Sitrep

Happy New Year! Well, 2022 was quite a year, wasn't it? War in Ukraine, cost of living crisis, inflation, rising interest rates, the absolute cluster** of Truss/Kwartang, monkeypox, Twitter getting taken over by a billionaire who apparently believes the world is just a simulation who didn't seem to actually want it and doesn't seem to really know what to do with it... Things can only get better! (…Right?)

Its 2023, my first day back in the office, and I'm pulling this together as I wait for my computer to deal with a couple of weeks worth of software updates. As I amusingly tooted on Mastodon this morning (a phrase which I think is already well out of date), its annual forget-all-your-work-passwords day which is making that a little trickier than usual.

One of my favourite things about the Christmas break (other than Christmas and spending lots of time with family, obvs) is that my office shuts down between Christmas and New Year, meaning its the one break that you can confidently not check your emails because everybody is officially on leave, so you can expect nothing to be happening in your absence. I took the last week off as well, and I've become quite disciplined about not checking my email when I'm on leave (because otherwise, its not really "leave", its just "not doing very much work", which is very different to being "off work".)

Somehow, I still have over 200 unread emails to work through today though...

One thing that happened in the break was my daughter (10) got her first smartphone for Christmas, which I think means that "her" iPad can now become "the family" iPad that it was supposed to be when I bought it. So, I was moving around some of the apps on the home screen (which were scattered across about four separate screens), dragging them one at a time when she showed me that if you hold one app and then tap some others, they all get collected together so you can move a bunch all at once. Which a) I didn't know, b) I would guess that means lots of other people don't know and is a really useful tip, and c) is officially the first time I've been schooled in tech stuff by my 10 year old daughter. Which, as a parent makes me feel quite proud but… as the 'tech expert'/unofficial office IT support guy... doesn't feel so good.

Meanwhile, most of my attention over the last month or so has been around sharpening my Python, Pandas and Matplotlib skills; stuff I've been doing for years in Excel/Ruby/R/SQLite, but what most people these days are doing in Python. So most of my Safari/Chrome history right now is stuff that has been very specifically interesting to me at a very specific point in time, but not likely to be of interest to many other people. (Or maybe thats another post...)

There was a good image meme thing I saw on mastodon about the 'twixtmas' 'between-Christmas-and-New Year' time period that I'd like to post here, which was a shot of Gandalf from The Two Towers when he's just fought the Balrog and fell through space and time and is lying bleeding and bruised... Except it seems that my office network is blocking mstdn.social, and where I am in the office is a weird mobile signal dead spot, so I can't find my bookmarked thing. So, that seems as good a place as any to start with some Long Things...

Mastodon

I like Mastodon. Which is to say, I went off Twitter (and social media platforms in general) some years ago, Mastodon's "fediverse" design seems to have sidestepped a lot of the issues I have with social media platforms in general, and I'm prepared to believe that its worth my time to get involved.

But its not all that easy. The first thing is choosing your instance - which kind of matters, because of how different instances connect to one another, but also kind of doesn't because you can follow/be followed by people on any instance, and it seems to be fairly straightforward to move from one instance to another. But it seems that I chose badly, because mstdn.social appears to be blocked by my office network, which is an issue because a) thats my laptop's internet connection when I'm in the office, and b) like I said, I seem to be in a weird mobile network dead zone when I'm in the office, which usually doesn't matter because my phone connects to the office wifi and what matters is the internet connection - anything important comes over TCP/IP (iMessage, WhatsApp etc.) rather than GSM. But when a domain or service gets blocked, then that causes issues.

This isn't just a Mastodon thing; I have a very nice Macbook Pro that my work has provided for me, but iCloud Drive apparently isn't a permitted service, which means that a bunch of apps that I took for granted when I was using my own Macbook (eg. Drafts) that used to sync between my laptop and my phone... well, they don't any more. So, I've got to think about what I want to keep on Box (which is the 'official' cloud storage/file sharing service that my office uses), what I want to keep on my "Work" OneDrive (which is apparently supported by my office, seems to work better than Box in all sorts of ways, but isn't the 'official' one we should be working with- although there were apparently plans to move across a few years ago), what I want to keep in my 'personal' OneDrive (I'm getting fussier about distinguishing between "my" work and my own personal stuff, now that I'm working on a non-personal laptop).

I had to go through something similar years ago when Work decided that Box was the One True File Sharing App and stopped me from using Dropbox on my Work laptop, and it was a pain. Not having iCloud Drive is also a pain, albeit slightly less of one (because I still have my own personal iCloud-Drive-compatible laptop, and there are plenty of other ways to get stuff from my phone to my laptop). But its still a pain.

And it means that, typically for 2 days a week, I can't use Mastodon 'properly'. But before I can use Mastodon 'properly', I've got to go through the job of finding all the people I want to follow, which I did on Twitter a long time ago (2008) when it was still a nice place full of nice people being nice all the time, but not all of my Twitter follows are still active (and not being at all active for several years means I've probably not survived a few follow-purges, so those following me are disproportionately inactive as well.)

Which is to say, I'm on Mastodon (@somerandomnerd@mstdn.social) for now at least), I should probably be thinking about finding a 'better' instance to be on, but I've got some work to do before me actually being active on Mastodon is really worthwhile, which I'll need to do before following me on Mastodon is really worthwhile.

(But its still probably better than following me on Twitter, for lots of reasons...)

How Broken Is Twitter? Part 2...

I said last time that 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, and the balance between the rate I write and the rate Musk does stuff (whether thats Twitter stuff, political/trolling stuff - I can't really distinguish between them any more) means the post that I said I'd write "in a couple of weeks or so" back in November is just an increasingly disorganised and disjointed collection of notes and links in a text file.

But if I had to note one significant development that is about Twitter the network (as opposed to Twitter Inc, the business that owns the platform, or Twitter the platform that the network exists on top of), it would be that you aren't allowed to post links to other social networks there any more. It seems that I got my Mastodon link in my profile before the new rule was implemented, but I remember when Facebook was the network that was the black hole that stuff went into and nothing came out of and Twitter was the shining example of how things were supposed to work.

I'm not saying that this is the final nail in the coffin (because I know that there will be more, and I know if I'd written the post I intended to write, then I would have written about at least one "final" nail already), but its a real statement of intent/principle that confirms to me that Twitter isn't really a place I want to be investing any of my time/attention any more, and that Elon Musk really has lost the plot.

Meta Metaverse struggles...

This time last year, I was excited about a Metaverse project I'd been working on for a good chunk of 2021. Metaverse hype was still building; probably coming close to a peak.

Since then, in August (2022) the price of the Meta Quest 2 went up by £100.

Now, the metaverse is not the same thing as VR. (I wrote a presentation on that subject early last year, which I'll probably share in a modified form here some time.) The Meta Quest 2 (formerly Oculus Quest 2) was a £300 headset in 2020 - its insane that a tech product like that is a £400 product in 2023. So its not surprising to me that headset sales went down last year.

But, in the same way that I'm bullish about Mastodon despite my own issues with actually using it, I'm still bullish about the idea of the metaverse - which is to say, my idea of the metaverse, which I'm starting to think is more significantly different to Mark Zuckerberg's idea of the metaverse than I thought a year ago. It seems that, to Zuck, the metaverse is a feature of a Meta hardware product - which is a little like saying that the internet is a feature of the iPhone. a) Its not entirely untrue, b) it was a big part of Steve Jobs' original iPhone pitch ("its an iPod, its an internet device, its a phone"), but c) its also missing the point of the internet, and d) nobody got confused and thought the internet was something Apple 'owned'.

By now, I would have expected to see some sort of evidence that Meta has some sort of idea of what 'the metaverse' as an open, decentralised platform would look like. Maybe some sort of idea about how you would use a persistent identity across services. Maybe even some sort of code that showed something - anything - actually working. But no - we've got a new VR headset that might be a vision of the future but is unaffordable, an existing piece of hardware that... well, it doesn't look good compared to existing games platforms, is (I think) less computationally powerful than a comparably priced smartphone, and is still a long way away from having a killer app outside of gaming.

Don't get me wrong- I think VR gaming is a lot fun. But for VR to reach its potential, it needs a killer app - which probably means a "real time" social component, and that isn't going to happen unless a) lots more headsets get sold (prices going up/sales going down mean that isn't likely to happen soon - even without an ongoing cost of living crisis), and/or b) people who have headsets start using them more often/for longer.

"Longer" isn't really likely to happen, given that its not a comfortable experience for long periods of time, and "more often" isn't going to happen until there's a killer app - which brings us back to the start of the cycle...

AI hype builds...

The tech world has been excited about Twitter/Mastodon for quite a while, also getting worked up about SBF and the implications for the whole crypto industry (which I’m not massively interested in, because as far as I can see it doesn’t really have anything to do with crypto, so much as old-fashioned “give me your money so I can do something with it that is not why you’re giving it to me” fraud). The other interesting tech story of late-’22 was AI.

AI is interesting. Perhaps, if I could go back a year, instead of doing a project on the future of the metaverse, I would do something about the future of AI instead. Both are technologies that were talked about for decades before coming close to reality. Both seem to be more about the idea of the future potential of a thing than a thing that actually exists today (although one seems a lot closer than the other right now...) Both seem (or seemed...) to be about to explode and change the world.

Perhaps... The thing is, AI has some similar issues. Its a tech idea that’s not quite found its application/purpose. Yes, you can log into DALL-E, throw some words at it and get an impressive image generated for you impressively quickly. Yes, you can do something similar with ChatGPT and get an impressive chunk of text generated for you impressively quickly.

The first question is - other than purely for the fun of it, why? Are these going to replace “artists”? Well, no - at least, not by my definition of “artists”; they are just tools, tools are generally additive not substitutive (cameras might have changed what artists were doing with paint and paintbrushes, but they didn’t “replace” artists...), and artists can use these new tools. They might replace “content creators” in certain workflow/production pipelines, but personally I’m not going to shed any tears over that...

But that does raise an interesting question about intellectual property and ownership. If I make an image with DALL-E or some text with ChatGPT, then are they mine - because I did the creative work of designing a unique prompt that generated the text? Do they belong to OpenAI, because they created the ‘product’ that actually make the image? (Given that I don’t think Nikon own my photos because they made the camera I took them with, I don’t think so...) Do they belong to the artists who created the content in the training data that the systems were trained on? Well, that gets interesting because our laws at the moment are a) designed for a very different technology in a very different age, and b) aren’t particularly consistent across the world. But we don’t really want the promise of this new technology (which, like it or not, is going to be developed) to be unnecessarily stifled because it conflicts with existing business interests. So there are some big questions around ownership and regulation.

Should we trust what AI tells us? Sure, it can do a good job of turning ‘facts’ into sentences (which has interesting implications for anyone marking essays in schools etc.), but when we don’t really know where those ‘facts’ came from, we should really treat all their output as much as we trust any random text on the internet - ie. not at all. But when we see 9 facts that we know is true followed by something we didn’t know already, its only natural that we would assume that was true as well. So there are some big questions around trust.

Trust, Ownership and Regulation turn out to be 3 of the 4 big questions we had this time last year about the Metaverse in our report. The other one was "social vs solo" - ie. how 'social' can metaverse experiences be when they pull your attention out of the real world (and the people around you) and pull it into a virtual world (with people who aren't in your physical presence.) Its not hard to think how that might also be an issue with AI systems - for example, where someone has built an AI chatbot based on her childhood diaries so she can speak to her 'inner child'.

Shorter Things that caught my attention

• John Higgs' Octannual Manual #39 - from October, but relelvant to the New Year; I really like the way John Higgs looks at the world, and the idea that 2022 was when a bunch of old systems fell apart and 2023 is going to be the time that whatever it will be that eventually takes their place will be starting to grow is one that appeals to me. "Winter is coming, but Spring will follow as well." Indeed...
• Meta has no soul, and needs to be allowed to buy one to complete Ok, thats not quite what the story here is - but thats how I read it.
• Happy birthday Internet. - last time I linked to a BBC story about SMS messages being 30 years old. Well, its now over 40 years since Arpanet completed the migration to TCP/IP - "Arpanet" being the big computer network that was the foundation of the internet, and TCP/IP being the set of protocols that computers on the internet use to communicate with one another. ¹ So - "the internet", in the sense of a global, decentralised open network, is now 40 years old.
• Same Words, Different Language - Dave Trott on why In communication it’s not enough to express yourself correctly, you need to make sure you’re heard correctly. The post is about English vs. American English, and how the difference between the languages (pavements vs sidewalks etc.) isn't nearly as important as the differences between the cultures that affect how the same phrases can be interpreted completely differently.
• Hallmark find a shortcut to making more generic films - Dan Harmon spotted two Hallmark films ("Sister Swap: A Hometown Holiday" and "Sister Swap: Christmas in the City") that are actually the same film... or at least, one film was shot, and two (slightly) different films were made out of the footage. We're all used to "Directors Cuts" and "Extended DVD versions", some of us might have seen the fan-edits of various Star Wars films that attempt to "fix" some of the flaws of the films - maybe even things like The Shining Recut trailer that makes a classic horror film look like a romcom, but this is something else. Perhaps the idea is that viewing data from streaming each of them will help Hallmark understand which one different viewers prefer. Maybe in the future, our recorded viewing preferences combined with AI editors will mean everyone can get their own personalised version of any given film (with appropriate subplots added/removed), and this kind of thing is something we'll see more of. For now... it just seems weird.
• Rishi Sunak wants Ofcom to regulate Netflix - maybe. Posting this one for the sake of completion more than anything, but there are a couple of things worth noting here; firstly, this is really a story about the backlash to Harry and Meghan's Netflix docuentary rather than online regulation (ie. more about celebrity gossip than media industry regulation); I haven't seen any... lets say "serious" reporting on the topic of Ofcom regulating Netflix for a while. Which isn't to say I don't think it will happen - just that it isn't currently on track to happen. Secondly, the current version of the Online Services Bill doesn't mention "Netflix", "SVOD", "on demand", or "television". (Mind you, it is 260 pages long and I haven't read it, so I might just be searching for the wrong terminology; "Ofcom" is mentioned 939 times, and I haven't checked them all...) But if it were to happen soon, then this is the bill I would expect it to be happening in. Thirdly - Netflix is a global company, so if they want to make a programme about the British Royal Family that Ofcom doesn't like and show it everywhere in the world except the UK, then there isn't anything Ofcom can do about it - so whats the point, really?
• Speaking of politics, it looks like EU laws not reviewed by the end of 2023 will be scrapped - which doesn't sound like good news. Any current UK legislation based on EU laws that gets bogged down in debate, or set aside while other crises get dealt with, could simply disappear at the end of the year. That might be great for the kind of mythical regulation about what you're allowed to call a banana that got people hot under the collar a few years ago, but not so great for the kind of regulation around, say, human rights that the conservative party's lobbyists would really like to just... quietly go away.