Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 39

A Few Notes on A Few Notes on The Culture

When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.

First of all, it���s me pointing at something and saying ���Check this out!���

Secondly, it���s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think ���Now what would past me have tagged it with?��� Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever

There are some links that I return to again and again.

Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It���s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.

Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?

But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).

Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks���s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is ��� without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset ��� intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and ��� through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others ��� a kind of synthetic evil.

Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I���ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.

Like I said, it���s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.

I have a section of my site called ���extras��� where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It���s mostly for my own benefit. That���s where I���ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.

Here���s a funny thing …for all the times that I���ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on���vavatch.co.uk���so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it���s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!

I���m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That���s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.

Facebook Container for Firefox

Firefox has a nifty extension���made by Mozilla���called Facebook Container. It does two things.

First of all, it sandboxes any of your activity while you���re on the facebook.com domain. The tab you���re in is isolated from all others.

Secondly, when you visit a site that loads a tracker from Facebook, the extension alerts you to its presence. For example, if a page has a share widget that would post to Facebook, a little fence icon appears over the widget warning you that Facebook will be able to track that activity.

It���s a nifty extension that I���ve been using for quite a while. Except now it���s gone completely haywire. That little fence icon is appearing all over the web wherever there���s a form with an email input. See, for example, the newsletter sign-up form in the footer of the Clearleft site. It���s happening on forms over on The Session too despite the rigourous-bordering-on-paranoid security restrictions in place there.

Hovering over the fence icon displays this text:

If you use your real email address here, Facebook may be able to track you.

That is, of course, false. It���s also really damaging. One of the worst things that you can do in the security space is to cry wolf. If a concerned user is told that they can ignore that warning, you���re lessening the impact of all warnings, even serious legitimate ones.

Sometimes false positives are an acceptable price to pay for overall increased security, but in this case, the rate of false positives can only decrease trust.

I tried to find out how to submit a bug report about this but I couldn���t work it out (and I certainly don���t want to file a bug report in a review) so I���m writing this in the hopes that somebody at Mozilla sees it.

What���s really worrying is that this might not be considered a bug. The release notes for the version of the extension that came out last week say:

Email fields will now show a prompt, alerting users about how Facebook can track users by their email address.

Like ���all email fields? That���s ridiculous!

I thought the issue might���ve been fixed in the latest release that came out yesterday. The release notes say:

This release addresses fixes a issue from our last release �����the email field prompt now only displays on sites where Facebook resources have been blocked.

But the behaviour is unfortunately still there, even on sites like The Session or Clearleft that wouldn���t touch Facebook resources with a barge pole. The fence icon continues to pop up all over the web.

I hope this gets sorted soon. I like the Facebook Container extension and I���d like to be able to recommend it to other people. Right now I���d recommed the opposite���don���t install this extension while it���s behaving so overzealously. If the current behaviour continues, I���ll be uninstalling this extension myself.

Update: It looks like a fix is being rolled out. Fingers crossed!

Reader

I���ve written before about how I don���t have notifications on my phone or computer. But that doesn���t stop computer programmes waving at me, trying to attract my attention.

If I have my email client open on my computer there���s a red circle with a number in it telling me how many unread emails I have. It���s the same with Slack. If Slack is running and somebody writes something to me, or @here, or @everyone, then a red circle blinks into existence.

There���s a category of programmes like this that want my attention���email, Slack, calendars. In each case, emptiness is the desired end goal. Seeing an inbox too full of emails or a calendar too full of appointments makes me feel queasy. In theory these programmes are acting on my behalf, working for me, making my life easier. And in many ways they do. They help me keep things organised. But they also need to me to take steps: read that email, go to that appointment, catch up with that Slack message. Sometimes it can feel like the tail is wagging the dog and I���m the one doing the bidding of these pieces of software.

My RSS reader should, in theory, fall into the same category. It shows me the number of unread items, just like email or Slack. But for some reason, it feels different. When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I���m subscribed to, it doesn���t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book. And, yes, books are also things to be completed���a bookmark not only marks my current page, it also acts as a progress bar���but books are for pleasure. The pleasure might come from escapism, or stimulation, or the pursuit of knowledge. That���s a very different category to email, calendars, and Slack.

I���ve managed to wire my neurological pathways to put RSS in the books category instead of the productivity category. I���m very glad about that. I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email. Maybe that���s why I���m never entirely comfortable with newsletters���if there���s an option to subscribe by RSS instead of email, I���ll always take it.

I have two folders in my RSS reader: blogs and magazines. Reading blog posts feels like catching up with what my friends are up to (even if I don���t actually know the person). Reading magazine articles feels like spending a lazy Sunday catching up with some long-form journalism.

I should update this list of my subscriptions. It���s a bit out of date.

Matt made a nice website explaining RSS. And Nicky Case recently wrote about reviving RSS.

Oh, and if you want to have my words in your RSS reader, I have plenty of options for you.

Hope

My last long-distance trip before we were all grounded by The Situation was to San Francisco at the end of 2019. I attended Indie Web Camp while I was there, which gave me the opportunity to add a little something to my website: an ���on this day��� page.

I���m glad I did. While it���s probably of little interest to anyone else, I enjoy scrolling back to see how the same date unfolded over the years.

���Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they���re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I���ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I���m excitedly pointing at something and saying ���Check this out!��� I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

But when I scroll down through my ���on this day��� page, it also feels like descending deeper into the dark waters of linkrot. For each year back in time, the probability of a link still working decreases until there���s nothing but decay.

Sadly this is nothing new. I���ve been lamenting the state of digital preservation for years now. More recently Jonathan Zittrain penned an article in The Atlantic on the topic:

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity���s knowledge together is coming undone.

In one sense, linkrot is the price we pay for the web���s particular system of hypertext. We don���t have two-way linking, which means there���s no centralised repository of links which would be prohibitively complex to maintain. So when you want to link to something on the web, you just do it. An a element with an href attribute. That���s it. You don���t need to check with the owner of the resource you���re linking to. You don���t need to check with anyone. You have complete freedom to link to any URL you want to.

But it���s that same simple system that makes the act of linking a gamble. If the URL you���ve linked to goes away, you���ll have no way of knowing.

As I scroll down my ���on this day��� page, I come across more and more dead links that have been snapped off from the fabric of the web.

If I stop and think about it, it can get quite dispiriting. Why bother making hyperlinks at all? It���s only a matter of time until those links break.

And yet I still keep linking. I still keep pointing to things and saying ���Check this out!��� even though I know that over a long enough timescale, there���s little chance that the link will hold.

In a sense, every hyperlink on the World Wide Web is little act of hope. Even though I know that when I link to something, it probably won���t last, I still harbour that hope.

If hyperlinks are built on hope, and the web is made of hyperlinks, then in a way, the World Wide Web is quite literally made out of hope.

I like that.

Solarpunk

My talk on sci-fi and me for Beyond Tellerrand���s Stay Curious event was deliberately designed to be broad and expansive. This was in contrast to Steph���s talk which was deliberately narrow and focused on one topic. Specifically, it was all about solarpunk.

I first heard of solarpunk from Justin Pickard back in 2014 at an event I was hosting. He described it as:

individuals and communities harnessing the power of the photovoltaic solar panel to achieve energy-independence.

The sci-fi subgenre of solarpunk, then, is about these communities. The subgenre sets up to be deliberately positive, even utopian, in contrast to most sci-fi.

Most genres ending with the -punk suffix are about aesthetics. You know the way that cyberpunk is laptops, leather and sunglasses, and steampunk is zeppelins and top hats with goggles. Solarpunk is supposedly free of any such ���look.��� That said, all the examples I���ve seen seem to converge on the motto of ���put a tree on it.��� If a depiction of the future looks lush, verdant, fecund and green, chances are it���s solarpunk.

At least, it might be solarpunk. It would have to pass the criteria laid down by the gatekeepers. Solarpunk is manifesto-driven sci-fi. I���m not sure how I feel about that. It���s one thing to apply a category to a piece of writing after it���s been written, but it���s another to start with an agenda-driven category and proceed from there. And as with any kind of classification system, the edges are bound to be fuzzy, leading to endless debates about what���s in and what���s out (see also: UX, UI, service design, content design, product design, front-end development, and most ironically of all, information architecture).

When I met up with Steph to discuss our talk topics and she described the various schools of thought that reside under the umbrella of solarpunk, it reminded me of my college days. You wouldn���t have just one Marxist student group, there���d be multiple Marxist student groups each with their own pillars of identity (Leninist, Trotskyist, anarcho-syndicalist, and so on). From the outside they all looked the same, but woe betide you if you mixed them up. It was exactly the kind of situation that was lampooned in Monty Python���s Life of Brian with its People���s Front of Judea and Judean People���s Front. Steph confirmed that those kind of rifts also exist in solarpunk. It���s just like that bit in Gulliver���s Travels where nations go to war over the correct way to crack an egg.

But there���s general agreement about what broadly constitutes solarpunk. It���s a form of cli-fi (climate fiction) but with an upbeat spin: positive but plausible stories of the future that might feature communities, rewilding, gardening, farming, energy independence, or decentralisation. Centralised authority���in the form of governments and corporations���is not to be trusted.

That���s all well and good but it reminds of another community. Libertarian preppers. Heck, even some of the solarpunk examples feature seasteading (but with more trees).

Politically, preppers and solarpunks couldn���t be further apart. Practically, they seem more similar than either of them would be comfortable with.

Both communities distrust centralisation. For the libertarians, this manifests in a hatred of taxation. For solarpunks, it���s all about getting off the electricity grid. But both want to start their own separate self-sustaining communities.

Independence. Decentralisation. Self-sufficiency.

There���s a fine line between Atlas Shrugged and The Whole Earth Catalog.

Hosting online events

Back in 2014 Vitaly asked me if I���d be the host for Smashing Conference in Freiburg. I jumped at the chance. I thought it would be an easy gig. All of the advantages of speaking at a conference without the troublesome need to actually give a talk.

As it turned out, it was quite a bit of work:

It wasn���t just a matter of introducing each speaker���there was also a little chat with each speaker after their talk, so I had to make sure I was paying close attention to each and every talk, thinking of potential questions and conversation points. After two days of that, I was a bit knackered.

Last month, I hosted an other event, but this time it was online: UX Fest. Doing the post-talk interviews was definitely a little weirder online. It���s not quite the same as literally sitting down with someone. But the online nature of the event did provide one big advantage…

To minimise technical hitches on the day, and to ensure that the talks were properly captioned, all the speakers recorded their talks ahead of time. That meant I had an opportunity to get a sneak peek at the talks and prepare questions accordingly.

UX Fest had a day of talks every Thursday in June. There were four talks per Thursday. I started prepping on the Monday.

First of all, I just watched all the talks and let them wash me over. At this point, I���d often think ���I���m not sure if I can come up with any questions for this one!��� but I���d let the talks sit there in my subsconscious for a while. This was also a time to let connections between talks bubble up.

Then on the Tuesday and Wednesday, I went through the talks more methodically, pausing the video every time I thought of a possible question. After a few rounds of this, I inevitably ended up with plenty of questions, some better than others. So I then re-ordered them in descending levels of quality. That way if I didn���t get to the questions at the bottom of the list, it was no great loss.

In theory, I might not get to any of my questions. That���s because attendees could also ask questions on the day via a chat window. I prioritised those questions over my own. Because it���s not about me.

On some days there was a good mix of audience questions and my own pre-prepared questions. On other days it was mostly my own questions.

Either way, it was important that I didn���t treat the interview like a laundry list of questions to get through. It was meant to be a conversation. So the answer to one question might touch on something that I had made a note of further down the list, in which case I���d run with that. Or the conversation might go in a really interesting direction completely unrelated to the questions or indeed the talk.

Above all, these segments needed to be engaging and entertaining in a personable way, more like a chat show than a post-game press conference. So even though I had done lots of prep for interviewing each speaker, I didn���t want to show my homework. I wanted each interview to feel like a natural flow.

To quote the old saw, this kind of spontaneity takes years of practice.

There was an added complication when two speakers shared an interview slot for a joint Q&A. Not only did I have to think of questions for each speaker, I also had to think of questions that would work for both speakers. And I had to keep track of how much time each person was speaking so that the chat wasn���t dominated by one person more than the other. This was very much like moderating a panel, something that I enjoy very much.

In the end, all of the prep paid off. The conversations flowed smoothly and I was happy with some of the more thought-provoking questions that I had researched ahead of time. The speakers seemed happy too.

Y���know, there are not many things I���m really good at. I���m a mediocre developer, and an even worse designer. I���m okay at writing. But I���m really good at public speaking. And I think I���m pretty darn good at this hosting lark too.

Safari 15

If you download Safari Technology Preview you can test drive features that are on their way in Safari 15. One of those features, announced at Apple���s World Wide Developer Conference, is coloured browser chrome via support for the meta value of ���theme-color.��� Chrome on Android has supported this for a while but I believe Safari is the first desktop browser to add support. They���ve also added support for the media attribute on that meta element to handle ���prefers-color-scheme.���

This is all very welcome, although it does remind me a bit of when Internet Explorer came out with the ability to make coloured scrollbars. I mean, they���re nice features���n���all, but maybe not the most pressing? Safari is still refusing to acknowledge progressive web apps.

That���s not quite true. In her WWDC video Jen demonstrates how you can add a progressive web app like Resilient Web Design to your home screen. I���m chuffed that my little web book made an appearance, but when you see how you add a site to your home screen in iOS, it���s somewhat depressing.

The steps to add a website to your home screen are:

Tap the ���share��� icon. It���s not labelled ���share.��� It���s a square with an arrow coming out of the top of it.A drawer pops up. The option to ���add to home screen��� is nowhere to be seen. You have to pull the drawer up further to see the hidden options.Now you must find ���add to home screen��� in the listCopyAdd to Reading ListAdd BookmarkAdd to FavouritesFind on PageAdd to Home ScreenMarkupPrint

It reminds of this exchange in The Hitchhiker���s Guide To The Galaxy:

���You hadn���t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.���

���But the plans were on display������

���On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.���

���That���s the display department.���

���With a torch.���

���Ah, well the lights had probably gone.���

���So had the stairs.���

���But look you found the notice didn���t you?���

���Yes,��� said Arthur, ���yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ���Beware of The Leopard.������

Safari���s current ���support��� for adding progressive web apps to the home screen feels like the minimum possible ���just enough to use it as a legal argument if you happen to be litigated against for having a monopoly on app distribution. ���Hey, you can always make a web app!��� It���s true in theory. In practice it���s …suboptimal, to put it mildly.

Still, those coloured tab bars are very nice.

It���s a little bit weird that this stylistic information is handled by HTML rather than CSS. It���s similar to the meta viewport value in that sense. I always that the plan was to migrate that to CSS at some point, but here we are a decade later and it���s still very much part of our boilerplate markup.

Some people have remarked that the coloured browser chrome can make the URL bar look like part of the site so people might expect it to operate like a site-specific search.

I also wonder if it might blur ���the line of death���; that point in the UI where the browser chrome ends and the website begins. Does the unified colour make it easier to spoof browser UI?

Probably not. You can already kind of spoof browser UI by using the right shade of grey. Although the removal any kind of actual line in Safari does give me pause for thought.

I tend not to think of security implications like this by default. My first thought tends to be more about how I can use the feature. It���s only after a while that I think about how bad actors might abuse the same feature. I should probably try to narrow the gap between those thoughts.

ReCoil

On the Coil developers site there���s a page proudly answering the question who is web monetized?

You���ll some familiar sites in there: CSS Tricks, A List Apart, and even this humble website, adactio.com.

But lest you think that this social proof is in any way an endorsement, I should probably clarify what my experience with Coil has been like.

Coil itself is grand. You get an identifier and you add it to your website in a meta element, much like you would do with indie web endpoints for webmentions or micropub.

The problem is with how you then actually get hold of any money that is owed to you from micropayments. Coil doesn���t handle this directly. You have to set up a ���wallet��� with a third-party service and therein lies the problem.

They are all terrible.

I���m not talking about the hoops you have to jump through to set up an account. I get it. This is scary financial stuff so of course I���ll need to scan my passport and hand over loads of information (more than is needed to open an actual bank account with, say, Monzo).

No, the problem is the stench of crypto.

I tried Stronghold for a while. They really, really don���t want you to use boring old-fashioned currencies like the euro or the pound. There���s also Gatehub. Same. And there���s Uphold. Also a shell game.

I���ve been using Coil and Uphold for a while now, and I���ve amassed a grand total of ��6.06 ��� woo-hoo! So I log into my account and attempt to transfer that sweet, sweet monetisation and …I can���t.

The amount needs to be greater than or equal to ��11.53 GBP

But I can still exchange that ��6.06 for magic beans like Bitcoin, XRP, and Ether.

The whole thing smells of grift and it feels icky to be in any way associated with it. I understand why Coil needs to partner with existing payment providers, but it would be nice if just one of them weren���t propping up ponzi schemes. If anyone has found a way to get web monetisation to work without needing like you need to take a shower afterwards, I���d love to hear about it.

An email to The Guardian

From: jeremy@adactio.comTo: guardian.readers@theguardian.com

Hello,

My name is Jeremy and I���ve been a paid subscriber to The Guardian for a few years now. But I���m considering cancelling my account after reading this editorial.

On the face of it, the headline of the article sound reasonable and hard to disagree with. But the substance of the article downplays anti-trans views as simply being ���gender critical.��� This is akin to describing segregationist views as ���integration critical.���

This line is particularly egregious:

As a society, we need to resolve the question of how to protect the privacy, dignity and rights of trans women while also respecting the privacy, dignity and rights of those born female.

Setting up these positions as though one in any way invalidates the other gives oxygen to those who wish to paint someone���s identity as a threat. I���m very disappointed to see this viewpoint expressed in an editorial on The Guardian website.

Yours,

Jeremy Keith

Notified

I got a notification on my phone on Monday.

For most people this would be an unremarkable occurence. For me it���s quite unusual. I���ve written before about my relationship with notifications:

If I install an app on my phone, the first thing I do is switch off all notifications. That saves battery life and sanity.

The only time my phone is allowed to ask for my attention is for phone calls, SMS, or FaceTime (all rare occurrences). I initiate every other interaction���Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, the web. My phone is a tool that I control, not the other way around.

In short, I allow notifications from humans but never from machines. I am sometimes horrified when I see other people���s phones lighting up with notifications about email, tweets, or���God help us���news stories. I try not to be judgemental, but honestly, how does anyone live like that?

The next version of iOS will feature focus modes allowing you to toggle when certain notifications are allowed. That���s a welcome addition, but it���s kind of horrifying that it���s even necessary. It���s like announcing a new padded helmet that will help reduce the pain the next time you choose to hit your own head with a hammer. It doesn���t really address the underlying problem.

Anyway, I made an exception to my rule about not allowing notifications from non-humans. Given the exceptional circumstances of The Situation, I have allowed notifications from the NHS COVID-19 app.

And that���s why I got a notification on my phone on Monday.

It said that I had come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19 and that I would need to self-isolate until midnight on Friday. I haven���t been out of the house much at all���and never indoors���so I think it must be because I checked into a seafront bar last week for an outdoor drink; the QR code for the venue would���ve encompased both the indoor and outdoor areas.

Even though it wasn���t part of the advice for self-isolation, I got a lateral flow test to see if I was actually infected.

I did the test and I can confidentally say that I would very much like to never repeat that experience.

The test was negative. But I���m still going to stick to the instructions I���ve been given. In fact, that���s probably why testing isn���t part of the recommended advice; I can imagine a lot of people getting a negative test and saying, ���I���m sure I���m fine���I don���t need to self-isolate.���

So I won���t be leaving the house until Saturday. This is not a great inconvenience. It���s not like I had many plans. But…

This is why, for the final day of UX Fest, I will be performing my hosting duties from the comfort of my own home instead of the swankier, more professional environment of the Clearleft studio. I hope I don���t bring the tone down too much.

I also had to turn down an invitation to play some tunes with two fully vaccinated fellow musicians on Friday. It felt a bit strange to explain why. ���I���d love to, but my phone says I have to stay in.���

I feel like I���m in that Bruce Sterling short story Maneki Neko, obedientally taking orders from my pokkecon.