Perfection

Vincenzo Latronico

2022

Finished this yesterday and really enjoyed it. I don’t often read fiction but this was really well written and created a world that felt very familiar, not necessarily in a good way.

We’re hopefully moving home early next year so we’re in the spring clean, de-clutter phase a little earlier than normal. This time I’m also trying to tackle everything digital.

Digital storage has for so long been cheap that deleting files almost feels unnecessary. But now I look back I see thousands of pointless files. Documents from school days, inconsequential contracts that ended a decade ago, photos of where I parked my car in airport carparks to remind me upon return. Just because I can keep all of this, really doesn’t mean that I should.

I’m probably a bit of a digital hoarder. The question, “but what if?” plagues me as I go through things. With storage remaining cheap I’m being relatively lenient with what stays, but it still feels good to clear everything down and re-organise.

Today shows that you can still play this as a team sport, with honesty, fairness and transparency at the centre of every race and still come out on top as champions.

Papaya rules.

My favourite part of my watch is the part you almost never get to see. The hidden workings. The intricate details.

Objectively this isn’t a very good watch. After a couple of days it’s often a few minutes behind. But that doesn’t matter to me. It’s still by far my favourite possession. A gift from my wife. I love wearing it, and I love taking it off and admiring the mechanism each day. There’s something so appealing about mechanical watches. As long as it moves, it’ll just keep going.

I realise I’m a couple of weeks late to the party with this, but the onboarding user experience with poke.com is brilliant.

It immediately feels familiar, being positioned as a contact through an existing chat interface, and it feels as though it “knows” you within a few minutes. Negotiating a monthly price is also novel, though I expect the vast majority of users end up paying the same amount.

However, I’ve played and enjoyed it for about a week and the novelty is starting to wear off. Sure, it’s immediately accessible and has helped draft a few emails, but in each case I’ve felt the need to adjust the draft before sending. Scheduled reminders and daily briefings are nice, but I’ve struggled to fit them into any sort of routine.

This is very much the state of AI more broadly today. Novel, intriguing, powerful. But we’re still figuring out how to integrate it properly. The real power is still to come. We’re still in the dial-up era.

The overwhelmingly cheap cost of storage has meant that we rarely delete things any more.

At work we come up with an idea, research it and present our findings as something that we could do. A few months pass, an evolution on that original idea comes along. We refresh our memory from the original idea, research what’s changed and then present it as a new idea, leaving the old one as it was.

Storage is cheap. The old idea is doing no harm. It’s just a harmless old document that no one would go and read.

Until we come to train LLMs on our company documents. All of a sudden, there’s important context missing. All those old (and good bad!) ideas and out of date reports all of a sudden are presented equally for an LLM to train against.

When we then come to interrogate this knowledge, how will we know what’s useful? How will we be able to trust it?

I need to get back to writing. Capturing ideas. Sharing something. Not for any particular reason or for an audience but just to start the habit. Last day of Blogtober feels as appropriate as any.

Social networks became “social media,” which, at first, meant receiving content from people you chose to hear from. But in the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention. And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t as entertaining as (god forbid) influencers who spend their waking hours making “content.”

This is an exciting post from Ev Williams as he launches a new social network app, Mozi.

No social media, just networking. Seeing who is where and fostering that connection. It’s well worth reading the post and checking out the app. It’s a great concept and something in general I think many people are longing for.

There’s far too much content consumption for all of us. Every time I leave the house my first thought is “what shall I listen to whilst walking/driving”. I immediately search for something to fill the silence. But all that does is reduce the time I have to think. Explore ideas. Form better ideas. Refine ideas.

This has been a driving force of my writing here. Just get something down on the page without worrying too much. We can improve as we go. It just gives me a space to think. After all, that’s really what writing is.

Who thought it would be a good idea to put “erase” right next to “eject”? There’s a genuine moment of panic every time I go to unplug the drive that it’ll somehow wipe the drive.

I know there are further confirmation steps before it actually would, but still.

Writing regularly is hard.

It’s not for a lack of ideas but spending so much time online you start to think, “isn’t there enough content already?”

I hate that word. Content. The internet has this ability to take the most incredible work from the worlds most impressive artists, authors, designers, journalists and distill it down and categorise it to its most basic form. Just. More. Content.

I came across Henrik Karlsson and his blog, Escaping Flatland yesterday. It is beautifully written and it’s clear the amount of work put into his pieces.

He has this concept of a waste book. A second, more private, blog that is much more a stream of consciousness than an edited and refined collection.

That’s what this is. My waste book. I’m mostly just thinking out loud here, figuring out what is important to me. The fact that it is shared online and is public is nothing more than a sense of accountability. It’s not just a notebook page I’ll never look at again, it’s out there, somewhere, with my name against it.

I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.

The author of that statement will, come January, be US Vice President. That will put him into a conveniently self-described blameless position, but one in which as an individual he has great scope to actually, genuinely, make things better.

A few years ago, when Hillbilly Elegy was released it seemed to me that JD Vance had an understanding of the problems faced by many - but far from all - Americans. More recent rhetoric through this campaign has severely dampened my optimism, but perhaps now that campaigning is finished his focus will shift from soundbites to attempting to solve the hard problems.

We need this presidency to be surrounded by sensible voices. Is there one here?

Apple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound

Since I discussed these features a few days ago, this felt a timely update. This is great to see. Also, The Verge URL had no tracking or campaign nonsense as part of it. Beautiful.

The latest updates to Apple AirPods bring a wealth of new accessibility features that I think we’ll all be able to benefit from.

Growing up my grandmother had hearing aids. They were huge, grey plastic devices that you’d struggle to wear with glasses. Every time you went near to them (hugging, for example), they’d ring out like some sort of panic alarm. They weren’t brilliant, didn’t work as well as you needed them to and were generally a pain to live with.

Now, one of my friends has hearing aids. Except you’d never know. They’re ludicrously small but much more powerful, too. And they take advantage of improved connection methods, meaning bluetooth is an option. So he’s able to connect to his phone, computer, TV. Going to a gig, he can tune in to a feed from the sound desk. Everywhere he goes, he has crystal clear audio available to him.

Hearing aids in the 1990s were beige accessibility devices. Hearing aids in the 2020s are a superpower.

Which is why it’s brilliant to see companies like Apple consider this use case in their headphones.

As far as I’m aware, my hearing is fine. I know it’s not perfect, but for my age and environment it’s where it should be. I spent a lot of time wearing AirPods - at my desk on video calls, out running, in the gym, commuting. There are many occasions where hearing my environment isn’t easy, but where the AirPods can happily use the microphone to listen, and then combine that environmental noise with whatever I’ve chosen to listen to to give me the safest balance.

Technology, and personal devices in particular, is designed to improve our lives and ability to enjoy the world around us. This is a great example of that. A little bit of consideration for how more users can benefit from AirPods (and I’m sure many other brands of similar headphones over time) that improves the experience for everyone.

Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast is one of my favourites.

Almost every episode I form an expectation of what I will make of the guest before it starts. Do I typically agree with their politics, expect to find myself agreeing with them, or relating to their stories?

Yet every episode I’m pleasantly surprised. The style of interview and the questions being asked go beyond the headlines and I consistently find myself appreciating the guests more than I expected. They’re all much more than a party member, or policy advocate.

In politics, but also more generally, I really dislike when one element of a person sets the complete tone for an interaction. How James Anderson votes has zero bearing on his incredible talent on a cricket field. Taylor Swift coming out in support of a political candidate doesn’t take anything away from the incredible show we saw this year. They’re no more defined by one characteristic as by another.

People are complex. As long as people are willing to explain, debate and where necessary change their opinions in light of new information, we should praise those that share views and stand up for things, whether we personally agree with them or not.

Speaking of missing 100% of the shots you don’t take, I finally released something to the outside world. An idea brought to life. Version one.

I won’t be talking specifically about it here as I want there to be a degree of separation for now. But it’s exciting to have something out there, something that can now be refined, improved and marketed. Zero to one might be the hard part, but there are a lot of numbers between one and one hundred. Let’s go.

In creative work, votes eliminate the interesting edges, because votes result in subtracting rather than adding, leaving only the boring residue that no one hated enough to vote off the island.

Another brilliant article from Jason Cohen here. The shared examples highlight so clearly the wisdom of crowds when there’s a clear right outcome. But with anything creative that is almost never the case. As the example describes, trying to find a meal that pleases everyone will only result in something bland. Building something new and using the wisdom of crowds is therefore likely to suffer the same fate.

This is a part of product management that I often struggle with. A lot of literature (using the term lightly to also include a heavy dose of “thought leadership”) discusses the merits of regularly talking to customers. Understanding their problem to therefore determine the solution that gets them to spend more money, time, effort with your product. This makes a lot of sense for a mature product where your goal is perhaps to nudge a few metrics in the right direction. But creating something new, from scratch, something genuinely innovative - does it work in the same way? Doesn’t applying these techniques and practices in that scenario only increase the chances of producing a bland meal?

Perhaps this is why many founders - whilst often very adept with product - often shy away from more formal theories. Of course, the need to communicate with customers - and every other stakeholder - is vital to learn and improve. But at least in the early stages it should be one of many inputs to your creativity. One that perhaps starts small and grows over time as your product matures. If you’re starting from scratch and don’t have enough conviction that there’s something there, the wisdom of crowds won’t help you create something genuinely new and exciting.

Alternative app stores coming to iOS in the EU.

The EU’s DMA rules came into force earlier this year and beginning September 16th, Apple will be allowing alternative app stores to appear on iOS within the EU.

To set my position nice and early, I don’t understand why the European Union feels the need to involve themselves with how international companies operate. No consumer is forced to use an Apple device (employees may be different, but there are many company-specific requirements an employee is faced with), and the fact that Apple is the market leader with these devices is - primarily - because they’re the best devices at what they do. If a consumer does not like Apple, their devices, how they market or enforce their own rules then they are welcome to find an alternative solution. That in my mind seems to make the most sense.

It’s also worrying when EU regulators take a very early stance on technology that we don’t yet understand well enough. It is far too early to regulate AI as the potential cost to innovation. Monitor, and ensure it stays within current law, yes. But if the smartest minds in AI research don’t yet know how the world will look in the future, I have a hard time imaging that EU policy makers do.

Anyway, back to alternative app stores. Perhaps it’s a good thing that there’s competition here. How Apple runs the App Store isn’t to everyone’s taste. There are many apps that simply aren’t allowed, and we’ve already seen some novel introductions through these alternative app stores such as device emulators. Again - fewer restrictions often opens up some interesting solutions that didn’t otherwise fit the expectations. We always want people pushing the boundaries with technology - the early days of jailbreaking iOS devices was fascinating to watch and at times join in with.

Ultimately though, Apple is a private company and no developer is forced to build an app for iOS, as no consumer is forced to buy them. Yes, they have the largest market, and yes their terms of engagement with developers feels harsh. But those - in my mind - are the terms of doing business with that market. If I want to sell widgets to UK consumers I have to abide by UK commerce laws. If I want to sell to Apple consumers, I have to abide by their terms, too. Do we need the EU - not even a global entity, making this even worse with different rules in different regions - to add another layer here?

I feel it important to finish this post by saying that this personal blog is simply my own thoughts. These thoughts aren’t necessarily fully formed, and opinions not always strongly held. I don’t have all the answers and often haven’t done hours of research into all sides of a topic or debate. I love conversation and debate, and seeing things from the other sides, and very often my views change to incorporate these conversations. The whole point of re-starting this blog is to share how I see the world and over time evolve and improve my thinking, and therefore my writing. The more honest discourse shared, the better.

Don’t think about having, think about becoming…

I’ve always been a fan of Jerry Seinfeld, ever since I was a young child and my Dad and I would listen to his stand-up on a CD we rented from the local library. Observational comics tend to see the world in a different light, but Jerry Seinfeld is one of the best at that. Which makes him the perfect candidate for a commencement speech.

More and more the thought began to gather shape, Was I getting the most, or the best, out of life? Was there no other kind of life in which toil was redeemed from baseness by its own inherent interest, no life which offered more of tranquil satisfaction and available, if humble, happiness? Day by day this thought sounded through my mind, and each fresh discouragement and disability of the life I led gave it sharper emphasis. At last the time came when I found an answer to it, and these chapters tell the story of my seeking and my finding.

I’ve just started to read The Quest of the Simple Life and I can tell this is going to be interesting.

The best reading strategy I’ve come across is the idea of a wide funnel and tight filter. Be willing to read anything that looks even a little interesting, but abandon it quickly and without mercy if it’s not working for you.

Morgan Housel makes a great point. This is something I really struggle with.

I love the sense of achievement that comes with finishing a book, and that is only tightened when I feel I’ve completed something that was difficult or not interesting to me. But this is surely the wrong approach.

Also quoted in another of Housel’s articles on this topic, Mark Twain said, “the man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them”.

There are far too many books in the world to spend time reading poor ones, so if I am to find and enjoy the good books, I surely have no choice but to leave those not worth my time unfinished.

I need to work past my mind on this.

I need to stop thinking that just because I struggle with a particular book, it doesn’t mean I’m not educated enough, or dedicated enough to get through this otherwise clearly excellent script.

It just means that at this moment, for me, it’s not the right thing to read.

And that’s okay.