How it started: TNG had just come out on DVD, and the box sets for each season were running about $100 each. With 7 seasons I was looking at $700 to binge-watch the whole show, about $1100 today’s money. Even renting the discs from Blockbuster meant I’d be spending $150 before I was done. That felt like a lot.

Instead, I tried out this new service for a fixed cost, about $10 a month. Netflix would send me a DVD at a time, so I could watch 4 episodes and send it back for the next 4. I loved that model for reasons I won’t go into here, and I did indeed binge all 7 seasons of TNG in a less than a year. Money well spent.

I know that was at least 20 years ago because I enthused about Netflix in 2004. Since then, between Netflix and Paramount I’ve probably spent about $2500 total to keep my Trek supply flowing. More than that initial sticker-shock cost, but over time it included the other Trek shows, the upgrade to streaming, and the TOS and TNG remasters to HD. I probably came out even.

Today I’m ditching Paramount because their new owner decided to choose the fascist path. Eff those guys. So I need an alternative to the Star Trek Channel. My usual go-to is Apple, and I did the math on what it would cost to get all the Star Trek series.

For example, TNG is now $100 for all 7 seasons. Enterprise is $50 for the 4 seasons they were able to get through. Older shows like Voyager and DS9 are cheaper, newer ones like Discovery and Picard a little more. The most expensive (Strange New Worlds) is about $25 a season.

The total for TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and the first 2 seasons of Strange New Worlds is… $600!

(Oh, and I did NOT forget Prodigy. I already own Prodigy because Paramount took it off their service and then Netflix did the same, and that’s a whole other reason not to stream. But I digress.)

Paramount’s least-garbage tier is $13/month. At that rate I could buy a season or so every couple months and have them all, every last Trek show to watch whenever I want forever, in 4 years. (Or I could decide to buy now so their sales numbers drop to zero after the merger.)

What about the new stuff? Yep, I’m giving up early access to Strange New Worlds, the only Trek show currently being released. I expect I’ll have to do the same for Starfleet Academy if they decide to release that. Maybe that means waiting a few months for a season to be available on Apple, or it might not be released there at all. I can be patient.

In the best case, they’re releasing new stuff and I’m buying it on Apple when it comes out. Wait, isn’t that just the same thing as paying them monthly? No. They’d need to be releasing an entire season every 2 months to cost the same, and we all know that’s not the direction they’re headed.

But also wait, isn’t this just replacing one big-company streaming service for another? OK, yes. Sure. I’m relying on Apple to be less terrible, which so far they have been. (No pre-roll ads. No “autoplay next video”. No pulling a show entirely. So far.) I’m also relying on the ability to download each video file in its entirely, and if Apple stops authorizing them for some reason I could REDACTED because the data’s all technically there, not on a remote server.

If I want to go further (and I might), I can look at my friendly local bookstore for seasons on disc. I’ve been doing that for shows like Mork & Mindy that aren’t on streaming at all, and they similarly tend to be about $10-20 a season. So I bet that over time I’ll end up with physical copies of all these shows, backing up the more-convenient Apple digital files, and ensuring my Trek supply for the next 20 years.

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?

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.

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.

Whenever I could get access to one, I read it cover-to-cover. Well, I probably skipped over the front bits with their opinions and letters, but I definitely spent time on everything in the back, including the ads. The science-magazine ads had a delightful mix of very-specific technical tools I wanted but didn’t understand or couldn’t afford – oscilloscopes, glassware, the occasional computer – but also bizarre ads for dubious contraptions like electric-shock pads to build muscle mass. (That one had a photo of arm wrestling with the huge caption “RUSSIA WINS?” because 80s cold-war movies.) The comic books dispensed with anything scientific or practical and focused on the dubious contraptions, with full-page spreads of “novelty” catalogs. Joy buzzers. Switch blades. Chattering teeth. Mini binoculars and spy cameras. And most intriguing of all: x-ray glasses.

The blurb under “x-ray glasses” always contained the keyword “illusion” to take the sting off, but it was surrounded by enticing phrases like “see bones through skin” and “see through clothes”. As an adult, I can look at that ad and easily spot the real message: this thing provides the illusion of seeing the bones in your hand, if you squint and aren’t familiar with what the bones of your hand should actually look like. If you look at someone from a bit of a distance, their clothes seem to take on a ghostly edge as though you could see through them to what’s behind the person. It’s a bit of a laugh for 5 minutes, and then you put it away.

Oh, but the implications to a kid! Especially a kid who just read through 5 minutes of a GI Joe or X-Men soap opera episode where either technology or “science” gives people powers. What if it really means you can see the bones in your hand, even if it’s using an “illusion” to show them to you? What if the “illusion” of seeing through clothes is of the person underneath, which is as good as the real thing? After all, the joy buzzer does something, and the switch blade is an actual knife, and even the chattering teeth do what they say in the big print.

What if it really works?

And if there was any barrier put up by skepticism or critical thinking, that one question was enough for my childhood optimism to swarm right over. And even if someone else tells me “it says it’s just an illusion”, then I have the perfect counter. I know it’s an illusion, but what if it really works? Bam, if I hold onto that cognitive dissonance, then it’s worth the purchase.

Which works in reverse, too. If I buy the glasses and try them on only to find that it’s an illusion that doesn’t show me bones or bodies or the insides of anything, really… “it didn’t work”. “It said it was just an illusion.” “Oh.” But does that stop the next person? Of course not. Because to them, what if it works? And that’s enough to keep people buying.

All that said, even though I understand the draw, I’d still be shocked if a doctor pulled out a pair of x-ray glasses to diagnose a pain in my arm. “Let’s see if there are any broken bones.” It wouldn’t just be a reason to doubt their diagnosis, it would be enough to doubt their competence.

This isn’t about generative AI specifically, but that’s what brought it to mind. I get sincerely baffled when someone leaps from “it’s just a language generator, but the ad said it could do this” to “I saw a demo that looked kinda like this if you squint” to “I’m going to base a critical decision on this.” “But it doesn’t actually do that,” I say, but they have the perfect cognitive-dissonance counter. “I know it’s an illusion, but what if it works?” And I have no recourse but to wait for the glasses to arrive, to watch them put the glasses on, and then watch them take the glasses off 5 minutes later. I want to be kind. “OK, how would you like to handle that critical decision now?”

It seems like there’s an endless supply of x-ray glasses out there. Crypto. Ride sharing.  ”Full Self-Driving”. Or a political candidate. Or a stainless-steel truck. Or a VR headset. Or “we’re going to Mars.” I can point straight at the part of the ad that calls out the illusion. And do it over again. And again.

But what if it works this time?

Or should it? As an individual, I actually dislike magical interfaces. I groan when I read setup documentation, because it always has 3 steps that fail somewhere between step 2 and 3. “Take the device out of the box, place it next to the main device, and it will pair.” Right. And if it doesn’t? (For me, it rarely does.) Then suddenly I’m in 300 more steps that are spread out over a dozen sites, hidden among the worst documentation interfaces possible. I’m pushing the one button on the device in a staccato rhythm while reinstalling the operating system of the other while draping a mylar blanket over both to block stray radiation, and… I realize I’m on the wrong end of the magic.

What I prefer in a case like that is good old fashioned* infrastructure. Plug A into B, tell B that A exists, tell A that B is what you want. Once they’re paired, remove the plug and you’re in the same situation the magic would have left you after step 3. Except! If you run into a problem, you know how to drop into the infrastructure and perform the same set of steps to get you back where  you need to be.

(*It’s not actually old fashioned. We just get used to the infrastructure that works, and it feels like it’s always been there. Infrastructure that doesn’t work is technology, and we get used to it not working and route around it.)

To design infrastructure vs magic, the difference is asking, “what happens when this goes wrong? How can someone using this get to the part that isn’t working and direct it manually?” That’s where the difficult work of engineering comes in, because you need to ask not only how your system works when it all works, but how the whole system it relies on behaves when it doesn’t. What does the process do when there’s no internet? What does it do when the signal from the other device is too weak? What does it do when the list of devices it sees is too long? When the device doesn’t speak the right protocol?

A lot of that design deals with falling back. If the latest protocol doesn’t work, is there an older one that might? If the signal is weak, is there a way to connect that doesn’t use radio? And above all, how do we communicate this to the person looking at it, so they know which part needs help?

So it’s hard work, but really it’s doing the work needed to create full automation. It’s not just automated when it works; that would be magic. Putting me in a place to fix it when it doesn’t work automatically is good infrastructure.

This site is the default page on my phone, so if you were tired of looking at a headline about Twitter when you visited here, rest assured I was feeling it every single day. I actually have had a post (title only) sitting in drafts for over a year, titled “a requiem for twitter”. I won’t be writing about that today, because we’re all tired of that place.

Instead, let’s get an early start on getting a new start. It’s the day after Solstice, which is either midwinter or the start of the new year (depending on how you do calendars). Time to dust off this site and get writing again.

Do I have a topic? Nah. You get a ramble today. I have a dozen different things on my mind, and perhaps the trouble comes from waiting for them to be fully-formed. The last thing I wrote here was before all this *waves hands*, and it’s weird that all those thoughts I had since about covid, working from home, working from work again during the apocalypse… all went unremarked here.

Am I writing because of Substack? Perhaps. Catching up on Mastodon today I discovered that they’re the new Main Character, for saying out loud the quiet parts about taking white supremacy money because they’re colorblind. The hypocrisy is transparent, in a way that’s becoming too common. We’re A because we’re committed to B. We’re B because we’re committed to not being A. If we say it in GPT-approved prose it sounds good enough, right?

So am I writing because of GPT? Maybe. I’m a technology fan and I want talking computers more than folks might realize, but something about the milk-toast marketing garbage that comes out of text generators bugs me right down to the nervous system. Seriously, my spine aches and my head hurts when you include those paragraphs that GenAI spat out, like blurry JPEG artifacts in a family photo or autotune in an aria. I don’t want it. It makes me want to write something from the heart, idiosyncratic and dumb and ultimately meaningful. (Doesn’t help that my style is already too stiff. Seriously, this is an unedited first draft. Imagine thinking thoughts like this in your head. It’s like an NPR podcast in here.)

So why am I writing? To reach out to you, dear reader. This’ll pass through a thousand mechanical apparatuses to reach you, but I hope it finds you. Well. Any time it does, and especially if you can find a way to reach back, on Slack or Mastodon or Discord or a postcard or just saying hi on the street or in the hallway, then I think it’s worth the time. Time to start again.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

Twitter’s stated goal is to make your timeline more engaging, which makes sense based on how they’re monetizing the service. Twitter charges advertisers to promote content, which like any other advertising requires a big block of people constantly paying attention to be worth anything.

For some users, filtering like this means nothing less than the end of Twitter. That may seem overblown, but I think it’s a fair assessment. To be specific: filtering the timeline changes Twitter from a communications service into a news or entertainment service, which is inherently less valuable to me as a Twitter user.

I’ll step back and define some categories:

Communications services involve connecting to a network, then sending or receiving over that network with any other member, as a peer. Examples include mail, phone, ham radio, text messaging, email, IM, and Skype. Connecting to the network may involve cost (like phone service) or registration (like ham radio), but once connected you can send and receive to and from anyone. Communications services are often judged by the completeness and availability of the network (vs. dropped calls or missed emails).

News services involve curated content made by producers and received by consumers. They might use their own network (like newspapers or television) or piggyback on communications networks (like email newsletters or sports updates by text), but the content itself is their primary concern. News services are often judged by the accuracy and timeliness of their information. Choosing whether to cover a particular story is considered an editorial decision, but news services can get in trouble for presenting edited content as truth. (Thus “recorded earlier” notices, or “this interview has been condensed”.)

Entertainment services are like news services, but go a step further; they curate content to be engaging, without the requirement to be true or accurate. Entertainment services often go hand-in-hand with news services, delivered by the same network (like television) or even sharing the same packaging (like newspapers).

The lines between these are fuzzy, but one yardstick to use is the kind of complaints you’d find reasonable in each case. We complain to the phone company when we can’t make a call, but we don’t complain to them about getting 20 tech support calls from family each day. We complain to ESPN when they don’t cover enough soccer, but not that a broadcast game didn’t feature enough goals. Conversely, if the phone company blocked your aunt’s tech-support calls or ESPN added CG goals to the game, that would be unacceptable. You wouldn’t see it as “more engaging content”; it would make the service inherently less valuable to you.

At its core, Twitter is (and has always been) a communications network. It’s a broadcast network, like ham radio, but if I’m sending and you’re listening you expect to get my message. It’s a free service, like IM, but you’d rebel if you started receiving IMs from advertisers or found companies on your buddy lists without adding them. It delivers news and entertainment content, like the mail, but you’d be shocked if the post office rearranged your newspaper or tucked another DVD in the Netflix sleeve.

The justification Twitter gives for adding tweets to your timeline – hey, these are still real tweets, not ads! – misjudge the category they’re in. If CNN swaps news stories with other news, that’s an editorial decision we expect them to make. If AT&T connects my call to a random neighbor because my wife didn’t pick up, that’s bizarre and unexpected.

Considering it this way, I’m not surprised at all that Twitter users are threatening to leave if filtering is added. I’ll probably leave myself, and look for a social communications service that knows what kind of network it is.

Paying for software sucks

Ever try applying a mod to Minecraft? They’re free to download, and they can add immensely to the gameplay. The trouble is that to pay for them, the developers put the files behind the nastiest advertising-based paywalls I’ve ever seen.

Finding ways to fund free software is broken. Part of it is the broad and fuzzy meaning of “free” here; it might be crucial open-source software like Linux produced by thousands of developers, or a freeware game made in an afternoon. It might be “free” and supported by ads (like those mods), or “free” and funded by a deep-pocketed patron who benefits from it (like Google Chrome).

Paid software isn’t much better. Despite the revolution brought by app stores (Steam and iOS in particular), the pay-up-front model still encourages developers to concentrate on a flashy big release with lots of features. Bug fixes and UX improvements are appreciated by users, but those users aren’t paying anything extra to get them.

In general, though, there’s a developer who has to choose between building your app and working on something else. Whether you’re waiting for a bug fix that keeps Kafka from paging you at 3am, or an update that adds reentry heating to Kerbal Space Program, you might find yourself wanting to shovel a little extra money in that developer’s direction to help them choose.

From the developer’s side, the ideal business model would be to give away the software to as many people as possible, then pick out the ones who can’t live without it and charge them as much as they’re willing to pay, monthly if they’ll put up with it.

Enter Patreon

Patreon was created in 2013 by Jack Conte, a musician who wanted to get his videos in front of as many people as possible. Jack didn’t like the two choices available to pay for them: YouTube advertising and iTunes. He was tempted to try crowdfunding, but couldn’t imagine running a new Kickstarter campaign for every new video just to cover a few hundred dollars.

Patreon works a lot like Kickstarter, but it’s progressive and recurring: Someone who loves Jack’s videos and wants him to make more can go to his Patreon page and pledge $1 toward the next video, which carries over to each video after that. Jack can then see how much patrons have pledged for the next video, whether $3 or $3000, and budget accordingly. When the video is done, Jack distributes it for free (to everyone, not just backers) and finds new people who love the video enough to kick in another dollar.

Patreon is new, but it’s already working well for both big and small projects. It provides recurring income to the artist, and a direct connection to the patrons. The patrons are paying a small amount for each release ($1 isn’t uncommon), but they can easily see how their pledges add up to give the project a decent budget. In some cases, artists have already dropped advertising because it annoys patrons who are kicking in enough to offset the income.

The key to Patreon’s model is that it encourages frequent releases of art made with the patrons in mind. When Jack is deciding whether a new video is worth doing, he has two natural questions to ask: “Will my patrons think this is worth the $1 they pledged?” and  ”Am I willing to give up that patron money if I don’t do this?” The result is a regular cadence of good art.

Patreon is ready for free software as-is

If you’ve worked with an open-source software project, this might sound familiar to you. There might be lots of people waiting on new releases that fix bugs or add crucial features, but there are only so many spare hours in the day to work on them. A steady stream of patron dollars might encourage developers to work on their free software projects rather than take a contract job or start a new app for the App Store.

Patreon is neutral about the kinds of projects it accepts, so a developer could theoretically set up a Patreon page and start accepting backers right now. Each time an update is released, instead of linking to Youtube the developer would link to the update on GitHub or RubyGems or wherever they normally would.

Links back to Patreon could be added to the project’s README or changelog, or better yet mentioned on feature requests and when closing bugs. After a while, I imagine the relationship between backers and good releases would become plain in both directions: If you want better software, pledge more. If you want us to give more, make real improvements more often.

Frequent updates make better software

As a side benefit, the Patreon model would support the agile software development model. Each iteration (a short development cycle, usually with a fixed time) is judged on whether a notable improvement was shipped to customers, and patrons would be more likely to pledge based on the same metric. Bug fixes can be as valuable to existing users as new features, so there would be a strong business case for fixing bugs and making UX improvements each sprint that otherwise wouldn’t get on the roadmap.

Semantic versioning might see a surge in use, too. Rather than bundling flashy new features into big releases that justify re-purchasing software, the Patreon model would reward regular, repeated progress. Without a monetary reason to treat a point release as a major version (cough Twitterbot 3 cough), the field might be clear to set version numbers based on API compatibility.

Build funding into project sites

The obvious next step would be to create a patron-funding site specifically for software projects. GitHub is already a great community for describing, delivering, and collaborating on open-source software. Integrating patron funding would probably be straightforward. The same could be said of RubyGems or any other site that keeps track of version releases, too.

The tricky part, though, is getting the balance right; Patreon and Kickstarter have both done a great job (and put in some serious UX and community work) distinguishing “backers” and “pledges” from “donors” and “tips”, which seems to make all the difference. Software-patronage sites would have to work to connect the money pledged to real and regularly-delivered improvements to the software.

Still, I hope this model gets adopted by software projects sooner rather than later. I’d love to pay for updates to an amazing Minecraft mod by kicking in a dollar instead of dodging sketchy ads. Wouldn’t you?

1. If you don’t meet the backing goal, this project will not happen.
2. If you do meet the backing goal, this project will happen.

In case they’re not obvious enough, an example:

The Furry Pink Car Example

Let’s say I built an absurdist art car, and I want to add furry pink seats in time for the next Burning Man. I have a good reason to want the new seats: riding in the car without them is uncomfortable enough that people complain loudly. However, I don’t have the funds to add them myself.

I have some rewards in mind: an exclusive video of the seats being installed, a ride in the car itself, and for top backers, your name painted on the passenger door.

I know there are plenty of people who would back my project, so I’m ready to go. How could I screw it up?

Remember: If the goal isn’t met, the project won’t happen.

Easy. I could state my project in broader terms than I’m actually funding. “Absurdist Art Car at Burning Man 2013!” My project video could talk all about the car, with a quick mention of how pink fluffy seats would be nice.

When potential backers read that title and watch that video, they’re left with a big question: “You already have this car. Why do you need more money?” From the project page (which is all they have to go on!) it sounds like the project will happen whether they back it or not.

I had this feeling about a recent space company that went the crowdfunding route. The rewards were the usual space-company merchandise, and the project boiled down to “Help us do what we’re already doing!” My contribution wasn’t going to make a difference, so I didn’t bother.

How could I fix it? Change my title to “Pink Fuzzy Seats: The Only Way To Travel” and describe the benefits (and unreasonable expense!) of the all-important seats. If the money doesn’t come through, the art car will be as uncomfortable as it was last year, so no rides for anyone!

Great! How could I screw that up, then?

Remember: If the goal is met, this project will happen.

Messing this up is more subtle, but a lot more common. There’s an assumption underlying my whole project, something I might completely miss by (correctly) stating the goal narrowly. Take a look: can you spot it?

That’s right: I need a working, drivable art car. The rewards require it, the seats are useless without it. If something happens to that car so that I can’t take it to Burning Man, then I’m on the hook to fix it.

WITHOUT asking for more money. That’s the really tough part. Going back to those fluffy-seat backers with a second Kickstarter (or IndieGoGo, or anything like it) seems natural, but it’s dead wrong. By asking for new funds to make an old project possible, I’m casting doubt on my ability to complete that project at all. Why would my backers throw good money after bad?

I often see this problem with films and other art projects, the kind that have lots of steps. (Writing, shooting, editing, post-production, distribution, aigh!) It’s natural to make the film the project, with backer rewards to match, but if you’re just funding the first steps you should only provide rewards from those steps. (A rough cut of the film, for example.) Don’t offer the whole film if you’re only funding part of it.

In my case, I’m resolving to keep the car running and get it to Burning Man, no matter what. It’s something I would have had to do anyway, but now my backers are relying on me to get the furry pink seats on the road.

Note that I’m not going to list “car breaking down” as one of the “risks” or “uncertainties” on the project page, either. If Burning Man is canceled, that’s an uncertainty. If faux pink fur melts in the Black Rock sun, that’s a risk. However, I’m pledging to do everything I can to get the car there, and it’s reasonable to expect me to deliver on that promise.