Transmission #44: Computing Post-Moore's, CIA Webmasters, Ark Heads and Me as a Muppet.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello. Welcome.
This is Transmissions by me, Marty Brown.
What is Transmissions? It’s an ongoing, (usually) fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
I recently went on holidays, which means I got to read more than usual, so it’s a bumper edition today. Enjoy.
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Design
The Next Century of Computing
Charles Rosenbauer, Substack
This article gets quite technical, and I won’t pretend to understand all of it, but it’s fascinating nonetheless. Moore’s Law is over. We had a good run while it lasted, but we have hit some fundamental physical limits on how small we can shrink chips, and so in order to keep wringing improvements out of computing architecture, we’re going to have to get a whole lot more creative.
What this means, says Ronsenbauer, is that we will see a profusion of differing approaches to how we might build new, faster chips, and that this is good and exciting thing.
America’s Throwaway Spies
Joel Schectman, Reuters
There’s a lot to recommend in this article, insight into life under the regime in Iran to the callous way that the CIA has treated its sources, but what caught my eye from a design perspective was the way that the CIA had created communication channels between its sources in Iran and their CIA handlers: it created 1-off, innocuous-looking fake websites that had secret messaging systems hidden inside them.
Far from being customized, high-end spycraft, Iraniangoals.com was one of hundreds of websites mass-produced by the CIA to give to its sources, the independent analysts concluded. These rudimentary sites were devoted to topics such as beauty, fitness and entertainment, among them a Star Wars fan page and another for the late American talk show host Johnny Carson.
These websites are so incredible. You really need to see them.
Of course, the whole thing went terribly wrong and innocent people have been thrown in jail for years as a result. For those who think the CIA is capable of extremely elaborate, world-shifting conspiracies that require a high level of competence to enact, let me present Exhibit A in my rebuttal:
Ideas
Ark Head
Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm
Rao puts his finger on something I’ve been feeling for a while: that we’re so collectively exhausted from living in ‘unprecedented times’ that we are simply blocking it all out, we’re unable to respond.
This isn’t to say we’re in a state of frozen helplessness or zombie behaviors. Most people are still responding functionally and practically. It’s just that those responses are extremely conservative and limited. We’re responding within the narrowest horizons we can conceive of. We’re drawing our circles of control much tighter, and dialing down our sensitivity in the circle of concern.
…
One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt… We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality–an ark–and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same.
Collision Course
Lauren Smiley, New York Magazine
Ripping yarn. “The car wrecks were staged. The injuries were real. Led by a charismatic rogue, one family bloodied itself to pocket $6 million.”
I mean, after an opening life that, you just have to keep reading don’t you?
Quote of the Week
"Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior – forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment.
We need to change our entire approach to the question. Our concerns about anonymity are overly-simplistic; system design can’t solve social problems without actual social change."
— The Real Name Fallacy, J.Nathan Matias, Coral
Chart of the Week
Other
🇺🇦 Lots of opinions about the Ukraine war: As the war sours, Putin will face rising political trouble at home and have to reverse course, Link. Physicist Max Tegmark puts the chances of all-out nuclear war at a mortifyingly high 1 in 6, Link. An excellent, in-depth account of the ‘escalation vortex’ how we might end up in a nuclear exchange, and what that could actually mean for the world, Link
🤖 James Earl Jones is 91 now, so he’s stepping back from voicing Darth Vader. He is being replaced, of course, by an AI. Link
👪 Advice on raising kids in the 21st century. Link
🤬 Many people believe that anonymity is the source of bad behaviour online, and that forcing people to use their real identities would fix this. Not true. Link. (The real problem is that some people are just assholes)
🏡 Turns out that spiralling housing costs is not just a problem in the real world. In-game economies also have faced this problem, however, unlike IRL, they have managed to solve it: by simply banning land-banking and speculation. Link
How the AI text-to-image model Stable Diffusion works under the hood. Link
I’ve been having a riotous time playing around with Stable Diffusion and strmr.com. Here’s me as a Muppet:
See you in a few weeks!