Unordered S2E2
Sitrep
Its snowing in the UK. Usually (in the "before times" sense of the word), snow was a good excuse to work from home, where "work from home" meant "don't go to the office and work, but keep an eye on your emails etc. and stay on top of what needs to be done - which won't be much because nobody is in the office."
In the past, I remember spending nearly 2 hours walking to the office through the snow, because there were hardly any buses and the ones that went past were too full to get on. That was a long time ago - before I had a work-issued laptop that I'd bring home at the end of the day. In later years, I remember deciding that it wasn't worth going into the office and working from the kitchen table being a novelty because "working from home" wasn't something I did on a regular basis. (Also, living on a pretty busy road on a hill, watching cars and vans slide around on the road through the window was kind of fun. Mostly because I didn't have a car parked on the road that I was worried about someone sliding into.)
Today, my son's school is closed, but he's got schoolwork to do from home, issued to him over Teams (I think); something that might have been technically possible before the pandemic, but I don't think the classes/students/teachers etc. would have actually been set up in advance to make it possible if it weren't for the pandemic. My daughter's school is open, so its BAU for her. My wife's Whatsapp groups are full of stories of younger siblings furious at the injustice of having to go to school when older siblings are staying at home. I'm not sure if I'm more sympathetic for my son having to home-school on a snow day or my daughter for having to actually go to school.
So, why am I in the office? Partly because I don't get as much work done from home when there are other people in the house. Mainly because the kind of work I'm doing today is easier to do when I've got two screens connected to my laptop than the one screen I have on my desk at home, which makes the commute worthwhile. (I - correctly - guessed that the roads would be clear of snow and ice but with fewer cars than normal; my drive in was actually slightly quicker than usual. Not sure what my drive home is going to be like though.) And partly because my office is next to the Westfield shopping centre, I'm not sure if I'm going to be in again this side of Christmas, and there's a decent chance that I might be able to get away without having to do another shopping trip this side of Christmas.
#UKsnow in my social feeds
The 21st century tradition when it snows is that lots of people post snowy photos online. But this year feels a bit different.
On Facebook; yes, there are a few photos of Christmas lights in the snow, kids building a snowman (slightly oddly, the first I saw were my own kids; they must have got up and dressed much faster than usual after I left for the office this morning), but mostly posts asking questions about schools opening, the state of the roads/trains etc. What I see people sharing is more "functional" communication - asking questions to help them make decisions, rather than the "sharing stuff about their lives" that Facebook used to be mostly made up of.
Also on Facebook, I'm also seeing a 3 day old "suggested for you" post about how every World Cup winner this century has followed two tactical rules, and those rules (you have to click through to discover what the rules are) mean that Brazil and England are the favourites to win the tournament. Brazil got knocked out on Friday and England got knocked out on Saturday, so my guess is that those rules aren't quite as important as the post is making out. Another "suggested for you" post about a blunder on Strictly Come Dancing that viewers spotted (it says "viewers", but its really a bunch of tweets repurposed as an article - again, you have to click through to find out what the blunder actually was, but I read the article and I'm still not entirely sure I understand what the blunder was. Something to do with wearing a kilt…) I see posts suggesting I read articles that are obviously stories from Matthew Perry's recent autobiography that have been rewritten for the web. Posts that are basically Reddit threads repurposed as listicles. Oodie adverts. I definitely feel that my Facebook feed is made up of more 'content'/'content marketing' than actual "social" posting.
On Twitter, I'm seeing fewer #uksnow posts than I'd usually expect. There's some interesting stuff about GPT-3 and broader generative AI stuff that sits in the intersection of "stuff I need to know about for work" and "stuff I find interesting that happens to help me sound like I know what I'm talking about at work". But, I'm not sure how much of it is about Twitter and how much is actually my preconception of whats happening on Twitter, but I get a real "the party's over but not everyone has noticed yet" vibe over there.
My LinkedIn is about snow, ChatGPT, marketing effectiveness, TV and video... because of all the self-promotion, its a bit harder to distinguish the content from the ads. I still feel like it would be a smart thing to do professionally to have a more active presence on LinkedIn, but at the same time it feels like a game that I'd enjoy winning but not really enjoy playing. What I probably need to do is spend a bit of time curating my network (read: unfollowing people) to filter out more of the stuff that I'm less interested in and try to turn my feed into something I would like to spend more time engaging with.
Over on Mastodon, I have the opposite issue; I need to spend a bit of time finding the people I want to be following. I like the idea of Mastodon; like Twitter, but without the centralisation, fewer people trying to turn it into something for commercial goals, more people just hanging out and chatting about interesting stuff with like-minded people. So, very much like the "old Twitter" I remember when it was fun... But for now, I'm not really seeing anyone, because although I have set up a profile and staked a claim on my usual username (@somerandomnerd@mstdn.social, in case you were wondering - although I've not yet decided if this is the instance I want to settle on just yet).
Other stuff thats caught my attention
- Brussels sprouts are evil.
I know the point of this is that lots of fruit and vegetables take a lot of work to get them from the farms to your dinner table and thats something we should be more mindful of (I remember about 20 years ago seeing sprouts still on the stalk, it blowing my mind that thats how they grow, and realising that I had literally no idea what I had expected sprouts to look like beyond the chopped-off micro-cabbage thing that my sister forces me to eat once a year), but this year this will be my ethical excuse for not putting one of them in my mouth.
- How broken is Twitter?
I mean, I'm still mildly surprised when I go to Twitter.com or open the app and don't see a fail whale, but I'm not convinced that when some part of the Twitter machine breaks down that its going to be obvious to the users at the time. So long as it can still populate your newsfeed with some vaguely recent content, I think the users will, by and large, be satisfied.
But "breaking" isn't just about the platform breaking; there's also the business which, despite a second attempt at turning it into a subscription-based business launching today, is dependant on advertising. There was a lot of noise about the biggest brands moving their ad spend away when Musk took over and started trying to do whatever it is that he's trying to do, but online advertising is really all about the long-tail; the millions of advertisers spending a few dollars matter far more than the few advertisers spending millions of dollars.
In that context, this chart is very interesting.
(Also, I should probably stop posting embedded Tweets here, on the grounds that I have no idea whether they will keep working, or what sort of code they might be adding in the future.)
How broken is Twitter? (part 2) - I mean, its not as though the Twitter that Musk bought was in great shape. (I think that goes for Twitter the company, Twitter the tech platform, Twitter the community, or pretty much whatever Twitter you mean - but this is specifically about the tech.)
Text messages are 30 years old (BBC article - which I'm using as an excuse to tell the story about when I was in my early 20s and worked at the NEC European Research & Development Centre in the late 1990s as a software tester/technical author. This was when mobile phones were still expensive things that most people actively didn't want to own - something that changed remarkably rapidly, at least among my peers, over the following 5 years or so. Anyway - one of the things we needed to test was the SMS functionality on the phones; sending texts from one handset to another, replying to them, checking the texts came through, checking that the right combination of buttons got you through the right menus etc. Anyway- I thought these seemed incredibly useful - like a pager, but something you could reply to. The idea that you could get a message from a friend while you were having dinner, read it and reply to it without the incredibly rude/disruptive behaviour of answering a phone call seemed so obviously useful to me (and the younger people I was working with.) But at the time, SMS messages were seen as a functionality for engineers to test things on the network rather than for 'normal people' to do anything with. (Predictive text was an innovation that was still a few years away.) Now, SMS is all but obsolete but the framework that it created is still at the heart of Twitter (and Mastodon etc.), WhatsApp, and a whole load of other messaging services.
Neurodiversity on TV I'm a big fan of Taskmaster, and I loved the last series. (In fact, I think I've loved every series.) I think almost every series has at least one contestent that I love watching, just because the format of the show shines a light on the fact that their brain seems to work in a way that is fundamentally different to my own. Sometimes, thats someone who is obviously very clever (eg. David Baddiel, Victoria Coren-Mitchell) who, in the context of the show, seems completely incapable of getting their head around some very simple instructions. Sometimes, its the way people try to think around the tasks and look for the cheats or tricks that will give them an edge. And sometimes its just people whose brains are fundamentally wired in a different way. I saw Fern Brady's Netflix special, in which she talks about being diagnosed with autism as an adult but I don't think it was ever actually mentioned on the show - but the simple fact that the show gave her a platform to be herself, for others with the same syndrome to see someone like them who they can relate to is simply the kind of thing that makes me feel a bit better about the world. And its the kind of thing that - I think - only really works well within the medium of "television".
- This r/NoStupidQuestions question made me feel old - They say that "the past is like a foreign country; they do things differently there… I mean... I was an adult when you didn't live in London and not own an A-Z. I remember when people got directions from Google Maps and printed them out. (Also, I remember when Google Maps didn't understand how roundabouts worked, so when you had to turn right at a roundabout, it would tell you to "turn left" (meaning turn onto the roundabout) and then take the third left (meaning to take the third exit from the roundabout - but when following the step-by-step directions, you'd find yourself taking the third left after the first exit while having absolutely no idea that you've just gone waaay off course because you've been following the directions to the letter...)
- San Francisco approves killer Robot Cops - speaking of foreign countries, America's attitude to police and guns is deeply weird from a British perspective
- Putting your foot down in a Mercedes is now a premium feature - It was weird when BMW made heated seats a subscription feature, but this feels like another level... In a way, the heated seats thing made a weird kind of sense to me; manufacturing cars involves economies of scale, so if making a separate set of heated and non-heated seats is more costly overall than just making one set of heated seats, then turning it into an after-sales service is... well, it feels icky, but I'm probably never going to buy a BMW so it doesn't really bother me. And maybe if I bought a second-hand BMW from someone who never wanted them but I did (or any other 'non-essential' feature of a car), I'd appreciate the fact that it would still be an option for me to unlock. But making something in the actual engine a paid-for extra (bearing in mind that the pay-to-unlock technology is probably another thing that could potentially go wrong) feels an order of magnitude more icky. Now, perhaps the whole "owning a car" thing is on its way out, and in the not-too-distant future we'll all be getting around in self-driving Ubers or something (not that I think the economics of that quite seem like they would work out) where everything will become a paid-for optional extra, and this is just a stepping stone along that trajectory. But for now, it just feels deeply dystopian.
Well, that all went a bit more "grumpy old man" than I was expecting, so sorry about that. (Its partly down to losing a few hundred words when Chrome crashed; Squarespace's lack of offline editing continues to be my biggest frustration with the platform...)
I promise to try to make the next one a bit more optimistic and uplifting.