Despite writing a well-received article on cybersecurity and feeling that I had finally cracked it regarding writing and productivity, it all went to shit.
I took a break as several things have been, frankly, overwhelming.
Without going into personal territory, I seem to live between extremes, with very little in the middle zone. It’s either all excellent or all dreadful. There will be some changes to my working week that I’m looking forward to, but I’m not giving up on the dream of writing and producing great articles and even research papers. I’m finishing an essay for a tourism business school, and with some luck, I’ll finish it in the next couple of weeks.
Reading
I finished iWoz, and to be fair, it was dragging on a little and, by the end, was a little bit boring. Although, right until the end, the book sounded just like him, and I’d be surprised to hear that his text had been heavily edited. On the good side, the feeling of computer nostalgia was present till the end, and I loved it. I’d recommend the book to anyone wanting to know a little more about how the computer revolution started and how circumstances and luck played an enormous part.
As a side note, if you want to have the complete story of the Macintosh, try this website that was eventually turned into a book: Revolution in the Valley.
I finished the Foundation series. Very entertaining. Now I’m looking for the next set of novels to read. As I’ve said before, Asimov is one of my favourites, and I still haven’t read everything he has written, so I might start to have a look there. Perhaps the Robot series. They look interesting.
In the meantime, I’ve started to read a book about slavery called A World Transformed. I think it is our duty to try to understand a little more about how, through the most organised system of kidnap and forced labour, the global north has benefited and still benefits to this day on the back of literally millions and millions. Living in the Caribbean only makes this more important and visceral to me.
I’m looking forward to digging in, and it has not disappointed me, with the author not shying away from a very emotive and difficult subject.
I need to pick up the pace on some of the other serious texts I’ve started. I’ll list them here next time, perhaps.
Of note
A new (anti?) social network was birthed between my last note and this one. It is called Threads and is a Twitter rip-off with fewer tools and few Nazis. That will change, of course. I mean both things.
Threads is Facebook’s, I mean ‘Meta’s’, second attempt at a text-based social network leveraging the social graph of Instagram. The first iteration failed spectacularly. This version seems to have gained traction, but there are serious doubts as to the longevity of that. I can’t see into the future, but I suspect this product will live or die on its ability to generate ad revenue.
Zuckerberg is only a one-trick pony. Pushing Ads into people’s faces is all he cares about and can do. Threads will inevitably get ads after its ad-free honeymoon period that is only there to initially trick people onto the site.
Such a drastic change to the user experience might be enough to discourage many away from it. Or its cannibalisation of Instagram might not bring as much revenue to the king of ads. And like most kings, he has not your welfare at heart; he has only his own.
Interestingly, the ‘Metaverse’ has virtually disappeared from his vocabulary recently. I’m not surprised. It was all smoke and mirrors and bluster. As soon as the sums on ads didn’t add up —an exponentially smaller target market— it was dead in the water. A floating corpse winding down a muddy river.
Lastly, the big cage match might become a “literal dick-measuring contest”. I thought it couldn’t get worse. It did. FFS.
