6 posts tagged with "tech"

Seventeen years ago yesterday, everybody was talking about that amazing gadget, the “iPhone” — but nobody you knew had one yet, because the world had been introduced to the iPhone only two months earlier.

Seventeen years ago yesterday, in Europe only wonks knew who “Obama” was, since he had just announced that he'd be running for president the previous month.

Seventeen years ago yesterday, I had been living and working in London for one year, and I was loving it.

Seventeen years ago yesterday, Twitter had been open for registrations for half a year, and was slowly getting more attention from geeks (although the product had been one year in the making already). It was exactly then that I joined the “micro-blogging platform” and started tweeting all kind of banal thoughts — just like the few friends of mine who were there already.

We have come to a point where end-to-end encrypting all your private data and private communications is no longer an ethical option, but an ethical duty.

Imagine a new law was being discussed in your country to make it mandatory that all buildings have glass walls. All houses would be transparent. The (stated) goal of the law is to make it harder for criminals to hide their wrongdoings. It would be difficult to stock up on illegal drugs or to operate an industrial printer of counterfeit money without the police (and, incidentally, some of your neighbours) noticing. Domestic violence and child abuse would be visible through transparent walls. Let's say that the new law will allow you to have a shower curtain, a little folding screen in your bedroom, and blankets on your bed. Except for those meagre provisions, assume that your government (and random passers-by, and potentially anyone) will be able to watch what you do at all times.

Now imagine you are a regular, law-abiding citizen who can afford to lead a “transparent” life most of the time, and manage to get some limited “privacy” only occasionally. Given how hard it is for individual citizens to steer the behemoth that is the State and its government, and since you personally “have nothing to hide”, you could be tempted to simply give up and prepare to obey the new law.

But you should resist.

You should strongly oppose that bill and help build resistance to it. Most importantly, if such a law ever came into effect you would be morally obliged to disobey, to boycott.

My current smartphone, a Moto G5S Plus, is five years and one week old.

At the time, on 2018-09-01, it cost me my employer €139.75 on Amazon.es. Not because that was the budget I was given, but because I chose that model (I could have easily asked for a more expensive phone). Back then I also bought a plastic case for it, and I think I have a film protecting the screen, too. I reckon I paid twenty euro or less for both accessories. That's a grand total of ~€160 for a phone that was quite good in 2018.

Let us ignore electricity consumption and carrier bills associated with it (those are practically a given, and there is little variance there in quality or price). The total cost of ownership (TCO) of my phone as of today is ~€32/year.

The phone is sturdy, and even more so with the case around it. I have clumsy hands, so I have dropped it on the floor multiple times, and banged it accidentally against other objects and furniture. I have taken it to hikes and runs, and to beaches. It got wet sometimes, and the case is scratched. After five years, I don't seem to be able to break it. If this phone is still in good condition one minute into 2024, its TCO will be ~€30/year.

In this era of advanced technology and AI-powered assistants, it's becoming increasingly important to establish trust and transparency in our digital interactions. That's why I'm excited to share a brand new proposal that aims to revolutionize the way we identify and acknowledge the origin of online content. Say hello to "AI-tiquette" or "AItiquette"! 🌟

The concept is simple yet powerful: every piece of content shared online will end with either "/human" or "/robot" to indicate whether it was created by a person or an AI-powered assistant. By implementing this small but significant addition, we can enhance transparency, foster trust, and embrace a new standard of digital etiquette.

On the back of the bet on the future relative prices of Bitcoin and US dollars that Balaji and Medlock settled publicly on 2023-05-02 (confirmation by Balaji; confirmation by Medlock),

today Fidel Ramos and I agree on the following terms of a bet:

One big reason places like Wikipedia and Stack Exchange became so amazing is that they have developed a very tight culture of quality: although it's true that anyone can contribute, in reality every entry is relentlessly filtered, edited and reviewed by a core group of committed contributors.

In the early days of the WP it was possible to append some nonsense to an existing article, and even (gasp!) start a new article with content of very poor quality. Those edits could stay unchanged for a very long time, and so it was relatively common to stumble upon pages filled with illegible stuff or including made-up gibberish without sources or external links. I know that because almost two decades ago I contributed a little for the first time to a couple articles (like “Granada”), and the few sentences I added stuck for months or years (not that I trolled or wrote anything false).

On the other hand, my recent (little) experience trying to contribute to WP articles has been less sweet. In the last years I have fixed typos and grammatical errors without any problem. However, when it comes to starting a new page or adding more than a few words to existing ones, I find that rules and etiquette are so stringent now that they raise the bar way above the time I can spend on a WP page as a quick distraction from work or whatever I am doing at the time, and so my edits have been sometimes questioned or reverted.

Ditto about Stack Overflow and all the other sites of the SE family. I remember well the refreshing feeling when Atwood & Spolsky launched the thing: it was bold, easy, incredible quality and very helpful. It's still all those things… but for the “easy” part. Today it's so easy to misstep (asking or answering a question) that sometimes it can be intimidating. “Too short”, “too long”, “answered elsewhere”, “add fewer tags”, “should provide and example”, etc.

(As I said at the beginning: I know I shouldn't complain, because those high bars and the incredibly serious army of contributors is precisely what makes those sites high quality, useful, and mostly reliable.)

Anyway, I was reminded of all that last week when I read about ChatGPT.