Canadian Tech News Site BetaKit Sold

Douglas Soltys*, owner and editor-in-chief of the Canadian tech news site, BetaKit, has sold a controlling interest of the company to Good Future, a Toronto-based firm founded by former Shopify executives. 

Good Future, a Toronto-based venture fund and philanthropic foundation led by husband-and-wife duo Satish Kanwar and Arati Sharma, has signed a partnership to hold the controlling interest in BetaKit, the companies told The Globe and Mail ahead of a public announcement on Tuesday. Financial details were not disclosed.

Mr. Kanwar will become interim chief executive officer and chair of the board of directors at BetaKit, while Ms. Sharma is joining its group of business advisers to work on its brand direction. Douglas Soltys, who has managed BetaKit for nearly a decade, will remain the publication’s editor-in-chief.

Good Future will provide BetaKit with capital for growth, Ms. Sharma and Mr. Kanwar said. They would not reveal any figures for their investment, but said it would be utilized for enhanced editorial offerings, subscriber benefits and community initiatives to “better serve and engage Canadian tech.”

If you have any interest in news about the Canadian tech industry and startups, you should follow BetaKit. With the acquisition and capital investment provided by Good Future, the site is sure to get even better.

*Douglas Soltys is my nephew. I have no connection, financial or otherwise, to BetaKit.

Read Mirroshades For Free

Mirrorshades is a seminal anthology of cyberpunk science fiction edited by Bruce Sterling and first published in 1986. It contained stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, and several other well-known writers. 

Rudy Rucker has made the anthology freely available to read online or download as an ebook.

Okay so NOW this FREE cyberpunk collection (which is so old you can see on the cover that it was only $3.50 for a paperback copy), is available as an #ebook download (FREE, I said!) as well as just opening it to read on your device. If you want it in that format, you can go there and try out the two ebook download systems it's offered on, let me know if it's not working. 

It's a credit to the authors and Sterling's editorial talents that these stories have held up so well over the intervening decades. Here's the table of contents.

• PREFACE
• THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM by William Gibson
• SNAKE EYES by Tom Maddox
• ROCK ON by Pat Cadigan
• TALES OF HOUDINI by Rudy Rucker
• 400 BOYS by Marc Laidlaw
• SOLSTICE by James Patrick Kelly
• PETRA by Greg Bear
• TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US by Lewis Shiner
• FREEZONE by John Shirley (Two Versions)
• STONE LIVES by Paul Di Filippo
• RED STAR, WINTER ORBIT by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson
• MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner
• CREDITS

What Is Next for OpenAI?

The turmoil at OpenAI has been the biggest tech news story of the month, if not the year so far. A few hints about what direction the company might be taking have emerged from all the verbiage in the press. Forbes has published a long article by AI researcher Lance Elliot that tries to make sense of the few tidbits that are out there. 

I found the article rather long-winded (the editor part of my brain figured it could have cut the article's word count down by at least a third), but does explain several topics that are critical to understanding current AI technology. 

In today’s column, I am going to walk you through a prominent AI-mystery that has caused quite a stir leading to an incessant buzz across much of social media and garnering outsized headlines in the mass media. This is going to be quite a Sherlock Holmes adventure and sleuth detective-exemplifying journey that I will be taking you on.

Please put on your thinking cap and get yourself a soothing glass of wine.

The roots of the circumstance involve the recent organizational gyrations and notable business crisis drama associated with the AI maker OpenAI, including the off and on-again firing and then rehiring of the CEO Sam Altman, along with a plethora of related carry-ons. My focus will not particularly be the comings and goings of the parties involved. I instead seek to leverage those reported facts primarily as telltale clues associated with the AI-mystery that some believe sits at the core of the organizational earthquake.

If you have the time to read it (it's about 9,500 words), you should find it worth the effort. The author also includes links that are worth exploring.  

 

  

Featured Links - November 27. 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Swans on the bay

• The most powerful cosmic ray since the Oh-My-God particle puzzles scientists. "Scientists spot a particle of intense energy, but explaining where it came from might require some new physics." The particle had an energy of 240 exa-electron volts. I was curious what its mass would have been so I asked Windows Copilot. It gave me an answer of 4.27 x 10^-16 kg, which is roughly 2.5 x 10^11 protons. I was impressed with the answer and the included explanation. 
• See the photos that made National Geographic’s ‘Pictures of the Year’. The photos are the main reason I read National Geographic. 
• Something Unexpectedly Cool Happens When You Use Banana Peel as an Ingredient. "... a study last year found that if banana peels are blanched, dried, and ground into a flour, they can be turned into baked goods that taste just as nice, if not better than wheat-based products."
• Study examines how massive 2022 eruption changed stratosphere chemistry and dynamics. "When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted on January 15, 2022 in the South Pacific, it produced a shock wave felt around the world and triggered tsunamis in Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, Peru and the United States. It also changed the chemistry and dynamics of the stratosphere in the year following the eruption, leading to unprecedented losses in the ozone layer of up to 7% over large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the University of Maryland."
• There’s trouble below at Elon Musk’s Boring Co. Why am I not surprised. 
• AI finds formula on how to predict monster waves. "Using 700 years' worth of wave data from more than a billion waves, scientists have used artificial intelligence to find a formula for how to predict the occurrence of these maritime monsters. Long considered myth, freakishly large rogue waves are very real and can split apart ships and even damage oil rigs."
• Aliens Are Out There — But They Probably Don’t Care About Us. "Science and astronomy are more and more pointing to the fact that there is other life out there. Here's why we haven't seen it yet."
• Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes: A Diary of an Influential Life. "Begun to improve his own technique, piano exercises that Glass wrote over decades are the subject this month of a new book, a concert and dances." 

Saturday Sounds - Little Feat - Waiting for Columbus - 2022/12/17

This week's musical treat features Little Feat performing Waiting for Columbus, their classic live album in Boulder Colorado last December. The sound quality is an excellent stereo mix; the video looks like it was fan shot, much of it from the hall's screens. 

For a band that's been around this long, the performance is awesome. 

You can find some videos of the classic lineup of Little Feat on this blog, here and here. 

Kindle Fire HD 8 First Impressions - Updated

I use several devices (Pixel 4a, Samsung Galaxy Tab A, Kindle Paperwhite). for reading. Even with strong reading glasses, I can't comfortably read newspapers, magazines, or most books in their paper editions. My preference is for dark mode (white text on a black background) as I find a white screen hard to view for any length of time. 

The Kindle Paperwhite does have a dark mode but it isn't very good, because the E-ink screen doesn't have enough contrast. I've been thinking about getting a small tablet (one smaller than the Samsung), so when I saw the Kindle Fire HD 8 tablet was on sale, I decided to get one. 

The tablet is solidly built although a bit heavy compared to my Kindle. I've read complaints about performance but it is adequately fast for general use, certainly faster than my now 5-year-old Samsung tablet. Amazon uses its own version of Android and has its own app store, which is much more limited than Google's. It is possible to add the Google Play Store to the tablet; more on that later. 

There are several Amazon-installed apps that you can't remove, but it's easy enough to move them into folders and tuck them away at the bottom of the home screen. I intend to use the tablet as an ereader and won't be installing email or social media apps like Facebook on it. So on my home screen right now, I have the Kindle app and Libby for reading magazines and books from the library. 

The Kindle app works but has some limitations that I find annoying. The major issue for me is that the choices of font and font sizes are limited. For font size, the choices aren't granular enough and I would like a size in between the sizes offered. You also can't add your own fonts to the app (I prefer Atkinson Hyperlegible), something that I verified with Amazon support. You can use Calibre to embed the font into a book and transfer it to the tablet as a document. 

The Libby app works quite well and I will probably be using it more than I did on the larger Samsung tablet. 

I ordered Amazon's own case for the tablet, but have decided to return it and get something else. Their case is very slippery, and I am really afraid I will drop it, especially if I read in bed. (Update: The Moko case is better than the Amazon case: the strap makes it much more secure to hold and the stand is better, at least for keeping it in landscape mode). 

I did get the Google Play Store onto the tablet by following these instructions and installed several apps. Unfortunately, I'm having a problem with Chrome; it won't let me log into my Google account, claiming the account is already on the tablet but won't let me log in. More investigation is needed, although given the intended uses of the tablet, it's not a big deal.

I likely would have gotten more flexibility out of a Samsung tablet or an iPad, but given the cost of the tablet ($100 CDN), I don't have many regrets. 

Update: After almost six months, I've noticed that my Google account now syncs with Chrome on the tablet. Either an OS or Chrome update fixed the problem as I didn't do anything else to change it. This makes the tablet much more usable. 

New Research on Sea Level Rise

New research on sea level rise indicates that it could happen faster than previously thought, with major implications for coastal areas around the world. The Washington Post just published a long article about geologist Andrea Dutton and her research in the Seychelles, an island state in the Indian ocean that is one of the world's countries most at risk from sea level rise.  

To Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Seychelles’ geologic singularity made it the perfect place to conduct research on ancient sea levels. The granite landmasses do not sink in the manner of atolls and volcanic islands, which subside as they drift away from the mantle plume that created them. The islands were also far enough from former ice sheets that they were less affected by changes in the Earth’s shape caused by ice pressing down on the crust.

“The Seychelles was really a serendipitous find in many ways,” Dutton said. The islands’ long-term stability made them ideal for comparing sea levels from ancient times to those seen today. If researchers found evidence of a reef on land that is now above water, they could be relatively certain it wasn’t because the land had moved — it was because the oceans had changed.

Her findings are troubling.

Alessio Rovere, a coastal geologist at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, said Dutton’s findings add to a growing body of evidence that the Last Interglacial ice sheets didn’t melt simultaneously, causing sea levels to surge upward in multiple, sudden spurts.

“We can use it as a benchmark for what could happen in a future that is slightly warmer,” Rovere said, helping scientists develop better models of how modern ice sheets will behave.

But there is a key difference between the Last Interglacial and today, Dutton warned. Back then, the poles alternated warming, so melting from one ice sheet was buffered by the other. Now, the whole planet is warming at the same time as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions. Both Greenland and Antarctica are crumbling at once.

It's a highly readable article that explains the her research, what it shows, and why it's important. It's also beautifully illustrated, something I often ignore in newspaper articles, but in this case the photos and graphics enhance the article. 

 

A Thanksgiving Comedy Classic

For my younger readers who, like my daughter, may not have seen this, here's the classic Thanksgiving turkey drop scene from WKRP in Cincinnati. It's one of the funniest single scenes in the history of television comedy. 

 

Here's a history of that episode and how it probably saved WKRP from cancellation. 

LG C3 OLED TV First Impressions

We decided to upgrade our family room's TV after the 55" Vizio P55 set we've been using for the last five years started to develop some display glitches. Vizio got out of the Canadian market a couple of years ago and they aren't providing the firmware updates that could have fixed the issues we were experiencing. I also wanted a bigger screen.

After looking at several sets, we decided on a 65" LG C3 OLED TV. I wanted an OLED set for the improved picture quality and the 65" set was about as big as we could go in our room. While pricier than LED sets, the C3 is almost a budget set these days as the price has come down by about $1500 from where this level of set was a few years ago.

Physically, the C3 is an improvement over the Vizio in several ways. The bezels are almost nonexistent, it's lighter, and the sound from the built-in speakers is better, even without LG's AI processing, which I haven't yet enabled. (We run the TV through a home theatre receiver with 5.1 speakers, so rarely use the TV speakers alone). The set does have a glossy screen, so reflections are more of an issue than they were with the Vizio; this is something we will have to keep in mind if we renovate the room, but it's not a problem right now.

Setup was straightforward and everything worked as expected (once we corrected a mismatched HDMI cable that we'd somehow mixed up). The picture quality is excellent, as we expected. Right now we're just using the default Standard or Cimema modes. The set has a gazillion options for changing the settings, but I don't intend to change the defaults; for now they seem adequate. I should note that there is one change that is important to make; turning off the power saving mode makes a noticeable improvement in the brightness level. 

There are some things I don't like that aren't related to the set itself.

• The Magic Remote (LG's name, not mine!) is not backlit, which is a major disappointment in a fairly expensive set. The onscreen cursor is more annoying than useful and can't be disabled.
• LG's ThinQ Android app is awful. It can be used in place of the remote, but half the time it refuses to connect to the TV. Setting the TV to allow power on and off using the app causes the app to refuse to connect to the TV. And it just functions as a remote; unlike the Vizio app, the menu options don't show up in the app itself, so you have to keep looking back and forth between the phone and the screen to make changes. Ridiculous in 2023. Do better, LG. 
• LG's website registration failed every time I tried to use it (including when I tried to register my new monitor a couple of weeks ago). I ended up having to call support to register the TV and monitor.

So overall it's a very nice television at a reasonable price (especially if you can get it on sale as we did) but the experience of using it is degraded by the remote and app. 

The Music of the Anthropocene

I've posted before about Karl Schroeder's excellent Unapocalyptic newsletter. A recent post diverges from the usual topics of science fiction and futurism to look at some modern music; The Music for the Anthropocene, as he puts it. 

I grew up in the 70s in a small Canadian prairie town during the era of progressive rock bands like King Crimson and Yes. They’re what I listened to on vinyl. If you were driving or hanging out at the mall, you’d be hearing top-40 tunes almost exclusively. But Brandon, Manitoba is a university town with a music school, so I also grew up around summer madrigals where they played the hits of the 1600s, and my parents listened to old-timie music as well as Tschaikovsky and Beethoven.

Fast forward to 2023, and the grocery stores are still playing the same top-40 hits as they were in the 80s. I know a lot of people my age who are cool with that; they listen backward, to the music of their youth, but I like to keep current, and there is a vast torrent of great music flooding the world right now. I feel a bit like the Angel of History, being blown backward into the future while I snatch at composers and bands as they fly by. I’ve only just discovered Hania Rani or Agnes Obel when there’s a new Fleet Foxes album or I stumble across a composer like Anna Clyne or Dobrinka Tabakova. There isn’t enough time in the day to take it all in.

Lately, though, some pieces are holding my attention not because they capture the aesthetic of the day, but because they engage with the moment in other ways: they are music about life in the Anthropocene. Here are a few that I’ve had on steady rotation. 

Like Karl, I have been trying to keep more current in my listening, and I was glad to have a chance to explore his musical suggestions. 

Out of the pieces that he recommends, my favourite was Mass for the Endangered by Sarah Kirkland Snider. It manages to combine the classical tradition of the mass with modern elements and is a beautiful piece of music. I also enjoyed Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Fordlandia. Both bear repeated listening. Links are in his post. 

He cites several other composers in his post and I expect to be checking them out in the future. 

 

A Couple of Impressive Interactive Websites

As a technical writer, I made my living wrangling words. I used graphics, mostly diagrams and screen captures, to enhance the content but they were never the primary part of my documentation. But the web has made interactive graphics an effective way of conveying information that would be difficult or impossible to do with just words. I am in awe of the people who can do this; aside from being a competent photographer, I am not a graphics person.

Here are a couple of websites that seriously impressed me, both with their content and the way it was conveyed. 

• goog_1893961212A portrait of Tenochtitlan, a 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire. 

"Not much is left of the old Aztec - or Mexica - capital Tenochtitlan. What did this city, raised from the lake bed by hand, look like? Using historical and archeological sources, and the expertise of many, I have tried to faithfully bring this iconic city to life." 

The site uses 3D modelling to show what Tenochtitlan might have looked like just before the Spanish invasion. The images are stunning. I especially liked the use of overlay graphics to show the comparison between 1500 and now. 

• The James Webb telescope is a giant leap in the history of stargazing. "Our view of the universe will never be the same." (no paywall link)

This interactive page, produced by the New York Times, is the best site I've seen for showing the capabilities of the James Webb telescope in comparison to the Hubble and terrestrial telescopes. 

Thanks to the Recomendo newsletter for pointing out these sites. 

Featured Links - November 20, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Foraging geese

• Here’s the Proof There’s No Government Alien Conspiracy Around Roswell. "Roswell, New Mexico, remains synonymous with the “discovery” of alien life on Earth—and a US government coverup. But history shows the reality may be far less out of this world—and still fascinating." This pretty much debunks the Roswell incident as far as I'm concerned.
• Starship & Superheavy Become The Biggest Rocket In Space.... Before Exploding. (YouTube link) Excellent analysis of videos showing the failure of both the booster and Starship. 
• How to use the secret software installer on your Windows PC. "Your PC has a big secret: The ultimate upgrade for installing and updating Windows applications." This is a good tip for Windows power users.
• Developers can’t seem to stop exposing credentials in publicly accessible code. "Many transgressions come from "very large companies that have robust security teams." It can happen in documentation projects too. I worked on a project once where a few of the screen shots included the IP addresses of internal servers and it didn't get caught until after the manuals were printed. We had to put stickers over the graphics.
• Welcome to eReaderIQ. Get email alerts when Kindle ebooks you are interested in go on sale.
• Physicists Simulated a Black Hole in The Lab. Then It Started to Glow. "A black hole analog could tell us a thing or two about an elusive radiation theoretically emitted by the real thing."
• "I'm so tired of these psychos": Moms for Liberty is now a toxic brand. "Last month, Salon reported on one town's fight over a right wing school takeover — Tuesday, the resistance won big."
• With the world on fire, a cowardly, timid news media is a threat to U.S. democracy. "News organizations are using cowardly words to describe killing abroad and fascism at home — downplaying the danger to democracy."

Photo of the Week - November 19, 2023

I took this week's photo with the Pixel 8 Pro while I was out walking and saw the remains of a pumpkin on the grass beside the walkway to the park. I don't know why someone dumped it there instead of putting in the garbage container a few feet away; perhaps it was intended as a meal for the local squirrels. If memory serves, I used the wide angle lens for this one and used the Dynamic setting in Google Photos to boost the colour a bit.

The red flower to the right of the pumpkin is a discarded Remembrance Day poppy. 

Pixel 8 Pro, F1.68, 1/1789 second, ISO 21

Saturday Sounds - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at the Ryman 10-21-2023

Jason Isbell is a musician who I've been following since his days with Drive By Truckers. In recent years, he's matured as a songwriter and performer, and I was happy to see a webcast of last month's appearance at the historic Ryman Auditorium crop up in my YouTube feed (posted with his permission, too). 

The webcast has great sound and video and Isbell and the 400 Unit are in fine form. I wish I had gotten tickets to see him at Massey Hall. 

SpaceX Has a Bad Worder Safety Record

I was going to write a post about the second SpaceX Starship launch, but it's been postponned until tomorrow. Instead, here's an article that looks at SpaceX's abysmal worker safety record. It's pretty damning.  

... Through interviews and government records, the news organization documented at least 600 injuries of SpaceX workers since 2014.

Many were serious or disabling. The records included reports of more than 100 workers suffering cuts or lacerations, 29 with broken bones or dislocations, 17 whose hands or fingers were “crushed,” and nine with head injuries, including one skull fracture, four concussions and one traumatic brain injury. The cases also included five burns, five electrocutions, eight accidents that led to amputations, 12 injuries involving multiple unspecified body parts, and seven workers with eye injuries. Others were relatively minor, including more than 170 reports of strains or sprains.

Current and former employees said such injuries reflect a chaotic workplace where often under-trained and overtired staff routinely skipped basic safety procedures as they raced to meet Musk’s aggressive deadlines for space missions. SpaceX, founded by Musk more than two decades ago, takes the stance that workers are responsible for protecting themselves, according to more than a dozen current and former employees, including a former senior executive.

It's clear that the injury rate at SpaceX facilities is much higher than the industry average.

The 2022 injury rate at the company’s manufacturing-and-launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, was 4.8 injuries or illnesses per 100 workers – six times higher than the space-industry average of 0.8. Its rocket-testing facility in McGregor, Texas, where LeBlanc died, had a rate of 2.7, more than three times the average. The rate at its Hawthorne, California, manufacturing facility was more than double the average at 1.8 injuries per 100 workers. The company’s facility in Redmond, Washington, had a rate of 0.8, the same as the industry average.

Hopefully, public knowledge of the situation and government scrutiny will force SpaceX to clean up its act.  

 

Comparing the Pixel 8 Pro Telephoto to a Fujifilm Zoom

I've taken quite a few pictures with the Pixel 8 Pro and have been impressed with quality of the pictures. They look very good on the phone and even on my 32" monitor. I was curious to see how the phone camera would compare to my Fujifilm X-S10 and it's 16-80 mm. F4 lens.

Last week, I took a picture of the west side of Frenchman's Bay with the 5x telephoto camera on the Pixel 8 Pro. That lens has a 35 mm. equivalent focal length of 112 mm., which is very close to the 35 mm. equivalent focal length of 120 mm. for the 16-80 mm. zoom. 

Pixel 8 Pro with 5x zoom

I went back in my archives and found a picture of the same scene that I had taken just after I got the camera a couple of years ago.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 80 mm. 

Viewed on the web without any extra magnification, the two pictures look similar.

However, once you zoom in, the situation changes.

Pixel 8 Pro zoomed in

Fujinon 16-80 mm. zoomed in

As you can see, the camera's photo is sharper and resolves quite a bit more detail. But for uses like posting on social media or small prints, the Pixel 8 Pro's camera is quite usable. It's good enough that it's making me reconsider my investment in the X-S10. I am considering trading it in on a small compact camera that I can take everywhere without the bulk (relatively speaking) of the X-S10 with its zoom.

See Amateur Photographer for a detailed review of the Pixel 8 Pro's cameras.

NASA introduces a streaming service

NASA has announced a new streaming service called NASA+ as a central site to view their live content and documentaries. It's available as part of their IOS or Android apps, or you can view it on the web.  

You can view topics, such as the solar system, humans in space, or the universe; view series created by NASA, or watch live events. 

It's not limited to US viewers either; you can view it worldwide. 

I'm bookmarking this one. 

Sony Accessible Controller a Great Idea with One Flaw

I've never been a console gamer. I'm just too nearsighted and sitting on the floor three feet from the TV isn't my idea of fun. We've had consoles in the house for the kids, both Nintendo and X-Box, but I've never used them. 

I'm still interested in the technology though. My son plays games on his PC using an X-Box controller and that's something I could get into; depending on the game, it can make more sense than using a mouse and keyboard.

So I was interested to listen to the discussion of video game accessibility on the CBC last week. The associated article shows the new Sony accessibility controller for the PS5. It's highly customizable and is designed to handle a wide range of abilities. It's something that I'd consider using, but it won't work on a PC, even on games that have been designed for both the PS5 and PCs. I think that's a major an unfortunate oversight on Sony's part. 

Should I decide that I really want to try a controller on my PC, there's always the X-Box adaptive controller. 

Featured Links - November 13, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

CJ, who does not like the news this week either.

• Crypto Slang: 25 Crypto Terms and Their Meanings Explained. It seems that crypto has developed its own slang very quickly. What the slang tells us about the world of crypto is more interesting than the words themselves.
• Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream. "The fast-growing platform represents the creator economy at its most bluntly transactional, where sex is just another unit of contento monetize."
• How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco. "When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out."
• The Case for Amplifying Trump's Insanity. "The "Banality of Crazy" has warped American politics, as few voters recognize just how deranged, delusional, and dangerous Donald Trump is...because the press rarely reports on his routine insanity." And if recent public appearances are any indication, he also has dementia.
• The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore. "She loved books. And in a time of spreading book bans in public schools, that’s why this Florida librarian had to quit."
• Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution. "The new House speaker has longstanding ties to the evangelical inspired Convention of States cause." Gilead rising. 
• monaspace. "An innovative superfamily of fonts for code." This is an excellent monospaced font, and I will probably use it in place of Consolas. 
  
  

Photo of the Week - November 12, 2023

This is the west side of Frenchman's Bay with its fading autumn colours. I took this with the Pixel 8 Pro's 5x telephoto lens. I boosted the colour and contrast a bit in Google Photos. 

The west shore of Frenchman's 

Saturday Sounds - Syd Perry - Rocky Road

Syd Perry is a young reggae musician who lived around the corner from us and went to school with my son. We've kept in touch as he's moved away from Pickering to further his musical journey. He's currently on tour in Hawaii and will be heading off to Australia and New Zealand soon.

Rocky Road is his latest single. An EP of new material should be coming soon. After you've listened to single, check out some of his other music.

Science Fiction Is Not a Manual for the Future

Charlie Stross has just published the text of a talk he gave earlier this week to a conference in Stuttgart. Titled "We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus", it has a theme similar to a recent newsletter post by Karl Schroeder (who he cites in the talk) — how we shouldn't rely on the ideas espoused by 20th-century science fiction. Like Schroeder, he believes those ideas are leading society in a direction that we probably don't want to go. 

The hype and boosterism of the AI marketers collided with the Rationalist obsession in the public perception a couple of weeks ago, in the Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. This conference hatched the Bletchley Declaration, calling for international co-operation to manage the challenges and risks of artificial intelligence. It featured Elon Musk being interviewed by Rishi Sunak on stage, and was attended by Kamala Harris, vice-president of the United States, among other leading politicians. And the whole panicky agenda seems to be driven by an agenda that has emerged from science fiction stories written by popular entertainers like me, writers trying to earn a living.

Anyway, for what my opinion is worth: I think this is bullshit. There are very rich people trying to manipulate investment markets into giving them even more money, using shadow puppets they dreamed up on the basis of half-remembered fictions they read in their teens. They are inadvertently driving state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized that are frankly misguided and crankish, because there's no crank like a writer idly dreaming up fun thought experiments in fictional form. They're building space programs—one of them is up front about wanting to colonize Mars, and he was briefly the world's richest man, so we ought to take him as seriously as he deserves—and throwing medical resources at their own personal immortality rather than, say, a wide-spectrum sterilizing vaccine against COVID19. Meanwhile our public infrastructure is rotting, national assets are being sold off and looted by private equity companies, their social networks are spreading hatred and lies in order to farm advertising clicks, and other billionaires are using those networks to either buy political clout or suck up ever more money from the savings of the poor.

Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It's long but I strongly recommend taking the time to read it. 

We're Toast 45

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Fading daisies

• We're Disrupting Another Major Earth Cycle, And No One's Talking About It. "Human activity is heating up the planet, putting wildlife in danger, and even altering Earth's spin. Now it appears we're also having a seriously detrimental effect on the planet's natural salt cycle, a new study reveals."
• Climate change has toppled some civilizations but not others. Why? "The link between environmental disasters and societal collapse, explained." If inequality and polarization are major factors in social collapse, as research suggests, then we are in deep trouble.
• The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next Pandemic. "Flu viruses and coronavirus started the last few pandemics. Could the next one be a paramyxovirus?" Nipah, spread by aerosols and with a 50 percent mortality rate, could be a serious problem.
• How gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations. "The documents show that natural gas utilities and their powerful trade group, the American Gas Association (AGA), focused on convincing consumers and regulators that cooking with gas is as risk-free as cooking with electricity. As the scientific evidence grew over time about the health effects from gas stoves, the industry used a playbook echoing the one that tobacco companies employed for decades to fend off regulation. The gas utility industry relied on some of the same strategies, researchers and public relations firms."
• Scientists call out rogue emissions from China at global ozone summit. "Researchers confirm a powerful greenhouse gas is being emitted from eastern China, despite reports to the contrary."
• If You Didn’t Care About Antarctica’s Icy Belly, You Will Now. "Scientists are getting an ever-clearer picture of the undersides of deteriorating glaciers. It’s not looking good."
• Can we still avoid 1.5 degrees C of global warming? "Global temperatures are approaching a crucial threshold."
• As Extreme Heat Increases, Heart Attacks Will Rise. "Dangerously hot days are becoming more common. That will trigger heart attacks and strokes in people made vulnerable by age, race, and the layout of cities."

Google Home Saves the Day

Earlier this year we bought an HBN outdoor smart plug to control the light strings we set up in the backyard. The control app we installed was the BN-Link Android app, which is the one the documentation said to use. It's not a great app but it worked, at least until I got a new phone with Android 14. After that it would not work due to constant crashes and I had to uninstall it.

After thinking about it a bit, I looked up the plug again on Amazon and yes, it supports both Alexa and Google Home. So I found HBN in the "Works with Google" list in Google Home app, linked it to my BN-Link account and added the plug as a device. And yay, it works, and I can now turn the lights on and off again. 

I also noticed that our video doorbell may also be supported (at least the brand is in the list), so I may check that out later.

I guess the moral of this story is that if you have any smart home devices and their default app is flaky, Google may be your friend.

More Useful Coding Tutorials for Technical Writers

Here are some more links to tutorials for technical writers who want to improve their technical skills. These are all from the excellent freeCodeCamp site.

• Increase Your VS Code Productivity: "VS Code is a powerful code editor used by pretty much every developer on freeCodeCamp's team, and most of the other developers I know, too. But much of its power is non-obvious. So freeCodeCamp published this comprehensive beginner-to-advanced VS Code course. It will help you navigate VS Code's Command Palette, customized themes, keyboard shortcuts, and its library of extensions for React, GitHub, and more. (6 hour YouTube course)
• September 30th is World Translation Day. And the freeCodeCamp community is celebrating by publishing this full-length Localization Handbook that will show you how to translate your website or app into many world languages.
• The HTML Handbook – Learn HTML for Beginners. If you're brand new to HTML and CSS, this is the book for you. You'll learn about HTML, the skeleton of a webpage. You'll learn about CSS, the skin of a webpage. You'll even learn a little about JavaScript, the muscles of a webpage. Sprinkle in some DevTools and HTTP requests. Now you've got a proper web dev primer. Enjoy the book, and bookmark it for future reference as well. 
• Agile Software Development Handbook – Scrum, Kanban, and Other Methodologies Explained. And we also published a handbook on Agile Software Development methodologies. You'll learn about the Agile Manifesto and how it spawned a smörgåsbord of approaches to building projects. You'll read about Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, and how to ship features at scale. If you want your team to benefit from some of these concepts, this book is an excellent place to get started.
• The Regular Expressions Book – RegEx for JavaScript Developers. freeCodeCamp just published a full-length book on RegEx. Regular Expressions are one of the most powerful – and most confusing – features of programming languages. You'll learn concepts like flags, metacharacters, grouping, lookaround, and other advanced techniques. If you know even a little JavaScript, this book is for you.
• Lightweight Linux Distributions For Older PCs. If you've got an old computer lying around, why not breathe new life into it by loading up a high-performance Linux operating system. I've found that even decade-old laptops can run like new with a light-weight Linux distribution. This tutorial will guide you through several options you can use to learn Linux through tinkering, while also resurrecting an old PC. 

Featured Links - November 6, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Autumn leaves

• British Library Exhibition: Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. "This new exhibition at the British Library explores the evolution of Fantasy. From ancient folk tales and fairy stories, gothic horror and weird fiction, to live action role-playing games inspired by Fantasy worlds, the exhibition celebrates the genre and its enduring impact…" I would love to see this exhibit but we won't be able to get to London for at least a year, sigh.
• 6 fantastic forgotten features in Google’s Chrome Android browser. "Save time and work smarter with these excellent out-of-sight options for Chrome on Android." I didn't know about several of these and some are quite useful.
• Is the GOP Disintegrating Before Our Eyes? "The current state of the Republican Party is akin to political party schisms of the past, which might signal a coming realignment." We can hope that they will be consigned to the dustbin of history.
• Nose Sprays: A Last Line of Defense in a World Hellbent on Giving You Covid. "Here's what we know." They can't come too soon.
• What Happens to a Werewolf on the Moon? "As space agencies turn their gaze to the moon, we need to consider what werewolves might mean for lunar exploration—and vice versa."
• The future of warfare: A $400 drone killing a $2M tank. "Ukraine’s early adoption of ‘first-person view’ drones tips the scales against an enemy fighting a conventional war." How long will it be before drone swarms are used in terrorist attacks and assassination attempts? I'm guessing before the end of 2024.
• Meta’s AI System Can Replicate Images in Your Brain in Milliseconds. "Meta has developed an artificially intelligent (AI) system that can scan a human brain and quickly replicate the images that a person is thinking about — in a matter of milliseconds." The implications of this kind of tech are quite unsettling. 

Photo of the Week - November 5, 2023

This week's photo is an autumn scene from Balsdon Park in Pickering, taken with my Pixel 8 Pro. This used the ultra-wide lens and I used the Dynamic filter in Google Photos to brighten it and punch up the colours a bit. 

An autumn scene

 

Saturday Sounds - The Beatles - Now and Then

There is a moment in the "making of" video for the Beatles' new single, "Now and Then" that gave me goosebumps. After hearing some of John Lennon's original  cassette demo, we hear Lennon's voice, isolated and extracted by Peter Jackson's magic new audio technology. It stunned me. I've known about this tech for a while now, but to hear it, and to hear just how well it works, was a revelation.

As for the song itself, it's pretty enough and Giles Martin and the remaining two Beatles have done a fine job of recreating what probably would have been a B-side from one of the later albums had John written it a few years earlier. That being said, it still made me weep at the end, not because it's such a work of musical genius, but for what might have been and what we've lost.

The Beatles - Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song (Short Film)

 

The Beatles - Now and Then 

For a view of what might have been, I recommend the novel, Once There Was a Way by Bryce Zabel. It's an alternate history based on the premise that the Beatles didn't break up in 1969. I liked it a lot and you can read my review here.

New Visions of the Future

I've been reading Karl Schroeder since his first novel, Ventus, was published in 2001. He's one of the most original and thought provoking writers working today. He's also a certified futurist (yes, there is such a thing), who has been hired by governments and corporations to help them plan for change.

He's now publishing a newsletter, Unapocalyptic, in which he says: "We talk about how a new science fiction can help us design a 21st century in which we can all thrive. News, facts, & worldbuilding for SciFi & personal futures." I have posted about it before, but I thought that his most recent post, The Science Fiction of the 1900s, deserves special mention.

In it he looks at how 20th century science fiction has shaped our visions of the future.

If the terror of my youth is different from the terrors of today, maybe I can also reframe the science fiction of the 1900s as carrying a different set of promises than we need in the 2020s. Maybe its main tropes are no longer relevant to the current moment.

This matters because in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on. Do I really need to argue for this?—after all, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like. Look at the things he’s working on: Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots. These are the 1900s’ vision of the 2020s; he’s trying to catch up to where 1980s SF thought we’d ‘advance to’ by now. The cliche complaint of “where’s my flying car?” is literally his complaint about the world, and he aims to do something about it.

He goes on to say it's time to think about different visions of the future that are based on what is happening now as we transition into a new era, the anthropocene using Neal Stephenson's concept of the hieroglyph, introduced in an anthology of the same name.

His hieroglyph is a science fiction meme that detonates in the public consciousness, sparking society-wide bursts of creativity. Examples of hieroglyphs are easy to find: the classic finned rocket-ship, the time machine, the blocky toy robot, the Star Trek communicator, VR goggles. The 1900s were packed with hieroglyphs, each one inspiring whole generations to enter engineering and science careers and make some hieroglyph real. The anthology posed a simple question: where are the hieroglyphs of the 21st century?

It's a powerful idea and one of that he plans to explore in more detail in future posts on his newsletter. I recommend it, and his novels, highly.  

Movie and TV Reviews - October 2023

Short reviews of what I watched in October. Sadly, I won't be watching the Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs this year.

Movies

• Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse: I am not a big fan of superhero movies but I do enjoy good animation and the animation in this was absolutely spectacular. I would have enjoyed the movie with the sound off. (Amazon Prime)
• The Creator:  It's extremely well made and fast paced, but it pushed my "willing suspension of disbelief" past the breaking point several times. Worth seeing, but not the great SF film some are claiming it to be. 

TV Shows

• We finished Ashoka (season 1), Foundation (season 2), and Antiques Road Trip (season 23). 
• Invasion (season 2): I've seen reviews that said that the show was finally going somewhere, but if it is, I can't see where. Really not my cup of tea. (Apple TV+)
• The Continental: This is a prequel to the John Wick series. If you liked the John Wick movies, you'll probably enjoy this. It's equally silly and equally brutal. (Amazon Prime)
• Get Back: A six-hour documentary about the Beatles in the studio preparing for their legendary rooftop concert in 1969. I haven't watched a lot of it so far, but what I've seen I've really enjoyed. It's a real slice of musical history. (Disney+)
• Deadloch: This is a seriously twisted dark comedy in the vein of Hot Fuzz. In a small town in Tasmania, bodies start turning up with their tongues missing. Hijinks ensue. Not for the squeamish, but totally over the top and sometimes very funny. (Amazon Prime)
• Payback: A British crime thriller by the producers of Line of Duty. As you might expect, it's very well done: taut, unpredictable, and with first-rate acting. (BritBox)
• Bosch: Legacy (season 2). The adventures of Harry Bosch and his daughter Maddy continue. If you liked the previous series, you'll like this. We do. (Amazon Prime).