Article

Future Challenges for Remote Working

22 May 2020 17:58 4

When the COVID-19 lockdown forced many offices to close and their staff to work remotely, some of us saw what was unfolding as an… opportunity in disguise. Instead of the slow-but-steady decentralisation of work that’s very slowly become possible (technically, administratively, and politically) over the last 50 years, suddenly a torrent of people were discovering that remote working can work.

Man in sci-fi jumpsuit and futuristic AR goggles. — Unfulfilled promises of the world of tomorrow include flying cars, viable fusion power, accessible space travel, post-scarcity economies, and – until recently – widespread teleworking. Still waiting on my holodeck too.

The Future is Now

As much as I hate to be part of the “where’s my flying car?” brigade, I wrote ten years ago about my dissatisfaction that remote working wasn’t yet commonplace, let alone mainstream. I recalled a book I’d read as a child in the 1980s that promised a then-future 2020 of:

near-universal automation of manual labour as machines become capable of an increasing diversity of human endeavours (we’re getting there, but slowly),
a three- or four-day work week becoming typical as efficiency improvements are reinvested in the interests of humans rather than of corporations (we might have lost sight of that goal along the way, although there’s been some fresh interest in it lately), and
widespread “teleworking”/”telecommuting”, as white-collar sectors grow and improvements in computing and telecommunications facilitate the “anywhere office”

Of those three dreams, the third soon seemed like it would become the most-immediate. Revolutionary advances in mobile telephony, miniaturisation of computers, and broadband networking ran way ahead of the developments in AI that might precipitate the first dream… or the sociological shift required for the second. But still… progress was slow.

At eight years old, I genuinely believed that most of my working life would be spent… wherever I happened to be. So far, most of my working life has been spent in an office, despite personally working quite hard for that not to be the case!

Driver's temperature being checked at the roadside by somebody in full protective equipment. — Apply directly to the head! Commuting looks different today than it did last year, but at least the roads are quieter.

I started at Automattic six months ago, an entirely distributed company. And so when friends and colleagues found themselves required to work remotely by the lockdown they came in droves to me for advice about how to do it! I was, of course, happy to help where I could: questions often covered running meetings and projects, maintaining morale, measuring output, and facilitating communication… and usually I think I gave good answers. Sometimes, though, the answer was “If you’re going to make that change, you’re going to need a cultural shift and some infrastructure investment first.” Y’know: “Don’t start from here.” If you received that advice from me: sorry!

(Incidentally, if you have a question I haven’t answered yet, try these clever people first for even better answers!)

More-recently, I was excited to see that many companies have adopted this “new normal” not as a temporary measure, but as a possible shape of things to come. Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Square, and Spotify have all announced that they’re going to permit or encourage remote work as standard, even after the crisis is over.

Obviously tech companies are leading the way, here: not only are they most-likely to have the infrastructure and culture already in place to support this kind of shift. Also, they’re often competing for the same pool of talent and need to be seen as at-least as progressive as their direct rivals. Matt Mullenweg observes that:

What’s going to be newsworthy by the end of the year is not technology companies saying they’re embracing distributed work, but those that aren’t.

…some employers trapped in the past will force people to go to offices, but the illusion that the office was about work will be shattered forever, and companies that hold on to that legacy will be replaced by companies who embrace the antifragile nature of distributed organizations.

Distributed Work's Five Levels of Autonomy, by Matt Mullenweg. — I’ve shared this before, I know, but it exudes Matt’s enthusiasm for distributed work so well that I’m sharing it again. Plus, some of the challenges I describe below map nicely to the borders between some of

Tomorrow’s Challenges

We’re all acutely familiar with the challenges companies are faced with today as they adapt to a remote-first environment. I’m more interested in the challenges that they might face in the future, as they attempt to continue to use a distributed workforce as the pandemic recedes. It’s easy to make the mistake of assuming that what many people are doing today is a rehearsal for the future of work, but the future will look different.

Some people, of course, prefer to spend some or all of their work hours in an office environment. Of the companies that went remote-first during the lockdown and now plan to stay that way indefinitely, some will lose employees who preferred the “old way”. For this and other reasons, some companies will retain their offices and go remote-optional, allowing flexible teleworking, and this has it’s own pitfalls:

Some remote-optional offices have an inherent bias towards in-person staff. In some companies with a mixture of in-person and remote staff, remote workers don’t get included in ad-hoc discussions, or don’t become part of the in-person social circles. They get overlooked for projects or promotions, or treated as second-class citizens. It’s easy to do this completely by accident and create a two-tiered system, which can lead to a cascade effect that eventually collapses the “optional” aspect of remote-optional; nowhere was this more visible that in Yahoo!’s backslide against remote-optional working in 2013.
Some remote-optional offices retain an archaic view on presenteeism and “core hours”. Does the routine you keep really matter? Remote-first working demands that productivity is measured by output, not by attendance, but management-by-attendance is (sadly) easier to implement, and some high-profile organisations favour this lazy but less-effective approach. It’s easy, but ineffective, for a remote-optional company to simply extend hours-counting performance metrics to their remote staff. Instead, allowing your staff (insofar as is possible) to work the hours that suit them as individuals opens up your hiring pool to a huge number of groups whom you might not otherwise reach (like single parents, carers, digital nomads, and international applicants) and helps you to get the best out of every one of them, whether they’re an early bird, a night owl, or somebody who’s most-productive after their siesta!
Pastoral care doesn’t stop being important after the crisis is over. Many companies that went remote-first for the coronavirus crisis have done an excellent job of being supportive and caring towards their employees (who, of course, are also victims of the crisis: by now, is there anybody whose life hasn’t been impacted?). But when these companies later go remote-optional, it’ll be easy for them to regress to their old patterns. They’ll start monitoring the wellbeing only of those right in front of them. Remote working is already challenging, but it can be made much harder if your company culture makes it hard to take a sick day, seek support on a HR issue, or make small-talk with a colleague.

Teleworker dressed from the waist up. — On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re only properly-dressed from the waist up. No, wait: as of 2020, *everybody* knows that. Let’s just all collectively own it, ‘k.

These are challenges specifically for companies that go permanently remote-optional following a period of remote-first during the coronavirus crisis.

Towards a Post-Lockdown Remote-Optional Workplace

How you face those challenges will vary for every company and industry, but it seems to me that there are five lessons a company can learn as it adapts to remote-optional work in a post-lockdown world:

Measure impact, not input. You can’t effectively manage a remote team by headcount or closely tracking hours; you need to track outputs (what is produced), not inputs (person-hours). If your outputs aren’t measurable, make them measurable, to paraphrase probably-not-Galileo. Find metrics you can work with and rely on, keep them transparent and open, and re-evaluate often. Use the same metrics for in-office and remote workers.
Level the playing field. Learn to spot the biases you create. Do the in-person attendees do all the talking at your semi-remote meetings? Do your remote workers have to “call in” to access information only stored on-site (including in individual’s heads)? When they’re small, these biases have a huge impact on productivity and morale. If they get big, they collapse your remote-optional environment.
Always think bigger. You’re already committing to a shakeup, dragging your company from the 2020 of the real world into the 2020 we once dreamed of. Can you go further? Can you let your staff pick their own hours? Or workdays? Can your staff work in other countries? Can you switch some of your synchronous communications channels (e.g. meetings) into asynchronous information streams (chat, blogs, etc.)? Which of your telecommunications tools serve you, and which do you serve?
Remember the human. Your remote workers aren’t faceless (pantsless) interchangeable components in your corporate machine. Foster interpersonal relationships and don’t let technology sever the interpersonal links between your staff. Encourage and facilitate (optional, but awesome) opportunities for networking and connection. Don’t forget to get together in-person sometimes: we’re a pack animal, and we form tribes more-easily when we can see one another.
Support people through the change. Remote working requires a particular skillset; provide tools to help your staff adapt to it. Make training and development options available to in-office staff too: encourage as flexible a working environment as your industry permits. Succeed, and your best staff will pay you back in productivity and loyalty. Fail, and your best staff will leave you for your competitors.

I’m less-optimistic than Matt that effective distributed working is the inexorable future of work. But out of the ashes of the coronavirus crisis will come its best chance yet, and I know that there’ll be companies who get left behind in the dust. What are you doing to make sure your company isn’t one of them?

Automattic Lockdown (days 79 to 206)

12 May 2020 09:00 13

Since I accepted a job offer with Automattic last summer I’ve been writing about my experience on a nice, round 128-day schedule. My first post described my application and recruitment process; my second post covered my induction, my initial two weeks working alongside the Happiness team (tech support), and my first month in my role. This is the third post, running through to the end of six and a half months as an Automattician.

Always Be Deploying

One of the things that’s quite striking about working on many of Automattic’s products, compared to places I’ve worked before, is the velocity. Their continuous integration game is pretty spectacular. We’re not talking “move fast and break things” iteration speeds (thank heavens), but we’re still talking fast.

Graph showing Automattic deployments for a typical week. Two of the 144 deployments on Monday were by Dan. — Deployments-per-day in a reasonably typical week. A minor bug slipped through in the first of the deployments I pushed on the Monday shown, so it was swiftly followed by a second deployment (no external end-users were affected: phew!).

My team tackles a constant stream of improvements in two-week sprints, with every third sprint being a cool-down period to focus on refactoring, technical debt, quick wins, and the like. Periodic HACK weeks – where HACK is (since 2018) a backronym for Helpful Acts in Customer Kindness – facilitate focussed efforts on improving our ecosystem and user experiences.

I’m working in a larger immediate team than I had for most of my pre-Automattic career. I’m working alongside nine other developers, typically in groups of two to four depending on the needs of whatever project I’m on. There’s a great deal of individual autonomy: we’re all part of a greater whole and we’re all pushing in the same direction, but outside of the requirements of the strategic goals of our division, the team’s tactical operations are very-much devolved and consensus-driven. We work out as a team how to solve the gnarly (and fun!) problems, how to make best use of our skills, how to share our knowledge, and how to schedule our priorities.

Dan in front of three monitors and a laptop. — My usual workspace looks pretty much exactly like you’re thinking that it does.

This team-level experience echoes the experience of being an individual at Automattic, too. The level of individual responsibility and autonomy we enjoy is similar to that I’ve seen only after accruing a couple of years of experience and authority at most other places I’ve worked. It’s amazing to see that you can give a large group of people so much self-controlled direction… and somehow get order out of the chaos. More than elsewhere, management is more to do with shepherding people into moving in the same direction than it is about dictating how the ultimate strategic goals might be achieved.

Na na na na na na na na VAT MAN!

Somewhere along the way, I somehow became my team’s live-in expert on tax. You know how it is: you solve a bug with VAT calculation in Europe… then you help roll out changes to support registration with the GST in Australia… and then one day you find yourself reading Mexican digital services tax legislation and you can’t remember where the transition was from being a general full-stack developer to having a specialisation in tax.

An Oxford coworking space. — Before the coronavirus lockdown, though, I’d sometimes find a coworking space (or cafe, or pub!) to chill in while I worked. This one was quiet on the day I took the photo.

Tax isn’t a major part of my work. But it’s definitely reached a point at which I’m a go-to figure. A week or so ago when somebody had a question about the application of sales taxes to purchases on the WooCommerce.com extensions store, their first thought was “I’ll ask Dan!” There’s something I wouldn’t have anticipated, six month ago.

Automattic’s culture lends itself to this kind of selective micro-specialisation. The company actively encourages staff to keep learning new things but mostly without providing a specific direction, and this – along with their tendency to attract folks who, like me, could foster an interest in almost any new topic so long as they’re learning something – means that my colleagues and I always seem to be developing some new skill or other.

I ended up posting this picture to my team’s internal workspace, this week, as I looked a VAT-related calculation.

I know off the top of my head who I’d talk to about if I had a question about headless browser automation, or database index performance, or email marketing impact assessment, or queer representation, or getting the best airline fares, or whatever else. And if I didn’t, I could probably find them. None of their job descriptions mention that aspect of their work. They’re just the kind of people who, when they see a problem, try to deepen their understanding of it as a whole rather than just solving it for today.

A lack of pigeonholing, coupled with the kind of information management that comes out of being an entirely-distributed company, means that the specialisation of individuals becomes a Search-Don’t-Sort problem. You don’t necessarily find an internal specialist by their job title: you’re more-likely to find them by looking for previous work on particular topics. That feels pretty dynamic and exciting… although it does necessarily lead to occasional moments of temporary panic when you discover that something important (but short of mission-critical) doesn’t actually have anybody directly responsible for it.

Crisis response

No examination of somebody’s first 6+ months at a new company, covering Spring 2020, would be complete without mention of that company’s response to the coronavirus crisis. Because, let’s face it, that’s what everybody’s talking about everywhere right now.

Dan in a video meeting, in a hammock. — All workplace meetings should be done this way.

In many ways, Automattic is better-placed than most companies to weather the situation. What, we have to work from home now? Hold my beer. Got to shift your hours around childcare and other obligations? Sit down, let us show you how it’s done. Need time off for COVID-related reasons? We already have an open leave policy in place and it’s great, thanks.

As the UK’s lockdown (eventually) took hold I found myself treated within my social circle like some kind of expert on remote working. My inboxes filled up with queries from friends… How do I measure output? How do I run a productive meeting? How do I maintain morale? I tried to help, but unfortunately some of my answers relied slightly on already having a distributed culture: having the information and resource management and teleworking infrastructure in-place before the crisis. Still, I’m optimistic that companies will come out of the other side of this situation with a better idea about how to plan for and execute remote working strategies.

Laptop screen showing five people videoconferencing. — Social distancing is much easier when you’re almost never in the same room as your colleagues anyway.

I’ve been quite impressed that even though Automattic’s all sorted for how work carries on through this crisis, we’ve gone a step further and tried to organise (remote) events for people who might be feeling more-isolated as a result of the various lockdowns around the world. I’ve seen mention of wine tasting events, toddler groups, guided meditation sessions, yoga clubs, and even a virtual dog park (?), all of which try to leverage the company’s existing distributed infrastructure to support employees who’re affected by the pandemic. That’s pretty cute.

(It might also have provided some inspiration for the murder mystery party I plan to run a week on Saturday…)

In summary: Automattic’s still proving to be an adventure, I’m still loving their quirky and chaotic culture and the opportunity to learn something new every week, and while their response to the coronavirus crisis has been as solid as you’d expect from a fully-distributed company I’ve also been impressed by the company’s efforts to support staff (in a huge diversity of situations across many different countries) through it.

Mackerelmedia Fish

1 May 2020 12:06 11

Normally this kind of thing would go into the ballooning dump of “things I’ve enjoyed on the Internet” that is my reposts archive. But sometimes something is so perfect that you have to try to help it see the widest audience it can, right? And today, that thing is: Mackerelmedia Fish.

Mackerelmedia Fish reports: WARNING! Your Fish have escaped! — Historical fact: escaped fish was one of the primary reasons for websites failing in 1996.

What is Mackerelmedia Fish? I’ve had a thorough and pretty complete experience of it, now, and I’m still not sure. It’s one or more (or none) of these, for sure, maybe:

A point-and-click, text-based, or hypertext adventure?
An homage to the fun and weird Web of yesteryear?
A statement about the fragility of proprietary technologies on the Internet?
An ARG set in a parallel universe in which the 1990s never ended?
A series of surrealist art pieces connected by a loose narrative?

Rock Paper Shotgun’s article about it opens with “I don’t know where to begin with this—literally, figuratively, existentially?” That sounds about right.

I stared into THE VOID and am OK! — This isn’t the reward for “winning” the “game”. But I was proud of it anyway.

What I can tell you with confident is what playing feels like. And what it feels like is the moment when you’ve gotten bored waiting for page 20 of Argon Zark to finish appear so you decide to reread your already-downloaded copy of the 1997 a.r.k bestof book, and for a moment you think to yourself: “Whoah; this must be what living in the future feels like!”

Because back then you didn’t yet have any concept that “living in the future” will involve scavenging for toilet paper while complaining that you can’t stream your favourite shows in 4K on your pocket-sized supercomputer until the weekend.

Dancing... thing? — I was always more of a Bouncing Blocks than a Hamster Dance guy, anyway.

Mackerelmedia Fish is a mess of half-baked puns, retro graphics, outdated browsing paradigms and broken links. And that’s just part of what makes it great.

It’s also “a short story that’s about the loss of digital history”, its creator Nathalie Lawhead says. If that was her goal, I think she managed it admirably.

An ASCII art wizard on a faux Apache directory listing page. — Everything about this, right down to the server signature (Artichoke), is perfect.

If I wasn’t already in love with the game already I would have been when I got to the bit where you navigate through the directory indexes of a series of deepening folders, choose-your-own-adventure style. Nathalie writes, of it:

One thing that I think is also unique about it is using an open directory as a choose your own adventure. The directories are branching. You explore them, and there’s text at the bottom (an htaccess header) that describes the folder you’re in, treating each directory as a landscape. You interact with the files that are in each of these folders, and uncover the story that way.

Back in the naughties I experimented with making choose-your-own-adventure games in exactly this way. I was experimenting with different media by which this kind of branching-choice game could be presented. I envisaged a project in which I’d showcase the same (or a set of related) stories through different approaches. One was “print” (or at least “printable”): came up with a Twee1-to-PDF converter to make “printable” gamebooks. A second was Web hypertext. A third – and this is the one which was most-similar to what Nathalie has now so expertly made real – was FTP! My thinking was that this would be an adventure game that could be played in a browser or even from the command line on any (then-contemporary: FTP clients aren’t so commonplace nowadays) computer. And then, like so many of my projects, the half-made version got put aside “for later” and forgotten about. My solution involved abusing the FTP protocol terribly, but it worked.

(I also looked into ways to make Gopher-powered hypertext fiction and toyed with the idea of using YouTube annotations to make an interactive story web [subsequently done amazingly by Wheezy Waiter, though the death of YouTube annotations in 2017 killed it]. And I’ve still got a prototype I’d like to get back to, someday, of a text-based adventure played entirely through your web browser’s debug console…! But time is not my friend… Maybe I ought to collaborate with somebody else to keep me on-course.)

Three virtual frogs. One needs a hug. — My first batch of pet frogs died quite quickly, but these ones did okay.

In any case: Mackerelmedia Fish is fun, weird, nostalgic, inspiring, and surreal, and you should give it a go. You’ll need to be on a Windows or OS X computer to get everything you can out of it, but there’s nothing to stop you starting out on your mobile, I imagine.

Sso long as you’re capable of at least 800 × 600 at 256 colours and have 4MB of RAM, if you know what I mean.

Digital Climate Strike’s Carbon Footprint

28 April 2020 12:36 3

Ironically, the web page promoting the “Digital Climate Strike” is among the dirtiest on the Internet, based on the CO₂ footprint of visiting it.

Global Climate Strike's "Take Action" webpage — Save your bandwidth: just look at this screenshot of the site instead of visiting.

Going to that page results in about 14 Mb of data being transmitted from their server to your device (which you’ll pay for if you’re on a metered connection). For comparison, reading my recent post about pronouns results in about 356 Kb of data. In other words, their page is forty times more bandwidth-consuming, despite the fact that my page has about four times the word count. The page you’re reading right now, thanks to its images, weighs in at about 650 Kb: you could still download it more than twenty times while you were waiting for theirs.

globalclimatestrike.net/action: "Uh oh! This web page is dirtier than 97% of web pages tested. Oh my, 7.74g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page." — Well that’s got to be pretty embarassing.

Worse still, the most-heavyweight of the content they deliver is stuff that’s arguably strictly optional and doesn’t add to the message:

Eight different font files are served from three different domains (the fonts alone consume about 140 Kb) – seven more are queued but not used.
Among the biggest JavaScript files they serve is that of Hotjar analytics: I understand the importance of measuring your impact, but making your visitors – and the planet – pay for it is a little ironic.
The biggest JavaScript file seems to be for Mapbox, which as far as I can see is never actually used: that map on the page is a static image which, incidentally, I was able to reduce from 0.5 Mb to 0.2 Mb just by running it through a free online image compressor.

Image compression comparison for the map image. Before: 536K, after: 201K (-63%). — This took me literally seconds to do but would save about a twelfth of a second for every single typical 4G user to their site. And it’s not even the worst culprit.

And because the site sets virtually no caching headers, even if you’ve visited the website before you’re likely to have to download the whole thing again. Every single time.

It’s not just about bandwidth: all of those fonts, that JavaScript, their 60 Kb of CSS (this page sent you 13 Kb) all has to be parsed and interpreted by your device. If you’re on a mobile device or a laptop, that means you’re burning through lithium (a non-renewable resource whose extraction and disposal is highly polluting) and regardless of your device you’re using you’re using more electricity to visit their site than you need to. Coding antipatterns like document.write() and active event listeners that execute every time you scroll the page keep your processor working hard, turning electricity into waste heat. It took me over 12 seconds on a high-end smartphone and a good 4G connection to load this page to the point of usability. That’s 12 seconds of a bright screen, a processor running full tilt,a data connection working its hardest, and a battery ticking away. And I assume I’m not the only person visiting the website today.

This isn’t really about this particular website, of course (and I certainly don’t want to discourage anybody from the important cause of saving the planet!). It’s about the bigger picture: there’s a widespread and long-standing trend in web development towards bigger, heavier, more power-hungry websites, built on top of heavyweight frameworks that push the hard work onto the user’s device and which favour developer happiness over user experience. This is pretty terrible: it makes the Web slow, and brittle, and it increases the digital divide as people on slower connections and older devices get left behind.

(Bonus reading: luckily there’s a counterculture of lean web developers…)

But this trend is also bad for the environment, and when your website exists to try to save it, that’s more than a little bit sad.

Understanding Them (Pronouns)

9 April 2020 17:00 4

I had a bit of a realisation, this week. I’ve long sometimes found it especially challenging to maintain a mental map of the preferred personal pronouns of people who don’t use “he”, “she”, or “they”. Further than that, it seemed to me that personal pronouns beyond these three ought to be mostly redundant in English. “Them” has been well-established for over six centuries as not just a plural but a singular pronoun, I thought: we don’t need to invent more words.

Over time – even within my lifetime – it’s become noticeably more-commonplace to hear the singular “they”/”them” in place of “he or she”/”him or her”, or single binary pronouns (e.g. when talking about professions which have long been dominated by a particular gender). So you might hear somebody say:

“I will make an appointment to see a doctor and ask them about my persistent cough.”

Venn-Euler diagram showing the "set of all people" containing the subsets "he", "she", and the singular "they". — This seemed a perfectly viable model.

It seemed to me that “they” was a perfect general-purpose stand in for everybody who was well-served by neither “he” nor “she”.

I’ll stress, of course, that I’ve always been fully supportive of people’s preferred pronouns, tried to use them consistently, ensured they can be represented in software I’ve implemented (and pressured others over their implementations, although that’s as-often related to my individual identity), etc. I’ve just struggled to see the need for new singular third-person pronouns like ze, ey, sie, ve, or – heaven forbid – the linguistically-cumbersome thon, co, or peh.

I’d put it down to one of those things that I just don’t “get”, but about which I can still respect and support anyway. I don’t have to totally grok something in order to understand that it’s important to others.

Venn-Euler diagram showing "he" and "she" as separate categories, but the name "they" shared between the subset (individuals for whom this is their individual pronoun) and the superset (one or more people whose genders are unspecified), causing confusion. — Hang on, there’s a problem with this model.

But very recently, I was suddenly struck by a comprehension of one of the reported problems with the use of the singular “they” to refer to people for whom the traditional binary pronouns are not suitable. I’ve tried to capture in the illustration above the moment of understanding when I made the leap.

The essence of this particular problem is: the singular “they” already has a meaning that is necessarily incompatible with the singular “they” used of a nonbinary subject! By way of example, let’s revisit my earlier example sentence:

“I will make an appointment to see a doctor and ask them about my persistent cough.”

Here, I’m saying one of two things, and it’s fundamentally unclear which of the two I mean:

I do not know which doctor I will see, so I do not know the pronoun of the doctor.
I will see the same doctor I always see, and they prefer a nonbinary pronoun.

The more widespread the adoption of “they” as the third person singular for nonbinary people becomes, the more long-winded it is to clarify specifically which of the above interpretations is correct! The tendency to assume the former leads to nonbinary invisibility, and the (less-likely in most social circles) tendency to assume the latter leads to misgendering.

Venn-Euler diagram showing the superset "they" (all people) containing subsets "he", "she", and an unnamed subset. — Okay, so I guess we do need a third-party singular pronoun that isn’t “they”.

The difference is one of specificity. Because the singular “they” is routinely used non-specifically, where the subject’s preferred pronouns are unknown (as with the doctor, above), unknowable (“somebody wrote this anonymous message; they said…”), or a placeholder (“when I meet somebody, I shake their hand”), it quickly produces semantic ambiguities when it’s used to refer to specific nonbinary individuals. And that makes me think: we can do better.

That said: I don’t feel able to suggest which pronoun(s) ought to replace the question mark in the diagram above. But for the first time, I’m not convinced that it ought to be “they”.

Ultimately, this changes nothing. I regularly use a diversity of different singular pronouns (he”, “she”, and “they”, mostly) based on the individual subject and I’ll continue to acknowledge and respect their preferences. If you’ve you’ve told me that you like to be referred to by the singular “they”, I’ll continue to do so and you’re welcome and encouraged to correct me if I get it wrong!

But perhaps this new appreciation of the limitations of the singular “they” when referring to specific individuals will help me to empathise with those for whom it doesn’t feel right, and who might benefit from more-widespread understanding of other, newer personal pronouns.

(and on the off chance anybody’s found their way to this page looking for my pronouns: I’m not particularly fussy, so long as you’re consistent and don’t confuse your audience, but most people refer to me with traditional masculine pronouns he/him/his)

The 7 Types Of StackOverflow Answers

2 April 2020 20:04 5

StackOverflow‘s one of the most-popular and widely-used resources for software developers. It dominates the search results when you’re looking for answers to techy questions. If you know how to read it, it can be invaluable.

But… I’m not sure what it is about the platform or the culture surrounding it that creates a certain… pattern to the answers that you can expect to receive on StackOverflow. To illustrate, let’s suppose we have a question:

Here are the answers you might see:

The Golden Hammer

The top answer is often somebody answering not the question you asked, but the question they’d like to think you asked.

Never mind that you specifically said that you were using a campfire, the answer suggests that you use a toaster. Look back a few years and you’ll see countless examples of people asking for solutions using “vanilla” JavaScript and being told to use some heavyweight, everything-but-the-kitchen sink jQuery plugin. Now we’re in a more enlightened time, those same people are being told to use some heavyweight, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink npm module. How far we’ve come.

The Belligerent

Far often than you might expect, a perfectly reasonable “how do I do this?” question is met with an aggressive response of “why would you want to do that?”

These are particularly infuriating to read when you come to a closed thread and you know that you do want to be doing the “forbidden” thing. You’ve considered the other options, you’ve assessed the situation… and now some arrogant bugger’s telling you that you’re wrong!

This kind of response is among the most annoying, second only to…

The Kindred Spirit

You’re getting a strange and inexplicable error message. You search for it and get exactly one result. Reading the thread, after hours of tearing your hair out, you suddenly feel a sense of relief: you’ve found another soul in this crazy world that’s suffering in precisely the same way as you are. Every word you read reconfirms for you that you and they have the same issue. At last, a solution is in reach!

Nope.

Not only have you not got a solution, but the saviour you thought you’d found? They do have a solution, but they were thinking only about themselves when they got it, so they didn’t share it.

I get it: when you’re deep in focus on a problem you forget that the forum you’re on will receive search traffic indefinitely. But “NM, I’ve worked it out” is the most infuriating sentence on the Internet. When you solve a tough problem that you’d talked about online, for the love of God put the solution online too.

The Expert

There’s always somebody who answers the question but in a way you’d need a PhD to comprehend.

StackOverflow is often used by beginners. Make your answer beginner-friendly if possible.

The Hero We Don’t Need

Like the Golden Hammer, the Hero We Don’t Need answers the question that they know the answer to rather than the question you actually asked. Unlike the Golden Hammer, the question they answer isn’t even remotely related to the question you asked.

Perhaps some future site visitor who chose their search terms badly might benefit from this out-of-the-box look at a completely different problem. But I wouldn’t count on it.

The Correct Answer

Eventually, if you’re lucky, somebody will provide the actual answer to the question. You’ll often have to scroll about this far down the page to find it.

Still, at least there’s an answer. And it only took four hours between posting the question and it appearing. Sometimes that’s what it takes, and at least the answer will be there for the next person, assuming that they, too, scroll down far enough.

Unfortunately hundreds of novice developers will have no way to tell that this alone is the correct answer amongst the endless stream of bullshit in which it resides.

The Echo

And finally, there’s always some idiot who repeats one of the same (useless) answers from before. Just to keep the noise-to-signal ratio up, I guess.

StackOverflow’s given me so many useful answers to so many questions, over the years. But it’s also been a great source of frustration for me at the hands of six of these seven archetypes. Did I miss any?

Gratitude

24 March 2020 15:38 2

In these challenging times, and especially because my work and social circles have me communicate regularly with people in many different countries and with many different backgrounds, I’m especially grateful for the following:

My partner, her husband, and I each have jobs that we can do remotely and so we’re not out-of-work during the crisis.
Our employers are understanding of our need to reduce and adjust our hours to fit around our new lifestyle now that schools and nurseries are (broadly) closed.
Our kids are healthy and not at significant risk of serious illness.
We’ve got the means, time, and experience to provide an adequate homeschooling environment for them in the immediate term.
(Even though we’d hoped to have moved house by now and haven’t, perhaps at least in part because of COVID-19,) we have a place to live that mostly meets our needs.
We have easy access to a number of supermarkets with different demographics, and even where we’ve been impacted by them we’ve always been able to work-around the where panic-buying-induced shortages have reasonably quickly.
We’re well-off enough that we were able to buy or order everything we’d need to prepare for lockdown without financial risk.
Having three adults gives us more hands on deck than most people get for childcare, self-care, etc. (we’re “parenting on easy mode”).
We live in a country in which the government (eventually) imposed the requisite amount of lockdown necessary to limit the spread of the virus.
We’ve “only” got the catastrophes of COVID-19 and Brexit to deal with, which is a bearable amount of crisis, unlike my colleague in Zagreb for example.

Bowl of ice, glasses of water, salt and sugar supplies. — Today’s homeschool science experiment was about what factors make ice melt faster. Because of course that’s the kind of thing I’d do with the kids when we’re stuck at home.

Whenever you find the current crisis getting you down, stop and think about the things that aren’t-so-bad or are even good. Stopping and expressing your gratitude for them in whatever form works for you is good for your happiness and mental health.

Hashcard

17 March 2020 19:40 0

As an intermittent geohasher, I was saddened when the xkcd forum hack lead to the loss of the Geohashing Wiki, so I worked to bring it back from the dead. This was great, and I’ve enjoyed making use of it in the few expeditions I’ve found time for since then. But I did it mostly for me; I wanted the wiki back. If other people felt the benefit, that was a nice side-effect.

Postcard depicting Lüneburg Town Hall, Lower Saxony, Germany — Lüneburg, I thought to myself… I don’t know anybody who’s on holiday in Lüneburg, do I?

But today my heart was filled with joy when today I received a postcard – a hashcard, no less – from fellow hasher Fippe, whose expedition to Lüneburg last week brought him past the famous town hall shown in the postcard, as evidenced by his photo from the site.

Postcard: Dear Dan Q, greetings from the Geohash 2020-03-13 53 10! And thank you very much for relaunching the wiki! Please forgive me for looking up your address online. Happy Hashing! Fippe — Fippe found my address online; I’m not sure which (of several possible) mechanisms he used, but we’re fortunate that I haven’t recently-moved-house (as I hope to later this year) yet!

A delightful bonus to my day.

Identifying Post Kinds in WordPress RSS Feeds

1 March 2020 11:43 12

I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and reviews, for example.

But for people who subscribe (either directly or indirectly) to everything I post, I imagine it must be a little frustrating to sometimes be unable to identify the type of a post before clicking-through. So I’ve added the following code, which I’m sharing here and on GitHub in case it’s of any use to anybody else, to my theme’s functions.php:

// Make titles in RSS feed be prefixed by the Kind of the post.
function add_kind_to_rss_post_title(){
	$kinds = wp_get_post_terms( get_the_ID(), 'kind' );
	if( ! isset( $kinds ) || empty( $kinds ) ) return get_the_title(); // sanity-check.
	$kind = $kinds[0]->name;
	$title = get_the_title();
	return trim( "[{$kind}] {$title}" );
}
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'add_kind_to_rss_post_title', 4 ); // priority 4 to ensure it happens BEFORE default escaping filters.

This decorates the titles of my posts, but only in my feeds, so it’s easier for people to tell at-a-glance what’s going on:

Down the line I might expand this so that it doesn’t show if the subscriber is, for example, asking only for articles (e.g. via this feed); I’m coming up with a huge list of things I’d like to do at IndieWebCamp London! But for now, this feels like a nice simple improvement to a plugin I love that helps it to fit my specific needs.

Difference Between VR and AR

24 February 2020 14:36 7

This weekend, my sister Sarah challenged me to define the difference between Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. And the more I talked about the differences between them, the more I realised that I don’t have a concrete definition, and I don’t think that anybody else does either.

A man wearing a VR headset while writing on a whiteboard. — AR: the man sees simulated reality and, probably, the whiteboard.
VR: the man sees simulated reality only, which may or may not include a whiteboard.
Either way: what the hell is he doing?

After all: from a technical perspective, any fully-immersive AR system – for example a hypothetical future version of the Microsoft Hololens that solves the current edition’s FOV problems – exists in a theoretical superset of any current-generation VR system. That AR augments the reality you can genuinely see, rather than replacing it entirely, becomes irrelevant if that AR system could superimpose a virtual environment covering your entire view. So the argument that compared to VR, AR only covers part of your vision is not a reliable definition of the difference.

Spectrum showing AR view of the Louvre on the left (with 5% of the view occluded by UI) and VR view of a 3D model of the Louvre on the right (with 100% of the view occluded). The middle of the spectrum remains undefined. — The difference by how much of your view is occluded by machine-generated images fails to define where the boundary between AR and VR lies. 5%? 50%? 99%?

This isn’t a new conundrum. Way back in 1994 back when the Sega VR-1 was our idea of cutting edge, Milgram et al. developed a series of metaphorical spectra to describe the relationship between different kinds of “mixed reality” systems. The core difference, they argue, is whether or not the computer-generated content represents a “world” in itself (VR) is just an “overlay” (AR).

But that’s unsatisfying for the same reason as above. The HTC Vive headset can be configured to use its front-facing camera(s) to fade seamlessly from the game world to the real world as the player gets close to the boundaries of their play space. This is a safety feature, but it doesn’t have to be: there’s no reason that a HTC Vive couldn’t be adapted to function as what Milgram would describe as a “class 4” device, which is functionally the same as a headset-mounted AR device. So what’s the difference?

You might argue that the difference between AR and VR is content-based: that is, it’s the thing that you’re expected to focus on that dictates which is which. If you’re expected to look at the “real world”, it’s an augmentation, and if not then it’s a virtualisation. But that approach fails to describe Google’s tech demo of putting artefacts in your living room via augmented reality (which I’ve written about before), because your focus is expected to be on the artefact rather than the “real world” around it. The real world only exists to help with the interpretation of scale: it’s not what the experience is about and your countertop is as valid a real world target as the Louvre: Google doesn’t care.

Milgram et al. (1994)'s Table 1: Some major differences between classes of Mixed Reality (MR) displays, showing seven classes: 1. monitor-based video with CG overlays, 2. headset-based video with CG overlays, 3. headset-based see-through display with CG overlays, 4. headset-based see-through video with CG overlays, 5. monitor/CG world with video overlays, 6. headset-based CG world with video overlays, and 7. CG-based world with real object intervention. — Categories 3 and 4 would probably be used to describe most contemporary AR; categories 6 and 7 to describe contemporary VR.

Many researchers echo Milgram’s idea that what turns AR into VR is when the computer-generated content completely covers your vision.

But even if we accept this explanation, the definition gets muddied by the wider field of “extended reality” (XR). Originally an umbrella term to cover both AR and VR (and “MR“, if you believe that’s a separate and independent thing), XR gets used to describe interactive experiences that cover other senses, too. If I play a VR game with real-world “props” that I can pick up and move around, but that appear differently in my vision, am I not “augmenting” reality? Is my experience, therefore, more or less “VR” than if the interactive objects exist only on my screen? What about if – as in a recent VR escape room I attended – the experience is enhanced by fans to simulate the movement of air around you? What about smell? (You know already that somebody’s working on bridging virtual reality with Smell-O-Vision.)

Dan and Robin concluding a VR Escape Room. — Not sure if you’re real or if you’re dreaming? Don’t ask an XR researcher; they don’t know either.

Increasingly, then, I’m beginning to feel that XR itself is a spectrum, and a pretty woolly one. Just as it’s hard to specify in a concrete way where the boundary exists between being asleep and being awake, it’s hard to mark where “our” reality gives way to the virtual and vice-versa.

It’s based upon the addition of information to our senses, by a computer, and there can be more (as in fully-immersive VR) or less (as in the subtle application of AR) of it… but the edges are very fuzzy. I guess that the spectrum of the visual experience of XR might look a little like this:

Honestly, I don’t know any more. But I don’t think my sister does either.

Why Aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses Vegetarian?

19 February 2020 19:56 2

I was visited this morning by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, doing the door-to-door ministry for which they’re most-famous, and I was reminded of an interesting quirk in the practices of the WTS. If you know anything at all about their beliefs, you’re probably aware that Jehovah’s Witnesses generally refuse blood transfusions.

A candle being lit. — Commenting on religions while belonging to none of them? That’s me. I don’t see this as a problem; I almost see it as an advantage. I couldn’t find a picture to express that, though, so you get this one.

I first became aware of their policy of rejecting potentially life-saving blood when I was just a child. A school friend of mine (this one!), following a problematic tonsillectomy, found his life at risk because of his family’s commitment to this religious principle. Because I’ve always been interested in religion and the diversity of theological difference I ended up looking into the background of their practice… and I came to a very different scriptural interpretation.

Annotated bible. — Nowadays, the Jehovah’s Witnesses use their own translation, the New World Bible. I don’t have a copy, but I’m choosing to ignore it because the relevant prohibitions predate its publication anyway.

First, it’s worth understanding that Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t opposed to most medical care, unlike for example the Church of Christian Scientists who eschew basically all medical science in favour of prayer (eww). No: Jehovah’s Witnesses specifically single out blood transfusions as prohibited (they’ve flip-flopped on a few other treatments) which, when you think about it, is pretty weird.

Dan with a copy of Awake!, wearing his WordPress Diversity t-shirt. — I hadn’t noticed until after my visitors left that I’d answered the door wearing a pride flag on my t-shirt. (Their opinion on queerness is wrong about for moral, rather than scriptural, reasons.)

The biblical basis for this prohibition comes from Leviticus 17:12-14, Acts 15:19, Acts 21:25, and – crucially, because it predates and almost-certainly informs them – Genesis 9:3-4, which reads (NIV):

Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.

This is God speaking to Noah, by the way. Sexacentenarian Noah’s took a six-week cruise on a floating zoo and God’s just said “boat number 1, your time is up… and by Me you’d better be horny ‘cos it’s time to go forth and multiply.” God invents the rainbow as a promise not to reformat-and-reinstall again, and then follows it up with a handful of rules because He’s a big fan of rules. And even though blood transfusions wouldn’t be invented for thousands of years, the Jehovah’s Witnesses almost-uniquely feel that this prohibition on consuming blood covers transfusions too.

That all sounds fair enough. I mean, it requires a pretty heavy-handed interpretation of what was meant but that’s par for the course for the Bible and especially the Old Testament.

Diagram showing how the presumed Priestly, Elohist, and Jahwist influenced Genesis as it appears in the Torah (the Deuteronomist source is ignored since it doesn't contribute to Genesis). — The genesis of Genesis. You can quickly find your way into a rabbit hole of these kinds of diagrams if you’re silly enough to ask questions like “but what’s the *original* translation?”

But let’s take a step back. Here’s those verses again, this time in Hebrew:

כָּל־רֶ֙מֶשׂ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר הוּא־חַ֔י לָכֶ֥ם יִהְיֶ֖ה לְאָכְלָ֑ה כְּיֶ֣רֶק עֵ֔שֶׂב נָתַ֥תִּי לָכֶ֖ם אֶת־כֹּֽל׃

אַךְ־בָּשָׂ֕ר בְּנַפְשׁ֥וֹ דָמ֖וֹ לֹ֥א תֹאכֵֽלוּ׃

A modern translation would be:

Every moving living thing is your food, like the plants you were already given. But you may not eat any creature that is still alive.

“Still alive?” That’s a very different way of reading it, right? Suddenly this strange verse about abstaining from, I don’t know, black pudding (and possibly blood transfusions) becomes a requirement to kill your dinner before you chow down.

This is like Deuteronomy 14:21, where it says “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.” The same directive appears in Exodus 34:26 but I prefer Deuteronomy’s because it also has this really surreal bit about how it’s not okay to eat roadkill but you can serve it to your immigrant friends. It turns out that kid-boiled-in-mother’s-milk was an old Canaan recipe and pagan tribes used to eat it ritualistically, so a prohibition on the practice by Noah and his descendants was not only an opposition to animal cruelty but a statement against polytheism.

Two young goats talking. One observes that their mother is being milked. The other asks what's for dinner. — “Kids! It’s dinnertime!”

Could “eating things alive”, which is specifically forbidden in Judaism, be – like goat-in-goat-juice – another pagan ritual, formerly widespread, that the early Israelites were trying to outlaw? Quite possibly.

But there’s a further possible interpretation that I feel is worth looking at. Let’s paint a picture. Again, let’s assume despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary that the bible is literally true, which meets people who use the covenant of Genesis as a basis for medical decisions much more than half-way:

God’s just declared bankruptcy on his first “Earth” project and wiped the slate clean. He’s had the RNG – I’m assuming that God plays dice – roll up a new landmass, and he’s populated it with one family of humans, plus two of every kind of land animal. Possibly more of the fast breeders like the insects and some of the small mammals, I suppose, depending on how closely they were housed in the ark. Don’t make me explain this to you.

Noah's Ark (1846), by Edward Hicks — Shem: “What do you want for lunch?”
Japheth: “Ham.”
Ham: “Gulp.”
Japheth: “No, I mean a pig.”
Ham: “We’ve only got two left. Let’s just smoke some kush instead; God gave dad *all* the plants.”
Cush: “Did somebody say my name?”

Let’s assume that God doesn’t want the disembarking humans to immediately eat all of the animals with no concern for sustainability. This is, of course, absolutely what we humans do: if we take a biblical-literalism viewpoint, it’s a miracle that the delicious dodo would last until the 17th century CE rather than being eaten on the first post-flood day. God’s sort-of promised that the humans will be allowed to eat almost anything they like and that He’ll stop meddling, but He doesn’t want a mass-extinction, so what does He do? He says:

You can eat all the plants you want. But don’t eat any of the animals that are alive right now: let them breed a bit first.

This has always seemed to me to be the obvious way to interpret the commandment not to eat living animals: don’t eat the ones that are living at the moment. Certainly more-rational than “don’t have blood transfusions.” And if what God (allegedly) said to Noah is to be treated as a rule that still stands today, rather than just at the time, then perhaps it’s vegetarianism for which Jehovah’s Witnesses should best be known. That way, they’d get to argue with the hosts of barbecues about what goes into their bodies rather than with judges about what goes into their childrens’.

But try telling them that. (Seriously: give it a go! They’re usually more than happy to talk about scripture, even if you’re a little bit sarcastic!)

Dissertation Hand-In Déjà Vu

9 February 2020 11:57 3

I last handed in a dissertation almost 16 years ago; that one marked the cumulation of my academic work at Aberystwyth University, then the “University of Wales, Aberystwyth”. Since then I’ve studied programming, pentesting and psychology (the P-subject Triathalon?)… before returning to university to undertake a masters degree in information security and forensics.

Today, I handed in that dissertation. Thanks to digital hand-ins, I’m able to “hand it in” and then change my mind, make changes, and hand-in a replacement version right up until the deadline on Wednesday (I’m already on my second version!), so I’ve still got a few evenings left for last-minute proofreads and tweaks. That said, I’m mostly happy with where it is right now.

Project management graph for my dissertation — I found it motivating to maintain a graph of my dissertation’s “outstanding tasks” where I would see it every day. Also, as it started to get hairy, my word limit.

Writing a dissertation was harder this time around. Things that made it harder included:

Writing a masters-level dissertation rather than a bachelors-level one, naturally.
Opting for a research dissertation rather than an engineering one: I had the choice, and I knew that I’d do better in engineering, but I did research anyway because I thought that the challenge would be good for me.
Being older! It’s harder to cram information into a late-thirty-something brain than into a young-twenty-something one.
Work: going through the recruitment process for and starting at Automattic ate a lot of my time, especially as I was used to working part-time at the Bodleian and I’d been turning a little of what would otherwise have been my “freelance work time” into “study time” (last time around I was working part-time for SmartData, of course).
Life: the kids, our (hopefully) upcoming house move and other commitments are pretty good at getting in the way. Ruth and JTA have been amazing at carving out blocks of time for me to study, especially these last few weekends, which may have made all the difference.

Dan's masters dissertation: "Impact of the use of Language on Adoption of Optional Multifactor Authentication" — Despite this thing being big and heavy and dense, it somehow doesn’t seem to fully represent the weight of blood, sweat and tears that went into it.

It feels like less of a bang than last time around, but still sufficient that I’ll breathe a big sigh of relief. I’ve a huge backlog of things to get on with that I’ve been putting-off until this monster gets finished, but I’m not thinking about them quite yet.

I need a moment to get my bearings again and get used to the fact that once again – and for the first time in several years – I’ll soon be not-a-student. Fun fact, I’ve spent very-slightly-more than half of my adult life as a registered student: apparently I’m a sucker it, for all that I complain… in fact, I’m already wondering what I can study next (suggestions welcome!), although I’ve promised myself that I’ll take a couple of years off before I get into anything serious.

(This is, of course, assuming I pass my masters degree, otherwise I might still be a student for a little longer while I “fix” my dissertation!)

Sankey chart showing participants divided into groups and exposed to different experiments, and the results of those experiments. — A personal highlight was that I got to find a *genuine use* for Sankey charts and treemaps in my work for perhaps the first time.

If anybody’s curious (and I shan’t blame you if you’re not), here’s my abstract… assuming I don’t go back and change it yet again in the next couple of days (it’s still a little clunky especially in the final sentence):

Multifactor authentication (MFA), such as the use of a mobile phone in addition to a username and password when logging in to a website, is one of the strongest security enhancements an individual can add to their online accounts. Compared to alternative enhancements like refraining from the reuse of passwords it’s been shown to be easy and effective. However: MFA is optional for most consumer-facing Web services supporting MFA, and elective user adoption is well under 10%.

How can user adoption be increased? Delivering security awareness training to users has been shown to help, but the gold standard would be a mechanism to encourage uptake that can be delivered at the point at which the user first creates an account on a system. This would provide strong protection to an account for its entire life.

Using realistic account signup scenarios delivered to participants’ own computers, an experiment was performed into the use of language surrounding the invitation to adopt MFA. During the scenarios, participants were exposed to statements designed to either instil fear of hackers or to praise them for setting up an account and considering MFA. The effect on uptake rates is compared. A follow-up questionnaire asks questions to understand user security behaviours including password and MFA choices and explain their thought processes when considering each.

No significant difference is found between the use of “fear” and “praise” statements. However, secondary information revealed during the experiment and survey provides recommendations for service providers to offer MFA after, rather than at, the point of account signup, and for security educators to focus their energies on dispelling user preconceptions about the convenience, privacy implications, and necessity of MFA.

Geohashing Resurected

6 February 2020 14:41 17

I keep my life pretty busy and don’t get as much “outside” as I’d like, but when I do I like to get out on an occasional geohashing expedition (like these ones). I (somewhat badly) explained geohashing in the vlog attached to my expedition 2018-08-07 51 -1, but the short version is this: an xkcd comic proposed an formula to use a stock market index to generate a pair of random coordinates, impossible to predict in advance, for each date. Those coordinates are (broadly) repeated for each degree of latitude and longitude throughout the planet, and your challenge is to get to them and discover what’s there. So it’s like geocaching, except you don’t get to find anything at the end and there’s no guarantee that the destination is even remotely accessible. I love it.

xkcd #426: Geohashing — My favourite kind of random pointlessness is summarised by this algorithm.

Most geohashers used to use a MediaWiki-powered website to coordinate their efforts and share their stories, until a different application on the server where it resided got hacked and the wiki got taken down as a precaution. That was last September, and the community became somewhat “lost” this winter as a result. It didn’t stop us ‘hashing, of course: the algorithm’s open-source and so are many of its implementations, so I was able to sink into a disgusting hole in November, for example. But we’d lost the digital “village square” of our community.

Graph of Dan's dissertation progress as the deadline creeps closer — My dissertation “burndown” is characterised on my whiteboard by two variables: outstanding issues (blue) and wordcount (red). There are… a few problems.

So I emailed Davean, who does techy things for xkcd, and said that I’d like to take over the Geohashing wiki but that I’d first like (a) his or Randall’s blessing to do so, and ideally (b) a backup of the pages of the site as it last-stood. Apparently I thought that my new job plus finishing my dissertation plus trying to move house plus all of the usual things I fill my time with wasn’t enough and I needed a mini side-project, because when I finally got the go-ahead at the end of last month I (re)launched geohashing.site. Take a look, if you like. If you’ve never been Geohashing before, there’s never been a more-obscure time to start!

geohashing.site homepage — My implementation of the site is mobile-friendly for the benefit of people who might want to use it while out in a muddy ditch. For example. Just hypothetically.

Luckily, it’s not been a significant time-sink for me: members of the geohashing community quickly stepped up to help me modernise content, fix bots, update hyperlinks and the like. I took the opportunity to fix a few things that had always bugged me about the old site, like the mobile-unfriendly interface and the inability to upload GPX files, and laid the groundwork to make bigger changes down the road (like changing the way that inline maps are displayed, a popular community request).

So yeah: Geohashing’s back, not that it ever went away, and I got to be part of the mission to make it so. I feel like I am, as geohashers say… out standing in my field.

Fox (Household NAS)

23 January 2020 12:27 15

Last week I built Fox, the newest addition to our home network. Fox, whose specification called for not one, not two, not three but four 12 terabyte hard disk drives was built principally as a souped-up NAS device – a central place for us all to safely hold and control access to important files rather than having them spread across our various devices – but she’s got a lot more going on that that, too.

A black computer "cube" nestled under a desk, amongst cables. — Right now, Fox lives under my desk along with most of our network cables.

Fox has:

Enough hard drive space to give us 36TB of storage capacity plus 12TB of parity, allowing any one of the drives to fail without losing any data.
“Headroom” sufficient to double its capacity in the future without significant effort.
A mediumweight graphics card to assist with real-time transcoding, helping her to convert and stream audio and videos to our devices in whatever format they prefer.
A beefy processor and sufficient RAM to run a dozen virtual machines supporting a variety of functions like software development, media ripping and cataloguing, photo rescaling, reverse-proxying, and document scanning (a planned future purpose for Fox is to have a network-enabled scanner near our “in-trays” so that we can digitise and OCR all of our post and paperwork into a searchable, accessible, space-saving collection).

QFlix (media selection) menu showing on a TV — “QFlix” is a lot like Netflix, except geared mostly towards saving us from having to walk over to the DVD shelf or remember which disc we were up to when watching a long-running series. #firstworldproblems

The last time I filmed myself building a PC was when I built Cosmo, a couple of desktops ago. He turned out to be a bit of a nightmare: he was my first fully-watercooled computer and he leaked everywhere: by the time I’d done all the fixing and re-fixing to make him behave nicely, I wasn’t happy with the video footage and I never uploaded it. I’d been wary, almost-superstitious, about filming a build since then, but I shot a timelapse of Fox’s construction and it turned out pretty well: you can watch it below or on YouTube or QTube.

The timelapse slows to real-time, about a minute in, to illustrate a point about the component test I did with only a CPU (and cooler), PSU, and RAM attached. Something I routinely do when building computers but which I only recently discovered isn’t commonly practised is shown: that the easiest way to power on a computer without attaching a power switch is just to bridge the power switch pins using your screwdriver!

Fox is running Unraid, an operating system basically designed for exactly these kinds of purposes. I’ve been super-impressed by the ease-of-use and versatility of Unraid and I’d recommend it if you’ve got a similar NAS project in your future! I’d also like to sing the praises of the Fractal Design Node 804 case: it’s not got quite as many bells-and-whistles as some cases, but its dual-chamber design is spot-on for a multipurpose NAS, giving ample room for both full-sized expansion cards and heatsinks and lots of hard drives in a relatively compact space.

Sandwichware: Machines Talking to Machines About Humans

13 January 2020 09:24 5

A recent observation by Phil Gyford reminded me of a recurring thought I’ve had. He wrote:

While being driven around England it struck me that humans are currently like the filling in a sandwich between one slice of machine — the satnav — and another — the car. Before the invention of sandwiches the vehicle was simply a slice of machine with a human topping. But now it’s a sandwich, and the two machine slices are slowly squeezing out the human filling and will eventually be stuck directly together with nothing but a thin layer of API butter. Then the human will be a superfluous thing, perhaps a little gherkin on the side of the plate.

While we were driving I was reading the directions from a mapping app on my phone, with the sound off, checking the upcoming turns, and giving verbal directions to Mary, the driver. I was an extra layer of human garnish — perhaps some chutney or a sliced tomato — between the satnav slice and the driver filling.

What Phil’s describing is probably familiar to you: the experience of one or more humans acting as the go-between to allow two machines to communicate. If you’ve ever re-typed a document that was visible on another screen, read somebody a password over the phone, given directions from a digital map, used a pendrive to carry files between computers that weren’t talking to one another properly then you’ve done it: you’ve been the soft wet meaty middleware that bridged two already semi-automated (but not quite automated enough) systems.

Galaxy Quest: Tawny Madison says "Gosh, I'm doing it. I'm repeating the damn computer." — Sigourney Weaver as Gwen DeMarco as Tawny Madison realised what she was doing back in 1999. Should I be alarmed that a science fiction spoof is a better indicator of the future that the science fiction it parodies?

This generally happens because of the lack of a common API (a communications protocol) between two systems. If your phone and your car could just talk it out then the car would know where to go all by itself! Or, until we get self-driving cars, it could at least provide the directions in a way that was appropriately-accessible to the driver: heads-up display, context-relative directions, or whatever.

It also sometimes happens when the computer-to-human interface isn’t good enough; for example I’ve often offered to navigate for a driver (and used my phone for the purpose) because I can add a layer of common sense. There’s no need for me to tell my buddy to take the second exit from every roundabout in Milton Keynes (did you know that the town has 930 of them?) – I can just tell them that I’ll let them know when they have to change road and trust that they’ll just keep going straight ahead until then.

Finally, we also sometimes find ourselves acting as a go-between to filter and improve information flow when the computers don’t have enough information to do better by themselves. I’ll use the fact that I can see the road conditions and the lane markings and the proposed route ahead to tell a driver to get into the right lane with an appropriate amount of warning. Or if the driver says “I can see signs to our destination now, I’ll just keep following them,” I can shut up unless something goes awry. Your in-car SatNav can’t do that because it can’t see and interpret the road ahead of you… at least not yet!

Oxbotica Driven self-driving car in Oxford. — I was certainly glad that this prototype self-driving car could “see” me when it overtook my bike the other day.

But here’s my thought: claims of an upcoming AI winter aside, it feels to me like we’re making faster progress in technologies related to human-computer interaction – voice and natural languages interfaces, popularised by virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa and by chatbots – than we are in technologies related to universal computer interoperability. Voice-controller computers are hip and exciting and attract a lot of investment but interoperable systems are hampered by two major things. The first thing holding back interoperability is business interests: for the longest while, for example, you couldn’t use Amazon Prime Video on a Google Chromecast for a long while because the two companies couldn’t play nice. The second thing is a lack of interest by manufacturers in developing open standards: every smart home appliance manufacturer wants you to use their app, and so your smart speaker manufacturer needs to implement code to talk to each and every one of them, and when they stop supporting one… well, suddenly your thermostat switches jumps permanently from smart mode to dumb mode.

A thing that annoys me is that from a technical perspective making an open standard should be a much easier task than making an AI that can understand what a human is asking for or drive a car safely or whatever we’re using them for this week. That’s not to say that technical standards aren’t difficult to get right – they absolutely are! – but we’ve been practising doing it for many, many decades! The very existence of the Internet over which you’ve been delivered this article is proof that computer interoperability is a solvable problem. For anybody who thinks that the interoperability brought about by the Internet was inevitable or didn’t take lots of hard work, I direct you to Darius Kazemi’s re-reading of the early standards discussions, which I first plugged a year ago; but the important thing is that people were working on it. That’s something we’re not really seeing in the Internet of Things space.

XKCD 927: Standards — Engineers: “Standards are good. Let’s have lots of them.”
Everybody else: “…?”

On our current trajectory, it’s absolutely possible that our virtual assistants will reach a point of becoming perfectly “human” communicators long before we can reach agreements about how they should communicate with one another. If that’s the case, those virtual assistants will probably fall back on using English-language voice communication as their lingua franca. In that case, it’s not unbelievable that ten to twenty years from now, the following series of events might occur:

You want to go to your friends’ house, so you say out loud “Alexa, drive me to Bob’s house in five minutes.” Alexa responds “I’m on it; I’ll let you know more in a few minutes.”
Alexa doesn’t know where Bob’s house is, but it knows it can get it from your netbook. It opens a voice channel over your wireless network (so you don’t have to “hear” it) and says “Hey Google, it’s Alexa [and here’s my credentials]; can you give me the address that [your name] means when they say ‘Bob’s house’?” And your netbook responds by reading out the address details, which Alexa then understands.
Alexa doesn’t know where your self-driving car is right now and whether anybody’s using it, but it has a voice control system and a cellular network connection, so Alexa phones up your car and says: “Hey SmartCar, it’s Alexa [and here’s my credentials]; where are you and when were you last used?”. The car replies “I’m on the driveway, I’m fully-charged, and I was last used three hours ago by [your name].” So Alexa says “Okay, boot up, turn on climate control, and prepare to make a journey to [Bob’s address].” In this future world, most voice communication over telephones is done by robots: your virtual assistant calls your doctor’s virtual assistant to make you an appointment, and you and your doctor just get events in your calendars, for example, because nobody manages to come up with a universal API for medical appointments.
Alexa responds “Okay, your SmartCar is ready to take you to Bob’s house.” And you have no idea about the conversations that your robots have been having behind your back

I’m not saying that this is a desirable state of affairs. I’m not even convinced that it’s likely. But it’s certainly possible if IoT development keeps focussing on shiny friendly conversational interfaces at the expense of practical, powerful technical standards. Our already topsy-turvy technologies might get weirder before they get saner.

But if English does become the “universal API” for robot-to-robot communication, despite all engineering common sense, I suggest that we call it “sandwichware”.