Ross's Micro Blog

That wasn’t as coherent as I wanted it to be. It’s too late. Good night!

Refusing to use a thing is LESS. It’s saying “I don’t need more”. It’s saying that something else is more important than having more.

And the bros? They “ignore the haters”. Because that’s what allows them to have more. Having more is the only way. And they have more than you!

Or something.

3/3

And that’s it isn’t it? The tech bros want to feel that they have MORE. And everyone is trying to get MORE to keep up.

The toxic positivity is so that people can get more without needing to think about the consequences.

2/3

I’ve been thinking about how I have a preference for small things.

And I think about AI. A lot!

And I have been thinking about tech bros and how they respond – on X – to criticism that they get on other platforms.

And now I’m reading Brené Brown on “scarcity”.

1/3

The theory that AI companies are wanting third parties to enforce a slow down on them because they can’t maintain the pace anyway and don’t want to look like it’s their fault is excellent.

Apps like this: https://abue-ammar.github.io/tinycast/

And this: https://appzapper.com/

Are great. But trust is such a huge issue. How do I know that these aren’t vibe-coded keyloggers or file slurpers or ransomware-injectors. It could be anything dressed up as a nice utility. I don’t know what anything is any more! 😵‍💫

Oh wow. The bad customer service folks just keep doubling down.

I can’t believe they’ll see this but my name is uncommon – you never know.

Tips:
– Own up. Admit something went wrong!
– Say sorry. It costs nothing.
– Take responsibility. You can’t fix it. But can you learn and improve? Tell me how!

Reminded of this 18-year-old, cheap, simple, but very effective 3D head-tracking concept.

I don’t know why something like this didn’t get built into modern game consoles somehow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

A weird thought/question I had while watching someone film an event today in vertical video format:

Do we “see” in portrait or landscape? Does the fact that our eyes are left and right rather than top and bottom mean we get a wide-but-shallow field of view?

Follow-up question: If our eyes were top and bottom instead of left and right, would we still see in depth the same way?

Bonus question: Are there any animals with top and bottom eyes?

Today was the funeral of a local legend, taken from us early and unfairly.

I was blessed to hang out with him a lot for a few years.

Never seen the crematorium so full. Standing room only.

No amount of healthy stuff can defend you from some things.

I’m inspired to try to live my best life now.

Just… too much tech news today.

– Panic do an awesome Playdate update
– Some company named after a fruit folded. Or something
– Nintendo emailed be about 55 new games coming up
– Tailwind bought by Shopify
– Digital Ocean sponsor the bad guy’s thing
– Some other tech dude in trouble

Crazy!

I really don’t get why I would pay extra for a foldable phone. A tech that I just have Zero interest in. Ideally I’d have a smaller, dumber phone, and revert to a laptop for any real activity.

Perhaps I’m just old.

Anyway. Tonight I went to a badminton club! This is much more my thing than Taekwondo that I tried over the summer.

We did a family “practice” yesterday to see if I was still any good.

Turns out I still got something here!! Not a lot. But something!!

Someone asked when I last played competitively, and I reckon it was when I was Vanbrugh College Badminton Captain in… 1998!

(“I was just starting primary school then!” came the reply. 😂)

Oh gosh. I try not to talk AI, but people so often miss one of the key things in the discourse: It’s so frickin’ inefficient!!

I always come back to the example of the person who had asked Gemini to analyse some data in a sheet and it made a pivot table.

But all it really did was filter a column.

Just learn to filter a frickin column!!!!

My “Psychology of Software Teams” book keeps giving me gold. Today @grimalkina gave me “Mastery Orientation” and “Performance Orientation” as… are they approaches? Traits? I’m not sure. But it ties into a lot of online discourse about tech (IMO – IANAP) and pulls on many other threads.

Nicer things: we obeyed the instruction to not feed birds over the hot summer to prevent spread of disease.

But they came looking yesterday. Juvenile starlings hopping around looking for seed on the ground.

It’s cooler now. So I put the feeder up.

And they entertained me all day.

Even the robin came to visit!

And one of the foxes wandered by too!

Delightful.

I don’t really know why I felt the need to share this.

Perhaps it’s a lesson in customer service.

If you mess up – or if your contractor messes up – don’t double down on being right. Don’t shrug off blame. Don’t ignore the customer’s feelings and requests. Own it. Fix it. Apologise.

It is possible to rescue a screw up. It’s also possible to show that you really don’t care.

Which resulted in an embarrassing trip to my local shop who had kindly taken a random DHL parcel in for me. They were not happy about it.

The supplier have not used the word “sorry” once in our exchanges. In fact, they were pretty rude and took no responsibility at all.

Awful.

All for 6 bottles of beer.

It’d better be good!!