And Another Thing: Pianos
I thought I had said everything I had to say about that Crush ad, but… I keep thinking about the Piano.
One of the items crushed by the hydraulic press into the new iPad was an upright piano. A pretty nice looking one! There was some speculation at first about how much of that ad was “real” vs CG, but the apology didn’t include Apple reassuring everyone that it wasn’t a real piano, I have to assume they really did sacrifice a perfectly good upright piano for a commercial. Which is sad, and stupid expensive, but not the point.
I grew up in a house with, and I swear I am not making this up, two pianos. One was an upright not unlike the one in the ad—that piano has since found a new home, and lives at my uncle’s house now. The other piano is a gorgeous baby grand. It’s been the centerpiece of my parent’s living room for forty-plus years now. It was the piano in my mom’s house when she was a little girl, and I think it belonged to her grandparents before that. If I’m doing my math right, it’s pushing 80 or so years old. It hasn’t been tuned since the mid-90s, but it still sounds great. The pedals are getting a little soft, there’s some “battle damage” here and there, but it’s still incredible. It’s getting old, but barring any looney tunes–style accidents, it’ll still be helping toddlers learn chopsticks in another 80 years.
My point is: This piano is beloved. My cousins would come over just so they could play it. We’ve got pictures of basically every family member for four generations sitting at, on, or around it. Everyone has played it. It’s currently covered in framed pictures of the family, in some cases with pictures of little kids next to pictures of their parents at the same age. When estate planning comes up, as it does from time to time, this piano gets as much discussion as just about everything else combined. I am, by several orders of magnatude, the least musically adept member of my entire extended family, and even I love this thing. It’s not a family heirloom so much as a family member.
And, are some ad execs in Cupertino really suggesting I replace all that with… an iPad?
I made the point about how fast Apple obsoletes things last time, so you know what? Let’s spot them that, and while we’re at it, let’s spot them how long we know that battery will keep working. Hell, let’s even spot them the “playing notes that sound like a piano” part of being a piano, just to be generous.
Are they seriously suggesting that I can set my 2-year old down on top of the iPad to take the camera from my dad to take a picture while my mom shows my 4-year old how to play chords? That we’re all going to stand in front of the iPad to get a group shot at thanksgiving? That the framed photos of the wedding are going to sit on top of the iPad? That the iPad is going to be something there will be tense negotiations about who inherits?
No, of course not.
What made that ad so infuriating was that they weren’t suggesting any such thing, because it never occurred to them. They just thought they were making a cute ad, but instead they (accidentally?) perfectly captured the zeitgeist.
One of the many reasons why people are fed up with “big tech” is that as “software eats the world” and tries to replace everything, it doesn’t actually replace everything. It just replaces the top line thing, the thing in the middle, the thing thats easy. And then abandons everything else that surrounds it. And it’s that other stuff, the people crowded around the piano, the photos, that really actually matters. You know, culture. Which is how you end up with this “stripping the copper out of the walls” quality the world has right now; it’s a world being rebuilt by people whose lives are so empty they think the only thing a piano does is play notes.
Crushed
What’s it look like when a company just runs out of good will?
I am, of course, talking about that ad Apple made and then apologized for where the hydraulic press smashes things down and reveals—the new iPad!
The Crush ad feels like a kind of inflection point. Because a few years ago, this would have gone over fine. Maybe a few grumps would have grouched about it, but you can imagine most people would have taken it in good humor, there would have been a lot of tweets on the theme of “look, what they meant was…”
Ahhh, that’s not how this one went? It’s easy to understand why some folks felt so angry; my initial response was more along the lines of “yeaaah, read the room.”
As more than one person pointed out, Apple’s far from the first company to use this metaphor to talk about a new smaller product; Nintendo back in the 90s, Nokia in ’08. And, look, first of all, “Nokia did it” isn’t the quality of defense you think it is, and second, I don’t know guys, maybe some stuff has happened over the last fifteen years to change the relationship artists have with big tech companies?
Apple has built up a lot of good will over the last couple of decades, mostly by making nice stuff that worked for regular people, without being obviously an ad or a scam, some kind of corporate nightmare, or a set of unserious tinkertoys that still doesn’t play sound right.
They’ve been withdrawing from that account quite a lot the last decade: weird changes, the entire app store “situation”, the focus on subscriptions and “services”. Squandering 20 years of built-up good will on “not fixing the keyboards.” And you couple that with the state of the whole tech industry: everyone knows Google doesn’t work as well as it used to, email is all spam, you can’t answer the phone anymore because a robot is going to try and rip you off, how many scam text messages thye get, Amazon is full of bootleg junk, etsy isn’t hand-made anymore, social media is all bots and fascists, most things that made tech fun or exciting a decade or more ago has rotted out. And then, as every other tech company falls over themselves to gut the entirety of the arts and humanities to feed them into their Plagiarism Machines so techbros don’t have to pay artists, Apple—the “intersection of technology and liberal arts”—goes and does this? Et tu?
I picture last week as the moment Apple looked down and realized, Wile E Coyote style, they they were standing out in mid-air having walked off the edge of their accumulated good will.
On the one hand, no, that’s not what they meant, it was misinterpreted. But on the other hand—yes, maybe it really was what they meant, the people making just hadn’t realized the degree to which they were saying the quiet part out loud.
Because a company smashing beautiful tools that have worked for decades to reveal a device that’ll stop being eligible for software updates in a few years is the perfect metaphor for the current moment.
Last Week In Good Sentences
It’s been a little while since I did an open tab balance transfer, so I’d like to tell you about some good sentences I read last week.
Up first, old-school blogger Jason Kottke links to a podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Nilay Patel in The Art of Work in the Age of AI Production. Kottke quotes a couple of lines that I’m going to re-quote here because I like them so much:
EZRA KLEIN: You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things I’ve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.
NILAY PATEL: Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something — at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.
“Building traffic instead of an audience” sums up the last decade and change of the web perfectly. I don’t even have anything to add there, just a little wave and “there you go.”
Kottke ends by linking out to The Revenge of the Home Page in the The New Yorker, talking about the web starting to climb back towards a pre-social media form. And that’s a thought thats clearly in the air these days, because other old school blogger Andy Baio linked to We can have a different web.
I have this theory that we’re slowly reckoning with the amount of cognitive space that was absorbed by twitter. Not “social media”, but twitter, specifically. As someone who still mostly consumes the web via his RSS reader, and has been the whole time, I’ve had to spend a lot of time re-working my feeds the last several months because I didn’t realize how many feeds had rotted away but I hadn’t noticed because those sites were posting update as tweets.
Twitter absorbed so much oxygen, and there was so much stuff that migrated from “other places” onto twitter in a way that didn’t happen with other social media systems. And now that twitter is mostly gone, and all that creativity and energy is out there looking for new places to land.
If you’ll allow me a strained metaphor, last summer felt like last call before the party at twitter fully shut down; this summer really feels like that next morning, where we’ve all shook off the hangover and now everyone is looking at each other over breakfast asking “okay, what do you want to go do now?”
Jumping back up the stack to Patel talking about AI for a moment, a couple of extra sentences:
But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas. […] The human creativity is reduced to a prompt, and I think that’s the message of A.I. that I worry about the most, is when you take your creativity and you say, this is actually easy. It’s actually easy to get to this thing that’s a pastiche of the thing that was hard, you just let the computer run its way through whatever statistical path to get there. Then I think more people will fail to recognize the hard thing for being hard.
(The whole interview is great, you should go read it.)
But that bit about ideas and reducing creativity to a prompt brings me to my last good sentences, in this depressing-but-enlightening article over on 404 media: Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher
A small publisher for speculative fiction and roleplaying games is shuttering after 22 years, and the “final straw,” its founder said, is an influx of AI-generated submissions. […] “The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” [founder Julie Ann] Dawson told me. “These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. Most of them don't even read recreationally. They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer. They think in terms of quantity and not quality.”
And this really gets to one of the things that bothers me so much about The Plagiarism Machine—the sheer, raw entitlement. Why shouldn’t they get to just have an easy copy of something someone else worked hard on? Why can’t they just have the respect of being an artist, while bypassing the work it takes to earn it?
My usual metaphor for AI is that it’s asbestos, but it’s also the art equivalent of steroids in pro sports. Sure, you hit all those home runs or won all those races, but we don’t care, we choose to live in a civilization where those don’t count, where those are cheating.
I know several people who have become enamored with the Plagiarism Machines over the last year—as I imagine all of us do now—and I’m always struck by a couple of things whenever they accidentally show me their latest works:
First, they’re always crap, just absolute dogshit garbage. And I think to myself, how did you make it to adulthood without being able to tell what’s good or not? There’s a basic artistic media literacy that’s just missing.
Second, how did we get to the point where you’ve got the nerve to be proud that you were cheating?
Antiderivitives
I’ve been thinking all week about this macbook air review by Paul Thurrott: Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch M3 Review - Thurrott.com (via Daring Fireball).
For a little bit of context Thurrott has spend most of the last couple decades as The Windows Guy. I haven’t really kept up on the folks in the Windows ecosystem now that I’m not in that ecosystem as much anymore, so it’s wild to see him give a glowing review to the macbook.
It’s a great review, and his observations really mirrored mine when I made the switch fifteen years or so ago (“you mean, I can just close the lid, and that works?”). And it’s interesting to see what the Macbook looks like from someone who still has a Windows accent. But that’s not what I keep thinking about. What I keep thinking about is this little aside in the middle:
From a preload perspective, the MacBook Air is bogged down with far too many Apple apps, just as iPhones and iPads are. And I’m curious that Apple doesn’t get dinged on this, though you can, at least, remove what you don’t want, and some of the apps are truly useful. Sonoma includes over 30 (!) apps, and while none are literally crapware, many are gratuitous and unnecessary. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning that up, but it was a one-time job. And new users should at least examine what’s there. Some of these apps—Safari, Pages, iMovie, and others—are truly excellent and may surprise you. Obviously, I also installed a lot of the third-party apps I need.
And this is just the perfect summary of the difference in Operating System Philosophy between Redmond and Cupertino.
Microsoft has always taken the world-view that the OS exists to provide a platform for other people to sell you things. A new PC with just the Microsoft OS of the day, DOS, Windows 3, Win 95 Windows 11, whichever, is basically worthless. That machine won’t do anything for you that you want to do, you have to go buy more software from what Microsoft calls an “Independent software vendor” or from them, but they’re not gonna throw Word in for free, that’s crazy. PCs are a platform to make money.
Apple, on the other hand, thinks of computers as appliances. You buy a computing device from Apple, a Mac, iPhone, whatever, out of the box that’ll do nearly everything you need it to do. All the core needs are met, and then some. Are those apps best-in-class? In some cases, yes, but mostly if you need something better you’re probably a professional and already know that. They’re all-in-one appliances, and 3rd party apps are bonus value, but not required.
And I think this really strikes to the heart of a lot of the various anti-monopoly regulatory cases swirling around Apple, and Google, and others. Not all, but a whole lot of them boil down to basically, “Is Integration Bad?” Because one of the core principles of the last several decades of tech product design has been essentially “actually, it would be boss if movie studios owned their own theatres”.
And there’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but also? Kinda not. We’ve been doing this experiment around tightly integrated product design for the last couple of decades, and how do “we” (for certain values of “we”) feel about it?
I don’t have a strong conclusion here, so this feels like one of those posts where I end by either linking to Libya is a land of contrasts or the dril tweet about drunk driving..
But I think there’s an interesting realignment happening, and you can smell the winds shifting around whats kinds of tradeoffs people are willing to accept. So maybe I’ll just link to this instead?
Hardware is Hard
Friday’s post was, of course, a massive subtweet of Human’s "Ai" pin, which finally made it out the door to what can only be described as “disastrous” reviews.
We’ve been not entirely kind to Humane here at Icecano, so I was going to sort of discretely ignore the whole situation, the way you would someone who fell down a flight of stairs at a party but was already getting the help they needed. But now we’re going on a week and change of absolutely excruciating discourse about whether it’s okay to give bad products bad reviews. It’s the old “everything gets a 7” school of video game reviews, fully metastasized.
And, mostly, it’s all bad-faith garbage. There’s aways a class of grifter who thinks the only real crime is revealing the grift.
Just tobe crystal clear: the only responsibility a critic or reviewer of any kind has it to the audience, never to the creators, and even less to the creator’s shareholders.
But also, we’re at the phase in the cycle where a certain kind of tech bro climbs out of the woodwork and starts saying things like “hardware is hard.” And it is! I’ve worked on multiple hardware projects, and they were all hard, incredibly hard. I once watched someone ask the VP of Hardware Engineering “do the laws of physics even allow that?” and the answer was a half-grin followed by “we’re not sure!”
I hate to break it to you, hard work isn’t an incantation to deflect criticism. Working hard on something stupid and useless isn’t the brag you think it is.
Because, you know what’s harder? Not having a hudred million dollars plus of someone elese’s money to play with interest-free for years on end. They were right about one thing though: we did deserve better.
Sometimes You Just Have to Ship
I’ve been in this software racket, depending on where you start counting, about 25 years now. I’ve been fortunate to work on a lot of different things in my career—embedded systems, custom hardware, shrinkwrap, web systems, software as a service, desktop, mobile, government contracts, government-adjacent contracts, startups, little companies, big companies, education, telecom, insurance, internal tools, external services, commercial, open-source, Microsoft-based, Apple-based, hosted onvarious unicies, big iron, you name it. I think the only major “genres” of software I don’t have road miles on are console game dev and anything requiring a security clearance. If you can name a major technology used to ship software in the 21st century, I’ve probably touched it.
I don’t bring this up to humblebrag—although it is a kick to occasionally step back and take in the view—I bring it up because I’ve shipped a lot of “version one” products, and a lot of different kinds of “version ones”. Every project is different, every company and team are different, but here’s one thing I do know: No one is ever happy with their first version of anything. But how you decide what to be unhappy about is everything.
Because, sometimes you just have to ship.
Let’s back up and talk about Venture Capital for a second.
Something a lot of people intellectually know, but don’t fully understand, is that the sentences “I raised some VC” and “I sold the company” are the same sentence. It’s really, really easy to trick yourself into believing that’s not true. Sure, you have a great relationship with your investors now, but if they need to, they will absolutely prove to you that they’re calling the shots.
The other important thing to understand about VC is that it’s gambling for a very specific kind of rich person. And, mostly, that’s a fact that doesn’t matter, except—what’s the worst outcome when you’re out gambling? Losing everything? No. Then you get to go home, yell “I lost my shirt!” everyone cheers, they buy you drinks.
No, the worse outcome is breaking even.
No one wants to break even when they go gambling, because what was the point of that? Just about everyone, if they’re in danger of ending the night with the same number of dollars they started with, will work hard to prevent that—bet it all on black, go all-in on a wacky hand, something. Losing everything is so much better than passing on a chance to hit it big.
VC is no different. If you take $5 million from investors, the absolutely last thing they want is that $5 million back. They either want nothing, or $50 million. Because they want the one that hits big, and a company that breaks even just looks like one that didn’t try hard enough. They’ve got that same $5 mil in ten places, they only need one to hit to make up for the other nine bottoming out.
And we’ve not been totally positive about VC here at Icecano, so I want to pause for a moment and say this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you went to go get that same $5 million as a loan from a bank, they’d want you to pay that back, with interest, on a schedule, and they’d want you to prove that you could do it. And a lot of the time, you can’t! And that’s okay. There’s a whole lot of successful outfits that needed that additional flexibility to get off the ground. Nothing wrong with using some rich people’s money to pay some salaries, build something new.
This only starts being a problem if you forget this. And it’s easy to forget. In my experience, depending on your founder’s charisma, you have somewhere between five and eight years. The investors will spend years ignoring you, but eventually they’ll show up, and want to know if this is a bust or a hit. And there’s only one real way to find out.
Because, sometimes you just have to ship.
This sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but to build something, you have to imagine it first. People get very precious around words like “vision” or “design intent”, but at the end of the day, there was something you were trying to do. Some problem to solve. This is why we’re all here. We’re gonna do this.
But this is never what goes out the door.
There’s always cut features, things that don’t work quite right, bugs wearing tuxedoes, things “coming soon”, abandoned dead-ends. From the inside, from the perspective of the people who built the thing, it always looks like a shadow of what you wanted to build. “We’ll get it next time,” you tell each other, “Microsoft never gets it right until version 3.”
The dangerous thing is, it’s really, really easy to only see the thing you built through the lens of what you wanted to build.
The less toxic way this manifests is to get really depressed. “This sucks,” you say, “if only we’d had more time.”
The really toxic way, though, is to forget that your customers don’t have the context you have. They didn’t see the pitch deck. They weren’t there for that whiteboard session where the lightbulbs all went on. They didn’t see the prototype that wasn’t ready to go just yet. They don’t know what you’re planning next. Critically—they didn’t buy in to the vision, they’re trying to decide if they’re going to buy the thing you actually shipped. And you assume that even though this version isn’t there yet, wherever “there” is, that they’ll buy it anyway because they know what’s coming. Spoiler: they don’t, and they won’t.
The trick is to know all this ahead of time. Know that you won’t ship everything, know that you have to pick a slice you actually do, given the time, or money, or other constraints.
The trick is to know the difference between things you know and things you hope. And you gotta flush those out as fast as you can, before the VCs start knocking. And the only people who can tell you are your customers, the actual customers, the ones who are deciding if they’re gonna hand over a credit card. All the interviews, and research, and prototypes, and pitch sessions, and investor demos let you hope. Real people with real money is how you know. As fast as you can, as often as you can.
The longer you wait, the more you refine, or “pivot”, or do another round of ethnography, is just finding new ways to hope, is just wasting resources you could have used once you actually learned something.
Times up. Pencils down. Show your work.
Because, sometimes you just have to ship.
Reviews are a gift.
People spending money, or not, is a signal, but it’s a noisy one. Amazon doesn’t have a box where they can tell you “why.” Reviews are people who are actually paid to think about what you did, but without the bias of having worked on it, or the bias of spending their own money. They’re not perfect, but they’re incredibly valuable.
They’re not always fun. I’ve had work I’ve done written up on the real big-boy tech review sites, and it’s slightly dissociating to read something written by someone you’ve never met about something you worked on complaining about a problem you couldn’t fix.
Here’s the thing, though: they should never be a surprise. The amount that the reviews are a surprise are how you know how well you did keeping the bias, the vision, the hope, under control. The next time I ship a version one, I’m going to have the team write fake techblog reviews six months ahead of time, and then see how we feel about them, use that to fuel the last batch of duct tape.
What you don’t do is argue with them. You don’t talk about how disappointing it was, or how hard it was, or how the reviewers were wrong, how it wasn’t for them, that it’s immoral to write a bad review because think of the poor shareholders.
Instead, you do the actual hard work. Which you should have done already. Where you choose what to work on, what to cut. Where you put the effort into imaging how your customers are really going to react. What parts of the vision you have to leave behind to build the product you found, not the one you hoped for.
The best time to do that was a year ago. The second best time is now. So you get back to work, you stop tweeting, you read the reviews again, you look at how much money is left. You put a new plan together.
Because, sometimes you just have to ship.
“And Then My Reward Was More Crunch”
For reasons that are probably contextually obvious, I spent the weekend diving into Tim Cain’s YouTube Channel. Tim Cain is still probably best known as “the guy who did the first Fallout,” but he spent decades working on phenominal games. He’s semi-retired these days, and rather than write memoirs, he’s got a “stories from the old days” YouTube channel, and it’s fantastic.
Fallout is one of those bits of art that seems to accrete urban legends. One of the joys of his channel has been having one of the people who was really there say “let me tell you what really happened.”
One of the more infamous beats around Fallout was that Cain and the other leads of the first Fallout left partway through development of Fallout 2 and founded Troika Games. What happened there? Fallout was a hit, and it’s from the outside it’s always been baffling that Interplay just let the people who made it… walk out the door?
I’m late to this particular party, but a couple months ago Cain went on the record with what happened:
and a key postscript:
Listening To My Stories With Nuance
…And oh man, did that hit me where I live, because something very similar happened to me once.
Several lifetimes ago. I was the lead on one of those strange projects that happen in corporate America where it absolutely had to happen, but it wasn’t considered important enough to actually put people or resources on it. We had to completely retool a legacy system by a hard deadline or lose a pretty substantial revenue stream, but it wasn’t one of the big sexy projects, so my tiny team basically got told to figure it out and left alone for the better part of two years.
Theoretically the lack of “adult supervision” gaves us a bunch of flexibility, but in practice it was a hige impediment every time we needed help or resources or infrastructure. It came down to the wire, but we pulled it off, mostly by sheer willpower. It was one of those miracles you can sometimes manage to pull off; we hit the date, stayed in budget, produced a higher-quality system with more features that was easier to maintain and build on. Not only that, but transition from the old system to the new went off with barely a ripple, and we replaced a system that was constantly falling over with one that last I heard was still running on years of 100% uptime. The end was nearly a year-long sprint, barely getting it over the finish line. We were all exhausted, I was about ready to die.
And the reward was: nothing. No recognition, no bonus, no time off, the promotion that kept getting talked about evaporated. Even the corp-standard “keep inflation at bay” raise was not only lower than I expected but lower than I was told it was going to be; when I asked about that, the answer was “oh, someone wrote the wrong number down the first time, don’t worry about it.”
I’m, uh, gonna worry about it a little bit, if that’s all the same to you, actually.
Morale was low, is what I’m saying.
But the real “lemon juice in the papercut” moment was the next project. We needed to do something similar to the next legacy system over, and now armed with the results of the past two years, I went in to talk about how that was going to go. I didn’t want to do that next one at all, and said so. I also thought maybe I had earned the right to move up to one of the projects that people did care about? But no, we really want you do run this one too. Okay, fine. It’s nice to be wanted, I guess?
It was, roughly, four times as much work as the previous, and it needed to get done in about the same amount of of time. Keeping in mind we barely made it the first time, I said, okay, here’s what we need to do to pull this off, here’s the support I need, the people, here’s my plan to land this thing. There’s aways more than one way to get something done, I either needed some more time, or more people, I had some underperformers on the team I needed rotated out. And got told, no, you can’t have any version of that. We have a hard deadline, you can’t have any more people, you have to keep the dead weight. Just find a way to get four times as much work done with what you have in less time. Maybe just keep working crazy hours? All with a tone that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.
And this is the part of Tim Cain’s story I really vibrated with. I had pulled off a miracle, and the only reward was more crunch. I remember sitting in my boss’s boss’s office, thinking to myself “why would I do this? Why would they even think I would say yes to this?”
Then, they had the unmitigated gall to be surprised when I took another job offer.
I wasn’t the only person that left. The punchline, and you can probably see this coming, is that it didn’t ship for years after that hard deadline and they had to throw way more people on it after all.
But, okay, other than general commiserating with an internet stranger about past jobs, why bring all this up? What’s the point?
Because this is exactly what I was talking about on Friday in Getting Less out of People. Because we didn’t get a whole lot of back story with Barry. What’s going on with that guy?
The focus was on getting Maria to be like Barry, but does does Barry want to be like Barry? Does he feel like he’s being taken advantage of? Is he expecting a reward and then a return to normal while you’re focusing on getting Maria to spend less time on her novel and more time on unpaid overtime? What’s he gonna do when he realizes that what he thinks is “crunch” is what you think is “higher performing”?
There’s a tendency to think of productivity like a ratchet; more story points, more velocity, more whatever. Number go up! But people will always find an equilibrium. The key to real success to to figure out how to provide that equilibrium to your people, because if you don’t, someone else will.
Getting Less out of People
Like a lot of us, I find myself subscribed to a whole lot of substack-style newsletter/blogs1 written by people I used to follow on twitter. One of these is The Beautiful Mess by John Cutler, which is about (mostly software) product management. I was doing a lot of this kind of work a couple of lifetimes back, but this one of the resources that has stayed in my feeds, because even when I disagree it’s at least usually thoughtful and interesting. For example, these two links I’ve had sitting in open tabs for a month (They’re a short read, but I’ll meet you on the other side of these links with a summary):
TBM 271: The Biggest Untapped Opportunity - by John Cutler
TBM 272: The Biggest Opportunity (Part 2) - by John Cutler
He makes a really interesting point that I completely disagree with. His thesis is that the biggest untapped opportunity for companies are people who are only doing good work, but give off the indications that they could be doing great work. “Skilled Pragmatists” he calls them—people who do good work, but aren’t motivated to go “above and beyond”, and are probably bored but are getting fulfillment outside of work. Not risk takers, not big on conflict, probably don’t say a lot in meetings. And most importantly, people who have decided to not step it all the way up, the’ve got agency, and deployed it.
In a truly world-class, olympic level of accidentally revealing gender bias, he posits two hypothetical workers, “Maria” who is the prototypical “Skilled Pragmatist” and by comparison, “Barry”, who takes a lot of big risks but gets a lot of big things done.
He then kicks around some reasons why Maria might do what she does, and proposes some frameworks for figuring out how to, bluntly, get more out of those people, how to “achieve more together”.
Not to use too much tech industry jargon here, but my response to this is:
HAHAHAHA, Fuck You, man.
Because let’s back way the hell up. The hypothetical situation here is that things are going well. Things are getting done on time, the project isn’t in trouble, the company isn’t in trouble, there aren’t performance problems of any kind. There’s no promotion in the wings, no career goals that aren’t being achieved. Just a well-preforming, non-problematic employee who gets her job done and goes home on time. And for some reason, this is a problem?
Because, I’ll tell you what, I’ll take a team of Marias over a team of Barrys any day.
Barry is going to burn out. Or he’s going to get mad he isn’t already in charge of the place and quit. Or get into one too many fights with a VP with a lot of political juice. Or just, you know, meet someone outside of work. Have a kid. Adopt a pet. That’s a fragile situation.
Maria is dependable, reliable. She’s getting the job done! She’s not going to burn out, or get pissed and leave because the corporate strategy changed and suddenly the thing she’s getting her entire sense of self-worth from has been cancelled. She’s not working late? She’s taking her kids to sports, or spending time with her wife, or writing a novel. She’s balanced.
The issue is not how do we get Maria to act more like Barry, it’s the other way around—how do we get Barry to find some balance and act more like Maria?
I’ve been in the software development racket for a long time now, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with people I was either directly managing, implicitly managing, or mentoring, and I can tell you I’ve had a lot more conversations that boiled down to “you’re working too hard” than I’ve had “you need to step it up.”
Maybe the single most toxic trait of tech industry culture is to treat anything less than “over-performing” as “under-performing”. There are underperformers out there, and I’ve met a few. But I’ve met a whole lot more overperformers who are all headed for a cliff at full speed. In my experience, the real gems are the solid performers with a good sense of balance. They’ve got hobbies, families, whatever.
Overperformers are the sort of people who volunteer to monitor the application logs over the weekend to make sure nothing goes wrong. Balanced performers are the ones that build a system where you don’t have to. They’re doing something with the kids this weekend, so they engineer up something that doesn’t need that much care and feeding.
I suspect a lot of this is based on the financialization of everything—line go up is good! More story points, more features, ship more, more quickly. It’s the root mindset that settled on every two weeks being named a “sprint” instead of an “increment.” Must go faster! Faster, programmer! Kill, Kill!
And as always, that works for a while. It doesn’t last, though. Sure, we could ship that in June instead of September. But you’re also going to have to hire a whole new team afterwards, because everyone is going to have quit after what we had to do to get it out in June. No one ever thinks about the opportunity costs of burning out the team and needing a new one when they’re trying to shave a few weeks off the schedule.
Is it actually going to matter if we ship in August?
Because, most of the time, most places, it’s not a sprint, and never will be. It’s a marathon, a long drive, a garden. Imagine what we could be building if everyone was still here five, ten, fifteen years from now! If we didn’t burn everyone out trying to “achieve more”.
Because, here’s the secret. Those overperformers? They’re going to get tired. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But eventually. And sooner than you think. And they’re going to realize that no one at the end of their life looks back and thinks, “thank goodness we landed those extra story points!” Those underperformers? They actually wont get better. Not for you. It’s rude, but true.
The only people who you’re still going to have are the balanced people, the “skilled pragmatists”, the Marias. They’ve figured out how to operate for the long haul. Let’s figure out how to get more people to act like them. And they want to work in a place that values going home on time.
Let’s figure out how to get less out of people.
-
I feel like we need a better name for these, since substack went and turned itself into the “nazi bar”. It’s funny to me that as the social medias started imploding, “email newsletters” were the new hotness everyone seemed to land on. But they’re just blogs? Blogs that email themselves to you when they publish? I mean, substack and its ilk also have RSS feeds, I read all the ones I’m subscribed to in NetNewsWire, not my email client.
Of course, the big innovation was “blog with out-of-the-box support for subscriptions and a configurable paywall” which is nothing to sneeze at, but I don’t get why email was the thing everyone swarmed around?
Did google reader really crater so hard that we’ve settled on reading our favorite websites as emails? What?
Electronics Does What, Now?
A couple months back, jwz dug up this great interview of Bill Gates conducted by Terry Pratchett in 1996 which includes this absolute gem: jwz: "Electronics gives us a way of classifying things"
TP: OK. Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the Net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.
BG: Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes, there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way that you can check somebody's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today.
“Electronics gives us a way of classifying things,” you say?
One of the most maddening aspects of this timeline we live in was that all our troubles were not only “forseeable”, but actually actively “forseen”.
But we already knew that; that’s not why this has been, as they say, living rent-free in my head. I keep thinking about this because it’s so funny.
First, you just have the basic absurdity of Bill Gates and Terry Pratchett in the same room, that’s just funny. What was that even like?
Then, you have the slightly sharper absurdity of PTerry saying “so, let me exactly describe 2024 for you” and then BillG waves his hands and is all “someone will handle it, don’t worry.” There’s just something so darkly funny to BillG patronizing Terry Pratchet of all people, whose entire career was built around imagining ways people could misuse systems for their own benefit. Just a perfect example of the people who understood people doing a better job predicting the future than the people who understood computers. It’s extra funny that it wasn’t thaaat long after this he wrote his book satirizing the news?
Then, PTerry fails to ask the really obvious follow-up question, namely “okay great, whose gonna build all that?”
Because, let’s pause and engage with the proposal on it’s own merits for a second. Thats a huge system Bill is proposing that “someone” is gonna build. Whose gonna build all that, Bill? Staff it? You? What’s the business model? Is it going to be grassroots? That’s probably not what he means, since this is the mid-90s and MSFT still thinks that open source is a cancer. Instead: magical thinking.
Like the plagiarism thing with AI, there’s just no engagement with the fact that publishing and journalism have been around for literally centuries and have already worked out most of the solutions to these problems. Instead, we had guys in business casual telling us not to worry about bad things happening, because someone in charge will solve the problem, all while actively setting fire to the systems that were already doing it.
And it’s clear there’s been no thought to “what if someone uses it in bad faith”. You can tell that even in ’96, Terry is getting more email chain letters than Bill was.
But also, it’s 1996, baby, the ship has sailed. The fuse is lit, and all the things that are making our lives hard now are locked in.
But mostly, what I think is so funny about this is that Terry is talking to the wrong guy. Bill Gates is still “Mister Computer” to the general population, but “the internet” happened in spite of his company, not due to any work they actually did. Instead, very shortly after this interview, Bill’s company is going to get shanked by the DOJ for trying to throttle the web in its crib.
None of this “internet stuff” is going to center around what Bill thinks is going to happen, so even if he was able to see the problem, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The internet was going well before MICROS~1 noticed, and routed around it and kept going. There were some Stanford grad students Terry needed to get to instead.
But I’m sure Microsoft’s Electronic System for classifying reputation will ship any day now.
I don’t have a big conclusion here other than “Terry Pratchett was always right,” and we knew that already.
Apple Report Card, Early 2024
So, lets take a peek behind the ol’ curtain here at icecano dot com. I’ve got a drafts folder on my laptop—which for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment—is named “on deck”, and when I come across something that might be a blog post but isn’t yet, I make a new file and toss it in. Stray observations, links, partially-constructed jokes, whatever. A couple lifetimes back, these probably would have just been tweets? Instead, I kind of let them simmer in the background until I have something to do with them. For example, this spent two months as a text file containing the only the phrase “that deranged rolling stone list”. I have a soft rule that after about three months they get moved to another folder named “never mind.”
And so, over the last couple of months that drafts pile had picked up a fair number of stray Apple-related observations. There’s been a lot going on! Lawsuits, the EU, chat protocols, shenanigans galore. So I kept noting down bits and bobs, but no coherent takes or anything. There was no structure. Then, back in February, Six Colors published their annual “Apple Report Card”.
Every year for the last decade or so, SixColors has done an “Apple Report Card”, where they poll a panel on a variety of Apple-related topics and get a sense of how the company is doing, or at least perceived as doing. This year was: Apple in 2023: The Six Colors report card . There are a series of categories, where the panel grades the company on an A-F scale, and adds commentary as desired.
The categories are a little funny, because they make a lot of sense for a decade ago but aren’t quite what I’d make them in 2024, but having longitudinal data is more interesting than revising the buckets. And it’s genuinely interesting to see how the aggregate scores have changed over the years.
And, so, I think, aha, there’s the structure, I can wedge all these japes into that shape, have a little fun with it. Alert readers will note this was about when I hurt my back, so wasn’t in shape to sit down a write a longer piece for a while there, so the lashed-together draft kinda floated along. Finally, this week, I said to myself, I said, look, just wrap that sucker up and post it, it’s not like there’s gonna be any big Apple news this week!
Let me take a big sip of coffee and check the news, and then let’s go ahead and add a category up front so we can talk about the antitrust lawsuit, I guess?
The Antitrust Lawsuit, I Guess: F
This has been clearly coming for a while, as the antitrust and regulatory apparatus continues to slowly awaken from its long slumber.
At first glance, I have a very similar reaction to this as I had to the Microsoft Antritrust thing back in the 90s, in that:
- This action is long overdue
- The company in question should have seen this coming and easily dodged, but instead they’re sucking claw to the face
- The DOJ has their attention pointed all the wrong things, and then the legal action is either gonna ricochet off or cause more harm than good. They actually mention the bubble colors in the filing, for chrissakes. Mostly they seem determined to go after the things people actually like about Apple’s gear?
But this is all so much dumber than last time, mostly because Microsoft wasn’t living in a world where the Microsoft lawsuit had already happened. This was so, so avoidable; a little performative rule changes, cut some prices, form a few industry working groups, maybe start a Comics Code Authority, whatever. Instead, Apple’s entire response to the whole situation has been somewhere between a little kid refusing to leave the toy store mixed with an old guy yelling “it’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!” at the Arby’s drive through. I’m not sure I can think of another example where a company blew their own legs off because deep down they really don’t believe that regulators are real. That said, the entire post-dot-com Big Tech world only exists because the entire regulatory system has been hibernating out of sight. Well, it’s roused now, baby.
You know the part at the start of that Mork Movie where The Martian keeps getting into streetfights, but then keeps getting himself out of trouble because he knows some obscure legal technicality, but then the judge that looks exactly like Kurt Vonnegut says something like “I don’t care, you hit a cop and you’re going down,” so that the rest of the movie can happen? I think Apple is about to learn some cool life lessons as a janitor, is what I’m saying.
I may have let that metaphor get away from me. Let’s move on, I’m sure there aren’t any other sections here where the recent news will cause me to have to revise from future-tense to past-tense!
Mac: A-
Honestly, as a product line, the mac is probably as coherent and healthy as it’s ever been. Now that they’re fully moved over to their own processors and no longer making “really nice Intel computers”, we’re starting to see some real action.
A line of computers where they all have the same “guts” and the form factor is an aesthetic & functional choice, but not a performance one, is something no one’s ever done before? It seems like they’re on the verge of getting into an annual or annual-and-a-half regular upgrade cycle like the iOS devices have, and that’ll really be a thing when it lands.
Well, all except The Mac Pro, which still feels like a placeholder?
Are they expensive? Yes they are. Pound-for-pound, they’re not as expensive as they seem, because they don’t make anything on the lower-end of the spectrum, and so a lot of complaints about price have the same tenor as complaining that BMWs cost more than an entry-level Toyota Camry, where you just go “yeah, man, they absolutely do.” Then I go look at what it costs to upgrade to a usable amount of RAM and throw my hands up in disgust. How is that not the lead on the DOJ action? They want HOW much to get up to 16 gigs of RAM?
MacOS as a platform is evolving well beyond “BSD, but with a nice UI” the way it was back when it was named OS X. I’m not personally crazy about a lot of the design moves, but I’d be hard pressed to call most of them “objectively bad”, as opposed to “not to my taste”. Except for that new settings panel, that’s garbage.
All that said… actually, I’m going to finish this sentence down under “SW Quality”. I’ll meet ya down there.
iPhone: 🔥
On the one hand, the iPhone might be the most polished and refined tech product of all time. Somewhere around the iPhone 4 or 5, it was “done”; all major features were there, the form factor was locked in. And Apple kept refining, polishing. These supercomputers-in-slabs-of-glass are really remarkable.
On the other hand, that’t not what anyone means when they talk about the iPhone in 2024. Yeah, let’s talk about the App Store.
I had a whole thing here about the app store was clearly the thing that was going to summon the regulators, which I took out partly because it was superfluous now, but also because apparently it was actually the bubble colors?
There’s a lot of takes on the nature of software distribution, and what kind of device the phone is, and how the ecosystem around it should work, and “what Apple customers want.” Well, okay, I’m an Apple user. Mostly a fairly satisfied one. And you know what I want? I want the app store they fucking advertise.
Instead, I had to keep having conversations with my kids about “trick games”, and explain that no, the thing called “the Oregon trail” in the app store isn’t the game they’ve heard about, but is actually a fucking casino. I like Apple’s kit quite a bit, and I keep buying it, but never in a million years will I forgive Tim Apple for the conversations I had to keep having with them about one fucking scam app after another.
Because this is what drives me the most crazy in all the hoopla around the app stores: if it worked like they claim it works, none of this would be happening. Instead, we have bizarre and inconsistant app review, apps getting pulled after being accepted, openly predatory in-app purchases, and just scam after casino after should-be-illegal-knock-off-clone after scam.
The idea is great: Phones for people who don’t use computers as a source of self-actualization. Phones and Macs are different products, with a different deal. Part of the deal is that with the iPhone you can do “less”, but what you can do is rock solid, safe, and you don’t ever have to worry about what your mom or your kid might download on their device.
I know the deal, I signed up for that deal on purpose! I want them to hold up their side of the bargain.
Which brings me to my next point. One of the metaphors people use for iOS devices—which I think is a good one!—is that they’re more like game consoles than general purpose computers. They’re “app consoles”. And I like that, that’s a solid way of looking at the space. It’s Jobs’ “cars vs trucks” metaphor but with a slightly less-leaky abstraction.
But you know who doesn’t have these legal and developer relations problems, and who isn’t currently having their ass handed to them by the EU and the DOJ? Nintendo.
This is what kills me. You can absolutely sell a computer where every piece of software is approved by you, where you get a cut, where the store isn’t choked by garbage, where everyone is basically happy. Nintendo has been doing that for checks notes 40 years now?
Hell, Nintendo even kept the bottom from falling out of the prices by enforcing that while you could sell for any price, you had to sell the physical and digital copies at the same amount, and then left all their stuff at 60-70 bucks, giving air cover to the small guys to charge a sustainable price.
Apple and Nintendo are very similar companies, building their own hardware and software, at a slightly different angle from the rest of their industries. They both have a solid “us first, customers second, devs third” world-view. But Nintendo has maintained a level of control over their platform that Apple could only dream of. And I’m really oversimplifying here, but mostly they did this by just not being assholes? Nintendo is not a perfect company, because none of them are, but you know what? I can play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch.
In the end, Apple was so averse to games, they couldn’t even bring themselves to use Nintendo’s playbook to keep the Feds off their back.
iPad: C
I’m utterly convinced that somewhere around 1979 Steve Jobs had a vision—possibly chemically assisted—of The Computer. A device that was easy to use, fully self-contained, an appliance, not a specialist’s tool. Something kids could pick up and use.
Go dial up his keynote where he introduces the first iPad. He knows he’s dying, even if he wasn’t admitting it, and he knows this is the last “new thing” he’s going to present. The look on his face is satisfaction: he made it. The thing he saw in the desert all those years ago, he’s holding it in his hands on stage. Finally.
So, ahhhh, why isn’t it actually good for anything?
I take that back; it’s good for two things: watching video, and casual video games. Anything else… not really?
I’m continually baffled by the way the iPad just didn’t happen. It’s been fourteen years; fourteen years after the first Mac, the Mac Classic was basically over, all the stuff the Mac opened up was well in the past-tense. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that happened because the iPad existed. Maybe in a world with small laptops and big-ass phones, the iPad just doesn’t have a seat at the big-kids table?
Watch & Wearables: C
I like my watch enough that when my old one died, I bought a new one, but not so much that I didn’t have to really, really think about it.
Airpods are pretty cool, except they make my ears hurt so I stopped using them.
Is this where we talk about the Cyber Goggles?
AppleTV
Wait, which Apple TV?
AppleTV (the hardware): B
For the core use-case, putting internet video on my TV, it’s great. Great picture, the streaming never stutters, even the remote is decent now. It’s my main way to use my TV, and it’s a solid, reliable workhorse.
But look, that thing is a full-ass iPhone without a screen. It’s got more compute power than all of North America in the 70s! Is this really all we’re going to use this for? This is an old example, but the AppleTV feels like it could easily slide into being the 3rd or 2nd best game console with almost no effort, and it just… doesn’t.
AppleTV (the service): B
Ted Lasso notwithstanding, this is a service filled exclusively with stuff I have no interest in. I’m not even saying it’s bad! But a pass from me, chief.
AppleTV (the app): F
Absolute total garbage, just complete trash. I’ll go to almost any length to avoid using it.
Services: C
What’s left here?
iCloud drive? Works okay, I guess, but you’ll never convince me to rely on it.
Apple Arcade? It’s fine, other than it shouldn’t have to exist.
Apple Fitness? No opinion.
Apple News? Really subpar, with the trashiest ads I’ve seen in a while.
Apple Music? The service is outstanding, no notes. The app, however, manages to keep getting worse every OS update, at this point it’s kind of remarkable.
Apple Classical Music? This was the best you could do, really?
iTunes Match? I’m afraid to cancel. Every year I spent 15 bucks so I don’t have to learn which part of my cloud library will vanish.
There’s ones I’m not remembering, right? That’s my review of them.
Homekit: F
I have one homekit device in my house—a smart lightbulb. You can set the color temperature from the app! There is no power in the universe that would convince me to add a second.
HW Reliability: A
I don’t even have a joke about this. The hardware works. I mean, I still have to turn my mouse over to charge it, like it’s a defeated Koopa Troopa, but it charges every time!
SW Quality: D
Let me tell you a story.
For the better part of a decade, my daily driver was a 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro. In that time, I’m pretty sure it ran every OS X flavor from 10.9 to 10.14; we stopped at Mojave because there was some 32-bit only software we needed for work.
My setup was this: I had the laptop itself in the center of the desk, on a little stand, with the clamshell open. On either side, I had an external monitor. Three screens, where the built-in laptop one in the middle was smaller but effectively higher resolution, and the ones on the sides were physically larger but had slightly chunkier pixels. (Eventually, I got a smokin’ deal on some 4k BenQs on Amazon, and that distinction ceased.) A focus monitor in the center for what I was working on that was generally easier to read, and then two outboard monitors for “bonus content.”
The monitor on the right plugged into the laptop’s right-side HDMI port. The monitor on the left plugged into one of the Thunderbolt ports—this was the original thunderbolt when it still looked like firewire or mini-displayport—via a thunderbolt-to-mini-displayport cable. In front of the little stand, I had a wired Apple keyboard with the numeric keypad that plugged into the USB-A port on the left side. I had a wireless Apple mouse. Occasionally, I’d plug into the wired network connection with a thunderbolt-to-Cat6 adapter I kept in my equipment bag. The magsafe power connection clicked in on the left side. Four, sometimes five cables, each clicking into their respective port.
Every night, I’d close the lid, unplug the cables in a random order, and take the laptop home. The next morning, I’d come in, put the laptop down, plug those cables back in via another random order, open the lid, and—this is the important part—every window was exactly where I had left it. I had a “workspace” layout that worked for me—email and slack on the left side, web browser and docs on the right, IDE or text editor in the center. Various Finder windows on the left side pointing at the folders holding what I was working on.
I’d frequently, multiple times a week, unplug the laptop during the middle of the day, and hide over to another building, or a conference room, or the coffee shop. Sometimes I’d plug into another monitor, or a projector? Open the lid, those open windows would re-arrange themselves to what was available. It was smart enough to recognize that if there was only one external display, that was probably a projector, and not put anything on it except the display view of Powerpoint or Keynote.
Then, I’d come back to my desk, plug everything back in, open the lid, and everything was exactly where it was. It worked flawlessly, every time. I was about to type “like magic”, but that’s wrong. It didn’t work like magic, it worked like an extremely expensive professional tool that was doing the exact job I bought it to do.
My daily driver today is a 16-inch 2021 M1 MacBook Pro running, I think, macOS 12. The rest of my peripherals are the same: same two monitors, same keyboard, same mouse. Except now, I have a block of an dock on the left side of my desk for the keyboard and wired network drop.
In the nineteen months I’ve had this computer, let me tell you how many times I plugged the monitors back in and had the desktop windows in the same places they were before: Literally Never.
In fact, the windows wouldn’t even stay put when it went to sleep, much less when I closed the lid. The windows would all snap back to the central monitor, the desktops of the two side monitors would swap places. This never happened on the old rig over nearly a decade, and happens every time with the new one.
Here is what I had to do so that my email is still on the left monitor when I come back from lunch:
- I have a terminal window running
caffeinateall the time. Can’t let it go to sleep! - The cables from the two monitors are plugged into the opposite side of the computer from where they sit: the cables cross over in the back and plug into the far side
- Most damning of all, I can’t use the reintroduced HDMI port, both monitors have to be plugged in via USB-C cables. The cable on the right, which needed an adapter to turn the HDMI cable to a USB-C/Thunderbolt connection is plugged into the USB-C port right next to the HDMI port, which is collecting dust. Can I use it? No, nothing works if that port is lit up.
Please don’t @-me with your solution, I guarantee you whatever you’re thinking of I tried it, I read that article, I downloaded that app. This took me a year to determine by trial and error, like I was a victorian scientist trying to measure the refraction of the æther, and I’m not changing anything now. It’s a laptop in name only, I haven’t closed the lid or moved it in months, and I’m not going to. God help me if I need to travel for work.
I’ve run some sketchy computers, I depended on the original OEM Windows 95 for over a year. I have never, in forty years, needed to deploy a rube goldberg–ass solution like this to keep my computer working right.
And everything is like this. I could put another thousand words here about things that worked great on the old rig—scratch that, that literally still work on the old rig—that just don’t function right on the new one. The hardware is so much better, but everything about using the computer is so much worse.
Screw the chat bubbles, get the DOJ working on why my nice monitors don’t work any more.
Dev Relations: D
Absolutely in the toilet, the worst I have ever seen it. See: just about everything above this. Long-time indie “for the love of the game” mac devs are just openly talking shit at this point. You know that Trust Thermocline we got all excited about as a concept a couple years ago? Yeah, we are well below that now.
Bluntly, the DOJ doesn’t move if all the developers working on the platform are happy and quiet.
I had an iOS-based project get scrapped in part because we weren’t willing to incur the risk of giving Apple total veto power over the product; that was five or six years ago now, and things have only decayed since then.
This is a D instead of an F because I’m quite certain it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Environ/Social: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
This category feels like one of those weird “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Grading on the curve of “silicon valley companies”, they’re doing great here. On the other hand, that bar is on the floor. Like, it’s great that they make it easy to recycle your old phones, but maybe just making it less of a problem to throw things out hasn’t really backed up to the fifth “why”, you know?
Potpurri: N/A
This isn’t a sixcolors category, but I”m not sure where to put the fact that I like my HomePod mini? It’s a great speaker!
Also, please start making a wifi router again, thanks.
What Now: ?
Originally, this all wrapped up with an observation that it’s great that the product design is firing on all cylinders and that services revenue is through the roof, but if they don’t figure out how to stop pissing off developers and various governments, things are going to get weird, but I just highlighted all that and hit delete because we’re all the way through that particular looking glass now.
Back in the 90s, there was nothing much else going on, and Microsoft was doing some openly, blatantly illegal shit. Here? There’s a lot else going on, and Apple are mostly just kinda jerks?
I think that here in 2024, if the Attorney General of the United States is inspired to redirect a single brain cell away from figuring out how to stop a racist game show host from overthrowing the government and instead towards the color of the text message bubbles on his kid’s phone, that means that Apple is Well and Truely Fucked. I think the DOJ is gonna carve into them like a swarm of coconut crabs that just found a stranded aviator.
Maybe they shoulder-roll through this, dodge the big hits, settle for a mostly-toothless consent decree. You’d be hard-pressed, from the outside, to point at anything meaningly different about Microsoft in 1999 vs 2002. But before they settled, they did a lot of stuff, put quite a few dents in the universe, to coin a phrase. Afterwards? Not a whole lot. Mostly, it kept them tied up so that they didn’t pay attention to what Google was doing. And we know that that went.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a modern case where antitrust action actually made things better for consumers. I mean, it’s great that Microsoft got slammed for folding IE into Windows, but that didn’t save Netscape, you know? And I was still writing CSS fills for IE6 a decade later. Roughing up Apple over ebooks didn’t fix anything. I’m not sure mandating that I need to buy new charge cables was solving a real problem. And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure breaking up Ma Bell did much beyond make the MCI guy a whole lot of money. AT&T reformed like T2, just without the regulations.
The problem here is that it’s the fear of enforcement thats supposed to do the job, not the actual enforcement itself, but that gun won’t scare anyone if they don’t think you’ll ever fire it. (Recall, this is why the Deliverator carried a sword.) Instead, Apple’s particular brew of arrogance and myopic confidence called this all down on them.
Skimming the lawsuit, and the innumerable articles about the lawsuit, the things the DOJ complains about are about a 50/50 mix of “yeah, make them stop that right now”, and “no wait, I bought my iPhone for that on purpose!” The bit about “shapeshifting app store rules” is already an all-time classic, but man oh man do I not want the Feds to legislate iOS into android, or macOS into Windows. There’s a very loud minority of people who would never buy something from Apple (or Microsoft) on principal, and they really think every computer-like device should be forced to work like Ubuntu or whatever, and that is not what I bought my iPhone for.
I’m pessimistic that this is going to result in any actually positive change, in case that wasn’t coming through clearly. All I want is them to hold up their end of the deal they already offered. And make those upgrades cheaper. Quit trying to soak every possible cent out of every single transaction.
And let my monitors work right.
The Dam
Real blockbuster from David Roth on the Defector this morning, which you should go read: The Coffee Machine That Explained Vice Media
In a large and growing tranche of wildly varied lines of work, this is just what working is like—a series of discrete tasks of various social function that can be done well or less well, with more dignity or less, alongside people you care about or don't, all unfolding in the shadow of a poorly maintained dam.
It goes on like that until such time as the ominous weather upstairs finally breaks or one of the people working at the dam dynamites it out of boredom or curiosity or spite, at which point everyone and everything below is carried off in a cleansing flood.
[…]
That money grew the company in a way that naturally never enriched or empowered the people making the stuff the company sold, but also never went toward making the broader endeavor more likely to succeed in the long term.
Depending on how you count, I’ve had that dam detonated on me a couple of times now. He’s talking about media companies, but everything he describes applies to a lot more than just that. More than once I’ve watched a functional, successful, potentially sustainable outfit get dynamited because someone was afraid they weren’t going to cash out hard enough. And sure, once you realize that to a particular class of ghoul “business” is a synonym for “high-stakes gambling” a lot of the decisions more sense, at least on their own terms.
But what always got me, though, was this:
These are not nurturing types, but they are also not interested in anything—not creating things or even being entertained, and increasingly not even in commerce.
What drove me crazy was that these people didn’t use the money for anything. They all dressed badly, drove expensive but mediocre cars—mid-list Acuras or Ford F-250s—and didn’t seem to care about their families, didn’t seem to have any recognizable interests or hobbies. This wasn’t a case of “they had bad taste in music”, it was “they don’t listen to music at all.” What occasional flickers of interest there were—fancy bicycles or or golf clubs or something—was always more about proving they could spend the money, not that they wanted whatever it was.
It’s one thing if the boss cashes out and drives up to lay everyone off in a Lamborghini, but it’s somehow more insulting when they drive up in the second-best Acura, you know?
I used to look at this people and wonder, what did you dream about when you were young? And now that you could be doing whatever that was, why aren’t you?
Cyber-Curriculum
I very much enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s riff today on why people keep building torment nexii: Pluralistic: The Coprophagic AI crisis (14 Mar 2024).
He hits on an interesting point, namely that for a long time the fact that people couldn’t tell the difference between “science fiction thought experiments” and “futuristic predictions” didn’t matter. But now we have a bunch of aging gen-X tech billionaires waving dog-eared copies of Neuromancer or Moon is a Harsh Mistress or something, and, well…
I was about to make a crack that it sorta feels like high school should spend some time asking students “so, what’s do you think is going on with those robots in Blade Runner?” or the like, but you couldn’t actually show Blade Runner in a high school. Too much topless murder. (Whether or not that should be the case is besides the point.)
I do think we should spend some of that literary analysis time in high school english talking about how science fiction with computers works, but what book do you go with? Is there a cyberpunk novel without weird sex stuff in it? I mean, weird by high school curriculum standards. Off the top of my head, thinking about books and movies, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days all have content that wouldn’t get passed the school board. The Matrix is probably borderline, but that’s got a whole different set of philosophical and technological concerns.
Goes and looks at his shelves for a minute
You could make Hitchhiker work. Something from later Gibson? I’m sure there’s a Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker novel I’m not thinking of. There’s a whole stack or Ursula LeGuin everyone should read in their teens, but I’m not sure those cover the same things I’m talking about here. I’m starting to see why this hasn’t happened.
(Also, Happy π day to everyone who uses American-style dates!)
The Sky Above The Headset Was The Color Of Cyberpunk’s Dead Hand
Occasionally I poke my head into the burned-out wasteland where twitter used to be, and whilw doing so stumbled over this thread by Neil Stephenson from a couple years ago:
I had to go back and look it up, and yep: Snow Crash came out the year before Doom did. I’d absolutely have stuck this fact in Playthings For The Alone if I’d had remembered, so instead I’m gonna “yes, and” my own post from last month.
One of the oft-remarked on aspects of the 80s cyberpunk movement was that the majority of the authors weren’t “computer guys” before-hand; they were coming at computers from a literary/artist/musician worldview which is part of why cyberpunk hit the way it did; it wasn’t the way computer people thought about computers—it was the street finding it’s own use for things, to quote Gibson. But a less remarked-on aspect was that they also weren’t gamers. Not just not computer games, but any sort of board games, tabletop RPGs.
Snow Crash is still an amazing book, but it was written at the last possible second where you could imagine a multi-user digital world and not treat “pretending to be an elf” as a primary use-case. Instead the Metaverse is sort of a mall? And what “games” there are aren’t really baked in, they’re things a bored kid would do at a mall in the 80s. It’s a wild piece of context drift from the world in which it was written.
In many ways, Neuromancer has aged better than Snow Crash, if for no other reason that it’s clear that the part of The Matrix that Case is interested in is a tiny slice, and it’s easy to imagine Wintermute running several online game competitions off camera, whereas in Snow Crash it sure seems like The Metaverse is all there is; a stack of other big on-line systems next to it doesn’t jive with the rest of the book.
But, all that makes Snow Crash a really useful as a point of reference, because depending on who you talk to it’s either “the last cyberpunk novel”, or “the first post-cyberpunk novel”. Genre boundaries are tricky, especially when you’re talking about artistic movements within a genre, but there’s clearly a set of work that includes Neuromancer, Mirrorshades, Islands in the Net, and Snow Crash, that does not include Pattern Recognition, Shaping Things, or Cryptonomicon; the central aspect probably being “books about computers written by people who do not themselves use computers every day”. Once the authors in question all started writing their novels in Word and looking things up on the web, the whole tenor changed. As such, Snow Crash unexpectedly found itself as the final statement for a set of ideas, a particular mix of how near-future computers, commerce, and the economy might all work together—a vision with strong social predictive power, but unencumbered by the lived experience of actually using computers.
(As the old joke goes, if you’re under 50, you weren’t promised flying cars, you were promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and well, here we are, pick up your complementary torment nexus at the front desk.)
The accidental predictive power of cyberpunk is a whole media thesis on it’s own, but it’s grimly amusing that all the places where cyberpunk gets the future wrong, it’s usually because the author wasn’t being pessimistic enough. The Bridge Trilogy is pretty pessimistic, but there’s no indication that a couple million people died of a preventable disease because the immediate ROI on saving them wasn’t high enough. (And there’s at least two diseases I could be talking about there.)
But for our purposes here, one of the places the genre overshot was this idea that you’d need a 3d display—like a headset—to interact with a 3d world. And this is where I think Stephenson’s thread above is interesting, because it turns out it really didn’t occur to him that 3d on a flat screen would be a thing, and assumed that any sort of 3d interface would require a head-mounted display. As he says, that got stomped the moment Doom came out. I first read Snow Crash in ’98 or so, and even then I was thinking none of this really needs a headset, this would all work find on a decently-sized monitor.
And so we have two takes on the “future of 3d computing”: the literary tradition from the cyberpunk novels of the 80s, and then actual lived experience from people building software since then.
What I think is interesting about the Apple Cyber Goggles, in part, is if feels like that earlier, literary take on how futuristic computers would work re-emerging and directly competing with the last four decades of actual computing that have happened since Neuromancer came out.
In a lot of ways, Meta is doing the funniest and most interesting work here, as the former Oculus headsets are pretty much the cutting edge of “what actually works well with a headset”, while at the same time, Zuck’s “Metaverse” is blatantly an older millennial pointing at a dog-eared copy of Snow Crash saying “no, just build this” to a team of engineers desperately hoping the boss never searches the web for “second life”. They didn’t even change the name! And this makes a sort of sense, there are parts of Snow Crash that read less like fiction and more like Stephenson is writing a pitch deck.
I think this is the fundamental tension behind the reactions to Apple Vision Pro: we can now build the thing we were all imagining in 1984. The headset is designed by cyberpunk’s dead hand; after four decades of lived experience, is it still a good idea?
Time Zones Are Hard
In honor of leap day, my favorite story about working with computerized dates and times.
A few lifetimes ago, I was working on a team that was developing a wearable. It tracked various telemetry about the wearer, including steps. As you might imagine, there was an option to set a Step Goal for the day, and there was a reward the user got for hitting the goal.
Skipping a lot of details, we put together a prototype to do a limited alpha test, a couple hundred folks out in the real world walking around. For reasons that aren’t worth going into, and are probably still under NDA, we had to do this very quickly; on the software side we basically had to start from scratch and have a fully working stack in 2 or 3 months, for a feature set that was probably at minimum 6-9 months worth of work.
There were a couple of ways to slice what we meant by “day”, but we went with the most obvious one, midnight to midnight. Meaning that the user had until midnight to hit your goal, and then at 12:00 your steps for the day resets to 0.
Dates and Times are notoriously difficult for computers. Partly, this is because Dates and Times are legitimately complex. Look at the a full date: “February 29th 2024, 11:00:00 am”. Every value there has a different base, a different set of legal values. Month lengths, 24 vs 12 hour times, leap years, leap seconds. It’s a big tangle of arbitrary rules. If you take a date and time, and want to add 1000 minutes to it, the value of the result is “it depends”. This gets even worse when you add time zones, and the time zone’s angry sibling, daylight saving time. Now, the result of adding two times together also depends on where you were when it happened. It’s gross!
But the other reason it’s hard to use dates and times in computers is that they look easy. Everyone does this every day! How hard can it be?? So developers, especially developers working on platforms or frameworks, tend to write new time handling systems from scratch. This is where I link to this internet classic: Falsehoods programmers believe about time.
The upshot of all that is that there’s no good standard way to represent or transmit time data between systems, the way there is with, say, floating point numbers, or even unicode multi-language strings. It’s a stubbornly unsolved problem. Java, for example, has three different separate systems for representing dates and times built in to the language, none of which solve the whole problem. They’re all terrible, but in different ways.
Which brings me back to my story. This was a prototype, built fast. We aggressively cut features, anything that wasn’t absolutely critical went by the wayside. One of the things we cut out was Time Zone Support, and chose to run the whole thing in Pacific Time. We were talking about a test that was going to run about three months, which didn’t cross a DST boundary, and 95% of the testers were on the west coast. There were a handful of folks on the east cost, but, okay, they could handle their “day” starting and ending at 3am. Not perfect, but made things a whole lot simpler. They can handle a reset-to-zero at 3 am, sure.
We get ready to ship, to light to test run up.
“Great news!” someone says. “The CEO is really excited about this, he wants to be in the test cohort!”
Yeah, that’s great! There’s “executive sponsorship”, and then there’s “the CEO is wearing the device in meetings”. Have him come on down, we’ll get him set up with a unit.
“Just one thing,” gets causally mentioned days later, “this probably isn’t an issue, but he’s going to be taking them on his big publicized walking trip to Spain.”
Spain? Yeah, Spain. Turns out he’s doing this big charity walk thing with a whole bunch of other exec types across Spain, wants to use our gizmo, and at the end of the day show off that he’s hit his step count.
Midnight in California is 9am in Spain. This guy gets up early. Starts walking early. His steps are going to reset to zero every day somewhere around second breakfast.
Oh Shit.
I’m not sure we even said anything else in that meeting, we all just stood without a word, acquired a concerning amount of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to spend the next week and change hacking in time zone support to the whole stack: various servers, database, both iOS and Android mobile apps.
It was the worst code I have ever written, and of course it was so much harder to hack in after the fact in a sidecar instead of building it in from day one. But the big boss got hit step count reward at the end of the day every day, instead of just after breakfast.
From that point on, whenever something was described as hard, the immediate question was “well, is this just hard, or is it ’time zone’ hard?”
Playthings For The Alone
Previously on Icecano: Space Glasses, Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone.
I hurt my back at the beginning of January. (Wait! This isn’t about to become a recipe blog, or worse, a late-90s AICN movie review. This is gonna connect, bare with me.) I did some extremely unwise “lift with your back, not your knees” while trying to get our neutronium-forged artificial Christmas tree out of the house. As usual for this kind of injury, that wasn’t the problem, the problem was when I got overconfident while full of ibuprofen and hurt it asecond time at the end of January. I’m much improved now, but that’s the one that really messed me up. I have this back brace thing that helps a lot—my son has nicknamed it The Battle Harness, and yeah, if there was a He-Man character that was also a middle-aged programmer, that’s what I look like these days. This is one of those injuries where what positions are currently comfortable is an ever-changing landscape, but the consistant element has been that none of them allow me to use a screen and a keyboard at the same time. (A glace back at the Icecano archives since the start of the year will provided a fairly accurate summary of how my back was doing.)
One of the many results of this is that I’ve been reading way, way more reviews of the Apple Cyber Goggles than I was intending to. I’ve very much been enjoying the early reactions and reviews of the Apple Cyber Goggles, and the part I enjoy the most has been that I no longer need to have a professional opinion about them.
That’s a lie, actually my favorite part has been that as near as I can tell everyone seems to have individually invented “guy driving a cybertruck wearing vision pro”, which if I were Apple I’d treat as a 5-alarm PR emergency. Is anyone wearing these outside for any reason other than Making Content? I suspect not. Yet, anyway. Is this the first new Apple product that “normal people” immediately treated as being douchebag techbro trash? I mean, usually it gets dismissed as overly expensive hipster gear, but this feels different, somehow. Ed Zitron has a solid take on why: How Tech Outstayed Its Welcome.
Like jetpacks and hover cars before it, computers replacing screens with goggles is something science fiction decided was Going To Happen(tm). There’s a sense of inevitability about it, in the future we’re all going to use ski goggles to look at our email. If I was feeling better I’d go scare up some clips, but we’re all picturing the same things: Johnny Mnemonic, any cover art for any William Gibson book, that one Michael Douglas / Demi Moore movie, even that one episode of Murder She Wrote where Mrs. Potts puts on a Nintendo Power Glove and hacks into the Matrix.
(Also, personal sidebar: something I learned about myself the last couple of weeks is somehow I’ve led a life where in my mid-40s I can type “mnemonic” perfectly the first time every time, and literally can never write “johnny” without making a typo.)
But I picked jetpacks and hover cars on purpose—this isn’t something like Fusion Power that everyone also expects but stubbornly stays fifty years into the future, this is something that keeps showing up and turning out to not actually be a good idea. Jetpacks, it turns out, are kinda garbage in most cases? Computers, but for your face, was a concept science fiction latched on to long before anyone writing in the field had used a computer for much, and the idea never left. And people kept trying to build them! I used to work with a guy who literally helped build a prototype face-mounted PC during the Reagan administration, and he was far from the first person to work on it. Heck, I tried out a prototype VR headset in the early 90s. But the reality on the ground is that what we actually use computers for tends to be a bad fit for big glasses.
I have a very clear memory of watching J. Mnemonic the first time with an uncle who was probably the biggest science fiction fan of all time. The first scene where Mr. Mnemonic logs into cyberspace, and the screen goes all stargate as he puts on his ski goggles and flies into the best computer graphics that a mid-budget 1995 movie can muster, I remember my uncle, in full delight and without irony, yelling “that’s how you make a phone call!” He’d have ordered one of these on day one. But you know what’s kinda great about my actual video phone I have in my pocket he didn’t live to see? It just connects to the person I’m calling instead of making me fly around the opening credits of Tron first.
Partly because it’s such a long-established signifier of the future, and lots of various bits of science fiction have made them look very cool, there’s a deep, built-up reservoir of optimism and good will about the basic concept, despite many of the implementations being not-so-great. And because people keep taking swings at it, like jetpacks, face-mounted displays have carved out a niche where they excel. (VR; games mostly, for jetpacks: the opening of James Bond movies.)
And those niches have gotten pretty good! Just to be clear: Superhot VR is one of my favorite games of all time. I do, in fact, own an Oculus from back when they still used that name, and there’s maybe a half-dozen games where the head-mounted full-immersion genuinely results in a different & better experience than playing on a big screen.
And I think this has been one of the fundamental tensions around this entire space for the last 40 years: there’s a narrow band of applications where they’re clearly a good idea, but science fiction promised that these are the final form. Everyone wants to join up with Case and go ride with the other Console Jockeys. Someday, this will be the default, not just the fancy thing that mostly lives in the cabinet.
The Cyber Goggles keep making me thing about the Magic Leap. Remember them? Let me tell you a story. For those of you who have been living your lives right, Magic Leap is a startup who’ve been working on “AR goggles” for some time now. Back when I had to care about this professionally, we had one.
The Leap itself, was pair of thick goggles. I think there was a belt pack with a cable? I can’t quite remember now. The lenses were circular and mostly clear. It had a real steampunk dwarf quality, minus the decorative gears. The central feature was that the lenses were clear, but had an embedded transparent display, so the virtual elements would overlay with real life. It was heavy, heavier than you wanted it to be, and the lenses had the quality of looking through a pair of very dirty glasses, or walking out of a 3D movie without giving the eyewear back. You could see, but you could tell the lenses were there. But it worked! It did a legitimately amazing job of drawing computer-generated images over the real world, and they really looked like they were there, and then you could dismiss them, and you were back to looking at the office through Thorin’s welding goggles.
What was it actually do though? It clearly wasn’t sure. This was shortly after google glass, and it had a similar approach to being a stand-along device running “cut down” apps. Two of them have stuck in my memory.
The first was literally Angy Birds. But it projected the level onto the floor of the room you were in, blocks and pigs and all, so you could walk around it like it was a set of discarded kids toys. Was it better than “regular” angry birds? No, absolutely not, but it was a cool demo. The illusion was nearly perfect, the scattered blocks really stayed in the same place.
The second was the generic productivity apps. Email, calendar, some other stuff. I think there was a generic web browser? It’s been a while. They lived in these virtual screens, rectangles hanging in air. You could position them in space, and they’d stay there. I took a whole set of these screens and arrayed them in the air about and around my desk. I had three monitors in real life, and then another five or six virtual ones, each of the virtual ones showing one app. I could glance up, and see a whole array of summary information. The resolution was too low to use them for real work, and the lenses themselves were too cloudy to use my actual computer while wearing them.
You can guess the big problem though: I coudn’t show them to anybody. Anything I needed to share with a coworker needed to be on one of the real screens, not the virtual ones. Theres nothing quite so isolating as being able to see things no one else can see.
That’s stuck with me all these years. Those virtual screens surrounding my desk. That felt like something. Now, Magic Leap was clearly not the company to deliver a full version of that, even then it was clear they weren’t the ones to make a real go of the idea. But like I said, it stuck with me. Flash forward, and Apple goes and makes that one of the signature features of their cyber goggles.
I can’t ever remember a set of reviews for a new product that were trying this hard to get past the shortcomings and like the thing they were imagining. I feel like most reviews of this thing can be replaced with a clip from that one Simpson’s episode where Homer buys the first hover car, but it sucks, and Bart yells over the wind “Why’d you buy the first hover car ever made?”, to which Homer gleefully responds with “I know! It’s a hover car!” as the car rattles along, bouncing off the ground.
It’s clear what everyone suspected back over the summer is true; this isn’t the “real” product, this is a sketch, a prototype, a test article that Tim Apple is charging 4 grand to test. And, good for him, honestly. The “real” Apple Vision is probably rev 3 or 4, coming in 2028 or thereabouts.
I’m stashing the links to all the interesting ones I read here, mostly so I can find them again. (I apologize to those of you to whom this is a high-interest open tabs balance transfer.)
- Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not - The Verge
- Apple Vision Pro Review: The Best Headset Yet Is Just a Glimpse of the Future - WSJ
- Daring Fireball: The Vision Pro
- The Apple Vision Pro: A Review
- Michael Tsai - Blog - Apple Vision Pro Reviews
- Apple Vision Pro hands-on, again, for the first time - The Verge
- Hypercritical: Spatial Computing
- Manton Reece - Apple needs a flop
- Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro | Vanity Fair
- The Apple Vision Pro Is Spectacular and Sad - The Atlantic
- Daring Fireball: Simple Tricks and Nonsense
- All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro — Wait But Why
But my favorite summary was from Today in Tabs The Business Section:
This is all a lot to read and gadget reviews are very boring so my summary is: the PDF Goggles aren’t a product but an expensive placeholder for a different future product that will hypothetically provide augmented reality in a way that people will want to use, which isn’t this way. If you want to spend four thousand dollars on this placeholder you definitely already know that, and you don’t need a review to find out.
The reviews I thought were the most interesting were the ones from Thompson and Zitron; They didn’t get review units, they bought them with their own money and with very specific goals of what they wanted to use them for, which then slammed into the reality of what the device actually can do:
Both of those guys really, really wanted to use their cyber goggles as a primary productivity tool, and just couldn’t. It’s not unlike the people who tried really hard to make their iPad their primary computer—you know who you are; hey man, how ya doing?—it’s possible, but barely.
There’s a definite set of themes across all that:
- The outward facing “eyesight” is not so great
- The synthetic faces for video calls as just as uncanny valley weird as we thought
- Watching movies is really, really cool—everyone really seems to linger on this one
- Big virtual screens for anything other than movies and other work seems mixed
- But why is this, though? “What’s the problem this is solving?”
Apple, I think at this point, has earned the benefit of the doubt when they launch new things, but I’ve spent the last week reading this going, “so that’s it, huh?” Because okay, it’s the thing from last summer. There’s no big “aha, this is why they made this”.
There’s a line from the first Verge hands-on, before the full review, where the author says:
I know what I saw, but I’m still trying to figure out where this headset fits in real life.
Ooh, ooh, pick me! I know! It’s a Plaything For The Alone.
They know—they know—that headsets like this are weird and isolating, but seem to have decided to just shrug, accept that as the cost of doing business. As much as they pay lip service to being able to dial into the real world, this is more about dialing out, about tuning out the world, about having an experience only you can have. They might not be by themselves, but they’re Alone.
A set of sci-fi sketches as placeholders for features, entertaining people who don’t have anyone to talk to.
My parents were over for the Super Bowl last weekend. Sports keep being cited as a key feature for the cyber goggles, cool angles, like you’re really there. I’ve never in my life watched sports by myself. Is the idea that everyone will have their own goggles for big games? My parents come over with their own his-and-hers headsets, we all sit around with these things strapped to our faces and pass snacks around? Really? There’s no on-court angle thats better than gesturing wildly at my mom on the couch next to me.
How alone do you have to be to even think of this?
With all that said, what’s this thing for? Not the future version, not the science fiction hallucination, this thing you can go out and buy today? A Plaything for the Alone, sure, but to what end?
The consistent theme I noticed, across nearly every article I read, was that just about everyone stops and mentions that thing where you can sit on top of mount hood and watch a movie by yourself.
Which brings me back around to my back injury. I’ve spent the last month-and-change in a variety of mostly inclined positions. There’s basically nowhere to put a screen or a book that’s convenient for where my head needs to be, so in addition to living on ibuprofen, I’ve been bored out of my mind.
And so for a second, I got it. I’m wedged into the couch, looking at the TV at a weird angle, and, you know what? Having a screen strapped to my face that just oriented to where I could look instead of where I wanted to look sounded pretty good. Now that you mention it, I could go for a few minutes on top of Mount Hood.
All things considered, as back injuries go, I had a pretty mild one. I’ll be back to normal in a couple of weeks, no lasting damage, didn’t need professional medical care. But being in pain/discomfort all day is exhausting. I ended up taking several days off work, mostly because I was just to tired to think or talk to anyone. There’d be days where I was done before sundown; not that I didn’t enjoy hanging out with my kids when they got home from school, but I just didn’t have any gas left in the tank to, you know, say anything. I was never by myself, but I frequently needed to be alone.
And look, I’m lucky enough that when I needed to just go feel sorry for myself by myself, I could just go upstairs. And not everyone has that. Not everyone has something making them exhausted that gets better after a couple of weeks.
The question every one keeps asking is “what problem are these solving?”
Ummm, is the problem cities?
When they announced this thing last summer, I thought the visual of a lady in the cramped IKEA demo apartment pretending to be out on a mountain was a real cyberpunk dystopia moment, life in the burbclaves got ya down? CyberGoggles to the rescue. But every office I ever worked in—both cube farms and open-office bullpens—was full of people wearing headphones. Trying to blot out the noise, literal and figurative, of the environment around them and focus on something. Or just be.
Are these headphones for the eyes?
Maybe I’ve been putting the emphasis in the wrong place. They’re a Plaything for the Alone, but not for those who are by themselves, but for those who wish they could be.
Wait, Who Answers The Phone?
Everyone is dunking on the lady who got called by “Amazon” customer support and ended up putting a shoebox with 50 grand in it in the back seat of a car, and rightly so! But there’s been a spate of “I got scammed and you can too” articles recently, and lots of “you don’t know what might happen to you in the right/wrong situation”.
But here’s the thing, they all start the same way: the person being scammed answered their phone. Not to be indelicate, but who in the fuck does that anymore? No one, and I mean no one does legitimate business over the phone anymore. If someone has a reason to get a hold of you, you’ll get an email, or a text or something. I haven’t answered the phone from a cold call in ages. Let it go to voicemail, read the transcript, maybe call back if it sounds important. Spoiler: it ain’t important.
Look, the fact that the phone system is entirely populated by robots and scammers is the stupidest possible flavor of this cyberpunk dystopia we’re living in, and we, as a society, should probably do something about it?
But for the moment, here’s a flowchart of what to do if the phone rings and it’s not a person you personally know who you were expecting to call:
- It’s a scam! Don’t answer it!
If it was important, they’d have sent you an email.
One of the running themes on Icecano is “STEM people need more Humanties classes”, but this feels like the opposite? There’s a delightful detail in that article that the caller claimed to be Amazon’s customer service group, and I don’t know how to break this to you, but Amazon doesn’t have anyone who talks on the phone. Not to mention the “government numbers can’t be spoofed” howler, or the “FTC badge number”. It’s like phones have some kind of legitimacy reverse-debt? If nothing else, paying someone to cold-call a customer is expensive. No business is going to do that for anything they won’t have a chance of turning into a sale. Letting you know about fraud? Email at best. They want you to call them. I’m baffled that anyone still picks up when the phone rings.
Not customers, partners
Over the weekend, Rusty Foster wrote up how things went migrating Today in Tabs off of substack: Tabs Migration Report.
There’s an observation towards the end that stuck with me all weekend:
All of us who make a living doing creative work on the internet inevitably find ourselves in a partnership with some kind of tech platform.
Whenever a platform starts acting the fool, there’s always a contingent of folks saying this is why you should run your own systems, and so on. And, speaking as someone who has literally run an entire website from a server in a closet, it’s great that option exists. It’s great that the structure of the internet is such that you can run your own webserver, or email system, or mastodon instance. But if you’re putting creative work out on the web shouldn’t have to, any more than writers shouldn’t have to know how to operate a printing press. Part of the web and personal computers “growing up”, is that you don’t have to be an all-in expert to use this stuff anymore.
There’s always a lot of chatter about whether big systems are “platforms” or ‘publishers”; what the responsibilities of those big systems are. In actual grown-up media, it’s understood that say, a writer and a publisher are in a partnership—a partnership with some asymmetry, but a partnership. It’s not a customer-service relationship with upside-down power dynamics.
I know it’s nowhere close to that simple, but maybe we need to start saying “partner” instead of “platform”.
40 years of…
Just about 40 years ago, my Dad brought something home that literally changed my life. It was a computer—a home computer, which was still on the edge of being science fiction—but more than that, it was a portal. It was magic, a box of endless possibilities. It’s not even remotely hyperbole to say that bringing that computer home, which had just been released into the world, utterly changed the entire trajectory of my life.
I am, of course, talking about the Tandy 1000.
That’s not how you expected that sentence to end, was it? Because this year is also the 40th anniversary of the Mac. But I want to spend a beat talking about the other revolutionary, trend-setting computer from 1984, before we talk about the ancestor of the computer I’m writing this on now.
I’ve been enjoying everyone’s lyrical memories of the original Mac very much, but most have a slightly revisionist take that the once that original Mac landed in ’84 that it was obviously the future. Well, it was obviously a future. It’s hard to remember now how unsettled the computer world was in the mid-80s. The Tandy 1000, IBM AT, and Mac landed all in ’84. The first Amiga would come out the next year. The Apple IIgs and original Nintendo the year after that. There were an absurd number of other platforms; Commodore 64s were selling like hotcakes, Atari was still making computers, heck, look at the number of platforms Infocom released their games for. I mean, the Apple ][ family still outsold the Mac for a long time.
What was this Tandy you speak of, then?
Radio Shack started life as a company to supply amateur radio parts to mostly ham radio operators, and expanded into things like hi-fi audio components in the 50s. In one of the greatest “bet it all on the big win” moves I can think of, the small chain was bought by—of all people—the Tandy Leather Company in the early 60s. They made leather goods for hobbyists and crafters, and wanted to expand into other hobby markets. Seeing no meaningful difference between leather craft hobbyists and electronics ones, Charles Tandy bought the chain, and reworked and expanded the stores, re-envisioning them as, basically, craft stores for electronics.
I want to hang on that for a second. Craft stores, but for amateur electronics engineers.
It’s hard to express now, in this decayed age, how magical a place Radio Shack was. It seems ridiculous to even type now. If you were the kind of kid who were in any way into electronics, or phones in the old POTS Ma Bell sense, or computery stuff, RadioShack was the place. There was one two blocks from my house, and I loved it.
When home computers started to become a thing, they came up through the hobbyist world; Radio Shack was already making their own parts and gizmos, it was a short distance to making their own computers. Their first couple of swings, the TRS-80 and friends, were not huge hits, but not exactly failures either. Apple came out of this same hobbyist world, then IBM got involved because they were already making “big iron”, could they also make “little iron”?
For reasons that seem deeply, deeply strange four decades later, when IBM built their first PC, instead of writing their own operating system, they chose to license one from a little company outside of Seattle called Microsoft—maybe you’ve heard of them—with terms that let Gates and friends sell their new OS to other manufacturers. Meanwhile, for other reasons, equally strange, the only part of the IBM PC actually exclusive to IBM was the BIOS, the rest was free to be copied. So this whole little market formed where someone could build a computer that was “IBM Compatible”—again, maybe you’ve heard of this—buy the OS from that outfit up in Redmond, and take advantage of the software and hardware that was already out there. The basic idea that software should work on more than one kind of computer was starting to form.
One of the first companies to take a serious swing at this was Tandy, with the Tandy 2000. In addition to stretching the definition of “compatible” to the breaking point, it was one of the very few computers to ever use the Intel 80186, and was bought by almost no one, except, though a series of events no one has ever been able to adequately explain to me, my grandmother. (I feel I have to stress this isn’t a joke, Grandma wrote a sermon a week on that beast well into the late 90s. Continuing her track record for picking technology, she was also the only person I knew with a computer that ran Windows Me.)
As much as the original IBM PC was a “home computer”, it was really a small office computer, so IBM tried to make a cut down, cheaper version of the PC for home use, for real this time. I am, of course, talking about infamous flop the IBM PCjr, also 40 years old this year, and deserving its total lack of retrospective articles.
Tandy, meanwhile, had scrambled a “better PCjr” to market, the Tandy 1000. When the PCjr flopped, Tandy pivoted, and found they had the only DOS-running computer on the market with all the positives of the PCjr, but with a keyboard that worked.
Among these positives, the Tandy 1000 had dramatically better graphics and sound than anything IBM was selling. “Tandy Graphics” was a step up from CGA but not quite to EGA, and the “Tandy Sound” could play three notes at once! Meanwhile, the Tandy also came with something called DeskMate, an app suite / operating environment that included a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar, basic database with a text-character-based GUI.
So they found themselves in a strange new market: a computer that could do “business software”, both with what was built-in and what was already out there, but could also do, what are those called? Oh yeah, games.
The legend goes that IBM commissioned the nacent Sierra On-Line to write the first King’s Quest to show off the PCjr; when that flopped Sierra realized that Tandy was selling the only computer that could run their best game, and Tandy realized there was a hit game out there that could only run on their rigs. So they both leaned all the way in.
But of course, even the Tandy couldn’t match “arcade games”, so the capabilities and limits helped define what a “PC game” was. Adventure games, flight sims, RPGs. And, it must be said, both the words “operating” and “system” in MS-DOS were highly asperational. But what it lacked in features it made up for in being easy to sweep to the side and access the hardware directly, which is exactly what you want if you’re trying to coax game-quality performance out of the stone knives and bearskins of 80s home computers. Even when the NES cemented the “home console” market that Atari had sketched in a couple years later, “PC games” had already developed their own identity vs “console games”.
Radio Shacks got a whole corner, or more, turned over to their new computers. They had models out running programs you could play with, peripherals you could try, and most critically, a whole selection of software. I can distinctly remember the Radio Shack by my house with a set of bookstore-like shelves with what was at the time every game yet made by Sierra, Infocom, and everyone else at the time. Probably close to every DOS game out there. I have such clear memories of poring over the box to Starflight, or pulling Hitch-hiker’s Guide off the shelf, or playing Lode Runner on the demo computer.
A home computer with better graphics and sound than its contemporaries, pre-loaded with most of what you need to get going, and supported by its very own retail store? Does that sound familiar?
I’m cheating the timeline a little here, the Tandy 1000 didn’t release until November, and we didn’t get ours until early ’85. I asked my Dad once why he picked the one he did, of all the choices available, and he said something to the effect of he asked the “computer guy” at work which one he should get, and that guy indicated that he’d get the Tandy, since it would let you do the most different kinds of things.
Like I said at the top, it was magic. We’re so used to them now that it’s hard to remember, but I was so amazed that here was this thing, and it would do different things based on what you told it to do! I was utterly, utterly fascinated.
One of the apps Dad bought with computer was that first King's Quest, I was absolutely transfixed that you could drive this little guy around on the screen. I’d played arcade games—I’d probably already sunk a small fortune into Spy Hunter—but this was different. You could do things. Type what you thought of! Pushing the rock aside to find a hole underneath was one of those “the universe was never the same again” moments for me. I could barely spell, and certainly couldn’t type, but I was hooked. Somewhere, and this still exists, my Mom wrote a list of words on a sheet of paper for me to reference how to spell: look, take, shove.
And I wasn’t the only one, both of my parents were as fascinated as I was. My mom sucked down every game Infocom and Sierra ever put out. The Bard's Tale) landed a year later, and my parent’s played that obsessively.
It was a family obsession, this weird clunky beige box in the kitchen. Portals to other worlds, the centerpiece of our family spending time together. Four decades on, my parents still come over for dinner once a week, and we play video games together. (Currently, we’re still working on Tears of the Kingdon, because we’re slow.)
Everyone has something they lock onto between about 6 and 12 that’s their thing from that point on. Mine was computers. I’ve said many, many times how fortunate I feel that I lived at just the right time for my thing to turn into a pretty good paying career by the time I was an adult. What would I be doing to pay this mortgage if Dad hadn’t brought that Tandy box into the house 40 years ago? I literally have no idea.
Time marched on.
Through a series of tremendous own-goals, Radio Shack and Tandy failed to stay on top of, or even competitive in, the PC market they helped create, until as the Onion said: Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business.
Meanwhile, through a series of maneuvers that, it has to be said, were not entirely legal, Microsoft steadily absorbed most of the market, with the unsettled market of the 80s really coalescing into the Microsoft-Intel “IBM Compatible” platform with the release of Windows 95.
Of all the players I mentioned way back at the start, the Mac was the only other one that remained, even the Apple ][, originally synonymous with home computers, had faded away. Apple had carved out a niche for the Mac for things that could really take advantage of the UI, mainly desktop publishing, graphic design, and your one friend’s Dad.
Over the years, I’d look over at the Mac side of the house with something approaching jealousy. Anyone who was “a computer person” in the 90s ended up “bilingual”, more-or-less comfortable on both Windows and Mac Classic. I took classes in graphic design, so I got pretty comfortable with illustrator or Aldus Pagemaker in the Mac.
I was always envious of the hardware of the old Mac laptops, which developed into open lust when those colored iBooks came out. The one I wanted the most, though, was that iMac G4 - Wikipedia with the “pixar lamp” design.
But the thing is, they didn’t do what I was mostly using a computer for. I played games, and lots of them, and for a whole list of reasons, none of those games came out for the Mac.
If ’84 saw the release of both the first Mac, and one of the major foundation stones of the modern Windows PC platform, and I just spent all that time singing the praises of my much missed Tandy 1000, why am I typing this blog post on a MacBook Pro? What happened?
Let me spin you my framework for understanding the home computer market. Invoking the Planescape Rule-of-Threes, there are basically three demographics of people who buy computers:
- Hobbyists. Tinkerers. People who are using computers as a source of self-actualization. Hackers, in the classical sense, not the Angelina Jolie sense.
- People who look at the computer market and thought, “I bet I make a lot of money off of this”.
- People who had something else to do, and thought, “I wonder if I could use a computer to help me do that?”
As the PC market got off the ground, it was just that first group, but then the other two followed along. And, of course, the people in the second group quickly realized that the real bucks were to be made selling stuff to that first group.
As the 80s wound on, the first and second group clustered on computers running Microsoft, and the third group bought Macs. Once we get into the late 90s the hobbyist group gets split between Microsoft and Linux.
(As an absolutely massive aside, this is the root of the weird cultural differences between “Apple people” and “Linux people”. The kind of people who buy Apples do so specifically so they don’t have to tinker, and the kinds of people who build Linux boxes do so specifically so that they can. If you derive a sense of self from being able to make computers do things, Apples are nanny-state locked-down morally suspect appliances, and if you just want to do some work and get home on time and do something else, Linux boxes are massively unreliable Rube Goldberg toys for people who aren’t actually serious.)
As for me? What happened was, I moved from being in the first group to the third. No, that’s a lie. What actually happened was I had a kid, and realized I had always been in the third group. I loved computers, but not for their own sake, I loved them for the other things I could with them. Play games, write text, make art, build things; they were tools, the means to my ends, not an end to themselves. I was always a little askew from most of the other “computer guys” I was hanging out with; I didn’t want to spend my evening recompiling sound drivers, I wanted to do somethat that required the computer to play sound, and I always slightly resented it when the machine required me to finish making the sausage myself. But, that’s just how it was, the price of doing business. Want to play Wing Commander with sound? You better learn how Himem works.
As time passed, and we rolled into the 21st century, and the Mac moved to the BSD-based OS X, and then again to Intel processors, I kept raising my eyebrows. The Mac platform was slowly converging into something that might do what I wanted it to do?
The last Windows PC I built for myself unceremoniously gave up the ghost sometime in 2008 or 9, I can’t remember. I needed a new rig, but our first kid was on the way, and I realized my “game playing” time had already shrunk to essentially nil. And, by this time I had an iPhone, and trying to make that work with my WindowsXP machine was… trying. So, I said, what the hell, and bought a refurbed 2009 polycarb MacBook). And I never looked back.
I couldn’t believe how easy it was to use. Stuff just worked! The built-in apps all did what they were supposed to do! Closing the laptop actually put the computer to sleep! It still had that sleep light that looked like breathing. The UI conventions were different from what I was used to on Windows for sure, but unlike what I was used to, they were internally consistent, and had an actual conceptual design behind them. You could actually learn how “the Mac” worked, instead of having to memorize a zillion snowflakes like Windows. And the software! Was just nice. There’s a huge difference in culture of software design, and it was like I could finally relax once I changed teams. It wasn’t life-changing quite the way that original Tandy was, but it was a fundamental recalibration in my relationship with computers. To paraphrase all those infomercials, it turns out there really was a better way.
So, happy birthday, to both of my most influential computers of the last forty years. Here’s to the next forty.
But see if you can pick up some actual games this time.
Monday Snarkblog
I spent the weekend at home with a back injury letting articles about AI irritate me, and I’m slowly realizing how useful Satan is as a societal construct. (Hang on, this isn’t just the painkillers talking). Because, my goodness, I’m already sick of talking about why AI is bad, and we’re barely at the start of this thing. I cannot tell you how badly I want to just point at ChatGPT and say “look, Satan made that. It's evil! Don't touch it!”
Here’s some more open tabs that are irritating me, and I’ve given myself a maximum budget of “three tweets” each to snark on them:
Wherein Cory does a great job laying out the problems with common core and how we got here, and then blows a fuse and goes Full Galaxy Brain, freestyling a solution where computers spit out new tests via some kind of standards-based electronic mad libs. Ha ha, fuck you man, did you hear what you just said? That’s the exact opposite of a solution, and I’m only pointing it out because this is the exact crap he’s usually railing against. Computers don’t need to be all “hammer lfg new nails” about every problem. Turn the robots off and let the experts do their jobs.
I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx | Ars Technica
So wait, this guy had a fully working stack, and then was all “lol yolo” and replaced everything with no metrics or testing—twice??
I don’t know what the opposite of tech debt is called, but this is it. There’s a difference between “continuous improvement” and “the winchester mystery house” and boy oh boy are were on the wrong side of the looking glass.
The part of this one that got me wasn’t where he sat on his laptop in the hotel on his 21st wedding anniversary trip fixing things, it was the thing where he had already decided to bring his laptop on the trip before anything broke.
Things can just be done, guys. Quit tinkering to tinker and spend time with your family away from screens. Professionalism means making the exact opposite choices as this guy.
AI Pins And Society’s Immune Responses
Apparently “AI Pins” are a thing now? Before I could come up with anything new rude to say after the last one, the Aftermath beat me to it: Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing?
I resent the imposition, the idea that since LLMs exist, it follows that they should exist in every facet in my life. And that’s why, on principle, I really hate the rabbit r1.
It’s as if the cultural immune response to AI is finally kicking in. To belabor the metaphor, maybe the social benefit of blockchain is going to turn out to have been to act as a societal inoculation against this kind of tech bro trash fire.
The increasing blowback makes me hopeful, as I keep saying.
Speaking of, I need to share with you this truly excellent quote lifted from jwz: The Bullshit Fountain:
I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like "how to interact with ChatGPT" is a useful classroom skill. It's not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn't have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it's not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be *right*, not to sound convincing. It's a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you're a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is *not to swim in it*.