Recent content in Blog on Francis Irving

 A man with a five year old in a push chair interrupted me. 
 It was a few weeks ago, in a coffee shop, I was finishing a volume of Ursula Le Guin short stories . 
 
 “How old do you think my kids need to be before I get them to start reading Le Guin?” 
 
 We agreed she could be quite dark. Yet, the man really wanted to avoid his children
getting addicted…
There are a few mobile apps that I’ve wanted for a while, and that are relatively
speaking just for me. 
 Toucan Music showing artwork 
 
 
 Places - When people recommend restaurants or cafes to me, I’ve for a long time put them in
a Google Maps list. It’s annoying in various ways, for example the page zooms out when you
select the list. And I…
Conversations about AI are febrile and have been for a while now. Everyone has different views. 
 It’s frustrating for me because not only do I empathise with all of you, in some ways I
have every major position in my mind. 
 I find myself impossible, messed up. Niller-nally, retwixt, fragmented. 
 I agree with the accelerationists 
 I briefly used an open source agentic…
Lots of dancers, civic society organisations, artists, musicians, clowns are only on Instagram. Unfortunately, my mind finds the platform distracting and overwhelming - for my own accessibilty I need to tame it. 
 I prototyped a web browser plugin for this in my week making something every day , and it’s now pretty stable. Try it out! 
 Plugin store links: Firefox Instagram Plugin ,…
One of the projects in my week long hackathon was to make a system to sample my own mind with a random alarm. 
 This was crudely based on Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling - there are lots of papers about that method, for an introduction see this overview BBC article or my own post about a book on the topic . Hurlburt has for a few years now released videos of the method in…
I’m starting a meetup / online commnunity to share tips on skillful use of social media. 
 Things like browser plugins that let you customise YouTube, tips on settings, social practices like how to form a healthy active WhatsApp group for a particular purpose. And so on. 
 Sign up to the first event if you’re in London and you’re interested! 
 Wherever you are,…
As a challenge, last week I made five things, one each day. Each had to be finished in some sense, and preferably published. This is what I made and what I learnt! 
 Monday - Godot game 
 My goal was to learn Godot enough to write some kind of video game and publish it, all in one day. Incredibly this was fairly straightforward. Things I learnt: 
 
 This video tutorial and the text…
This post has two sections, one about gas prices and energy savings, the other about Android automation and the Netatmo API. 
 1. What a smart thermostat is like and how much money I saved 
 
 Last year, with gas prices going up, I decided to get smart radiator valves. I’d thought the saving from these would be by only heating rooms when I’m in them. I was lazy about going…
These days I alternate mobile operating system. Partly because as an app-making professional I strongly feel I need to understand both, and partly because it slightly irritates people who are die-hard fans of one or the other. 
 I don’t particularly love either - a plague on both their houses. I’d rather we all used a fully open operating system, or there was a lot more competition…

 Our brains have 100 trillion connections. Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. 
 Geoffrey Hinton , deep learning pioneer 
 
 The recent surge in interest in generative AI was sparked by neural networks trained on high quality public, human culture. 
 Their use of this culture is…
A book review of “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel (2007) 
 A couple of years ago I realised I didn’t have a visual imagination . 
 This was ultimately quite inspiring - it’s led me to ask maybe a hundred people about their own inner lives. The answers so varied, I’m left in wonder at this…
To my surprise this list is television heavy - I didn’t find any incredible new board games, and I was disappointed in most video games. It’s somewhat in order - my favourite is roughly last. 
 Thanks everyone who recommended these to me - you know who you are! I’m not going to link to where to watch things - for TV and films I use JustWatch to find a suitable source.
A three year old draft blog post I just found. Feels worth publishing - the improvements in AI since then if anything make it clearer, and all the “right now” caveats justified. 
 It’s better to start by thinking of us as pattern matching devices first. 
 Not simple ones - such as modern deep learning AI that essentially does layered functions to measure correlation.…
It was a rushing, a burning, an all-things-are-change, a compulsion. 
 I was torn up for three days or was it two weeks, except the long moments when I just forgot. Intertially, suddenly remembering, half weeping, half positively reconstructing my own construction of who I am and why. 
 Everyone I talked to I would grill - wait, what do the sheep look like when you try to go to sleep by…
This is a recipe from Phil the Dhal, a friend who has been experimenting with pressure cooking Indian food. I’m posting it here so it doesn’t get lost. Ask if you want this just to be the first of a series! 
 First pressure cook of split urad dhal was a success. 
 Needs some understanding and refinement of what you can put in with the dhal in the pressure cooker. i.e. salt and…
This year, the public narrative around Facebook has switched - the company feels on the defensive in lots of ways. I think it deserves to be - with billions of users, it is long past time for them to spend their energy on reducing harm, rather than on more growth. 
 There’s a bit less talk about YouTube (owned by Google), and the problems with its recommendation algorithm. 
 The…
A tasty early morning breakfast with friends in town, and time to cycle home. A sunny day, so take the route along the river! 
 Crossing the road by the docks. The sky impeccable. Delicious light of being away from the tropics, strong and clear, but not overly harsh. 
 The dome of one of the three graces is just visible, and at the right hand edge the tower which has sucked car pollution…
In the last couple of weeks I’ve: 
 
 Deactivated my Facebook account. 
 Logged out of Twitter on my desktop. 
 Stopped using Google Contacts, Calendar and Photos 
 
 I’m not really sure why, but there it is, I have. I think over the last five years in excitement at the good user experience and high user adoption, I forgot why I was negative about such…
Culture is important. 
 Particularly, it’s important for technology which is about how we as humans talk to one another. 
 Telephones, computers, mobile phones, internet… They’re all about how our particular species of primate communicates. And now they’re becoming one powerful industry newly reformed. 
 
 We’re each a neural network, thrown abruptly…
He listened. 
 The speaker started with a natural forest. 
 
 A gorgeous, maddening, complex, survived-of-the-fittest, multi-species, layered, organic feedback pathways, mycella-ridden delightful speckled sunlight happy, violent/eating/parasiting/singing insects/birds/people, robust kind of a forest. 
 They followed with a timber forest. 
 
 A straight-laced, single…
I avoided statistics at school like a rash - filled myself up with super powered double A-levels in Maths And Mechanics instead. I’m not sure why, as it turns out statistics is vital to the good functioning of our world in 2017. 
 We have plenty of computers and plenty of data, and plenty of willingness to make evidence based decisions. Alas it is easy to fool yourself into thinking you…
I’m personally still frustrated with the email services I know about. I’m going to start by reviewing what I use now, which is FastMail. 
 This is for my personal email, which I use for identity on many web services, for notifications and for writing letters to people. I’m working for myself at the moment too, so I use it for business in that context. 
 As background, be…

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The campaign which won last year’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union immediately dissolved, and in the process kindly open sourced some of its innovative canvassing software VICS - blog post , github repository . 
 This afternoon, prompted by a chat with Incubator of Change (a Liverpool based think tank working on new ideas for how to develop policies), I took a quick…
In the late 1890s - the story goes - an ordinary boy in southern India heard an uncle mention the name of this holy mountain. 
 
 Arunchala! 
 
 Just this, just the name, started pulling him to it. The mountain is meant to be, literally, an incarnation of the deity Shiva. 
 Then, a while later, for no apparent reason, the boy had a sudden spiritual awakening on the nature of…
Last night I watched Charlie Brooker’s news recap of the year . As I watched, the humour leavened things and left me entertained. But in my sleep, my mind has realised it had made me pretty angry. So a brief change in tone for this blog - a rant! 
 Charlie - both you personally, and you as a representative of the media - stop whining about the news bubble! You collectively all made the…
I went on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation course in the Goenka school, at Bodhgaya in Bihar province in north India. 
 It was a complex event - my emotions and thoughts about it have often changed dramatically in a day. 
 This blog post is more in note form than a cohesive, final account. 
 
 1. Silence 
 For 9 of the 12 days on site we were silent. Not just no spoken…
He took my hand. “Follow me. Move fast. Don’t stop.” 
 I’d spent the early morning looking round the tranquil mosques of ancient Champaner at the bottom of the holy hill. 
 
 (This is a good guide to them , plus I left a comment on buses which might be useful. It’s in Gujarat, west India, a little north of Bombay.) 
 Now it was time to get to the top.…
A two year old draft blog post I just found, which is too good not to publish. Age leavens its earnest attempts to be ahead of trend. 
 New computer technology used to be my relaxation, my hope. 
 As the world has changed, that comfort has gone. 
 We grew up in a digital village. Now we’re in its seedy metropolis. 
 
 A decade or so ago, I used my energy for emotionally…
They all seem to be called Lakshmi. 
 The first one I met at the Virupaksha Temple in Hampi. 
 
 You pay a small coin for a blessing, which he takes with his trunk and passes on to his minder. 
 Then he touches your bowed head like this woman in Pondicherry. 
 
 That one was at the Sri Manakula Vinayagar Temple. An amazingly clean temple, worth visiting to see what Hinduism…
I wrote this post two weeks ago before going on a meditation retreat. It felt too negative at the time; it isn’t in that it reflects my mood then. 
 India is like a scouring pad. 
 The dirt the dust. 
 Litter cast uncaringly - except in Pondicherry, as if to show it is deliberate everywhere else. 
 The highest ambition of the government cleanup campaign is to end public human…
Zenrainman’s house is like a tree. 
 
 Grown out of the earth of its own basement on the edge of Bangalore, pressed into bricks. 
 
 Nurtured entirely by water and light from its own roof. 
 
 It breeds, symbiotically, large primates to maintain it. 
 
 Treating their sewage. 
 
 To water a rooftop rice paddy ready to grow enough to feed them. 
…
Oh India! 
 There’s always another surprise, toughening your way through the day. 
 This week Modi, the Hindu nationalist PM, announced to the nation that the two largest bank notes were now worthless pieces of paper. 
 This clamp down on black markets and electoral bribes has a complex set of rules which let you trade in the old notes in limited ways, and heavily restricts use…
India is unusual in having two shared public “pets”. 
 Dogs are the ones that I’ve seen before in other countries, prowling every street and temple. These puppies with their sore-furred mum are in Pushkar. 
 
 Unusually, people feed them. The other day while waiting for a safari at a tiger reserve, I saw a woman feed a whole packet of sweet biscuits to a cute dog with…
The next page I found in the notebook ( after the last one ) is my own view of the problem of information goods having zero marginal cost, so not functioning within capitalism. Paul Mason describes this in Postcapitalism . 
 
 Walking through the diagram… 
 “Zero marginal cost newtech ” is the starting point. A “marginal cost” is a business term for the…
I found another oldish notebook . It’s about the edge of chaos . 
 The more lightly shaded left hand edge is absence, null, non existence. The dark shaded right hand side is total chaos, randomness. The sharp line down the middle is the edge of chaos - where things are balanced, interest lies, life grows. 
 
 There are four examples. 
 1. “Too few forum members”…
Drifting in the sea of political beliefs, left and right don’t seem to have any meaning any more. 
 It’s possible to make up new axes . Alas, these aren’t grounded in real views of the population, instead they’re distorted by the politics of their creators. 
 Luckily, there is a way of finding actual axes by experiment, using opinion polls and maths. 
 Back in…
Thanks to the excellent Thinking Liverpool [1], a lunchtime talk about the history of libraries caught my eye. 
 I mention the history of public libraries worryingly often . I make an analogy between libraries in the age of the printing pres and the modern need for equivalently novel public institutions in the age of the networked computer. Time to find out more. 
 It was in the Victoria…
I found some notes I’d written at the start of this notebook, a few months old. 
 
 I used to campaign in Cambridge for more Fairtrade coffee and chocolate. That was a “closed” tactic, as opposed to an “open” tactic like open source software or open data. 
 It worked - even the best selling chocolate bar Dairy Milk is Fairtrade now. The tactic slightly…
The fabulous Redecentralize Conference was organised by Ira and a bunch of other volunteers. Its subject - how do we make the net resilient, private and fun again? 
 It was an unconference, so I decided to do a session on a personal itch I’ve had for the last few years - file synchronisation and backup. 
 I don’t have a nice way to manage my files - documents, music, photos,…
The topic of how to make our information society safe and fair regularly comes up in conversations. 
 I think we need some quite big, radical things. They’ll need new public service Internet organisations to implement. 
 This is my high level view list. 
 1. Access to culture 
 
 “People have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years…
This mad dash bad mixen fun up down world. 
 Forces smash hither and fither, 7 billion of us strange qualia,
doing, being human. 
 Web culture, open source culture… sucked out of academia,
hacking, sharing, making, funning, building. Just late enough
for usability to be just there just cheap enough. 
 Smashed with. 
 Political culture… burnt out, tired, so…
How is she going to vote? My friend (let’s call her F) just doesn’t know. 
 This isn’t unusual - about 20% of voters are like her ( see Q3 ). 
 She needs to work it out fast. She doesn’t like polling stations, so has a postal vote. She has to decide this weekend - or she’ll get busy with work, and not remember to post the ballot in time. 
 
 mySociety…
My side project for the last month is to try and collect the Curriculum Vitae of everyone standing for Parliament. 
 It’s called Democracy Club CVs . 
 I’ve been working every spare hour - mainly around midnight and on Sundays. Partly it is technically interesting , partly the other Democracy Club volunteers are fun to hang out with… 
 It’s also just enjoyable,…
One of the pitched battles in this century’s cyber war is about advert blocking and injecting. 
 It’s in full flow. 
 You can tell - journalist friends complaining that ad blockers have killed Joystiq, a 10 year old gaming magazine; web friends complaining that an ad blocker charges advertisers to not block some ads. 
 I’ve got some perspective. 
 Back in 1996, I…
We’re really bad at thinking about innovation. 
 
 To improve my own sense, I’ve been gradually absorbing Simon Wardley’s Value Chain Mapping since first seeing him talk about it a few years ago. 
 The picture to the right is an example of one of his maps. Each blob is a technology need. 
 As you go from left to right in the map, the technologies go from custom…
1. Virtual bugs 
 I first really knew that all software was fundamentally insecure back in 2001. 
 I was working for an artificial life games company. We made virtual pets - amazing ones with a simulated brain, biochemistry and genetics. 
 
 I’d just built a new networked version called Creatures Docking Station . It let the cute, furry, egg-laying Norns travel through…

 Let’s keep this post simple. 
 We’re near the start of a long cold, cyber war. Many things make this clear - from Stuxnet to Snowden, from the Sony hacks to Chinese DNS poisoning . 
 This is a hard time to be in information technology. 
 Just in raw, technical security terms this is tough - rebuilding every layer of computing infrastructure so that it is safe. 
…
I blinked. 
 A long, slow, twenty year blink. 
 And meanwhile, space exploration went… Phoooom! 
 From a distance it looks bad. We haven’t sent humans to the moon for over forty years. There’s no grand, visible, memorable showpiece - apart from space shuttles exploding and being decomissioned. 
 And yet, when I recently got interested again, I found a flurry of…
Dear Nicholas, 
 Thank you for your previous two letters. I’m sorry I was so slow getting back to you after the first one, that you had to write another. 
 I didn’t know Canon meant essentially the same things as Round. I’m sure I must have been told, but I never got what it meant or cared. I only really appreciated rounds at all in actually singing them with people at…