Rolandt

In my previous post, I wrote joyously of a fun bit of programming: implementing ordered pairs using sets.

Alas, there was a bug in my solution. Thanks to Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick for finding it so quickly:

Heh, this is fun, great post! I wonder what happens though if a = b? Then the set is {{a}}. first should still work, but would second fail, because the set difference returns the empty set?

Carl Friedrich had found a hole in my small set of tests, which sufficed for my other implementations because the data structures I used separate cells for the first and second parts of the pair. A set will do that only if the first and second parts are different!

Obviously, enforcing a != b is unacceptable. My first code thought was to guard second()'s behavior:

    if my formula finds a result
       then return that result
       else return (first p)

This feels like a programming hack. Furthermore, it results in an impure implementation: it uses a boolean value and an if expression. But it does seem to work. That would have to be good enough unless I could find a better solution.

Perhaps I could use a different representation of the pair. Helpfully, Carl Friedrich followed up with pointers to several blog posts by Mark Dominus from last November that looked at the set encoding of ordered pairs in some depth. One of those posts taught me about another possibility: Wiener pairs. The idea is this:

    (a,b) = { {{a},∅}, {{b}} }

Dominus shows how Wiener pairs solve the a == b edge case in Kuratowski pairs, which makes it a viable alternative.

Would I ever have stumbled upon this representation, as I did onto the Kuratowski pairs? I don't think so. The representation is more complex, with higher-order sets. Even worse for my implementation, the formulas for first() and second() are much more complex. That makes it a lot less attractive to me, even if I never want to show this code to my students. I myself like to have a solid feel for the code I write, and this is still at the fringe of my understanding.

Fortunately, as I read more of Dominus's posts, I found there might be a way to save my Kuratowski-style solution. It turns out that the if expression I wrote above parallels the set logic used to implement a second() accessor for Kuratowski pairs: a choice between the set that works for a != b pairs and a fallback to a one-set solution.

From this Dominus post, we see the correct set expression for second() is:

... which can be simplified to:

The latter expression is useful for reasoning about second(), but it doesn't help me implement the function using set operations. I finally figured out what the former equation was saying: if (∪ p) is same as (∩ p), then the answer comes from (∩ p); otherwise, it comes from their difference.

I realized then that I could not write this function purely in terms of set operations. The computation requires the logic used to make this choice. I don't know where the boundary lies between pure set theory and the logic in the set comprehension, but a choice based on a set-empty? test is essential.

In any case, I think I can implement the my understanding of the set expression for second() as follows. If we define union-minus-intersection as:

    (set-minus (apply set-union aSet)
               (apply set-intersect aSet))

    (second p) = (if (set-empty? union-minus-intersection)
                     (set-elem (apply set-intersect aSet))
                     (set-elem union-minus-intersection))

The then clause is the same as the body of first(), which must be true: if the union of the sets is the same as their intersection, then the answer comes from the interesection, just as first()'s answer does.

It turns out that this solution essentially implements my first code idea above: if my formula from the previous blog entry finds a result, then return that result. Otherwise, return first(p). The circle closes.

Success! Or, I should: Success!(?) After having a bug in my original solution, I need to stay humble. But I think this does it. It passes all of my original tests as well as tests for a == b, which is the main edge case in all the discussions I have now read about set implementations of pairs. Here is a link to the final code file, if you'd like to check it out. I include the two simple test scenarios, for both a == b and a == b, as Rackunit tests.

So, all in all, this was a very good week. I got to have some fun programming, twice. I learned some set theory, with help from a colleague on Twitter. I was also reacquainted with Mark Dominus's blog, the RSS feed for which I had somehow lost track of. I am glad to have it back in my newsreader.

This experience highlights one of the selfish reasons I like for students to ask questions in class. Sometimes, they lead to learning and enjoyment for me as well. (Thanks, Henry!) It also highlights one of the reasons I like Twitter. The friends we make there participate in our learning and enjoyment. (Thanks, Carl Friedrich!)

Loose Change, which Vanity Fair once called “our first internet blockbuster,” came out just a few years after 9/11. Directed by 22-year old Dylan Avery, “researched” by Jason Bermas, and produced by veteran Korey Rowe, the film questioned the official narrative of the attack on the Twin Towers. Though initially distributed via DVD and over BitTorrent, it took on a new life as viewers began uploading it to streaming sites. Soon enough, the film had climbed its way onto Google Video’s top 10, garnering millions of views and an audience that included Charlie Sheen, David Lynch, and Alec Baldwin, who called it the “Gone With the Wind of the [9/11 conspiracy] movement.”

The movie begins with an ominous breakbeat played over footage of the 9/11 attack. As we watch the first plane crash into the tower, a voiceover tells us, “at face value it might not look like much. However, upon closer inspection…” Then, a DJ scratch as the image rewinds. The footage replays again and again, zooming in closer each time, until the image becomes an incoherent blur. From here, “if we look closely,” the narrator says, we’ll be able to see a discrepancy between the shadow of the plane and the flash that follows — proof that the explosion was independent of the crash.

Next up, a four-panel view shows the second crash at different angles. The film moves through each one frame by frame, conducting a similar “analysis” as the images dissipate into a mostly indecipherable cloud of pixels. Rather than acknowledge the ambiguity of these images, Loose Change exploits it, by imposing a narrative of what we should be seeing. As soon as each image is enlarged to the point of illegibility, the narrator returns, piecing together a story that gives form to the mess: a promise that if we really look closely we could make out the truth. The film constantly reassures the viewer that it’s merely supplying the raw material for them to come to their own conclusions, even while offering a narrowly prescribed view of what the right conclusion would be.

When Loose Change first appeared online it was met with a mix of awe and concern. It proved that “a video produced on a laptop,” as one NPR piece described it, could become one of the most popular films in any given year. It showed that digital media had the potential to not only rival, but beat out more established forms of media, and precisely by virtue of its “authenticity“: low budget, makeshift production values. It also showed how easily our sense of truth could be unmoored and manipulated through a style that leaned into the experience of using digital media — the feeling that one is a participant in the narrative, rather than a passive observer. Loose Change encourages “critical freethinking,” urging the viewer to “look closer” into the indeterminate image, to think for themselves, while in the same breath supplying the viewer with a pre-baked hermeneutic strategy that interprets the image for them.

Loose Change wasn’t made for YouTube, but it would establish a blueprint for much of the work that has flourished on the platform since. Longform “investigations” like the blockbuster Plandemic paint the Covid-19 vaccine as dangerous, while videos about K-pop idols frequently employ the same kind of image and content analysis, connecting innocuous details (e.g., matching phone cases) to prove that stars are dating, while encouraging fans to look for further clues. Other videos analyze viral content, like the recent “couch guy” clip, for “hidden” truths, nudging toward a narrative consensus: in this case, a girl surprising her long-distance boyfriend contains “clear red flags” that indicate that he’s cheating.

According to Google, the top reasons for visiting YouTube are generally educational: learning something new, satisfying curiosity. Losing yourself on the platform, it’s easy to feel like you’re undergoing a process of discovery and self-betterment. The ability to comment, repost, and otherwise engage adds to a sense of agency and collaboration, as though you are teaming up with other users to uncover the truth. Rather than passively consuming content, the YouTube viewer is a user, an active participant in the text’s construction. This feeling is highly exploitable.

Sometime in the late 1950s, English writer Brion Gysin was at the “Beat Hotel,” a small, 42-room building in the Latin Quarter of Paris that served as a residence for several members of the Beat poetry movement. In his room, he sat cutting up newspapers, rearranging the sections at random. As he did so, new phrases, ideas, thoughts seemed to emerge. Gysin introduced this method to his friend, William Burroughs, who was also staying at the hotel. Burroughs would later write that this “cut-up” method could free the writer from the mental constraints of language and collapse the distinction between reader and author.

Around that time, the mechanical engineer Charles Bachman was working at General Electric, wrestling with the ever-expanding information systems enabled by computers, which were increasingly integrated in networks. At GE, he would come to pioneer a new way of navigating these databases, shifting the center of focus away from the individual computer towards the database as a whole, and refining the tools that would eventually make these databases accessible to ordinary users. These figures lived and worked in two seemingly separate domains, yet each was responding to a nascent network culture, characterized by increased attention to clusters over individual nodes. Now, we regularly traverse databases to discover and engage with texts (books, films, music) that are themselves databases, that point us to other nodes in the network, and so on: an exploded world of interconnected systems, hypertexts, fractal-like media.

YouTube — at once a medium, platform, screen, editing panel, public forum — epitomizes this culture’s mode of consumption. With over one billion hours of watch-time a day, it continues to beat out rival platforms, including TikTok, globally. YouTube is also a database, and it’s this quality — with its potential to collapse the acts of reading and authoring — that creates the sense of autonomy so essential to consuming its content. Every route taken through a database represents a new narrative possibility, so every act of viewership implies creation: an algorithm may direct the user from one video to the next, but the user determines the relationship between them.

YouTube is also the product of successive waves of visual media that have shifted the weight of meaning-making from the creator to the viewer. In the movie theater, there’s a clear distinction between the author who composes the visual experience, and the viewer, who sits in a theater and encounters the movie on terms that the director has laid out. The viewer rolls along a set track that takes them from the beginning of the story to the end. With the development of home video systems, the horizontal logic of viewership gained depth: suddenly, we could pause, rewind, fast forward, skip to other sections. “When broken down in this way,” wrote Laura Mulvey, “a movie’s apparently horizontal structure mutates.” Details cast aside by the linear flow of the film gained significance, disrupting the “chain of meaning invested in cause and effect” in favor of a model that privileges standalone moments, subtle details, patterns dispersed throughout the film.

Digital software like Quicktime imitated the functions of the VCR, letting viewers pause, rewind, and skip around. It equipped users with editor and zoom functions, giving them the ability to further manipulate the image, an autonomy that many of us have come to expect. Converting cinema to bits of information also allows it to coexist with other media at the user’s will — placed side by side in the same folder, on the same webpage. On YouTube, still images, text, and video coexist and interrelate, and each component has the potential to alter a user’s engagement. The act of viewing is almost inseparable from the act of curating, of making decisions about how we’re viewing. To watch YouTube is to constantly be in the process of deciding where to go, what to watch, what to read and what to ignore.

On YouTube, meaning arises not simply from linear cause-and-effect, or the deep plunge into an image, but all the relations that a piece of media has within a massive field. The platform’s content is constantly recontextualized by the circumstances in which it is encountered: the videos previously watched, the recommendation feed, the comments, playlists, and images that surround the playback. The narrative is led not by causal “chain of action and reaction,” as film theorist Thomas Elsaesser puts it, but “keywords or tags, tag clouds or semantic clusters, embedded links, user’s comments and of course, one’s own ‘free’ associations.” Here, “narrational authority… seems to pass from ‘narrator’ to ‘narratee,’ from storyteller to user.” But “seems to” is key: more often than not, we still consume media in a fairly traditional, uni-directional format.

As new media theorist Lev Manovich writes, “new media objects assure users that their choices — and therefore, their underlying thoughts and desires — are unique, rather than pre-programmed and shared with others.” Just as Burroughs and Gysin unlocked the density of the written page as a tool for authorship, the database logic of YouTube gives the viewer the sense that they, and they alone, are always in the process of “authoring” their own experience. Films like Loose Change can easily leverage this sense of authorship, making us feel like we’re playing a far more active role than we actually are.

One writer called Loose Change and the style it employed “YouTube vérité.” It’s a fitting title; where traditional vérité documentarians would take their cameras into the field, capturing footage on location as it happened, the makers of Loose Change delved into the digital mediascape. At the level of style, they stretch, zoom, and expand clips to introduce certainty through ambiguity. At the level of narrative, they weave their story by drawing on a vast archive of events, photos, and news clippings that range from a Manhattan office fire from the ’70s to Serbian politician Slobodan Milošević’s bombed-out residence. These elements seem disparate, but the film’s composition suggests an improbable throughline that the right sort of vision could detect, employing the logic of the “conspiracy wall.”

The conspiracy wall is a helpful visual to ground our experience of this database mode: its contents are similarly exploded, co-present, disparate. As Manovich notes, the web often “appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records.” In this fragmented world, making sense of the noise becomes a feat in itself. YouTube influencers are lauded not just for exhibiting their beauty or sense of style, but for their ability “cut through all the static, to make something beautiful yet saleable out of the glut,” as Safy-Hallan Farah writes in Techcrunch. Before YouTube, essayistic works by filmmakers like Adam Curtis, Thom Andersen, and Godfrey Reggio recombined disparate images, guiding the viewer through the collage toward an all-encompassing thesis. Watching, you might feel as though you’d drawn your own throughline. This influence is detectable in much of the longform work found on YouTube today.

For the conspiratorially minded — who, as Brian Keely writes in the Journal of Philosophy, are “some of the last believers in an ordered universe” — this sort of pathfinding becomes an act of defiance: an assertion of individuality, through a refusal to take the disordered world at face value. Films that engage this desire for pattern recognition, that can offer a “grand unified theory,” create a seemingly more active connection between the viewer and the text; the feeling of working alongside a film to parse through the slush imbues the viewer with a sense of ownership in it.

If Paris in the ’60s had the radical breaks of the nouvelle vague, and Rome in the ’40s had neo-realism, YouTube has spawned a form of entertainment we might call “Do-Your-Own-Research.” In Loose Change, the “research” happens largely through zooms, replays, and frame-by-frames. The film makes the viewer feel as if they’re actively re-interpreting clips they might have already seen on the news, exploring the image in more detail than they’d previously thought to. (“It’s not so much what they say,” David Lynch observed. “It’s the things that make you look at what you thought you saw in a different light.”) The film recontextualizes familiar images (e.g. the hole in the Pentagon) with surprising references (e.g. a photo of a bombed out building) to unground our understanding, using older filmic techniques like montage and match-cuts to lead the viewer towards a predetermined conclusion. These visual manipulations equip us with the tools and methods of the detective. As a result, we begin to feel a sort of identification with the figure of the detective — the narrator, the protagonist.

The “Do-Your-Own-Research” mode isn’t limited to the world of conspiracy theorists. Elements of its style can be found across a number of domains. Take the recent explosion in “true crime” media — podcasts, documentaries, books — which similarly appeal to a sense of discovery. The listener or viewer rides along with the narrator, interrogating official narratives, reexamining old evidence, and making surprising connections. “True crime has come to mainstream prominence in the viewing-on-demand era because of how well it lends itself to Google search culture,” writes Tanya Horeck, author of Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. “To an extent, we are all ‘desktop detectives.’” Jean Murley, a scholar at Queensborough Community College, told the New Yorker, “we’re a nation of crime experts now.” Both true crime and conspiracy documentaries leverage ambiguity, satisfying a desire for everything to make sense. Both can be accused of fostering a sense of vigilante justice.

YouTube is replete with benign examples of remixed content. One might recall the “recut trailers” genre that went viral in the mid-aughts, which showed the malleability of digital content by editing Mary Poppins into a horror movie trailer, and recutting Friends clips to feature Ross as a homicidal sociopath. “One of YouTube’s basic recipes for success is the new remix culture in which older forms of media are molded into new interfaces,” writes media theorist Pelle Snickars. Taken as a whole, however, these examples show us how unstable the meaning of a given text can be on the platform — and how a film like Loose Change can leverage this instability, designing a trajectory that delivers us to a conclusion we feel is our own.

Of course, many creators deploy this participatory mode in less nefarious ways, to foster a deeper sense of engagement with the text. Marble Hornets is a film series inspired by the Slenderman mythos which features a number of tape entries, uploaded to a YouTube account, showing a student being haunted by a mysterious being known as “The Operator.” Though each entry is numbered, the viewer is free to traverse the archive any way they please. The viewer takes on the role of “detective,” slowly uncovering what happened to the tapes’ creator. The film’s appeal is precisely the way it marries this sense of active discovery with a contained narrative that is clear enough to have a Wikipedia plot synopsis. “It feels kind of like you’re investigating something,” Tim Sutton, one of the series’ actors and writers, told the Verge. “You still feel like you’re in on the mystery.”

This sense of identification with the “detective” figure was cleverly used in the 2018 film Searching, in which John Cho plays a father looking for his missing daughter. The film takes place entirely on smartphones and laptop screens, as we follow him through the digital mediascape to uncover the mystery of her disappearance. In this respect, it bears a family resemblance to Loose Change, which feels like a visual catalog of its creators’ travels through the web. Cho’s character becomes a stand-in for the audience, who sees the character’s screen as if it were their own.

In 2016, director Dean Fleischer-Camp — known for his work on the viral hit, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On — released Fraud, a “meta-documentary” composed of a series of home videos. They follow a family with a mounting pile of debts participating in a crime spree to wipe the slate clean. Though the videos that make up the film are real, the story itself is entirely fabricated: Fleischer-Camp made the film after stumbling onto an account holding hundreds of hours of home videos. By methodically going through this vast archive, he was able to recombine these clips into a crime narrative. Suddenly, a clip of a woman spraying her carpet becomes a woman about to burn down a home.

In a Q&A following Fraud’s premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, Fleischer-Camp was called a “con artist” and “liar” by audience members who were disturbed by his working methods. These viewers took issue not with the film’s plot, but its construction. Unlike Loose Change, which purports to discover the truth in a lie, Fraud explicitly attempts the reverse, showing that one could convincingly tell any story with materials found on a site like YouTube. Ironically, it’s Fraud that, to its critics, defies the open, truth-leaning and “collaborative” ethos that people associate with the platform.

Works born of YouTube are most effective when they harness the viewer’s sense of autonomy. Marble Hornets never pauses or rewinds video footage on its own accord, but it encourages the user to do so by placing subtle details or shots that demand replay. In Entry #26, for example, a shot of a mysterious face pops up for less than a second; viewers need to go back to grasp exactly what they just saw. Similar series — like Louise Is Missing, which follows a fictional woman’s experience with a stalker — include subtle details that can only be picked up through the act of pausing and reviewing. (“Holy crap,” reads one comment on a video from the Louise series, “my friend and i have been watching this for EVER now, we never noticed the feet at the end! we’re freaking out!”) The right sort of framing turns viewers into editors, freezing and rewinding the film based on the cues provided — all without being explicitly told to.

These works invert the conventional wisdom that a medium that encourages engagement is less likely to manipulate the viewer. Here, the feeling of engagement is precisely the mechanism by which manipulation occurs. Rather than receive a given perspective via the “hypodermic needle” of mass media, in a film like Loose Change, the viewer obtains their conviction through the assurance that they’ve arrived at it independently. Such a belief is harder to displace than one obtained passively.

YouTube has frequently come under fire for creating spaces where conspiracy and predatory viewing behaviors can thrive. From comment sections that serve as meeting grounds for child predators to recommendation algorithms that pushed conspiratorial content, the platform has served as a breeding ground for malicious behaviors of all kinds. Nonetheless, the company assures users that it’s getting things under control through a process that incorporates human tagging and machine learning to identify, deplatform, and reduce the prominence of videos deemed “harmful.”

So far this policy has had uneven success, and it faces an uphill battle. As Wired’s Clive Thompson noted, “the recommendation system may be less important, for good and ill, to the spread of misinformation today,” because the largest right-wing commentators these days have audiences and networks that come to life in both the comments and on other platforms. “If YouTube completely took away the recommendations algorithm tomorrow, I don’t think the extremist problem would be solved,” a Data & Society researcher told Thompson, “because they’re just entrenched.”

YouTube isn’t self-contained; it is part of a larger online ecosystem. The most effective content has always integrated this understanding into itself. Loose Change was, after all, uploaded to Bittorrent; Louise Is Missing had an affiliated Myspace page. Comments on conspiracy videos often refer to other “research,” coverups, and theories that proliferate both on and off the site. By pointing outwards to a wider web of similar content, as much as inwards towards the text itself, the “Do-Your-Own-Research” mode not only provides further “evidence” of the conclusions proffered, but buffers itself against YouTube’s attempts at censorship.

YouTube is a space where the successors of Burroughs, Gysin, and Bachman meet, where author and viewer at least appear to collapse, and the possibilities of the webpage open up. The ability to engage as a viewer has never been so substantive. But this sense of engagement is double-edged: it can allow for new innovations in narrative, but also in persuasion and propaganda. The feeling of engagement is not the same thing as actually engaging. “Do your own research” is less an imperative than a strategy of flattering one’s audience: the implication is that you have done your own research simply by watching the film. Despite controlling the playback, the user is just as passive as ever.

It’s time for another COVID update–and possibly the last I’ll be doing in this format.

This series began 50 days after the start of the pandemic and has had irregular updates 120, 200-ish, 250-ish, 300-ish, 320-ish, 333, one year, 420, 500, 600, 640, 670, and 700 days later.

Last time we were still reaching insanely new heights of new infections, but, thanks to vaccination, we got past that with much less impact in hospitals (or deaths).

But even as cases decreased and restrictions were (again, probably prematurely) loosened, we’re currently experiencing another bump after the big surge:

This new bump, like the peak before it, seems to be sustained by the sub-20 demographics, and, again, matches what I’ve seen regarding vaccination (I suspect many have only first doses, if anything):

Hospitals are coping, but admittances always lag behind new case figures and things are still evolving:

And this is why I’m wary of looking at the data without a long-term view, and taking in all angles–COVID-19 might be becoming endemic, but it is far from being gone, and I suspect that with the usual rainy months we have around this time (which were belated but seem to have finelly arrived), it may well rise again, and the Rt figures certainly hint at it doing that now:

But, like I wrote above, this may be the last post I do with this amount of detail.

The reason for that came in another display of premature incompetence a few days ago, when the government stated they would stop issuing daily reports on the COVID situation and move to a “simpler” weekly bulletin.

This move puts at jeopardy community initiatives like dssg-pt/covid19pt-data, which have relied on scraping the data (or entering it manually) from the DGS website, and continues the two-year-old tradition of utter inability to do something as simple as providing a daily updated consolidated .csv file (let alone a decent API).

Also, I’m very much out of steam as far as this is concerned.

Months of typing in figures from PDFs, weeks spent trying to scrape data and the progressive de-escalation towards the the (now very minimal) wrapper I use to import the data from dssg-pt folk and the minor adjustments I do to the dashboard still mean too more time and energy than I can spare.

I’ve also long given up on pointing out that if someone can build a fully working dashboard in 5 minutes with nothing but Excel and a free Power BI account, the Portuguese government could surely do better–and yet they haven’t, for the past two years, and are now certain to make it worse.

I get there’s a war on, fuel prices are through the roof and the economy is tanking, but to assume the pandemic has gone away and lowering visibility on data is just… stupid.

Which is why I’d give this government (which, incidentally, got reelected recently) a D- in technology savvy, because I still can’t believe they’re still issuing the same half-assed PDF reports in 2022.

If you’re tuning in just now, yes, our government used PDFs, with charts without axis indicators or supporting tables, as their official reporting tool.

That said, things are improving overall, even if we do keep hearing about co-workers, friends and family getting sick every week.

Remote work is no longer mandatory, so most people are back at work (although most sane companies have moved to hybrid regimes, since it’s become plain over the past two years that remote work works for many people and roles) and wearing masks only in enclosed spaces (like classrooms) and public transport.

I know it’s just a matter of time until we catch COVID, and am still worried about long-term consequences even if vaccines will protect us from most ill effects (and even that protection is sure to wane), but having lunch with other people is fast becoming a concept we can entertain again, and something I can actually look forward to–but I plan to do so warily and with appropriate restraint for many months to come still.

If you haven’t seen Severance yet (the TV series, not the movie), you just have to, especially if (like me) you’re perennially struggling with work-life balance.

I won’t spoil yesterday’s season finale for you (nor, I hope, the series), but the basic premise is well-known: that we’re all someone different at work–only surgically so for the protagonists, who take on not merely work personas that are treated somewhat like children, but completely separate identities they have no recollection of being once they leave the office.

And in my particular case, having the season finale coincide with my taking some time off was… serendipitous, to say the least.

Part of my fascination with Severance stems from its timeliness.

Its premise, plot and visuals (love that classic office look, even down to the computers) make for fantastic counterpoint to what many of us (at least the “lucky” ones) are experiencing now–i.e., that work and personal life have been amalgamated upon the anvil of the pandemic, becoming an intense, almost overwhelmingly hard puzzle where it’s hard to disentangle your personal self from the arcane ceremonies of corprate life.

I also find it profoundly amusing that Apple, of all companies obsessed with secrecy, would be the ones streaming it (yes, it’s on Apple TV+, and definitely worth the money), but that’s almost besides the point right now.

Let’s just say that as someone who’s always had a disclaimer up on his blog, compartimentalizes his personal and work relationships and managed to keep work matters off the dinner table for decades, Severance can feel very real. Even down to the pointless hunt for moving digits in Excel… ahem “macrodata”.

Some of the brilliant things about Severance for me (there are more, but these five stick out to me in particular):

• Slaving over apparently meaningless, obscure bits of information that only make sense at work, where ownership and understanding of such is crucial.
• The dynastic corporate vibe and near-idolatry towards founder and Board.
• The hardback corporate manuals filled with profane gospel and procedure, embodying the bazillion intranet pages in the real world.
• Inter-departemental rivalries between vaguely understood, far-off teams turned to legend.
• Optics and Design as internal marketing & communications, shaping people’s perceptions of their work environment.

…all of this wrapped in that amazing, classical, 60s/80s look that telegraphs to the viewer that the office setting is real in its very own way, while providing an almost asseptic, otherwordly framing for each character’s attempts at figuring out who they are both at work and at play.

As someone who’s been struggling with defining who I am over the past few years (am I a systems engineer? a cloud architect with an unusual bent towards both networking and data? a telco expert? a technology strategist, or merely an organizational anthropologist who just happened to be at the right place at arguably the right times to be cast into all of those roles?), Severance has struck a deep chord as I recalled several periods of exaustion, burnout and frustration at being stuck in an office doing meaningless, mindless work that might as well have happened to someone else given that during those periods I only felt myself when I was off the clock.

Like today.

And I think that’s where it grabs the viewer–by exploring that gap you cross when “going to work” and taking on entirely different frames of reference for what is expected, required, and even enjoyable (yes, faux office parties are sumblimely ridiculed, too), as well as taunting us with the idea that to those at work, life can be both meaningless and laced with blissful ignorance of what lies outside.

And then the masterfully written plot goes and flips it all on its head, requiring you to re-assess who is the whole person.

Considering that many (like myself) have never found it easy to do work they didn’t like, understand or found meaningful, and that offices are still being touted as havens of productivity (especially in these post-pandemic days, with many more people aware that working from home works), anything that explores these boundaries is… riveting, to say the least.

I know what it’s like to need… compartimentalization between the various aspects of my work and personal life (so much so that I’ve started avoiding sitting in my home office during weekends for a year or so now), but Severance also makes me wonder if I wouldn’t want to have that kind of quick, painless self-erasure from work.

And I write this even knowing that, until fairly recently, I could never disconnect from it altogether. That is always hard for me, since I tend to work relentlessly when I find meaning in what I’m doing–which is seldom of late, but that’s another story.

Given the amount of times I’ve found myself struggling to focus on meaningless meetings and disconnect from work after long days of utterly pointless, completely unrewarding tasks that make no use whatsoever of my real skills but force me to maintain a sharp, “can do” work persona who might as well be looking at a screen for “scary” numbers and repeatedly gets tasked to deal with particularly nasty ones, well… Severance feels like a distillation of what my relationship with work could be like if taken to (perhaps not too distant) extremes.

Like the pun goes, all the corporate proponents of work/life balance are still mentioning work first, and Severance (so far) is definitely casting the spectre of work dominating our lives in multiple ways.

I can’t wait for Season 2. Nor for such a time when I can actually be myself again.

Gallant’s is one of my favourite local businesses, and they’ve a staff of go-above-and-beyond people. Great work for someone who wants to work in a happy, cooperative kitchen.

I’m running one small cell in a global COVID testing panopticon, part of history’s greatest biosurveillance operation.

Olivia needs to be COVID tested twice-weekly as a condition of participating in the day program at Stars for Life. On top of this, our off-Island travel last week brought with it a days 0, 2, and 4 testing requirement on return.

So there’s been a lot of swab, dip, swoosh, squeeze, drip, “Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes“ action here of late. All of it negative to date.

As a student of design and communications I’m fascinated by the test kit variants: the different ways of providing the testing medium, the different swabs, the instruction sheets (varying from a single badly-photocopied sheet to detailed multicoloured booklets). Some kits use three drops, some four, some six. Some instructions show the swab painlessly tucked in the nose, some in contact with the brain stem.

I’ve been trying, so far in vain, to make contact with the Korean provider of beautifully-designed silica gel packs in one of the variants. I just want to laud their attention to detail.

And these kits need to be usable by anyone, regardless of literacy level, mother tongue, disability. What an enormous challenge.

With the world’s testing literacy increased by all this flurry, I wonder if we might ramp up parallel citizen-science operations on other topics: water quality, shoreline erosion, traffic counting.

In the meanwhile, more swab, dip, swoosh, squeeze, drip, “Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes.“

A montage of photos of the number 56, from the Flickr group No. 56

I turn 56 years old today. Two times twenty-eight.

If I live as long as my great-great-grandfather Than–97–then I still have 41 years left.

If I live as long as my father–84–then it’s just 28 years. Not tomorrow, but closer to the end than the beginning.

(It’s also the 20th anniversary of the first time I wrote about my birthday here).

Back in November, I posted this:

I’ve realized recently that the process of supporting Catherine through 6 years of living with, and ultimately dying from, cancer made me feel like I was 75 years old: all that time in hospitals and hospice, all that fragility, all that ever-closer end.

But I’m not 75 years old, I’m 55 years old. And getting a handle on that, and remembering how to do that, that’s a thing.

Now, 150 days later, I’m 56 years old, and I find myself in a lovely new relationship, I’m meeting new people, experiencing new things, I have a new spring in my step.

I’m looking forward more than backward, toward more than inward or outward.

At the same time, as I write, I feel surrounded by COVID, with new reports of positive cases marching ever-closer to home, and nary a day going by without a friend, or friend of a friend, declaring they’re isolating. Add that to the foot of snow that fell out of nowhere yesterday, to say nothing of the ongoing war in Ukraine, home to one quarter of my ancestors, and it’s a stressful, chaotic context to get a year older in.

In the midst of this, an insightful blog post from Rebecca Toh showed up in my feedreader:

These days I’ve been trying to change, but I’m also trying to be as gentle about it as possible.

Self-improvement can be insidious and a source of stress, because for many people, self-improvement is actually self-dislike in disguise. If we’re not careful, we can spend years on the self-improvement treadmill trying to reach our goals but feel utterly, utterly empty at the end.

There is simply no imaginary day in the bright future ahead when we’d wake up in the morning transformed, an ideal version of ourselves.

There is only transforming in the here and the now.

Which also means we have to do the work NOW and not tomorrow, but for us to truly transform, we have to do it with an attitude of non-striving, of not wanting to control the outcome exactly.

This is what I mean by trying to change, but also trying to be as gentle about it as possible.

I woke up this morning feeling groggy and a little out of sorts. The day was made brighter by the ones I love, and by friends old and new. 

There is simply no imaginary day in the bright future ahead when we’d wake up in the morning transformed, an ideal version of ourselves.

Today is the day.

I used to hate on the Ventilation File and this blog post is about how I changed my mind about it. The Ventilation File is a document (or a folder with a series of documents) where you go vent (hence the name) and dump your frustrations regarding your writing rut (if you are in one).

Normally, on the last day of the month or the first of the next one I spend some time revisiting my writing goals, my teaching, my research, my service.

In doing this calendar review, I also write an End-of-The-Month Achievements Review https://t.co/39LxTW6W6Q

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 1, 2022

I also obviously edit my plan for the month, since things ALWAYS come up. So whatever I had planned for April has now changed. Anyhow, I couldn’t bottle my pent up frustration and this morning, I wrote 350 words of a rant for my Ventilation File.

It is a bit scary to share. pic.twitter.com/KjsJcHLJKb

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 1, 2022

But then I figured that:

(1) writing up my frustrations would give me again the tactile sensations that make me enjoy writing (typing in a computer).

(2) I can use this text for a blog post that others can read on my site whenever they feel equally frustrated as I was.

I DO feel better, having gotten the frustration out of my chest, and can now focus on ACTUALLY WRITING.

Hopefully the Ventilation File strategy to getting out of a writing rut will work for you too.

For those interested, here is the text of my Ventilation File this morning (April 1st, 2022)

I’m frustrated with my lack of time to write

Writing has rarely been this hard for me, and it’s April 1st, 2022. It’s not that I don’t love to write (I do). It’s not that I am not good at writing (I am). It’s not that I don’t know what I want to write (I do know). It’s the overwhelming and sheer number of responsibilities (and meetings!) that I’ve had to attend over the past few weeks, the many things I’ve had to do for others (letters, committees, care work, etc.) and the reduced amount of time I have had to actually sit down, think and write. I don’t feel in a rut, and I do feel that I will get out of these many meetings because I just finished a week where I had 27 hours of meetings scheduled (out of 40!). But I really need to get back to reality and to doing the thing I love the most. I do enjoy teaching, and service, but I really need to be able to write more. Even my very early morning writing time is compromised because I’ve used it to catch up on stuff that I had to prepare and send. This is incredibly frustrating.

And for the very first time in my writing career I am using a Ventilation File. This approach was pioneered by David Sternberg in his book “How to Survive and Complete a Doctoral Dissertation”, and taken up by (and popularized!) by the incomparable Joli Jensen in her book “Write No Matter What”.

I will confess that for decades, I was skeptical of the Ventilation File. Why on Earth would I need to write down my thoughts on why I was feeling in a writing rut? This seemed like a useless strategy. Then I read Sternberg. Then I read Jensen. And today, April 1st, I just needed to get this out of my chest. So I have basically written about 315 words worth of a rant that will go on to my Ventilation File.
It’s never too late to teach an old dog new tricks.

For some reason, I suppose due to (post-?)pandemic malaise, I take far fewer photos than I used to. So few, in fact, that I sometimes struggle, as I am doing this week, to find one to illustrate and add a bit of interest to my weeknote. So instead, I will do without. My words will have to suffice.

This week has felt like a bit of a rollercoaster. But not one of those rollercoasters that make you go upside-down and loop-the-loop. Rather, a more gentle rollercoaster, one that might cause your hat to blow off in a downhill section and then perhaps the whole thing ends with a water splash.

A conversation this week confirmed something that I had been starting to realise as 2022 progresses. I guess you could say that the realisation was the ‘water splash’ referenced above, and constituted acknowledging that… client work is kinda boring. Whoah. There, I said it.

Let me immediately put a heavy caveat on this. Some work that we do through WAO, although technically paid for by a client, feels like a partnership. I’d definitely put our work with Participate in this category (which is best accessed through our new MVP website badges.community). I’d also put the work that I’m doing through Dynamic Skillset with the Bonfire team on the Zappa project in the same category.

I guess this begs the question: what’s the difference between client work and partnership work? The answer, I think, comes in the way that both sides approach working together. Instead of one side having the money and power, dictating terms to the other, it’s a negotiation. There’s a shared vision, and a better world to work towards.

The conversation I alluded to earlier was with Cade Diehm, founder of The New Design Congress. The way that he explained they way that they’re working to have organisation partner with them on a roadmap that they’ve already agreed upon was so refreshing. Laura was also part of that conversation, so we’ve got some conversations to have. (One of them might be over dinner as we’ll meet IRL with our partners in Amsterdam next weekend for the first time in over two years!)

Hannah, my wife, was away in London this week for a couple of days for a meetup with her NHS Digital team mates. She’s recently been told that her contract is being renewed for another six months, which is great, but she hasn’t had the actual contract through yet. This is a little frustrating as a great house was put up for sale just around the corner from us this week. Although our current home isn’t on the market yet, it could be quite quickly — as it was for a few weeks just over a year ago. The area and price bracket we’re looking at for our next house is unbelievably specific, so to (probably) lose out on this one, is annoying.

There’s a chance that I’m a little bit more irritable than normal given that I haven’t slept very well this week. This is likely due to parental hyper-vigilance while Hannah was away, but also the start of hayfever season. For the last few years, I’ve become used to being on daily Loratadine from March to September. Weirdly, this corresponds with the time of the year when I have most energy, so I associate taking tiny hayfever tablets with productivity!

Another reason I didn’t sleep very well on Tuesday night was after I attended the second Tethix pilot fellowship session. It was pretty intense and, as it’s running between 20:00 and 23:00 local time, my brain was buzzing as I tried to get to sleep. Coupled with birds singing the dawn chorus from on top of the dormer window next to our bed in the loft conversion, and the whisky I drank while collaborating during the Tethix session, I was a little groggy on Wednesday morning…

The main thing that’s been on my mind this week has been preparations for going away to the Netherlands next week. I’ll be away for eight days which doesn’t sound like a lot until I point out that I’ll be in four different places during that time, and that I haven’t been on a work trip for almost exactly two years. I had logistical questions to figure out, not only in terms of travel between places in the Netherlands, but also in terms of entry requirements. Thankfully, it looks like I just need to do a Covid test in Newcastle airport.

I also had some sartorial questions to answer. I haven’t bought anything other than hoodies and jeans for the last couple of years, so I needed to think about things to wear for the four sessions I’m running. What does smart casual look like in 2022? Let’s hope what I’ve ended up buying arrives on time, looks like it did online, and goes together in a way that lets people assume that I’m dressed that way on purpose.

Some people might be amazed that I’ve got this far without mentioning Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Well, there’s literally nothing I can do about that, and getting micro-updates about the war isn’t good for my mental health. Instead, I have an ambient awareness of what’s going on, and also read my subscription to the print edition of The Guardian Weekly. I’ve also donated just over a quarter of my crypto directly to the Ukrainian government, which you can join me in doing by following the guidance in this article.

Next week, we’ve got a rearranged co-op half day, as one of our members was sick last week. Then I’ve got 2.5 more days of work at home, before heading to the Netherlands (and in particular Leeuwarden) on Thursday afternoon. I’m meeting Hannah in Amsterdam on Friday night, and we’re staying there until Monday.

I’m looking forward to my time away, but also I’ll be pleased when it’s all over and completed successfully. I’ll then be able to focus on my next trip, which is walking Hadrian’s Wall with Aaron. We finalised booking our accommodation, which is a mixture of camping and hostels, earlier this week. I’ll probably need to buy some more clothes for that trip, too!

Interesting observation from economist Sassone - time saving software like PowerPoint have potentially reduced company efficiency. Tasks previously conducted by support staff now done by senior executives.

In Marriott column in Times pic.twitter.com/27APu7Jp9K

— richard shotton (@rshotton) April 7, 2022

A reader alerted me to a tweet which leads to an article behind a paywall. More googling leads to a blog post which cites a report which reveals a horrifying fact.

It seems that senior executives are spending time working out how to communicate effectively with their clients and team members.

No wonder everything's going to the dogs.

This post was originally published on my LinkedIn Newsletter (here). Please sign up, and join the discussion thread there.

Background

I'm increasingly finding myself drawn into discussions of #geopolitics and how it relates to #telecoms. This goes well beyond normal regulatory and policymaking involvement, as it means that rules - and opportunities and risks - are driven by much larger "big picture" strategic global trends, including the war in Ukraine.

As well as predicting strategic shifts, there are also lessons to be learned from events at a local, tactical level which have wider ramifications. Often, there will be trade-offs against normal telecoms preoccupations with revenue growth, theoretical "efficiency" of spectrum or network use, standardisation, competition and consumer welfare.

This is the first of what will probably be a regular set of articles on this broader theme. Here, I'm focusing on the Ukraine war, in the context some of the other geopolitical factors that I think are important. I'm specifically thinking about what they may mean for the types of network technology that are used, deployed and developed in future. This has implications for #5G, #6G, #satellite networks, #WiFi, #FTTX and much more, including the cloud/edge domains that support much of it. 

 

Ukraine and other geopolitical issues

This article especially drills into how the conflict in Ukraine has manifested in terms of telecoms and connectivity, and attempts to extrapolate to some early recommendations for policymakers more broadly.

I'm acutely consicous of the ongoing devastation and hideous war crimes being perpetrated there - I hope this isn't too early to try to analyse the narrow field of networking dispassionately, while conflict still rages.

For context, as well as Ukraine, other geopolitical issues impacting telecoms include:

• US / West vs. China tensions, from trade wars to broader restrictions on the use of Huawei and other vendors' equipment, as well as sanctions on the export of components.
• Impact of the pandemic on supply chains, plus the greater strategic and political importance of resilient telecom networks and devices in the past two years.
• The politics of post-pandemic recovery, industrial strategy and stimulus funds. Does this go to broadband deployment, themes such as Open RAN, national networks, smart cities/infrastructure, satellite networks... or somewhere else?
• Tensions within the US, and between US and Europe over the role and dominance of "Big Tech". Personal data, monopoly behaviour, censorship or regional sovereignty etc. This mostly doesn't touch networks today, but maybe cloud-native will draw attention.
• Semiconductor supply-chain challenges and the geopolitical fragility of Taiwan's chip-fabrication sector.
• How telecoms (and cloud) fits within Net Zero strategies, either as a consumer of energy, or as an enabler of green solutions.
• Cyber threats from nation-state actors, criminal cartels and terrorist-linked groups - especially aimed at critical infrastructure and health/government/finance systems.

In other words, there's a lot going on. It will impact 5G, 6G development, vendor landscapes, cloud - and also other areas such as spectrum policy and Internet governance.

Network diversity as a focus

I've written and spoken before about the importance of "network diversity" and the dangers of technology monocultures, including over-reliance on particular standards (eg 5G) or particular business models (eg national MNOs) as some sort of universal platform. It is now clear that it is more important than ever.

The analogy I made with agriculture, or ecological biodiversity, is proving to be robust.

(Previous work includes this article from 2020 about private enterprise networks, or my 2017 presentation keynote on future disruptions, at Ofcom's spectrum conference. (The blue/yellow image of wheat fields, repeated here in this post, was chosen long before it became so resonant as the Ukrainian flag). I've also covered the shift towards Open RAN and telecoms supplier diversification – including a long report I submitted to the UK Government's Diversification Task Force last year - see this post and download the report).

A key takeout from my Open RAN report was that demand diversity is as important as creating more supply choices in a given product domain. Having many classes of network operator and owner – for instance national MNOs, enterprise private 4G/5G, towercos, industrial MNOs and neutral hosts – tends to pull through multiple options for supply in terms of both vendor diversity and technology diversity. They have different requirements, different investment criteria and different operational models.

In Ukraine, the "demands" for connectivity are arising from an even more broad set of sources, including improvised communications for refugees, drones and military personnel.

The war in Ukraine & telecoms

There have been numerous articles published which highlight the surprising resilience and importance of Ukrainian telecoms during the war so far. Bringing together and synthesising multiple sources, this has highlighted a number of important issues around network connectivity:

• The original “survivability” concept of IP networks seems to have been demonstrated convincingly. Whether used for ISPs’ Internet access, or internal backhaul and transport for public fixed and mobile networks, the ability for diverse and resilient routing paths seems to have mostly been successful.
• Public national mobile networks - mostly 4G in Ukraine's case - have proven essential in many ways, whether that has been for reporting information about enemy combatants' locations and activities, obtaining advice from government authorities, or dealing with the evacuation as refugees. (I'm not sure if subway stations used as shelters have underground cellular coverage, or if there is WiFi). Authorities also seem to have had success in getting citizens to self-censor, to avoid disclosing sensitive details to their enemies.
• Reportedly the Russian forces haven't generally targeted telecoms infrastructure on a widescale basis. This was partly because they have been using commerical mobile networks themselves. However, because roaming was disabled, Russian military use of their encrypted handsets and SIMs on public 3G/4G networks seems to have failed. Two articles here and here give good insight, and also suggests there may be network surveillance backdoors which Russia may have exploited. There have also been reports of stingrays ("fake" base stations used for interception of calls / identity) being deployed. It also appears that some towns and cities - notably the destroyed city of Mariupol - have been mostly knocked offline, partly because the electrical grid was attacked first.
• Ukraine’s competitive telecoms market has probably helped its resilience. There is a highly fragmented fixed ISP landscape, with very inexpensive connections. There are over a dozen public peering-points across the country. There are three main MNOs, with many users having SIMs from 2+ operators. (This is a good overview article - https://ukraineworld.org/articles/ukraine-explained/key-facts-about-ukraines-telecom-industry). It seems they have enabled some form of national roaming to allow subscribers to attach to each others' networks.
• WiFi hotspots (likely with mobile backhaul) have been used by NGOs evacuating refugees by buses.
• Although it is still only being used at a small scale, the LEO satellite terminals from SpaceX’s StarLink seem to be an important contributor to connectivity – not least as a backup option. Realistically, satellite isn’t appropriate for millions of individual homes – and especially not personal vehicles and smartphones – but is an important part of the overall network-diversity landscape. Various commentators have suggested it is useful as a backup for critical infrastructure connectivity, as well as for mobile units such as special forces.
• Another satellite broadband provider, Viasat, apparently suffered a cyberattack at the start of the war (link here), which knocked various modem users offline (or even "bricked" the devies), reportedly including Ukrainian government organisations. Investigations haven't officially named Russia, but a coincidence seems improbable. This attack also impacted users outside Ukraine.
• Various peer-to-peer apps using Bluetooth or WiFi allow direct connections between phones, even if wide area connections are down (see link)
• There have been some concerning reports about the impact of GPS jammers on the operation of cellular networks, which may use it as a source of “timing synchronisation” to operate properly, especially for TDD radio bands. While this has long been a risk for individual cell-sites from low-power transmitters, the use of deliberate electronic warfare tools could potentially point to broader vulnerabilities in future.
• There has been wide use of commercial drones like the DJI Mavic-3 for surveillance (video and thermal imaging), or modified to deliver improvised weaponry. These use WiFi to connect to controllers on the ground, as well as a proprietary video transmission protocols (called O3+) which apparently has range of up to 15km using unlicensed spectrum. Some of the "Aerorozvidka" units reportedly then use StarLink terminals to connect back to command sites to coordinate artillery attacks (link).

In short, it seems that Ukraine has been well served by having lots of connectivity options - probably including some additional military systems that aren't widely discussed. It has benefited from multiple fixed, cellular and satellite networks, with potential for interconnect, plus inventive "quick fixes" after failures and collaboration between providers. It is exploiting licensed and unlicensed spectrum, with cellular, Wi-Fi and other technologies.

In other words, network diversity is working properly. There appears to be no single point of failure, despite deliberate attacks by invading forces and hackers. Connectivity is far from perfect, but it has held up remarkably well. Perhaps the full range of electronic warfare options hasn't been used - but given the geographical size of Ukraine and the inability of Russia forces to maintain supply-lines to distant units, that is also unsurprising.

Another set of issues that I haven't really examined are around connectivity within sanctions-hit Russia. Maybe it will have to develop more local network equipment manufacturers - if they can get the necessary silicon and other components. It probably will not wish to over-rely on Huawei & ZTE any more than some Western countries have been happy with Nokia and Ericsson as primary options. More problematic may be fixed-Internet routers, servers, WiFi APs and other Western-dominated products. I can't say I'm sympathetic, and I certainly don't want to offer suggestions. Let's see what happens.

Recommendations for policymakers, industry bodies and regulators

So what are the implications of all this? Hopefully, few other countries face a similar invasion by a large and hostile army. But preparedness is wise, especially for countries with unfriendly neighbours and territorial disputes. And even for everywhere else, the risks of cyberattacks, terrorism, natural disasters - or even just software bugs or human error - are still significant.

I should stress that I'm not a cybersecurity or critical infrastructure specialist. But I can read across from other trends I'm seeing in telecoms, and in particular I'm doing a lot of work on "path dependency" where small, innocent-seeming actions end up having long-term strategic impacts and can lock-in technology trajectories.

My initial set of considerations and recommendations:

• As a general principle, divergence in technology should be considered at least as positively than convergence. It maintains optionality, fosters innovation and reduces single-point-of-failure risks.
• National networks and telcos (fixed and mobile) are essential - but cannot do everything. They also need to cooperate during emergencies - a spirit of collaboration which seems to have worked well during the pandemic in many countries.
• Normal ideas about cyber-resilience and security may not extend to the impact of full-scale military electronic warfare units, as well as more "typical" online hacking and malware attacks.
• Having separate "air-gapped" networks available makes sense not just for critical communications (military, utilities etc) but for more general use. It isn't inefficient - it's insurance. There may be implications here for network-sharing in some instances.
• Thought needs to be given to emergency fallbacks and improvised work-arounds, for instance in the event of mass power outages or sabotage. This is particularly important for software/cloud-based networks, which may be less "fixable" in the field. Can a 5G network be "bodged"? (that's "MacGyvred" to my US friends)? As a sidenote - how have electric vehicles fared in Ukraine?
• Unlicensed spectrum and "permissionless communications" is hugely important during emergency situations. Yes, it doesn't have control or lawful intercept. But that's entirely acceptable in extreme circumstances.
• Linkages between technologies, access networks and control/identity planes should generally be via gateways that can be closed, controlled or removed if necessary. If one is attacked, the rest should be firewalled off from it. For the same reason "seamless" should be a red-flag word for cross-tech / cross-network roaming. Seams are important. They offer control and the ability to partition if necessary. "Frictionless" is OK, as long as friction can be re-imposed if needed.
• Governments should be extremely cautious of telcos extending 3GPP control mechanisms – especially the core network and slicing – to fixed broadband infrastructure. Fixed broadband is absolutely critical, and complex software dependencies may trade off fine-grained control vs. resilience - and offer additional threat surfaces.
• Democratising and improving satellite communications looks like an ever more wise move, for all sorts of reasons. It's not a panacea, but it's certainly "air-gapped" as above. 3GPP-based "non-terrestrial" networks, eg based on drones or balloons, also has potential - but will ideally be able to work independently of terrestrial networks if needed.
• I haven't heard much about LPWAN and LoRa-type networks, but I can imagine that being useful in emergency situations too.
• Sanctions, trade wars and supply-chain issues are highly unpredictable in terms of intended and unintended consequences. Technology diversity helps mitigate this, alongside supplier diversity in any one network domain.
• Spectrum policy should enable enough scale economies to ensure good supply of products (and viability of providers), but not *so* much scale that any one option drives out alternatives.
• The role and impact of international bodies like ITU, GSMA and 3GPP needs careful scrutiny. We are likely to see them become even more political in future. If necessary, there may have to be separate "non-authoritarian" and "authoritarian" versions of some standards (and spectrum policies). De-coupling and de-layering technologies' interdependency - especially radio and core networks - could isolate "disagreements" in certain layers, without undermining the whole international collaboration.
• There should be a rudimentary basic minimum level of connectivity that uses "old" products and standards. Maybe we need to keep a small slice of 900MHz spectrum alive for generator-powered GSM cells and a box of cheap phones in bunkers - essentially a future variant of Ham Radio.

So to wrap up, I'm ever more convinced that Network Diversity is essential. Not only does it foster innovation, and limit oligopoly risk, but it also enables more options in tragic circumstances. We should also consider the potential risks of too much sophistication and pursuit of effiency and performance at all costs. What happens when things break (or get deliberately broken)?

In the meantime, I'm hoping for a quick resolution to this awful war. Slava Ukraini!

Sidenote: I am currently researching the areas of “technology lock-in” and “path dependence”. In particular, I have been investigating the various mechanisms by which lock-in occurs and strategies for spotting its incipience, or breaking out of it. Please get in touch with me, if this is an area of interest for you.

On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Within days, practically the entire planet was on lockdown. We went indoors and online. 

So how did the sudden mass migration online impact browser extension usage? Pretty dramatically, it turns out. On this two-year mark of the start of the pandemic we looked back at Firefox extension installs and usage data to discover several compelling trends.  

We wanted to see the types of extensions Firefox users were drawn to during the early days of the lockdown, so we compared average monthly installs for three months at the start of the lockdown (March – May ‘20) to average monthly installs for the three months prior (Dec. ‘19 – Feb. ‘20). For this exercise we only looked at Firefox extensions with a minimum of 10,000 users. Here are some things we found… 

We need all the help we can get working and educating from home 

As much of the world suddenly transitioned their work and schooling to home computers in March 2020, Firefox users flocked to a handful of notable extensions to make life a little easier.

Which extension got the biggest install boost during the first few months of lockdown?

Zoom Scheduler

Of course it’s a Zoom extension. Zoom Scheduler installs increased 1,522%. 

Created by Zoom, their extension integrates Google Calendar with the Zoom app so you can conveniently schedule or start Zoom meetings directly from your Google Calendar on Firefox. 

Dark Background and Light Text 

When you’re suddenly doing everything on a computer, you need to take care of those precious peepers. Dark Background and Light Text installs jumped an eye-popping 351%. 

By default the extension flips the colors of every web page you visit, so your common light colored backgrounds become text colors and vice versa. But all color combinations are customizable, freeing you to adjust everything to taste. You can also set exceptions for certain websites that have a native look you prefer. 

Tree Style Tab

Apparently we suffered from too many open tabs at the start of the pandemic (work tabs! school tabs! breaking news!). Tree Style Tab (+126%) gives Firefox users a great way to cope with tab overload.  

The extension helps you organize all of your open tabs into a cascading “tree” format, so you can group tabs by topic and get a clean visual layout of everything. 

To Google Translate

This translation tool was already very popular when the lockdown started, so it’s curious its install rate still climbed a whopping 126%, going from 222,000 installs/month to more than 504,000. 

To Google Translate provides easy right-click mouse access to the Google Translate service, eliminating the nuisance of copying text and navigating away from the page you’re on just to translate. 

We can only speculate why Firefox users wanted translation extensions when the pandemic started (To Google Translate wasn’t an aberration; all of the top translation extensions had install increases), but it’s worth wondering if a big factor wasn’t a common desire to get broader perspectives, news and information about the emerging virus. Perhaps Firefox users who sought out international news coverage would explain the increased appetite for translation extensions? 

To Google Translate had particularly impressive install gains in China (+164%), the U.S. (+134%), France (+101%), Russia (+76%), and Germany (+75%). 

We started taking our digital privacy more seriously

Privacy extensions are consistently the most popular type of Firefox add-on. Even so, the pandemic pushed a few notable extensions to new heights. 

Cookie AutoDelete

Already averaging an impressive 42,000 monthly installs before the lockdown, Cookie AutoDelete skyrocketed 386% to averaging more than 206,000 installs/month between March – May 2020. 

The extension automatically eliminates any unused cookies whenever you close a tab, unless you specify sites you trust and wish to maintain cookie contact.

Facebook Container

Naturally a lot of people spent more time on the world’s largest social media platform to stay connected during lockdown. But many folks also want to enjoy this sense of connectedness without Facebook following them around the internet. So it makes sense Mozilla’s very own Facebook Container was among the most popular extensions at the start of the lockdown—installs climbed 211%. 

The extension isolates your Facebook identity into a separate “container” so Facebook can’t track your moves around the web. Indeed the social media giant wants to learn everything it can about your web habits outside of Facebook. 

Privacy Badger

No sophisticated setup required. Just install Privacy Badger and it will silently work in the background to block some of the web’s sneakiest trackers. Privacy Badger actually gets better at its job the longer you have it installed; it “learns” more about hidden trackers the more you naturally encounter them navigating the web. 

Privacy Badger installs lept 80% globally during those first few months of lockdown, with particularly keen interest from Italy (+135%) and Brazil (+119%). 

We found ways to stay connected, entertained and inspired

It wasn’t all work and no play online during the dreadful early days of the lockdown. 

BetterTTV

Installs of this top Twitch extension were up 46% as we turned to each other for live streaming entertainment. BetterTTV can radically alter the look and feel of Twitch with new emoticons, a more focused interface, content filters, and a reimagined chat experience (including Anonymous Chat so you can join a channel without drawing attention). 

BetterTTV was particularly popular in Germany, where installs soared 76%. 

Watch2gether extension

A lot of people became “watch party” animals during lockdown. If you haven’t tried social streaming, it’s a fun way to enjoy synced videos while chatting with friends online. Watch2gether extension became a popular choice for social stream parties (+82%). 

You don’t need the extension to use the web-based Watch2gether platform, but the extension provides a few added perks when used in conjunction with the web service, such as easy browser access to your watch rooms and the ability stream videos that aren’t directly supported by the Watch2gether website (e.g. the video source doesn’t offer an embeddable version). 

YouTube Non-Stop

A 45% install increase means we started listening to a lot more music on YouTube when the lockdown hit. YouTube Non-Stop solves the problem of that annoying “Video paused. Continue watching?” prompt by automatically clicking it in the background so your groove never comes to a grinding halt. 

Two years into this pandemic, our day-to-day lives — and how we rely on browsers — have permanently shifted. As we continue to adjust to new life and work routines, these incredible extensions are as useful as ever. If you want to explore more, please visit addons.mozilla.org to browse thousands of Firefox extensions. 

The post The pandemic changed everything — even the way we use browser extensions appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Different is dope. Firefox has always stood by this. It’s also the mantra of Abby Wren, the woman featured in the pilot episode of our new docuseries, “Firefox Presents.”

Launching Friday, April 15, “Firefox Presents” is a documentary series featuring colorful and inspiring creators who each have a unique journey of finding themselves or their community online. We speak with them about how they are using the internet to overcome obstacles, challenge the status quo and express themselves in a way that encourages and inspires other people to feel welcome and safer online. 

Abby Wren, an alopecia advocate and makeup artist who represents the alopecia and bald communities online through her Tiktok channel. Finding an online community after her diagnosis helped her feel less alone, and she’s now doing the same for others in return.

“There are all these other people who had alopecia that I didn’t know existed before the internet brought us together,” Abby said in our behind-the-scenes interview with her.

Each episode will be released monthly on Firefox’s YouTube channel. Upcoming episodes will feature activist, writer and actor Brandon Kyle Goodman, featured on Netflix’s “Human Resources,” and engineer, entrepreneur and YouTuber Xyla Foxlin. 

The “Firefox Presents” series is produced by Mozilla in collaboration with Long Haul Films, and is executive produced by Steve Flavin (Mozilla) and directed by Melissa Dowler (Long Haul Films).

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The post Mozilla celebrates groundbreaking creators in new docuseries “Firefox Presents” appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Abby Wren wants you to look.  

With her face and bald head as her canvas, she creates wildly elaborate and colorful makeup designs that have gained her more than 177,000 followers on TikTok. She’s transformed herself into an Easter bunny, the Cheshire cat and Homer Simpson. Once, she turned herself into Bernie Sanders from that 2020 inauguration meme. 

Abby, an L.A.-based makeup artist, didn’t always feel comfortable with people’s gaze. 

In 2006, while in high school, she started to notice clumps of hair falling out in the shower. She and her mother made multiple doctor’s visits outside her small town in Montana until she received a diagnosis: alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss as a person’s immune system attacks hair follicles by mistake. 

Being the subject of stares while doing normal American teenager things like walking in the mall frustrated Abby. She just wanted to blend in. Now, if you ran into her on the street and you looked at her head, she’d probably greet you with a big smile. 

“I want to show that it’s OK to look,” Abby said. “I want you to look.”

She encourages people to ask questions, and she’s eager to educate and connect: “I don’t want this to be an isolating experience, because there’s more going through it than people know.”

After high school, Abby attended the University of Alaska to study psychology. She wanted to work as an art therapist, which she felt was her calling at the time. But after moving back home to Montana, she felt a disconnect.

With her mother’s encouragement, Abby decided to pursue something she’s loved since owning her first eyeshadow kit in the sixth grade, a color palette she still remembers to this day (“a shimmer, a light brown, a bright teal and a purple”). 

Abby moved out of the country to attend one of the top makeup programs in Canada. By then, about a decade after high school, her hair had grown back. She started modeling her own work on Instagram, her face conventionally made up and her hair long and blonde. 

Her talent brought her to the Emmy Awards, where she did makeup for a team of HBO producers, and New York Fashion Week, where she worked on a show for a Denver-based fashion line. She was riding a career high — until Abby started to lose her hair again.

“I was completely freaking out,” she remembered. “I had really gotten used to myself with hair again.” 

She associated her success with how she looked, and that made her more self-conscious. 

“I was so worried that someone would see the bald patch, or the extension would slip and they would see the track,” Abby said.

Her partner, Wade, who recently became her fiancé, encouraged her to shave her head. “He was like, ‘It’s just hair, who cares?’ And I felt the same way,” Abby said.

Wade gently took clippers to her head, a sweet episode that Abby shared on her Instagram and TikTok feeds. Commenters responded with supportive messages.  

“I started to paint my head and paint the sides of my face and down my neck,” Abby said. Her bald head became her signature.

Abby said she approaches her “little slice of the internet” with boldness: “How can I do things a little differently? How can I spread my message in a way that’s going to uplift? I want to make people’s day better.”

She became an advocate with an organization called Baldtourage, where she found a community of “moms, daughters and little boys” affected by hair loss.

“There are all these other people who had alopecia that I didn’t know existed before the internet brought us together, Abby said.

Of course, she said, there are still less-than-perfect moments. 

“Someone in a bar the other day asked me ‘what’ I was,” she said. “My approach is always like, ‘Well, I’m a woman. And I’m a makeup artist. I’m a home chef. I’m a partner to my fiancé. I’m so many things, and my hair doesn’t define me.’”

Abby said she recognizes the privilege of having a platform, which has allowed her to tell her full story widely through collaborations — including with Firefox. 

“The internet is really powerful, so I don’t take the responsibility lightly,” she said. “I always try to communicate my message with a lot of love and color.”

Abby finds joy in getting to work with young kids experiencing alopecia. She recalled receiving a card from an 8-year-old girl that had an image with a message saying, ‘That is me bald with a painted face. I’m beautiful. And so are you.”

She said she’s so happy with the person she’s become that if her hair grew back, she’d probably just shave it off again.

“I wish 15-year-old Abby could see this now,” she said. “All I can do is hopefully be there for other young kids going through this. … To know that someone else is going through it with you and has gone through it, it’s powerful.”

She said if she could, she’d tell her younger self that “it’s OK to just be the way you are. You don’t have to wear anything to cover your baldness. Be bold. Be vibrant. Be courageous. It’s all going to be OK in a couple of years.”

Firefox is exploring all the ways the internet makes our planet an awesome place. Almost everything we do today ties back to the online world in some way — so, join us in highlighting the funny, weird, inspiring and courageous stories that remind us why we love the world wide web.

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Download Firefox

The post Firefox Presents: A makeup artist with alopecia redefining beauty online appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Throughout the entire history of what we call media, we have consumed its contents on producers’ schedules. When we wanted to know what was in newspapers and magazines, we waited until the latest issues showed up on newsstands, at our doors, and in our mailboxes. When we wanted to hear what was on the radio or to watch what was on TV, we waited until it played on our stations’ schedules. “What’s on TV tonight?” is perhaps the all-time most-uttered question about a medium. Wanting the answers is what made TV Guide required reading in most American households.

But no more. Because we have entered the Age of Optionality. We read, listen to, and watch the media we choose, whenever we please. Podcasts, streams, and “over the top” (OTT) on-edmand subscription services are replacing old-fashioned broadcasting. Online publishing is now more synchronous with readers’ preferences than with producers’ schedules.

The graph above illustrates what happened and when, though I’m sure the flat line at the right end is some kind of error on Google’s part. Still, the message is clear: what’s on and what’s in have become anachronisms.

The centers of our cultures have been held for centuries by our media. Those centers held in large part because they came on a rhythm, a beat, to which we all danced and on which we all depended. But now those centers are threatened or gone, as media have proliferated and morphed into forms that feed our attention through the flat rectangles we carry in our pockets and purses, or mount like large art pieces on walls or tabletops at home. All of these rectangles maximize optionality to degrees barely imaginable in prior ages and their media environments: vocal, scribal, printed, broadcast.

We are now digital beings. With new media overlords.

The Digital Markets Act in Europe calls these overlords “gatekeepers.” The gates they keep are at entrances to vast private walled gardens enclosing whole cultures and economies. Bruce Schneier calls these gardens feudal systems in which we are all serfs.

To each of these duchies, territories, fiefs, and countries, we are like cattle from which personal data is extracted and processed as commodities. Purposes differ: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and our phone and cable companies each use our personal data in different ways. Some of those ways do benefit us. But our agency over how personal data is extracted and used is neither large nor independent of these gatekeepers. Nor do we have much if any control over what countless customers of gatekeepers do with personal data they are given or sold.

The cornucopia of options we have over the media goods we consume in these gardens somatizes us while also masking the extreme degree to which these private gatekeepers have enclosed the Internet’s public commons, and how algorithmic optimization of engagement at all costs has made us into enemy tribes. Ignorance of this change and its costs is the darkness in which democracy dies.

Shoshana Zuboff calls this development The Coup We Are Not Talking About. The subhead of that essay makes the choice clear: We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. Her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, gave us a name for what we’re up against. A bestseller, it is now published in twenty-six languages. But our collective oblivity is also massive.

We plan to relieve some of that oblivity by having Shoshana lead the final salon in our Beyond the Web series at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop. To prepare for that, Joyce and I spoke with Shoshana for more than an hour and a half last night, and are excited about her optimism toward restoring the public commons and invigorating democracy in our still-new digital age. This should be an extremely leveraged way to spend an hour or more on April 11, starting at 2PM Eastern time. And it’s free.

Use this link to add the salon to your calendar and join in when it starts.

Or, if you’re in Bloomington, come to the Workshop and attend in person. We’re at 513 North Park Avenue.

Welcome to another Long Links, selected pointers to long-form pieces that have added value to my semi-retired days and one or two of which might reward you if you make time for them. A few of this month’s pieces aren’t free; it’s a bitter fact that the truth is paywalled but the lies are free. Sorry.

Let’s start with climate issues, which I’m cheerful enough to think might be at the center of the world’s attention were it not for Covid and Mr Putin. One of my favorite environmentalists is Tzeporah Berman, who’s been fighting the good fights, and winning a few, for decades. She writes Fear and Loathing in the Climate Era: 8 Thoughts on How We Win. It’s cheerful, practical, and wise.

There’s a certain faction of people who claim to share reasonable concerns about the onrushing climate catastrophe but scoff at us hippies always going on about renewables because, they say, Nuclear is what we really need. I can’t suppress a suspicion that it’s because there’s something manly about nuclear power. Except for, it’s way, way too expensive. The nukies reply that future technologies will fix that. The most plausible of which is Small Modular Reactors (everyone says SMRs). The Economist dives deep in Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come. I’d be wide-open to them if they turn out to be affordable and deliverable. Per this article, they’re not obviously hopeless, but they’re nowhere near a slam-dunk.

While we’re on the carbon trail, my former employer now offers this new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. The idea is that if you’re doing cloud computing you might still want to know how much you’re worsening the planet’s carbon lead. This is supposed to do that (haven’t tried it myself). It’s a big deal because for a lot of big enterprises who don’t actually bend metal or refine fluids, their IT might be where their carbon load is concentrated. A little bird told me that when, back in 2019, Amazon decided to sign The Climate Pledge and try to be a better climate citizen, one input was customers beating up on AWS leadership, saying “I need to know my carbon load, and that’s you.” Tip o’ the hat to AWS!

Speaking of not wasting energy, here’s another chance to expose the dangerous lunacy that is the cryptocurrency world. And absolutely nobody is better at that than Amy Castor. Read The gorilla in the room: Yuga Labs investors pretend to care about the planet. They don’t and you’ll probably find yourself agreeing with me about Amy. Her blog is reliably excellent on this stuff.

Let’s dip into politics. Conservative politics. Regular readers know that I’m pretty far out on the left wing, but I make a point of trying to track the other side, because I think we need intelligent conservatives. Which are and have been mostly absent in North America. But, things are getting weird.

There is starting to be a conservative faction saying that our business-dominated civic fabric is doing a really bad job of building a decent society; that monopoly is a problem, and working-class impoverishment, and exploitive health-care economics. Which is perfectly sensible; what’s weird is that this is often coupled with religious absolutism, activism against any sexual expression which is not straight outta the Fifties, and regular flirtation with racism; all packaged up under the banner of being “anti-Woke”. I personally think that anyone inveighing against “Woke”-ness probably has their head up their ass, but like I say, there are also voices saying interesting things.

Like for example Only the Economic Left Can Beat the Woke, by David Reiff. Ignore that “woke” in the title and give it a try. It’s intelligent, well-written and, yes, wrong in places. But it feels like someone you could talk to, unlike anything out of today’s conservative Trumpist mainstream. Sound-bites: “To put it brutally, you can’t fight a culture war when you really have never been interested in culture before.” And “The mainstream right simply doesn’t have the intellectual tools to fight a battle of ideas.”

When someone rants about the awfulness of the “woke”, you can bet that pretty soon, they’re gonna be inveighing against “cancel culture.” Most such rhetoric is slimy unserious partisanship, the hyperoverprivileged whining that they can no longer get away with being arrogantly offensive pricks in public. Can we conclude therefore that the whole cluster of issues is a nothingburger? I’d say “Yes, … mostly.” But damn, it’s a hard subject to talk about. Ken White offers Our Fundamental Right To Shame And Shun The New York Times – What the NYT Cancel Culture Editorial Got Wrong, And What It Got Right. I don’t agree with all of it but it’s careful and made me think about some things I hadn’t before. Out-take: “Similarly, if you denounce ‘cancel culture’ without citing specific examples and suggesting how people should act differently, you’re closer to chilling speech than fixing it.”

Writing this piece led me to a pleasant surprise. I was going to recommend a few pieces by Chris Arnade on the basis that “even conservatives can write smart, eloquent, important things.” I don’t know how I got the idea he’s one of those, because he isn’t. Anyhow, what he’s up to recently is going places and walking around them, taking pictures and notes. For example, Kyiv. And Lima. He also writes things that aren’t pure travel narratives, for example Among the Half-Masked – COVID theater is a sign of a healthy society.

OK, let’s retreat to the comfortable left side of the road for a heartfelt JWZ rant: Following the money. There are few places in the world more likely than San Francisco to drive thoughtful people to righteous rage; this is a fine piece of that.

Famous non-conservatives include Albert Einstein, who in 1949 wrote Why Socialism?, from which this nice little excerpt, with a link to the whole piece.

OK, enough politics. Let’s talk food, and address the question Does Adding Pasta Water Really Make a Difference? Turns out it does! (Also, fun piece.) Don’t say I don’t add value for my readers.

This month’s musical Long Link is R.L. Burnside’s Come On In, which popped up in a random blues-fan stream I follow and oh my goodness, it’s a keeper. Although Wikipedia says R.L. did some innovating on this one, to me it just sounds like pure, minimal, warm-toned and warm-hearted electric blues. Something that the world always needs more of

I’m going to end up on a geeky note, so those of you who are tech-hostile or tech-oblivious can drop out now and my feelings won’t be hurt. Baby’s First AWS Deployment is the story of a first-timer building a little app on AWS from scratch. The author eventually decides to walk away from AWS, for reasons that obviously don’t apply to everyone, but I found instructive and you might too

Let’s close with what I think could become a very, very big story. It’s from The Information which is paywalled (and expensive), but you can see the first couple of paragraphs of Amazon’s Public Shareholders Show Their Hand. It contains lots of juicy insider information that I won’t reproduce here but I think the following is very significant:

“As of February, Bezos had the right to vote just 12.7% of Amazon stock, including shares owned by his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott. A decade ago, Bezos could vote 19.5%. Back in 1998, shortly after Amazon went public, he owned 41%. Perhaps just as meaningful: This year the combined stakes of two big institutional holders, Vanguard and BlackRock, is almost equal to his. And remember, Amazon doesn’t have a class of supervoting shares guaranteeing its founder control regardless of his ownership, unlike firms such as Alphabet and Meta Platforms.

“What this means is that power at Amazon is gradually shifting to public shareholders…”

Big Tech was distinguished, throughout my career, by having founding leadership still setting its directions. Which in most cases meant a focus on customer success that is not exactly a usual feature of Twenty-First century capitalism. (OK, yeah, I know, Larry Ellison, but still.)

If that changes — if Big Tech becomes just another arena for financial engineers to maximize their extractive power, it’ll be a whole lot less fun. And by the way, an even more attractive target for legislators and regulators, which is a good thing. I suppose it had to happen someday.

I wanted to build a Twitter bot that would tweet Covid sewage graphs from this page every day.

To do that, I needed the following four credentials for a new @covidsewage Twitter account.

• consumer key (for a new Twitter application)
• consumer secret
• access token key (for my specific Twitter account)
• access token secret

Applying for a Developer account

I created my new Twitter account, then applied to set that up as a Twitter Developer on https://developer.twitter.com/

When I filled in the form there I said I wanted to create a bot. I think this is one of the things that triggers a manual review flow.

I filled out the application form and submitted it.

I then got an email requesting further details - I replied to that email with pretty much a copy of the data I had entered in the application form early on.

A few days later my application was approved.

Configuring the app

Since the goal here is to get credentials that can be used to write to the account (in order to Tweet), the application needs to be configured to support that.

It turns out you need to turn on "OAuth 1.0a" in order to generate a read-write token for the account (thanks Igor Brigadir for the tip).

The following settings worked for me:

Since callback URI and website URI were required (even though I'm not going to be using them) I set them to the Twitter profile page, which seemed to work.

Generating the credentials

Having configured the app, the "Keys and tokens" page for that application gave me the option to generate an access token and secret for the account:

Building the bot

Having generated the four credentials I needed, I built the rest of the bot using GitHub Actions, see https://github.com/simonw/covidsewage-bot

I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.

I'm increasingly distrustful of Covid numbers as fewer people are tested in ways that feed into the official statistics. But the sewage numbers don't lie! As the Santa Clara county page explains:

SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is shed in feces by infected individuals and can be measured in wastewater. More cases of COVID-19 in the community are associated with increased levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, meaning that data from wastewater analysis can be used as an indicator of the level of transmission of COVID-19 in the community.

That page also embeds some beautiful charts of the latest numbers, powered by an embedded Observable notebook built by Zan Armstrong.

Once a day, my bot tweets a screenshot of those latest charts that looks like this:

How the bot works

The bot runs once a daily using this scheduled GitHub Actions workflow.

Here's the bit of the workflow that generates the screenshot:

- name: Generate screenshot with shot-scraper
  run: |-
    shot-scraper https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater \
      -s iframe --wait 3000 -b firefox --retina -o /tmp/covid.png

This uses my shot-scraper screenshot tool, described here previously. It takes a retina screenshot just of the embedded iframe, and uses Firefox because for some reason the default Chromium screenshot failed to load the embed.

This bit sends the tweet:

- name: Tweet the new image
  env:
    TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY }}
    TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET }}
    TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY }}
    TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET: ${{ secrets.TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET }}
  run: |-
    tweet-images "Latest Covid sewage charts for the SF Bay Area" \
      /tmp/covid.png --alt "Screenshot of the charts" > latest-tweet.md

tweet-images is a tiny new tool I built for this project. It uses the python-twitter library to send a tweet with one or more images attached to it.

The hardest part of the project was getting the credentials for sending tweets with the bot! I had to go through Twitter's manual verification flow, presumably because I checked the "bot" option when I applied for the new developer account. I also had to figure out how to extract all four credentials (with write permissions) from the Twitter developer portal.

I wrote up full notes on this in a TIL: How to get credentials for a new Twitter bot.

Datasette for geospatial analysis

I stumbled across datanews/amtrak-geojson, a GitHub repository containing GeoJSON files (from 2015) showing all of the Amtrak stations and sections of track in the USA.

I decided to try exploring it using my geojson-to-sqlite tool, which revealed a bug triggered by records with a geometry but no properties. I fixed that in version 1.0.1, and later shipped version 1.1 with improvements by Chris Amico.

In exploring the Amtrak data I found myself needing to learn how to use the SpatiaLite GUnion function to aggregate multiple geometries together. This resulted in a detailed TIL on using GUnion to combine geometries in SpatiaLite, which further evolved as I used it as a chance to learn how to use Chris's datasette-geojson-map and sqlite-colorbrewer plugins.

This was so much fun that I was inspired to add a new "uses" page to the official Datasette website: Datasette for geospatial analysis now gathers together links to plugins, tools and tutorials for handling geospatial data.

sqlite-utils 3.26

I'll quote the release notes for sqlite-utils 3.26 in full:

• New errors=r.IGNORE/r.SET_NULL parameter for the r.parsedatetime() and r.parsedate() convert recipes. (#416)
• Fixed a bug where --multi could not be used in combination with --dry-run for the convert command. (#415)
• New documentation: Using a convert() function to execute initialization. (#420)
• More robust detection for whether or not deterministic=True is supported. (#425)

shot-scraper 0.12

In addition to support for WebKit contributed by Ryan Murphy, shot-scraper 0.12 adds options for taking a screenshot that encompasses all of the elements on a page that match a CSS selector.

In also adds a new --js-selector option, suggested by Tony Hirst. This covers the case where you want to take a screenshot of an element on the page that cannot be easily specified using a CSS selector. For example, this expression takes a screenshot of the first paragraph on a page that includes the text "shot-scraper":

shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net/2022/Apr/8/weeknotes/ \
  --js-selector 'el.tagName == "P" && el.innerText.includes("shot-scraper")' \
  --padding 15 --retina

And an airship museum!

I finally got to add another listing to my www.niche-museums.com website about small or niche museums I have visited.

The Moffett Field Historical Society museum in Mountain View is situated in the shadow of Hangar One, an airship hangar built in 1933 to house the mighty USS Macon.

It's the absolute best kind of local history museum. Our docent was a retired pilot who had landed planes on aircraft carriers using the kind of equipment now on display in the museum. They had dioramas and models. They even had a model railway. It was superb.

Releases this week

• tweet-images: 0.1.1 - (2 releases total) - 2022-04-17
  Send tweets with images from the command line
• asyncinject: 0.3 - (5 releases total) - 2022-04-16
  Run async workflows using pytest-fixtures-style dependency injection
• geojson-to-sqlite: 1.1.1 - (11 releases total) - 2022-04-13
  CLI tool for converting GeoJSON files to SQLite (with SpatiaLite)
• sqlite-utils: 3.26 - (99 releases total) - 2022-04-13
  Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
• summarize-template: 0.1 - 2022-04-13
  Show a summary of a Django or Jinja template
• shot-scraper: 0.12 - (13 releases total) - 2022-04-11
  Tools for taking automated screenshots of websites

TIL this week

• GUnion to combine geometries in SpatiaLite
• Trick Apple Photos into letting you access your video files
• How to get credentials for a new Twitter bot

Cyclists who live in small spaces know the conundrum: You want your bike easily accessible but hate tripping over it all the time.

After spending some 30 hours researching dozens of indoor bike-storage stands, we assembled and tested the 10 most viable options, leaving our bikes at their mercy for days—and sometimes weeks—on end.

Ultimately, we decided that for most people, the Delta Cycle Michelangelo Gravity Stand is the best way to store your bike indoors.

The stand takes minimal effort and expertise to install, it’s lightweight and strong, and it can accommodate one or two bikes of any variety—mountain, road, hybrid, and even step-through cruisers.

I took our two bicycles to Our Community Bikes this morning. I was responding to a Tweet I had seen yesterday that said donated bikes could get to “new Canadians”. So I thought of the increase in refugees that we are seeing Canada accept, and I liked the idea that maybe a Ukrainian might find one of our old bikes useful. There is, of course, no way to tell who will get the bike you donate – and maybe it just gets used for parts or something. And since this is currently tax form completing season for last year, the thought of another tax receipt was also welcome.

The shop is on Main Street near the junction with Broadway, which is going to be the location of a new underground station. So lanes are closed, turns are banned and access is a bit awkward. The idea is that you park in the lane and they come and take the bike, or bikes, from you when you call them. The lane is blocked at the southern end by the Broadway works. And, on this occasion, by a large truck which has backed down to deliver supplies to a restaurant. I get out of its way by going to an anonymous space which turns out not to be their back door after all. By the time I have taken the bikes off the bike rack and taken that off the back of the car and stowed it in the trunk, I notice that this has taken me 15 minutes – so rather longer than “I’ll be right out” lead me to expect. Two other people are also trying to donate bikes – and calling the shop but getting no response. The large delivery truck has now left so I can move my car closer to the back of the shop but then the recycling truck shows up. By gestures and a bit of shunting we get ourselves sorted out, and I go to the front door to see why we are being made to wait so long. I get a lecture about their mask policies instead.

I go back to the alley and find that one person seems to have just left his bike and gone and another is being told that her bike is not wanted as it is too old. They do take both the bikes I have, as well as the various accessories we will no longer need, like the bike locks, pump, helmets, two spare wheels and so on. My bike, while old is a bit like the hammer that has had two new heads and three new handles. My partner’s bike is six years old and cost $700 then. So I am gutted to hear that we do not qualify for a tax receipt. It is too late to put the bikerack back on the car and reload the bikes so I accept what seems a blatantly unreasonable decision. After all, writing a tax receipt doesn’t actually cost them anything at all.

The guy who is driving the recycling truck, who has been delayed by my car’s use of the alley, is very friendly. He remarks on the obvious value of my partner’s bike and is surprised by our willingness to give it up. I tell him I think that it is better that someone gets to use a bike that has been just sitting in a garage for two years.

My partner does not like cycling where we live. There are too many cars and too much speeding. We have used bike sharing systems in New York, Paris and Denver (and a rental in San Francisco) but have never used the one in Vancouver. We walk a lot, and take transit or an Evo if it seems like we have walked too far that day. Our nearest ShawGo station is about as far as the nearest Modo – and we haven’t used that either for the same reason. I cannot manage the hills which surround us in three of the four main compass points, and I blogged about the great electric wheel disaster some time ago. I also find that our local bike lanes tend to be badly designed – paint is no protection and sharrows actually make things worse.

So maybe, once we get to travel again, we may rent bikes once more. But Vancouver needs to get serious about protected bike lanes – and ebikes have to be one of the choices to get me on a bikeshare here. I hope whoever gets one of our bikes gets plenty of use out of them.

Check out London’s new underground rail line (just don’t call it the Underground) via BoingBoing

https://boingboing.net/2022/03/20/check-out-londons-new-underground-rail-line-just-dont-call-it-the-underground.html

Check out London’s new underground rail line (just don’t call it the Underground) | Boing Boing

Drak Paul who killed Daniel Bertini while driving on Keele St. north of King City just got sentenced to two years in jail, with a five year driving ban.

Consider the following:

• he was uninsured
• he was doing 125 kph in a 60 kph zone. Those who have ridden in the area know that there are many rolling hills in that stretch, and that anything above 60 kph is insane
• he fled on foot and was captured 2.7 km from the scene

There are many upsetting things about this particular report.

• “Rose (the judge) added that he’s been struggling with Paul’s decision to run from police, explaining that had he stopped he would have likely just received a traffic ticket and in turn, ensured the safety of Daniel Bertini, 54, a Richmond Hill father-of-one.”
  • This refers to the fact that the driver was clocked doing 125 kph, and this was followed by a police chase that was aborted at some point.
• “During their submissions, Crown Sean Doyle requested 30 months in jail and a 6.5-year driving prohibition, while defense Domenic Basile requested 18 months and a five-year driving ban.”
  • What’s depressing here is that the penalties proposed by both prosecution and defense were wholly inadequate

We need stricter penalties. We need vulnerable road user legislation. We need it now. Bill 58 is at committee but we don’t know if it will be considered before the June election. You can write your MPP about it.

• the original account of the ghost bike installation
• the driver pleads guilty
• heartbreaking coverage of the victim impact statements

Renewed condolences to Mr. Bertini’s family and friends.

John Cusack’s first movie The Sure Thing is one of my favorites. In one scene, Cusack’s college roommate is explaining his success bedding a string of random coeds; “It’s all about sincerity; once you can fake that the rest is easy.” Cusack’s character arc is all about his inherent sincerity and learning to let it through in place of the games he thinks he should play.

It’s a constant challenge to stop looking for shortcuts and do the work. This is my fundamental objection to the language of “connecting the dots” It perpetuates the mythology of shortcuts. It puts the focus on the final step, the reveal.

“Solving for pattern” shifts the emphasis productively. Wallowing in the phenomena to identify things that may or may not turn into a dot. Trying out different combinations, connections, and clusters to see whether they point to something interesting. Formulating and testing hypotheses that might explain what you are observing.

I grew up wanting to be a scientist; preferably a rocket scientist based on the dominance of science fiction in my reading habits. As I found myself drawn more and more to the human side of the equation, I questioned that dream. Things were too messy to fit into the narrow conception of science I had started with. I was confusing the pretty pictures with the underlying discipline of the process.

The post Honor the Work appeared first on McGee's Musings.

There’s a thread in a list I’m on titled “NFTs are a Scam.” I know too little about NFTs to do more than dump here three thoughts I shared on the list in response to a post that suggested that owning digital seemed to be a mania of some kind. Here goes…

First, from Walt Whitman, who said he “could turn and live for awhile with the animals,” because,

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied.
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.

Second, the Internet is NEA, meaning,

No one owns it
Everyone can use it
Anyone can improve it

Kind of like the Universe that way.

What makes the Internet an inter-net is an agreement: that every network within it will pass packets from any one endpoint to any other, regardless of origin or destination. That agreement is a protocol: TCP/IP. Agreeing to use that protocol is like molecules agreeing to use gravity or the periodic table. Everything everyone does while operating or using the Internet is gravy atop TCP/IP. The Web is also NEA. So is email. Those are held together by simple protocols too.

Third is that the sure sign of a good idea is that it’s easy to do bad things with it. Look at email, which is 99.x% spam. Yet I’m writing one here and you’re reading it. NFT’s are kind of like QR codes in the early days after the patent’s release to the word by Denso Wave early in this millennium. I remember some really smart people calling QR codes “robot barf.” Still, good things happened.

So, if bad things are being done with NFTs, that might be a good sign.

The image above is of a window into the barn that for several decades served the Crissman family in Graham, North Carolina. It was toward the back of their 17 acres of beautiful land there. I have many perfect memories of time spent on that land with my aunt, uncle, five cousins and countless visitors. The property is an apartment complex now, I’m told.

“Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.” — George S. Patton (in the above shot played by George C. Scott in his greatest role.)

Is the world going to croak?

Put in geological terms, will the Phanerozoic eon, which began with the Cambrian explosion a half billion years ago, end at the close of the Anthropocene epoch, when the human species, which has permanently put its mark on the Earth, commits suicide with nuclear weapons? This became a lot more plausible as soon as Putin rattled his nuclear saber.

Well, life will survive, even if humans do not. And that will happen whether or not the globe warms as much as the IPCC assures us it will. If temperatures in the climate of our current interglacial interval peak with both poles free of ice, the Mississippi river will meet the Atlantic at what used to be St. Louis. Yet life will abound, as life does, at least until the Sun gets so large and hot that photosynthesis stops and the phanerozoic finally ends. That time is about a half-billion years away. That might seem like a long time, but given the age of the Earth itself—about 4.5 billion years—life here is much closer to the end than the beginning.

Now let’s go back to human time.

I’ve been on the planet for almost 75 years, which in the grand scheme is a short ride. But it’s enough to have experienced history being bent some number of times. So far I count six.

First was on November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. This was when The Fifties actually ended and The Sixties began. (My great aunt Eva Quakenbush, née Searls or Searles—it was spelled both ways—told us what it was like when Lincoln was shot and she was 12 years old. “It changed everything,” she said. So did the JFK assassination.)

The second was the one-two punch of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, on April 4 and June 6, 1968. The former was a massive setback for both the civil rights movement and nonviolence. And neither has fully recovered. The latter assured the election of Richard Nixon and another six years of the Vietnam war.

The third was the Internet, which began to take off in the mid-1990s. I date the steep start of hockey stick curve to April 30, 1995, when the last backbone within the Internet that had forbidden commercial traffic (NSFnet) shut down, uncorking a tide of e-commerce that is still rising.

The fourth was 9/11, in 2001. That suckered the U.S. into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and repositioned the country from the world’s leading peacekeeper to the world’s leading war-maker—at least until Russia stepped up.

The fifth was the Covid pandemic, which hit the world in early 2020 and is still with us, causing all sorts of changes, from crashes in supply chains to inflation to complete new ways for people to work, travel, vote, and think.

Sixth is the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, just eleven days ago as I write this.

Big a thing as this last bend is—and it’s huge—there are too many ways to make sense of it all:

• The global struggle between democracy and autocracy
• The real End of History
• At last, EU gets it together
• Putin the warlord
• The man is nuts
• Zelensky the hero
• Russia about to collapse, maybe
• WWIII
• Ukraine will win
• Hard to beat propaganda
• Putin’s turning Russia into 
• It’ll get worse before it ends badly while we all do more than nothing but not enough
• Whatever it is, social media is reporting it all
• World War Wired
• Russia does not have an out
• The dawn of uncivilization

I didn’t list the threat of thermonuclear annihilation among the six big changes in history I’ve experienced because I was raised with it. Several times a year we would “duck and cover” under our desks when the school would set off air raid sirens. Less frequent than fire drills, these were far more scary, because we all knew we were toast, being just five miles by air from Manhattan, which was surely in the programmed crosshairs on one or more Soviet nukes.

Back then I put so little faith in adult wisdom, and its collective expression in government choices, that I had a bucket list of places I’d like to see before nuclear blasts or fallout doomed us all. My top two destinations were the Grand Canyon and California: exotic places for a kid whose farthest family venturings from New Jersey were to see relatives in North Carolina and North Dakota. (Of no importance but of possible interest is that I’ve now been a citizen of California for 37 years, married to an Angelino for 32 of those, and it still seems exotic to me. Mountains next to cities and beaches? A tradition of wildfires and earthquakes? Whoa.)

What’s around the corner we turned two Thursdays ago? Hard to tell, in spite of all that’s being said by Wise Ones in the links above. One things I do know for sure: People have changed, because more and more of them are digital now, connected to anybody and anything at any distance, and able to talk, produce “content” and do business—and to look and think past national and territorial boundaries. We make our tools and then our tools make us, McLuhan taught. Also, all media work us over completely. We have been remade into digital beings by our wires, waves, and phones. This raises optionalities in too many ways to list.

I’m an optimist by nature, and since the ’90s have been correctly labeled a cyber-utopian. (Is there anything more utopian than The Cluetrain Manifesto?) To me, the tiny light at the end of Ukraine’s tunnel is a provisional belief that bad states—especially ones led by lying bastards who think nothing of wasting thousands or millions of innocent lives just to build an empire—can’t win World War Wired. Unless, that is, the worst of those bastards launches the first nuke and we all go “gribbit.”

Our challenge as a species, after we stop Russia’s land grab from becoming a true world war, is to understand fully how we can live and work in the Wired World as digital as well as physical beings.

I want to tell you a story about measuring things. It starts with a simple one, the thermometer. Even though a rough understanding of basic principles of the thermometer are two thousand years old, for centuries the whole idea of measuring temperature was dogged by superstition. How, the question went, could you measure an experience as subjective and ethereal as temperature? Even though you could demonstrate the basic idea in ancient Greece with glass tubes and a fire the idea was absurd, like asking how much a poem weighs.

It was more than 1600 years between the first known glass-tube demonstrations of the principles involved, and Santorini Santorio's decision to put a ruler to the side of one of those glass tubes. It was most of a century later before Carlo Renaldini suggested that Christiaan Huygens's suggestion to measure against the freezing and boiling points of water be used as the anchor points of a universal scale. (Isaac Newton's proposal for the increments of that gradient was 12, incidentally, a decision I'm glad we didn't stick with. Forty years later Andres Celcius had a better idea.)

The first precision thermometers—using mercury, one of those unfortunately-reasonable-at-the-time decisions that have had distressing long-term consequences—were invented by Farenheit in 1714. More tragically, he proposed the metric that bears his name, but the tool worked. And if there's one thing in tech that we all know and fear, it's that there's nothing quite as permanent as something temporary that works.

In 1900, Henry Bolton describe this long evolution as, "encumbered with erroneous statements that have been reiterated with such dogmatism that they have received the false stamp of authority." Today, of course, outside of the most extreme margins, these questions are behind us.

Computing, as a field, is much less than a century old; most of the metrics we've tried to establish haven't proved out, and so many of the benchmarks we've chosen are just…arbitrary. (Nobody's counting lines of code anymore, but why are sprints two weeks?)

But we've got tools that the smartest people in the 17th century didn't. We can take our raw material, these huge piles of precision data-ore, and feed it into math furnaces that can anneal it, polish it, and harden it to a point.

But computing is as broad as any field of human endeavour has ever been; at the intersection of math, engineering, art and the social sciences. How could you measure something like that? The whole idea is absurd. You might as well be asking how much a poem weighs.

Which brings me to these lightning talks. It's still early days. This field is so young, so often dogmatic and superstitious. But I'd like to introduce you people who are building thermometers.

Take a look around you, at the ridiculous comforts of modernity that can only exist because we share this single consistent yardstick. The glass in your windows, the beams in the walls. Bread baked just so, served on ceramic plates and cut with knives that hold an edge. And then ask yourself, what about all this software, all these ideas we take out of heads and turn into machines. What could we build, if we weren't starting with loose clay, shaping it outside in the weather?

You might want to be there: I think it will be pretty cool.

mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

Als damals alle in ihren Studios auf DAT setzten, verliebten wir uns gerade in die MiniDisc als Medium. Ein Rekorder stand im Studio, einen Player hatten wir im Auto und selbst tragbare MiniDisc Player fanden ihren Weg zu uns. Die Discs waren robust, klein und hatten einen vorzüglichen Klang, so dass wir sie so lange nutzten, bis dann irgendwann HD-Recording bezahlbar, CDs brennbar und MP-Player zum Standard wurden. Hier ein bisschen Geschichte über das von Sony entwickelte magneto-optische Speichermedium zur digitalen Aufnahme und Wiedergabe von Musik und Sprache. Kann mir gut vorstellen, dass die auch heute noch ihre Liebhaber hat.

(Direktlink, via BoingBoing)

Apple has announced a variety of new products at its March 'Peek Performance' event including a new iPhone SE (2022), a new iPad Air, a Mac Studio and more. Here's the Canadian pricing and availability for all the devices that the Cupertino-based company announced at the event.

Firstly, most of these devices are available to pre-order starting March 11th and release on March 18th. You can grab them online or from your local Apple store.

iPhone 13 and SE

• 64GB iPhone SE (2022): $579 
• 128GB iPhone SE (2022): $649
• 256GB iPhone SE (2022): $789
• iPhone 13 Pro Alpine Green: starts at $1,399
• iPhone 13 Pro Max Alpine Green: starts at $1,549
• iPhone 13 Green: starts at $1,099
• iPhone 13 mini Green: starts at $949

You can learn more about the new iPhone SE 2022, here.

iPad Air

• 64GB iPad Air (2022): $749
• 256GB iPad Air (2022): $949 

You can learn more about the new iPad Air, here. 

Mac Studio

The Mac Studio is now available to pre-order; however, it still releases on March 18th.

• M1 Max Mac Studio: starts at $2,499
• M1 Ultra Mac Studio: starts at $4,999 -- it's worth noting that the M1 Ultra Mac Studio will be shipping later than all the other devices. My order date (for Toronto) won't ship out until April 1st to April 8th

You can learn more about the Mac Studio, here.

Studio Display

The Studio Display is now available to pre-order; however, it still releases on March 18th.

• Standard glass: $1,999
• Nano-texture glass: $2,399 

The Tilt-adjustable stand and the VESA mount adapter are both free with purchase. The Tilt-and height-adjustable stand is an extra $500.

You can more about the Studio Display, here. 

To read all of our event coverage check out our Apple March Event 2022 tags.

For everything revealed during Apple's March event, follow this link.

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At its 'Peek Performance' event earlier today, Apple unveiled its long-rumoured updated 3rd-gen iPhone SE with an updated A15 bionic chip.

The entry-level smartphone isn't available to pre-order until Friday, March 11th, so you don't have to commit just yet. Rather, spend that time learning more about the device, and see if it is worth the upgrade, especially if you're planning to move up from the 2020 SE to the 2022 one.

Let’s dive in and see how the iPhone SE compares to the... well... iPhone SE.

Display and design

One of the main differences between the 2nd and 3rd-gen iPhone SE design-wise is that the latter now features an iPhone 13-like glass back, which Apple says is the toughest glass on a smartphone ever (Apple says that whenever it releases a new device).

Other than that, the two smartphones look identical, with the same body and the same 60Hz 4.7-inch LCD panel with a 1334 x 750 pixel ratio and support for HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Like its predecessor, the 2022 iPhone SE retains the Touch ID home button and broad top and bottom bezels, along with IP67 water and dust resistance.

Internals

In addition to the tough glass back, the 2022 iPhone SE takes another aspect of the iPhone 13 -- its chip. The 3rd-gen iPhone SE runs on Apple's in-house A15 Bionic chip which allows it to offer 5G connectivity, a feature that was missing in the 2nd-gen iPhone SE which ran on the A13 Bionic.

While we are not exactly sure about the 3rd-gen SE's battery size, Apple's website does say that it offers up to two hours more video playback than the 2020-release iPhone SE. Additionally, like its predecessor, the new smartphone offers wireless charging, though it is still missing MagSafe support.

Both models are available in 64, 128 and 256GB storage variants.

Camera

The two variants which were released two years apart feature the exact same single-camera setup on the front and rear of the device, though that doesn't mean the camera isn't more capable.

The 2020-release iPhone SE sports an f/2.2 7-megapixel camera on the front and a f/1.8 12-megapixels one on the back, and Apple decided it is going to stick with the same setup for its new SE offering. However, the new smartphone, thanks to an updated chip, has a few new tricks up its sleeve.

The new chip allows the device to do near-instant computations after you take a snap to adjust lighting, along with Smart HDR 4 that refines contrast and helps retain accurate skin tones.

The 3rd-gen iPhone SE also takes advantage of Deep Fusion, which Apple first released with iOS 13.2 for the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and Pro Max, a feature that wasn't available with the 2nd-gen SE. According to Apple, "Deep Fusion studies multiple exposures pixel by pixel to capture the subtlest details, textures and patterns in your final shot."

Another upgrade directly tied to the 3rd-gen iPhone SE's camera that doesn't necessarily involve clicking photos is Live Text. Live Text was introduced last year with iOS 15 and allows users to scan text in the real world and convert it into digital text. That is just a brief explanation of Live Text. For an in-depth tutorial on how to use it, click here.

Colours and pricing

Upon release, the 2nd-gen iPhone SE was available in 'Black,' 'White' and 'Product Red colourways in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB storage variants. The device was priced at $599 for the 64GB version, $699 for the 128GB version and $809 for the top-of-the-line 256GB model.

The new 2022-release iPhone SE is available in 'Midnight,' Starlight' and 'Product Red' colourways. The former two colours are the same as 'Black' and 'White,' albeit in a fancier lingo.

Like its predecessor, the 3rd-gen iPhone SE is also available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB variants for $579, $649 and $789, respectively.

Worth the upgrade?

While the 3rd-gen iPhone SE doesn't seem to have any monumental upgrades over its predecessor at first glance, the A15 Bionic chip is sure to make the daily-use experience feel smoother and faster, along with added camera features that the 2nd-gen iPhone SE couldn't get its hands on. The upgraded chip also means that the 2022-release iPhone SE can survive longer per charge, all while offering 5G connectivity.

With added features comes an added cost? Not really. The 3rd-gen iPhone SE is actually $20 cheaper than its predecessor, making it the new affordable iPhone king.

For everything revealed during Apple's March event, follow this link.

Image credit: Apple