Tech Feels

The YouTube algorithm recently suggested me this short, from an extremely minimalist guy who has lived out of a small backpack for the last 10 years. He — Jeremy Maluf — travels the world, staying in different places for a month or two at a time, eating every meal out, then moves on. He has no other possessions, though he keeps a home base in NYC because it’s relatively cheap compared to staying in Airbnbs there — but he says he never spends any time there except for sleeping. (Also, it’s hilarious to me that as minimal as he is, he still carries both a MacBook Air and an iPad Pro.)

This video kind of lit a fire inside of me. It’s been about a decade since I started to become a bit of a minimalist myself — though never to the level of this guy — but I have found myself intentionally loosening the reins in recent years (mostly to good effect, I think). Maybe it’s time to start going the other way again.

What the video, and his accompanying blog posts, made me realise were that there is so much freedom and possibility in how one can spend their life. As the tagline on his YouTube channel reads, “Live a life no one has lived before”. I find his lifestyle quite inspiring, and although I’m not about to start doing the same thing myself, I do like the idea of incorporating some aspects of it into my own life, albeit on a lesser scale. I’m not quite sure what that looks like yet, but I feel that hearing about him has opened my mind to new opportunities. Doing longer stretches of travel with only a backpack, for one. (I’ve been doing weekends away with only a 28L backpack for a few years now and it’s great.)

Here he is back in 2017 — poetically his website is as minimal as his lifestyle, and he doesn’t even keep old blog posts on there, instead giving you links to the Internet Archive versions of his website from back then:

Some perks of carrying everything you own in your backpack include always having everything you need with you, not being able to waste money shopping, and being able to travel at any given moment (literally if you feel like visiting another country all you need to do is call an uber to the airport).

Now that’s freedom.

He’s also extremely active, averaging about 30,000 steps per day, and once even walked 100,000 steps in a day, just for the challenge. As he points out in the video, for context there are only 86,400 seconds in a day, so walking 100,000 steps is kind of mind-blowing to me.

A lifestyle centred around travel and exploring, being physically active and not tied down in any way, with a minimal-yet-sufficient set of quality possessions that you always have with you. That’s quite something.

Some snippets from a couple of recent articles about AI coding tools, and what this means for the future.

Firstly, “The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived” by Paul Ford:

Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. […] When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000. […] Is the software I’m making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it’s immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company’s quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system. What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes poof? That doesn’t mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly.

And “Lose Myself” by Greg Knauss:

Very good and very long essay from Paul Graham on branding, using the watch industry as a lens through which to explore how it’s evolved over time.

I could quote so many paragraphs from this piece, but the part that was most fascinating to me detailed the lengths that Patek Philippe go to in order to preserve their brand image:

Terry Godier:

The notification badge took email's unread count and made it universal. Any app could now claim urgency. A game wanting you to collect coins wore the same badge as a message from your mother. The weight was democratized. The meaning was gutted. We invented escape hatches that became new traps. Read-later apps promised relief: save this, flee the obligation of reading it now. But the app created a new queue, a new count, a new obligation. You didn't eliminate the phantom. You moved it. Podcasts borrowed the queue from music players. But nobody ever felt guilty about unplayed albums. "I haven't listened to all my records" isn't a confession. Podcast apps added unplayed counts, progress bars, completion stats. Your listening became a task list. And perhaps the purest phantom generators of all: todo apps. You write down something you want to do. An aspiration. A hope. The app counts it as debt. The thing you wanted becomes the thing you owe.

A delightfully thoughtful essay on user interface design and the psychological effects that small decisions have on all of us. It’s such a shame how many of the products we use nowadays use the same guilt-inducing sense of obligation to pressure us to spend more time in their apps. The tragedy is how successful they are at it, and the interfaces designed with the user’s interest in mind aren’t as sticky, and therefore aren’t as popular. We’ve created our own prisons.

See also: The Last Quiet Thing.

And a hat tip to Marco Arment, developer of the Overcast podcast player, for this pithy statement he's had on his settings screen since the start. Naturally the setting is off by default.

Interesting new device in the minimalist phone genre, called Meadow. Similar to the Light Phone III in that it offers only a curated selection of apps, designed to give you the convenience of a smartphone without being sucked down distraction rabbit holes.

But whereas the Light Phone requires you to either keep swapping your SIM between your regular phone and it — or use it as your only phone — the Meadow uses your main phone number for calls and gives you unlimited access to a separate 4G network, making it a better companion device to a smartphone. The downside of this approach is that you need to pay a subscription to use the network, though — don't think there's any getting around that. It's also still too expensive — $400 — to be anything more than a niche device, and is only available to pre-order in the US at the moment.

The form factor looks great to me — I love the choice to go square rather than a phone-like rectangle, and it's apparently "half the size and weight of a smartphone". It looks easily pocketable from the marketing photos, and with nicely rounded corners that make it look soft and inviting — a much more friendly aesthetic than the kinda-brutalist Light Phone III.

It's also kind of hilarious that on the back, next to the camera, is a little convex mirror — I suppose if there's no selfie camera to check your appearance with then that's an interesting fallback option.

Craig Mod, with a lovely piece where he reminisces about an old restaurant run by a cantankerous couple, whose rules made the place what it was: no talking, no books, no phones, no leaving food on your plate. In return you got “Michelin levels at McDonald’s pricing”.

Today, I often think about what could be arbitraged, what could be brokered, and how we could regain our attention from the black mirrors in our hands. I’ve come to feel that a café or restaurant banning phones themselves (never mind laptops; phones always strike me as the real vibe-killer (but of course, dingdongs rocking video calls in cafés will forever be the ultimate boss of sanity)) would provide some kind of utility to the world, would self-select for a certain kind of customer craving shared silence from the algorithms, from the news, from the din of endless horror and outrage.

On a recent weekend visit to Cambridge I came across a coffee shop with rules. Just one guy running the place. The outside of the shop seemed designed to get as few walk-ins as possible: no name on the front, the inside obscured by large plants in the windows — it may as well have said “invitation only”. Open only a few days a week. No phones or laptops allowed, no taking pictures. And he served only a few customers at a time, on one big bench, so it was a 20-minute wait when I went in. But the vibes were good, so wait I did.

The eloquent ramblings of a wise old man on personal growth and understanding what life’s all about, from a speech made in 1994. Chock full of great passages, I highly recommend grabbing a beverage and reading it in full. (It’s quite short.)

The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character. You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.

One paragraph I found particularly beautiful:

There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are. It matters very little whether they’re behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.

And one of the greatest pitfalls to avoid in life; one which I myself try to stay vigilant of at all times:

One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we’ve piled up enough points to count ourselves successful. So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around, and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty. You may wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Another fascinating video from Kurzgesagt, this time focused on how much danger earth is in from asteroids, and whether we could stop a large one destroying the planet if it happened to come our way.

Written 10 years ago, I just stumbled upon this beautiful little piece where Haruki Murakami explains his beginnings as a novelist.

It started with an epiphany that came to him out of the blue, while sat watching a baseball game on his own, beer in hand, on a grassy knoll:

In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokoba’s first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

And remember, strike while the iron’s hot when it comes to these kinds of feelings, lest they slip away:

After the game (Yakult won as I recall), I took the train to Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of writing paper and a fountain pen. Word processors and computers weren’t around back then, which meant we had to write everything by hand, one character at a time. The sensation of writing felt very fresh. I remember how thrilled I was. It had been such a long time since I had put fountain pen to paper.

It ends with a fascinating anecdote about how he sent his novella off to a literary journal — his one and only copy! — and had he not heard back from them, that would’ve been the beginning and end of his career as a novelist:

Composing it had been, so to speak, an act of defiance—I had written it very easily, just as it came to me—so the idea that it might make the short list had never occurred to me. In fact, I had sent them my only copy. If they hadn’t selected it, it probably would have vanished forever. (Gunzo didn’t return rejected manuscripts.) Most likely too, I would have never written another novel. Life is strange.

I recently finished the audiobook of Patrick McGee’s Apple in China, which was a fascinating read. Some of the figures and anecdotes he quoted were just unbelieveable, so I was constantly typing them out on my phone to remember for later.

I thought I’d share a few of the best ones here.

On money:

Since 2007, the iPhone alone has already earned a cumulative $2 trillion in sales.

When Apple first hit their $3 trillion valuation in January 2022, it meant Apple’s market value had grown by more than $700 million per day from when Cook took over in August 2011.

On design:

Reviewers of the original iPod critiqued the stainless steel back as fingerprints marred the chrome look. But this wasn’t some oversight: it forced the user to polish the unit, and for Ive, that created an unconscious, nurturing connection.

In September 2006, four months before the original iPhone would be announced, Jobs was angry about the small scratch marks on the then-plastic screen of the prototype. The mid-level executive who he was kvetching to about it responded, “Well Steve, we have a glass prototype, but it fails the one-metre drop test 100 times out of 100 times”.

Gorilla Glass was originally developed for fighter-jet cockpits back in the 1960s. They’d never found a market for it, and abandoned the project.

On not working your life away:

In the ’90s and ’00s Apple overworked employees to the point of death in a lot of cases. Apparently many engineers died in their 40s and 50s because of stress and overwork. Jobs even attributed his own cancer to the volume of work he’d taken on in 1997, running both Apple and Pixar.

On China’s feverish desire for some of the earlier iPhone models, like the iPhone 4:

A study of college students in Wuhan found that 20,000 had taken out loans with 12-month interest rates as high as 47% to buy fancy electronic products, 90% of which were Apple. Perhaps the most widely publicised incident was that of a 17-year-old who underwent black-market surgery to sell his kidney, in exchange for enough cash to buy a new iPhone and iPad.

The normal metrics for forecasting demand in China, like median wage, just didn’t apply — they always underestimated demand, every year. Even when they directly quizzed customers on their salaries, it didn’t seem to add up. There was an anecdote about a post office worker spending 30% of his annual salary on an iPhone. “When people see me with the iPhone, I’m not just a mailman,” he said. It’s all about status. “It was a symbol. It wasn’t even the phone. It was the symbol of the phone.”

Apple’s manufacturing strategy in a nutshell:

Apple’s strategy was to hire suppliers based on quality rather than price. And they would teach the supply chain how to make their latest luxury creation, using new processes and tooling. Engineers would be going back and forth to China all the time. “So the factories were actually willing to forego profit so that Apple’s operations engineers would come and teach them how to be efficient”, which meant that Apple’s margins were much fatter than the rest of the industry’s. It was all about teaching local partners how to efficiently scale while maintaining the highest quality standards. But they would diversify their supply chain partners, both to keep costs low and to keep each supplier from getting complacent. And because so many iPhones were being produced each year (up to 250 million units), the suppliers couldn’t risk losing that business. Luxury at scale. As one analyst said, “It’s not like building 10 million Volkswagens or 10 million Fords. It’s like building 10 million Ferraris.” The suppliers would then use their new know-how to sell the same type of manufacturing excellence to other companies, but at much higher prices. So Apple’s margin would be about 33% whereas Oppo’s et al. would only be about 6%. This is why Apple routinely accounts for 80% of the smartphone market’s profits while only selling about 20% of the units as a whole.

For years, Apple was booking 50 business class seats daily, on flights from San Francisco to Shanghai.

On TSMC, the Taiwanese chip foundry that manufactures all of the processors for Apple’s products:

TSMC is the only corporation in history that could cause a global depression if it were forced to halt production.

If Taiwan were to be invaded, some US officials have speculated that the American military would rather destroy the TSMC foundries than allow China to control them.

Taiwan also lives on the world’s greatest earthquake belt, where 81% of such tremors occur.

For the past few days I’ve been voraciously reading the blog of a young Cornish woman called Beth Matthews, who tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, but survived. She writes incredibly candidly about her experience before, during and after the event. It’s compelling reading, and incredibly brave of her to divulge as much as she does.

I’ve never read anything like it before. It’s so graphic, and no holds barred. But it feels terribly important, somehow. And I’m very grateful to her for writing it. I expect she's helped a lot of people who are in a similar boat feel less alone.

Shortly after writing most of this post I read in a comment on her blog that Beth died in 2022, a few years after she wrote these posts. I’m very sad about that, despite having never met her. The power of sharing one’s thoughts, I guess. Rest in peace, Beth.

And, as always, treat every stranger you meet with compassion, because you don’t know what they might be going through.

Here it is, sandwiched between an iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 12 mini in its closed form:

And open:

So it's quite a bit wider, but squatter, than a regular iPhone in its closed state, but this allows it to be a more useful ~4:3 aspect ratio when it's open. It seems that most folding phones on the market now are a bit taller and thinner than this in their closed state, leading to a too-square aspect ratio when it's opened up, so I think this is probably a good design choice by Apple, if true.

There are very few adverts that will have any emotional impact on me, but these Emergency SOS ones (see also: this) get me every time. I think it's because while watching it you realise that if this same scenario happened a few years earlier this person would be dead right now, and just another statistic. For all the ills it has done the world, technology has enabled some remarkable things, and few things are more remarkable than the ability to save a human life. I hope all the people who worked to make this feature happen are proud of themselves, because they should be.

So far, folding phones have never really piqued my interest. Partly because there are too many design tradeoffs, like needing different cameras everywhere to work in all orientations, durability question marks, and the awful crease, of course. But mainly because the aspect ratio of regular folding phones is too square when unfolded, making it kinda useless for watching video, one of the main reasons for a folding phone to exist in the first place. And sometimes the aspect ratio of the small screen (when the device is folded) is compromised, such that it's too tall and thin.

But this “tri-fold” phone from Huawei is actually a lot more compelling as a product, because you can just have one huge camera array that can also be used as a front-facing camera, and it folds out into a 10-inch size with closer to a 16:9 aspect ratio than regular foldables. They've also managed to keep the bezels around the display very thin the whole way round. It's kind of a marvel of engineering, so props to Huawei. Chinese manufacturing continues to push the boundaries of what's possible.

I'm not sure how tri-fold phones can overcome the inherent downside of being three phones' worth of thickness, though — they've already got each piece down to about 4mm here, which is incredibly thin — and the tradeoffs in things like speaker quality that result from each piece being so thin, so maybe the concept is flawed in that way.

Really cleverly made web app from the British Heart Foundation that teaches you how to perform CPR and use a defibrillator in about 15 minutes.

It uses your phone's camera (in a privacy-preserving way) to tell you if you’re pushing on your pillow-human at the right cadence or not.