/reader

How? The United States Handicapper General takes care of it.

Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

Here’s the full story, it’s great, you should read it, it’ll take you like 9 minutes.

ANYWAY.

iOS 18.2 is shipping this week, and with it Apple will activate the Hearing Test functionality for AirPods Pro 2 in the UK.

This in turn enables Hearing Assistance, which means I can use my AirPods as hearing aids. Good news.

My everyday hearing doesn’t (yet) require hearing aids. But I have a trance techno shaped hole from the 90s, the high end is done in from covid, and I wear earplugs to the cinema because I can’t see the pictures if I don’t knock 20 decibels off the sound.

So I’m looking forward to having a bit of a compensatory boost from the wearables I already wear every day.

That said, they do already have transparency mode, which is when you keep your earphones in and they proxy in external sound using tiny microphones. (Hearing aids are transparency mode plus computational adjustment from the hearing test.)

And people can’t tell that you’re using it, even though you can have a conversation just fine, which means I get looks like I’m being rude when I use transparency mode to order coffee or whatever. So I end up taking my AirPods out anyhow, to be polite.

(Obviously the next generation of AirPods should be literally transparent when transparency mode is active, like the Nothing Ear range. You’d be able to see the circuitry and components inside. Then when you switch them back to regular mode, they would dynamically go opaque - the same look as the current model - using electrically-triggered LCD smart glass, perhaps with an e-ink style technology so they’re not always drawing current.)

Also one day I’m hoping that future Vision Pro Eyeglasses will have a similar kind of compensatory boost for face blindness.

Everyone would be made to look highly memorable by exaggerating their grossest features or putting them in costume, like street artist caricatures or programmatic Charles Bonnet Syndrome.

So I look forward to the coming era of everyday cyborgs.

(We’re on the shallow end of the exponential. Pro golfers are already secret cyborgs (2020). And what is Ozempic but a cyborg adaptation?)

But in the spirit of predicting not just the automobile but the traffic jam, what happens when ten thousand everyday cyborg prostheses are just… the everyday? What could go wrong?

You can see how a well-meaning woke resurgence could be simultaneous with a new spirit of authoritarianism; then a misplaced urge to enforce equality could arise – perhaps extreme pressure on the job market caused by AI and rumours of in-utero CRISPR fiddling used to lock in secret, artificial genetic advantage for the rich. Then there’s public support for putting this through the courts, and in the same way that you’re not allowed to ask certain questions in an interview, next we all have to look the same over video calls, to reduce bias there too; and then the state always reaches for technology capabilities with centralised controls… and well, the cyborg compensators are right there, everyone has them already…

And by 2081 we’ve inched our way, step by logical step, to a society where our everyday cyborg prostheses are used to bind us instead of letting us bound ahead.

Hey that’s a good premise for a sci-fi short.

Oh it’s been done already I forgot.

More posts tagged: glimpses-of-our-cyborg-future (14).

Auto-detected kinda similar posts:

• AirPods, and the cognitive ergonomics of tools for thought (19 Nov 2021)
• Headphones need smart transparency mode with voice recognition (8 Jan 2021)
• A lengthy ramble through many responses to that FaceTime Attention Correction tweet (4 Jul 2019)

The favorite part of my day comes somewhere between 12 AM and 2 AM. That's an odd time, right? Sure, but allow me to explain.

My wife is a creature of habit and goes to bed at 10 PM every night. When I'm working, I'm right there in bed with her. But naturally, I'm a night owl, and on the weekends, holidays, or times when I'm not working like right now, I tend to stay up later. I love the quiet and peacefulness of the evening, and I'm most productive late at night.

Over the past month, I've gone to bed most nights between 12 AM and 2 PM. It's nothing special, I go upstairs, walk into the adjoining bathroom where I brush my teeth, use the restroom, before heading to bed. The moment that brings me so much joy is when I open the bedroom door. The majority of the time, I have a little white fluff ball waiting for me. She walks into the bathroom with her tail up high, purring up a storm, and rubs herself against my legs. Without fail, I pick her up, nuzzle her and pet her before putting her back down. From there, I walk into the bedroom, and she stops by the food bowl by the door and gets a late night snack while I crawl into bed.

By the time I situate myself with my iPad or a book, she's done eating, and she jumps under my covers where she lays against my hip next to the edge of the bed. I usually end up putting my arm down so she can cuddle up next to it without having to worry about falling off the bed. If I'm lucky, our second cat Jupiter comes from under the bed or off of my wife's legs and cuddles up between my legs.

I lay there in the dark with a healthy wife next to me, a cuddly kitty beside me, and sometimes a second one on my legs, and I think about how lucky I am. It's at that moment, I feel truly loved. The meanness of the world washes away and things are just perfect. It usually only lasts fifteen minutes before Khalessi finally decides she is warm enough and heads back to her cat stand to sleep, but those fifteen minutes are the best part of my day and I do my very best not to take them granted.

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Anyone can build on an open format. That's part of what it means for it to be open. Developers and users are free to use anyone's ideas, or not use them, even if they claim to be the Holy Church of Some Open Format. No one can form an organization that owns the future of the open format because then it wouldn't be open. #

I've got the new version of Bingeworthy running here. When I saw how the database code worked, I had to redo it from scratch. It was probably my first SQL project, and I barely knew what I was doing. It's too bad, because looking at it from that point of view I could see how SQL could have been much simpler by making some of the optional features automatic. A higher layer on top of SQL is possible, it seems to me. Having ChatGPT review my ideas has been invaluable in this project. I'm going to use it myself for a while, and see how I want to reorganize the user interface. There were opportunities for factoring I didn't take back then because I was in a rush to do something else. #

How I know Twitter was great. When something was going on anywhere, any kind of thing, I'd go to Twitter and it happened there 14 minutes ago. It was the pulse of the news. And somehow they couldn't figure out how to make a business of that! Amazing.#

I bet a lot of people who voted for Trump hoped they were voting for Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith goes to Washington, or It's a Wonderful Life. I think they may be surprised to find that they actually voted for Mr Potter or Ebeneezer Scrooge. Look for a lump of coal in the stocking. #

If you want to get excited about the future, I highly recommend this week's Jon Stewart podcast interview with Bernie Sanders. I recognize these ideas, it sounds like what we're waiting for in the social web and in journalism. And working for and with each other.#

personal canon, a Substack I follow, turns 1 today. It feels scarcely believable to me that you can reach that quality of writing and size of audience (8,000) in one year and thirty-four posts. Reading Celine's story and advice made me think about my own trajectory. I started blogging here two and a half years ago now, purposely without a niche or topic to allow me to write with as little pressure as possible. Since I'd never published anything before, I knew I had to keep the barriers low for me to stick with it, and in that regard I have no regrets. Blogging anonymously and without expectations helped me develop a regular writing practice for the first time in my life.

As I approach 500 posts on this blog I've been thinking more about what I want this blog to be, where I want it to go. I'm grateful that I still enjoy writing here, and frankly I'm a little surprised I've kept at it for this long, but now that I've settled more or less into a rhythm I'm not sure if I should be pushing myself further out of my comfort zone, to do more of the things Celine did in so short a time. You know — make a Substack, choose a niche, write more for readers than for myself, publish more polished content. Network. The sort of stuff that might translate into having something to show for this love I say I have, into something I can maybe parlay into a career or even a side gig one day. Basically, taking this more seriously.

This is something I grapple with in many areas of my life. Work and career is one I assume others share with me, but I feel this way about fitness too, and language learning, even my social activities to an even greater extent than for work. The specifics change slightly for each of these, but the underlying questions are the same: should I push myself to do more? If so, how much? And why, what am I doing this for? I can't and won't deny that my mom's insistence that I turn everything into a moneymaking endeavor has rubbed off on me at least to some degree, as has the ubiquitous advice to do what you love. But I also think there's something else here, an intrinsic desire to simply do things well and live the best life I can live. More than anything, I want to honor that part of me and listen to that elusive ambition when it does arise.

Clearly, I don't have the answers to these questions, and I don’t expect anyone will. This lack of guidance is simultaneously the best and worst part of being an adult. It sounds freeing until you're crushed by the realization that you have to decide everything for yourself — what to do, when to do it, how to do it, how much to do it — with nobody to really hold you accountable or tell you you're doing it right or overdoing it or not doing enough.

When confronted with indecision like this, one exercise I turn to is Jeff Bezos's regret minimization framework: when I imagine myself a few years in the future, will I still be doing this, say, five years and two thousand posts from now? Will I be okay with that, or will I rue not having tried to push myself and turn this into something more? Alternatively, what if I try to go the Substack way, and find out it isn't for me, that I don't have enough to say that holds up in that light? I'm not sure what I could even write about at that length and depth anyway, and I worry that opening up this passion to the winds of more serious endeavors may snuff the flame out entirely.

I also struggle with this belief I hold that the kind of person who can write a column like Celine's is somewhat preordained. This is the same reason why I don't think everyone should blog: not everyone has something they want to say or share, and that's okay! Following that logic, maybe the reason that I don't already have a Substack like Celine's with interesting commentary on books I've read is because I don't have that much to say which is worth reading. (Then again: is this just my fear and my fixed mindset talking?) Maybe I should just stick to my silly little public journal, and I mean that non-derogatively, because I think what I have here is beautiful and I'm happy with it. I just don't know if I should be satisfied with it.

(I know you're probably thinking, well there's only one way to find out. And you'd be right! I just… have this inviolable desire to do things the Right Way even as I recognize that there is no Right Way.)

In more uplifting news, December is flying by. I'm packed to the gills this week and the week I’ll be back home again for Christmas. As a little treat to myself, I signed up for a poetry class with a friend early next year, after which I was so excited I could hardly sleep. I'm terrified too, since we'll have to not only discuss poems but also write our own (hides under desk). But when I saw that one of my favorite bloggers was teaching a class I knew with every ounce of my being that I simply had to take the leap. Isn't it nice, when your heart knows something with that much conviction? I know what it feels like in love, or at least what it feels like when that conviction is missing. Whether that certainty serves me well is another issue entirely, but for now I want to focus on finding it in my craft.

The shrieks of joy and surprise from the living room could be heard throughout the entire house. Perhaps our whole village.

🦸 You're my hero! (For using RSS to follow my blog.) 🥇

I mean, of course. Of course it is.

There’s nothing wrong with emotion, with the feelings of anguish and anger, but you don’t have to cling to those feelings. You don't have to feel a certain amount of bad to validate the experience. 

If the pain fades, you can let it fade. 

If change seems positive despite what you'll be leaving behind, you can let yourself feel excited.

You don’t have to approach every change in your life the same way.

You get to be all over the place.

And you don't have to feel bad about feeling good. Like, if you're dealing with a big-bad-scary-sad change, and at some point in there you look up and think, "Huh, I'm feeling kinda good today," you can just let yourself feel that way. 

No need to explain, no need to justify, no need to compare. 

You're not erasing anything. You don't undo the depth of your grief by having a moment of okayness. 

We all need reprieve. 

Here’s the idea:

• You have a bunch images
• Each image is a real-life og:image pulled from an online article
• You try to guess the title of the article based solely off the social share image

For example, can you guess the title of the article for this image?

Is it:

1. The ultimate guide to developer happiness
2. Florida woman wins $500,000 at Georgia/Alabama football game
3. A guide to sizing wedding rings
4. The key to building high-performing teams

Answer: it’s an article from slack.com and its real title is number 4 above.

Did you get it right?

Without question, we seem to have accepted (and stretch ourselves to support) this idea that every web page in the entire world should should be annotated with an image that encapsulates its contents into a single, visual expression.

This game is meant to illustrate the absurdity of this notion in both principle and real-world execution.

Why Make The Game?

I often vent about social share imagery to anyone who will listen — both in person and on my blog.

Sometimes a satirical game can convey the idea better than words.

What’s Wrong With Social Share Images?

Nothing inherently.

But because they’re possible, everyone feels like they’re leaving clicks and pageviews on the table if they don’t implement them.

“You’re not going to have an image for every post? Are you a crazy person?! People are 1,267% more likely to click through to your website if you have one!”

So everyone makes them, and as a result they end up stretching themselves — and the meaning between the image the content — to come up with these images.

That article has a picture of a clock? It could be about anything, such as:

• Time management & productivity
• History of clocks and time keeping
• Time dilation and physics
• Aging and mortality
• Technological advancements in timekeeping
• Time travel and fiction
• Biological clocks

It could also have nothing to do with clocks and just be an article for a technical blog where nobody could come up with a better idea of how to visually express “Latest news from our release of [insert codebase name here]”.

For anybody who has done it, the task of coming up with a good image for every article is a tough one. The web has turned everyone into a publisher, but not everyone is backed by a large media corporation that employs people to do this task as their full-time job. If you as an individual or a small group of people try to compete with the quality of social share imagery from media publications, it’ll never be as good. Full stop. In other words: you’ll never be as good at the game as the companies who do it for a living, so the only way to win is not to play the game.

Or, you can try to compete and then you reach for automation. As Nicholas Carr says, “The endless labor of self-expression cries out for the efficiency of automation.” But automated social share images have their downfalls:

• They’re bland and generic (e.g. stock photography or AI-generated imagery)
• They’re unrelated to the content (e.g. abstract computer-generated patterns and shapes)
• They’re duplicative (e.g. an image with text for the title and description of the article, which is already included in og:title and og:description and, on many social sites, displayed under the image itself)

So What Are They Good For?

Social share images are basically billboards on the information superhighway. Perhaps they were intended to convey additional context about the article, but in practice they’re really just screaming to catch your eye (and attention) and hopefully make you click.

Perhaps even better than a contextual image summarizing the content of the article, these images should just have some flamboyant visual with giant, bold type set in Impact that says, “BET YOU COULD NEVER GUESS WHAT IS HERE! CLICK TO FIND OUT!!!"

Look I get it. Social platforms are giving you the chance to have a free billboard, one that might grab the attention of all the people passing it by in their feeds. Why wouldn’t you leverage a free billboard?

I mean this game, which makes fun of social share images, even has one. So who the hell am I to say anything?

Nobody really, just another person on the internet.

Again, you can check out the game at: omgimg.jim-nielsen.com

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…I have spent 63 years trying to cultivate hope, but my thoughts wander in this direction too often these days. Why protect the wildflowers that grow in our yard when all the emerald yards nearby are drenched in herbicides and when their purely ornamental shrubs are drenched in insecticides? Why trouble myself to keep the stock-tank ponds filled with water when every spring there are fewer and fewer tree frogs who might need a nursery for their eggs? Why turn off the lights to protect nocturnal creatures when all around me the houses are lit up like airport runways? Why bother to plant saplings when a builder will only cut them down later, after my husband and I are gone, to make room for yet another foolishly large house that glows in the dark? …

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying? …

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others…

In saving the leaves for the moths and the fireflies and the dark-eyed juncos, I am still trying. And in the trying perhaps I can save my own soul.

— Margaret Renkl, from “How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark” (NY Times, December 9, 2024)