Much like last week, the week started on a bank holiday. I know there are a lot of them in May in France. However, unlike in other countries, the bank holiday days are fixed to the calendar day of the month. That means in practice, if the bank holiday falls on a weekend, the day off is taken on that day, and it is not moved to the following Monday like in the U.K.

To take advantage, we had friends over for lunch, and for their son to catch up with ours, they’re best friends. They’re both budding professional sports players, albeit in different sports, and they have been separated for a year whilst my son’s friend has been studying and training abroad. Next year it’ll be the same for my son, so it is important to celebrate and enjoy these moments together.

The UNCTAD training continued, and I finally finished the last module and passed the course with an average of over 80%. That is not bad for someone new to the subject. Admittedly, it’s not in my daily wheelhouse, but I found the information useful, and it has rounded my view on international trade.

I haven’t worked as much on the research paper I had been asked to write, but I plan to catch up this week. The priority was the UNCTAD training as it had a hard deadline, which was vital for me to mobilise the energy to complete the task. However, I spent much time reading academic papers on AI, ChatGPT and other LLMs in the HR industry and general productivity use in businesses. There’s already a lot of material out there. Some with questionable conclusions and others with outright listicle-like compositions. Still, they help gauge the feeling out there.

This was done, again, to a deadline, as I have been asked to teach a couple of training courses on the use, background, and usefulness of LLMs in business. I’ll be training a couple of small groups this month, and I’m looking forward to giving the participants a good overview and some food for thought.

I’ve virtually completed the writing for a newsletter post on cybersecurity. I haven’t finished it, and it’ll need a bit of trimming and editing, as well as some new topic injection, but I think I’ll be able to do it this week. I miss writing for the newsletter and getting that buzz out of writing something a little longer than brief paragraphs to satiate a personal need. So, fingers crossed, I’ll get around to it, despite having a fairly busy week ahead.

My exercise has continued, and I’ll be off for a run after I finish writing this evening. I felt much better on the last run and can already see a difference in my heart rate and how I feel while running. At least I don’t feel like I’m about to die immediately like I did at the start.

Reading

I’m still reading Foundation’s Edge and enjoying it, and there’s only one book I haven’t read in the series after this, Foundation and Earth. Unfortunately, due to some stupidity on my part, I read the two books that followed Foundation and Earth already, reading them out of step. Oh well. At least I read them.

The other books I mentioned last week are all still on the go, and I’ll be making inroads, no doubt, during the week.

I’ve also read academic papers on sports injuries, training and flexibility. I’m trying to get as much scientific evidence as possible to see how I can help my son progress. Rather than leave things to chance, professional sports require evidence and experience. I can bring some of that research to the table and hopefully contribute to building a better athlete than just leaving it to develop without guidance.

Of note

Next week will see Apple’s introduction of a totally new platform if the rumours are to be believed. Essentially, Monday is the keynote presentation of their Worldwide Developers Conference or WWDC. At 13h ET, they’re live-streaming the keynote and will talk about the new things slated to be available over the coming year or so. This year’s talk is about an xR product that leapfrogs all the VR/AR devices introduced previously to a resounding ‘meh’ from the public.

Apple rarely invents new things. Instead, it tends to look at what’s come before it and do it properly, answering the question of what problem this is solving. Up until tomorrow, all of these products have been the very definition of solutions looking for a problem.

I can’t quite see the problem that needs fixing with strapping a computer and a couple of screens to one’s face, but I’m staying open-minded for now.

That said, I think this is going to tank initially. I think it is too early —the world still isn’t ready for Glassholes— and I think it is a rushed product without need.

Time will tell if I am right or not.

On to next week.

5 June 2023 — French West Indies

I’m trying to kickstart this mini-project to help me document and reflect on my life. So apologies from the outset if this is not interesting or even boring for you. In reality, it is more for me and complementary to a personal journal that is, for obvious reasons, private. So why put this out in public? I guess it’s like trying to have a personal coach or supervisor forcing me to write more.

You see, I like to write. If I’m honest, I think writing is one of those things in my life that I’ve always wanted to do but never had the self-belief that I could. From an early age, I had it kicked out of me during school, exacerbated by my inability to focus enough in class. I struggled at school despite having the intellect to do well, but I didn’t have the skill set to get on at school with classmates or the faculty. I got through it but by the skin of my teeth. So this is an attempt to force me to document my week(s) in broad strokes—nothing too detailed or personal. My objective is for it to serve two purposes, 1) to have a document to look back on, giving me an overview of what I was up to, and 2) to force me to develop consistency to finish my crap.

If there is one Achilles Heel that I have to contend with, I have to have superhuman perseverance to complete anything that is not immediate or simple and fast to do. It’s not that I’m incapable of finishing things. However, the mental effort required to complete the mundane stuff is so hard that it fatigues me quickly. That is, if I can muster up the necessary effort to start what I need to do!

So I’ve started, and I intend to continue, despite it being utter rubbish at this stage. Hopefully, I can motivate myself enough until it becomes something better and something I look forward to doing.

I’ll spare a long introduction in the future, but I needed to put it down and get it out there. So please indulge/forgive me.

My week

Last week started on a Bank Holiday, much like today is, coincidentally. In the French West Indies, abolition of slavery day is a bank holiday. A day in which people reflect on the legacy of Chattel slavery. In Martinique, that day is the 22nd of May. The decree to ‘end’ slavery was signed on the 27th of April 1848. However, it took time for official documents to reach the Caribbean and be enacted on the islands. I’ll most likely reflect upon this subject again as I have a particular interest.

Moving on, I continued the UNCTAD training course I signed up for —a short course on international merchandise trade statistics. I’ve been doing it for a couple of weeks and find it quite interesting. Learning about how countries gather information on trade and merchandise flows is much more complex than I had imagined. It’s not directly related to my work, but it’s a field of interest that adds to what I’m learning and researching. It is a subject that is of importance in the Caribbean, hence why I’m taking the time to delve into it.

My 15-year-old son is a world-class athlete in the making. This puts a lot of stress on his body, and we had to visit a dermatologist doctor to burn off a particularly nasty verruca on his foot. It’s getting better but might need more treatment. It got me thinking about all the effort and hardship sports players at the top of their game must go through. In silence. In pain. In desperation. Alone. Spare a thought for that player you chastised for screwing up and try to imagine how hard it has been for them to get to where they are and to maintain that level. I suspect most people have absolutely no idea how difficult it is.

The rest of the week was spent reading and researching for two projects I’m working on. One is a paper for the business school academic journal that will be published this year. It’s ostensibly about web3 (whatever that is?), and I’d like to publish it. I’d love to make it a regular thing too. Getting back to the purpose of this blog, the constant uphill battle to concentrate and motivate myself to write is partly why I’m publishing this.

The other project is a labour of love that I believe can make a difference in the Caribbean in a small but important way. Our idea (as I’m partnering with someone else) is to publish research-grade papers to those who need or want them but may not be able to pay for them or have the necessary access to them. I think the difficulty is more about the motivation to do the work without having the financial resources to write without having a salary. Would transforming the project into an academic-type non-profit project seeking a grant be better than bootstrapping something that will inevitably be difficult to sell? Analysis paralysis, I suppose. But that’s how my brain works.

I’ve also tried to get back to regular exercise and started a zero to 5k running program. I feel a little better having exercised. It’ll likely take longer than the program timeline, but I hope to stay on track as best as possible. The trick is finding a way to corner me enough to provoke the desire to exercise. For example, this Saturday, I took advantage of my son’s training session to run/walk for 30 minutes. It’s not a lot, but it is a start, and I can see the benefit in heart rate and recovery, even after only 3 or 4 sessions over the last few weeks.

Again consistency.

If there is a word that defines my life, it is consistency. I am trying to be more consistent. I hope this contributes.

Reading

I’ve just finished Jean-Louis Gassée’s self-published Grateful Geek. I particularly enjoyed the book and read it in short time. Much like the Monday Notes he puts out regularly. If you’re a fan of tech, I’d recommend the book.

I’m continuing to read the Foundation series, something I’m a little ashamed to admit I didn’t read a long time ago. I’m not quite sure why, but I couldn’t get into it the first time I picked it up. I’m thoroughly enjoying it this time around, however.

I recently finished Player One by Douglas Coupland. One of my favourite authors. It didn’t disappoint.

I’ve started several other books:

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff
• Viral Justice - Ruha Benjamin
• The Alignment Problem - Brian Christian
• The New Politics of Numbers - Open access. I’ve nearly finished this one.

Of note

Roland Garros has started, and I’ll no doubt be watching some great matches over the coming weeks.

I hope to repeat this next week.

29 May 2023 — French West Indies

There’s a number which is called Dunbar’s Number. It’s around 150 or so.

It’s a significant number in that it seems to indicate that, as humans, we are incapable of having a meaningful discussion and keeping personal links with other humans if we have to do that for a group larger than this number.

Think about how many friends you have, no not Instagram acquaintances, real friends? Now think about how many of them you can keep in touch with in a meaningful way. It’s probably much less than Robin Dunbar’s suggestion.

I’ve started to see discussions about having a much more sociable social network, prompted by not just Elmo’s destruction of Twitter but the abject fatigue surrounding the use of social media that sucks you dry and intentionally disconnects you emotionally from a human being on another smartphone. Connecting more people was supposed to bring us together. Instead, it has succeeded in doing the exact opposite. For example, suggestions discuss limiting follows and followers to around 300 people or so and making them mutually agreed upon.

I don’t know the solution, and I don’t think it is Mastodon in its current guise. Still, I think it is a good starting point for people, organisations, institutions and even governments to see how they can build more community rather than more division.

Community centres and youth clubs were everywhere before. They weren’t perfect, nor do I expect Social Media to be. But I think there’s an opportunity to build something more localised and connected simultaneously. And that is what I think the value of something like Mastodon may inspire.

5 January 2023 — French West Indies

From Wired:

Unless you’ve been hiding, in a coma, or purposefully ignoring Social Media, you will have seen the explosion of the use of GPT-3 through a website called ChatGPT.

The above is a transcription of what transpired when the model was used for interactions of a health-related matter.

Quite extreme and clearly nothing a human would do —sociopaths notwithstanding.

Please read the article to get the context. It’s not that long and is quite informative about some of the risks of Large Language Models (LLMs).

3 January 2023 — French West Indies

Writing a paper for an International journal resulted in a better understanding and stopped me in my tracks.

Excuse the rambling. This is written in the true sense of blogging, and it started life as a short blog post idea, transforming into this, for what it’s worth. So I decided to cross-post it here first. I’ll publish it verbatim on my blog soon. That blog is another outlet for my brain, and not exclusively about matters digital.

I wrote a paper proposal for an international hotel industry journal sometime last year. My proposal was accepted, and I started writing in earnest. The paper had a deadline, and I was on track to finish on time, which is extremely rare for me. Sadly, that went south as I progressed and began to formulate a more complete picture of the technology I was writing about and its origins.

The title was:

Is Web 3.0 the next great opportunity in tourism?

The introduction goes like this:

Since the advent of the commercial internet, businesses in the travel and tourism industry have harnessed technology to promote their destinations. Some early tourism websites tried, in vain, to replicate the marketing materials traditionally used to promote destinations, mainly hotels.

This “copy and paste” methodology was seriously limited due to the underlying factors that meant that media-rich websites were near unusable for those with dial-up internet at 56kb/s and invisible for the majority who had not yet become connected to the internet. These simplistic lists of hotels and tourist attractions displaying available amenities neither incited nor informed potential visitors.

Broadband’s wide deployment and adoption enabled a new generation of technologies that would later be named Web 2.0. These technologies allowed media-rich websites to be developed. Many hotel websites today not only market properties in attractive ways but also allow potential visitors to reserve rooms, pay for their stay, and in some cases, simplify check-in and check-out, all achieved automatically without any interaction with reception staff. Today, many of the technologies of Web 2.0 allow hotels to generate first-party data for use elsewhere in their business. For example, for marketing, demand generation or even stock control. It allows benchmarking against other hotels within the same group or in comparison to similar competition. The distinction is important, and it separates these businesses from others that operate through travel agencies, typically providing little or no valuable data for such purposes.

Today, we are at an inflexion point where technology is evolving rapidly, and the adoption is accelerating and becoming more democratised. Technologies like Blockchain, Augmented/Virtual Reality, digital money (through tokens and CDBCs), and the metaverse can allow businesses in the travel and tourism industry to take advantage of this shift. It enables better value and faster client discovery. For example, several key performance indicators, such as the technology acceptance model (TAM), perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived enjoyment (ENJ), showed how virtual reality helped maintain potential visitor interest in destinations cut off by the pandemic and how that technology affected the tendency to visit the actual site (TenAS) (El-Said and Aziz, 2021).

This paper will discuss these technologies and how they may be harnessed so that visitors and non-visitors alike can be incited to visit destinations around the globe, thus generating value for the tourism industry.

Do the new technologies of the Metaverse and web3 provide opportunities for the tourism industry?

Specifically, the following research questions will be addressed:

1. What are the new technologies, and how are they used?

2. What are the opportunities and risks associated with this technology?

3. How can the tourism industry best utilise this technology to its advantage?

The paper’s structure was pretty classic in that there is an introduction (see above), a discussion on what web3 is, a literature review, and a discussion ending with conclusions. All sections are researched and backed up with examples and references.

A lot of it has already been written. Sadly, I started this at possibly the worst possible time for the technology, as it coincided with when web3 began to be exposed for the smoke and mirrors it turned out to be.

I couldn’t faithfully finish the paper as I was becoming increasingly sceptical about the fundamentals of web3, its purported merits and far-right origins. How could I write such a paper and stand by it when I didn’t believe or support most of it?

I have always been crypto sceptical, but I have kept an open mind on blockchain tech and have publicly said so on several occasions here and as a guest on various podcasts. No longer. I’m no longer much of an enthusiast about it.

How did I get here?

Writing a paper is nothing like writing a blog post or firing off a simple observation on social media. For one, papers are generally peer-reviewed before publication. That process starts at the proposal phase, and my proposal didn’t pass on initial inspection, requiring some changes to be considered for publication. Peer review is brutal. If someone doesn’t like or agree with you, they’ll tell you straight and point out why with facts, observations and references as to where you are wrong. When diving deep into a subject, you can quickly build a cognitive bias and eventually see things that aren’t necessarily there or see something that you wish was there (wish casting). During peer review, this is spotted and called out almost immediately.

Secondly, as I researched deeper into the world of web3, I found more things that I couldn’t agree with. It made me uncomfortable and left me dealing with cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonances never end well. One example of the things I was struggling with was the criminal amounts of energy wasted by one of the most useless technologies ever conceived. Blockchain. Without getting into the technical details, some blockchains use what is termed Proof of Work. Linked is the Wikipedia article on what that is. Take the time to read it. Reread it if you have already. I refer to it as Proof of Waste, as I have concluded that it is a more accurate term. Blockchains waste disgraceful amounts of energy on slow validations that could easily be done with existing database technology for a fraction of the cost and an order of magnitude faster.

Yes, I know that the new shiny kid on the block is Proof of Stake, and its energy consumption is vastly reduced. But it also goes directly against a central tenet of web3, decentralisation. Proof of stake puts power into the hands of the most invested (as in money). That sounds very distributed and democratic to me. The EU has recommended that Proof of Stake be used instead of Proof of Waste, threatening an outright ban on it. Only one high-profile cryptocurrency has completed the move to Proof of Stake, taking over eight years in the process.

But here’s another aspect that many seem to have misunderstood. Blockchain is directly against the law in the EU, as outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Of the advertised “advantages” of blockchain is immutability. Blocks are Immutable, i.e., permanent. This is illegal in the EU because the GDPR mandates that people have the right to correct errors and rectify false information through due process. Blockchain doesn’t (can’t) do that. Data on the chain is not erasable. Likewise, illegal. Blockchain prevents ledger data from being deleted. That data is part of the chain. Break the chain, and you break the system.

Then there’s the whole thing of NFTs or Non-Fungable Tokens. What a scam! Personified recently by a certain DT, camply cosplayed up as various imaginary Superheros, and a grift so big it could probably be seen from space.

For the paper —getting back to the subject— I’d thought about how destinations and hotels could mint tokens and sell them as souvenirs. I still quite like the idea and think it has some merit, but the ecosystem is not yet there. Regulation is missing. How do you display them? Can you resell them? What governs gains, losses, and value? Do people really want to virtue signal they’ve been to Bali in this way? How do you prevent grifters and scammers?

For the moment, NFTs are essentially simple pump-and-dump scams that prey on the unsuspecting, the vulnerable, and the plain stupid. I don’t think that is a morally acceptable way to run a business. But then again, I’m not a thief.

On the energy aspect, with energy costs rising and no near-term solution to the impending climate crisis, any project that adds to the planet’s burden should be considered illegal. Yes, you can say that my words here are useless and use energy wastefully in their production, distribution (email) and reading. That’s true. But wake me up when this uses the amount of energy of a small European country, and I’ll gladly stop. Wake me up when the sum total of all the WordPress blogs on the internet reaches the same energy levels as that wasted by Bitcoin to “prove” your magic bean is worth something. And don’t forget that there are literally hundreds of thousands of other magic beans out there too!

They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.”

The above is taken from a blog post by Tim Bray (AWS). Pro blockchain or not, you should read it as it nicely sums up blockchain’s uselessness.

Even more sinister…

Back to the paper. During my research, I happened upon the following book:

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

Here’s an extract:

By far the majority of interest in Bitcoin came from technologists and those who follow and admire the work of technologists. To those of us who were watching Bitcoin with an eye toward politics and economics, though, something far more striking than Bitcoin’s explosive rise in value became apparent: in the name of this new technology, extremist ideas were gaining far more traction than they previously had outside of the extremist literature to which they had largely been confined. Dogma propagated almost exclusively by far-right groups like the Liberty League, the John Birch Society, the militia movement, and the Tea Party, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, and to a lesser extent rightist outlets like the Fox media group and some right-wing politicians, was now being repeated by many who seemed not to know the origin of the ideas, or the functions of those ideas in contemporary politics. These ideas are not simply heterodox or contrarian: they are pieces of a holistic worldview that has been deliberately developed and promulgated by right-wing ideologues. To anyone aware of the history of right-wing thought in the United States and Europe, they are shockingly familiar: that central banking such as that practiced by the U.S. Federal Reserve is a deliberate plot to “steal value” from the people to whom it actually belongs; that the world monetary system is on the verge of imminent collapse due to central banking policies, especially fractional reserve banking; that “hard” currencies such as gold provide meaningful protection against that purported collapse; that inflation is a plot to steal money from the masses and hand it over to a shadowy cabal of “elites” who operate behind the scenes; and more generally that the governmental and corporate leaders and wealthy individuals we all know are “controlled” by those same “elites.”

David Golumbia continues to outline how Bitcoin embodies extremist ideologies through Cyberlibertarianism and Internet Exceptionalism frameworks. Simply put, governments should not regulate the internet, and the internet is different and can’t be governed by mere mortals that don’t ‘get it’. This is in line with the extreme right’s ideology, which has brought us to world war, mass ethnic killings, and, more recently, the genuine possibility of a wholesale destabilisation of society. Linking these ideas to the Tea Party, the John Birch Society and conspiracists like David Icke and Alex Jones, the book does an excellent job of showing how the definition of “freedom” is less clear when you question it more robustly. Presciently, he mentions how some public figures do not necessarily outwardly declare their adherence to these ideologies but have demonstrated just that. Elon Musk is one such specimen. There are others, but take note of the ongoing (December 2022) train wreck at Twitter for context. Another article cited in the book is that of Langdon Winner (1997). A must-read, in my view, in which is discussed a personality not talked about much outside Silicon Valley. Ayn Rand. She’s a darling of Silicon Valley but was almost certainly a sociopath. If you have access to the BBC, watch “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” to better understand her and her effect on the Silicon Valley mindset and culture.

To these people, freedom always seems to mean the freedom to do “what I want”, without regard for others.

The Politics of Bitcoin is short —70-odd pages— but I highly recommend it. If you are from a technical background, like me, this will provoke thoughts and perhaps challenge some of your preconceived ideas about tech in the 21st Century. You don’t have to agree, but disagreeing through knowledge is infinitely better than a position to the contrary through ignorance.

Final thoughts

The tourist industry is already under scrutiny for its environmental effects, from ecosystem-damaging hotel developments to carbon waste (mostly travel). I didn’t want to be the author of a paper that promotes or encourages damaging consequences through needless and scam-enabling technologies like crypto and NFTs. Especially not just because it is “cool stuff”. I didn’t want to be part of a group that ignorantly legitimises innovation to extinction.

There may be a future for NFT-type spin-offs once regulation and other parts of the ecosystem are ready, and blockchain might evolve to become genuinely useful. But I suspect that evolution to look remarkably similar to database technology we’ve had for decades.

This experience was enlightening, and I wouldn’t change it for the world because it helped me come to a better, more nuanced understanding. In the near future, I may propose a different paper, although I suspect it might not be accepted. We’ll see.

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Have a great holidays, and I’ll probably write some thoughts in the new year.