Apple Archives - Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel

25 April 2020

Saturday sandcastles

The photos of brutalist sandcastles accompanying this week’s link roundup made me both smile and really miss care-free walks on the beach. Although technically we’re still allowed to visit the coast, our local council has closed nearby car parks.

This week I’ve been busy, busy, but managed to squeeze in a bit of non-fiction reading, the best of which I’m sharing below. Oh, and one link that I can’ really quote is UnblockIt which was shared via our team chat this week. If your ISP filters certain sites, you might want to bookmark it…

There will be no ‘back to normal’

In this article, we summarise and synthesise various – often opposing – views about how the world might change. Clearly, these are speculative; no-one knows what the future will look like. But we do know that crises invariably prompt deep and unexpected shifts, so that those anticipating a return to pre-pandemic normality may be shocked to find that many of the previous systems, structures, norms and jobs have disappeared and will not return.
Nesta

I’m going to return to this article time and again, as it breaks down in a really helpful way what’s likely to happen post-pandemic in the following areas: political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal, and environmental.

Plan for 5 years of lockdown

I’m attempting to be pragmatic. I think this is one of those times where we should hope for the best but plan for the worst. Crucially, I think that a terrifying number of people are in denial about the timescales of disruption that Covid-19 will cause, and this is causing them to make horrible personal and professional decisions. I believe that we have a responsibility to consider any reasonably likely worst case scenario, and take appropriate steps to mitigate it. But to do that we have to be honest about the worst case.
Patrick Gleeson

It’s hard to disagree with the points made in this post, especially as the scenario planning that universities are doing seems to point in the same direction. Having said that, I don’t think ‘lockdown’ will mean the same thing everywhere and at each stage of the pandemic.

‘Will coronavirus change our attitudes to death? Quite the opposite’

For centuries, people used religion as a defence mechanism, believing that they would exist for ever in the afterlife. Now people sometimes switch to using science as an alternative defence mechanism, believing that doctors will always save them, and that they will live for ever in their apartment. We need a balanced approach here. We should trust science to deal with epidemics, but we should still shoulder the burden of dealing with our individual mortality and transience.
The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.
Yuval Noah Harari

Some amazing writing, as ever, by Harari, who argues that, because our secular societies focus on the here and now rather than the afterlife, science has almost become a religion.

A startup debt to talk about more: emotional debt

We incur emotional debt whenever there’s an experience we’ve had, but not fully digested in all aspects of it. In my trauma therapy training I learned that this is in fact a natural and important human survival skill. Imagine you’re living in a pre-historic village and it gets raided by a neighboring tribe. Although no one gets killed, a number of houses have been burned down and food has been stolen. The next morning the most important tasks for everyone are to protect the village again, rebuild the houses and hunt for food to survive. Many of the villagers will have been deeply traumatized from the fears and terror they experienced in their bodies. Since food and shelter takes first priority to humans, not processing these emotions for now is a debt that’s necessary and important to incur. We can put it aside and leave it stuck in our bodies, ready to reengage and digest it later. It’s a great survival feature if you will.
A couple of weeks later when everything has been rebuilt, there might be a chance for the local shaman to offer a ritual around the fireplace where everyone can gather and re-experience the emotions that were too difficult to deal with at the actual event of the raid: the rage and anger towards the attackers, the fear and the terror over their lives and eventually the grief for the loss of their goods and most importantly their safety. Once that has been felt and integrated, everyone is able to move on and the night of the village raid can safely go into the history books, fairy tales and heroes journey accounts that luckily everyone survived, yet learned from.
Leo Widrich

While this is framed in terms of startups, I think every organisation has ’emotional debt’ that they have to deal with. I like this framing, and will be using it from now on to explain why teams need times of compression and decompression (instead of never-ending ‘sprints’).

Don’t let remote leadership bring out the worst in you

Recognize that the pressure you apply is a reaction to a construct of control. You think you can control people – and things – and the reality is you can’t. The quicker you can realize this, the sooner you can shift to a frame of mind where you can focus constructively on the things that actually help your team, such as: (1) Making it clear why the work matters (2) Creating milestones to help that person achieve that work (3) Giving as much context as possible so they can make the best decisions (4) Helping them think through tough problems they encounter.
Claire Lew

I’ve led a remote team for a couple of years now, and worked remotely for six years before that. Despite this, it’s easy to fall into bad habits, so this is a useful article to remind all leaders (most of whom are remote now!) that the amount of time someone spends on something does not equate to progress made.

Google Apple Contact Tracing (GACT): a wolf in sheep’s clothes.

But the bigger picture is this: it creates a platform for contact tracing that works all across the globe for most modern smart phones (Android Marshmallow and up, and iOS 13 capable devices) across both OS platforms. Unless appropriate safeguards are in place (including, but not limited to, the design of the system as described above – we will discuss this more below) this would create a global mass-surveillance system that would reliably track who has been in contact with whom, at what time and for how long. (And where, if GPS is used to record the location.) GACT works much more reliably and extensively than any other system based on either GPS or mobile phone location data (based on cell towers) would be able to (under normal conditions). I want to stress this point because some people have responded to this threat saying that this is something companies like Google (using their GPS and WiFi names based location history tool) can already do for years. This is not the case. This type of contact tracing really brings it to another level.
Jaap-Henk Hoepman

This, by a professor in the Netherlands who focuses on ‘privacy by design’ is why I’m really concerned about the Google/Apple Contact Tracing (GACT) programme. It’s only likely to be of marginal help in fighting the virus, but sets up a global surveillance network for decades to come.

In this Zombie Apocalypse, your Homework is due at 5pm

Year in and year out, when school’s in, children know that they are to be at certain places at certain times, doing particular tasks in particular ways. And now, weeks loom ahead where they are faced with many of the same tasks, absent of all the pomp and circumstance. This is the ultimate zombie apocalypse nightmare—a pandemic has hit the world with a mighty force, schools and tuition centers are shut, and homework is still due. Children are adaptable creatures, but it will be challenging for many, if not most, to do all that they are expected to do under these altered conditions.
Youyenn Teo

I was attracted to this article by its great title, but it’s actually an interesting insight into both education in a Singaporean context and the gendered nature of care in our societies.

Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income

As cash transfers are increasingly seen as the ideal way to confront the magnitude of the coronavirus threat, it is unclear whether our political imagination is truly up to the task. The current crisis might accelerate rather than decrease our dependency on the market, strengthening capital’s grip on society. Large-scale public works are evidently unfeasible with physical distancing. But, with a clear medical equipment shortage and lacking trained personnel, there is obvious space for public planning responses, and “production for use value” seems ever more necessary. None of these ills will be solved by cash transfers.
Anton Jäger & Daniel Zamora

This, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, considers a new work by Peter Sloman entitled The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain. Having previously been cautiously optimistic about Universal Basic Income (or ‘cash transfers’) I’m not so sure it would all work out so well. I’d rather we funded things like the NHS, but then that might be my white male privilege speaking.

How we made the Keep Calm and Carry On poster

I first found the poster in 2000, folded up at the bottom of a box of books we had bought at an auction. I liked it straight away and showed it to my wife Mary – she had it framed and put up in the shop. The next thing we found was that customers wanted to buy it. I suggested we make copies but Mary said: “No, it’ll spoil the purity.” She went away for a week’s holiday, so I secretly got 500 copies made.
Stuart Manley (interviewed by malcolm jack)

This ridiculously-famous poster was discovered in a wonderful second-hand bookshop not too far away from us, and which we visit several times per year. I love the story behind it.

Images via The Guardian: For one tide only: modernist sandcastles – in pictures

9 October 2018

GAFA: time to ‘ignore and withdraw’?

Last week, Motherboard reported that an unannounced update by Apple meant that third-party repairs of products such as the MacBook Pro would be impossible:

Apple has introduced software locks that will effectively prevent independent and third-party repair on 2018 MacBook Pro computers, according to internal Apple documents obtained by Motherboard. The new system will render the computer “inoperative” unless a proprietary Apple “system configuration” software is run after parts of the system are replaced.

As they have updated the story to state, iFixit did some testing and found that this ‘kill switch’ hasn’t been activated – yet.

To me, it further reinforced why I love and support in very practical ways, Open Source Software (OSS). I use OSS, and I’m working on it in my day-to-day professional life. Sometimes, however, we don’t do a good enough job of explaining why it’s important. For me, the Apple story is a terrifying example of other people deciding when you should upgrade and/or stop using something.

Another example from this week: Google have announced that they’re shutting down their social network, Google+. It’s been a long-time coming, but it was only last month that, due to the demise of Path, my family was experimenting with Google+ as somewhere to which we could have jumped ship.

Both Apple’s products and Google+ are proprietary. You can’t see the source code. You can’t inspect it for bugs or security leaks. And the the latter is actually why Google decided to close down their service. That, and the fact it only had 500,000 users, most of whom were spending less than five seconds per visit.

So, what can we do in the face of huge companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (GAFA)? After all, they’ve got, for all intents and purposes, almost unlimited money and power. Well, we can and should vote for politicians to apply regulatory pressure on them. But, more practically, we can ignore and withdraw from these companies. They’re not trillion-dollar companies just because they’re offering polished products. They’re rich because they’re finding ever more elaborate ways to apply sneaky ways to achieve vendor lock-in.

This affects the technology purchases that we make, but it also has an effect on the social networks we use. As is becoming clear, the value that huge multi-national companies such as Google and Facebook gain from offering services for ‘free’ vastly outstrips the amount of money they spend on providing them. With Google+ shutting down, and Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, the number of options for social networking seems to be getting ever-smaller. Sadly, our current antitrust and monopoly regulations haven’t been updated to deal with this.

So what can we do? I’ve been using Mastodon in earnest since May 2017. It’s a decentralised social network, meaning that anyone can set up their own ‘instance’ and communicate with everyone else running the same OSS. Most of the time, people join established instances, whether because the instance is popular, or it fits with their particular interests. Recently, however, I’ve noticed people setting up an instance just for themselves.

At first, I thought this was a quirky and slightly eccentric thing to do. It seemed like the kind of thing that tech-literate people do just because they can. But then, I read a post by Laura Kalbag where she explained her reasoning:

Everything I post is under my control on my server. I can guarantee that my Mastodon instance won’t start profiling me, or posting ads, or inviting Nazis to tea, because I am the boss of my instance. I have access to all my content for all time, and only my web host or Internet Service Provider can block my access (as with any self-hosted site.) And all blocking and filtering rules are under my control—you can block and filter what you want as an individual on another person’s instance, but you have no say in who/what they block and filter for the whole instance.

You can also make custom emoji for your own Mastodon instance that every other instance can see and/or share.

Ton Zylstra is another person who has blogged about running his own instance. It would seem that this is a simple thing to do using a service such as masto.host.

Of course, many people reading this will think so what? And, perhaps, that seems like a whole lot of hassle. Maybe so. I hope it’s not hyperbolic to say so, but for me, I see all of this as being equivalent to climate change. It’s something that we all know we need to do something about but, for most of us, it’s just too much hassle to think about what could happen in future.

I, for one, hope that we’re not looking back from (a very hot) year 2050 regretting the choices we made in 2018.

27 June 2018

Our irresistible screens of splendour

Apple is touting a new feature in the latest version of iOS that helps you reduce the amount of time you spend on your smartphone. Facebook are doing something similar. As this article in The New York Times notes, that’s no accident:

There’s a reason tech companies are feeling this tension between making phones better and worrying they are already too addictive. We’ve hit what I call Peak Screen.

For much of the last decade, a technology industry ruled by smartphones has pursued a singular goal of completely conquering our eyes. It has given us phones with ever-bigger screens and phones with unbelievable cameras, not to mention virtual reality goggles and several attempts at camera-glasses.

The article even gives the example of Augmented Reality LEGO play sets which actively encourage you to stop building and spend more time on screens!

Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones, and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind.

So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.

[…]

Screens are insatiable. At a cognitive level, they are voracious vampires for your attention, and as soon as you look at one, you are basically toast.

It’s not enough to tell people not to do things. Technology can be addictive, just like anything else, so we need to find better ways of achieving similar ends.

But in addition to helping us resist phones, the tech industry will need to come up with other, less immersive ways to interact with digital world. Three technologies may help with this: voice assistants, of which Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant are the best, and Apple’s two innovations, AirPods and the Apple Watch.

All of these technologies share a common idea. Without big screens, they are far less immersive than a phone, allowing for quick digital hits: You can buy a movie ticket, add a task to a to-do list, glance at a text message or ask about the weather without going anywhere near your Irresistible Screen of Splendors.

The issue I have is that it’s going to take tightly-integrated systems to do this well, at least at first. So the chances are that Apple or Google will create an ecosystem that only works with their products, providing another way to achieve vendor lock-in.

Source: The New York Times

22 January 2018

The backstory of Apple’s emoji

This is a lovely post, full of insights and humour. A designer, now at Google but originally an intern at Apple, talks about the first iterations of their emoji.

My favourite part:

Sometimes our emoji turned out more comical than intended and some have a backstory. For example, Raymond reused his happy poop swirl as the top of the ice cream cone. Now that you know, bet you’ll never forget. No one else who discovered this little detail did either.

A fantastic read, really made my day.

Source: Angela Guzman

Tag: Apple