/reader

I hate paywalls tied to subscription. I’m never going to subscribe to a Philadelphia news org, but based on Jay’s recommendation I might pay $1 on my EZ Pass for News to read this story, esp since I saw the Civil War movie. I just had a thought, I might subscribe to a Philadelphia news org for a week or two, given that the Knicks are playing their NBA team right now in the first round of the playoffs. I really want to know everything there is to know about this faceoff. See, I want to pay for journalism here, but journalism hasn't been willing to sell it to me, at any price. They've never gotten the basic truth of: "The customer is always right." Really important point and true in every way.#

Over the weekend I tested the blogroll plugin for WordPress. It worked. After a little more testing and docs-writing we'll be ready for other people to test it, an important step before wider use. So if you're a regular Scripting News reader, and are curious what this blogroll stuff is about, you'll be able to try it out pretty soon. #

Jeff Jarvis writes that a German man who died with 70K books in his house was obsessed with the work of writer Arno Schmidt, who was my great-uncle, my grandmother's brother. #

It put a damper on my weekend plans. Was hoping to get some yard work done and drill the bench dog holes in my workbench. I did get some reading done, though. Still reading Children of Time.

Before my energy totally crashed on Saturday and I had to admit to myself that I was sick, I cleaned up an old Craftsman scroll saw, lubricated the arm, replaced the blade, figured out the tensioning, and got it running. It will be nice to use that to make tighter turns than I can make on the bandsaw.

Would a whole grilled duck be good? Perhaps spatchcocked like a chicken.

I should listen to more Titus Andronicus.

Further carbonation adventures:

• I overcarbonated some imperial cider I brewed. Every drink let off way too much carbonation and it foamed too much in the mouth. Next time I’ll try less. I did ~50PSI and about a minute of shaking. Next time ~35PSI and 30-45s of shaking.
• I carbonated a standard negroni to share with the folks at Benny’s Brown Bag. It came out quite nice. Also ~50PSI, and two rounds of carbonating since I decanted it into a glass swing top bottle for sharing.

Two upcoming woodworking projects:

1. Sawbenches, similar to these: https://blog.lostartpress.com/2014/12/07/have-a-party-build-a-sawbench/
2. A wooden tball bat for Charlie. After some research, I think it should be ~24″ long and 13oz. Still trying to decide which wood to use.

FreedomBox server updates:

• I installed Kiwix and downloaded the entirety of Project Gutenberg (~80GB) to add. It worked great, but now the server crashes around midnight each night, which is when updates and backups run, so I’m trying to exclude Kiwix from the backups to see if that solves it.
• I have email running on the box now! It took a while to get the correct ports forwarding and DNS records set up, but it works! Got my first DMARC report the next morning.

House project updates:

• Fence contractor is secured, materials ordered, proposal signed. I couldn’t find two critical pins with my metal detector and survey, so a surveyor is coming out to stake the lot lines.
• Sump pump installation proposal signed, too. Should happen within the next month, which should help with the basement flooding.

Things are moving forward.

I made some Matzo Ball Soup on Sunday for the first time. Fitting, because it was cold, it is Passover, and I wasn’t feeling well. It was good, though I think I still prefer chicken noodle soup.

We were able to spend some lunches and pre-dinners on the porch. Amanda took a moment to press some of the violets in our yard. Charlie enjoyed looking up at the sky.

I didn’t take many photos this week. The sickness and rain really put a damper on things. But two more photos for fun: Charlie and Amanda explored the football field and track while I was sick. And before I was sick Charlie and I were silly at the dinner table.

 

There's been a minor storm brewing around journalism ethics, that's centred on one of the most popular journalists in the world. But, because he's a YouTuber and a reviewer, the storm hasn't moved much out of the tech world.

Massive YouTube star Marques Brownlee ruthlessly deconstructed the Humane AI Pin, a badge that aims to replace your phone. (Notice that every new hardware product needs an AI component…) You can get the general tenor of his review from the headline:

If you don't fancy watching the whole of that video, you can get the general idea from this excerpt on X:

NEW Video - Humane Pin Review: A Victim of its Future Ambition

Ouch.

Should reviewers “do no harm”?

It's fair to say that some of the tech industry were less than impressed by his review. This X post in particular kicked off a storm:

Blimey. This guy — a minor Twitter influencer with courses on tech entrepreneurship to sell — is genuinely asserting that reviewers shouldn't give a bad review because that might hurt the company. Could I perhaps suggest that it isn't really the bad review that's hurting the company — it's the bad product? The reviewer is merely accelerating the process by spreading the news more quickly. Word would get out soon enough when purchaser started getting them. And some of those people have been saved a lot of money by Brownlee's review.

A journalist's duty is to the readers

As Ian Betteridge, himself a long-term reviewer, put it:

“First, do no harm” is not a principle that can or should ever be applied to reviews. “First, tell the truth about the product”, on the other hand, is absolute the reviewer’s mantra. You owe nothing to the people who made the product. You owe everything to the people who might consider spending their hard-earned money on it.

This should be obvious. So why would Vassallo be so surprised by what Brownlee said? Simple. He, like so many other tech industry hangers-on, has become accustomed to a largely compliant and uncritical tech-centric press.

Edward Ongweso Jr had plenty to say on this, in his evaluation of noted tech journalist Kara Swisher's book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story for The Baffler:

For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

🔥🔥🔥. And there's more:

Few writers have been as instrumental to this process as Swisher. In Burn Book, she tries to atone for her decades of boosterism by adopting a slightly more critical posture, but the analysis, such as it is, has no bite because Swisher still, at her core, fundamentally believes in Silicon Valley. 

The role of journalism in tech

Too much of the tech media has been little more than an extension of the PR arms of the tech giants. You can see it in the reaction of the “tribes” of tech media: the ones that are loyal to Apple, the Google followers, the start-up evangelists. Their sceptical, cynical takes are the exception, rather than the rule.

And look how many tech journalists have been assimilated into the startup world as venture capitalists: Mike Arrington, Om Malik, MG Siegler. While the mainstream press ignored the burgeoning tech sector for too long, and then swung wildly between criticism and boosterism when it too it seriously, the specialist press has always had an uneasily cosy relationship with these tech companies.

If that relationship is over, it will came as a big shock to people like Vassallo. They've had a couple of decades to get used to an easy ride. But people like Brownlee are so successful that they don't need to worry about the potential backlash of a negative review. They're not reliant on access to the tech companies for their reporting, because they have an audience and a revenue model that works.

So, finally, proper journalism is coming to the tech world, step by step, product by product. Brownlee summed this up perfectly, in his reply to Vassallo's post:

Every startup thinks their baby is the most beautiful. Still, I am not the one to not try something new. What sold me was their persuasive argument. Not only will the image quality be great, they will continue to improve the hardware with new software upgrades. 

Chugh and Sohlstrom said that with computer vision (and other aspects of AI) making progress by the week, we can’t think of the camera as static hardware. It can not just be upgraded, but also, the hardware can be given more capabilities over a period of time. 

The ability to upgrade hardware via firmware is well understood, but very few camera (and device makers) think of continuously enhancing their products with software. In other words, the camera is no different from a computer for them. Just like smartphone companies — who use their smart phone’s innards to make the camera better. 

Opal has since released a product called Composer, which allows you to enhance your Opal Camera. It takes advantage of onboard chips to do so. By installing the software, you can increase (or decrease) the depth of field effect (Bokeh) by controlling the virtual aperture. If you own an iPhone, this is the webcam equivalent of Portrait mode. In a media release, Opal explained:

The neural nets we are running become steps in a longer pipeline used within features on the device. For example Bokeh – for our Bokeh effect, we start with a neural network guessing the segmentation between the foreground and background, which kicks off a proprietary set of filters that tune the segment, and a graphic rendering pipeline that actually models the physics of how light enters a lens through a hexagonal lens – all to make a Bokeh effect that is far more convincing than anything else out there. Each of these steps, we’re doing 30 times a second.

You can Zoom in on your face and have the camera follow you around. There are several other enhancements, for example, pinch to zoom. The multiple mics filter out the noise. And you can create a “look” for yourself. Opal is not the only game in town — China-based Insta360 makes Link, a 4K webcam, that too is “AI” enhanced and offers gesture control, AI tracking, and many such features. These are table stakes in the business now. No wonder I find Logitech dowdy, in comparison. 

In the past, you needed mirrorless cameras to get similar functionality, and even then they are not very advanced. In comparison, Composer is a collection of algorithms and software that has the option of giving a $200 webcam more capabilities by the day. Hardware companies such as Opal have to consider offering a paid service where software and algorithms, and not hardware, help them make a profit by enhancing the camera on an ongoing basis. That is better than a one-time “hardware” sale. 

An ongoing evolution happening in the world of cameras. While overall sales of cameras might be slumping, there are many more “cameras” out in the world. In 2016, I made my argument in The New Yorker:

We are splintering what was the “camera” and its functionality—lens, sensors, and processing—into distinct parts, but, instead of lenses and shutters, software and algorithms are becoming the driving force. And this is not just happening on smartphone cameras. You can expect the software to define and enhance what lenses, sensors, and processing units in other settings can do. Dash cams, security cams, adventure cams, driving cams—these are just early examples of devices that have specific applications, cameras that could become much more powerful in the future.

Every single time I use Opal’s Composer, I become acutely aware of how far behind the camera companies are lagging in thinking about artificial intelligence, computer vision, and software to look beyond selling hardware. It is even more confounding because most modern mirrorless cameras have processors, connectivity, storage, and power. The possibilities are endless.

Sadly, Sony and Nikons of the world make hardware — and they won’t even know how to contemplate the notion — that sometimes, a camera is not just a camera. 

April 22, 2024. San Francisco

I like thinking about little packets of data traveling at the speed of light with a pod of whales ambling along above.

Josh does a great job with the story. Only 22 boats repairing cable world wide! Most boats lay new cable. The people that do the work are aging out and it’s hard to find new people. Even though the work is incredibly important

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. 

In the work that would make his name as one of the finest medievalists of his generation, The Allegory of Love (1936), he pauses at the end of a learned exposition of the poems of Ariosto and Tasso to make a confession: Samuel Johnson, [C.S. Lewis] says, “once described the ideal happiness he would choose, if he were regardless of futurity” — that is, if he did not need to consider any future consequences of his choice. “My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.”