#109 Recommendon’t, Guilt And Accessibility

+ Tactile Cars, Satellite Sight, Open/Closed Dealings, Journ-AI-lism, etc.

At A Glance

Most US tech was focused on the elections this past week, with markets especially jittery since this particularly charged election coincides with earnings calls in an uncertain and shaky tech landscape. Since it was also Halloween, we also got some interesting articles about candy .

It may not seem like something that’d be relevant to the wider tech landscape, yet the traditions and fears that can cling to something as seemingly innocuous as candy are actually very relevant! They betray just how ‘vibe ’ driven a lot of the major decision-making on all fronts of the industry actually is.

Beyond that, AI continues its slow takeover of Hollywood whilst regulators are trying to close the net around dangerous illegal products before they end up under a Christmas tree. There are also a bunch more partnerships, rivalries, and fatigue on the chip war and cloud infrastructure battlefronts.

No major deviations from what I’ve covered in recent newsletters already though. Everyone’s still just looking to find solid footing whilst destabilizing the competition, with a fair few failing to check themselves before they wreck themselves. Business as usual, in a sense.

The Week that Was:

A look back at the tech world of the past week.

Recommendon’t:

A curious thing gradually sunk in as I went about my weeks-long pet project of researching all kinds of software for the sake of creative self-betterment. I found that whilst the particularities of recommendation culture are intricate and vast, everything boils down to efficiency in the end.

As The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka puts it “We want to consume the best things, develop the best habits, and visit the best places. And yet unchecked efficiency, whether algorithmically or organically promoted , is inhospitable to the development of a deeper sense of taste.”

When one thinks about the current rollout of algorithmic recommendation agents, the easy thing would be to consider the bots as manipulative, undermining human curiosity and individuality. However, my findings suggest the contrary.

These bots represent the natural endpoint of an efficiency-at-all-costs recommendation culture. In rejecting the zenith of such systems, people may end up returning to the more experimental, inquisitive traits that supposedly make us unique both as people and as a species.

As an example, most forum denizens who found their fix via experimentation were happier than those who simply opted for ‘the best’ and forced themselves to commit without further inquiry. The latter group was generally more frustrated.

This was hardly a rigorous academic pursuit. Are we aware that my findings were purely anecdotal at best? However, one can’t help but wonder. Perhaps, short of active and targeted resistance tactics towards a data-driven society, there may also be an inherent ‘baked-in’ resistance to what can only be referred to as pure efficiency.

Pure efficiency disregards everything sub-optimal, leading all experiences to the same pixel-perfect outcome. Whilst some efficiency is great when you want to actually get stuff done on time, recent research at least seeming to support my own anecdotal findings is quite heartening. All efficiency and no play make for a dull life. LINK

Guilt And Accessibility:

Let’s talk about the dual narratives of guilt and accessibility regarding interface design. Should a tool or technique make you feel stupid or guilty for using or not using it? Marketers and activists certainly think so. I myself disagree with both.

Guilt in interfaces tends to mostly relate to matters of agency and self-expression. Digital art, for example, has always been subject to the tensions of whether one’s work is done by you yourself, or by ‘the machine’ on your behalf. The guilt comes from the idea that you’ve not earned praise or compensation.

I think this is misguided. For example, you don’t need to understand physics to benefit from HAL effect sensors and the way they use magnetism. If you generally struggle with complex topics and subject matter, where would be the shame in a simpler, more accessible explanation that meets you at your level?

My own work can have quite the barrier to entry, and I don’t begrudge anyone for thinking it a bit of a mouthful at times! That’s what accessibility is for though. It allows people to engage with the world around them in a way that makes sense to them .

Accessibility in media too often gets vilified as a crux though. Such a stance would mean that if you yourself don’t read and comprehend the entire oeuvre of Franz Kafka, you have no right to any of the insights he had, nor the rich cultural heritage he left behind. I reject that.

I also reject accessibility as a Trojan Horse, as a means of making people feel stupid so you can take control and choice away from them . And hey, would you look at that? I just so happen to have an interview here for you if you’d like to read more about how Kafka might relate to tech policy. LINK

Go, Go Gadget:

Technologies and gadgetry that are worth keeping an eye on.

Tactile Cars:

Some months ago, I had a really thought-provoking conversation with some car enthusiasts about car controls. The resurgent popularity of analog in tech continues, and I want to use the car convo to explain why this makes so much sense (to me at least). For those curious, the current wave of such sentiment started back in September , but it’s neither the first nor the last.

The general gist is that people are getting sick of touch controls in general, but that they particularly suck in cars. These guys have access to the best on the market. It’s not for a lack of superior alternatives that they complain. Especially when it comes to those more luxury vehicles, it feels like there are entire TVs plastered to (or crammed into…somehow) the dashboards.

To effectively operate a touch screen you need your eyes, fingers, and attention. In a car, your eyes and attention need to be on the road. You need to ideally be able to? ‘grasp’ whatever function of your car you might need with minimal effort/distraction. Ever tried using a touch screen without looking? Can you feel the difference between your Netflix app and WhatsApp?

Chances are you can’t and that’s exactly the problem. The attention economy would call this a feature rather than a bug. The emergency services would call this another rough day on the job. And so a new/old job is on the rise, ‘button expert.’ LINK

Satellite Sight:

This past week the European Commission announced plans for its Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity, and Security by Satellite (IRIS) initiative. This is to be a satellite broadband network intended to ward off overreliance on Starlink.

Obviously one doesn’t just want a constellation of 290 interconnected satellites into existence overnight. However, this does continue a pattern of thought that goes a little something like ‘wait a minute… maybe being fully dependent on the whims of (individual ) Americans for all our tech is bad for us…?’ Better late than never with that realization huh Europe? But good job, nonetheless.

Aside from the strategic need for greater independence, there are also practical benefits. Spain suffered tragic flooding this past week, for example. When terrestrial infrastructure is disrupted, satellite solutions come in clutch. They can also provide overviews of disaster zones to better plot out relief strategies.

An existing example of such tech in action would be Apple’s successful SOS feature. So successful that the company is buying a 20% stake in its partner to maintain momentum.? Now, we do need to remain realistic here. This isn’t a silver bullet. Australia even scrapped its own plans because it considered them too vulnerable to anti-satellite weaponry . Meanwhile Japan…is sending a wooden satellite into space. One small step for man, one giant leap for treekind.

In all cases, it remains to be seen how well these various plans pan out. But I personally find orbital logistics endlessly fascinating, so I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement.

Open/Closed Dealings:

When it comes to trying to upend entrenched systems of power and influence, one of the first and most pressing questions is: who would prefer that you didn’t? It’s a tale as old as time really. Most people in the room for major policy decisions will have friends or financiers both literally and figuratively invested in particular outcomes.

So it goes that the EU Commission, lofty as its ambitions might be, needs to reckon with mundane realities like loopholes and conflicts of interest . More broadly, such conflicts of interest are also what will define the future of Open Source more than anything.

You might recall that last week, I wrote about the newly minted definition of open-source AI by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) . Meta’s Llama models, proudly touted by the company itself as more open alternatives to the likes of OpenAI… do not meet these criteria .

They do not meet the criteria for predictable reasons such as Meta wanting returns on its investment and lock-in for it ecosystem. It is hardly alone in that . But it’s also just really hard to make money from something that by its very nature, is equally open to and useable by all.

And whilst the speakers of a recent conference hosted by Tech Crunch obviously all have their individual agendas as well, it is nonetheless worth listening to their perspective on why and how ‘open source as a business model’ is hard. It’s even more interesting to note how their respective definitions of open source might match or diverge from the OSI’s. LINK

Journ-AI-lism:

“Man that writes a newsletter loves quality journalism” is quite the shocker right? Stop the presses, everyone! No wait, not literally… oops. Seems the New York Times (NYT) tech guild went on strike . The timing was mostly meant to apply maximum pressure on management by timing the strike to coincide with a highly charged election.

At time of writing it appears that Donald Trump has won . I’ll withhold further commentary until next week’s newsletter, assuming there’s reason to do so of course. The interesting tech stories come first; the politics come second if they’re relevant.

Kind of darkly comedic in a way. Because in this same weak I saw conflicting narratives of the NYT as an example of journalists and AI supposedly coexisting peacefully vs. Perplexity’s CEO offering to replace striking workers with his AI.

Whilst the latter might seem to just be an opportunistic offer extended in poor taste, it’s a lot more complex than that. This is primarily due to the fact that advertising for digital media outlets was never more than a Band-Aid for a gaping monetization wound. The Band-Aid has been ripped off, ye the wound remains untreated.

We now predictably have dramatic headlines such as ‘AI search could break the web .’ This is true, but only because ‘the web’ as it is now basically boils down to Captain Google’s “Oops, all AdTech!” The solution to that problem might also rest with Google, funny enough.

If the trillion-dollar question of Journ-AI-lism is ‘Who gets to make money from it? ’ then what if the biggest AdTech infrastructure on the market were turned into a public-interest operation with no hidden fees? Let’s call it OpenAd or something, if only for the sake of irony. LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web.

Price Haiku LINK

Haiku Inspection LINK

High Rolling Hackers LINK

Spyware vs Cheaters LINK

Pencil Problems LINK ?

8GB Wasn’t Enough LINK

Thanks For Nothing LINK

JRPG History LINK

Content Creation Accessibility LINK

Do It Apple LINK

GitChat LINK

iPad Gameplans LINK

Strava Struggles LINK

Occult Inspirations LINK

Brand Strategies LINK

Dow and Out LINK

OpenAI x AMD LINK

OpenAI x Broadcom LINK

Intel Hell LINK

Vibe Check LINK

Outage Ouchies LINK

Wikipedia AI Volume LINK

Wired History LINK

ChatGPT Search LINK

Reddit Traffic LINK

Altman AMA LINK

Empty Sandbox LINK

One More Thing…

Millie caught a hedgehog…? Before we go to bed, we always let Millie out into the garden to get her final fix of evening air before bedtime. Often enough, she gets up to mischief. I tend to know shenanigans are afoot when she doesn’t immediately return when I call her. This particular evening though, I heard a lot of rustling leaves.

When Millie finally emerged from the darkness again on this particular evening, something wasn’t quite right. She had something round in her mouth. A ball? No, it looked weird and coarse, there were leaves and dirt on it…Millie had somehow managed to uproot some poor, innocent hedgehog from its leafy bed and carried it in her mouth back into the house. There the poor thing was, on our doormat…wiggling a bit.

It seemed to have survived the ordeal, thank god. We put some extra hedgehog food and water out as an apology as we escorted Millie’s (almost) victim back into the garden. Lest you wonder, Millie herself was entirely uninjured, no blood in her mouth, no quills anywhere else either. If only she was as delicate with my feet when she wanted to play as she was with this Hedgehog. All’s well that ends well I guess. T_T