Tags: change

gilest.org: A chat with 19-year-old me

I love this conversation.

I really like Brad’s new project, Cold Album Drumming:

Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?

I got a kick out of watching him play along to Radiohead’s In Rainbows and The Decemberist’s The Crane Wife.

I was really into The Decemberists in the first decade of the 21st Century. I remember seeing them in a long-gone Brighton venue more than twenty years ago.

But I kind of stopped paying attention to them after they released The Hazards Of Love. Not because I didn’t like that album. Quite the opposite. I love that album. I think in my mind I kind of thought “That’s it, they’ve done it, they can go home now.”

It’s exactly the kind of album I should not like. It’s a concept album. A folk-rock opera.

When I was growing up, concept albums were the antithesis of cool. Prog rock was like an insult.

You have to remember just how tribal music was back in the ’70s and ’80s. In my school, I remember the divide between the kind of people who listened to The Cure and The Smiths versus the kind of people who listened to Prince or Queen. Before that you had the the mods and the rockers, which in hindsight makes no sense—how are The Who and The Jam not rockers?

Looking back now, it’s ridiculous. I get the impression that for most people growing up in the last few decades, those kind of distinctions have been erased. People’s musical intake is smeared across all types and time periods. That is a good thing.

Anyway, a folky prog-rock opera like The Hazards Of Love is exactly the kind of thing that past me would’ve hated. Present me adores it. Maybe it’s because it’s got that folky angle. I suspect Colin Meloy listened to a lot of Horslips—heck, The Decemberists even did their own mini version of The Táin.

Speaking of mythic Irish language epics, I really like John Spillane’s Fíorusice:

Fíoruisce - The Legend of the Lough is a three-act Gaelic folk opera composed by Irish artist John Spillane. It is a macaronic or bilingual work. The work is an imagined re-Gaelicization of the Victorian Cork fairytale Fior-usga collected by Thomas Crofton Croker in the 1800’s and published in his book Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1828). The story is a surreal tale culminating in a drowned kingdom, which as lore tells us, becomes The Lough in Cork city as we know it today. They say, you can see the tops of the underworld towers on a clear day and hear the music of their big party on Midsummer’s night.

Yup, it’s another concept album. And funnily enough, past me was not a fan of John Spillane either.

I first heard him when he was part of a trad band called Nomos in Cork in the early ’90s (the bódhran player’s mother was friends with my mother). I really liked their tunes but I thought the songs were kind of twee.

Over the years, the more of his songs I heard, the more I understood that John Spillane was just being completely open and honest. Past me thought that was twee. Present me really respects it. In fact, I genuinely love his songs like Johnny Don’t Go To Ballincollig and All The Ways You Wander.

And then there’s Passage West. It’s a masterpiece. I might be biased because Passage West is the next town over from Cobh, where I grew up.

So yeah, Fíorusice is something that past me would’ve disdained:

1. a concept album by
2. John Spillane in
3. the Irish language.

Present me is into all three.

It’s Bandcamp Friday today. I think I know what I’m going to get.

AI wants to rule the World, but it can’t handle dairy.

AI has the same problem that I saw ten year ago at IBM. And remember that IBM has been at this AI game for a very long time. Much longer than OpenAI or any of the new kids on the block. All of the shit we’re seeing today? Anyone who worked on or near Watson saw or experienced the same problems long ago.

Here Come the Lionfish – James Bridle

A terrific article by James.

It always annoys me when a politician is accused of “flip-flopping” when they change their mind on something. Instead of admiring someone for being willing to re-examine previously-held beliefs, we lambast them. We admire conviction, even though that’s a trait that has been at the root of history’s worst attrocities.

When you look at the history of human progress, some of our greatest advances were made by people willing to question their beliefs. Prioritising data over opinion is what underpins the scientific method.

But I get it. It can be very uncomfortable to change your mind. There’s inevitably going to be some psychological resistance, a kind of inertia of opinion that favours the sunk cost of all the time you’ve spent believing something.

I was thinking back to times when I’ve changed my opinion on something after being confronted with new evidence.

In my younger days, I was staunchly anti-nuclear power. It didn’t help that in my younger days, nuclear power and nuclear weapons were conceptually linked in the public discourse. In the intervening years I’ve come to believe that nuclear power is far less destructive than fossil fuels. There are still a lot of issues—in terms of cost and time—which make nuclear less attractive than solar or wind, but I honestly can’t reconcile someone claiming to be an environmentalist while simultaneously opposing nuclear power. The data just doesn’t support that conclusion.

Similarly, I remember in the early 2000s being opposed to genetically-modified crops. But the more I looked into the facts, there was nothing—other than vibes—to bolster that opposition. And yet I know many people who’ve maintainted their opposition, often the same people who point to the scientific evidence when it comes to climate change. It’s a strange kind of cognitive dissonance that would allow for that kind of cherry-picking.

There are other situations where I’ve gone more in the other direction—initially positive, later negative. Google’s AMP project is one example. It sounded okay to me at first. But as I got into the details, its fundamental unfairness couldn’t be ignored.

I was fairly neutral on blockchains at first, at least from a technological perspective. There was even some initial promise of distributed data preservation. But over time my opinion went down, down, down.

Bitcoin, with its proof-of-work idiocy, is the poster-child of everything wrong with the reality of blockchains. The astoundingly wasteful energy consumption is just staggeringly pointless. Over time, any sufficiently wasteful project becomes indistinguishable from evil.

Speaking of energy usage…

My feelings about large language models have been dominated by two massive elephants in the room. One is the completely unethical way that the training data has been acquired (by ripping off the work of people who never gave their permission). The other is the profligate energy usage in not just training these models, but also running queries on the network.

My opinion on the provenance of the training data hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s hardened. I want us to fight back against this unethical harvesting by poisoning the well that the training data is drawing from.

But my opinion on the energy usage might just be swaying a little.

Michael Liebreich published an in-depth piece for Bloomberg last month called Generative AI – The Power and the Glory. He doesn’t sugar-coat the problems with current and future levels of power consumption for large language models, but he also doesn’t paint a completely bleak picture.

Effectively there’s a yet-to-decided battle between Koomey’s law and the Jevons paradox. Time will tell which way this will go.

The whole article is well worth a read. But what really gave me pause was a recent piece by Hannah Ritchie asking What’s the impact of artificial intelligence on energy demand?

When Hannah Ritchie speaks, I listen. And I’m well aware of the irony there. That’s classic argument from authority, when the whole point of Hannah Ritchie’s work is that it’s the data that matters.

In any case, she does an excellent job of putting my current worries into a historical context, as well as laying out some potential futures.

Don’t get me wrong, the energy demands of large language models are enormous and are only going to increase, but we may well see some compensatory efficiencies.

Personally, I’d just like to see these tools charge a fair price for their usage. Right now they’re being subsidised by venture capital. If people actually had to pay out of pocket for the energy used per query, we’d get a much better idea of how valuable these tools actually are to people.

Instead we’re seeing these tools being crammed into existing products regardless of whether anybody actually wants them (and in my anecdotal experience, most people resent this being forced on them).

Still, I thought it was worth making a note of how my opinion on the energy usage of large language models is open to change.

But I still won’t use one that’s been trained on other people’s work without their permission.

New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev – Baldur Bjarnason

The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.

The global fight against polio — how far have we come? - Our World in Data

I think it’s always worth revisiting accomplishments like this—it’s absolutely astounding that we don’t even think about polio (or smallpox!) in our day-to-day lives, when just two generations ago it was something that directly affected everybody.

The annual number of people paralyzed by polio was reduced by over 99% in the last four decades.

Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change ‹ Literary Hub

Beautiful writing from Rebecca Solnit, that encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say:

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby.

Climate Optimism · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Humans are allergic to change. And, as Jeremy impressively demonstrated, we tend to overlook the changes that happen more gradually. We want the Big Bang, the sudden change, the headline that reads, “successful nuclear fusion solves climate change for good.” But that’s (usually) not how change works. Change often happens gradually, first very slowly, and then, once it reaches a certain threshold, it can happen overnight.

Time team: Documenting decisions & marking milestones · Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s the transcript of Paul’s excellent talk at this year’s UX London:

How designers can record decisions and cultivate a fun and inclusive culture within their team.

The bedrock of the World Wide Web is solid. Built atop the protocols of the internet (TCP/IP), its fundamental building blocks remain: URLs of HTML files transmitted over HTTP. Baldur Bjarnason writes:

Even today, the web is like living fossil, a preserved relic from a different era. Anybody can put up a website. Anybody can run a business over it. I can build an app or service, send the URL to anybody I like, and most people in the world will be able to run it without asking anybody’s permission.

Still, the web has evolved. In fact, that evolution is something that’s also built into its fundamental design. Rather than try to optimise the World Wide Web for one particular use-case, Tim Berners-Lee realised the power of being flexible. Like the internet, the World Wide Web is deliberately dumb.

(I get very annoyed when people talk about the web as being designed for scientific work at CERN. That was merely the first use-case. The web was designed for everything …and nothing in particular.)

Robin Berjon compares the web’s evolution to the ship of Theseus:

That’s why it’s been so hard to agree about what the Web is: the Web is architected for resilience which means that it adapts and transforms. That flexibility is the reason why I’m talking about some mythological dude’s boat. Altogether too often, we consider some aspects of the Web as being invariants when they’re potentially just as replaceable as any other part. This isn’t to say that there are no invariants on the Web.

The web can be changed. That’s both a comfort and a warning. There’s plenty that we should change about today’s web. But there’s also plenty—at the root level—that we should fight to preserve.

And if you want change, the worst way to go about it is to promulgate the notion of burning everything down and starting from scratch. As Erin says in the fourth and final part of her devastating series on Meta in Myanmar:

We don’t get a do-over planet. We won’t get a do-over network.

Instead, we have to work with the internet we made and find a way to rebuild and fortify it to support the much larger projects of repair—political, cultural, environmental—that are required for our survival.

Though, as Robin points out, that doesn’t preclude us from sharing a vision:

Proceeding via small, incremental changes can be a laudable approach, but even then it helps to have a sense for what it is that those small steps are supposed to be incrementing towards.

I’m looking forward to reading what Robin puts forward, particularly because he says “I’m no technosolutionist.”

From a technical perspective, the web has never been better. We have incredible features in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all standardised and with amazing interoperability between browsers. The challenges that face the web today are not technical.

That’s one of the reasons why I have no patience for the web3 crowd. Apart from the ridiculous name, they’re focusing on exactly the wrong part of the stack.

Listening to their pitch, they’ll point out that while yes, the fundamental bedrock of the web is indeed decentralised—TCP/IP, HTTP(S)—what’s been constructed on that foundation is increasingly centralised; the power brokers of Google, Meta, Amazon.

And what’s the solution they propose? Replace the underlying infrastructure with something-something-blockchain.

Would that it were so simple.

The problems of today’s web are not technical in nature. The problems of today’s web won’t be solved by technology. If we’re going to solve the problems of today’s web, we’ll need to do it through law, culture, societal norms, and co-operation.

(Feel free to substitute “today’s web” with “tomorrow’s climate”.)

I did an episode of the Clearleft podcast on innovation a while back:

Everyone wants to be innovative …but no one wants to take risks.

The word innovation is often bandied about in an unquestioned positive way. But if we acknowledge that innovation is—by definition—risky, then the exhortations sound less positive.

“We provide innovative solutions for businesses!” becomes “We provide risky solutions for businesses!”

I was reminded of this when I saw the website for the Podcast Standards Project. The original text on the website described the project as:

…a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.

I pushed back on that wording (partly because I’ve seen the word “innovation” used as a smoke screen for user-hostile practices like tracking and surveillance). The wording has since changed to:

…a grassroots coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.

That’s better. It’s more precise.

Am I nitpicking? Only if you think that “innovation” and “improvement” are synonyms. I don’t think they are.

Innovation implies change. Improvement implies positive change.

Not all change is positive. Not all innovation is positive.

Innovation goes hand in hand with disruption. Again, disruption involves change. But not necessarily positive change.

Think about the antonyms of change and disruption: stasis and stability. Those words don’t sound very exciting, but in some arenas they’re exactly what you should be aiming for; arenas like infrastructure or standards.

Not to get all pace layers-y here, but it seems to me that every endeavour has a sweet spot for innovation. For some projects, too little innovation is bad. For others, too much innovation is worse.

The trick is knowing which kind of project you’re working on.

(As a side note, I think some people use the word innovation to describe the generative, divergent phase of a design project: “how might we come up with innovative new approaches?” But we already have a word to describe the practice of generating novel and interesting ideas. That word isn’t innovation. It’s creativity.)

Spring is arriving. It’s just taking its time.

There are little signs. Buds on the trees. The first asparagus of the year. Daffodils. Changing the clocks. A stretch in the evenings. But the weather remains, for the most part, chilly and grim.

Reality is refusing to behave like a fast-forward montage leading up to to a single day when you throw open the curtains and springtime is suddenly there in all its glory.

That’s okay. I can wait. I’ve had a lot of practice over the past three years. We all have. Staying home, biding time, saving lives.

But hunkering down during The Situation isn’t like taking shelter during an air raid. There isn’t a signal that sounds to indicate “all clear!” It’s more like going from Winter to Spring. It’s slow, almost impercetible. But it is happening.

I’ve noticed a subtle change in my risk assessment over the past few months. I still think about COVID-19. I still factor it into my calculations. But it’s no longer the first thing I think of.

That’s a subtle change. It doesn’t seem like that long ago when COVID was at the forefront of my mind, especially if I was weighing up an excursion. Is it worth going to that restaurant? How badly do I want to go to that gig? Should I go to that conference?

Now I find myself thinking of COVID as less of a factor in my decision-making. It’s still there, but it has slowly slipped down the ranking.

I know that other people feel differently. For some people, COVID slipped out of their minds long ago. For others, it’s still very much front and centre. There isn’t a consensus on how to evaluate the risks. Like I said:

It’s like when you’re driving and you think that everyone going faster than you is a maniac, and everyone going slower than you is an idiot.

COVID-19 isn’t going away. But perhaps The Situation is.

The Situation has been gradually fading away. There isn’t a single moment where, from one day to the next, we can say “this marks the point where The Situation ended.” Even if there were, it would be a different moment for everyone.

As of today, the COVID-19 app officially stops working. Perhaps today is as good a day as any to say Spring has arrived. The season of rebirth.

The one about AI - macwright.com

Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.

And that is something that I’m more and more aware of as I get older – sources of joy. It’s good to diversify them, to keep track of them, because it’s way too easy to run out. Or to end up with just one, and then lose it.

The thing about luddites is that they make good punchlines, but they were all people.

I’ve already written about how much I enjoyed hosting Leading Design San Francisco last week.

All the speakers were terrific. Lola’s talk was particularly …um, interesting:

In this talk, Lola will share her adventures in the world of blockchain, the hostility she experienced in her first go-round in 2018, and why she’s chosen to head back to a technology that is going through its largest reputational and social crisis to date.

Wait …I was supposed to stand on stage and introduce a talk that was (at least partly) about blockchain? I have opinions.

As it turned out, Lola warned me that I’d be making an appearance in her talk. She was going to quote that blog post. Before the talk, I asked her how obnoxious I could be about blockchain in her intro. She told me to bring it.

So in the introduction, I deployed all the sarcasm I had in me and said:

Listen, we designers have a tendency to be over-critical of things sometimes. There are all these ideas that we dismiss: phrenology, homeopathy, flat-earthism …blockchain. Haters gonna hate.

I remember somebody asking online a while back, “Why the hate for web3?” And someone I know responded by saying “We hate it because we understand it.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

But look, just because blockchains are powering crypto ponzi schemes and N F fucking Ts, it’s worth remembering that it’s also simply a technology. It’s a technological solution in search of a problem.

To be fair, it’s still early days. After all, it’s only been over a decade now.

It’s like the law of instrument says; when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Blockchain is like that. Except the hammer is also made of glass.

Anyway, Lola is going to defend the indefensible and talk about blockchain. One thing to keep in mind is this: remember when everyone was talking about “The Cloud”? And then it turned out that you could substitute the phrase “someone else’s server” for “The Cloud?” Well, every time you hear Lola say the word “blockchain”, I’d like you to mentally substitute the phrase “multiple copies of a spreadsheet.”

Please give an open mind and a warm welcome to Lola Oyelayo Pearson!

I got some laughs. I also got lots of gasps and pearl-clutching, as though I were saying something taboo. Welcome to San Francisco.

Lola gave as good as she got. I got a roasting in her talk.

And just to clarify, Lola and I are friends—this was a consensual smackdown.

There was a very serious point to Lola’s talk. Cryptobollocks and other blockchain-powered schemes have historically been very bro-y, and exploitative of non-bro communities. Lola wants to fight that trend.

I get it. But it reminds me a bit of the justifications you hear from people who go to work at Facebook claiming that they can do more good from the inside. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

The crux of Lola’s belief is this: blockchain technology is inevitable, therefore it is uncumbent on us as ethical designers to ensure that the technology is deployed in a way that empowers people instead of exploiting them.

But I take issue with the premise. Blockchain technology is not inevitable. That’s the worst kind of technological determinism. It’s defeatist. It’s a depressing view of “progress” driven not by people, but by technological forces beyond our control.

I refuse to accept that anti-humanist deterministic view.

In any case, for technological determinism to have any validity, there needs to be something to it. At least virtual reality and machine learning are based on some actual technologies. In the case of cryptobollocks, there is no there there. There is nothing except the hype, which is why you’ll see blockchain enthusiasts trying to ride the coattails of trending technologies in a logical fallacy that goes something like this:

1. There are technologies that will be really big in the future,
2. blockchain is a technology, therefore
3. blockchain will be really big in the future.

Blockchain is bullshit. It isn’t even very clever bullshit. And it certainly isn’t inevitable.

I’ve spent the last few days in San Francisco where I was hosting Leading Design.

It was excellent. Rebecca did an absolutely amazing job with the curation, and the Clearleft delivered a terrific event, as always. I’m continually amazed by the way such a relatively small agency can punch above its weight when it comes to putting on world-class events and delivering client work.

I won’t go into much detail on what was shared at Leading Design. There’s an understanding that it’s a safe space for people to speak freely and share their experiences in an open and honest way. I can tell you that there were some tough topics. Given the recent rounds of layoffs in this neck of the woods, this was bound to happen.

I was chatting with Peter at breakfast on the second day and he was saying that maybe there was too much emphasis on the negative, like we were in danger of wallowing in our own misery. It’s a fair point, but I offered a counterpoint that I also heard other people express: when else do these people get a chance to let their guard down and have a good ol’ moan? These are design leaders who need to project an air of calm reassurance when they’re at work. Leading Design is a welcome opportunity to just let it all out.

When we did Leading Design in New York in March of 2022, it was an intimate gathering and the overwhelming theme was togetherness. After two years of screen-based interactions, it was cathartic to get together in the same location to swap stories and be reminded you are not alone.

Leading Design San Francisco was equally cathartic, but the theme this time was change. Change can be scary. But it can also be energising.

After two days of introducing and listening to fascinating talks on the topic of change, I closed out my duties by quoting the late great Octavia Butler. I spoke the mantra of the secular Earthseed religion founded in Parable Of The Sower:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

When Our Tools Hold Us Back | OddBird

What happens if the ‘pace layers’ get out of sync?

A very thoughtful post by Miriam on how tools can adversely affect the pace of progress in the world of web standards.

When tools intervene between you and your access to the web platform, proceed with caution. Ask not only: How well does it work? But also: How well does it fail? Not only: What features do they provide? But also: What features do they prevent?

Envisioning Our Shared Storm with Andrew Dana Hudson - Long Now

This observation feels spot-on to me:

The shift that I noticed, totally anecdotally, is literary writers are starting to write more dystopian climate futures and science fiction writers are starting to write about climate solutions.

The Future History of the Nuclear Renaissance With Isabelle Boemeke

I really like the format of this bit of journo-fiction. An interview from the future looking back at the turning point of today.

It probably helps that I’m into nuclearpunk just as much as solarpunk, so I approve this message.

Atomkraft? Ja, bitte!

Practice the future | A Working Library

I want to posit that, in a time of great uncertainty—in an era of climate change and declining freedom, of attrition and layoffs and burnout, of a still-unfolding rearrangement of our relationship to work—we would do well to build more space for practicing the future. Not merely anticipating it or fearing it or feeding our anxiety over the possibilities—but for building the skill and strength and habits to nurture the future we need. We can’t control what comes next, of course. But we can nudge, we can push, we can guide and shape, we can have an impact. We can move closer to the future we want to live in, no matter how far away it seems to be.