Digital Extremes wants to break the trend of live-service games meticulously planning years of content ahead of time using road maps…’What happens then is you don’t have a surprise and you don’t have a world that feels alive,’ [community director Rebecca] Ford says. ‘You have a product that feels like a result of an investor’s meeting 12 months ago.'”

— Steven Messner, “This Means War,” PC Gamer, Feb. 2020, p. 34

Video games have been leading indicators for almost forty years. It was back in the early 1980s that games started welcoming modders who altered the visuals, turning Castle Wolfenstein into Castle Smurfenstein, adding maps, levels, cars, weapons, and rules to game after game. Thus the games became more replayable. Thus the games became whatever users wanted to make them. Thus games — the most rule-bound of activities outside of a law court or a tea ceremony — became purposefully unpredictable.

Rebecca Ford is talking about Warframe, but what she says about planning and road maps points the way for what’s happening with business strategies overall. The Internet has not only gotten us used to an environment that is overwhelming and unpredictable, but we’ve developed approaches that let us leverage that unpredictability, from open platforms to minimum viable products to agile development.

The advantage of strategy is that it enables an organization to focus its attention and resources on a single goal. The disadvantages are that strategic planning assumes that the playing field is relatively stable, and that change general happens according to rules that we can know and apply. But that stability is a dream. Now that we have tech that lets us leverage unpredictability, we are coming to once again recognize that strategies work almost literally by squinting our eyes so tight that they’re almost closed.

Maybe games will help us open our eyes so that we do less strategizing and more playing.

Comments Off on Games without strategies

It is fantastic that 14 Paris museums have put images of 150,000 artworks into the public domain. Go take a look. It makes the world visibly better.

But …

…The images are easily accessible one at a time for a human who is browsing. You can also click to download it, and then do whatever you want with it. But they are, apparently purposefully, difficult to batch download. That deprives us of the ability to set computers onto the images and their metadata so that they can discover relationships, and patterns of relationships, among them. That’s a lost opportunity.

I understand it’s hard for institutions to give up on the credit they deserve for maintaining these artworks. Items put in the public domain can be passed around and duplicated without any reference to the source that made them available, or even to the artist who created them. But in return, the culture gets to freely share those images, and to incorporate them into new works, which helps to preserve and extend our shared culture.

So I don’t want to be ungrateful for this enormous gift to the world. But one more step – say, an open API that enables batch download – and the world can benefit even more from these museum’s awesome generosity.

(Hat tip to Keith Dawson.)

Comments Off on In the public domain, but encumbered

Just over twenty years ago, computer scientists were racing the clock to fix a possibly devastating error brought about by an over-estimation of the pace at which tech becomes obsolete, which is an over-estimation of the pace of change itself. It turns out that one of the two popular solutions to the problem made the same mistake. And now we’re paying for it, but mainly through some annoyances, not the sort of world-stopping calamity that the prior error threatened.

The problem twenty years ago was that software developers had with some frequency thought that storing the year could be done with two digits, so that 1970 would be saved as 70. After all, the program wouldn’t still be used in 2000! Would we also still be driving around on earth-bound cars, or giving poodles ridiculous haircuts? Ridiculous!

But, if those apps were in fact still be used as the new millennium began, then the two digits internally representing the year would be taken internally as 00, which would be likely to confuse a computer that would assume – based on the way numbers work – that 00 (2000) comes before 70 (1970). And 2001 would look like 1901, etc.

One approach developers took to preempt the Y2K (year two thousand) bug was to change the way the programs expressed date data, allotting four digits to the year. We shall call this “the right way.” But it’s more complex than it seems. For example, you may have to find every place in a complex, integrated set of programs where the date is referred to. You may have to recompile ancient code, unearthing compilers from ancient crypts guarded by three-headed dogs. It was a freaking nightmare for many organizations.

The second approach was to write a little code that looked for year dates between 00 and 20, and write an except that takes them as referring to 2000-2020. Most applications aren’t dealing with dates going back to the beginning of the 20th century, so that worked. Chris Stokel-Walter (twitter: @stokel) in his excellent, brief explainer in New Scientist, says that an estimated 80% of Y2K solutions took this approach, known as “windowing”, but which we shall refer to it as the “Please don’t do this” approach.

Well, now it’s 2020 and some indeterminate number of windowed apps haven’t updated the fix. Thus, some traffic meters have stopped working. As Chris writes, “The theory was that these windowed systems would be outmoded by the time 2020 arrived…”

So, exactly the same over-estimation of the pace of tech obsolescence has led to exactly the same problem. Surprise?

It’s not at all clear, however, who has made this mistake. The developers implementing the windowing patch were staving off an imminent, plausible crashing of globally crucial systems. Windowing was a reasonable approach to forestalling this crisis … but only if there was a system – a human system – to remember to allocate resources for fixing the problem that the patch postponed.

Conclusion: “Human system” is an oxymoron.

Comments Off on Y2K’s 1% solution

This title is the last line of a post from Bix.

Here is the post’s opening:

So, this research from Orbit Media (via Andy McIlwain) should actually be read as a list of all the things we should ignore if we truly want to revive the blogosphere.

Bix’s post is correct.

Comments Off on “Just fucking blog”

Here are links to the earliest cartoons in Riochard Brody’s excellent article, “Draw Stars,” in the Dec. 30, 2019 New Yorker. (Note: Racist and other stereotypes below.)

Emile Cole, Fantasmagorie, 1908, restored. (Original)

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo, 1911:

McCay, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914:

Max and Dave Fleischer, Out of the Inkwell: The Tantalizing Fly, 1919 (remastered):

The Fleischers, Jumping Beans, 1922 (remastered):

Wallace Carlson (Bray Studios), How Cartoons Are Made, 1919:

Wallace Carlson, He resolves not to smoke, 1914:

Gregory La Cava, The Breath of a Nation, 1919:

Joseph Sunn claymation: Green Pastures, 1919:

Wallace McCutcheon’s merging of Green Pastures with live action, in The Sculptor’s Nightmare:

Howard S. Moss stop action, Mary & Gretel, part 1, 1916:

Mary & Gretel, part 2:

Walter Ruttmann’s abstract Opus 1, 1921:

Lette Reiniger’s silhouette Cinderella, 1921:

Bryant Fryer’s silhouette Follow the Swallow, 1927:

Comments Off on Early animation

I did an image search on this photo to see whether it’s openly licensed. Google couldn’t find it, but here’s what it told me:

Nailed it.

Comments Off on It’s official

Inc. magazine has named Everyday Chaos as one of its 11 “must read” books for entrepreneurs. “For product makers, industry shakers, and folks who want to be their best selves, these are the titles to read now.”

The article’s author, Leigh Buchanan, does an excellent job encapsulating the book:

Weinberger, for decades one of the most prescient and philosophical thinkers about the internet, here tackles the broader subject of how technology influences the way we understand and function in the world. Moving back and forth between ancient history and 10 minutes from now, Everyday Chaos explains that fixed-future ideas like progress and preparation are insufficient in the face of multiplying layers of complexity. Yet as our decision-making is overtaken by machines, it becomes possible to operate without our own hypotheses about what will work. Weinberger advocates for operating in a state of “unanticipation” in which we leave options open (think minimal viable products, agile development, and black swans). In this way of looking at the world, traditional strategy can be dangerous. Obscurity is your friend.

Comments Off on It’s official: You MUST read Everyday Chaos

In “The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up“, Florent Crivello (twitter: @Altimor) has written a clear, convincing, and compact critique of the assumption that efficient organization is tidy, neat, and rectilinear. “[E]fficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient.”

This is because complex systems — like laws, cities, or corporate processes — are the products of a thousand factors, each pulling in a different direction. And even if each factor is tidy taken separately, things quickly get messy when they all merge together

He applies this to management organization, the tool sets used by collaborators, city planning, science fiction visions of the future, parenting, and pizzas.

Not to mention that in one brief, beautiful essay he unites the themes of two of my books: Everything Is Miscellaneous and my new Everyday Chaos.

Comments Off on The inefficiency of order. The efficiency (and beauty) of chaos

Note that this is not late-breaking news. It’s breaking news brought to you late: Android contains a really great Google transcription tool.

Live Transcribe transcribes spoken text in real time. So far, it seems pretty awesome at it. And its machine learning model is loaded on your device, so it works even when you’re offline — convenient and potentially less intrusive privacy-wise. (Only potentially, because Google could upload your text when you connect if it wanted to.)

You can download Live Transcribe from the Play Store, but if you’re like me, it will only give you an option to uninstall it. Oddly, it doesn’t show up in my App drawer. You have to go to your phone’s Settings > Accessibility screen and scroll all the way down to find the Live Transcribe option.

Once you turn it on, you’ll get an icon all the way at the bottom of your screen, to the right of the Home button. Weird that it’s given that much status, but there it is.

I expect I will be using this tool with surprising frequency … although if I expect it, it won’t be surprising.

Comments Off on Late, breaking Android app news: transcription

Of the 4.67 gazillion pages on the Web, exactly 1.87 nano-bazillion are understandable by children. Suppose there were a convention and a service for making child-friendly versions of any site that wanted to increase its presence and value?

That was the basic idea behind our project at the MindCET Hackathon in the Desert a couple of weeks ago.

MindCET is an ed tech incubator created by the Center for Educational Technology (CET) in Israel. “Automatically generates grade-specific versions? Hahaha.”Its founder and leader is Avi Warshavsky, a brilliant technologist and a person of great warmth and character, devoted to improving education for all the world’s children. Over the ten years that I’ve been on the CET tech advisory board, Avi has become a treasured personal friend.

In Yeruham on the edge of the Negev, 14 teams of 6-8 people did the hackathon thing. Our team — to my shame, I don’t have a list of them — pretty quickly settled on thinking about what it would take to create a world-wide expectation that sites that explain things would have versions suitable for children at various grade levels.

So, here’s our plan for Onderstand.com.

Let’s say you have a site that provides information about some topic; our example was a page about how planes fly. It’s written at a normal adult level, or perhaps it assumes even more expertise about the topic. You would like the page to be accessible to kids in grade school.

No problem! Just go to Onderstand.com and enter the page’s URL. Up pops a form that lets you press a button to automatically generate versions for your choice of grade levels. Or you can create your own versions manually. The form also lets you enter useful metadata, including what school kid questions you think your site addresses, such as “How do planes fly?”, “What keeps planes up?”, and “Why don’t planes crash?” (And because everything is miscellaneous, you also enter tags, of course.)

Before I go any further, let me address your question: “It automatically generates grade-specific versions? Hahaha.” Yes, it’s true that in the 36 hours of the hackathon, we did not fully train the requisite machine learning model, in the sense that we didn’t even try. But let’s come back to that…

Ok, so imagine that you now have three grade-specific versions of your page about how planes fly. You put them on your site and give Onderstand their Web addresses as well as the metadata you’ve filled in. (Perhaps Onderstand.com would also host or archive the pages. We did not work out all these details.)

Onderstand generates a button you can place on your site that lets the visitor know that there are kid-ready versions.

The fact that there are those versions available is also recorded by Onderstand.com so that kids know that if they have a question, they can search Onderstand for appropriate versions.

Our business model is the classic “We’re doing something of value so someone will pay for it somehow.” Of course, we guarantee that we will never sell, rent, publish, share or monetize user information. But one positive thing about this approach: The service does not become valuable only once there’s lots of content. “Because sites get the kid-ready button, they get value from it”Because sites get the kid-ready button, they get value from it even if the Onderstand.com site attracts no visitors.

If the idea were to take off, then a convention that it establishes would be useful even if Onderstand were to fold up like a cheap table. The convention would be something like Wikipedia’s prepending “simple” before an article address. For example, the Wikipedia article “Airplane” is a great example of the problem: It is full of details but light on generalizations, uses hyperlinks as an excuse for lazily relying on jargon rather than readable text, and never actually explains how a plane flies. But if you prepend “simple” to that page’s URL — https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-wing_aircraft — you get taken to a much shorter page with far fewer details (but also still no explanation of how planes fly).

Now, our hackathon group did not actually come up with what those prepensions should be. Maybe “grade3”, “grade9”, etc. But we wouldn’t want kids to have to guess which grade levels the site has available. So maybe just “school” or some such which would then pop up a list of the available versions. What I’m trying to say is that that’s the only detail left before we transform the Web.

The machine learning miracle

Machine learning might be able to provide a fairly straightforward, and often unsatisfactory, way of generating grade-specific versions.

“The ML could be trained on a corpus of text that has human-generated versions for kids.”The ML could be trained on a corpus of text that has human-generated versions for kids. The “simple” Wikipedia pages and their adult equivalents could be one source. Textbooks on the same subjects designed for different class levels might be another, even though — unlike the Wikipedia “simple” pages — they are not more or less translations of the same text. There are several experimental simplification applications discussed on the Web already.

Even if this worked, it’s likely to be sub-par because it would just be simplifying language, not generating explanations that creatively think in kids’ terms. For example, to explain flight to a high schooler, you would probably want to explain the Bernoulli effect and the four forces that act on a wing, but for a middle schooler you might start with the experiment in which they blow across a strip of paper, and for a grade schooler you might want to ask if they’ve ever blown on the bottom of a bubble.

So, even if the ML works, the site owner might want to do something more creative and effective. But still, simply having reduced-vocabulary versions could be helpful, and might set an expectation that a site isn’t truly accessible if it isn’t understandable.

Ok, so who’s in on the angel funding round?

Comments Off on Making the Web kid-readable