2024-11-16 18:17:03
I’ve banged on about the parlous strategy of Reach plc before, but the departures from its senior editorial ranks will continue to make a bad strategy worse. What makes this situation more difficult for the company is its board, which is free of any experience in newsrooms or in audience development, the two key product areas which are intended to drive its growth.
This lack of experience at board level plus the exodus of senior editorial talent will mean that there is zero experience of what it’s like to go through as Google traffic declines. Reach is in a doubly difficult position than most publishers, as its brands are largely local, and local news benefited for a time from Google’s largesse to a degree that nationals didn’t. I doubt this message is filtering through to the boardroom, who don’t have the right experience to dig themselves out of the hole they’re in.
One of the great failings of American publishing is on full display currently, as publications struggle to describe the latest crop of appointments to the incoming Trump clown car as what they are: disastrous for America and the world. Benjamin Mazer at The Atlantic highlights some of the more egregious examples connected to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a notorious spreader of conspiracy theories and lies about science who will now oversee public health. At least he’s not a sex trafficker.
You would think an incoming administration with a whacking great majority would have confidence, but Labour appears to be approaching all aspects of policymaking with the timidity of someone who squeaked an election. There is so much wrong with technology secretary Peter Kyle’s claim that companies like Facebook, Google, et al. need to be treated with the same approach as nation states rather than, you know, them having to be subject to law like everyone else.
It would be pathetic if it weren’t serious. Kyle appears to have read the section of Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism which looks at the power of these companies while ignoring the impact they will have on freedom and democracy.
This article from Timothy Snyder on Trump’s appointments is a good read, but the headline – “Decapitation Strike” – made me catch my breath. A decapitation strike is a military strategy aimed at removing or incapacitating the leadership or command structure of an enemy. This involves targeting high-ranking officials, such as political leaders, military commanders, or key decision-makers, with the aim of causing disarray, disrupting coordination, and undermining the enemy’s ability to organise and respond effectively.
Is there a better description of what Putin has achieved with his covert support for Trump? Trump’s ties to Putin were well known, but now the mask is off.
Everyone knows the role conspiracy theories spread by social media played in Trump’s election, but this isn’t stopping the left eschewing the reality-based community too. Honestly, there is enough wrong with the world without having to invent anything.
One of the challenges for us on the more radical wing of politics is to understand that the landscape has changed, and what it means for us. It’s no longer business as usual – we are finally getting to the point of the internet revolution where the new forms and norms which are native to the net emerge, rather than the period when a new medium apes the old forms.
One of those new forms – relating back to the point about technofeudalism – is the company which is too big to fail, and Cory Doctorow once again skewers an example of this in the shape of Lincare, the company which supplies almost every oxygen molecule used in US healthcare. Lincare practices illegal tactics with impunity.
And before those of us in the civilised world of socialised medicine get too pleased with ourselves: the main supplier of oxygen to the NHS is BOC. Linde Group own BOC. Guess who Linde Group also own?
I try not to use services from a single supplier, but the way Apple, Google and Microsoft set up their operating systems doesn’t make it easy. This is particularly true for storage on iOS, where Apple makes it effortless to use iCloud Drive while making it a little more difficult to use, say, Dropbox to the full extent it could. Thankfully, the venerable Which? magazine is taking Apple to court over it.
Agatha All Along didn’t grab me at first. I took my usual approach of watching three episodes then dumping it. But something got me watching it again, and I’m glad I did because the last two episodes were absolute hum dingers. Chuck Jordan wrote a great piece about it (contains big spoilers), and I agree with him: it managed to escape the curse of Marvel TV series, in that it felt like it was an interesting self-contained series full of good ideas, which wasn’t there simply to tee-up a movie.
At exactly the point where we need a tech company which is not some kind of play for absolute authoritarian power, Mozilla is all over the place. Please, people, pull out of this crazy tail spin.
Of course, it’s Howard, writing in detail about the history of Apple’s low speed ports, including ADB and USB. I had forgotten that ADB wasn’t supposed to be hot-swappable, possibly because I spent my entire life while working with it completely ignoring that and just plugging stuff in live.
2024-11-10 19:45:17
It’s been a while since I wrote a weeknote, although I’ve kept up with the other kinds of writing that I do. But: I work now. I’m working at a small B2B publisher helping them sort out a few things. This was originally going to be an in-and-out job which would take nine months, but I’ve extended my contract to the end of next year. Because there is much more to be done than I thought at the start.
That’s sometimes the way with contracts. I joined Redwood on a short-term gig for a couple of months and left eight years later. This job won’t last that long, I think. The hours are 8.30–4.30, which feels civilised but is different to the 10–6 that I had when I first started working, and that is probably my optimum working pattern. It does mean that on office days (two a week) I get home at a reasonable hour.
When I’m working on a job like this, the amount I can say about what I’m doing tends to be more limited. I can’t talk much about the details of strategy changes, structures, development, and all the other stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis. I can say that I’ve learned more about the pharmaceutical and food manufacturing industries, which has been interesting. I’ve been traveling a fair bit: Berlin, Milan, Amsterdam. This is business travel which usually means seeing (in order) an airport, a taxi, a hotel, a convention centre/meeting rooms, a hotel, a taxi, an airport.
Part of the deal is that I’m doing four days a week, although there have been times recently when I’ve needed to do five. What I’ve discovered doing this is that after a while a two day weekend feels incredibly short. How do people managed with two days off? How do you cope? There’s no time to do anything! It’s ridiculous.
(This is how it starts: the great long weekend of retirement. Is this how it feels? You suddenly realise that working isn’t interesting enough to fill the five days plus that you worked when young, and that lounging around is much more fun?)
Even when I work five days the busy-o-meter is pinging loudly and blowing out steam. My temptation is to dive into a bunch of things which are technically not in my remit, but which are very much in my wheelhouse – and that leads to me being spread far too thinly.
My curse is that I’m ridiculously experienced at a wide range of things. Want someone to create a content strategy? Do technical SEO? Lead and mentor a young team? Run a panel discussion? Develop product strategy? Coach people on how to pitch?
Done it all. Can do it all to a high degree of competence.
But does that look like a job to you? Is it one of those nice compact and well-defined roles which are beloved of the Harvard Business Review crowd? Nope. Not even close.
Things I have learned in this job:
A couple of weeks ago we found out from our postman that one of our neighbours had died. He wasn’t old – he was younger than me – and leaves behind a wife and four kids. Septicaemia. All of which makes me realise quite how little time I have left, and how much I need to make the most of it.
I’ve had a numbness in the front of my thigh for a while which has no developed into full blown occasional sciatica. Or at least I think that’s what it is: I’ll talk to the doctor next week. I was woken up one day by a shooting pain going down my thigh, like a stabbing electric shock, painful enough for me to make some real noise. Another reminder to do a few more things to keep myself healthier (as if any more reminders were needed, or less likely to be ignored).
I still have not fixed my bike.
I was greatly annoyed at the fact I have to pay for a month’s Discovery streaming to watch the rugby Autumn internationals on TNT Sport. On the plus side, TNT also has Australian football, which I find baffling and exciting in equal measure. There’s also a few Champions League and Premier League football matches to watch. But the last thing I need is yet more streaming, so I have to remember to cancel it at the end of the month.
On the tech front, I have been experimenting with using Readwise Reader as my feed reader (which is at least one two many uses of the word “read” in a sentence, but I will let it slip). I’m still in love with the MacBook Air M2.I still wish I had bought the one with more storage.
My friend Cory had cancer but he’s OK. It reminded me of my own health scares (a heart which needed checking out, and was perfectly fine; a “just in case” chest X-ray which might have revealed something a lot more serious). The key question: who do you tell? I told Kim of course, but no one else, and spent a few weeks worrying that I might be about to check out, and thinking about all the things I had left unfinished.
I have been playing around with using Nirvana, which is a really good GTD app, instead of Things, which is a really good GTD app which doesn’t quite work how I like. I still love Things because it just looks pretty, but Nirvana might actually be a better fit.
2024-11-10 00:20:58
For those of you not in the UK, the British system of university funding is a weird mash-mash of different stuff, cobbled together from the mistakes made by successive governments. When I was young, the government effectively paid all tuition fees, and students who qualified could get a grant to go. It was a system which worked, but wouldn’t work if the university sector expanded to give more access to students.
Over time, to finance expansion, governments introduced loans rather than grants, and then tuition fees paid for by students through the same loan system. It allowed the numbers of students to rise, but tuition fees were never allowed to rise even as costs to universities rose – because, of course, that would have meant students (particularly from poorer backgrounds) taking a look at the tens of thousands of pounds of debt and concluding it wasn’t worthwhile.
All this, plus moves to restrict foreign students (who pay larger fees) have left the universities in dire financial straights. What’s compounded that is they have been allowed to recruit as many students as they can, with no cap. This sounds like a good idea in theory – improving access to education – but in practice it’s just meant more students at “the best” universities (they’re not) and mid-tier places falling to bits.
So the incoming government is raising fees by 3.1%, which is both not enough to help universities and enough to make students – who already often work long hours in jobs while trying to study – unhappy. The whole system essentially needs taking apart and rebuilding from scratch with an eye to improving academic standards and focusing on making a degree worthwhile. But that won’t happen with our timid mouse of a government.
Wendy Grossman’s column this week covers a lot of interesting ground, but one line which really stood out was this: “platforms either start with or create billionaire owners”. And she’s absolutely right. It sounds obvious, and it’s almost certainly not unique, but platforms are capital – they are the “means of production” of a huge amount of content and value for both advertisers and the people that use them.
And in a capitalist society, capital has primacy. It’s more than simply owning a market place – which is what Apple does with the App Store – it’s owning the means of production itself.
Apple Intelligence is coming to the EU in April. Which of course means that there were technical means to comply with the law all along – Apple simply chose not to engage with regulators to work them out in time to launch the same product everywhere.
Short version: Cory very sensibly never wants to be caught on a platform where he can’t take his following with him if it turns to crap. Fool me once, etc. While Bluesky has made some strides towards the kind of federation where you can move from one server to another, it’s really got finished the work which lets you move your following. And that’s a big problem, because it’s how you end up trapped on platforms like Twitter.
Gut-punching way to start a blog post and doubly so when it’s also about the US presidential election. Me and John Gruber often spar, but I genuinely love the guy and he can write.
I promised myself I wasn’t going to write much/anything about the US election, but the other piece that’s well worth reading is Tom Nichols at the Atlantic (paywalled, but you can circumvent it easily enough). As Tom says, democracy will not fall overnight, but that is no reason to be complacent. As he says, “if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents”.
Isn’t it odd how often that features designed to stop thieves from accessing and reselling your phone while also protecting your data also stop cops doing something they claim is fine because they’re “the good guys”?
Back in the early 80s, computers were not as globally available as they are now. In fact in some places – such as Eastern Europe – there were limits on who could own one, who could use one, and who could build them. So what should someone do? Build it yourself, of course, and in a way that’s actually very, very cool.
Electric vehicles accounted for nearly a third of new car registrations in the UK in October 2024. Petrol cars formed only just over half of the total.
Of course the mega rich don’t think any of this will apply to them, which is why they continue to use private planes as if they were taxis. Proof, of course, that pigs can fly.
2024-11-02 03:04:05
You might have heard something about how Google now creates a quarter of its code using AI. But as with most things concerning everyone’s favourite hot tech, the devil is in the details. And the details, according to this poster on Hacker News, are that what’s being counted here as “written” by AI is, in fact, lines being written by a human being using autocomplete suggestions. This is a bit like saying this blog post was “written” by AI, because Word also has autocomplete. But hey, the stock market loves the idea that AI will replace humans.
In contrast to the ever-deepening hole that Matt Mullenweg is digging both himself and WordPress into, John O’Nolan of Ghost has written a wonderfully clear piece on how the company has tried to avoid falling into the same pitfalls. This involves having a simple structure that’s all about a non-profit, and not aiming to be too big. It makes me very glad that I backed their original Kickstarter.
What is it about YouTubers and their inability to avoid getting involved in crypto scams? The latest is that loveable rogue Mr Beast. MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, acts like a YouTube’s answer to a mad scientist with a credit card and a mission.
He’s also created MrBeast Burger, so technically, he’s the only YouTuber who might surprise you with is meat. But it turns out, he also has an interesting web of crypto wallets and a habit of being in the right place at the right time for the kind of dodgy coin drops which make some people a lot of money while pulling in a lot of suckers.
Be as dumb as Jeff Bezos. And that number continues to grow. Perhaps Jeffy is thinking that he can just replace them all with MAGA-hat wearing morons.
And speaking of AI, it turns out to the surprise of absolutely no one that resume/CV screening AI systems prefer white male job candidates to the majority of the human beings on the planet – who happen to not be white males. Garbage in, garbage out. Bias in, “hugely exciting development in HR”.
The floods in Spain are, of course, a tragic natural disaster. But like most tragic natural disasters, less people would have been killed without the ineffable urge of stupid human beings to put innocent people in danger. First, there is Carlos Mazon, president of the right wing government of Valencia who shut down the Valencia Emergencies Unit as soon as he took office. This was the body who were supposed to provide a rapid response in the event of natural disasters. Like, you know, floods.
Then of course there was the contribution of our wonderful capitalist task masters such as those at Uber Eats and Glovo, who forced delivery drivers to make their usual deliveries during the worst floods in living memory. Well done lads, well done.
How do you lose a 40% discount from a supplier overnight, one that would have saved you hundreds of millions of dollars? Ask Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger, who managed to offend chip foundry TSMC with some unwise comments about the stability of Taiwan. This is just one example of how Gelsinger has mismanaged the company, apparently learning all the wrong lessons from the legendary Andy Grove. It’s now got the point where companies that Grove’s Intel would have treated as little more than annoyances are credible suitors for a purchase of the company.
I would put Ghostbusters II in the sparsely populated category of “sequels that are better than the original”. You might remember it: a lot of the plot revolves around the attempt of a horrible 16th century tyrant and sorcerer to come back to life, possibly by using the life force of Sigourney Weaver’s baby. Or something. It’s all very silly and very fun.
Anyway, the actor who played Vigo — which, as his lines were dubbed by Max Von Sydow, mostly involve standing around and scowling — had something of an interesting life. Wilhelm von Homberg was, by almost all accounts, a thoroughly unpleasant man who may or may not have been the father of his sister (don’t ask). He was someone who never let an opportunity to insult someone pass him by.
And by the time he developed the cancer which eventually killed him, he was basically living in his car. It’s a slightly crazy story, and well worth a read.
I have always been a little bit suspicious is stoicism. Or rather, I have been a bit suspicious of the kind of people – almost always men – who dive into stoicism and find a philosophy of life for themselves.
So I was surprised to find just how level-headed and likable Ryan Holliday is. Ryan has written many books explaining stoicism in layperson’s terms, and is popular amongst the kind of Silicon Valley people I loathe. But I’m not going to hold that against him.
Cory Doctorow is super-productive. During lockdown he wrote nine books, which makes my two short stories and a hatful of blog posts look like amateur hour. So how does he do it?
Mostly with some really very simple processes, the main one of which is setting yourself a really small daily goal of the kind that you have no excuses whatever for not completing. A page a day, for example, is something you can write in 20 minutes if you’re as ferocious a typer as Cory (or me, for that matter).
2024-10-27 04:57:23
When people start talking about how good it is for use in surgery. Don’t believe me? Here’s a Microsoft piece from 2018 talking about surgeons were using HoloLens. These kinds of applications are as old as AR itself, and they represent the kind of niches which are the most obvious business-side areas for using the tech. Industrial applications are exactly what Microsoft spent a decade trying to push for HoloLens. It didn’t work. It won’t work for Apple, either.
Dave Lee, who knows a thing or two, sums it up nicely: “When Reach goes out of business it’ll blame AI or Big Tech or the BBC or the TikTok generation or literally anything that allows the bosses to avoid admitting they forced their employees to publish complete shit”.
And of course when complaining about the BBC, they won’t mention the £8m a year that the BBC puts into funding more than 150 local reporters. Some of whom work at titles owned by, erm, Reach.
You might have noted that Penguin Random House came out strongly against AI software makers lifting their books for profit. But as Cory Doctorow points out, that doesn’t mean one of the most rapacious groups in publishing has suddenly gained a moral compass. Instead, it just wants to make sure that it gets some money from any AI-related work using “its” content:
This is a pretty naive take. What’s far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot’s training-hopper. It’s also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.
WordPress.com, the organization which believes trademarks are a vital weapon to defend their business, are routinely misusing other companies’ trademarks by republishing plugins on a private repo for their customers. We are very much at “you couldn’t make it up” now.
Why is the owner of “Britain’s greenest energy supplier” so against heat pumps? The cynical bones in me want to say that the interests of an energy supplier definitely don’t align with the idea of using less electricity.
You know how in bad science fiction there’s a moment when someone defeats an invasion of killer robots by asking a question which ties them in knots by making no sense?
“Why is a mouse when it spins?”
“Because… BZZZZT… DAMN… YOU… PUNY… HUMAN.. .BZZZT”
Cue triumph of humanity..
You can get a similar effect from me by asking “hey Ian what’s your favourite iPad?” I’m typing this on an M4 11in iPad Pro and it’s gorgeous. That screen! That speed! That pencil! OK maybe not so much that pencil. On the other hand, the iPad mini. The size! The lovely compactness! The USB-C! The pencil! OK, maybe not the pencil either.
The problem is that Apple does not love the mini as much as its users do, which is why this review of the latest version rings true to me. The one quibble I have is with the placement of the camera – if my use is anything to go by, having the camera at the top in portrait makes sense for the mini where it doesn’t for everything bigger.
As always, the irrepressible Howard Oakley will be your guide. I love Howard’s in-depth technical work. Those of us who worked with him on MacUser knew he was brilliant, but I didn’t know he was this brilliant.
Iain Banks was a genius writer, and one of the things which I love most about his is how his literary touchpoints are so similar to mine: M John Harrison, Barrington Bailey, and John Sladek are the ones he lists in this interview, but there are many others.
A lot of people are underwhelmed by Apple Intelligence, which is finally getting closer to officially rolling out in the UK. Personally I have found things like email summarization useful, but not game changing – and that’s OK. I would rather generative AI happens on-device, where I have more control over what data leaks out, and be a little underwhelmed.
When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed.
If that first line doesn’t get you reading there’s no hope for you.