During my (brief) stint teaching senior leaders about AI, there was one question that I urged them to learn above all others. What is the acceptable failure rate? For this, I had to teach them two concepts. False Positives. For example, telling someone they have cancer when they don't. False Negatives. For example, telling someone they don't have cancer when they do. There is a cost associated with both of these errors. In the first case, it is the monetary cost of unnecessary treatment …
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Uber are undoubtedly a company engaged in extremely dodgy activity. But, on the other had, they're ridiculously convenient. A few months ago, we landed in a foreign country, opened the same Uber app as we used back home, and booked a cab. It just worked. I didn't need to register for a different version. I didn't need to create a new account. I didn't need to add a new credit card. That's the sort of seamless experience which can only come from a centralised service. But, hey, we're all…
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Only fools try to predict the future. You can read my earlier predictions, or dig deep into my archives and rate me on how foolish I am. I tend to look at technology through the lens of "what do I want to happen?" and then assume the worst. So, here goes! Federation Gets Simpler As I wrote about in The Social Pendulum we see a swing to extremes of culture. We've had a decade-or-so of big central social networks. Now we're swinging the other way. Will Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr start using …
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Nat Spiller, an admired climate change activist, has accidentally drowned. That’s the police verdict. But was it an accident? His partner Ellie thinks otherwise. Pam, Ellie’s aunt, draws a reluctant Lauren Fraser into the mystery. It's a bit weird to describe a murder mystery as "cosy" - but that's the vibe of this book. It's a sequel to The One That Got Away and follows a similar template. The eponymous Lauren Fraser isn't exactly the town snoop - but she has a knack for sticking her nos…
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How should I design my personal DNS for all the cool new Federated Services and IndieWeb protocols? Way back in the early 2000s, I started this website - shkspr.mobi. A few years later, I added a blog. I could have used the main domain, or created a subdomain like blog.shkspr.mobi. In the end, I chose a subdirectory of shkspr.mobi/blog I don't know if that was the right choice back then, but it is looking like the wrong choice now. I want to be a "first class" citizen of the Fediverse. I…
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The headstrap which ships with the Meta Quest 2 is shit. It is a cheap piece of fabric, held together with velcro. It's fiddly to adust and uncomfortable to use for longer than a few minutes. Zuckerberg likes causing you pain. So I purchased the cheapest upgrade strap I could find - £15 on special offer. It has a forehead cushion, which reduces pressure on the face. The tightness is adjustable with a dial - much easier to use and more precise than the tension straps on the original. The …
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The Church of England publishes statistics about the numbers of its faithful. These are particularly interesting in light of the recent news that the UK no-longer has a Christian majority. The CofE's statistics are for 2019 - before COVID messed up everything - and I think offer a fascinating glimpse into its future. The two figures which struck me were: 89,000 baptisms during 2019 114,000 funerals during 2019 Back in 2014, the numbers were: 130,000 baptisms 146,000 funerals The good…
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Amazon Alexa is losing billions of dollars. Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars. The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars. Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress? I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. How true is that! If you've…
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Way back in the mists of time, I did my secondary-school work experience at the BBC. Specifically, Children's BBC. Every day for a couple of weeks, I'd commute into White City, wander those hallowed halls, sit at a desk, and... You know... I can't remember! I know I got to visit the "Broom Cupboard", and I'm pretty sure I did a lot of data entry, oh - and I sat in a meeting for "Two-Way TV". These were the early days of the consumer Internet. The WWW was still brand new and it wasn't certain…
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It's a Friday night in the late 1990s and my teenaged friend group are bored. We're not cool enough to hang about in the park drinking cider. And we're not nerdy enough to play D&D. We don't have enough money to go to the cinema. What we do have is a Blockbuster card and, between us, just enough cash to rent a newly released movie. Eight of us pile into the local Blockbuster and begin to scavenge the shelves. DVDs have yet to appear in our sleepy town, so we hold up chunky VHS boxes for…
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Problem: My wife and I are going on a long plane journey and don't have seats next to each other. How can we communicate? Constraints: The plane WiFi is ruinously expensive. The in-seat messaging service isn't private. We both have Android phones. Preferences: Open Source. Secure. Easy to use. Solution: Use Bluetooth messaging app Briar. The Good The app was pretty easy to set up. Enter a username and password. Grant it the permissions it needs. Then add a contact. Briar lets you send…
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.screenplay { /* width: 80%; */ margin: 0 auto; font-family: monospace; } .screenplay dl { position: static; border: none; padding: 0; display: block; width: 50%; min-width: 24em; margin: 0 auto; } .screenplay h2, .screenplay dd { font-size: 100%; } .screenplay h2, .screenplay dd, .screenplay span { text-transform: uppercase; } .screenplay dd { text-align: center; } .screenplay dt { margin: 1em 0; } .screenplay dd + dt { margin-top: 0; } < p>Another short story. This time in the form of a…
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