. Companies like Snapchat, Westfield Labs, and Intel like working with R/GA Ventures because they get visibility in the emerging tech ecosystem, and early access to startups which are ready to partner. Let me know if you’d like to chat more.

1.

Voice systems are always listening, but it’s expensive (and invasive) to analyse everything picked up by the microphone. Hence wake-up words, which keep the rest of the system switched off until heard, and are - in theory - cheap to detect.

How the “Hey Siri” wake-up words work, by Apple’s machine learning team.

The wake-up words run as a tiny brain. In the following, DNN stands for "Deep Neural Network."

To avoid running the main processor all day just to listen for the trigger phrase, the iPhone’s Always On Processor (AOP) (a small, low-power auxiliary processor, that is, the embedded Motion Coprocessor) has access to the microphone signal (on 6S and later). We use a small proportion of the AOP’s limited processing power to run a detector with a small version of the acoustic model (DNN). When the score exceeds a threshold the motion coprocessor wakes up the main processor, which analyzes the signal using a larger DNN.

Compiled tiny brains. High accuracy, low power recognisers, super focused single feature fetishisers.

A.I. on dedicated silicon is getting cheeeeeap.

My hunch:

Give it a few years, and I reckon voice-on-a-chip and hand-gesture-sensitive-lensless-camera-on-a-chip and make-any-surface-touch-sensitive-on-a-chip and make-use-of-nearby-watches-and-headphones-on-a-chip will be so accurate, so power efficient, and so cheap that they will undercut the cost of physical interface components like buttons and screens – and therefore be used instead. For everything from kitchen scales to door locks. Which will change how we interact with products and what they look like.

2.

Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation

This finding represents the first convincing demonstration for the use of the starry sky for orientation in insects and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for orientation in the animal kingdom.

3.

What factories looked like in the age of steam:

The mechanical power came from a single massive steam engine, which turned a central steel drive shaft that ran along the length of the factory. Sometimes it would run outside and into a second building.

Subsidiary shafts, connected via belts and gears, drove hammers, punches, presses and looms. The belts could even transfer power vertically through a hole in the ceiling to a second or even third floor.

And then electricity:

But electric motors could do much more. Electricity allowed power to be delivered exactly where and when it was needed.

Small steam engines were hopelessly inefficient but small electric motors worked just fine. So a factory could contain several smaller motors, each driving a small drive shaft.

Electricity changed factory architecture:

A factory powered by steam needed to be sturdy enough to carry huge steel drive shafts. One powered by electricity could be light and airy.

Steam-powered factories had to be arranged on the logic of the driveshaft. Electricity meant you could organise factories on the logic of a production line.

Old factories were dark and dense, packed around the shafts. New factories could spread out, with wings and windows allowing natural light and air.

More here: Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing?

4.

The fractional horsepower motor took the domesticated factory drive shaft right into the home:

Electrification began in cities around 1915 and with electrification so too came the potential market for washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and a host of other commercial appliances. … By 1920, over 500,000 fractional horse-power motors were powering washers and other appliances in America.

Back in 2012, I wrote about fractional artificial intelligence. Here’s a talk on the same topic from 2010. Watching this now it’s like watching somebody stumbling around in the dark, but I think this is what’s happening today.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (127).