It’s Thursday, 1 February in Portland, Oregon, and my study is a mess because I moved everything around. This was made slightly easier because I decided to get wheels for the standing desk I got at the beginning of the pandemic. WHEELS. Not for nothing are they considered a significant invention.
\nA very short one today, because I am remiss in the below announcement, and also because I have a much, much longer episode I hope to post tomorrow.
\nHallway Track 007: Blocking is Good, Actually is tomorrow, Friday 2 February 2024, at 12pm Pacific, 3pm Eastern, and 8pm London.
\nI’m co-hosting it with Superbloom’s Georgia Bullen, and we’ll have Sydette Harry and Derek Powazek joining us.
\nHere’s the blurb:
\nWhile Twitter continues to implode, Bluesky and Mastodon are busy carving out their niches and Meta storms ahead with Threads, let’s talk about ways people might improve their experience on social networks, starting with blocking. We’ll talk about things like:
\nWhat’s Hallway Track, if you’ve forgotten or I never told you?
\nHallway Track is a series of free, ad-hoc gatherings, where we pretend to be in the hallway chatting with each other after a great conference session. It’s for small groups of only 25 people so it’s not too big people can’t talk and not too small there’s dead air; they run for 90 minutes; they’re not recorded, to encourage free conversation.
\nRegister for Hallway Track 007: Blocking is Good, Actually and find out more.
\nSo. Apple’s Vision Pro came out and of course there are a bunch of opinions and reactions. You’ll be excited to learn that this is not that!
\nToday’s thing that caught my attention is in response to a conversation with friends (hi friends!) about that Vision Pro, so, eh.
\nPhones are too good.
\nI mean, they’re really, really good, when you think about what their hardware does and what that hardware is capable of. That’s before you even get into all the computational-slash-AI-stuff.
\nEven the iPhone as it launched was too good! It didn’t even have copy and paste and still it was too good in terms of what it could do as a sorta-computer. Adding apps afterwards certainly helped, but you get my general thesis. These things are really, really good.
\nSo 17 years later, we’re getting bored of phones. They’re very good. A recent thing people got super excited about was this Rabbit thing which is red, and that honestly is a thing to get excited about, which is also sad.
\nBut Rabbit -- a hardware thing people got excited about -- was also something where people said: “hang on, isn’t the rabbit just... also software?” and the answer of course is “yes”, it is.
\nSo maybe sure people are bored of things that are phones and want a thing that is better. In the case of Rabbit, it’s demoware promises of it being able to “do things”.
\nYou know what would make phones a lot better?
\nI don’t think it’s the stuff like process shrinks enabling more perf-watt efficiency, I don’t think it’s higher density energy storage, I don’t think it’s removable batteries (but that would help!), or cameras, or LIDAR, or any more sensors, not really. Because all of those things have come up against a completely different limit.
\nYou can’t process-shrink your way out of an economic and regulatory situation that prevents interop.
\nThe thing that’s holding phones (and computer-type things) back isn’t the hardware and software, it’s not cross-platform developer frameworks, it’s that the economic environment incentivizes putting things in silos and not having any interoperability.
\nRabbit and LLMs are a kind of symptom of this because they show the promise -- whether realized or not -- of being able to take tedious, siloed tasks that require a human to do, because humans are able to cross economic silo barriers across services that aren’t designed to work together, and, well, do them repeatedly and faster. They’re a hack, and as pointed out by others, a grossly inefficient hack from the position of energy efficiency.
\nThe hardware’s fine. But software can only be as good as the economic system it’s embedded in. Which feels like “duh, of course”, but also as a shower thought, it felt somewhat deep.
\nAnyway, we hit that limit. Arguably we regressed once financialization crossed the warp 10 threshold, which explains all the “software and computers are getting worse, actually” takes.
\nLike a person much smarter than me (Hi, Erika!) said: the business models are the design constraints now.
\nAnd, to be clear this is not a rallying cry to move fast and break things. You don’t smash your way through these design constraints. It’s going to take a while, it’s going to be hard work, and it’s going to require a lot of collaboration and cooperation.
\nOK, that’s it! Still just a few places left for that Hallway Track tomorrow. If you’re on the fence you should come along!
\nHow have you been?
\nBest,
\nDan
\nThings That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please [consider becoming a paid supporter]({{ upgrade_url }}).
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\nPaid supporters get a free copy of Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and free subscribers get a 20% discount.
\n","body_text":"0.0 Context Setting\n\nIt’s Thursday, 1 February in Portland, Oregon, and my study is a mess because I moved everything around. This was made slightly easier because I decided to get\nwheels\nfor the standing desk I got at the beginning of the pandemic. WHEELS. Not for nothing are they considered a significant invention.\n\nA very short one today, because I am remiss in the below announcement, and also because I have a much, much longer episode I hope to post tomorrow.\n\n0.1 Hallway Track News\n\nHallway Track 007: Blocking is Good, Actually\nis tomorrow, Friday 2 February 2024, at 12pm Pacific, 3pm Eastern, and 8pm London.\n\nI’m co-hosting it with\nSuperbloom’s\n\nGeorgia Bullen\n, and we’ll have Sydette Harry and Derek Powazek joining us.\n\nHere’s the blurb:\n\nWhile Twitter continues to implode, Bluesky and Mastodon are busy carving out their niches and Meta storms ahead with Threads, let’s talk about ways people might improve their experience on social networks, starting with blocking. We’ll talk about things like:\n\nwhat we can learn from fantastic products like Block Party (RIP);\n\nhow blocking is or isn’t used as a content moderation signal in various social platforms’ recommendation algorithms;\n\nwhere blocking should be used as a content moderation signal to prevent post or account recommendation;\n\nare people actually using the block function? How much? And how or why might they use it more?\n\nreasons why platforms might have to hide or de-emphasise blocking;\n\nexactly how bad would it be (very bad) to gamify and incentivize blocking?\n\nhow these topics might tie into the idea of a marketplace of content moderation providers.\n\nWhat’s Hallway Track, if you’ve forgotten or I never told you?\n\nHallway Track is a series of free, ad-hoc gatherings, where we pretend to be in the hallway chatting with each other after a great conference session. It’s for small groups of only 25 people so it’s not too big people can’t talk and not too small there’s dead air; they run for 90 minutes; they’re not recorded, to encourage free conversation.\n\nRegister for Hallway Track 007: Blocking is Good, Actually\nand find out more.\n\n1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention\n\n1.1 It’s not a hardware or software problem, dummy\n\nSo. Apple’s Vision Pro came out and of course there are a bunch of opinions and reactions. You’ll be excited to learn that this is not that!\n\nToday’s thing that caught my attention is in response to a conversation with friends (hi friends!) about that Vision Pro, so, eh.\n\nPhones are\ntoo good\n.\n\nI mean, they’re really,\nreally\ngood, when you think about what their hardware does and what that hardware is capable of. That’s before you even get into all the computational-slash-AI-stuff.\n\nEven the iPhone as it launched was\ntoo good\n! It didn’t even have copy and paste and still it was\ntoo good\nin terms of what it could do as a sorta-computer. Adding\napps\nafterwards certainly helped, but you get my general thesis. These things are really, really good.\n\nSo 17 years later, we’re getting bored of phones. They’re very good. A recent thing people got super excited about was this Rabbit thing which is red, and that honestly is a thing to get excited about, which is also sad.\n\nBut Rabbit -- a hardware thing people got excited about -- was also something where people said: “hang on, isn’t the rabbit just... also software?” and the answer of course is “yes”, it is.\n\nSo maybe sure people are bored of things that are phones and want a thing that is\nbetter\n. In the case of Rabbit, it’s demoware promises of it being able to “do things”.\n\nYou know what would make phones\na lot\nbetter?\n\nI don’t think it’s the stuff like process shrinks enabling more perf-watt efficiency, I don’t think it’s higher density energy storage, I don’t think it’s removable batteries (but that would help!), or cameras, or LIDAR, or any more sensors, not\nreally\n. Because all of\nthose\nthings have come up against a completely different limit.\n\nYou can’t process-shrink your way out of an economic and regulatory situation that prevents interop.\n\nThe thing that’s holding phones (and computer-type things) back\nisn’t\nthe hardware and software, it’s not cross-platform developer frameworks, it’s that the economic environment incentivizes putting things in silos and\nnot\nhaving any interoperability.\n\nRabbit and LLMs are a kind of symptom of this because they show the promise -- whether realized or not -- of being able to take tedious, siloed tasks that require a human to do, because humans are able to cross economic silo barriers across services that aren’t designed to work together, and, well, do them repeatedly and faster. They’re a hack, and as pointed out by others, a grossly inefficient hack from the position of energy efficiency.\n\nThe hardware’s fine. But software can only be as good as the economic system it’s embedded in. Which feels like “duh, of course”, but also as a shower thought, it felt somewhat deep.\n\nAnyway, we hit that limit. Arguably we regressed once financialization crossed the warp 10 threshold, which explains all the “software and computers are getting worse, actually” takes.\n\nLike a person much smarter than me (Hi, Erika!) said: the business models are the design constraints now.\n\nAnd, to be clear\nthis is not a rallying cry to move fast and break things\n. You don’t smash your way through these design constraints. It’s going to take a while, it’s going to be hard work, and it’s going to require a lot of collaboration and cooperation.\n\nOK, that’s it! Still just a few places left for that\nHallway Track\ntomorrow. If you’re on the fence you should come along!\n\nHow have you been?\n\nBest,\n\nDan\n\nHow you can support Things That Caught My Attention\n\nThings That Caught My Attention is a free newsletter, and if you like it and find it useful, please [consider becoming a paid supporter]({{ upgrade_url }}).\n\nLet my boss pay!\n\nDo you have an expense account or a training/research materials budget? Let your boss pay, at\n$25/month, or $270/year\n,\n$35/month, or $380/year\n, or\n$50/month, or $500/year\n.\n\nPaid supporters get a free copy of\nThings That Caught My Attention, Volume 1\n, collecting the best essays from the first 50 episodes, and\nfree subscribers get a 20% discount\n.","raw_format":"markdown","source":"api","summary":"This issue pivots from announcing a Hallway Track discussion about blocking on social platforms to exploring why technological innovation feels stalled despite genuinely impressive hardware capabilities. The core argument threading through the pieces is that economic incentives creating siloed, non-interoperable systems—rather than limitations in processing power, sensors, or code—are the real constraint on what computers and phones can meaningfully do, with recent AI-powered tools like Rabbit functioning as inefficient workarounds for problems that wouldn't exist if services could actually talk to each other. The newsletter suggests that business models have become the real design constraint in technology, and that fixing this will require sustained collaboration rather than disruption.","reading_minutes":5,"links":[{"url":"https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack","normalized_url":"https://verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack","domain":"verylittlegravitas.com","anchor_text":"Hallway Track 007: Blocking is Good, Actually","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"self"},{"url":"https://superbloom.design","normalized_url":"https://superbloom.design/","domain":"superbloom.design","anchor_text":"Superbloom’s","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://georgiabullen.com","normalized_url":"https://georgiabullen.com/","domain":"georgiabullen.com","anchor_text":"Georgia Bullen","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"external"},{"url":"https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack","normalized_url":"https://verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack","domain":"verylittlegravitas.com","anchor_text":"Register for Hallway Track 007: Blocking is Good, Actually","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"self"},{"url":"https://www.verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack","normalized_url":"https://verylittlegravitas.com/hallwaytrack","domain":"verylittlegravitas.com","anchor_text":"Hallway Track","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"self"},{"url":"https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh","normalized_url":"https://buy.stripe.com/fZe28qbFOazZ4M04gh","domain":"stripe.com","anchor_text":"$25/month, or $270/year","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"plumbing"},{"url":"https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW","normalized_url":"https://buy.stripe.com/cN200i8tCgYn4M0eUW","domain":"stripe.com","anchor_text":"$35/month, or $380/year","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"plumbing"},{"url":"https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD","normalized_url":"https://buy.stripe.com/bIYcN4cJSgYnbao9AD","domain":"stripe.com","anchor_text":"$50/month, or $500/year","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"plumbing"},{"url":"https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1","normalized_url":"https://store.verylittlegravitas.com/l/ThingsVol1","domain":"verylittlegravitas.com","anchor_text":"Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"self"},{"url":"https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber","normalized_url":"https://verylittlegravitas.gumroad.com/l/ThingsVol1/subscriber","domain":"gumroad.com","anchor_text":"free subscribers get a 20% discount","is_archive":0,"archive_url":null,"archive_service":null,"category":"self"}],"sections":[{"id":2887,"ord":0,"number":"0.0","heading":"Context Setting","level":1,"word_count":81},{"id":2888,"ord":1,"number":"0.1","heading":"Hallway Track News","level":2,"word_count":270},{"id":2889,"ord":2,"number":"1.0","heading":"Some Things That Caught My Attention","level":1,"word_count":6},{"id":2890,"ord":3,"number":"1.1","heading":"It’s not a hardware or software problem, dummy","level":2,"word_count":598},{"id":2891,"ord":4,"number":null,"heading":"How you can support Things That Caught My Attention","level":2,"word_count":35},{"id":2892,"ord":5,"number":null,"heading":"Let my boss pay!","level":3,"word_count":65}]}