Category Archives: Current Technology

An essay on Star Trek, Androids, and the gig economy

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This showed up in Imgur recently, and it’s the second time I have seen it there. It makes a powerful lot of sense, and shows how badly broken our current system of employment is at all levels.

A twitter thread by @_danilo on 24 January 2020. A hat tip 🎩 to Phil Stracchino for the transcription.

After the premiere of Picard, [I] name checked Bruce Maddox, [and] decided to head back and watch Measure of a Man, TNG S2E09.

And it turns out Maddox is a bit of a tech bro. Startling how well this holds up three decades later. This kind of guy is still a problem.

As a refresher, The Measure of a Man was TNG at its hammiest, most thought provoking best.

A courtroom drama where the fate of Data hinges on the question of whether he is sentient being deserving of what we’d call basic “human rights”.

After Riker delivers a devastating presentation that proves Data is an elaborate machine, Picard joins Guinan for a drink.

Guinan warns Picard that civilizations love nothing more than to create “disposable people,” to do the jobs no one else wants, with no recourse.

Guinan’s point is that by creating a special category that allows Data to be property by an arbitrary distinction, the Federation risks creating a permanent underclass.

This was the lever Picard needed — he wins the argument by appealing to Starfleet’s high mindedness.

This got me to thinking about Silicon Valley innovation.

Today, androids are far beyond our technological capabilities. So what the Valley did was build it lean.

Rather than building artificial laborers, the tech industry invented artificial supervisors.

When the algorithm determines who gets fired, when you work, what you get paid, and everything else about your daily life, there’s no limit to the cruelty of the workplace.

The human needs of the laborers are invisible to the software.

You don’t need to invent an entire android under this model, nor do you need to bear the costs of manufacture.

The software becomes an abstraction around real humans, but the owners of the business never need see them or interact with them in a supervisory context. rows in a db.

We’re left with “algorithmically disposable people.” Entirely commodified labor that can be discarded at will.

No one has to look them in the eye when they’re fired. No one need think of their kids or dependent parents.

No one has to worry about a thing — except the workers.

Gig workers are precarious not only because they lack benefits, but also because the everyday bedrock of their work is determined by a black box algorithm designed to extract maximum profit for a distant corporation.

They are raw material to be optimized.

And what is so dark about this is that the software is perfectly suited to this task.

Software perfectly shields the humans profiting from this one-sided equation from confronting the personal toll it takes on the algorithmically disposable people the company is chewing through.

One of the most striking parts of @Mikelsaac’s Super Pumped¹ is how OPTIONAL it was for Uber management to interact with drivers.

They could hide away, pop out to interact with the drivers IF THEY WANTED, and go back into hiding again, and the machine kept working either way.

Footnotes

¹ This refers to Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (September 3, 2019)

Dear Verizon (not)

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Multiple times a day, multiple times a week, my phone is assaulted with “Thank you for choosing Mariott!” or some other company – Hilton, Southwest Airlines, whatever script of the moment is selected by the robocalling software used by this never-sufficiently-to-be-damned timeshare flogger in Mexico.Âą

Invariably, the caller ID shows a number with my own area code and prefix, still hoping that I’ll pick up thinking it’s a neighbor.

All I want is to be able to have these calls blocked at the source. Every call that comes in with an ID of (nnn) xxx-. Permanently.

Right now I can’t even get through to a real person; your tech support number fobs off every issue onto your digital assistant, which is as useful as a set of false teeth for a rooster. All it gives me is the option of blocking 5 different numbers… for 90 days. Given that there are roughly 10,000 spoofed number possibilities with my area code and prefix, that’s virtually no help at all.

Don’t try to tell me you don’t have the tech to address this issue. Those spoofed numbers come from somewhere, and they have to be transmitted by some means during the call, and you should surely have the ability to sniff those out and block them if the subscriber desires it.

Robocalls of all sorts are a major headache costing millions of Americans countless hours, massive amounts of money (for those who fall prey to scammers), and immeasurable frustration. But eliminating neighborhood spoofing seems to be an easy enough fix, and would eliminate a huge percentage of these calls.

I’m not impressed that you don’t seem to have the will to help your subscribers by providing this option.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Âą I’d like to drop the cabrones who run this outfit into a Fargo-style wood chipper… very slowly. Since they’re out of the country, US laws can’t touch them and they know it – these calls have been going on for years, and it’s maddening.

Frightfully clever crossover technology marketing

Posted on by The Old Wolf

The picture below submitted to reddit by /u/golmal7 shows a flexi-disc CD by Kid Koala entitled “15 Blues Bits.”

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The top side of the CD comes impressed like a vinyl record, and the disc comes with a cardboard gramophone that you can play.

Here’s a video of the record being played with the included kit:

And here’s what it sounds like on a regular turntable:

I have no idea whether the music on the CD is any good, but that’s innovative marketing.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The driverless car: 60 years on, and still on the drawing board.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

In a story published in 1953 entitled “Nobody Here But…”, the Good Doctor Asimov wrote,

“We were especially interested in the automobile angle. Suppose you had a little thinking machine on the dashboard, hooked to the engine and battery and equipped with photoelectric eyes. It could choose an ideal course, avoid cars, stop at red lights, pick the optimum speed for the terrain. Everybody could sit in the back seat and automobile accidents would vanish.”
They promised us flying cars, too,
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but this idea looks like it’s going to happen a lot sooner.
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The Google driverless car is a reality. Watch Steve Mahan, a blind individual, get taken to Taco Bell. These cars have now driven over 500,000 miles without a serious accident when the car itself was in control. While the technology is not yet perfect, it does not need to be; as long as the driverless car reduces accidents – in other words, if it’s better than human drivers – there is no reason why industry, including the insurance companies should not get on board. It will save lives, and reduce insurance costs dramatically.
That’s not to say that the technology is easy to develop:
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Google’s engineers are dealing with problems like this increased by an order of magnitude. But based on results, they are doing it.
Right now, the technology costs about $75,000 to $85,000 per vehicle, more than the car itself. But I fully expect that my grandchildren will be able to make full use of this technology, long before flying cars are ever – if ever – practical. And the Good Doctor Asimov would be proud.
The Old Wolf has spoken.

Big boys play with big toys

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Saw these posted over at reddit the other day and since I live just down the road from where these big boys are used, I thought I’d share it. In fact, one of the men in my neighborhood drives one of these trucks. The comparison with the school bus next to it is pretty mind-bending.

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Here’s an image of the Kenecott open-pit copper mine where these devices are in use; the inset shows one of the loaders and its relative size to the pit.

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Next up is a time-lapse video showing the reconstruction of an access road that was wiped out during the massive slide of April 10, 2013 – in fact, four of these monster trucks were buried in the debris, but have since been recovered.

Of course, even these humonstrous machines are dwarfed by the Bagger 288, the largest movable machine ever created by man – built in 1978 in Germany by Krupp.

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This beast was designed for coal mining, and it chews up everything – including the occasional stray bulldozer.

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For more eye-popping images of this device, head over to Dark Roasted Blend.

Wind power? I’m a big fan. But not as big as this one.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Berlin’s Godzilla-size windmills, 1932

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“Berlin rests in the shadow of a monstrously tall steel tower with a hydra head of spinning fans, each about 500 feet in diameter. A medium-sized town’s population climbs over the 1,400-foot-high structure, noshing in a cavernous cafeteria and peering off a cloud-shrouded viewing deck. The city is aglow with great gouts of energy pouring out of the windmill – as much as 130,000,000 kilowatt hours a year – illuminating the anguished faces of once-profitable oil barons now crying into their beer.

This was the ambitious 1930s-era vision of Hermann Honnef, a German engineer with a lifelong obsession with high towers and wind power.”

Found this interesting bit over at The Atlantic – Cities – click through for the full article.

On the other end of the scale, scientists are working on windmills so tiny that 10 of them could fit on a grain of rice, with a view toward using such small devices to recharge cell phones and such.

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More on the idea can be read at The Verge.

While some ideas are phantasmagorical and others are yet futuristic, thinking out of the box and along these lines is both admirable and necessary. Anything we can do to get the oil industry crying into their beer steins is a good thing.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The Berlin Clock of Lives, 1935

Posted on by The Old Wolf

“A CLOCK of Lives operated by the Statistical Office in Berlin, Germany, informs spectators that the German population is constantly increasing. To insure being seen by many people, the clock was placed in Dönhoffplatz, a busy Berlin thoroughfare. The clock tolls the number of births and deaths occurring every quarter of an hour. The tone of the bells indicates whether a birth or a death has occurred.”

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Another view of the Clock of Lives:

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The clock, more properly called the Wilhelm-Lach Tower, was built in 1935. The small bell tower had the following inscription:

Every five minutes, nine children are born in the German Reich – every five minutes, seven men die. This tower is dedicated to the memory of the first National Socialist Mayor in the Central District, P[arty] M[ember] Wilh[elm] Lach, Born 9 June 1801- Died 6 July 1935″

According to the German Wikipedia site, the buildings around the square were heavily damaged during the war, and were largely razed and rebuilt. It is assumed that the clock tower met its demise around the same period.

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A photo of the clock memorial taken in 1935.

Berlin no longer has a population clock, but it has a pretty sick world time clock in Alexanderplatz:

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Der Alte Wolf hat gesprochen.

The universe may be watching, but we are listening.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

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A friend of mine posted this picture of the Glowing Eye nebula (gacked from APOD) in the constellation of Aquila, taken by the Hubble telescope. It’s clear that the universe is watching.

However, we are peering just as deeply into the void, and now moreso than ever.

 

 

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According to the Miami Herald,  the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, better known as ALMA, is by far the largest radio telescope on earth. Interestingly, despite their size, the dishes are portable. Engineers transported them around the plateau on two giant flat-bed trucks. What the telescope picks up depends on where the antenna are positioned. Click to the Herald article for more details.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Planned Obsolescence

Posted on by The Old Wolf

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It’s a conspiracy, right? We all know that cars, computers, printer cartridges, lightbulbs, and other consumables are now designed to fail sooner than they have to, in order to get us to buy more.

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Well, wait just a minute.

I ripped this comment by redditor Fenwick23 in its entirety, because it’s the best analysis of the “planned obsolescence” issue I’ve ever read. I’ve only bowdlerized it a little, and corrected a couple of spelling issues.

I grow weary of this repeated conspiratorial usage of the phrase “planned obsolescence”. They would have you believe that there are engineers out there designing products with the intent of causing them to break down sooner. Ridiculous. People just don’t understand how competition in manufacturing has shaped consumer product design. One of the oft-cited examples is the venerable Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer. Back in the early 90’s if you bought a low-end HP laser printer, you got a printer built like a tank. The damn things were slow, but they never wore out. Contrast with the low-end now, which are flimsy, come with 3/4 empty toner cartridges, and certainly won’t be functional in 10 years. “Planned obsolescence”, the conspiracy theorists conclude smugly. But wait… how much did you pay for that LaserJet 4 in 1993? Yeah, it was over $2000… in 1993 dollars. How much did that lousy HP P1600 printer you’re complaining about cost? Yeah, it was $200. If you spend the equivalent of two grand in 1993 dollars, which is over $3000 today, you get something like the HP M575c , which prints, copies, and faxes in color, and it’s built like a tank.

What people don’t realize is that in the “good old days” of a given product, a cheap version simply did not exist, so all products of that kind of that vintage were well built. This happens in every industry, at various rates. Engineers are under constant pressure to reduce manufacturing costs to widen the consumer base. Those $200 printers sell at far more than 10x the rate of $2000 printers, because every college freshman is buying one. To that end, certain parts must by necessity be less durable. Ikea isn’t making bookshelves out of particle board to sell more bookshelves when they break, they’re using particle board because not enough people can afford $500 oak book shelves to keep all those Ikea stores in business. (emphasis mine)

“But Fenwick23”, you ask, “What about that inkjet printer that had an expiration date coded into the inkjet cartridges?” Well, that one’s sadly all too easy to explain. Engineers, under the aforementioned pressure to cut costs, came up with a way to make inkjet systems for much cheaper. The only trade-off was that they had limited useful life before the ink dried out and clogged the nozzles. No big deal, just add an expiration system to the all-in-one nozzle-head-ink-tank package that lets the customer know that they need to buy a new one. This design is so much cheaper than the old design, they won’t mind buying it more often. But as so often happens in big corporations run by non-engineers, between the engineering department and the store shelves some upper-middle-manager looked at these cheaper ink jet cartridges and said “WOW WE CAN MAKE MOR PROFITZ IF WE SELL THEM SAME PRICE AS THE OLD KIND!” As a result, the anticipated reasonable trade-off intended by the engineers disappeared in a puff of pointy-haired logic, and six months later HP is stuck with a PR nightmare that looked like planned/programmed obsolescence, but which was in reality the result of managerial idiocy.

There are, of course, some real examples of planned obsolescence. The canonical example, from which the phrase was popularized, was Brooks Stevens use of it to describe 1950’s automotive marketing strategy. Brooks wasn’t talking about the cars breaking down, though. He was talking about aggressively marketing styling changes. The idea was to make last years model seem obsolete by changing the body designs. In essence, Brooks’ notion of planned obsolescence was nothing more than adopting the same strategy as the high fashion clothing industry. Sure, your car and your jacket work fine, but don’t you know that this year the cool people have wider lapels and round taillights?

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The one place where planned obsolescence is a conspiracy to make you throw away perfectly serviceable items and buy new ones in order to prop up an industry is college textbooks. Renumbering pages and shifting end of chapter questions around is exactly the sort of sinister behavior people accuse HP of. The reasons educational publishers stoop to such tactics is quite clear, though. Their customer base is not expandable by making the product cheaper, so in order to maintain profits they have to make their otherwise durable product “expire” somehow. It’s evil, but understandable.

I applaud people repairing serviceable goods. Heck, I make a living repairing broken things. I just get sick of idiot “journalists” from places like Wired parroting the tired notion that the obsolescence of products in our cheap consumer society is the result of sinister motives, rather than the fact that we’re all bloody cheapskates.

Thank you, Fenwick23.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The VFX dilemma: It’s not easy being green

Posted on by The Old Wolf

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If it weren’t for VFX (visual effects) people, that’s just what Avatar and Lord of the Rings would look like.

There’s a lot of buzz on the internet right now about Bill Westenhofer’s suddenly-interrupted Oscar speech for “The Life of Pi.” Many people are interpreting this as a deliberate sabotage or a snub of VFX workers, but everything I have read seems to indicate that all participants were briefed early on about how much time they would have (one minute) and what would happen if they went overtime (the music from “Jaws”, followed by a cutaway.) It would seem that Mr. Westenhofer was simply not aware of how quickly one minute passes, and instead of jumping straight to his message, he exulted in the moment – which is what Oscar wins are for anyway.

I can’t speak to reality, because I just don’t have enough information. By Occam’s Razor it would indicate more happenstance than malice was at work here. But the more important point is that the event brought the entire issue of VFX studios into the public eye, and that’s a good thing.

Longtime critic and commentator Drew McWeeny published an open letter to Hollywood yesterday, and if you’re a consumer of films, either from Hollywood or independent producers, you would do a lot worse than to read this article – and the following commentary, which is just as enlightening.

The executive summary? Major studios are inserting hard objects into every possible orifice of VFX companies, who in turn are inserting hard objects into every possible orifice of those who work for them. And that’s the polite version. But read the letter, and the commentary, and then branch out and do your own research.

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None of this is new, of course. “The Wizard of Speed and Time,” while a delightful and entertaining film in its own right, is essentially a rant by Mike Jittlov about having hard objects inserted into every possible orifice by the movie studios of his own time… and things have only gotten worse. Now, instead of creative geniuses like Jittlov working on their own and being screwed, we have entire stables of very talented people being worked insane hours without compensation (either not being paid overtime, or not being paid at all beyond their base wages), having no benefits, being classified as independent contractors despite working full-time for their companies, having no representation, simply seeing their jobs eliminated as studios outsource their work to places like India, having their whereabouts monitored, and even being threatened with physical abuse if they don’t perform like gods. Two other good reads are at the VFX Soldier and io9.

Granted, this is the outrage du jour. Public fickleness being what it is, the tempest will calm and people will go back to their lives as soon as yesterday… but for those working in the industry, the intolerable conditions will continue. But it raises a question in my own mind: as a consumer, what’s my responsibility?

Many people are up in arms about genetically modified foods, and consumers right and left are declining to shop at places that sell GMO’s; many people refuse to buy coffee that isn’t Fair Trade; Apple felt the pressure of public outrage and stepped up their game with their Chinese suppliers; even humble quinoa has raised a few eyebrows after it was found that increasing Western demand has so raised prices that local producers can no longer afford their own product. People get mad about stuff, and they do things.

It’s long been known that (with a few notable exceptions in cases of truly ethical companies), the only way to influence an industry is to hit it where it really hurts – in the wallet. Hollywood studios are interested in only one thing – maximizing dollars for themselves, and minimizing dollars spent on other people. Those dollars, however, come from us. You and me. The lovers of Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, The Avengers, you name it. If it were not for these talented people (and the writers, of course, but that’s another essay), I would not have been able to laugh myself silly watching Hulk toss Loki around like a rag doll – best moment in the whole film, if you ask me – these films would be worth less than nothing without the VFX people behind the visual magic.

It’s a tough issue, because good movies are a large part of my entertainment, and a great way to escape the daily grind, or to forget about the douchebaggery and unfairness that pervades 21st-Century society. Giving up all movies until the VFX people have fair and effective representation would be one solution, but would have little effect unless enough people chose this route to cut revenues for Hollywood, and the chances of that are… well, “snowball in Hell” is what comes to mind.

At the very least, I can contribute to raising the awareness of people about the issue. This article is a tiny drop in the ocean, but it’s a lot of tiny drops coming together that create a flood. I can also be more judicious about what I watch and when, and continue to think about the issue from the consumer side. The people who are at the heart of more and more movies at least deserve that much consideration.

The Old Wolf has spoken.