NATO phonetic alphabet
I was pretty excited recently to speak with a customer support agent who knew the NATO phonetic alphabet. Finally, some clarity! With a last name like mine, it really helps.
King for a day
If I were king for a day, I'd address many of those little annoyances we face every day by requiring that everyone…
- Use the metric system
- Use 24-hour time
- Use the YYYY-MM-DD format for dates
- Stop using daylight saving time
- Use the International Fixed Calendar, which has exactly 28 days each month, except…
- Treat Monday as the first day of the week (it's called the weekend, after all)
On my second day, maybe I'd mandate Unix line endings and outlaw feedback requests. We'll see.
Gmail spam from other Gmail addresses
My Gmail address frequently receives spam messages from other Gmail addresses. Gmail even marks the messages as spam. Why does Google not automatically close the offending accounts or help their proper users to recover them? (In some cases, spammers hijack legitimate accounts so that they can send the spam out as that person.) I find this so irresponsible. It seems like another case where Congress should force a tech company to do the right thing, if only Congress knew anything about technology.
The purpose of conversation
It saddens me that social media appears to have taught so many people that the purpose of conversation is to score points.
Vitalik Buterin on Community Notes
Vitalik Buterin's excellent essay What do I think about Community Notes? is one of the very few articles about social media that has left me feeling extremely optimistic.
Even if less than one percent of misinformative tweets get a note providing context or correcting them, Community Notes is still providing an exceedingly valuable service as an educational tool. The goal is not to correct everything; rather, the goal is to remind people that multiple perspectives exist, that certain kinds of posts that look convincing and engaging in isolation are actually quite incorrect, and you, yes you, can often go do a basic internet search to verify that it's incorrect.
It's clear Community Notes is imperfect, and X does incalculable harm, just as pre-Elon Twitter did. Still, this project is genuinely impressive: a smart, thoughtful, verifiable open-source algorithm that aims to reduce misinformation and that actually stands a chance of decreasing political polarization. As terrible as X can be, I don't see this happening at Meta or ByteDance.
What’s so hard about developing software?
Why do non-technical people sometimes dramatically underestimate the time, money, and effort required to build software? I think it’s because they only see the end result: the app, website, or other product.
If a Martian visited Earth and inspected War and Peace or the encyclopedia, they might assume books were easy to produce. Some paper, some ink… what’s the big deal? How hard is it to scribble on pulp or bang on a keyboard? Of course, the visitor wouldn’t understand what the ink and pages represent. They wouldn’t understand how much research went into the work, let alone reading, planning, conversation, editing, and life experience. Thankfully, most of us have had some writing experience in school, and we understand it’s not so simple.
Dunking on others is not persuasion
If we want to create a better world, good people need to persuade others to at least consider their perspectives. Dunking on them does not achieve that. In fact, dunking on outsiders has to be one of the most effective ways of pushing them even further away.
Why do we do it?
When you make a mistake while using technology, make it again
What makes me “good” with computers? I've wondered and written about this in the past. Recently, I remembered another habit that helps me learn.
When I make a mistake, I try to start over and make it again. That may be unintuitive, but there's no better way of learning how to avoid it. I don't recommend repeating a mistake if doing so would cause additional harm, of course, but even catastrophic mistakes can be repeated safely with some creativity. If you accidentally delete an important file, for example, create an unimportant file and try to delete that one in the same way.
Righteous indignation
Righteous indignation powerfully affects the world. For that reason, we need to be sure we're actually right before we act on it, or for that matter, before it acts on us.