My week was pretty busy with a few projects and a lot of teaching. I teach at a couple of local universities for a diverse set of subjects: English, Project Management and Microsoft Technologies. I have a lot of experience, and I am proud to share as much of it as possible. I get a real buzz from seeing a student understand something for the first time. I had a student understand IP addresses and netmasks. He’d been listening and using the techniques but didn’t really grasp the concepts thoroughly. I’d diverted off the teaching track, something I’m prone to do, and ended up giving a quick course on IPs and associated aspects of TCP/IP. Then suddenly, the student told me they had now understood the subject for the first time, despite following several weeks of routing and firewall courses during the same degree.

That’s why I teach.

Last Wednesday, I was selected to present to the group that had been following a training course on the legal aspects of eCommerce. I have been training in various courses with UNCTAD (United Nations Conference for Trade and Development) since the start of the year. I submitted a presentation on the use of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) in the Caribbean. I had a lot of good feedback, and I think I was able to clarify some of the challenges and opportunities for the Caribbean regarding digital money.

In last week’s note, I mentioned that I had been enamoured with the release of the latest version of iA Writer and that I would move my work from Ulysses.app. Well, things have been going fine so far, and I’ll keep moving stuff over during the coming weeks and months.

The team at iA wrote a blog post to thank people for the feedback they had gotten during the launch week, including this blog. I am really grateful for the mention. You can read their blog post here.

I’ve been using some of the GenAI tools, and with the help of iA Writer, I have found it to give me more freedom of expression without feeling bad about using those tools. I don’t use them for posts like this, but there is definitely a benefit and use case for things that require a less personal or intimate expression.

Recently, I used GenAI to help me develop an in-class exercise for project management students. I created an interactive and fun exercise that solidified the students’ understanding of some of the concepts around project management. GenAI didn’t write it for me. What it did was give me a few ideas to start, and then I was able to dive deeper into the development, with GenAI providing some of the contextual information required for the students to carry out the exercise. I was pleased with the result, and judging by how the students participated, I can confidently say they enjoyed it.

Reading

After that, I’m torn about whether or not to continue the series or start a new series of books I have never read. I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve never read Dune, so perhaps that might be on the horizon soon. I’m not sure yet.

Of note

I think I’m becoming more sensitive and frustrated with Big Tech BullShit (BTBS) and its misrepresentation of reality and utility.

I listened to the latest episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, entitled The Bill Gates problem. It is worth your time, regardless of how your feel about Bill Gates, or William … Gates the … rd. I encourage you to listen to it to help you gain some context to make up your own mind about him.

Anyway, have a great week, and I’ll write a few thoughts again soon.

Where did the week go?

I had a few days to work on several projects but didn’t advance too well. I got distracted and ended up researching other topics that, while useful, were not related to the work I should have been doing. Specifically, I have been looking at changing my text editor.

For a few years now, I’ve been a user of the Ulysses app on my Mac. But earlier in the week iA (information Architects) released a new update to their text-based writing app. iA Writer V7. I’ve used it on and off for several years, and I’ve always been happy with it as an editor, even changing the defaults on macOS to open .txt files in the application for a while —that job has subsequently been taken on by BBEdit recently.

iA Writer is a breed of distraction-free writing environments that support Markdown text. If you haven’t used Markdown, I highly recommend you look it up and integrate it into the tools you use to write. Many feel it is targeted only for text that will end up on the Internet as a web page, but I’ve seen plenty of value in using it for basic note-taking. iA Writer has some tools to help you write, but this is not a review, so I’m not going to go into those. Suffice it to say it is an excellent app.

However, version 7 introduces a concept of Authorship, which, on the face of it, is like Word’s Track Changes functionality. But it is much simpler and efficient and now helps you work with text generated by LLMs such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Their take on this useful, if flawed, tool is interesting and nuanced. As writers themselves, they see the value in those tools and their flaws. Authorship allows writers to combine, edit, and integrate LLM-generated text in a way that helps the author integrate those tools into their writing without losing the human aspect. Read their blog post about it here.

I haven’t road-tested it yet, but I plan on doing so in the coming days and weeks. What this version change has done for me, however, is to reevaluate what text-writing tool I am going to use going forward. And I have already switched to iA Writer. This decision is born out of a couple of thoughts and tests. Not only the Authorship functionality but also something I consider to be really important. Transportability and preservation of my work.

iA Writer works with plain text documents. Ulysses does not. In fact, Ulysses creates proprietary formatted text files and stores them in iCloud. Unfortunately, they don’t provide a way to extract those files easily and in bulk. Once the files are in Ulysses, they’re pretty much stuck there. That is not entirely true, but you get the idea. iA Writer allows me to create a folder on pretty much any storage system (Ulysses allows this too, but in a convoluted fashion that I never got around to exploring) and have that synched through that system. I use a combination of iCloud and OneDrive storage to separate work and personal writing. However, the beauty of storing only text files allows me to use DEVONThink Pro to index those folders and have all the text files included in its database. This enables a whole host of functionality within DEVONthink. Indexing, search, links, and much more. This combination is really beneficial to the workflow, and I see it as an enabler for me to take advantage of the notes and articles I write in a structured and helpful manner, something that Ulysses didn’t allow.

I’ll see how I get on with it over the coming weeks. Still, for now, I need to set aside time to export important files from Ulysses and save them to the folders assigned in iA Writer and DEVONthink, and the magic will happen automatically.

Reading

Of note

Some of the truth about Sam Altman has also started to appear. Recently, there has been news of what some would call dodgy dealings between OpenAI and a company that was set up with his money and a big order (promise to purchase) for the coming years.

On the same topic, the blow-up revealed and unveiled the stupidity and their downright cynical attitude. Despite the name, it is neither “effective” nor “altruistic”. Be very careful and strike it down wherever you see it. It is rotten to the core, and those who espouse it are similarly so. It is something I have been following for a while and is mixed in with another dangerous position: Longtermism.

Another rich dude got a bit of an Internet kicking when a prestigious university library cancelled their renewal of his company’s software after taking the time to understand where the person was coming from morally. Reprehensible is the word to describe his words. I’ll leave you to look it up. Finding it with the information I posted here would be trivial.

The last thing I wanted to write here is the brewing conflict in South America. No, not in Argentina, in Venezuela and in Guyana. A referendum is taking place this Sunday, and the result is all but assured for the reasons you already know. This referendum is trying to justify an annexation of approximately half the territory of Guyana. This is a complex situation and one that can’t be understood only by looking at recent history. It requires a lot more thought and research to understand the nuances. I’m only at the beginning of that journey. Maybe I’ll write something about it in the future.

Have a good week.

I’m sitting here on a Sunday evening, looking at the options for consolidation of some of my subscriptions. Do I really need them? Do they provide real value? Could I perhaps help a smaller operation rather than paying a big platform?

I think these are valid questions to ask oneself these days. Large platforms are trending towards the enshittification end of the scale, whereas smaller devs and suppliers are more in tune with what the users need and want. Sure, they’ll make some decisions that aren’t agreed upon by all, but they won’t deliberately trample over a whole bunch of payers to chase the next big thing or to skew things in their favour without regard to users’ privacy, etc.

Next time you come back here, it might look a little different. I haven’t decided yet.

I use four different platforms, and I’m looking to consolidate into two and concentrate more on my professional profile online. Making the conscious decision to decrease a personal presence. Although to be fair, my personal presence was already minimal, I’m likely to reduce it to nothing.

The internet has become so bad that each and every data point you put out there is being used to profile you. It is as if you are being asked to provide fingerprints each time to use the Internet.

I don’t know about you, but the debate about real-time ID systems is similar to one we have on Internet privacy. If you’re okay with being fingerprinted each time you leave your house (i.e. being captured on a real-time video surveillance system), then I think you have a serious misunderstanding of what that means and what that means for the future.

As the world turns towards the hard right and totalitarianism, they no longer need the Stasi of East Germany. You’re providing much more willingly across the Internet every day with your photos of your holidays, the photos of the food you’re about to eat (wtf is that all about, btw?), the “I’ve just watched so and so” check-ins, the “On the train to …”.

You might regret it sooner than you think.

Of note

This time last week, we were trying to keep up with the absolute madness going on at OpenAI. One of the bright sides of what happened is the outing and generalisation of understanding of Effective Altruism, or EA.

It’s a cult. And a really bad one at that.

I hope the media absolutely has a field day over it and gives it the treatment it deserves.

It is laughable and downright disgusting when you understand what it is about.

As usual, it is from the mindset of a privileged elite that has sadly been born free from needing to employ and develop their empathy. What an awful bunch they are. Each and every one of them.

We also saw CZ (🤦‍♂️) admit to being a criminal. Sadly, he may not go to jail. Another deeply disturbing and criminal enterprise is being exposed slowly but surely. Crypto-betting, as it should be called, is an unregulated way of ripping off as many mugs across the world as possible. It is a shameful enterprise and one that I hope is regulated into near disappearance.

Note: Don’t confuse CBDCs with things like Bitcoin. They are not the same.

What a world we live in at the moment.

Have a good week.

I had another busy week, starting a new class and teaching Microsoft technologies to a new group. I have many years of experience with Microsoft products and services, and I hope to pass on some of that knowledge to get them up to speed over the coming weeks. The first class was good, and I got the students to research the beginnings of Windows Server and highlight the major features added in each subsequent release with a short explanation of what they add/do. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the students’ work in such a short time.

Next week is busy with a lot of teaching and test writing.

I’ve inherited a business-grade firewall, so I’ll be researching wireless access points to move off my already long-in-the-tooth router/Wi-Fi solution. It used to be so simple. Now, it’s more complicated than ordering a coffee at Starbucks in California!

Reading

I’ve been reading a lot of training notes last week, giving the novel reading a bit of a back seat. With a bit of luck this coming week, I’ll pick up from where I left off.

Of note

Maybe my cries for help to Apple actually did something —I doubt it— but I’ve had much more success in using the HomePod mini stereo pair in my office this week. I force-rebooted a couple of times. The result has been more stability. It is still not up to the initial rock-solid state it was a few months ago. I suspect my Internet has something to do with that, but that would be very hard to pin down, given that Apple gives you literally no way to see what is happening on the HomePod devices. They are truly a closed-off example of a closed device. It’s convenient when it works but a frustrating shit-show when it doesn’t.

I guess the week’s big news was the tropical storm of news Friday evening when Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI.

The fallout is still settling, and there have been literally hundreds of rumours surrounding what may have happened. The latest, as of writing, is that the board are now pleading with him to come back, apparently led by Satya Nadella of Microsoft, who apparently knew nothing of the ousting despite having 49% shares of the for-profit side of the structure.

That’s another thing that has come out of this, something that we probably all should have been more aware of, is that the Open AI business structure seems to be set up in a less than transparent way and gives the impression that it is a non-profit research organisation. Clearly, it is far from that, and Friday night events have only highlighted that.

The other big question is how Microsoft seems to have put all of its eggs (or at least a vast majority) in one basket… Open AI. That might come back to bite them in the future.

Lastly, I’ll just say that the name of Open AI is disingenuous. It is not open at all. More on that in the future if I get around to writing that up.

Have a good week.

I had another very busy week in the end. It wasn’t planned that way, but it ended up being so. I had two full days at the end of the week, giving training to the top managers of a local company on GenAI. It’s a course I have been teaching since around June, and it always incites a lot of philosophical discussion and even some question that reflects the fear people have about this technology.

I try to demystify it a little and give people help on how to use it effectively. However, I don’t shy away from the negative impacts of these products, notably the environmental effects and the digital colonialism that goes on in the background, something that absolutely none of the people I have trained had thought about.

I’ll continue teaching this because the technology is here. If we (or I) can get enough people to think about its use more equitably and sensibly, perhaps the platforms behind these products could do better. I grant you that it is a little naive, but I don’t see much option currently. This is moving so fast and out of control that reeling in from the point of view of a user is one of the strategies we can use to effect change.

Reading

I’m continuing my reading of the Asimov robot series and picking up where I left off on other books, as well as starting a new book. This is quite a departure from my usual reading, as I tend to read factual books or novels. I picked up Thurston Moore’s (of Sonic Youth) autobiography. I’ve only read a couple of chapters so far, and I’m a little indifferent about the person described in the book.

Sonic Youth is a group I have listened to a lot over the years and is probably the group of which I have the most albums. They were very prolific, which goes some way to explain that, but I always enjoyed their music. Not so much this autobiographical work, for the moment. I’ll give it a little more time and will probably get into it at some point.

Of note

It seems I spoke (wrote?) too fast. HomePod Amnesia is still a thing for my stereo pair. It’s so fucking tiring. It used to be that we could press play, and music would emanate from speakers without stuttering, losing place, flipping from left to right or losing a channel. Bad equipment notwithstanding. And I know I sound like Old Man Screaming at Clouds, but this is really basic stuff. There is no world where performance this shitty is acceptable. As I write this, the left channel has just clicked a couple of times for no reason other than to diminish my listening experience. Apple? Is that you? If it is, can you fix this crap, please, because it is beyond a joke now!

Have a good week.