All posts by Chris

between a paradox

Science fiction, Writing

The second note was a surprise.

The first letter was a delight, of course, the best possible gift for your 11th birthday. It told you of your purpose, and set out in detail how you had built – would build – the time machine. It told you step-by-step how you would stop – had stopped – your grandfather all those years ago, with subtle redirection to make him the kind man you cried over when he died. You were just 10, and it seemed that everything changed, and here it was changing again at 11.

It gave you a chance to meet him again, eventually, after all that study and experimentation changed you too. You became his friend, maybe the only one, and little by little you helped him avoid the horrors that the letter warned you about.

So that one last day when you left him and wrote the letter to yourself, you didn’t expect to find another letter waiting. You copied it – will copy it – word for word just as you had the first, starting: “The second note was a surprise…”

And in the end, you understood – I hope you understand – what it was telling you. The purpose is done, but not gone. You can be proud of who you are – who we had to be. Now you are yourself. After this one last task, you’re free. Go on.

a community building

Culture, Technology

My head’s a swirl of different ideas right now, but here’s one that keeps coming up: libraries as resilience centers, and whether that’s a problem or a solution.

One of the attractive (to me) features of a resilience center is placing emergency supplies and aid in the same place that people will ordinarily use on a regular basis. Need to charge your phone during an outage? Go to the same community center where you take art classes or play board games. Need a meal when your kitchen isn’t safe to use? Use the kitchen at the community center where we do potlucks and movie nights. That familiarity is useful for a lot of reasons, but one that stands out to me today is that the resources get regularly used, maintained, and verified useful. I don’t know my camp stove and battery backup are in working order, because it’s been years since I used either. I do know my “Mr. Induction” hotplate works because I used it this morning.

Japan has this great infrastructure pattern called “disaster parks“, where coordination and supplies and other resilience infrastructure is built in (and under) city parks, so that when disaster strikes people can go to their nearest park for aid. Very helpful in fires or earthquakes, where buildings themselves are the danger to avoid and distance from them is a benefit. The familiarity is “go to the park”, but are any of the emergency supplies used regularly to test them? Is there a big ol’ cookout every 6 months as they rotate in new dry goods?

I go to the local library on the regular, so I do think of it as a cooling shelter or a warming shelter. (Seattle isn’t awful in either regard, but we do have our days.) Cooling the library in a resilient way makes a lot of sense, and by design it’s got great capacity for a lot of people at once. (Books like to have a big sturdy building around them.)

Are we expecting too much from a library, though? People in crisis need to eat, to marshal their resources, to go to the bathroom. Libraries don’t like this day-to-day; even the most trafficked university library generally wants you to go somewhere else to get refreshed. At most, a library dedicates a portion of the building to the less book-friendly stuff. So when people in crisis start to cross those lines, we hear about “safety concerns” at libraries or a lack of staff. (Because if you’re looking to work at a library, are you really thinking of it as a resilience center?)

So when I say a “community center”, what do we actually have that suits that purpose? Is it the library, expanded? Is it something else? (Don’t say a mall, we already showed that isn’t true.) Where do you go when you need to find community?

 

 

AI is going great (dot com)

Oddly Enough, Technology

News stories describing the reality behind AI hype just keep coming, and they’re starting to remind me of Molly White’s excellent Web3 Is Going Just Great site.

Turns out LLMs won’t so much solve the climate crisis, but the energy they use will hasten it. (from The Tyee, which I encourage reading on the regular if you aren’t already)

Turns out AI “copilots” hallucinate software packages that don’t exist, which creates a security hole ready to exploit.

Those are the costs, though. What about the rewards?

Well, turns out government chatbots tell people it’s OK to break the law. So that’s a savings?

And at the absolute forefront of automation in retail, Amazon is giving up on AI-driven checkout in favor of (checks notes) scanning the bar code of the thing you’re going to buy, because the “automation” turned out to be 1000 people in India watching customers as they shop.

 

Nintendo’s robot

Science

There’s an entertaining Youtube video about the R.O.B. toy robot that Nintendo included with the first NES system. The toy was pivotal in recasting the video game system – which to be sure was a video game system at the start, was a video game system when released, and continues to this day as a video game system – as an “entertainment system” that was a “toy experience” unlike any the then-crashing video game industry had ever seen.

Except it wasn’t. Clearly.

In development, it was an intriguing prototype that wasn’t likely to go anywhere unless it got expensive enough that no one could buy it. On release, Nintendo created only two games that could use it. Those would be the only two games ever released for it, and for good reason. And even today, with folks developing sophisticated games for old systems for the sheer challenge of it, and despite how many of the original systems were sold, there are still just the two games. (Watch the video for details.)

So in short, it never fulfilled its purpose.

As a robot, that is.

It was an excellent marketing ploy. The robot could sit in a shop window and draw people in. The breathless ad copy on the packaging could promise a “toy experience” that got past parents’ objectives to another video game system. And underneath it all was the vague sense that it could be the future. You never know, right?

Except it wasn’t. R.O.B. was a flop as a robot, as an experience, and as a technology.

But it was successful as a distraction.