F-Day plus 125

125 days since our house flooded, and the damaged furniture fittings, floors, underfloors, and now inner walls have been torn out.

Over a third of a year since we had to move out, I’m optimistic that perhaps, at last, reconstruction work is almost ready to begin.

It’s a long, slow process. And there’s clearly a way to go. But it’s good to see progress happening.

A view through a pair of dilapidated residential rooms, through the gaps in a hollowed-out partition wall.

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Note #29482

🎶 It starts with sausage,
A hot dog in a bun.
One simple sausage,
Put some mustard on one…

Is it just me, or are (sinner) Sir Pentious‘s colours reminiscent of a hot dog?

Sir Pentious, an anthropomorphic snake from Hazbin Hotel, in black and yellow longitudinal stripes with red 'eyes'.

×

The chair guardian

I guess it’s sweet that the dog has decided that I’m not to leave my home office without her noticing.

But when the naps right behind my wheelie chair I worry she’s going to get her paws run over!

A fawn-coloured French Bulldog lies on a laminate floor against the feet of an office chair.

×

Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.

OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.

Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.

With thanks to Mark Palko for sharing: yes, this seems like a spot-on observation of Musk’s career:

  • a few unqualified successes (Tesla leading the charge on the EV rollout; Starlink providing widespread Internet), and
  • a lot more unfulfilled promises and vapourware (Twitter’s post-takeover nosedive, the failure to deliver anything-of-use by Neuralink, The Boring Company/Hyperloop, the worse-than-pointless Grokipedia, all the things SpaceX hasn’t yet done…).

The vast majority of his wealth comes from investment, not from returns: people buy his stock if they buy his hype. I’m not saying he’s producing nothing of value… but yeah: the “world’s first trillionaire” is… unfortunate.

But then again, I’d be quite happy for him to be the world’s last trillionaire, too.

Ad Infinitum

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.

That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article, necessarily. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t send users to websites. They deliver “synthesized updates” with maybe a link or two buried at the bottom. The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed. Google is creating its own context.

Google thinks it no longer needs the Web to deliver answers. And it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is you. Your emails, your files, your calendar, your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the kind of personal context those auction models need to work. The prediction module in the prominence allocation framework doesn’t run on keywords. It runs on knowing you.

An excellent piece by Matthias Ott, discussing revelations from this year’s Google I/O. In particular, the imminent pivot of Google Search from its lifelong “query in, list of links out” model to a wholesale “query in, LLM output out” one.

This isn’t just about putting AI output at the top of the search results, as I gather they do today, but about getting rid of search “results” entirely, and running everything through the model.

To which Matthias wisely asks: well, how will ads work then? Google’s business model is based on mining your personal data and shoving ads in your face. Where do they go in a search interface that it’s really a search but a “helpful” AI.

It turns out there’s a few approaches that Google seem to be considering, but what they’ve all got in common is the idea that marketers will be able to “influence” the LLM’s token generation, perhaps by using an LLM of their own to decide whether you (based on everything Google knows about you) are worth marketing to, and how much they’ll pay to do so, and then this input being “weighted” against competing advertisers and actual ingested data in order to feature advertiser-influenced content woven directly into the output of the LLM.

David Cross, as Arrested Development's Tobias Fünke, bites into a burger in a Burger King restaurant, with a Chicken Tendercrisp advertisement prominently displayed in the background.

Superficially, this sounds a little like product placement, like you sometimes see in American-made TV shows and movies. You know, where one character says, of “I’m going to go get a drink refill. You know you can get unlimited refills on any drink you want… and it’s free?”, and the next says “It’s a wonderful restaurant.”, while they’re sitting in Burger King.

Except this isn’t about saying “hey, people who watch this show are probably high and want a snack, let’s push our fast food their way”. It’s individualised.

It’s more like if the characters, knowing that your GMail account had a recent email about some test results, and your Google Calendar had an appointment tomorrow at the doctor, started talking about a particular brand of medication to, y’know, put the idea into your head.

Scene from Futurama, showing a display of Lightspeed Briefs with the slogan 'as seen in your dreams'.
The future presented in Futurama was supposed to be a joke, right?

We’re not at the point of completely-customised TV shows – nor the injection of commercials into dreams – yet. But Google’s plans, which blur the already-grey boundaries between organic and advertising content, are pretty insidious.

Assuming you’re in their ecosystem already, and possibly even if you’re not… Google may already be looking at your search terms, your calendar, your emails, your location and schedule, who you communicate with and how often, which web pages you visit, which apps you use, where you spend money, etc. (Seriously: if you somehow haven’t begun de-googling already, what are you waiting for?)… there’s a huge potential for misuse there.

But the arms race between people blocking or learning-to-ignore ads and advertisers trying to foist them upon us continues, and Google thinks this is an acceptable next step in escalating that. Using an insane amount of energy to recycle other people’s work without crediting them, in order to mash up the result with information they know about you in order to deliver you an unverifiable soup of words which might answer your question but with no clue how much or little commercial interest went into producing it, or by whom.

That’s some proper Darkest Timeline shit, right there.

You don’t need to take my nor Matthias’s word on it (although you should read his full post because it’s excellent): just look at the concept videos in Google’s blog post on the subject. You’ll also notice that almost-nowhere in their demos do Google even hint at the possibility of linking-out to anybody else’s website: there’s like one “visit site” button that appears at the very end of one of the flows, after the agent has done its things. Google is building a walled garden where they hope you’ll live, served by their AI butler on behalf of the companies who pay Google to tell you about their products.

Ugh.

× ×

New social media restrictions

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

🚫 Regrettably you have been locked out of diamond geezer pending age verification protocols.

You may be UNDER 16 YEARS OF AGE and therefore you must not read anything here UNTIL YOU CAN PROVE THAT YOU’RE NOT.

The government is taking urgent action to ensure that children are no longer able to access harmful social media apps. At the personal behest of the Prime Minister a raft of carefully thought-through definitely-not-rushed non-kneejerk policies designed to restrict inappropriate content is to be introduced forthwith.

There is some absolutely terrible stuff online, much of which has already tarnished the minds of innocent youth. It is therefore imperative that all potentially terrible stuff must now be wrapped in a secure plain cover and placed on the digital top shelf. It’s for everyone’s own good.

Despite being parody, diamond geezer’s new age-gating – which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn’t actually block access to the site – somehow perfectly straddles the line between “invasive” and “ineffective”… in exactly the same way that I expect the UK’s legal implementation will manage in a year or two.

Tango Two

Making another attempt at learning to tango, this time at a more-beginner, more-local class. It’s still super hard but he makes me question whether I even know how to walk, let alone dance, but I love it so much!

My Polyamory is Boring

I was chatting to JTR about our shared experiences of being openly polyamorous1 bloggers. Both JTR and I observed that it’s something that we don’t write about often.

We don’t say much about it… even though it’s probably something that, to some readers, would seem interesting and unusual. And also, perhaps, still sufficiently “taboo” that they wouldn’t feel comfortable asking us about it outright, either.

Why is that?

In my case, the single biggest reason that I don’t often write about it is… I think my polyamory is kinda boring!

A family of two white men with beards and one white woman sit at a picnic bench in a barn, alongside their two (blurred) children. They're holding baps with sausages, bacon, or eggs in, and surrounded by canned drinks and takeaway coffee cups. A tote bag nearby gives away that they're at the cafe of Diddly Squat Farm.
From left to right the adults you can see are: (1) me, (2) my metamour2 JTA,3 and (3) my partner (and his wife) Ruth. On each side of her are our two school-aged children.

It’s boring… because it’s established

Part of the reason I think it’s boring is because, well, it’s far from novel! We’ve been doing this for the vast majority of our adult lives:

  • I’ve been in (only) nonmonogamous relationships for about 25 years.
  • The three of us – Ruth, JTA and I – have been together for 19 years
  • Of that, we’ve been cohabiting for 15 years, co-owning property for 13 years, co-parenting for almost as long

To me, this arrangement just feels like everyday life. We all know where we’re at and what we’re about, and we’re by now fuelled by long-established Old Relationship Energy4.

JTA, Ruth and Dan at Ruth and JTA's wedding.
We were already pretty well-established before Ruth & JTA’s fabulous wedding, all those years ago. Gosh, we’ve been doing this a while!

It’s boring… because it’s not scandalous

The second reason my polyamory is boring is because it’s free of drama; free of scandal; free of titillation.

We don’t go to swingers parties. We don’t have a dungeon in our basement5. We don’t revel in jealous chatter or gossip. We don’t spend most of our time naked. We’re not doing some kind of cuckoldry thing. We’re not doing this as part of some kink or fantasy.6

We don’t spend lots of time negotiating boundaries or handling jealousy or working out who needs an STI test: if you catch us discussing something, it’s much more-likely to be how we handle our savings account or who’s taking a kid to their swimming lesson or when’s least-inconvenient for everybody for the car to be serviced. Y’know: boring stuff!

We also only very-rarely “date” outside of our polycule7.

I’m confident that we attract a little gossip from the “school mums” or the nosy neighbours in our quiet rural village. But mostly, I suspect, it’s of the “hey, having a third parent around sounds super convenient: how can I get that?”8 type.

The same adults and children pose in a colourful escape room, with padlocked boxes and banks of light switches visible amongst cat toys.
We’re boring because we’re fundamentally just like any other family. Except with one more adult than is typical.

I love that my polyamory is boring!

Don’t get me wrong: I love that our relationships are unexpectedly-boring.

It’s a reflection of our stability and our commitment that the rest of my trio and I are a comfortably predictable. A perpetual landmark in the eyes of our families, friends, and children. We’re just part of the furniture. Just people, doing our thing, plodding along like everybody else.

Yes, Ruth gets to have a husband and a boyfriend. Yes, we’re all both “in a relationship” and “available to date”. Yes, our kids are raised by three parents (which I personally think is a huge advantage to them, and I imagine that they’d agree). But that’s where the excitement ends. We’re just regular-old common or garden humans.

So that’s the main reason I don’t blog about my polyamory. It’s just not that exciting. Sure: I could talk about how we organise our shared finances or who sleeps where on any given night or how we decided which adult does which part of the school run on which weekday… but it’s all pretty dull. And it’s frankly the kind of thing that any monogamous couple could talk about just as well!

Most successful long-term relationships are boring. Stability and consistency are not exciting.

But if I’m wrong…

…then tell me! There’s a comments form below9: ask whatever you like!10

And if nobody comments… then I’ll know that I’ve convinced you. I’ll know that I’m right. That my relationship structure, however uncommon, isn’t actually that interesting:

My polyamory is boring. And that’s great.

Footnotes

1 Polyamory: the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners with the knowledge and consent of everybody involved. I’ll try to keep a glossary going here in the footnotes for any less-commonplace terminology.

2 Metamour: the partner of your partner.

3 I apologise that my metamour JTA’s name is literally one-character different from that of JTR, a completely different person with whom I had the conversation that inspired this post. It annoys me to have to type it, so I’m sure it annoys you to have to read it.

4 Old Relationship Energy (ORE), or Established Relationship Energy, is the contented kind of relationship happiness that comes with time, and trust, and familiarity. It contrasts New Relationship Energy (NRE), which is the buzzy, loved-up kind of excitement common to new relationships and sometimes called the “honeymoon period”. These concepts are common to many relationship styles (and, indeed, the transition from NRE to ORE can be a source of challenges for some relationships), but they’re more-often talked-about in polyamorous circles because their impact is more widely-felt. For example: observing your partner experience NRE with somebody new and remembering when you and they shared the same can be a source of friction or jealousy… or a source of compersion (vicarious joy at somebody else’s love), depending on the people, timing, context, and more.

5 If we did have a basement sex dungeon (which we don’t), it’d have long ago become a swimming pool when our house flooded earlier this year. Sigh.

6 No shade thrown if you are a drama-queen nudist swinger with a sex dungeon and a cuckoldry kink. More power to you. All I’m saying is that’s not us, and therefore – by comparison – we’re pretty boring.

7 Polycule: a network of romantic relationships, or the people within those relationships, that are all connected to one another. The simplest polycule is arguably the dyad: two people in a relationship together. There are probably two possible configurations of three people: a triad, where each party is romantically involved with each of the other two, and a vee – a “V-shaped” polycule where one person is in a relationship with two others, who are not in a relationship with one another. Letters of the alphabet are useful to summarise other polycule shapes too, like an N-shaped or O-shaped quad or a W-shaped or A-shaped quintet, but of course there are many other ways you can permute the people and relationships when you’ve got this number of participants. Some polycules are huge (and, usually, loose, with the most-peripheral people possibly less-likely to be in direct contact with one another); others are relatively small. There’s a philosophical argument that can be made either way about whether a single person is a polycule-of-one.

8 I’ve got to admit, triple-parenting is convenient, sometimes. I have an enormous deal of respect for solo parents because that shit is hard. Two parents is simpler, but three… three sometimes feels like playing on easy-mode. Not always – kids will quickly learn which parent is the one to appeal to if they want an extra half-hour before bedtime or you to buy them a new book, for example, and having more parents gives them more ways to do that! – but sometimes.

9 Don’t want me to know that it was you? You can ask anonymously, if you like. But you do need to type in something that looks like a believable email address to ensure you get past the spam filter. Here’s some throwaway anonymous email addresses if you want one.

10 So long as you’re not a bigot or an arsehole, you can ask whatever you like and I’ll try to answer. Tell me that I’m living in sin or that what I’m doing is bad for my children or that we’re cheating on one another and you’ll find that you don’t make it through the moderation filter.

× × ×

Remembering the 90s Web

This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who’s researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand.

I’m seeing more and more interest in this period – even, surprisingly, among people too young to be nostalgic about it – as the countercultural “web renaissance” tiptoes out of the shadows and encourages newcomers to take their first steps in building their own Web identity with HTML, CSS, and (maybe) JavaScript.

Anyway: chatting to Andreas was great and it reminded me of quite how grateful I am to have gotten to experience a lot of these seminal technologies when they were at their newest and most-experimental.

Is midnight in the middle of the night?

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Niki said:

I was curious if midnight is, in fact, a middle of the night. Turned out it is! In winter time. In summer time, middle of the night is around 1 am.

Graph showing sunrise, sunset and middle point between them for a year

Also explains why winters are so brutal: 16 hours of darkness between sunset and sunrise on Jan 1! Charted for Berlin

It does, of course, depend on your position within your solar timezone!

Berlin is about 13.5 degrees East of the Prime Meridian, so it’s 13.5 / 360 * 24 = 0.9 hours. So that means it’s 54 minutes East of UTC.

UTC is functionally equivalent (for normal humans) to GMT, which is calibrated based on the solar time at the Prime Meridian.

Germany’s timezone is UTC+01:00 in the winter, so you’d expect solar “midnight” (and “midday” for that matter) to be 6 minutes “early”, on average. Which is probably exactly what your graph shows! (There’s a little bit of a wobble because of complicated orbital physics and inclination and stuff, but it’s ABOUT right.)

Being out by an hour in summer is, of course, because the clocks are “wrong” by an hour in the summer, compared to solar time. Or rather, in Berlin, wrong by an hour and six minutes.

This rule, of course, doesn’t hold true everywhere. If you live in the far West of China, your true solar time might be only UTC+05:20, but China’s timezone is UTC+08:00, so solar events like sunrise, sunset, midday and “midnight” would fall over two and a half hours “late”!

What you’re seeing in Berlin is the consequence of you being almost-exactly in the centre of the idealised solar UTC+1 timezone. Look at a timezone map that extends bands all the way to the top or bottom and you’ll see what I mean! And spare a thought for the folks in Reykjavík who are on UTC+0 despite being at a solar position of approximately UTC-01:25!

I want my friends to have blogs too

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Blogs. The curated, written looking glass into someone’s perspective. That’s what I love about them. Blogs. Waking up in the morning and spending a little time reading over the carefully chosen words of another human being. Truly astounding. Blogs. Poured time and energy, someone distilling themselves into this personal, sharable medium. Blogs.

I guess to bring this post to an end… if you don’t have a blog, change that! (especially if I know you IRL, seriously). I wanna hear about you and your life! Start that quirky and personalised website. If you already do, tell me and share! Every one of them is awesome; from digital gardens to byte-based megacities. Fill them with you and share! I can’t wait to start reading :)

Oh, so very much this.

There was a time, a couple of decades and change ago, when almost all of the people I spent time with in my real life blogged. Nowadays, it’s far fewer. Ruth shares interesting bits of tech (plus Thames Path walks!), and I keep an eye out in case Gareth shares more ‘plane-related news or Andy takes a deeper dive into his music… but nowadays the active blogs I follow are, for the most part, people I know online (or, at least, people I knew online first, even if I’ve subsequently met them in person).

That’s not bad. I like meeting people online. And increasingly, the smallweb’s becoming better-interconnected and less-lonely than ever.

Daniel really puts it well:

Blogs allow for a deeper level of thought; not everything is well suited to an in-person chat. We sometimes need time to get our thoughts in order and detailed concepts are often much better understood in writing. It’s honestly a shame that we have confined ourself to short processing times and quick responses. A back and forth can sure be fun, but so can the meticulous; and nothing’s stopping you from chatting over the stuff you’ve written – imagine how insightful that could? Blogging really recaptures that “handwritten letter” spark.

Getting updates from people over text is kinda hard too. While I’ve been abroad, I have missed so many moments in peoples lives (good and bad), of which I usually only hear a summarised fraction. I get it though, asking is hard and responding is even harder; retyping a shortened version of something for the 5th time isn’t much fun. I dream of a time where more of my friends write blogs, a world where I can easily grasp and know the wheres and whats in someone’s life without feeling like I am nagging for details; where the focus is being a friendly part of their lives…

I don’t expect this repost to encourage any of my IRL friends to dust off their old blogs (or start new ones). But I can dream!

AI is not a person

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

You didn’t “have a conversation” with ChatGPT.

It doesn’t “think you should…” It doesn’t think.

It didn’t “tell you that…” It doesn’t speak.

It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel.

AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided.

A useful reminder for the next time you’re tempted to personify or humanise an LLM.

LLMs are statistical tools. There are some things that the statistics of language can be good at, especially on average: stuff like summarisation, sentiment analysis, pattern identification, and checking for internal consistency.

But they’re just maths. They’re not a person.

It’s not even that they don’t care about you or don’t want to help you. They don’t even go that far: they’re incapable of “caring” or “wanting” in the first place. What they do is take all of the information they’ve ingested, plus their training and prompt, plus the conversation you’d had with them so far, plus a random number, and produce output which is, after a fashion, a prediction of what comes next.

As always: that’s not to say it’s useless. (It’s also not to say it’s always useful.) But as a tool, it’s pretty opaque to most normal people.

Unless you’ve really taken a deep-dive into understanding low LLMs work, they must seem like magic (hell; speaking as somebody who has taken such a deep-dive, they sometimes seem like magic!). I’m sure that some of the time, they must seem like they’re a living thing, or at least an approximation of one.

But they’re not. And it’s important to remember that.

I Hate (Most) Keyboard ‘Fn’ Keys

Duration

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Hi, HackerNews! Please be kind/friendly! I’d love to hear your experiences of these (IMHO horrible) keyboard features, whether good or bad. Drop me a comment or join in on the thread over there.

In my living room1 is an ageing Windows media centre PC, which is connected to the TV and principally used for Jellyfin, Netflix, Nebula, Steam, and the like. For convenient sofa use, I’ve equipped it with a wireless keyboard/trackpad combo.

A slim Microsoft all-in-one keyboard and touchpad, in British layout, alongside two game controllers.
The keyboard is, for the most part, fine. You wouldn’t want to type an essay on it, but if you’re searching for a YouTube video it does the job.

Unfortunately, the manufacturers of this keyboard decided that it needed a dozen extra functions, and repurposed the F-keys F1 through F12 for these purposes.

It was nice that they gave dedicated keys to volume control/toggling muting – we use those all the time. And there are three other dedicated keys in the top right which we never use… so there was clearly capacity for a little extra. And they still they felt the need to do… this:

Close-up of the F4 key, showing a 'moon' icon. Of the other visible function keys, F3 shows 'fast forward', F5 shows 'hourglass', F6 shows what appears to be an illustration of a supercollider spinning up, and so on.
That F4 key has been repurposed as a “sleep” button. This poses a problem.

I don’t want any of these “special function keys. Occasionally, I suppose, I might need one2, but mostly I’d just like F1 through F12 to remain the multi-purpose, context-dependent keys that they have been since they first appeared in 1965.

And so, because I don’t want to hold Fn every time I want to press an F-key for its intended purpose, I used the arcane shortcut Fn+Caps to “lock” the keyboard into “standard” mode, where multipurpose F-keys remain multipurpose F-keys unless I hold down the special magic button that transforms them into rarely-used single-purpose special function keys.

But here’s where the problem occurs. If the batteries get changed, or if the keyboard gets turned-off for an extended period, or sometimes – seemingly – just randomly… that function-lock gets switched off.

And I’ll grab the keyboard and, to quickly quit Steam Big Picture or a Jellyfin Client or something, I’ll press Alt+F4. Which will send the “sleep” command. And because this computer’s a bit older, it’ll hibernate.

Instead of closing one application, which is what I intended, I now have to wait upwards of a minute for the old box to finish copying all of its RAM into a file, and shutting down, and then booting up again (in response to my repeated and frustrated hammering of the space bar), and then loading everything back into RAM… just to put me back where I started3.

What’s most-frustrating is at F4 is the only key with such a time-consuming and annoying function. If I accidentally paused some music or opened the system settings or did whatever-the-hell the icon on the F6 key is supposed to mean, that wouldn’t be so bad. But man; the three or four times a year that this catches me out are just aggravating enough to piss me off without being quite bad enough for me to do something about it4.

Close-up of a WASD keyboard with Pride rainbow keycaps, focussing on its Menu/Fn key and the handful of media keys it supports (which are primarily the Pause, Insert, Home, Delete, End, Page Up and Page Down keys).
This is the WASD Code keyboard on another of my computers5, showing how a Fn key can be done right.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

My WASD Code gets it right by resigning the effects of all double-duty keys to minor conveniences only, and making them the secondary functions of the keys to which they’re attached. I use these volume control buttons and they’re fine6

My Keychron K10 gets it right by having the double-duty keys mirror those of the Mac it attaches to7: again, all minor, low-impact functions that are easily and quickly un-done. Also, when you lock it to traditional F-key mode it stays that way, even if it’s disconnected and left unpowered for an extended period.

Close-up of Mac-style double-duty function keys F9 through F12, for fast-forward, mute, volume-down and volume-up respectively.
I had one of those Macbooks with the stupid LCD screen in place of keys, once, and I hated that “feature” and was glad to see it disappear (although occasionally I still see it on other hardware): who the hell wants a hardware keyboard that they can only use by looking at it? This is a much saner design, and I appreciate how easy it is to switch it to “normal” mode8.

These keyboards – which are my daily drivers – show that an Fn key can be done right.

Here’s what “doing Fn right” looks like, to me –

  1. Where keys do double-duty, it’s a low-impact and quickly reversible operation, so there’s little cognitive load or delay in correcting any mistakes.
  2. The default state is the traditional key function, or if that’s not the case, switching mode is easy (doesn’t involve looking up an underdocumented shortcut or installing a proprietary driver).
  3. When you switch the default state, it stays switched and doesn’t swap back to factory defaults just because of a loss of power or other arbitrary and unrelated trigger.

Sadly, a great number of keyboards get their Fn key implementations wrong. And I hate them for it.

Footnotes

1 By which, right now, I mean the living room of the Chicory House, on account of my actual house being busy having its underfloor foundations torn up.

2 In particular, this keyboard lacks dedicated page up/page down keys, and I don’t mind pressing Fn+F11 or Fn+F12 for that. And maybe once or twice I’ve used Fn+F2 for pause/play. But other than that, they’re completely pointless.

3 Yes, I’m fully aware that I could just disable all sleep/hibernation functions at an OS or even BIOS level. But at the time I remember that, all I want to do is get back to watching the latest episode of Star City or something.

4 I mean, except for write this blog post, I suppose. But for that I blame Terence Eden, who put the idea in my head with a recent poll.

5 And why yes, I do have Pride keycaps in place of my function keys, why do you ask?

6 The volume control knob of the mechanical it replaced, a Das Keyboard 3, was better, but you can’t have everything.

7 The Keychron itself is super versatile and OS-independent: it’s easily toggled between layouts and even comes with spare keycaps to make it “look like” your preferred operating system, assuming that unlike me you don’t routinely use around three different ones in a typical session.

8 Don’t get me started on Apple’s other UX decisions like “natural scrolling” which makes no sense whatsoever on a mouse… but – unlike every other operating system I’ve checked – won’t let you configure a different scrolling orientation on a mouse than for a trackpad: both have to be kept aligned in MacOS. Argh!.

× × × ×

F-Day plus 115

115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what’s beneath and whether it’s stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody’s coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we’ll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company).

Several vehicles parked in the rain on the rural residential driveway of 'The Green'.

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So Unbelievable it Sounds Like you Googled It

“To Google”

When it first appeared, Google Search was a breath of fresh air. Simple, powerful search that Just Worked. It’s little wonder that the phase “to Google” something became synonymous with “to search for” something.

Somewhere,  Google lost its way.1 Perhaps the latest example of that is the injection of AI into every search2:

I’ve been to the cinema a few times lately so I’ve seen the Google AI ad that inspired me to make this parody… a lot.
Music by Dead Tubes Foundation (click to unmute/mute).

Apparently the kids these days don’t “Google it”. At least, not in their colloquialisms: they’re still probably using the search engine.

They say that they’ll “search it up”.

And this presents us with an opportunity:

Let’s reclaim the phrase “to Google”

I was inspired by a blog post by Mr Scribs (itself inspired by a Fediverse conversation), discovered via Bubbles:

We should turn the verb use of googling into an insult.

Example: “That’s so unbelievable it sounds like you googled it.”

I love this, and I’m absolutely going to start using it. “To Google” can absolutely transform from meaning “to search for, using a Web search engine” to meaning:

  • to seek knowledge in a lazy and convenient way, without regard for its accuracy
    (“I Googled from a guy at the pub that 5G caused Covid”)
  • to acquire information that can’t accurately be sourced or verified
    (“don’t quote me on that, though: I Googled it”)
  • to prefer an answer to a question that’s mildly more-convenient for the asker, even if getting it was ethically problematic
    (“pass me the jump leads, I’m going to Google one of the hostages”)

DeGoogling is so… 2010s. Let’s make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb, in a way that better represents what it means to continue to buy in to the ever-increasingly toxic Google Search ecosystem.

Footnotes

1 Maybe it was then the Search-Chrome-Analytics trifecta that positioned the company as both the assistant to, and the adversary of, the users. Maybe it was when they dropped “don’t be evil”. Maybe it was when they stopped listening to users, or when they stopped listening to their own developers. Maybe it was when they helped sterilise the Web. Maybe it was AMP and they way they abused their monopoly to force it down everybody’s throats. Maybe it was when they killed (insert your favourite service here). Maybe it was when they started enshittifying Android. Make your own mind up.

2 Yes, I’m aware that some other search engines include AI summaries in results, too. But they all seem easier to turn off… and I’m yet to see a cinema advertisement about the fact that they do it for anything other that Google Search.