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EOQ! Wow, can't even believe we are at the end of another third quarter. And you know what that means: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years', bam bam bam bam. And poof another year in the books. Happens faster and faster every year.
Some blogs (and some social media) have a "keep at top" feature, which artificially boosts dwell time. I used to do this myself, every once in a while, but haven't for a while. I have mentally played with the idea of recording inbound traffic (hits) for each post, and sorting archived posts by "max hits". That would make reader interest a part of dwell time, which would be good. Presumably if something was of interest to many or externally linked it likely would be of interest to the next reader. Or I could just keep posting whatever whenever and let the chips fall where they may. Heh. {Update: added digression: whoever wanted Google's .webp images? Why do they exist? Someone spent all that time inventing a new image format just so we all have to convert them back to JPEGs. What an incredible waste of time.}
I'm still riding Centuries, and yesterday rode a nice one: the Lighthouse Century from Morro Bay up PCH to the Piedras Blancas lighthouse, through San Simeon, and by the Elephant Seal overlook. To get to 100 miles the organizers start with a nice little jaunt into the hills of Paso Robles; beautiful wine country, if you can take a minute from climbing to take in the views. Yes, it was a great ride, and yes, I am quite proud of myself for being able to ride a Century in under six hours; "only" 5,200' of climbing... but still! I've been playing with the various ways to record video of a ride from my GoPro, and this little clip contains several of them: straight video, speeded up, time lapse pictures, turned into a video, and "posterized" video to turn it into effectively a timelapse sequence. Not sure yet of the best way. I do like taking pictures during the ride and embedding them; for all that the GoPro is amazing, the iPhone pictures are better yet, and you can really see the difference on a cold and cloudy day. And with my phone I can shoot "sideways", whereas the GoPro is always pointed "down the road". Onward!
Among all the amazing capabilities of Perplexity* and honestly, c'mon, it is amazing, right? one of the biggest for me is that it has completely replaced online help. For some time now we were sure that Google was always better than a product's own online help, but now Perplexity is amazingly better.
And you know what Perplexity costs? $0... What a time to be alive!
So when passkeys were invented, everyone said yay. But they don't solve all the problems and create many new ones. The difficulty of having them across multiple devices, the difficulty of creating them in the first place, and the difficulty of implementing them. And the reliance on central authorities.
The best solution to passwords is not to have them at all. Just send the user a limited time link in text or email. This is simple to explain, simple to use, simple to implement. And no less secure than passwords; most of the time you can change or recover a password with a link in text or email anyway. Oh, and it supports multiple devices easily.
Tonight I watched stage 16 of La Vuelta (the Tour of Spain cycling race), which finished atop the legendary Lagos da Covadonga climb in Asturias, the Northernmost province of Spain. It was a fantastic race on an amazing track.
I rode this very climb myself, way back in 2007; I was in Spain for business and detoured up to Asturias to ride the stage and then watch the pros do it too. After an improbable series of barriers surmounted I made it, probably the hardest climb I've ever done then or since. Watching the race today was doubly enjoyable remembering being there which seems like yesterday, 17 years ago...
Rereading my report on the day, I remember feeling a weird sense of inevitability; with each obstacle it felt like something good was going to happen, and then it did. "How did I get here (!)" indeed ... Quite a day.
Watching pro cycling in Europe is the best - in addition to another Vuelta stage I've been privileged to watch two stages of the Tour de France, and to ride and then watch the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders). I still have to see a Giro d'Italia stage (Tour of Italy), and would love to see the Strade Bianca (which tours Tuscany and finishes in La Plaza in Siena). It's nice to have goals :) Onward !
a Labor Day spent sailing w your granddaughter is pretty perfect
Yesterday I drove my bike up to Arroyo Grande and took a nice out-and-back ride to Avila Beach. Here's a composite video from the ride: This is a test, there are several things going on here. First the video itself is a GoPro time-lapse combined with a Strava GPS flyby, with embedded iPhone pics. Experimental, and I like it. Composed with Adobe Premier. LMK what you think.
And LBNL, this is my first time posting a video with my new spiffy (shaved-yak) email-to-blog mechanism. I love it by the way; this is being composed on my iPad, sitting in my den, miles away from my laptop and office.
{Another Update: modified the API to support embedding videos, as opposed to merely linking them. This takes advantage of modern browsers' support for video; in the bad old days I used to embed various video plugins, and in the worse older days used Flash. But now even mobile browsers can play video directly ...}
Well enough of the navel gazing; it was a fun ride watching the masses at the beach, and traversing through Shell Beach which is a beautiful little residential neighborhood tucked in between Pismo and Avila.
Pismo Beach is a real slice of Americana; except for the size of the people and their tattoos, could have been any time in the 1980s; the kids and dogs playing in the surf were just the same.
Speaking of dogs, this has to be the best way to tour around with them, and is my favorite pic from the trip. Woof. And onward...
I recently reread this post about AI and emergent properties, from May 2003, and was blown away by its prescience and relevance. (In posting about old posts I seem to be following the New Yorker's example and reusing content in lieu of new thinking, but in this case it's delightfully "meta", as new observations have "emerged" over time).
Way back in the dawn of time, 2009, now (checks sundial) 15 years ago, I posted about remembering 1984, about the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At the time I posted it was 25 years ago, so now (gasp) it's been 40 years. All of those observations are still valid, more poignant for being so much older now; rowing on Lake Casitas, Peter Ueberroth, Ronald Reagan. Time Magazine. The first televised Olympics! The Torch OJ Simpson, Rafer Johnson. And LBNL the first Olympics (and still the only one) to be run as a business, at a profit for the host city. (Just typing LA84 gives me chills how weird is that? I was 25 at the time, must have made quite an impression on me :) And so with memories of Paris fading, we're getting ready to do it all again in 2028. Hope we can show everyone how it should be done, again. Should be amazing!...
Seems currently LA28 will feature 35 sports!
Speaking of The New Yorker, (we were) I've made it to the bottom of my stack, the Aug 26 issue (with a "haha" cover featuring A roller coaster with Harris and Walz going up while Trump and Vance go down ... typical), and I encountered this thoughtful review by Louis Menand of two books about bookstores, subtitled "why do bookstores still exist?" There's some good background and interesting thinking, but no clear answer. I think it has to do with the same reason I prefer paper magazines to their digital counterparts:skimmability. When you're seeking a specific book you go to Amazon and poof you buy it. But when you're browsing for a book, how do you find one? For that, nothing is better than a bookstore where you can easily scan the shelves, view covers, and if so minded, pick up and (gasp) sample the wares. They’re “fun”. Yeah, to some extent this contradicts The Long Tail (curiously, not mentioned in the review), but not really; the tail is there forfinding and ordering, at Amazon and elsewhere online, but browsing is still mostly done at the head, and the physical experience trumps virtual inventory. In fact the curation - concentrating and filtering the vast space of all books to a much more manageable inventory - is part of the attraction. Interestingly and as noted in the article, most independent bookstores call themselvesshops, and shopping is why they still exist.
In my office I have a pile of magazines. Real paper pick em up and read em magazines. The stack is in FIFO order, and depending on how busy or bored I am, it gets deeper or shallower. Regulars include the Economist still enjoy it, although the increasingly left bent is tiresome Fortune, Caltech, Traveler (always fun and getting better), Wired (kind of a legacy, rapidly fading into irrelevance), and of course The New Yorker I parted from them politically long ago, but enjoy the feature writing and above all the cartoons.
Anyway.
To the top of the stack recently rose the Aug 12 issue of New Yorker, with the title Comedy, an archival issue. They have been doing this a bit; cutting back on staff, they can run an issue with almost entirely recycled content, and readers like me find it interesting. In fact, honestly, it was way more interesting than the "regular" issue from Aug 12. Okay the focus was comedy, but also, there was a characteristic spirit of inquiry has been sadly lacking of late. The New Yorker's general stance is that it is a giant world out there (including, albeit begrudgingly, the world outside of New York city) filled with people and stories, and it wants to tell you about them. Lately it seems to have morphed into telling you how to think about them, and that doesn't go over as well nor foster that positive spirit. And so in this issue there is a lot of awesomeness: Notes about Robin Williams and Joan Rivers, rabbi jokes, Girl Scouts, and Buster Keaton, and articles about laughter, Richard Pryor, and the birth of Saturday Night Live, among others. The reviews were cherry picked as well, including Chelsea Handler on late night TV and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. I almost did read it cover to cover, and might yet go back. I guess it's inevitable that an old guy would look back and think "that was a better time", but ... it was :)
As usual Randall hit a nail on the head, and he comes at it in a way which makes a point... yes, this is a useful periodic table, but no, a little too dumb and not that useful. This is how I feel about the current trend toward "simple" user interfaces. They're dumbed down past the point of usefulness. The other day I tried Microsoft's "new Outlook", and it's a joke; you can't find anything because all the controls are hidden. Can we go back to good UI design now? Anyway...
Looking at history I see that this date Aug 13 has been a quiet one. I guess on this day I’ve mostly been busy, sailing, traveling, working, or otherwise not blogging. Sorry not sorry. But maybe (?) this will unplug the pipe. Hope y’all are having a nice summer and will check in again sooon…
NY 240527:
Fairly recent posts (well last handful, anyway):
For older posts please visit the archive.
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I've been ruminating on the "dwell time" of an online post. When you post something to a blog, on X, on Facebook, wherever your friends / followers / whomever see it for as long as it is your "current" post. As soon as you post something else, it gets pushed down the stack a bit, and people are less likely to see it. This is independent of the relative value or importance or length of the post. I could post a lengthy diatribe with incredible analysis, and then immediately post something trivial, and that diatribe will become history while the trivia might live on a long time.
I'm editing a video with Adobe Premiere - 
Passwords are a problem, for sure, for me as a user as well as for me as an applications developer. Good passwords are hard to remember, every site has different rules, sometimes you have to change them, sometimes you can't reuse them, and everybody writes them down insecurely. (Yep, you do too, admit it.)
So long passkeys, we hardly knew ya...
Little did I know or could have known that 21 years later AI would be at the forefront of all tech, and that it would be a "brain dead" form of AI, without heuristics, happily using applied statistics to synthesize emergent properties. We can now hypothesize that not only does this lead to "intelligence", but it might be all that ever does; there are no underlying heuristics at all. In this, I find an analogy to Alpha Zero, 
In the post linked above AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was quoted as saying "AI can't deal with concepts like water is wet'". That was true in the 1970s. And it was thought that to deal with this, "wet" would have to be defined, and an association between "water" and "wet" would have to be made. Now we can see that a concept like "wet" emerges from the presence of things like water, and so the association is causative, water "causes" wetness. Such properties are a function of observation, they are not inherent nor are they explicit, and they are to some extent influenced by the observer as well as the thing itself.
Consider a more abstract property like "beauty". Not only is it famously "in the eye of the beholder", but it is only such, it does not exist in and of itself. (This point is made in another old post made only a week later, 
Here’s a great shot of some unusual action at last weekend’s C-15 North Americans. Wow. That’s my crew Carly and I; we won that race but finished fourth overall in a great regatta at the Santa Barbara Yacht Club. (Perhaps, more to follow.). And yes, we made the front page of Sailing Anarchy, not quite the Rolling Stone but for sailors, close.
