Rolandt

This is one of those stupid 'you have two free articles left' pages, but if you're blocked you can find most of it reprinted here or here. The hook is that LinkedIn's recruitment AI was biased (cue the moral panic) but the main lesson people should be taking away from this article (and the reason why it's worth reading) is that it describes how AI is used for recruiting. "ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn—most of the world’s biggest job search sites use AI to match people with job openings." Why is this important? Because when this effort succeeds (and it will) then we will have no particular need for degrees, certificates and credentials. And when that happens, the historical monopoly education institutions have over recognition and assessment will end, which disrupts one of their core value propositions. When the university degree is no longer relevant, it's hard to imagine people paying tens of thousands of dollars to obtain one. Oh, and the AI bias? Even at its worst, I would say, it's far less than the historical bias found in academic institutions.

The Windows 11 announcement was fun and interesting, but there is a reason that Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft's business.

From Ian Sherr, writing about last week’s Windows 11 announcement for CNET:

When you choose a computer or smartphone to buy these days, you have to pick between several factions. There’s Apple world, which includes the Mac computer, iPhones and iPads, all designed to work together to help you share files, video chat and watch TV as easily as possible. There’s also Google land, whose Android software powers an array of phones, tablets and computers. But with Windows 11, Microsoft wants to break that mold.

The software giant said Thursday that its next major version of Windows will launch as a free upgrade this fall, offering a host of new features that in some ways appear designed to position Microsoft as the company whose products work with ones from Apple, Google and pretty much anyone else.

The company’s expanding its support for the Android app for example, allowing people to more easily run phone apps on their computer. Microsoft’s building its Teams software into Windows in a similar way as Apple’s FaceTime is built into Macs — except Microsoft doesn’t want it to be exclusive. There’s already a Microsoft Teams app for Mac, iPhones and Androids. (Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even told a reporter he’d be happy to accept FaceTime onto Microsoft computers.)

I really enjoyed this event; coming in at a tight 44 minutes and 51 seconds, it had a sort of playfulness and lightness that felt like a big contrast to Apple’s COVID-era commercial-like presentations. It feels like a bit of a role reversal from twenty years ago when Microsoft would have grand over-produced events at CES while Apple put on budget productions at Macworld.

That’s not a surprise, when you think about it: back then new versions of Windows meant new experiences for basically everyone who used a computer, new opportunities for developers, and new reasons to worry for competitors scared that this might be the year Microsoft made their products a feature. Apple, on the other hand, had nothing to lose.

Today is the opposite: Apple reigns supreme over the computing landscape. iOS 15 will bring new experiences to a billion users, new APIs provide new opportunities for developers, and Apple isn’t just building in features that hurt competitors, but creating new ones (i.e. Facebook and app install advertising); it is Windows that feels like it has nothing to lose.

The End of Windows

Of course Windows remains essential software, with a billion-plus user base of its own, and a critical part of the enterprise landscape in particular (although, as the company highlighted in the presentation, COVID re-established the importance of the PC for consumers as well). What gives Microsoft more freedom-of-movement, though, is that Windows is no longer the core of its business. This remains CEO Satya Nadella’s biggest triumph; I recounted how he shifted the company away from its Windows-centricity in 2018’s The End of Windows:

The story of Windows’ decline is relatively straightforward and a classic case of disruption:

• The Internet dramatically reduced application lock-in
• PCs became “good enough”, elongating the upgrade cycle
• Smartphones first addressed needs the PC couldn’t, then over time started taking over PC functionality directly

What is more interesting, though, is the story of Windows’ decline in Redmond, culminating with last week’s reorganization that, for the first time since 1980, left the company without a division devoted to personal computer operating systems (Windows was split, with the core engineering group placed under Azure, and the rest of the organization effectively under Office 365; there will still be Windows releases, but it is no longer a standalone business). Such a move didn’t seem possible a mere five years ago, when, in the context of another reorganization, former-CEO Steve Ballmer wrote a memo insisting that Windows was the future…

Thus my assertion at the top, that the story of how Microsoft came to accept the reality of Windows’ decline is more interesting than the fact of Windows’ decline; this is how CEO Satya Nadella convinced the company to accept the obvious.

The rest of that article walks through how Nadella led Microsoft to that point, including Office on iPad, several of his strategy memos, and killing Windows Phone; I know it’s a cliché to say that something makes for a great business case study, but this really makes for a great business case study!

What Nadella’s change management also enabled was, to steal the title from Joanna Stern’s delightful interview with Nadella, a new “Start” for Windows:

Yes, the reference was about moving the ‘Start’ menu to the center, but it applies to the Windows opportunity as well, and that opportunity only exists because what came before was already ended.

Apple’s Self-Reliance

To return to the Windows/Mac comparison of twenty years ago, Apple’s problem was certainly a lack of developers, but that was, above all, because the company simply didn’t have enough users. The way the company fixed the problem was exactly what you would expect from Apple: they relied on themselves. One of the most brilliant and underrated moves of the Steve Jobs era was the development of the iLife suite of apps — iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, and GarageBand. I noted last year in Apple’s Shifting Differentiation:

OS X brought software to the forefront, delivering not simply a technically sound operating system, but one that was based on Unix, making it particularly attractive to developers. And, on the consumer side, Apple released iLife, a suite of applications that made a Mac useful for normal users. I myself bought my first Mac in this era because I wanted to use GarageBand; 16 years on and my musical ambitions are abandoned, but my Mac usage remains.

By that point I was buying a Mac despite its hardware: while my iBook was attractive enough, its processor was a Motorola G4 that was not remotely competitive with Intel’s x86 processors; later that year Jobs made the then-shocking-but-in-retrospect-obvious decision to shift Macs to Intel processors. In this case having the same hardware as everyone else in the industry would be a big win for Apple, the better to let their burgeoning software differentiation shine.

The point of that article, which I wrote upon the release of the M1 Macs, is that Apple’s software differentiation, particularly in the case of the Mac, was the smallest it had been in many years, which is why it was appropriate that the company’s differentiation was shifting back to hardware. Interestingly, though, that means that Microsoft is by definition on the other side of that coin: to the extent that Apple Silicon is superior to x86 (or other ARM chips) is the extent to which Windows is at a disadvantage.

The Bill Gates Line

Microsoft, like Apple, is responding by doing what they do best, but, because it’s Microsoft, it’s the exact opposite of Apple: instead of more deeply integrating and doing everything themselves in an attempt to appeal to consumers, they are opening up and removing limitations in an attempt to appeal to developers, and by extension consumers who don’t want to be bound into Apple’s ecosystem.

Nadella expounded on this in a really excellent interview with Nilay Patel at The Verge:

Patel: That brings me to some of the big changes in Windows, which are fundamentally about what kind of operating system Windows is going to be and what kind of businesses you can run on it and what kind of business will that be for Microsoft.

There is a new user interface. The Start button is in the center of the screen. There’s cosmetic differences. But you’re also allowing Android apps to run on Windows. You are integrating the Amazon Android app store. You’ve made some changes to the store economics. You’ve reduced Microsoft’s cut to 15 percent. That’s in comparison to the very controversial 30 percent that Apple charges.

Then you’re saying to developers, “You can be in our store and you can not pay us a cut at all if you want to use your own payment model.” How much of that is opportunistic changes — you’re seeing all the controversy and you sense a market opportunity? And how much of it is this being the correct way to shift your business?

Nadella: I think it’s driven by competition. What I mean by that is – what should Microsoft do to manage the platform and the platform rules such that we can thrive in that role?

The way I’ve interpreted what platforms do is: they have to create opportunity for people who build on the platform. That’s the way to keep a platform relevant. If you’re creating a great opportunity for others to be born on your platform and scale on your platform — that’s the Microsoft I grew up in. That’s the Windows I grew up with. Whether it is the Adobe folks creating their Creative Cloud or SAP building their ERP [enterprise resource planning] business. Or in today’s world, whether it’s Discord building their community for gamers on Windows or any other business.

To me, how do we make Windows more vibrant going forward?

I sense a real opportunity, because the other two ecosystems that are at scale, for their own internally consistent set of reasons, have conflated — at least in my mind — the platform and the aggregation layer with one set of rules. There’s no reason why there should be one set of rules. They can be disaggregated. After all, we do have a store. We do have commerce. You can use it all or you can bring your own. That’s [a] practical thing for Microsoft to do.

I’m not even trying to make some value statement that Microsoft is virtuous here and others are not. Others have chosen it for whatever reasons they have. This is a design choice and a business model choice. I want to make our own set of design and business model choices so that creators find more choice.

It’s easy — and right! — to note that Microsoft definitely has nothing to lose when it comes to app stores. They don’t make that much money from the Windows App Store, and they (still) need to get more consumer apps for their platform. At the same time, Nadella’s framing of history very much fits with how Microsoft has always thought about Windows; I called it The Bill Gates Line:

Over the last few weeks I have been exploring what differences there are between platforms and aggregators, and was reminded of this anecdote from Chamath Palihapitiya in an interview with Semil Shah:

Semil Shah: Do you see any similarities from your time at Facebook with Facebook platform and connect, and how Uber may supercharge their platform?

Chamath: Neither of them are platforms. They’re both kind of like these comical endeavors that do you as an Nth priority. I was in charge of Facebook Platform. We trumpeted it out like it was some hot shit big deal. And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates, 3 or 4 months after — like our funding history was $5M, $83 M, $500M, and then $15B. When that 15B happened a few months after Facebook Platform and Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”

By this measure Windows was indeed the ultimate platform — the company used to brag about only capturing a minority of the total value of the Windows ecosystem — and the operating system’s clear successors are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s own Azure Cloud Services. In all three cases there are strong and durable businesses to be built on top.

Nadella referenced this exact point in the interview:

Nadella: In our case at Microsoft, I’ve always felt that, at least the definition of a platform is: if something bigger than the platform can’t be born, then it’s not a platform. The web, it grew up on Windows. Think about it. If we said, “All of commerce is only mediated through us,” Amazon couldn’t exist, if we had somehow said, “We’re going to have our own commerce model.”

Therefore I think each company has to choose and see what aggregation layer, what platform layer, [and] what rules work for them and their ecosystem. But, in our case, it’s very clear to us that we do want to solve for the same security issues, [and] discoverability issues, because that’s one of the reasons why we’re emphasizing the store. At the same time, the store can be used at different levels by different creators. We want to have that flexibility be a competitive differentiation.

There is, to be clear, some amount of motivated reasoning here; in response to a question as to whether Microsoft would allow Google’s Play Store on Windows (the answer is yes), one of the examples Nadella cited positively was the existence of multiple marketplaces for games, from the Microsoft Store to the XBox Game Pass to Steam to Epic. I can tell you, though, that when I worked on the initial version of the Microsoft Store a decade ago there was a lot of consternation that Steam had built what Microsoft felt it should have; what if the company had realized the app store opportunity first? Would it be so laid back about competing models if there were billions of dollars at stake?

Perhaps not, but I think that is a blessing in disguise. It’s hard to feel great about the impact of the App Store on Apple from any angle other than a financial one; it’s not simply a strategy tax, but a cultural one, not only poisoning the company’s relationship with developers but actually resulting in a worse experience for users, and it carries huge regulatory risk.

Return of Windows?

Back in 2005 Paul Graham wrote Return of the Mac:

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get. The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?…

If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good. And open and good is what Macs are again, finally.

So Windows is open, both in terms of the software you can write on it, the software you can run, and the business models you can employ; Microsoft has thrown the doors wide open to everyone. That leads to the next obvious question: is it good? Certainly this approach is going to lead to a lot of inconsistency; Patel asked Nadella what was the best argument against Android apps on Windows:

Nadella: I think always the argument will be, “do we have to have a consistent app model?” Because if you think about innovation — is there is some kind of NUI or even an AI chip that we want to light up? How can the APIs of that be lit up in such a way that this application can take advantage of it? When you have multiple subsystems and multiple app models, can you surface your platform system-level innovation such that all apps light up?

That is going to be the fundamental challenge in such a world, but we feel that there are ways. One of the ways I look at this is you can light an Android app or a PWA app or a UWP app on Windows in the future, or even today, for some of the new AI APIs.

At Microsoft we build for iOS, we build for Android, we build for Windows. That’s one of [our] fundamental challenges. We’re trying to make sure that as developers, we can leverage as much of the common code base, as much of the cloud, but at the same time, be native on each platform.

Nadella’s last point actually leads to another answer to Graham’s challenge: does it matter? Apple’s shift to increasingly differentiate the Mac via hardware isn’t simply a function of the M1, but of the reality that for Macs and PCs the vast majority of essential software are web apps, or run on web technologies like Electron; meanwhile, in the one category where being native matters most — high performance games — Windows is as dominant as ever.

Perhaps that is why this presentation felt so playful and light: it might not matter. Windows is an essential business, but Nadella reduced its importance to Microsoft not out of spite, but because the the world had already changed before the company did.

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Western Digital customers who had configured the company’s external hard drives to be remotely accessible are waking up to find all their data erased. WD has downplayed the problem, hiding its response in a support update. Should WD be addressing the problem more visibly, or is this a case of “buyer beware?” According to Krebs … Continued

The post After hackers wipe Western Digital hard drives, WD hides from the problem appeared first on without bullshit.

This is well worth reading, and Ben asks all the right questions (with a lot of in-depth reference material).

We are, indeed, living in interesting times.

This morning GitHub made a big announcement: Introducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer. Everybody's talking about it. And for good reason -- it looks really cool.

But my own reactions are mixed. I admire the accomplishment, and I am eager to try it, but I am also troubled by the apparent trend.

This blog entry is my attempt to write about that. As I begin, I hope the paragraphs below favor questions over judgments. I hope to express my feelings and perspectives without being critical of others. I hope to write something that is not just another "get off my lawn" rant. Let's see if I succeed.

In short: It looks to me like AI-assisted software development is just getting started, and will probably become a very big thing. And, it feels to me like yet another step toward shallow understanding in our field.

Hmmm. That last sentence looks kinda harsh. I wonder if I've already crossed the line I didn't want to cross.

Let me try to say this another way.

In my nearly 4 decades of writing code, I have consistently found that the most valuable thing is to know how things work. Nothing in software development is more effective than the ability to see deeper. To borrow Joel Spolsky's terminology, I claim that almost all abstractions are leakier than you think, so it is valuable to see through them.

• Knowing how to allocate and free memory is one thing. Much better is to have understanding of how the memory allocator works. That is the kind of depth that gives me what I need to make decisions.

• Writing SQL statements is fairly easy. But there is a lot going on under the hood. The whole experience goes so much better if I understand indexes and table scans and lock escalation.

• Networking code? Don't even get me started.

I am utterly convinced that deep understanding is important.

But increasingly, I feel like I'm swimming upstream. It seems like most people in our industry care far more about "how to do" rather than "how does it work".

And yes, there are good reasons for this. People have jobs. An employer's expectations are typically about getting things done.

So I am not saying it is unimportant know how to do things. Rather, what I'm saying is that after I understand how things work, seeing how to do something is usually trivial. And the next time I need to figure "how to do", it will go faster.

But the world and I seem to be at odds about this. I feel like I crash into this conflict every. single. day.

• A lot of programming documentation is structured around the steps to follow to perform a certain job, but that is almost never what I'm looking for.

• On question/answer sites, it seems like every interesting question yields responses from people saying "You shouldn't do that", which seems unhelpful.

• After years of seeing people say "Don't write your own crypto", I made peace with it, but now I see "Don't write your own X" for all kinds of X. I mean, if we want X in the world, somebody has to write it, right?

• Last week I was trying to confirm that the CIL castclass instruction returns the same object reference it was given (when it doesn't throw). Previous people who asked this question were mostly told some form of "you shouldn't need to know that". But surely somebody on this planet needs to know that?

• Most people facing a software problem will move forward as soon as they are unblocked, without stopping to learn why the given solution worked.

I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of people saying "I did (whatever) and the problem went away".

Most online interaction I have with other software developers results in me feeling different and alone.

But I remain "utterly convinced". I have bet my career on the importance of depth, and I will continue to do so. And, when given the opportunity to guide and mentor younger people, I steer them along the same path.

And yet, as the trends in the industry seem to move away from me, I am forced to wonder about how well my own experience will map onto a very different future. Am I giving newbies bad advice when I suggest (for example) that they learn what's really going on with async/await?

Sometimes I worry that my posture is a form of gatekeeping. I don't want to be someone who insists that everybody's path needs to mirror mine. If you are having an enjoyable and successful software career without studying stuff like two's-complement arithmetic and B-trees, I am happy for you. But do I believe, broadly speaking, that your career would take another positive step every time you learn more? Yeah, I do.

Simply put, I see two basic possibilities here. Either I am correct, and technical depth is still important even as fewer people value it, or I am a dinosaur, and nature has selected my kind for extinction.

So... GitHub Copilot looks like fun. But the day is coming soon when I'm going to see somebody respond to a coding question with "Why are you asking this? Just use the AI pair programmer." And I'm probably going to throw a tantrum.

Introduction to Modern Statistics by Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel and Johanna Hardin is a free-to-download book:

Introduction to Modern Statistics is a re-imagining of a previous title, Introduction to Statistics with Randomization and Simulation book. The new book puts a heavy emphasis on exploratory data analysis (specifically exploring multivariate relationships using visualization, summarization, and descriptive models) and provides a thorough discussion of simulation-based inference using randomization and bootstrapping, followed by a presentation of the related Central Limit Theorem based approaches.

Read it in the browser or buy a print version. A good deal either way.

Tags: book, introduction

“The pandemic has exposed many uncomfortable truths about Canadian society, among them, the limits of our healthcare system, tragic flaws in long-term care, our systemic racism, and our inability to protect the most at risk when an infectious threat arrives in our midst. As our multi-faceted study finds, it appears that we failed to notice two-thirds of all those who died of COVID-19 outside of the long-term care sector, most likely in financially precarious, racialized communities. It’s critical that we now work urgently to protect those most at risk with intensive, frequent, and accessible testing, public health outreach and information, and ensuring these communities are among the highest priority recipients for both doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Too many lives are at stake to delay action, as our report raises the possibility that at this moment there may be twice as many people dying than we know.”

Excess All-Cause Mortality During the COVID-19 Epidemic in Canada

How is it possible to miss so many deaths? There are of course multiple reasons, but the one that stands out is a failure to recognize that deaths for other reasons than COVID declined during the pandemic. For instance, when a lot of travel is avoided there is less traffic and thus fewer collisions. There is also the difficulty of recognising symptoms correctly, especially when you not do anything like the number of tests that other countries did/do. But the one that stands out for me is “the country’s slow system for reporting causes of death, [which] left Canada without a crucial warning system to alert officials to the worrisome number of deaths happening outside of long-term care.”

It turns out that other countries are much better at tracking causes of death. They also suffer from the current constant attacks on government bureaucracy as unnecessary, expensive and meddlesome when in fact regulations and their enforcement came into being because the lack of them, which caused issues, like death. As long as the politicians in charge of the system insist that the only policies that they will adopt reduce the size of government and its “burden” on the people then we will be plagued. The recent building collapse in Florida, which so far appears to have killed ten people, has yet to be allocated a determined cause. But at the same time as that investigation is going on you can bet that developers are bleating about the delays of their profits due to the need for inspections and permits on construction and renovation.

A similar problem is evident right now. People are dying due to the heat wave. Some police forces were a bit quicker off the mark of reporting these deaths than others. ‘The province’s chief coroner says there have been 233 sudden deaths during the “heat dome.”’

But that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that we have known for a certainty that this was going to happen. Anthropogenic climate change due to trapped gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides and methane in the atmosphere due to burning fossil fuels has been an established scientific fact for a long time. Not that you would have noticed that at the time thanks to the oil, gas and coal industries and their tame politicians and mass media companies.

In exactly the same way Public Health and Statistics Canada – and lots of other agencies – have been under constant pressure to cut costs and reduce the “burden of taxation”. The people making the most noise being those who long decided that they weren’t going to pay any tax at all.

So end of my rant. Return to the report in question – which you can download for free as a full report or summary.

“Established by the President of the Royal Society of Canada in April 2020, the RSC Task Force on COVID-19 was mandated to provide evidence-informed perspectives on major societal challenges in response to and recovery from COVID-19. 

“The Task Force established a series of Working Groups to rapidly develop Policy Briefings, with the objective of supporting policy makers with evidence to inform their decisions.

“It is widely assumed that 80 per cent of Canada’s deaths due to COVID-19 occurred among older adult residents of long-term care homes, a proportion double the 40-per-cent average of peer countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But an indepth analysis of all deaths that have so far been reported across Canada during the pandemic casts doubt on this estimate. It reveals evidence that at least two thirds of the deaths caused by COVID-19 in communities outside of the long-term care sector may have been missed.”

Authors of the Report

Tara J. Moriarty (Chair), Faculties of Dentistry and Medicine Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto

Anna E. Boczula, Faculties of Dentistry and Medicine Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto

Eemaan Kaur Thind, Independent public health professional

Janet E. McElhaney, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Health Sciences North Research Institute

Nora Loreto, Independent journalist

The revelations around the horrors of the residential school burial grounds and the shameful past we are forced to confront are overwhelming. First nations in Canada have long been telling these stories and now there is no longer any possibility of denial. It has cast a pall over the annual celebration of our national day and hopefully forced a time of deep reflection. But this is only one aspect of a puncturing of comfortable assertions of our identity as a welcoming, tolerant and inclusive society. We are daily learning through the media of multiple forms of racism, misogyny and homophobia. Someone not here and only getting news reports might easily conclude that we live in a horrific, dystopian and hypocritical society. 

Yet at the same time as my wife Eti and I have criss-crossed much of the city on foot and by bike over these past months, it has been hard not to be deeply impressed by full spectrum of humanity in every conceivable way, age, ethnicity, income, gender etc. all sharing our city, enjoying the spacers we inhabit together, our parks, our magnificent waterfront, our ravines and trails and local main streets, and each other’s company. I honestly don’t know of many (any?) places that would equal this. 

Both these things are true. We live in a remarkable city and country and yet it is deeply flawed with an appalling legacy of injustices and bigotry that we still live with. How to come to terms with this. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” 

On June 26th Vancouver-based reporter published an article in the Toronto Star which chronicled how Canada’s citizenship study guide for newcomers has evolved from 1947 to today. It is a moving target and depending on how you look at it, progress has been rapid or depressingly slow. But it is mostly trending in one direction, seeking an expanding definition of what it means to be Canadian and an growing (if grudging) acknowledgement of first nations and the negative impacts of European settlement even as a gap remains between aspiration and reality. Below are excerpts from different versions of the guide. 

1947 

Prior to 1947, people living in Canada were British subjects. But that all changed at the end of the Second World War, when Paul Martin Sr., then a Liberal cabinet minister and secretary of state, visited the Canadian war cemetery in Dieppe, France. It is said that visit inspired him to create legislation that would formally recognize Canadian citizenship. 

The first version of the citizenship guide boasts of Canada’s emergence from the war as a “great nation. “Her vast resources, her agricultural and industrial capacity, exercise a profound influence on world affairs,” the guide states. “Her people, drawn from every racial group, are welded into a mighty democratic force through their love of freedom, hatred of oppression, and the steadfast determination that the powers of government shall be exercised by and through the people for the common benefit of all.” 

There is a lengthy recitation of the arrival of European settlers but scant mention of their interaction with Indigenous Peoples. 

1964 

The 1964 version of the citizenship guide highlights Canada as a “nation of immigrants.” 

“All have brought with them the traditions of their various countries and cultures. They have settled in Canada, have become a part of it but, at the same time, they have contributed to the cultural diversity which is characteristic of the country,” the guide states. 

The guide notes that a “very small part” of the Canadian population is composed of “native Indians and Eskimos” who had been “living here for thousands of years before the first European arrived.” 

“In this sense they are the most truly Canadian of the country’s citizens.” 

Despite this acknowledgment, Indigenous people are only briefly mentioned elsewhere in the guide in the context of the fur trade and “violent wars ... among the Indian tribes who had allied themselves with either French or British settlers.” 

1975 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canada, under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, formally adopted policies of bilingualism and multiculturalism. 

These developments are reflected in the opening pages of the 1975 citizenship guide. 

“Newcomers find it an advantage to learn at least one of these languages for their everyday use in Canada,” the guide states. 

“This does not mean by any means that you have to give up your own culture and traditions, as Canada is also officially a multicultural country. Through the Canadian government’s multicultural policy you can maintain your inherited culture and share it with your fellow-Canadians. In this way, all Canada will be richer, in developing a new identity that is drawn from all parts in the world.” 

1995 

Pride in the different cultural and ethnic groups that live and work “together in harmony” is emphasized in the opening pages of the 1995 citizenship guide. So is the idea of equality. “We have shown how much we value this idea by having it written into the Constitution as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” 

For the first time, would-be Canadians are introduced to some of Canada’s symbols, including the beaver, the red-and-white maple leaf flag and the Queen as head of state. 

The guide also devotes a section to the “Aboriginal Peoples of Canada.” 

“When Europeans arrived in what is now Canada, they began to make agreements, or treaties, with Aboriginal Peoples. The treaty making process meant that Aboriginal people gave up their title to lands in exchange for certain rights and benefits. Most of the agreements included reserving pieces of land to be used only by Aboriginal Peoples. These pieces of land are called ‘reserves,’” the guide states. 

“Today, Aboriginal groups and the Canadian government continue to negotiate new agreements for land and the recognition of other rights. Aboriginal Peoples in Canada are working to keep their unique cultures and languages alive. They are trying to regain control over decisions that affect their lives — in other words, to become self-governed. Aboriginal Peoples continue to play an active role in building the future of Canada.” 

2000-2002 

At the start of the 21st century, the citizenship guide’s opening pages highlight Canada’s “genius” for compromise and coexistence and for being a peaceful nation. 

“Canadian history and traditions have created a country where our values include tolerance and respect for cultural differences, and a commitment to social justice,” the guide states. In the 2002 version, the word “tolerance” is dropped. 

A nod is given to the millions of immigrants who have helped build the country. Indigenous people are said to constitute an important part of the country’s population and are described as “working to protect and promote their languages, cultures and traditions and acquire self-government.” 

2009-2012 

Newcomers are told they “must” learn about Canada’s history, symbols, democratic institutions and geography. The guide also impresses upon would-be citizens the idea of “shared traditions, identities and values.” 

Language reinforcing “the equality of women and men” is introduced for the first time. 

“In Canada, men and women are equal under the law,” the guide states. “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’ female genital mutilation or other gender-based violence. Those guilty of these crimes are severely punished under Canada’s criminal laws.” 

For the first time, the guide touches on how the arrival of European traders, missionaries, soldiers and colonists “changed the native way of life forever.” 

“Large numbers of Aboriginals died of European diseases to which they lacked immunity. However, Aboriginals and Europeans formed strong economic and military bonds in the first 200 years of coexistence, which laid the foundations of Canada.” 

There is a passing reference to how treaties “were not always fully respected.” A paragraph is devoted to how the government “placed” Indigenous children in residential schools. 

“The schools were poorly funded and inflicted hardship on the students; some students were physically abused,” the guide states. “Aboriginal languages and cultural practices were mostly prohibited. In 2008, Ottawa formally apologized to the former students.” 

The guide includes a list of notable Canadians behind great discoveries and inventions. 

They are all men. 

Coming next 

The current version hasn’t been updated in more than a decade, drawing criticism for using outdated terminology and leaving out or sanitizing darker moments of Canada’s past, including attempts to forcibly assimilate Indigenous Peoples. 

In 2015, one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “calls to action” included that the information kit for newcomers “reflect a more inclusive history of the diverse Aboriginal Peoples of Canada, including information about the Treaties and the history of residential schools.” 

The current guide includes only one paragraph on residential schools. 

The federal government now says it expects to roll out later this year a revamped study guide that will present a more “honest” portrait of the country’s past and present. 

The guide will include a section outlining the government’s attempts to compel Indigenous Peoples to adopt European customs through policies “designed to end Indigenous ways of life, languages and spiritual beliefs.” 

The new guide will also touch on (among other injustices) the history of slavery in Canada and the Underground Railroad; discrimination against Chinese immigrants through the head tax; the Komagata Maru incident that saw more than 350 South Asian migrants denied entry to Canada; the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War; the demolition of Africville, a community of Black Canadians in Halifax, in the 1960s; and Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women. 

It will also include an acknowledgment of the existence of systemic racism and efforts to combat it, as well as new information on a variety of historically under-represented groups, such as Francophones, women, Black Canadians, the LGBTQ2 community and Canadians with disabilities. 

It is hardly surprising that this multi-generational journey has been slow and bumpy. The privileges enjoyed by what was a largely white relatively homogeneous patriarchal majority are not given up easily. As the demographics shift occurs it is also not surprising that some elements of that dominant group are fearful and uncertain about their role in a vastly different country and sometimes react to the loss of unquestioned assumptions of superiority with resistance from micro-aggressions to actual violence. But this backlash only means we need to redouble our efforts. 

This Canada Day is clearly not a time for self-congratulation, rather a moment for soul searching and a renewed commitment to acknowledge our failings and act to address the undeniable challenges in making our world more equitable and inclusive. I feel privileged to be here and able to strive to make our shared aspirations a reality. 

This sequence of images from the citizenship guides gives some sense of the shifting landscape. 

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Given the events of the last year and a half this is an interesting and topical discussion, but I want to be clear that the act 'to cancel' is something that came into existence only when people of privilege began facing consequences for their actions. That's why it's not surprising to find some forms of cancellation (like the 'Karen' phenomenon) specifically targeting a less privileged class. And (again in my view) the idea of 'cancel culture' is about those people of privilege appropriating the language of people who have very genuinely faced discrimination from that same privileged class. It's like they're saying "what you're doing to us is the same as what we've done to you," when of course there's utterly no comparison. Now, having said that, the interesting parts of this post revolve around what what 'cancellation' is (I would ask, are social norms really enforced by individuals calling out transgressions) and who is responsible (is it 'cancellation' only if it results in sanctions by employers, advertisers, and other authorities?).

We’ve started to actively manage some of our family investments. It’s entertaining me, and I notice people really like talking about money, so why not talk about it here? This is the start of a new blog category.

[Important: I have no training or expertise in managing money, am not trying to influence or convince anyone, and you would be very foolish to treat this as investment advice, because it isn’t.]

[Also important: I think it’s important that you know about the financial interests of anyone whose words you’re reading, and any potential conflicts of interest. I will likely write positively or negatively about areas where I’m invested, and I think I owe my readers disclosure. So I might as well make blog fodder out of it.]

Background

I’ve been employed in the high-tech sector since 1981, my spouse since 1990 or so; salaries are good, stock options pay off sometimes, and we’ve had strokes of luck. We think we have enough saved up to get us by and educate our kids.

So we’ve parked the savings with a smallish money-management firm who build customers a conservative, balanced, and diversified portfolio in exchange for a very small fully-disclosed fee. The effect is that the money (net of fees) grows, not as fast as the stock market does when it’s on a tear (as at the moment) and when the market’s tumbling, shrinks a lot less.

This approach has worked OK for us — my involvement is limited to glancing at the balance once or twice a month — but I’m not claiming it’s the only way; I know people in similar situations who get good results working with giants like Fidelity and Vanguard.

We have a family corporation because back in the Nineties when I was an indie, IBM wanted me to consult for them but wouldn’t do the deal if we weren’t a company. Lauren’s used it since then to facilitate her consulting practice. Then, this year, the company had a little windfall when a US M&A deal unexpectedly turned some shares I’d earned at another advisory gig into cash.

So, rather than put the new eggs in the existing money-management basket, and because it wasn’t that much money, we decided to run it ourselves.

By the way: Canadian tax law means that a great big chunk of the windfall will eventually go off to Ottawa. Which I’m OK with; being Canadian is, on balance, a good financial bargain.

When we talked about managing this money ourselves, we agreed on a set of principles aimed at minimizing stress and maximizing peace-of-mind. Here they are.

Principle: Be careful

We’re cautious, no gambling instinct at all. So there’ll be no big white-knuckle bets like short-selling or option-writing.

Also, we believe in the conventional wisdom about buying low-cost ETFs not shares or mutuals, about diversifying, about not trying to time the market, and so on.

Principle: Do no harm

We are not gonna route money to anything that’s a significant contributor to the climate emergency.

Similarly, we’ll try to avoid supporting oppressive governments such as China’s and technologies which aim to achieve damaging ends, such as AdTech, surveillance, or the gig economy.

I’m starting to see interesting progressive investment opportunities; we’ll watch that space.

Principle: Support the transition

We think that fortunes will be made in transitioning the energy economy to clean, renewable sources. Others will be made remediating the damaging effects of climate change. Also, the planet needs these things to happen. So they feel like two good sectors to invest in.

Principle: Short bad tech

We have unusually deep exposure to the technology business. Still, I’d be nervous about trying to pick winners.

But, looking back, I’ve been good at spotting technology crazes that were empty at their core and failed to deliver value, and also big well-regarded companies that were making bad technology bets. On social media, I’ve sneered freely at various technologies I didn’t like. Now I can put a little money where my mouth is.

Going forward

I expect there to be occasional short blog pieces in which I discuss individual investment moves. I hope they start arguments. I’ll be honest when we turn out to have been wrong, and try to (at least mostly) restrain my gloating when we’re right.

I just bought put options on MicroStrategy ($MSTR), Coinbase ($COIN), and Purpose Bitcoin ETF ($BTCC-B.TO), all at a strike price not far off the current (late June) price, expiring around Christmas. Here’s the thinking.

Context

But first: This is part of this blog’s Investing theme, whose Intro makes it clear that I have no investment expertise and nobody should take this as investment advice, because it’s not. It’s just a bloggy disclosure of some of my own financial positions, which I owe readers anyhow.

Disclosures

I have personally made money buying and selling Bitcoin.

While I’m an admirer of the technology, I’ve repeatedly criticized Bitcoin specifically and blockchain in general, on the grounds that I’ve seen no practical real-world applications.

Beliefs

I believe the following things about Bitcoin. This is not a scholarly article so I’m not going to provide references, but I’ve seen enough evidence that I’m willing to bet my own money based on them.

1. A high proportion of all Bitcoins are owned by insiders; miners and people close to the exchanges. Their cost basis is much lower than the current Bitcoin price, and that cost is in practice sunk.

2. Bitcoin is not usable as a currency because the transaction costs and latency are both too high. (Yes, I know about the Lightning network.)

3. A high proportion of Bitcoin trading is intermediated by Tethers (USDT). There are strong reasons to suspect that Tethers are a highly unstable stablecoin. The facts about whatever backs them up are mostly unknown. In practice they’re quite difficult to convert to real money. There are repeated allegations that Tethers are created out of thin air to prop up the price of Bitcoin.

4. The Bitcoin market is largely unregulated, and it’s easy to believe that much of the trading is seriously sketchy, whether that’s based on ad-hoc Tether creation, wash trading, or other well-known pump/dump schemes. These practices have run rampant on every financial market in human history that hasn’t regulated against them fiercely. Why should Bitcoin be any different?

5. The net effect is that money flows in from, in effect, suckers and rubes, then into the pockets of the insiders. A bit goes back out to non-insiders but, as I know personally, converting Bitcoin into cash is a high-latency high-friction operation. Converting Tether to cash? Good luck with that.

6. Bitcoin’s Byzantine-generals solution, based on proof-of-waste, is unacceptable in the face of the oncoming climate crisis.

7. To the extent that Bitcoin has an ideology, it’s some sort of mutant greedhead libertarian claptrap. Most people on the scene can’t spell “ideology” and are there to make a quick speculative buck. Since Bitcoin has no practical uses, the buyer is a fool who is counting on eventually finding a greater fool.

My best guess is that pretty soon the supply of greater fools runs out. At that point the insiders holding the bulk of Bitcoins will rationally be willing to unload for dramatically lower prices, which probably leads to a dramatic deflation. This could be provoked by a Tether collapse, or legal action from any one of a number of governments, or the public exposure of egregious insider sleaze. Or some surprise of the kind that history is full of, the kind that nobody was expecting.

When will it happen? I dunno. I’ll be astonished if we get through 2021 without an explosion.

How to short Bitcoin?

The classic short would be to borrow Bitcoins and sell them, in the expectation of being able to buy them back for much less when the time comes to return them. But I’ve sold Bitcoin and I didn’t like the experience. Also, if I’m wrong, the downside is unlimited, which violates our #BeCareful investing principle. So no.

Some of the crypto exchanges offer options, including puts. But I personally have little to no faith in the integrity or durability of these organizations. Should Bitcoin take the kind of dive I expect, the chances of getting your Put exercised would be about zilch. So, no.

In Canada, there’s the Purpose Bitcoin ETF (BTCC.B on TSX), which actually trades on the mainstream market. Which I take to mean that a put option should exercise fine even during a meltdown because whoever wrote it would have had to establish their ability to cover margin. Nothing fancy about it, as I write this its assets are 21597.3588 Btc.

Then there’s this company called MicroStrategy ($MSTR) which has been around since 1989 and sells business-intelligence and analytics software. I have no idea if the software is any good.

They became infamous in March 2000 upon revealing “accounting problems”. The share price collapsed, marking the start of the dot-com crash. The US Securities & Exchange Commission sued their asses for fraud and eventually the company settled, paying big fines without admitting any guilt.

21 years later, the company still has the same CEO, Michael Saylor. His Twitter avatar now has Bitcoin-y laser eyeballs, as you can see in the tweet below.

Between August 2020 and June 2021, MicroStrategy bought a lot of Bitcoin. There’s a prominent Bitcoin-labeled pointer on the front page at microstrategy.com which leads to hope.com — Bitcoin is Hope. It’s absurd.

Recall the words “rube” and “sucker” that I used above? I think Micro­Strategy is one of those, corporately. Maybe their share price can survive the Bitcoin bet going south? But I doubt it. So I bought puts.

Finally, Coinbase. I see no reason to think they’re dishonest or stupid, and I know people who’ve used them for Bitcoin trading and came away happy. If you believe in the long-term existence of a lively Bitcoin marketplace, they’re probably a good investment. But I don’t. So, I picked up puts.

Looking forward

Puts are pretty cheap. If I’m totally wrong and Bitcoin is still sailing along at the end of 2021, I’ll be annoyed but not impoverished. If it crashes I’ll be sad for the unfortunates who lost their stakes, and entirely unsympathetic to the insider community.

Will report back.

Luke Page has a great post up with his list of YAGNI exceptions.

YAGNI - You Ain't Gonna Need It - is a rule that says you shouldn't add a feature just because it might be useful in the future - only write code when it solves a direct problem.

When should you over-ride YAGNI? When the cost of adding something later is so dramatically expensive compared with the cost of adding it early on that it's worth taking the risk. On when you know from experience that an initial investment will pay off many times over.

Lukes's exceptions to YAGNI are well chosen: things like logging, API versioning, created_at timestamps and a bias towards "store multiple X for a user" (a many-to-many relationship) if there's any inkling that the system may need to support more than one.

Because I like attempting to coin phrases, I propose we call these PAGNIs - short for Probably Are Gonna Need Its.

Here are some of mine.

A kill-switch for your mobile apps

If you're building a mobile app that talks to your API, make sure to ship a kill-switch: a mechanism by which you can cause older versions of the application to show a "you must upgrade to continue using this application" screen when the app starts up.

In an ideal world, you'll never use this ability: you'll continue to build new features to the app and make backwards-compatible changes to the API forever, such that ancient app versions keep working and new app versions get to do new things.

But... sometimes that simply isn't possible. You might discover a security hole in the design of the application or API that can only be fixed by breaking backwards-compatibility - or maybe you're still maintaining a v1 API from five years ago to support a mobile application version that's only still installed by 30 users, and you'd like to not have to maintain double the amount of API code.

You can't add a kill-switch retroactively to apps that have already been deployed!

Apparently Firebase offers this to many Android apps, but if you're writing for iOS you need to provide this yourself.

Automated deploys

Nothing kills a side project like coming back to it in six months time and having to figure out how to deploy it again. Thanks to GitHub Actions and hosting providers like Google Cloud Run, Vercel, Heroku and Netlify setting up automated deployments is way easier now than it used to be. I have enough examples now that getting automated deployments working for a new project usually only takes a few minutes, and it pays off instantly.

Continuous Integration (and a test framework)

Similar to automated deployment in that GitHub Actions (and Circle CI and Travis before it) make this much less painful to setup than it used to be.

Introducing a test framework to an existing project can be extremely painful. Introducing it at the very start is easy - and it sets a precedent that code should be tested from day one.

These days I'm all about pytest, and I have various cookiecutter templates (datasette-plugin, click-app, python-lib) that configure it on my new projects (with a passing test) out of the box.

(Honestly, at this point in my career I consider continuous integration a DAGNI - Definitely Are Gonna Need It.)

One particularly worthwhile trick is making sure the tests can spin up their own isolated test databases - another thing which is pretty easy to setup early (Django does this for you) and harder to add later on. I extend that to other external data stores - I once put a significant amount of effort into setting up a mechanism for running tests against Elasticsearch and clearing out the data agin afterwards, and it paid off multiple times over.

Even better: continuous deployment! When the tests pass, deploy. If you have automated deployment setup already adding this is pretty easy, and doing it from the very start of a project sets a strong cultural expectation that no-one will land code to the main branch until it's in a production-ready state and covered by unit tests.

(If continuous deployment to production is too scary for your project, a valuable middle-ground is continuous deployment to a staging environment. Having everyone on your team able to interact with a live demo of your current main branch is a huge group productivity boost.)

API pagination

Never build an API endpoint that isn't paginated. Any time you think "there will never be enough items in this list for it to be worth pagination" one of your users will prove you wrong.

This can be as simple as shipping an API which, even though it only returns a single page, has hard-coded JSON that looks like this:

{
  "results": [
    {"id": 1, "name": "One"},
    {"id": 2, "name": "Two"},
    {"id": 3, "name": "Three"}
  ],
  "next_url": null
}

But make sure you leave space for the pagination information! You'll regret it if you don't.

Detailed API logs

This is a trick I learned while porting VaccinateCA to Django. If you are building an API, having a mechanism that provides detailed logs - including the POST bodies passed to the API - is invaluable.

It's an inexpensive way of maintaining a complete record of what happened with your application - invaluable for debugging, but also for tricks like replaying past API traffic against a new implementation under test.

Logs like these may become infeasible at scale, but for a new project they'll probably add up to just a few MBs a day - and they're easy to prune or switch off later on if you need to.

VIAL uses a Django view decorator to log these directly to a PostgreSQL table. We've been running this for a few months and it's now our largest table, but it's still only around 2GB - easily worth it for the productivity boost it gives us.

(Don't log any sensitive data that you wouldn't want your development team having access to while debugging a problem. This may require clever redaction, or you can avoid logging specific endpoints entirely. Also: don't log authentication tokens that could be used to imitate users: decode them and log the user identifier instead.)

A bookmarkable interface for executing read-only SQL queries against your database

This one is very much exposing my biases (I just released Django SQL Dashboard 1.0 which provides exactly this for Django+PosgreSQL projects) but having used this for the past few months I can't see myself going back. Using bookmarked SQL queries to inform the implementation of new features is an incredible productivity boost. Here's an issue I worked on recently with 18 comments linking to illustrative SQL queries.

(On further thought: this isn't actually a great example of a PAGNI because it's not particularly hard to add this to a project at a later date.)

Driving down the cost

One trick with all of these things is that while they may seem quite expensive to implement, they get dramatically cheaper as you gain experience and gather more tools for helping put them into practice.

Any of the ideas I've shown here could take an engineering team weeks (if not months) to add to an existing project - but with the right tooling they can represent just an hour (or less) work at the start of a project. And they'll pay themselves off many, many times over in the future.

Camera phone hack: shoot in panorama mode, but vertically. The iPhone, at least, is smart enough to figure out what you’re doing. And the vertical is often a lot more interesting that the horizontal. 

Here’s the back yard at 100 Prince Street last night about an hour before sunset:

Evidence of the runway that Ethan the Dog used to bound off the back deck and into yard is still evidence, but nature is gradually sprouting it back to life.

Via Clark I learned about The Shed a few weeks ago. I made my first visit this afternoon and had an exceptional macchiato. 

It’s located in a corner of the Royal Canadian Legion building on Pownal Street. It’s as close to a Berlin-style third wave “coffee, coffee and more coffee” coffee shop, with a tiny roaster in the corner and owners who are obviously coffee-talented.

Isn’t this paragraph, by Eva Wiseman in Sex is back, but it’s going to be different in The Observer, just the greatest:

The trick will be to weaponise this awkwardness, and transform it into a series of exquisite tensions. It is a chance to be naive again, to purr as a person presses your back like a cat on Instagram or a David Attenborough cub. People are excited simply to sit across from a person they admire, simply to pull the window closed or wetly kiss their cheek – each drop of this excitement must be noted, harnessed and claimed as adorable. There will be people who want to lie fully clothed on top of the covers and breathe at each other. There will be people who want to use all the knowledge accrued from twice-daily Zoom meetings to direct erotic films with high production values and a plotline about office politics. There will be people who unload all the therapy they’ve had across the year on to their partner’s bed and roll around on it. There will be someone for everybody, once they’ve worked out how to say hello, I like you.

by Connor     

    When Igor asked me to start writing posts for the blog, I began to wonder what kinds of things I could write about that readers might enjoy beyond basic technical knowledge. As a bike mechanic of just over 9 years coming over to the manufacturer's side of the industry, my brain still looks at a bike from the technical side of things:

"Is this the right stem length for that bike? How will this drivetrain pairing work? Is this tire going to work well with the internal width of that rim? Those wheels aren't tubeless compatible? Ugh..."

All day.

    And I'm sure that perspective is unlikely to change, but technical jargon doesn't make for good writing, and in turn, doesn't make for good reading. I can attest that riding bikes is certainly more fun than wrenching on them, so I'm going to talk a little bit about this new, crazy, never-before-seen sect of cycling: commuting.

    That's right, someone call the Radavist, make sure they get the early scoop on this one. With the glamour and excitement associated with the Gravel boom keeping the big companies occupied with providing mass-produced 'cross bikes with longer wheelbases and room for a fender, the little guys are simultaneously in a race to make the coolest, wildest looking wide-tire drop-bar bike you've ever seen. Not to mention everyone and their mother is squeezing a gravel event into wherever the state forgot to repave.

    It sometimes feels like everything else has been left to the wayside. Sure, full-sus bikes now come with travel ranging in increments of 5mm per model, and practically every bike on the Tour this year has disc brakes and tubeless tires- there's a lot to be excited about. But not everyone (and by that, I mean most people) is buying these bikes. 

    As Scott said to me today, "If the bike industry were like the car industry, we'd all be driving F1 cars to work." Ferraris Monday-Friday and mudding through swampy doubletrack in our Rover Defenders over the weekend. But we're not. This is not Car and Driver, I drive a pre-owned Golf. 

    And don't get me wrong, there's much to be enjoyed from the fad waves as they ebb and flow through online forums and bike magazines. Innovation sparks improvement, which is an ethos that we at VO have humbly applied to our bikes in recent years, evidenced by thru-axles, tapered head tubes and disc brakes on currently available models. But I'd be willing to bet that the majority of bike riders (and by bike riders I mean the aggregate of all people who hop on the saddle and pedal) are just out to get somewhere and have fun doing it. Enter cycling's unspoken majority: The Commuters.

    Whether you're a college kid just trying to get across campus, a paralegal trying to get to your city office a few minutes faster in the morning, or you're the kind of person who, like Igor, would feel rather silly getting in their car to drive less than a mile to the grocery store for half a backpack's amount of food, you're a commuter. And it's not all about Ortlieb panniers and waterproof suit bags, either (though it honestly should be... So dope). It can be much simpler than that- Sneakers and a backpack, sandals and a handlebar bag. 

    Having spent my first month here at VO commuting 22 miles roundtrip most days on my 2nd-gen All City Nature Boy, I've had ample time to reflect on my setup, how I got into a morning routine to accommodate the time it takes to ride in, and the benefits I've seen thus far after a month. I started out with some takeoff flat bars (which were too wide), an original Blackburn MTN Rack (which rattled a ton), and some vintage 80's panniers (which billowed). A valiant first effort.

    It was after my first week that a riding buddy of mine was towing me to work one morning, and he goes "Man... that left pannier is like a parachute. Why didn't you take it off? And that right one isn't even full. Why'd you put the rack on there? And you're so upright, it's great coasting behind you." And while I was trying not to over-analyze my commuter bike, I could see he was right. To carry a small lunch container and a change of clothes, I'd bolted on what was likely more than enough equipment to facilitate a 2-day camping trip. And I could definitely tell that the wide flat bars had me in an oddly upright position. So after some scrounging in the parts bin, walks to the warehouse, and a couple days later...

    There's something to be said about looking down and the aesthetic of your bike contributing to the experience of your ride. Not only is your bike doing what you built it to do, but it looks damn good doing it. It's not everything, but I can't deny that it's a contributing factor. 

    I've owned this bike for many years- it's been a campus crusher, a DC city commute brawler, a cyclocross race rocket, and a flat bar, singletrack, do-it-all, beer blaster. This is without a doubt my favorite setup of the bike yet. It's still very light, looks sharp, and holds just the things I need- perhaps the ethos of a good commuter bike. Beyond that, the changes have made the bike much more enjoyable to ride, so much so that I get mildly disappointed if something comes up and I have to drive in, which is a new thing for me.  

    So. Buy that cool rack or that utility bag! It may change everything about your trip to work or the store. One thing's for sure; if you use your commuter bike to get to work every day like I do, even the little improvements go a much longer way than a $300 Kogel pulley on your weekend machine. You're still on your bike, the most important thing is that you enjoy it.

If you're interested in a comprehensive build list, click here: https://velo-orange.com/pages/all-city-nature-boy-gen-1-build-list-lightweight-commuter

mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

Kanada hat eine kaum weniger schlime Geschichte im Umgang mit den Ureinwohnern als die USA. Kürzlich brauch da der Schorf auf, als ein Massengrab mit 215 Kinderleichen bei einer Schule für Indianerkinder gefunden wurden. Die Schule war kein Angebot der Weißen an die Ureinwohner sondern ist explizit eingerichtet worden, um die mit Schulpflicht in die weiße Gesellschaft zu zwangsintegrieren.

Die erste Reaktion war auch angemessen:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was a "painful reminder" of a "shameful chapter of our country's history".

“As Prime Minister, I am appalled by the shameful policy that stole Indigenous children from their communities,” Mr. Trudeau said.

“Sadly, this is not an exception or an isolated incident,” he said. “We’re not going to hide from that. We have to acknowledge the truth. Residential schools were a reality — a tragedy that existed here, in our country, and we have to own up to it. Kids were taken from their families, returned damaged or not returned at all.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday he has asked the pope to come to Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church's role running residential schools for indigenous children, after nearly 1,000 bodies were found in two mass graves.

Ich bin jetzt der Letzte, der die katholische Kirche verteidigen oder exkulpieren will, aber das hier? Nee, sorry, das finde ich abstoßend.

Tja und was passiert, wenn man einer moralisch mit dem Rücken zur Wand stehenden Bevölkerung so einen diskreten Hinweis auf einen möglichen Mittäter gibt: Es springt voll auf!

Pope John Paul II statue vandalized with red paint at Edmonton church

In Berlin hingen immer Plakate für ein Theaterstück aus. "Ich bin's nicht, Adolf Hitler ist es gewesen". Wahrere Worte wurden selten gesprochen.

Ich bin's nicht, der Papst ist es gewesen.

It has been aggressively hot for the past few days, such that I have not wanted to have a hot laptop on my lap. Updates are going to be a bit behind for a few more days.

Origins

This Twitter thread (from 17 May) is interesting. It from someone who describes the changes from bat coronaviruses to the Wuhan strain. Basically, they say, “If *I* was going to engineer a virus, I certainly wouldn’t do it like that. These modifications are just stupid, it would be much better to do these modifications.”

This interview with a Westerner who worked in the Wuhan virology lab says that she’s pretty sure COVID-19 did not come from a lab leak.

Vaccines

This study, from the UK, also shows that mixing vax is better than matching vax in a test tube. (Here’s a mass media article on the study.) It found that people who got Pfizer first, then AZ, gave about the half the antibody levels as Pfizer+Pfizer, and about 5x as AZ+AZ. AZ first, then Pfizer, gave about the same as Pfizer+Pfizer. Mixing gave significantly better T cell responses than matching, with AZ first then Pfizer working better than Pfizer then AZ.

This article reports on a study that says that the mRNA vaxes might protect us for years.

There’s a paper going around which claims that the harms from vaccination are on a par with the harms from not getting vaccinated. This Twitter thread absolutely demolishes that paper.

Mitigation Measures

This article says that, because of Delta’s increased contagiousness, some European governments are asking people to ditch cloth masks and wear medical-grade masks instead.

Unintended consequences

Influenza really disappeared during the pandemic:

Europe

I don’t post much about COVID-19 in the rest of the world. In part, it’s scope creep, but it’s also depressing.

Well, today I was surprised to see just how well Europe is doing. All the bad news from UK, South America, Indonesia, etc. etc. etc. shoved Continental Europe right out of my consciousness. Look how well they are doing!

NB: It has been very very hot here, and I have not wanted to spend a lot of time with a hot computer on my lap. So some news will be delayed.

Supply

According to the BC CDC Dashboard, we haven’t yet gotten all the Moderna that we were supposed to get last week.  They owe us 526,400, on top of the 528,500 which is supposed to come this week.

Not to worry, we still have tons of vax. STUPID amounts of vax. By my calculations (if all the shipments we are due actually show up) we’ll have enough vax for second doses for everyone who has had a first dose by a week from now.

Press Briefing

NB: I did not write down as much at the time because of the heat, so this is going to be sketchier.

Observations:

• Dix and especially Dr. Henry looked really happy. The cases/hospitalizations/deaths/positivity/R are all down and the vaccinations are way up.
• THERE WAS A REPORTER IN THE ROOM! I think. I think it was Keith Baldrey from Global News.
• Because of the extreme heat, some of the vaccine clinics had to be moved or postponed. They assured us that everybody got notified, that everyone will be rescheduled, and that they were able to preserve 95%.
• Yesterday there were 1850 ambulance callouts — a record. This is undoubtedly due to heat, not COVID-19, but it is a reminder that the health care system has more stressors on it than just COVID-19.
• Last week, BC gave a record 427K vaccines.
• There was a data adjustment to remove 48 cases from the cumulative total. I don’t know what days those were from and I don’t care enough right now to dig into it.
• Dr.H gave a modelling presentation. You can check out the slides here, but mostly it was tables and maps and graphs of “yep, we’re doing well!”
• The Delta strain is now around 12% of cases. Alpha is about 48% of cases, Gamma (P.2, “Brazilian”) makes up about 40% of cases, and Beta is basically gone from BC.
• Dr.H said that the modelling showed that case counts might go up a little bit, but that we could still manage it.
• At one point, Dr.H said something about how we needed to “keep doing what we were doing”. Every single other time she’s uttered that phrase, she has recited a list of things individuals needed to do: stay home when sick, wash our hands, keep distant and/or wear masks, etc. This time, she talked about what Public Health needs to do: keep vaccinating and keep doing test/trace/track. That seemed significant to me.
• Someone asked Dr.H if she was worried about introductions from other provinces, and she didn’t exactly say, “chill, we got it covered”, but that was kind of the message. She basically said that Public Health would handle it: that we’ve got widespread enough immunization that it’s not going to get out of control and that the number of cases would be small enough that Pub Health will be able to contain it with testing/tracing/tracking.
• Someone asked DrH about the new Communicable Diseases Safety Plan (what’s taking over from the COVID Safety Plan that businesses have to do), and she positioned that as being ready for The Next Thing, not going back to what we had pre-COVID-19. Remember, in the Before Times, a significant number of people would die of the flu every year and we shrugged and accepted it. She was saying we should do better than in Before Times. The first specific thing she mentioned was the importance of sick leave. She mentioned that there are some industries where people are at quite high risk of respiratory infections (I thought immediately of meatpacking) and that some measures (like barriers) are probably going to remain forever in those industries.
• Several reporters pressed for regular reporting on how many cases/deaths were in un/partially/fully vaccinated people. Dr.H protested that those numbers weren’t as meaningful as the vaccine effectiveness rate, which is running ~75% for the mRNAs and ~60% for AZ and J&J. Ed: She’s… not… wrong. The vaccines are known to not be 100% effective and what really matters is how many people around you are sick. (Again: you are safer being unvaccinated in New Zealand than vaccinated in India right now.) As the number of vaccinated people goes up, the fraction of sick people who have been vaccinated will go up. If 100% of people are vaccinated, then 100% of the people who get sick will be vaccinated!

Statistics

Fri-Sat: +57 cases, +2 deaths
Sat-Sun: +50 cases, +2 deaths
Sun-Mon: +38 cases, +1 death

Over the weekend, +30,083 first doses, +153,077 second doses, of which +4112 were AZ.

Currently 107 in hospital / 37 in ICU, 930 active cases, 144,848 recovered.

We have 827,151 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 12.8 days at last week’s rate.  We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 10 days ago.

We have 753,544 mRNA doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 11.7 days at last week’s rate.  We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 10 days ago.

We have 73,607 AZ doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 29.4 days at last week’s rate.

Charts

Based on satellite imagery, Erin Davis found the average color of places around the world. The above is by county in the United States, but Davis also made maps by country, which are a mix of greens, browns, and yellows.

See also the NYT piece from 2020, which framed color by political leaning.

Tags: color, Erin Davis, R, satellite imagery

I made a leap of faith today with my Surface Pro X onto Windows 11 Preview and Office Preview. This machine is running Windows on a Snapdragon Chipset instead of Intel/AMD and Windows 11 brings support for lots of apps that would not run before. Now I have Office 64-bit native and Affinity Photos running on this machine and it really makes it whole.

And pretty. So pretty.

It being the third marking time of year again, I get to enjoy the delights of having to use various institutional systems to access marks and student scripts. One system stores the marks, allocates me my third marking tasks (a table of student IDs and links to their marks, their marks, and a from to submit my marks). Another looks after the scripts.

To access the scripts, I need to go to another system, enter the course code and student ID, one at a time, (hmm, what happens if I try a list of IDs with various separators; could that give me multiple files?) to open a pop-up window from which I can click to collect a zipped file containing the student’s submitted work. The downloaded file is downloaded as a zip file with a filename of the form ECA-2021-06-28_2213.zip ; which is to say, a filename based on datetime.

To update a set of marks, I need to get a verification code from the pop up raised after entering the student ID on the second system into a form on the page associated with a particular student’s marks on the first system. Presumably, the thinking about workflow went something like: third marker looks at marks on first system, copies ID, gets script and code from second system, marks script, enters code from second system in first system, updates mark. For however many scripts you need to mark. One at a time. Rather than: download every script one at a time, do marking howsoever, then have to juggle both systems trying to figure out the confirmation code for a particular student to update the marks from a list you’ve scribbled onto a piece of paper against their ID (is that a 2 or a 7?). Or whatever.

Needless to say, several years ago I hacked a mechanicalsoup Python script to look up my assigned marking on the first system, along with the first and second marks, download all the scripts and confirmation codes from the second system, unzip the student script downloads and bundle everything into a directory tree. I also hacked some marking support tools that would display how the markers compared on each of the five marking criteria they scored scripts against and allow me to record my marks. I held off from automating the upload of marks back to the system and kept that as a manual step becacause I don’t want to get into the habit of hacking code to write to university systems just in case I mess something up… I did try to present my workflow and tools to exams and various others by sharing a Powerpoint review of it, but as I recall never got any reply.

Anyway… mechanicalsoup. A handy package combing mechanize and beautifulsoup, the first part mocked a browser and allowed you to automate it, and the second part provided the scraping utilities. But mechanize doesn’t do Javascript. Which was fine because the marks and scripts systems are old old HTML and easily scraped, pretty vanilla tables and web forms. And the old OU auth was pretty simple to automate your way through too.

But the new OU authenticator uses Javascript goodness(?) as part of its handshake so my timesaver third marking scraping tools are borked because I can’t get through the auth.

So: time to play with Selenium, which is a complete browser automation tool that automates an off-the-shelf browser (Chrome, or Firefox, or Safari etc) rather than mocking one up (as per mechanicalsoup). Intended as a tool for automated testing of websites, you can also use it as a general purpose automation tool, or to provide browser automation for screenscraping. I’ve tinkered with Selenium before, scripting it from Python to automate repetitive tasks (eg Bulk Jupyter Notebook Uploads to nbgallery Using Selenium) but there’s also a browser extension / Selenium IDE that lets you record steps as you work through a series of actions in a live website, as well as scripting in your own additional steps.

So: how hard can it be, I thought, to record a quick script to automate the lookup of student IDs and then step through each one? Surprisingly faffy, as it turns out. The first issue was simply how to iterate through the rows of the table containing each individual student reference to pick up the student ID.

The method I ended up with was to get a cound of rows in the table, then iterate through each row, picking up the student ID as link text (of the form STUDENT_ID STUDENT NAME), duly cleaned by splitting on the first space and grabbing the first element, and then manually creating a string of delimited IDs STUDENT_ID1::STUDENT_ID2::... . (I couldn’t seem to add IDs to an ID array but I was maybe doing something wrong… And trying to find any sensible docs on getting stuff done using the current IDE seems to be a largely pointless task.)

So, I now have a list of IDs, which means I can (automatically) click through the script download system and grab the scripts one at a time. Remember, this involves adding a course code and a student identifer, clicking a button to get a pop up, clicking a button to zip and download the student files, then closing the pop up.

Here’s the first part – entering the course code and student ID:

In the step that opens the new window, we need to flag that a new window has been opened and and generate a reference to it:

In the pop-up, we can then click the collect button, wait a moment for the download to start, then close the pop-up and return to the window where we enter the course code and student ID:

If I now run the script on a browser where I’m already logged in (so the browser already has auth cookies set), I can just sit back and watch it grab the student IDs from my work allocation table on the first system to generate a list of IDs I need scripts for, and then download each one from the second system.

So I have the scripts, but as a set of uselessly named zip files (some of them duplicates); and I don’t have the first and second marks scrpaed from the first system. Or the confirmation codes from the second system. To perform those steps, I probably do need a Python script automating the Selenium actions. the Selenium IDE is fine (ish) for filling in forms with simple scraped state and then clicking buttons that act on those values, but for scraping it’s not really appropriate.

Whilst the Selenium IDE doesnlt export Python code, it does produce an export JSON file that itemises the steps in scripts created in the IDE. This could be used to help boostrap the production of Python code. The Selenium IDE recorder provides a way of recording simple pointy-clicky sequences of action which could be really useful to help get those scripts going. But ideally, I need a thing that can replay the JSON exported scripts from Python then I could have the best of both worlds.

Finally, in terms of design pattern, this recipe doesn’t include any steps that interact directly with logging in: the automated browser uses cookies that have been set previously elsewhere. Rather, the script automates actions over a previously logged in browser. Which means this sort of script is something that could be easily shared within an organisation? So I wonder, are there orgs in which the core systems don’t play well but skunkworks and informal channels share automation scripts that do integrate them, ish?!

(Hmm… would the Python scripted version load a browser with auth cookies set, or does it load into a private browser in which authentication would be required?)

Bah… I really should be marking, not tinkering…

PS It looks like you can export to a particular language script:

…but when I try it I get an error message regarding an Unknown locator:

I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our knowledge effectively.

Though I’m hesitant to say I’m there yet, I’ve found myself repeatedly coming back to a group of related ideas I’m going to call incremental note-taking about how to best gather knowledge into notes, and how we should design tools built around this workflow. This post is one attempt (of hopefully many more) to share them with you. This is a longer post, so here’s a roadmap. If you’re impatient, I suggest you begin with the principles.

1. Good notes should behave like memory – a story of how I arrived at the ideas in this post
2. Principles of incremental notes – my current beliefs about how to build a good note-taking system
3. Tools for incremental note-taking – how existing tools support (or don’t support) taking incremental notes, and some insights into the tools I’m building for myself today

Good notes should behave like memory

At its best, a good collection of notes is like a powerful extended memory. It helps us quickly answer questions like, “What did this person tell me?” “What should I remember about this topic?” “What things am I currently working on?” We think tens of thousands of thoughts every single day, and the job of a good note-taking system is to help us make the most of them, even when our squishy, biological brains can’t.

Curiously, most of the thoughts we think are not what traditional note-taking apps consider “important”. The mind is like an iceberg: most of our everyday thoughts go unnoticed. By this, I mean: Most productivity solutions focus on the 10% of our thoughts that are easy to categorize and structure, like lecture notes, meeting minutes, people’s contacts, and highlights of readings. But the vast majority of thoughts we think – the other 90% – still hold underrated, underestimated latent value. In these 90% are things you pick up in conversations, only to forget by the next minute. These are the shower thoughts and ideas that slip past you so elusively, and to-dos that you let yourself forget because they’ll come back if they’re really that important. Without the right tools, our minds are hopelessly leaky. We forget much of what we think.

In an ideal world, we won’t have to forget things from our minds and workspaces. We could live in an infinite room for thought:

What if, on a single sheet of paper that lasts an entire lifetime, you could inscribe every thought you’ve ever had? It would be the written version of Jess’s infinite room for thought. Every idea you have would have a place here. In a perfect world, when you stumbled across a new idea that relates back to a previous memory, you’d simply take a pencil and draw arrows from this new idea all the way back to the ideas that came before. In this way, we’d construct an infinite transcript of our thoughts that was our life’s canvas for ideas. This infinite notebook would reflect the way we learn – we would connect related ideas together to trace out a web of memories, and label and sort them for future recollection.

This kind of an “infinite room” or “infinite paper” behaves like our memory. Our memory doesn’t ever really run out of space (though some ideas fade out over time). Our memory is also much less selective about what is remembered than most of our knowledge tools. We don’t remember things because we’ve somehow deemed something worthy of remembering, we simply remember things because they’re remembered, because they happened, because they stuck in our minds. I think a great note-taking system should inherit these properties of memory to properly extend it.

An age-old note-taking method that preserves these characteristics of memory is to carry a small notebook with you wherever you go. Christine Dodrill writes in the linked blog post:

Paper is cheap. Paper is universal. Paper doesn’t run out of battery. Paper doesn’t vanish into the shadow realm when I close the window. Paper can do anything I can do with a pencil. Paper lets me turn back pages in the notebook and scan over for things that have yet to be done. Honestly I wish I had started using paper for this sooner. Here’s how I use paper:

• Get a cheap notebook or set of notebooks. They should ideally be small, pocketable notebooks. Something like 30 sheets of paper per notebook.
• Label it with the current month (it’s best to start this at the beginning of a month if you can). Put contact information on the inside cover in case you lose it.
• Start a new page every day. Put the date at the top of the page.
• […]

And then just write things in as they happen. Don’t agonize over getting them all. You will not. The aim is to get the important parts.

In this method, we take notes with a pencil in small handheld notebooks, each labelled with a month. We note things down and cross things out over time as ideas occur to us in the course of days and weeks. Paper notes created by this workflow aren’t some evergreen, digital garden, so much as a record of our thoughts and actions in life. No need for “edit history” here – the history is alive in between pages of crossed-out and postponed tasks and ideas.

Though I don’t personally have a pencil-and-paper workflow, I can see the appeal of this kind of a note-taking system. It records your thoughts over time – how they change, where they came from, when they came to you, and the context in which you had them. Just like the way we remember things in time, these notes improve by growing incrementally, with each new line and entry. Old notes become outdated, but are never replaced. And recalling past ideas is as simple as flipping through the pages to go back in time.

For some reason, when we moved our workflows into the digital realm, we began to lose respect for this way of taking notes, of simply adding new information to an ever-growing log of our thoughts. Instead, we built tools that encourage us to keep only the most current version of reality. Popular tools like Notion and Roam Research are about maintaining a timeless web of ideas, but life is anything but timeless! Old guards like Evernote feel much more like well-curated collections of notes over time, but it’s so difficult to organize and connect ideas in those apps that they quickly become black holes, where notes go in but rarely come out again. Most notes apps these days don’t lead us to collect notes, so much as simply keep them up to date. In that transition, I think we’ve forgotten the power of keeping notes over time, and remembering our past through our old notes.

Incremental notes is my push against this trend of note-taking tools that only live in the present and deny the reality of learning and living through time. We don’t remember things by modifying our past memories – we simply accumulate more, as if adding entries to a log or a journal. We search through them by traversing time, looking for links between ideas and experiences. These are the principles from which I want to build tools that augment our minds. With such tools, hopefully, we’ll be able to make more of the 10% of our ideas we’ve already retained, and hold on to much more of that lost 90%.

Principles of incremental notes

When designing something as complex as a note-taking system, I find it useful to lay down a few ground rules, the “principles” of the domain, to help make the right trade-offs. I’ve condensed my principles of incremental note-taking into four big ideas.

1. Captured ideas are better than missed ones. No self-respecting “note-taking system” should ever allow an idea to escape our minds un-recorded because it took too long, or was too much of a hassle to write it down. In order to make the most of the invisible 90% of our ideas that float through our minds, we need a tool that can capture ideas in the moment, however fleeting. This means our tool has to be fast, and can’t burden you with questions like “In what folder should I put this?” that aren’t relevant in the moment.
2. Adding new ideas is better than updating old ones. When our notes become outdated, our natural instinct is to go erase what’s now incorrect and fill that blank with the new information. But in that rewrite, we lose all of the original context we could have remembered about the history of our idea. Updating notes in-place is inherently lossy, and I think it’s unnecessary. Very often, it’s useful to have a record of our processes – how we came to some understanding, how we learned something through experience, how our relationships with the people close to us have changed over time. One of my favorite things about keeping handwritten notes is that the history of my thoughts are right there, next to my latest and greatest ideas. If we simply erased our old notes every time our understanding of the world changed, we would quickly forget how we got here. Just as our memory grows by remembering new things rather than “updating” old memories, our notes should also grow by incrementally gaining new knowledge, rather than replacing old valuable ideas with more recent ones.
3. Ideas that can’t be recalled are worse than useless – effective search and recall form the soul of great notes. Apple Notes (the notes app that comes pre-installed on all iPhones) is probably one of the most widely used knowledge capture systems in the world. Nearly everyone I know who owns an iPhone uses Apple Notes for something in their lives. The tragedy of Apple Notes is that it’s an idea black hole. Most of what goes into the app never leaves it again, because people rarely remember what they need to recall, and searching for the right things in an Apple Notes collection is tough. Of course, keyword search is not the only way to recall notes. Many tools these days have time and location-based reminders, as well as references and backlinks to connect related notes together into a graph. Regardless of how you recall information back from your notes, a great note-taking system should make it trivial to get ideas out, as well as in.
4. Time is essential to how we remember, and should be a first-class concept in a good note-taking system. The moment in time when we learned or thought something isn’t just some arbitrary metadata, it’s a mental anchor we use to remember nearly everything. We use daily and weekly planners, divide up school into semesters, plan engineering tasks into two-week sprints… time is absolutely essential to remembering what we learn. Whatever tool we use should recognize this, and help place our knowledge in the context of time.

Taken together, these principles of incremental note-taking lead us to a note-taking system designed less like a place you must “move into” with all your past notes slung behind your shoulders, and more like an extra layer of memory you grow around yourself, incrementally and gradually over time.

Tools for incremental note-taking

I’m at the very early days of putting these ideas and principles to use, but I want to share my perspective on existing note-taking solutions through the lens of incremental notes, and a few experiments I find interesting that put some of these principles to use.

Many of the current crop of popular note-taking tools, like Notion, Roam Research, Obsidian, and whatever you use at work (probably), are about helping you build a snapshot of your world as it is today. Some of them put some of these incremental note-taking principles into practice, but few of them honor all four faithfully.

Notion

Notion is probably the worst offender of them all – calling Notion an effective “note taking” app that extends your memory would be charitable. Notion is great at what it does, which is helping everyone easily create a shared web of documents that look and feel great. But it is not a note-taking app. It’s too slow to capture every thought I have. Its search is rudimentary and rarely helps me find the one thought I’m looking for. And it’s not designed to be used to recall thoughts from my past self. As far as I can tell, it’s primarily designed to act as a source of truth for a team. You can bend Notion to do most of these other things, but the result is slow and unergonomic. When you have just a moment and your idea is about to slip through your mind, you probably aren’t going to open a new page in your Notion workspace to add a quick note.

Roam (and others)

Roam and its clones fare much better. Roam is designed to help you incrementally build up a connected, sophisticated knowledge graph of ideas. It doesn’t force you to figure out exactly where to place every idea you record. Instead, you just write things down, perhaps on a “Daily notes” page, and connect each thing to other related things. If Roam can become and stay fast, I think it’s a promising platform for taking incremental notes. But Roam’s notion of time is weak at best – each day is treated as just another “thing” in a Roam graph of notes, rather than a first-class concept around which the tool is designed. In Roam, my thoughts don’t live “in time” – moments in time are just a special kind of idea. It doesn’t really make much sense, and I think this is a place where Roam has stayed too axiomatic for its own good.

Mira

The first tool I personally built that embodied the incremental note-taking principles is probably Mira, which I still use a year later as my primarily “people notes” app. I built it to replace my ever-growing mess of a note about everyone I knew and wanted to keep in touch with. Mira is fast – it often loads fully in the time it takes for Notion to start showing its loading spinner. After a conversation with someone, I always go back to Mira and add a few things I remember from the conversation, marked by the day’s date. When I open the app, Mira will show me people I’ve spoken to most recently, based on the conversations I’ve recorded. This means Mira is aware of time. In Mira, I rarely ever delete something from my past notes. Rather than removing “works at GFC” and replacing it with “works at Ideaflow”, I simply add a new entry: “Spoke at a tech dinner in New York, now working at Ideaflow”. In this way, Mira is a collection of notes grown incrementally over time. It describes a world changing through time, rather than a snapshot of it today. Lastly, Mira has some structured and free-form search. It’s lacking, but hopefully improving soon.

Ideaflow

Ideaflow, the note-taking software I help build at work, also embodies many of these principles. In fact, Ideaflow is my current “main” notes app. Ideaflow’s main interface is a timeline of notes, what we’ve internally called your “thought stream”. Imagine a long Twitter-style timeline, where each tweet is a note of some arbitrary length, potentially linking to many other notes. Many of these notes are short and simple, like random ideas or interesting links I read on the subway. There are even little facts I probably wouldn’t have put in my notes in most other apps, like transcripts of important emails and a list of publicly accessible bathrooms around the city. These are the 90%, underneath-the-surface thoughts that don’t really belong anywhere specific. Of course, there are also detailed, long-form notes like plans for conference talks, a folder of potential blog topics, records of conversations, and project ideas. Between my 980 notes today, there are around 1250 connections linking people to conversations, companies to investors, and ideas to their progenitors and other ideas inspired by them. So in a sense, incrementally, over time, Ideaflow helps me built up a sophisticated knowledge graph too. But in Ideaflow, time is a first-class citizen. Rather than a haphazard web of connections and words, notes go neatly into a timeline, grouped by days and weeks. This organization works together with my natural memory to help me remember things in units of time that I already use to understand my life. When I learn something new, I simply push another note onto the top of my timeline of notes, perhaps something connected to an older idea. Over time, this web grows denser and more populous like a forest of ideas growing around my life. I’m biased, of course, but I’ve found what I’ve been using so far to feel like a true extended memory, more than simply another database of facts.

Inc(remental)

Most recently, this week I began hacking on a tool called inc (short for “incremental”), a minimal notes app that delivers only the features promised by the principles above, and little else, in a small command-line driven package.

Inc is an experimental, append-only notes app. This means you grow your notebook by adding information to existing notes, or adding new notes; never modifying older ones. This approach to taking notes feels strange at first. Why would we want a notebook where we can never update our notes? What if something about the world changes?

Rich Hickey, in his talk about the design of the Datomic database, gives us the answer:

If my favorite color was red and now it’s blue, we don’t go back and change the fact that my favorite color was red to be blue – that’s wrong. Instead, we add a new, updated fact that my favorite color is now blue, but the old fact remains historically true.

In other words, this database (like our memory) doesn’t update information by forgetting what was once true, and overwriting it with the new fact; instead, it simply remembers that the fact changed at some point in time. Using this approach, we can have a notes app where we only add new information, and never delete old ones. (With this approach, it’s also obviously extra-important for our tools to understand time.)

Inc is currently just a command-line utility with a few commands:

• + Some note about #ink adds the note “Some note about #ink” to my notes. #ink is a tag I might use to search through my notes more effectively, but it has no special meaning beyond showing up in a different color in the app.
• /some keyword searches my notes database using the keywords, and gives me a numbered list of the matching notes. Because the results are numbered here, I can then take another action:
• @12 Goes to Stanford adds the information “Goes to Stanford” to note number 12 returned from my previous search.
• Typing history shows us the full edit history of my notes database. In Inc, the way my notes came to be today is just as important as the information it currently holds. Using the history, I can rewind my notes back to any specific day, or just remember what I learned at any point in the past.

There are a few other shorthands and commands, but this is the core of Inc. Thought of something? Write it down in seconds. Trying to remember something? Search for it immediately. Want to review and understand your notes? Sift through time with a full history of your notes. Inc is focused on quickly capturing what’s on your mind, growing a knowledge base incrementally around your life, and helping you understand your notes with a first-class concept of time.

Above is how I use Inc in practice, to manage development of Inc itself, captured in the form of an inc history output. The most visible parts are all the notes I add, but in between them are the quick searches I do to remember and keep track of my ideas, and the occasional history lookup to help myself remember what I was doing, and place myself in the right mental context where I left off.

Truth be told, Inc is a new project (as are Ideaflow and many other projects in this space), so my hypotheses about incremental note-taking and the way these tools work are only so strong. But as a good investigator should, I want to hold myself to these principles laid out here, build tools around the incremental note-taking workflow, and see where the ideas take me. Perhaps I’ll come to believe them even more over time. There’s also a good chance I’ll correct myself, and look for a new thesis. Regardless, I’m excited by the vast design possibilities we’ve yet to explore in this space of building tools that embrace and extend the way our minds make sense of the world.

Thanks to Jared Pereira, Jacob Cole, and Jess Martin among others for the many conversations with me that have led, sometimes through long winding paths, to my thoughts in this post.

Honda is very tepidly getting into the electric vehicle (EV) market by announcing two new all-electric cars are coming to Canada. The first is an EV called the Honda Prologue set for release in 2024, and the second car will be under the Acura brand.

The Prologue name works well since it will introduce Honda’s electrified lineup as the company works to turn all of its cars into electric models by 2040. The Verge also notes that Prologue is a synonym of the Honda Prelude sports Coupe from the 80s. This suggests that maybe Honda is bringing that car back or channelling some of its design like Ford did with the Mustang Mach-e.

These first two electric vehicles are the first two cars to come out as part of GM’s partnership with Honda. The cars will use GM’s Ultium battery packs, so it seems like that it may have a similar range and specs to the Cadillac Lyric.

The only other thing that Honda shared is that it’s aiming to sell enough Prologues to sit between the Honda Pilot and Passport in terms of sales numbers. To me, this suggests that the Prologue will be a crossover-style car.

After these first two EVs release post-2024, Honda will start building electric vehicles with its own Honda e-Architecture battery design. 

Source: The Verge 

The post Honda bringing all-electric ‘Prologue’ SUV to Canada in 2024 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Prince Edward Island is missing Miꞌkmaq-language place names on OpenStreetMap, something easily resolved using this list from the Miꞌkmaq Confederacy.

Here’s how.

Go to OpenStreetMap.org and search for the English-language place name. Say, Beech Point:

Click on the search result, and then Edit (creating an OpenStreetMap account in the process, if you don’t already have one).

Scroll down to the “Tags” section and click the “+”, and then enter name:mic for the tag name, and the Miꞌkmaq name as the value:

Click the “upload” button (upward-pointing arrow) in the top-right corner of the map, and add a note indicating what you entered, and click Upload.

As you go along, you can use this Overpass Turbo link to see the list of Miꞌkmaq names already added: