I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

I remember when my hometown library first replaced the trusty old card catalogue with a computer version. I looked up - fittingly enough - books on computers, and I discovered that the system had three related categories: One was just "computers," another was "electronic computers," and then there was "digital computers." Of course, "electronic computers" only rules out the abacus and Charles Babbage's difference engine. But "digital" includes all modern computers, save for some curiosities. So essentially the three categories are the same, and if you're looking up a book on computers, it could be in any of them, you have no idea which.

I bring up this tale from the library of the nineties because I'm amazed at how often the same sort of problems come up. No, not in libraries, but in stores.

You'd think that a modern e-tail store would be able to do better than my nineties small town library. After all, they have decades more technology, millions more in their budget, and they only have to categorize a limited selection of products, not all of humanity's knowledge.

But still, they have the same inability to clarify things. Similar to that nineties librarian, whose classification system was technically correct, but worse than useless, they have difficulty classifying their wares in a way that helps people find things.

Again, I'm having difficulty shopping for an external hard drive. Hard drives can be internal or external. They can also be solid state or, um, the spinny kind. So you'd think I'd just have to make my choice on those two dimensions and look at what fits the category. But often there are weird, imaginary dichotomies, like they have categories for solid-state drives or external drives. So if I want a solid-state, internal drive, I don't know where to look.

(And this is fun: when I typed, "spinny" into my phone, it interpreted it as "spiny" and suggested the hedgehog emoji.)

Another weird aspect of that early computer catalogue were the dates. See, on a lot of old manual typewriters, there were keys for digits "2" through "9," but no "1" key, since that was identical to the lower-case "L" in the old Courrier-like font they used, and apparently keys were incredibly expensive. So I would occasionally see that a book was published in "l985," because it was typed by someone who was still used to those old typewriters. Those entries must have been fun for anyone who had to search for a book by year.

But even today, we're at the mercy of whoever types in the information, just hoping they get it right, and are consistent. When I was looking for the game controller previously, I found Walmart had only four Xbox controllers. Actually, they have hundreds, but there were only four where the underpaid stock boy who enters the info had bothered to add the Xbox tag.

And when I went looking for earbuds, I found that when filtering the brands, there was an entry for "Sony" and another for "SONY" from someone who must have thought it was an acronym. Or I suppose the problem could have been they just didn't know their caps-lock was on, but that just adds to the 90's computer system ambiance.

I'd like to think that we will eventually build up a better understanding of how to organize things. Like maybe once databases are as old and commonplace as that card catalogue was to the librarians in the l990's. Maybe then the understanding will be so innate that people will just naturally organize things in a nice efficient way, and when I'm shopping for my nanobot farm, I'll only have to think "indoor nanobot farms" into my neural interface, and not worry that it will exclude the new transquantum nanites just because the warehouse cyborg entered them separately.

The Stylus Counsel

I have an iPad, and I've been interested in buying a stylus for it. (That’s the pen-like thing you can draw on the screen with.) Of course, Apple will gladly sell you one, but like most of their accessories, it's shockingly overpriced. I realize it has a lot of impressive technology, and it works quite well, but still, it is a pen that costs $130. Well, it doesn't even have ink, it really is just something to touch the screen with. So even worse, it's a stick that costs $130.

But I'm not going to rant about Apple products being overpriced; everyone knows about that. What I'm finding frustrating is trying to find a reasonably-priced alternative. 

I'm amazed at how bad people are at giving advice. it sounds simple: I’m looking for a cheaper alternative. Yes, I know that means compromising on features. I’m looking for a balance of features and price. That shouldn't be so complicated; it's what people have been doing for years.

But every comparison article just tells you that the Apple pen is the best. Really? The most expensive option is the best? Next you're going to tell me that the Bugatti Chiron is superior to a Kia Rio. And yes, I do understand everything in car analogies; after all, it did make this easier to understand the basic point that in more mature industries, we understand these concepts. But for some reason, the tech industry approaches the situation with the simplistic attitude of a five-year-old. 

You’d think there would be at least some discussion of whether the superior features are worth the extra money compared to buying a Chinese knockoff from Amazon. And I did find a lot of discussions in which people ask the seemingly-obvious question: What's a cheaper alternative to the Apple pencil. And so often the advice from other people is to buy the Apple pencil anyway, because it's worth it.

I think there's a couple of problems here. One is that there's very little understanding of financial realities. A lot of people can afford to spend a hundred dollars on a luxury, so it's not a big deal to spend that to get the best available option. But there are also a lot of people that can't spare a hundred dollars. If you're in that boat then telling you that it's the best option is not a real justification for buying the hundred-dollar stick, even if it is the best.

Also, I've noticed for a while now that techy people are really not good at giving advice on which products are best for others. Specifically, the problem is that they're bad at understanding another person's requirements and adjusting their priorities accordingly. They'll always recommend  the most sophisticated, powerful, configurable option, because that's what they would want. That's why your nerdy cousin convinced your tech-phobic aunt that Linux would be just perfect for her. I've seen the same pattern repeated over and over through the years and across different market segments. Just be glad they don't recommend buying a Koenigsegg Gemera because of the cool valve technology. Oh, there I go again.

Anyway, I did buy a much cheaper stylus from a company I hadn't heard of, after I did find some reviews that said it wouldn't be that bad, I guess. And so far, it seems to be the reasonable compromise I was looking for. But no, this doesn't mean I'm buying my next car from an anonymous online company.

Toe Beans Of The Apocalypse

Recently on Facebook, I saw a cutesy picture of a cartoon kitten carrying some flowers. It was one of those pictures that was so adorable that it transcended even its own cliched nature. So I'm sitting there thinking, aw cute widdle kitty, when something struck me as a little odd about it. The slightly soft-focus CGI looked eerily familiar...

Then I noticed it: the kitten had six toes on its paw!

What, that wasn’t a dramatic revelation for you? Oh, well, if you're not familiar with that implication, A.I.-generated art is becoming a big controversy, and - despite its leaps-and-bounds in recent years - it’s notorious for getting fingers wrong. So this picture was evidently created by one of the new graphics services that can create a picture for you based on a simple text description.

A few years ago, A.I. art programs just made weird nightmare images. But recently, they’ve been making great strides, and can now do convincing pictures of a wide variety of subjects using just about any style you can think of. But they still have their flaws, including their difficulties with hands and fingers.

That’s kind of a good thing; in the midst of the A.I.-pocalypse, this whole extra-fingers thing is kind of exciting, because it's exactly the kind of contrived plot-point they'd throw into a science-fiction story for convenience, which the fans would forever be complaining about. It's like on Star Trek, where Data couldn't use contractions. 

By the way, I used to think Data’s contractions thing was pretty unbelievable, but then I learned that the laws of contractions really are quite cryptic. They’re a lot more complex than people think they’re.

I've experimented with some of the A.I. art generators, and learned some things about them. There’s Midjourney which is quite powerful, but only free for a limited number of uses, and can only be accessed on the Discord social network. 

"Elephant playing basketball" by Midjourney

Then there’s Stable Diffusion, which is free to use, though limited in its functionality. For instance, you can’t refine pictures, you can only ask it to try again. Overall, I found its first attempts were a lot better.

"Elephant playing basketball" by Stable Diffusion

I’d seen some amazing A.I. art on social media, so I enthusiastically tried it out. But I found out that it doesn’t always work. Here’s some of my successes (done with Stable Diffusion.)

"Steampunk motorcycle"

"Chocolate hippo"

"Humanoid nerdy bunny"

"Cow playing hockey style of Pixar"

"George Clooney made of lego"

But a lot of times the results leave a lot to be desired. Here's some of what I've learned:

• They take refinement. Generally the programs work by producing several attempts. The (human) user can then choose one of those pictures to improve upon. And improving on the pictures, slowly getting closer to the desired outcome, is usually necessary. The impressive examples you see are never the first efforts. Those first attempt are usually half-formed nightmares that look like Scotty's first try working the transporter. 
• On the other hand, they're great at styles. I've seen them imitate everything from Monet to Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. Even in instances where the application flubbed the content, it usually got the style right.

"Business man driving convertible style of Roy Lichtenstein" by Midjourney. Nailed the style; content, not so much.

Anyway, the deformed kitten was an example of how A.I. art is making its way into the mainstream, and a lot of people are unhappy. For one thing, it’s taking work from artists; though many of the A.I. art programs require a subscription, it’s still pretty cheap, and it’s easy to imagine a small firm opting for that instead of paying an artist every time they need a picture. Then there's also the use of styles. No one is really upset if ol' Monet is getting ripped off, but it can also be used to copy the style of artists and cartoonists that are working for a living today.

"Elvis style of Gorillaz" by Stable Diffusion

The whole thing is reminiscent of NFT's. On the one hand, you have people who are enthusiastic either because it's an intriguing new technology, or because there's money to be made. So they jump on the new bandwagon. It was weird watching businesses make big announcements about getting into cryptocurrencies or NFT's, only to have howls of protest from customers. The business was then caught unprepared, because they’d spent decades working on the assumption that they had to get into new technologies as fast as possible or be left behind. 

And now it's happening again with A.I. art. Worse, some of the companies that are making the mistake are in the creative industries, and thus supposed to be allies of the artists who are most wary of the new tech. Companies like Adobe and book publisher Tor have had to go into quick damage-control mode.

But there is one way this might work out well: if Big Media starts to protect its intellectual property. For instance, one of the most impressive A.I. pictures I made was "Mickey Mouse in a cafe, painted by Monet." But I’m afraid to put it on this post for fear of getting sued out of existence. That’s one thing that could stop the art-pocalypse in its tracks: some decisive court case, or a strict new law, like how the DMCA was an overreaction to MP3’s. 

Interestingly, using A.I. art for memes, like that kitten, is probably the least controversial use of the technology. It’s not putting anyone out of work. And as I’ve pointed out before, Facebook memes are often hacked-together pop-culture references that completely contradict the creator’s intentions.

So for now, I find the whole thing interesting, but I'm much less enthusiastic, learning that has unpleasant imperfections and implications.

Surface Tension

Microsoft has a new, cheaper version of its Surface tablet. The Surface Go is a 10” table for C$529, which puts it close to the cheapest iPads. That seems like a good move. I never understood Microsoft’s early attempts at a tablet. In general, I don’t understand why they feel the need to make tablets, but that’s another issue. The first Surfaces were very high-end, and I wondered how much market there is for tablets that are more expensive than nearly all laptops. On top of that, there’s the question of how many people want a super expensive tablet but haven’t bought them from Apple. It’s like when VW periodically tries making an expensive car; it may well be a nice car, but I’m not buying a luxury vehicle from Volkswagen.

But with the Surface Go, Microsoft seems to have taken a sensible approach to deliver an inexpensive but still powerful tablet, so they apparently think there’s a good market there. That’s interesting, because it’s been about ten years now that computer makers have been fussing around trying to make a new computing format, something that’s portable, affordable, and convenient.

First we had the netbooks. They started off as microscopic laptops with flash memory and custom Linux-based operating systems — essentially they were small versions of today’s Chromebooks. That seemed like an intriguing idea, but people weren’t ready to make such a big break with the past, and soon netbooks had hard drives and Windows, which made them less cheap, portable and usable.

Then tablets took off, and while they’ve been popular, they haven’t been super-profitable for manufacturers. And as a personal observation, they’ve been kind of an awkward proposition: you can get a really cheap tablet which you can use for many things, but it will be far from a replacement for a laptop/desktop. You can use it for e-mail and some web surfing, but many web pages won’t work well on a small screen and underpowered processor. And slightly larger jobs like typing this blog entry won’t be easy.

But there seems to be a new format coalescing: you can get a 9.7” iPad with a keyboard case for about $500, and now Microsoft is aiming at a similar price-point. I find that tablets at this level are much more capable what with their screen and computing power, and an unobtrusive keyboard opens up many more uses, while still keeping the device more portable than a laptop. And sure enough, I’m typing this on one of those iPad/keyboard pseudo laptops.

So I think we’ve finally figured out the formula for a new computing format. I don’t see this replacing anything: there’s still things laptops are better at, smaller tablets are significantly cheaper, and phones are much more portable. But the 9-10” tablet/keyboard is a very useful setup. My apologies to that kid in the “what’s a computer” Apple commercial. You were on to something. But it’s still a computer.

Tomorrow I'll Be Perfect

I once read one of the What Color Is Your Parachute books. In trying to explain how to find your ideal career, the author related an incident where he was advising a client. He asked the client to find three things he really enjoyed, and the three he chose were psychology, gardening and carpentry. A little research showed that there is a branch of psychology that deals with plant therapy, thus combining the client's top two interests. The author then points out the need for wooden shelves to hold the plants.

When I read that, I wasn't sure if that was the dumbest or most brilliant thing I'd ever seen. I mean, surely you could combine those interests in a less literal way. Like if you're interested in carpentry, it's probably not just exposure to wood that you're looking for; it's probably a more abstract working with spatial ideas, or honing a craft. Surely you could find those things in some other, less contrived career.

But at the same time, I secretly was jealous. I mean, wouldn't we all love to be working in a job that combined our favourite things? Doing something you love would be great, but this would be better, since you could never get bored, or come to resent that one activity. Curse you, modern economy, for not providing a job that combines political punditry, driving, and watching sports!

And strangely, it was watching sports that made me think of this passage from the book. During a baseball game, the commentators informed us that the Dodgers' Cody Belanger was the only player in the Major Leagues to hit a home run in every possible count this season. That is, there are twelve possible counts of balls and strikes, and he had hit at least one homer while in each of them.

At this point, I asked the question every modern sports fan asks from time to time: how the hell do they come up with these stats?

But between my knowledge of sports and computers, I can understand it. If a person has a strong knowledge of both sports statistics and databases I think it would be pretty believable that they could come up with oddball facts like that. You have an inkling about a possible statistical point of interest, compose it into a database query and check it out.

Of course, that means having a great interest and expertise in two different areas. But if you do happen to fit the qualifications, then it's your perfect job. Those are some pretty specific requirements, but then, there won't be many openings for it either, so this occupational serendipity is pretty rare. That's unfortunate; wouldn't you love a world where everyone got to work in a job so perfectly tailored to them? I'm still looking, so I'll have to go back to the book.

Tweet Dreams Are Made Of This

You've probably seen Apple's current ad campaign where they show people holding up oversized tweets.  The narrator then tells them how their problems will be solved by getting an iPad. Some of them are kind of entertaining, though they're no "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" or "1984".

But I noticed that the tweets they hold up have actual Twitter handles on them.  So I thought I'd look them up. I figured they would be too smart to just use random names that might belong to real people.  They'd probably create Twitter accounts for each of the characters in the ads, to make sure no one else takes those names. And Apple is an inventive enough company that they might do something fun with the concept,  like have fake Twitter feeds for each of these characters.

What I found was quite surprising:

• These are all real people, and the Tweets are real.  But...
• The people in the ads are not just actors, but in most cases they're totally different from the actual people. For instance, the gothy teenager who hates everything is actually an African-American woman who doesn't seem particularly nihilistic. 

So I'm wondering what exactly the point of this campaign is.  I can understand you might want to involve real people, that will get you viral guerilla marketing tactics to access key influencers and other buzzwords. But if you're not going to use the actual people, why not just make up the Tweets as well.  Instead of trying to associate your product with some random kvetch, why not give yourself a nice convenient set up. @who_needs_MSOffice says, "I wish my tablet weighed 0.17 grams less." "You're in luck..."

So really, using real Tweets is just a creativity exercise for the ad creators. They say sometimes you need to give yourself arbitrary constraints to get the creative juices flowing; taking a bunch of Tweets as the starting point is just their way of seeking inspiration. 

Deriving Functions

Apple has an interesting new innovation. You may have missed it because we were all distracted by the collapse of western civilization. But their new MacBook Pro has replaced the function keys with a "Touch Bar" which is a small touch-sensitive screen. The idea is that a program can present customized buttons, or entirely different controls. The initial demonstration showed a video-editing program that let you scroll up different parts of the of the timeline with the Touch Bar.

The reaction seemed to be pretty negative. Though I thought it was a good idea. Let's face it: function keys kind of suck. They were okay in the pre-GUI days when they're really was no better way to reach large numbers of features. But now that we have drop-down menus, toolbars, context menus, tool-tips, etc., there really is no need for a row of unlabeled buttons.

To make matters worse, computer makers have usurped the function keys to handle things like volume control. Now I can't remember whether my F5 is going to save or turn down the screen brightness. I actually find myself missing the WordPerfect function key template.

But a touch screen would be ideal here. Their disadvantage is that the lack of physical keys mean that using them at speed is difficult (as anyone counting typos on this blog will know.) Inevitably, a company led by a hunt-and-peck typist will try marketing an all-touchscreen keyboard, and then wonder why it flops.

But no one needs to touch-type on the function keys, so it doesn't really matter if you have to look down at them. And if you're going to look down before you press the button, you might as we get the confirmation that it does what you think it does.

What they need to do now is start replacing all of the less-used keys. A lot of them are just a technological appendix. Which leads to...

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #35

Computer keyboards still have a SysReq key. And no one has figured out what it's for.

But to me the biggest proof that the Touch Bar is here to stay is that people immediately started doing weird things with it. You can play the original Doom on it, or have a KITT style radar blip. I'm sure they can come up with plenty more ideas. Maybe make it look like a WordPerfect template.

These Memes Won't Turn Anyone On

I'm kind if surprised that people are still using homosexuality as a putdown.  For instance, I've seen a few variations on the graphic to the right.

As you can see, it makes pronouncements about how various musical jobs will affect a man's ability to attract women.  For the most part it shows the hierarchy we'd expect, putting the singer and guitarist at the top.  Although in my experience, people are quicker to slag the drummer than the bassist, but either way, neither gets the respect they deserve.

But it's disappointing that they use the implication of gay men to deliver the ultimate put down to the keyboardist.  Yes, I know, homosexuality has been devalued forever, this shouldn't be news.  But with its increasing acceptance in society, you'd think the people who still see it as an insult would be aging legislators who don't know how to use the Internet.

So it worries me that a lot of the acceptance of homosexuals may be shallower than we think.  People have gotten to the point of accepting their existence, or their lack of evilness at least. But perhaps they still haven't gotten to the point of seeing it as equal to any other sexuality.

Like I said, I've seen a few variations on it.  One was to insult different types of cars.  Unfortunately I couldn't find it when I just went looking, but the same point can be made with these graphics that reflect demonizing of gay men, or possibly straight women:

And of course it reasserts my point that the Chevy/Ford rivalry is just a meaningless lobbing of the same insults back and forth.

But the breaking point that prompted me to write this was when I saw the meme applied to programming languages:

I assume that if you aren't familiar with programming, then this looks rather surreal, a bunch of unfamiliar names arbitrarily assigned to implications of virility. Well let me reassure you that even if you are familiar with all these languages, it looks about the same.  I really have no idea how they decided on these, other than that it was obviously put together by a PHP programmer. As the oldest and least-forgiving language there, one would think that C will make you attractive to others. Maybe Perl if you're looking for someone particularly kinky. But the point is, that shows how silly this all is. People are just flinging outdated insults at others, but all they're doing is exposing their own bigotry .

Vengeance Is Mine

I've seen several jokey references to Minesweeper recently, specifically jokes about how no one knows how to play it.

Um, well, I've played Minesweeper since it came out a quarter-century ago. And actually I do know what I'm doing.  I see "1-2-1" and "1-2-2-1" combos in my sleep. I completed the expert level in 2:19. In that one game in the image that just started, I can already see where half the mines are without even thinking about it.  It's all I can do to stop myself from instinctively clicking on the image.

I'm not bragging, nor am I making fun of anyone who isn't very good at the game; I'm sure you instead used your early adulthood to acquire social skills.  I'm just kind of surprised at how these jokes are so confidently assuming that everyone is with them on this. Yeah, I know, they don't literally mean that "no one" knows how to play; it's like if you say no one understands their tax return, it doesn't mean that you are oblivious to the existence of tax accountants.

If someone were joking about frustrations at golf, they wouldn't imply that everyone is just randomly choosing clubs and hoping for the best.  Sure, many people do struggle, but it's well known that some people are really good at golf. Minesweeper isn't televised (despite my letters to ESPN on the subject) but I thought it was well known that there are a fair number of people who are good at Minesweeper - I knew a guy who did the expert in 1:39. And the one time I did try to brag to a friend about a new personal best, he shot me down saying patiently, "yes, I am aware that some people have very fast times on Minesweeper."  I wasn't offended - I was quite impressed at how efficiently he defused my attempt at one-upmanship.  I've used that technique many times since then when people attempt to brag about achievements at something I have chosen not to pursue, such as golf or social skills.

So if you try to reassure yourself about your Minesweeper skills by seeking company in that concern, realize that it's just not going to work.  Just accept that for pretty much any challenge, someone out there is good at it or obsessed with it.

Before Accessing This Blog, Please Read And Agree To The Following

Those user license agreements they make you agree to when you install software have become a bit of a joke. It's sort of assumed that you won't really read it, even though you usually have to click the button swearing you have read it.  And the companies don't seem to care that you don't read them.  They do urge you to carefully read it, but it's not like they give you a quiz to prove you've read it.  A few times I've seen agreements where it won't let you click the "I Agree" button until you've scrolled to the bottom of the agreement.  But that's a pretty half-hearted way of encouraging us to read it.

I don't read the agreements, but I do make a case of skimming over it.  I do this for a couple of reasons:

• It allows me to feel morally superior to people who don't read it at all
• I can at least ensure that they haven't snuck in something crazy like adware.

And that's actually saved me from installing something I didn't want a few times.

Today I had one of those agreements: I scanned through the first few paragraphs, but then something came up, and I had to leave the computer for a bit.  I didn't get back to it until about an hour later.  Of course, even in our heavily-surveilled society, I doubt anyone was tracking my actions.  But if they were, they would be left wondering why it took me over an hour to click the "I Agree" button. And the only two explanations would be:

• I'm the first person ever to read the entire agreement, or
• The agreement is so boring, I actually fell asleep while reading it.

Bland Turing

I keep hearing talk about how Artificial Intelligence is going to revolutionize everything. We're all going to be out of work, even you folks who think for a living. And yet, I keep seeing artificial stupidity everywhere. I've mentioned how Google Now keeps acting in seemingly random ways. The calendar app is similarly unpredictable: I schedule an appointment and it gives me suggestions as to where the appointment will be, and with whom. But the suggestions are bizarre. It thinks I'm going to have a doctor's appointment at my bank, and that I'm going to invite distant relatives. And Facebook just suggested I'd be interested in attending a favourite musician's latest tour, oblivious that all the dates are in England.

Speaking of Facebook, recently there was the big story about Facebook avoiding conservative stories in their "trending" box. That was, if the claims are true, disturbing in a political way. But it also revealed something technologically embarrassing: the "trending" feature isn't really automated, at least, not totally. That's pretty surprising; finding trending stories isn't exactly a no-brainer, but compared to self-driving cars, understanding natural language, or inventing things, it's pretty easy.

Really, I'm sure they could make a fully-automated trend system, but for some reason, they don't. It could be that an automated version would have unfortunate quirks (say, it can't tell trending news from trending porn.) Or it might not make much financial sense. Maybe it's just cheaper to have a team of people do the work rather than a bunch of computers. Or maybe they just can't teach the computers to have a liberal bias.

Meanwhile, I just saw a story about a translation device that fits in your ear. Yes, fellow geeks, it's an artificial version of the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The story even had a note about the fictional fish, confident that the reference wouldn't hurt the concept's credibility. Given how notoriously awkward current translation is, I find it hard to believe we're ready to make the jump to the Universal Translator anytime soon.

So maybe AI is going to make a big, fast push, quickly becoming a big part of our lives. Or maybe this is another case of reporters falling for technology hype, or AI's weird ability to fool people into seeming smarter than it is.

Pictures Of "U"

What you're reading right now is a "text file." Essentially, it's a list of numbers, with each number representing a letter.  That may seem like a lot of numbers, but keep in mind that computers can store an astounding quantity of numbers; a gigabyte is essentially a billion numbers.  Looking at it that way, you realize that text files are downright insignificant for modern computers.

Now consider this picture of antique pig statuettes:

There are different ways of storing graphics, but most involve one or more numbers for each pixel, to describe the colour of that pixel.  There's usually some sort of mathematical trick to shorten that big list of numbers, but even if that trick can reduce the list by 90%, that's still a big list of numbers.  If you compare the number of letters in this post to the number of pixels in the picture, you'll realize that pictures take up far more space in a computer than text.

Go ahead, do your "picture is worth a thousand words" joke now.  I'll resist the temptation to point out that it's far more than a thousand in this case. Why am I taking you through Computer Principles 101? Consider the possibility of a picture of words.

It may seem to you that this is no different than the words around it.  But it's quite different for the computer.  The text you're reading now was shipped across the Internet letter by letter, then drawn on your screen by your web browser.  The picture of the words was drawn on my computer, then shipped to you, pixel by pixel.  The amounts aren't large in the grand scheme of things, but I'm always amazed at how many people don't realize that one is orders of magnitude larger than the other.

I first noticed it in university, when a physics professor posted the answers to a quiz on the web in the form of a huge scan of a printed page.  This was over twenty years ago, when such a large file choked the pitiful computers in the undergrad lab.  I couldn't figure out how he typed up the answers on a word processor, printed them out, and ran them through a scanner without thinking there had to be an easier way.

This misunderstanding about computers has reappeared from time to time, and the latest instance is on Twitter.  Of course, Twitter is weird in a lot of ways, but none more than the self-imposed and totally arbitrary 140 character limit.  The concept of posting graphics with your tweets was added later on, despite the fact that the pictures are much bigger than tweets.  And next thing you know, the graphics capability has become a way of overcoming the character limit; when people want to quote a larger amount of text, they can attach a picture of it to their tweet. Of course, for many people this inefficient way of communicating is not a problem. But when I'm stuck using a slower connection, it's hard to believe this is how we send text across the Net.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #24

One of the world's biggest news stories is something called a “Wikileaks dump.”

You're Watching The Turing News Network

There's a phrase you sometimes see in discussions of artificial intelligence: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." That phrase illustrates some of the problems with getting computers to understand human language.

• "Flies" can be a plural of a common insect, or the third-person singular form of the verb "fly"
• "Like" is either a verb indicating affection, or a preposition indicating similarity.
• Many nouns (such as "fruit") can be turned into adjectives.

See, it's grammatically legitimate to assume that these sentences are telling us that time-traveling insects use arrows as their weapon of choice, and fruit travels through the air in the same way a banana does. The point is that you can't understand human speech or writing without a lot of background knowledge about the human experience. And that's why you should be patient with Siri.

Of course, even other human beings sometimes misunderstand things when the meanings of words and phrases are ambiguous. I find this happens to me often when reading the news scroll on BBC World News. I mentioned this on Twitter a couple of months back:

BBC World, a headline like "French Air Strike" sounds rather more military than what you meant, "Air France Strike"

— Jason Roe (@JasonTRoe) April 8, 2015

But then last night I had a great deal of trouble parsing the headline, "Baby from ovary frozen in childhood." Wait, was the baby frozen? Wouldn't the baby have to be frozen in childhood; I mean, it hasn't experienced any other life stages yet. And aren't all babies from ovaries?

This was followed by the solemn even-harder-to-read news about the Alps plane crash: "Alps crash remains land in Germany." Does no one read these?

There’s also the problem that the scroll is all in capitals, and they are unable or unwilling to use periods in initials. That makes American news hard to read. A visit by the CEO of China’s Alibaba.com to the U.S. comes out as, "Alibaba boss in us charm offensive." Really, he's in us right now? And I thought Amazon was everywhere.

And they just had to decode to refer to ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State as "IS". With the U.S. fighting them, you get a headline like, “Us ‘spends $9M a day’ fighting is.”

Hack Writer

It was only a few years ago that I was seeing people in the computer biz lamenting the loss of the word "hack" (and "hacking," "hacker," etc.)  Originally, a hacker was a person who used a computer a lot.  That is, a programmer was a type of hacker.

But all that changed when the media needed to talk about people who use computers maliciously.  They seized on the word "hacker" to describe these people. And this was at a time when the word was still only vaguely understood by the general public.  So the word that had been semi-affectionate term for people with a common interest became a scary and slanderous word only a few steps up from "terrorist."  Some computer fans tried to rescue "hacker" by promoting the made-up word "cracker" as a replacement for people who break in to systems.  That never got far.

But in the past few years, the positive connotations of hacking have made a comeback.  Websites like Lifehacker have promoted the word as a more general term for clever, non-standard action.  I'm seeing this new (old) use of "hack" in more and more places, so it's safe to say the public has bought in to the idea that hacking can mean positive things.

Binary Digits

I've been having some computer problems lately, which is why I haven't posted in a few days. When you're wrestling with this issue, it's easy to take it personally and conclude that your computer hates you. I try to tell myself it's just my imagination, but then I played the following Minesweeper game, which I swear I have not doctored:

It Keeps Going And Going And...

This week was the fiftieth anniversary of Moore's Law. If you're not familiar with it, Gordon Moore is an engineer who was involved in the creation of the first microchips. Early on in the process, he noted that their progress in making newer and improved chips was going at a steady rate of improvement: the amount of circuitry they could fit on a chip doubled every 18 months. The concept has become notable for a couple of reasons:

• It's continued at a similar rate since then. That's odd, given that microchip design and manufacturing has changed so much. It's gone from a small number of researchers working on a little-known technology, to a huge business that the world depends on, pushed by a duopoly of multinational tech companies.
• People have been predicting it demise for a variety of reasons - both technical and economic - for years. And yet, like a microchip-powered Timex, it just keeps ticking. Even Moore himself predicted that it would eventually be no longer economically feasible to keep upgrading manufacturing equipment to keep making chips smaller and faster. That was almost twenty years ago.

But the weird thing about Moore's law is that for all the false predictions of doom, we know it has to end eventually. If we just keep making the circuitry on chips smaller and smaller, eventually, we'll get to the point where the wires are just a line of individual atoms, and we can shrink it no more. And thanks to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, it would stop behaving like any normal wire long before we can get it that small.

So claims of the end of more Moore's law are like the predictions of a bad psychic: if we make enough of them, we'll eventually be right.

And that's led to the strangeness of people celebrating the anniversary of Moore's Law with discussion of what happens when it ends.  It may not seem like a big change, but for many of us, constant and fast growth of computing power is all we've ever known.  Our devices have always been getting faster and more powerful.  But what if our kids just used the same apps we do now?  One article posited that we'll have heirloom computers handed down from one generation to another.  I don't see that happening; if new computers are no better than the old ones, we'll just start emphasizing their design and style.

But lack of computer improvement could be positive: without constant power increases to cover up bad programming and design, there'd be more pressure to get software right.  And we the users would probably start to refine the way we use computers into something more effective and intelligent, instead of just bouncing from one start-up service to another.  Gaming would surely improve too, since the developers couldn't just rely on greater realism to convince audiences to replace old games.

But seriously, computer engineers, keep the new chips coming.

Bogus Technology, Dude

A lot of people have been talking about this article in the New York Times by then-technology writer, Erik Sandberg-Diment. That's in spite of the fact it's from 1985. What's notable is that it is about laptops, or at least the overgrown calculators that passed for laptops in the eighties.  The article has been widely ridiculed for getting it about as wrong as possible.

As an aside, I wonder why people are only now seeing it. Presumably it's been sitting there on the NYT web site for years, just waiting for someone to find it. Maybe there's someone with a hobby of reading the Times thirty years later for fun.

The website Boing Boing made the point that the lesson of this article is less about obtuse journalism, and more about how companies try to push a technology before it's ready for the public. I think they've got a point. Consider what a "laptop" was in 1985: it wasn't just a portable desktop. These machines were underpowered even by the standards of the time. They made do with tiny, monochrome screens that only had room for a half-dozen lines.  In retrospect, the only reason those machines look useful is that we look at them knowing what they would evolve into.  Really, they were trying to produce future technology with what was available at the time: in other words, they were low-level steampunk.

It also reminds us that predictions have to be taken with a little context. One thing that stood out to me in the article was that he kept focusing on those laptops as failing due to their software. That's quite nonsensical today: we're used to laptops having the same software available as a desktop. But in those days, they were limited to custom-made, perhaps built-in, software, made to deal with the less-powerful processors and limited screens. If he could see what we consider a laptop today, he might change his tune. I'm guessing anyway; I couldn't find a comment from Sandberg-Diment himself.  As far as I can tell, he left technology journalism to go back to his first love, painting. 

Anyway, the point is, our world is well beyond the scope of a 1985 newspaper article.  Back in the twentieth century people thought of "the future" as starting in 2000, so we're not just living in his future, we're living beyond it. Who knows what people in the eighties would have imagined 2015 to look like. Oh, wait, we don't have to wonder, they made a whole movie about it.

I bring this up as someone who has made negative predictions about a few technologies myself. I've been bearish on self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and drones. So I feel I should emphasize that I'm not saying these things will never happen, just that they'll take longer than people - particularly the media - think they'll take. I have no doubt that they're all possible, and barring disaster they'll all happen eventually.

But another point on considering misguided predictions from the past, is that it's never clear when to finally pass judgement. A second part of the article that stood out to me was his ridiculing the idea of lugging a laptop home from work, when you could just carry a few floppy disks. And of course, today we could replace those floppies with a thumb drive that's more portable and durable. So that's a good question, why do we lug our laptops/tablets/phones around?

The simple answer is that in a world where computers do so many things, the data and applications specific to us are more than we can fit on a thumb drive. But I wonder how long the current situation will last. More and more devices are connected, and more of our data is on the cloud. All we need are some breakthroughs in security, encryption and identification, and we would have a world where people feel comfortable accessing their personal data from whatever devices are available, not necessarily their own personal devices. To put it another way, we expect artificial lighting to be available wherever we go, but that doesn't mean we carry flashlights everywhere. It could be that people in the future will look back at laptops as a strange aberration in the history of computers, and see this New York Times article as very prescient.

Rediskovery

Every time I get a new computer, I go through that ritual of copying files from the old computer to the new one.  That means all the software I use, as well as documents, pictures, music, information, and unfinished projects. 

Everyone does this, but it's worse for me.  I've always been a pack rat in real life, and that trait has transferred to the virtual world too. I'm forever shifting around a snowballing load of data from one hard drive to another.  This process originally had to be done by floppies and the magic of PKZip.  Then it was a pile of CD-ROMs. I still have a drawer of them, both purchased disks of applications, and the disks I'd burned of my own data.

With my most recent new computer, I had to go through the process again.  And since I also have to install Linux, there's even more work to do.  It took a while, but I got my personal files transferred, and all the applications I regularly use installed.  That night, as I was putting the computer (a laptop) away, I picked it up and felt the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever tray give a little under my hand, and it only then occurred to me: hey, this computer has a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever drive.  I mean, yes I did know that; I had taken notice that it had one before buying it.  But here I had done all that installing and copying without using the drive.  The software was mostly downloaded, and my files were copied with either thumbdrives or back-up hard drives (or in some cases, cloud storage.)

In fact, it was only today that I finally opened the tray and used the drive. This was to go looking for fonts from old CD's of graphics and word processing programs.  Wow, when did CD's get so big?  And jewel cases are so thick and heavy.  You can't fit that in your pocket, how are you supposed to carry it around?

Computer, End Program

Contrary to what you might think, I don't think of myself as the only intelligent/sane person in the world. One of the few intelligent/sane people in the world, sure. But there are times when I feel like I'm alone. A good example has been the talk about the upcoming Windows 10.

First of all, there's a distinct flaw in the premise which no one seems to be noticing. The story from the media has been that Microsoft knows it needs to hit one out of the park, so they've designed an interface that will be suited for the PC, tablet, or phone. Am I the only one who noticed that the reason Windows 8 sucked was because the tried to give it an interface suited for the PC, phone or tablet? They're trying to fix a problem by repeating what caused the problem. 

Then there's the new HoloLens that they revealed along with the preview of Windows 10. There was tremendous excitement about it. In fact, the wow-factor seemed to deflect the cynicism that usually accompanies a Microsoft product announcement.

I have to admit, HoloLens does look like it has potential. And it's refreshing to see Microsoft doing something other than playing catch-up. But didn't Google just fail at pretty-much the same thing? I know, HoloLens is more sophisticated than Google Glass, but it does seem to have the same downsides: a (presumably) high price, a dorky, intrusive design, and vague usage scenarios.

But the other aspect that I can’t believe no one noticed: Microsoft had previously said they’d be offering info on Windows 10 that day, and used the opportunity to show a flashy new technology that no one knew about. Doesn’t that seem suspicious? Essentially, they stole their own thunder, distracting the world’s media from reporting on their big product. I’m assuming that they meant to do that, wanting to avoid people parsing every aspect of the new Windows. That would have lead to people realizing that it won’t give them much reason to abandon Windows 7. Or XP, for that matter.