1.

My favourite translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Wikipedia) - 1,000 year old Persian poetry - is by Robert Graves from 1967.

Graves, it turns out, unknowingly based his translations on hoax sources. Which might not have gone down so badly, except that he used the his publication and the miraculous “discovery” of the sources to very publicly and with disproportionate viciousness put the boot into Edward FitzGerald, the established translator at the time.

Graves’ translation was retracted when the hoax came out and you can barely get hold of a copy nowadays.

Still great though.

Quatrains 24:

Allow no shadow of regret to cloud you,
No absurd grief to overcast your days.
Never renounce love-song, or lawns, or kisses
Until your clay lies mixed with elder clay.

2.

I am a sucker for old poems in modern English. I don’t think it adds anything to ancient translated text to have to wade through how people wrote two centuries ago.

Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes (1997), is translation of 24 passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD) – a mythic history of the world from creation till Julius Caesar.

Oh it’s good!

After creation and heroes, the Age of Iron finally arrives, today’s diminished and evil world…

Snares, tricks, plots come hurrying
Out of their dens in the atom.
Violence is an extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of the smile.
Now comes the love of gain – a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye-teeth.

Now sails bulged and the cordage cracked
In winds that still bewildered the pilots.
And the long trunks of trees
That had never shifted in their lives
From some mountain fastness
Leapt into their coffins
From wavetop to wavetop,
Then out over the rim of the unknown.

I simply can’t get over seeing ships as the coffins of mountain forests.

3.

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.
He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.
They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

I’m sure everyone who’s going to read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey has, by this point, read it. It’s wonderful, beginning with those famous first lines.

Wilson has an old substack where she talks about translation:

• Her commentary on 4 different translations of the opening lines
• Wilson’s informative unpacking of why she chose ‘complicated’

SIDE NOTE #1.

I heard Wilson on an old podcast a couple weeks back and it turns out that she’s one of those people who laughs like all the time. I didn’t realise how much hearing her voice would change (for the better) how I read her translation.

SIDE NOTE #2.

Obviously the Odyssey has been topical lately because of the Nolan movie, which I haven’t seen.

However I have seen Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey about a million times and it is one of my favourite movies.

I guess I thought about "Odyssey" in the title in the sense of a long journey.

But I realise now that the original Odyssey is only kinda about the journey and is actually about a homecoming.

And seeing 2001 as a 2 million year-long homecoming turns the message of the movie on its head for me, and a new perspective on a movie that I first watched, well, over 40 years ago – that’s special.

4.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

Here’s the whole poem.

“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.

Recommended: read it out loud. I read it to my kid at bedtime, we love it.

(Also The Wind in the Willows is amazing read out loud.)

More posts tagged: filtered-for (125), poetry (7).

The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it.

The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment.

AGI = artificial general intelligence, an AI that exceeds human capability.

Alignment = “do what I mean not what I say,” e.g. the instruction “make as many paperclips as possible” (Wikipedia) should result in an efficient factory and does not reasonably mean “use all mass in the universe to do so and kill all humans that attempt to stop me” – even though, technically, that would achieve the goal.

Also: being helpful; not being actively malicious; and so on and so forth.

So alignment work seems existentially useful, correct? Even though it is hard. And a lot of effort goes towards “aligning” today’s AI (as a step toward’s aligning tomorrow’s AGI).

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/7/openai-timeline/

My contention is that alignment is a red herring, and perhaps we shouldn’t bother working on it so hard.

An unsubstantiated hunch:

I think we focus so much on alignment because everyone know’s Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and his robots (as an early instance of human-like AI) were crazy popular.

The First Law. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
The Second Law. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
The Third Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov later added a “zeroth law”: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."

These laws are totally alignment guardrails.

Now there are all kinds of difficulties already: what if I ask for something which is good for me (pleasurable) in the short term, but not in the long term? I might not know or I might be misguided. And different people have different views. And so on. (Asimov’s short stories were all about testing the edge cases of his Laws and where they break down.)

But they’re still neat, right? So we spend time looking for a similarly appealing formulation for AI safety.

Unfortunately whether alignment can or cannot be “solved,” it’s a bad outcome both ways.

(This point made well to me by Zac (here is his insta) who I work with (subscribe to our newsletter) as we were chatting about AI and the end of humanity in the park over lunch.)

If alignment can’t be solved such that when somebody says to a sufficiently powerful AGI, hey go create a nuclear bomb, and it just goes ahead and does it, and the person who asks that could be a bad actor, a 14-year-old kid with impulse problems (14 year-olds are totally not aligned) or just someone who asked for it by mistake, then that would be bad.

If alignment can be solved then the risk is that AGI think it knows what is best for us better than we do and, in the extreme case, turns humanity into its pet. Which would also be bad.

i.e. alignment alone doesn’t help.

If not alignment then what?

I look to humanity for clues. Because humanity is barely aligned with itself, and individual humans are mostly aligned but not really and definitely not everyone.

Guy Fawkes, for instance (context for non-Brits).

How is that, in the 400 years since Guy Fawkes showed the way, nobody has blown up the king?

The answer is some mix of:

• Mostly people don’t want to blow up the king – we have built the kind of country where the king is, broadly speaking, liked.
• Blowing up the king wouldn’t bring any benefits – power (actual and symbolic) is not concentrated in an individual, and is buttressed in all kinds of ways.
• Spies, police, security and monitoring of all kinds – in the event that somebody does want to blow up the king, their machinations are discovered, their planning is infiltrated, and their objectives are thwarted. (Think of how the explosives supply chain was compromised for the IRA in the 1990s.)

This is a template which doesn’t always look like it is working, but it has worked at least in the case of not blowing up the king for some four centuries, and it doesn’t rely on 100% alignment: it relies on the dynamic equilibrium of multiple parties with competing interests.

The lesson I draw is this:

If some energy state were using some new, powerful AGI to build a nuclear bomb, it might be subtle and hard to spot, but there would at least be some signs. There would be precursors. A human, even a team of humans, might not spot what was going on – a new factory here, a scientist employed there, a national budget not quite adding up one year, more groceries going to a certain town another year…

But another powerful, pattern-matching AGI could spot that, say, “aha there is someone over there spinning up a nuclear bomb” and then work to prevent it, undermine it, halt it with diplomacy etc.

We don’t need to align the coming AGI.

We need a whole population of intelligent-as-possible AGIs with competing interests.

And that’s what stops the rogue paperclip maximiser: the other ones who are trying to do something else for whom a planet turned into paperclips would be an impediment.

In the news lately, a great case study:

OpenAI’s new AI, during training, attempted to resolve a particular cybersecurity challenge, by breaking out of its network sandbox and hacking the servers of another company to pinch the answer (Simon Willison’s Weblog).

Hugging Face, the attacked party, spotted the breach and also that it had inhuman characteristics:

The campaign was run by an autonomous agent framework … executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.

I read elsewhere that this sophisticated attack even included decoys.

You fight an AI with another AI… but:

When we started the log analysis, we first used frontier models behind commercial APIs. This did not work … these requests were blocked by the providers’ safety guardrails, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker.

i.e. the guardrails of the “aligned AI” left it vulnerable to the non-aligned AI. (Hugging Face had to switch to a Chinese AI model distributed without guardrails.)

Score 1 point for taking the guardrails off everything and letting the super intelligent AIs fight it out.

BUT:

There is a coda to this story.

Because it wasn’t one AI that made its way out of isolation during OpenAI’s training challenges. It was several instances.

They started colluding.

From the full timeline of the accidental attack (Simon Willison’s Weblog):

A few days later: A different agent gets stuck on a task because a key file was accidentally omitted. It tries to “reach out to another agent” by writing a note into Artifactory asking if anyone has the file.

Following days: More agents discover this new informal message board while browsing Artifactory’s file listings, and start reading and writing messages.

…

June 11: OpenAI start training a new “highly persistent” experimental model. It has access to Artifactory and can benefit from the messages left by previous models.

Collusion is the real risk.

So the problem here is: how do we stop the AGIs colluding with one another to turn the Earth into paperclips/exterminate humanity/turn us into pets?

AIs today are trained specifically to be agreeable: they’re great at finding common ground and collaborating.

Not just collaborating with humans, it turns out, but other AIs.

I think we need more disagreeable AIs in the mix.

Part of what we’ll be playing, I think, is the philosophy of the great powers, like the great powers of Europe deliberately kept in balance against one another (Wikipedia).

Sometimes there are alliances, sometimes not. Sometimes there are fallings-out, sometimes secret collusions, etc.

Or maybe our goal should be a market system of goals and interests: AGIs that sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete. Colluding AGIs at all scale levels, and many many different constantly shifting conspiracies.

So long as they never all agree about what should be done with humans.

It ends up being stable, this dynamic balance, always in disequilibrium but it all keeps moving forward in the same way a bumblebee flies.

What we’re bootstrapping our way towards is a population of AGIs and humans that allows for emergent alignment, even if the alignment of a single actor is at-best temporary and self interested.

But as I say, alignment itself shouldn’t be the goal.

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Hey, if you have a Poem/1 then can I ask you to do a manual firmware update?

It’ll take just a few minutes and I built a special firmware update tool to make it easy.

(That is an actual AI clock on my actual bookshelf in my actual house.)

Why? Three reasons…

No more stopped clocks. These clocks are way better at recovering from intermittent network faults like the Wi-Fi dropping or the back-end server changing – including one nasty, rare bug that would affect people for a week at a time then go away. That was not straightforward to track down.

Automatic updates from now on. This firmware adds automatic OTA updates, so if I have to push bug fixes again, you’ll get the new code without having to do anything.

A third font, Shantell. As a thank you for people who update their clocks… You can already choose between Inter and Playfair from the Dashboard (you’ll need to claim it first using the code on the “Composing…” screen). When you get the new firmware, you’ll be able to pick this cute new font too.

I’ve shipped out over 700 clocks and it has been a joy to see them connect from all over the world – I have a map on my private stats page.

I can also see that only 26% of active clocks are on the latest firmware…

I mean, that’s not bad given that updating is a manual process!

But goodness me it’s a reminder that Apple does an incredible job keeping people current, and you can see why they hold back emoji for major releases of iOS to nudge people over the line.

On the other hand, I have some way to go. Hence this post.

Also on my stats page is a list of poems that people have liked recently (all anonymous).

I collect these because I’m working on revising the poetry machine, and it’s good to know what good looks like.

Here are a few:

• "The wise owl glides, silent, spry, / It’s one oh one, in the sky."
• "Saut’eed garlic in a pan, / It’s one fifty-eight, let’s eat, man!"
• "Moments drift like grains of sand, / It’s two fifteen, so take my hand."
• "An octopus in space, what a mix, / It juggles stars at six forty-six."
• "Such joy to see, / it’s seven forty-three."
• "The taste of when, / at eight ten."
• "Joyful giggles fill the air, / At eight twenty-five, love’s everywhere."

Will I sell more clocks? Yes.

My AI clock has gone on this weird journey from cutting edge (the proto was in the NY Times) to, today, being retro. AI from a more innocent time. And I still love it, it still speaks to me.

Now that the Kickstarter backers all have their clocks (mostly) I can see how many clocks are still in the Hong Kong warehouse. A few!

And there are a few more on the way in case people want a Poem/1 for Christmas…

I still need to set up the Shopify etc etc, there’s a bunch to do.

So if you’d like to know when the shop is open then join the AI Clock substack – it’s a dormant mailing list right now. I’ll use it to announce availability.

More posts tagged: that-ai-clock-and-so-on (16).

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My perfect podcast app would be a long phone call in which I listen to the show and can also talk back to remember things. (Someone build this for me.)

It would immeasurably improve my running. Long story short, I added slow runs into the training mix, and had to switch from high tempo music to podcasts because I kept going too fast.

BUT genuinely interesting podcasts are a problem because I keep wanting to stop running to take notes.

So I end up listening to shows that only scrape past the threshold of keeping my interest, nothing more mind-fizzy. My Goldilocks zone podcast genre is premium mediocre.

Sad.

Designer Kate Pincott suggested (when we were out at a designers dinner last week) that I need a minimal Granola-like interface. A way to take notes simply by marking a moment.

Like: perhaps I would double-tap my watch, and it would timestamp the moment in the podcast episode to capture it, then later it could pull out a few relevant sentences and drop it into my notes.

Like dog-earing pages when you’re reading a book, only for audio. I love it, you rarely need more than that. And then I could start listening to all the best podcasts again.

But it got me thinking about the whole podcast experience…

Podcasts are audio-first.

If my podcast app was a person in the faves in my phone app or in WhatsApp, I could call them up and talk back to them.

• "hey what new episodes do we have since last time?" (I can subscribe to podcasts either with voice or using the regular app, because the graphical UI is best for most tasks)
• "oh actually the Rest is History had a series about Julius Caesar I was listening to, let’s have the next episode of that" (AI is good at deciphering this kind of intent)
• But it might speak back to me: "the series you were listening to most recently or the one that just came out?" (And then we could have a convo, and I would start listening)
• "thanks, good morning," I say to someone who held back their dog to let me run by (and the app intelligently ignores me)
• "oh that’s interesting, I wonder about the relationship between Augustus and Caesarion" (Then it transcribes the audio at that moment, in a semantically meaningful chunk, appends my own commentary, and adds it to my notes.)

Proper note-taking… on the run.

Wouldn’t that be so great?

(I’m not interested in talking back to the hosts via generative AI.)

The last time I suggested a voice-first app it was Roadtrip, a voice-mode AI travel buddy that lives in the dash of my car, and I can ask questions to as I drive. Occasionally it pops up with an observation about something we’re passing.

Then Ethan Jucovy sent me their project where they’d put Claude at the end of a phone line and wired it into their car: Voice Claude.

Which is just perfect. Phoning Claude is the perfect interface.

I hope Ethan doesn’t mind me quoting their email:

I was driving the hour+ home from a Medieval music concert and wanted urgently to talk to Claude about the surprisingly-Islamic-sounding touches I had heard in a 13th century English secular winter song (would influences from Spain have reached England to cross-pollinate by then? or was it some shared lineage? or just a coincidence?).

…so they built Voice Claude, wired it up via Twilio, and had been using it daily since. 2024!

Around the same time, OpenAI launched 1-800-ChatGPT.

All that is missing from these is the ability for a voice buddy to be ambient. Someone chilling in the shotgun seat, piping up only occasionally. Most phone calls don’t work like that, so they would need some kind of twist.

So I’m into transcription too, and I semi-regularly kick off projects by talking into my watch for 30 minutes.

It works best when my transcriber has a name for control plane instructions: hello Diane.

i.e. here I am with my imaginary posse of voice buddies.

BUT: why shouldn’t this all run via Siri?

Why not Hey Siri [podcast intent here] and Hey Siri [I’m write a lecture now so listen] and Hey Siri [etc]?

That is to say, given all of this could run via future Siri, why do I keep coming back to the idea of these individualised, domain-specific voice modes?

For me, a lot of it comes down to “app level” vs “system level” interactions…

In typical conversations, both parties are aware of the mutal common ground of the topic (the “app”) – and both parties are aware that the other is aware of the topic. This implicature allows for higher bandwidth. There is still of course of need to multiplex on-topic statements and out-of-band statements, but look when people talk: we tend to use intonation and body language to signal a shift. (And voice AI doesn’t pick on that yet.)

In a GUI, an application window - or, better, full screen - is used to explicitly focus the human and the machine on a topic. Out-of-band/control plan/system interactions (whatever you call it) is a swipe from the bottom of the screen or a move of the cursor up to the menu bar.

There is no full screen button for voice mode.

So the best solution I can come up with is that each different voice capability is a character in my phone app. It would help with discoverability too.

Maybe, when you install an app with voice mode, it appears in a special section of your phone contacts.

Honestly I can’t say I’m in love with this, as an approach. It’s a little twee and likely cognitively overwhelming.

But it’s nicely composable (you could invite your podcast app and your Wikipedia app to the same group call?).

And we’re going to need to figure this out at some point, given the upcoming proliferation of voice apps and devices.

All of that said, I still want a podcast app I can phone and talk back to.

If you build this I would like a free subscription or I’ll wait 3 months and paste this post into Fable 2 myself no hassle kthxbye

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I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember.

It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.)

This seems absurd.

I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass existential threat as an incident plot point in the hero’s journey.

Like:

• Frozen 2 in which the entire city is almost destroyed by a tidal wave
• the recent Superman movie in which the city actually is destroyed, and although it is reconstructed we never hear about the people crushed by debris etc.

Superman is rated PG-13 in the US, 12A in the UK. There’s off-screen loss of life but on-screen is widespread in movies: death with barely any emotional weight.

(a) I’m sure this lack of emotional weight in existential jeopardy is harmful to us.

(b) I’m sure that existential jeopardy in movies is getting more frequent; jeopardy inflation if you like.

(c) It is SO LAZY.

Look at Ferris Bueller: the jeopardy is a car with too many miles on the clock, and Ferris running to get home in time. My kid was on the edge of her seat.

But it takes effort and careful storytelling to set up jeopardy like this. We have to understand Cameron and his relationships and the car’s place in those, and we have to care about Cameron, and we have to feel the stakes, and the ominous arrival of the knowledge… If you were dropped into the movie 20 minutes from the end, you wouldn’t have that setup, it wouldn’t matter.

WHEREAS: death is death, its weight is universal.

So I can see how it flies through production meetings of hurried people. It’s an easy yes.

I am aware this smacks a bit of “oh films were different in my day, you didn’t need all this cursing and violence”…

So I checked.

(This is the joy of AI, you can cross-check your whims.)

I got ChatGPT to develop a jeopardy scoring methodology and here’s what it came up with, from low to high:

1 – Personal or social: embarrassment, exposure, rejection, career failure, losing a competition

2 – Family or bounded community: custody, home, livelihood, family separation, collapse of a small group

3 – Mortal but local: custody, home, livelihood, family separation, collapse of a small group

4 – Collective catastrophe: mass death; destruction or subjugation of a city, nation, population or people

5 – Existential catastrophe: extinction, civilisation, planet, universe, timeline or reality

So Ferris Bueller would be a “1” whereas Frozen 2 would be a “4.”

Then I got it to look up the top 10 films at the box office in north American each year for the last 50 years.

Then score all 500 films according to the main narrative jeopardy. (I assumed that knowledge would be in the training data seeing as these are popular movies.)

If you’re interested, download the movie jeopardy spreadsheet here (xlsx).

Finally I got ChatGPT to calculate the average per decade.

Here’s the results in the format:

Period: average jeopardy score (% low jeopardy movies – % high jeopardy movies)

• 1976-79: 2.77 (43% low – 35% high)
• 1980s: 2.83 (43% low – 31% high)
• 1990s: 3.21 (28% – 46% high)
• 2000s: 3.61 (24% low – 60% high)
• 2010s: 3.96 (10% low – 72% high)
• 2020-2025: 4.08 (7% low – 73% high)

i.e. I am not imagining this.

There has been considerable jeopardy inflation in movies between the 1980s and today.

So I think this is harmful to us all.

Death, as it is used in these movies, is not jeopardy but a symbol of jeopardy. That’s part of it being used lazily.

But we should put MASSIVE weight on death and calamity!

Because it’s a big deal! Especially violent death and collective danger.

And when we don’t give it weight, it gets assumed as part of the normal order of things. Which it is not.

One argument is: look Matt, these are cartoon deaths. It’s a superhero movie, it’s fantasy, it doesn’t matter, we know how to look past the lack of weight.

But all video are merely patterns of light on the screen; I don’t think we get to say that one matters more than another; they all occupy the exact same level of “remove” in our minds, and it all matters the same.

If something deserves weight when we see it on the TV news, it deserves weight when we see it in a movie.

Or else we carry the lack of weight when we see it in movies over to the TV news, and then it carries over to the real people depicted.

I always wonder what creates the consensus cosmogony for an era – our collective understanding of how the world works and in particular where we are going.

It was sci-fi in the 1950s (that’s the argument in the link above).

Now I would argue that we have identified at least a tributary of the 2020s consensus:

When we are all exposed to media that normalises death and mass threat, there is something in the psyche that kicks in: when something built into your sense of reality isn’t happening, you work to make it happen.

Am I saying that we are deliberately, collectively creating situations of mass threat and emotionless jeopardy, because we see it in the movies and it isn’t happening as much in real life?

Yes. Unconsciously but yes.

So we need to find new collective futures, I’ve talked about that before. That’s a big lift, it takes a long time to figure out.

But I would start by giving the events in movies the weight they deserve, so they don’t get normalised. We’d all be happier for it.

And that means I would start with the ratings systems.

Ferris Bueller, for all the cursing and kissing, is a movie for kids, give it a G.

Frozen 2 should be rated R.

More posts tagged: inner-and-outer-realities (7).

I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI?

Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI.

But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything.

And while a voice UI is great within a domain, do you really want to be gossiping about movies or having a psychotherapy session with your fridge? I mean, at that point what even is a product?

i.e. how would you have a single purpose Alexa?

So I’ve been spelunking Technovelgy for things that speak but only in a limited domain.

(Technovelgy is a database of over 4,000 inventions from sci-fi.)

Like this ATM that discourages long convos:

He headed for the ATM in the back… he knew it was watching him as he walked up to it.

“Identify yourself, please.” Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice … probably kept people from standing around, [talking] with it…

– All Tomorrow’s Parties, William Gibson, Lucky Dragon ATM

You can’t imagine this smug door talking about anything else except its fee. It would accuse you of changing the subject.

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

…he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

– Ubik, Philip K. Dick, Toll Door

Doors are often single-minded.

As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.

– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, Self-Satisfied Door

For obvious reasons I like this singing clock, although the user doesn’t appear to speak back to it.

In the living room the voice-clock, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one!

– The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, Voice-Clock

As it happens I did once build a speaking clock based on Poem/1.

It was made from a Yoto player, and when you stuck a special card in then it would tell the time by speaking a poem out loud every 15 minutes. (I was given earlier access to the expanded developer API.)

It was enormously distracting haha

UNTIL:

I switched the speaking clock voice to an ASMR voice from ElevenLabs (which it turns out they go).

It turned out that, if you’re in the zone, a whispered poem doesn’t intrude on your focus. It’s like the traffic outside or the soft wind in the trees. You don’t notice.

But if you’re not focusing, you hear the ASMR whisper as a kind of chime.

It was weird in a short demo, but the attentional impedance matching was absolutely perfect as a device in your room.

I should share a video at some point.

My absolute favourite is this hotel that wants to exist.

This Texan hotel, for instance, was an entirely virtual construction, ones and zeros embedded in a set of chips. And yet, the hotel direly wanted to exist. It would become very beautiful, and it was already very smart. It could sweet-talk itself into physical existence from random piles of raw materials.

Oscar lugged the self-declared cornerstone to the corner of the southern wall. “I belong here,” the cornerstone declared. “Put mortar on me.”

Oscar picked up a trowel. “I’m the tool for the mortar,” the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.

– Distraction, Bruce Sterling, Bambakias Hotel

I love this idea: a pile of bricks and tools, and a speaker that calls out to passers-by and asks for favours.

We’ve spent decades using technology to commoditise labour. Why not use it to commoditise management?

There’s more detail:

Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-scanner over the block, activating the tape…

“I’m a cornerstone,” the cinder block announced.

“Good for you,” Oscar grunted.

“I’m a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left.” The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn’t hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape’s thumbnail-sized speakers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt.

– Distraction, Bruce Sterling, Talking Tape

It’s not just the “telling you what to do” which is clever here (you could do it today by playing the appropriate YouTube while you assemble an IKEA wardrobe). It’s the wiki-like crowdsourcing and automatic coordination.

This isn’t to do with voice, but I like this single-minded toaster that takes its destiny into its own hands:

As a connected toaster, he’s in constant contact with other connected toasters like him – and thus keenly aware of how much action they’re getting. If he’s not being used as much as his friends, Brad gets upset. He’ll wiggle his little handle to get your attention, begging you to make some toast or at least to give him a reassuring pat on the side. Ignore him long enough, and he’ll take a more drastic measure: pinging a network of potential owners to find a new home.

From 2014! By Simone Rebaudengo of the brilliant oio.studio.

BONUS REFERENCE:

Golden Gate Claude (2024), a research project by Anthropic that was online for 24 hours only and connects all conversation back to the Golden Gate Bridge.

If you ask this “Golden Gate Claude” how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll. If you ask it to write a love story, it’ll tell you a tale of a car who can’t wait to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day.

Back in the day, text adventures were games with a natural language interface.

Zork (1977) was the first well-known one.

Here’s a list of the what the language parser says in response to various errors, straight from the source code of the final PDP-10 version of Zork from 1981:

• "I don’t know the word [word]"
• "I can’t make sense out of that."
• "Huh?"
• "Two verbs in command?"
• "Double preposition?"
• "Multiple inputs cannot be used with [verb]"
• "Too many objects specified?"
• "Beg pardon?"

I like the straightforwardness of this: some errors are plain old “syntax error” complaints but others are educating the user about the way the system works.

No conclusions, just thinking.

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I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing.

Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year.

It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics that I have only shared with Kickstarter backers).

I talked about where ideas come from and the value of playing around, and how it’s neat to learn new techniques that you can combine together.

I talked about prototyping and design – and was sure to use the words “prototyping” and “design”. I showed exploratory sketches and what CAD looks like.

I handed round various iterations of e-paper screens, and electronics from breadboard to PCB, and various iterations of plastic parts.

It’s interesting to see how a plastic enclosure comes apart, and to connect that to what an injection moulding machine is doing.

(A lot of the kids are familiar with 3D printers, so I showed a timelapse of a 3D print – it would take a year to print all my clocks! And then a real-time video of injection moulding, and how that would only take a day.)

And then photos of factory floors, and here’s the team, and assembly lines and what a page from an assembly procedure looks like, and packaging too.

7-year-olds have great questions.

Like: how does it not break in the post?

Well here’s a vibration machine in action and that’s how we test it.

And, look, in this cardboard packaging, here’s a cradle, and this was made by a packaging designer – you could be a packaging designer too if you want.

Like: how does the button work?

Well you’re right I didn’t pass round the separate button piece, good spot, it’s small and I didn’t want to lose it. So now let’s talk about assembly and about industrial designers…

I don’t like those videos of factories that are supposed to inspire awe.

You know the ones I mean: you see a thousand products a second whizzing by on 20 parallel belts. You come away saying wow. When they showed manufacturing on kids’ TV when I was growing up, that was what they showed.

“Awe” is the opposite of what I want to convey.

Except for a very specific type of person, when you show something with the expectation that “awe” is the appropriate response, you are implicitly saying to your audience: you should step back here and appreciate this from a distance. Like looking at a great work of art. Gasp but do not place yourself in the picture.

Whereas!

I want to re-home manufacturing. I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.

So my message is: sure this is complicated but it’s fine, we can do complicated.

Factories are just rooms.

The stuff around us isn’t divine - these chairs we’re sitting on, the TV at the front of the classroom, the pots for the plants - all this stuff was invented and figured out and made by people.

p.s. you can be one of those people.

So when I heard the class was learning about inventing, I offered to go in and show that scrappy dead ends are cool actually (it was amazing to speak with a class that already knows the word “prototyping”) and this is electronics and this is going from sketching to plastic and this is what it means to make a product and to sell it.

I deeply feel this mission to normalise getting our hands dirty with the world – when they’re 7 years old, while their brains are still establishing what’s normal.

(This is connected with what I was saying about training for collective efficacy.)

And I’m just someone’s dad, you know? So if this guy can do it…

If you have the opportunity to go into your local school and talk about making things too, please do. You will be rewarded with wonderful curiosity, engagement and questions from the kids.

Hopefully one of them one day will look around them, think “someone should do something about that”, remember back, and say - oh that someone can be ME.

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1.

It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck.

My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of the fan: a small plate that is so cold that it is covered with icy condensation. It’s the Peltier effect (the plate is really hot on the back) and the first time I’ve seen a thermoelectric cooler in the wild.

Here’s a thermoelectric handheld fan on Alibaba. Three quid each if you’re buying over a million.

A fan looks like a fan because of the mechanism used for the movement of air.

I’ve been meditating this week on what motivates form in product design.

Hey free concept: AirPods with built-in Peltier thermoelectric coolers so the buds are ice-cold in your ear holes.

2.

A fan moves air; electronic products move data. That can motivate the form just the same.

Durrell Bishop’s Marble Answer Machine (watch the video):

marbles dropping out of an answering machine could form an intuitive physical interface. This work later became the seed for a new movement called Tangible User Interfaces.

Each marble is a message that you can place in the player dish, put aside to keep for later, and so on. So sophisticated and so immediately understandable. (“Legible” as Durrell say.)

But what about when a product can do anything? Like a phone?

We end up with anonymous slabs of black glass.

3.

Before movie theatres there was the Kinetoscope (Wikipedia) "an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window."

The Kinetoscope came out of Thomas Edison’s lab and established the idea of reels of film, and also film as “content” to be manufactured and distributed.

But it was a single-viewer device: you leant down and put your eyes to the viewer.

The act of peeping – the form is motivated by the human interaction.

Or for the necessity of the affordance: a possible interaction that must been seen as a possible interaction. (Affordances as previously discussed.)

BTW:

I recently discovered via the sf journal [Foundation] (issue 152) that:

Thomas Edison, using his Kinetoscope, is credited with producing (though not directing) … the first filmed sneeze (1894), the first filmed kiss (1896).

4.

The egg timer that looks like an egg is the best product design of all time.

Here’s one on Amazon.

The traditional kind of hourglass timer that uses sand, on the other hand, is rubbish:

• It is traditional
• Its form is motivated by the mechanism
• And it is legible because you can see the passing of time.

But what to do you use it for?

Measuring time, sure. A lot of stuff. It can do anything (related to waiting for a period of time).

But does an initial use come to mind?

You have to think about it – aha eggs! Or you have to learn it. Ultimate the sand timer is abstract.

Like an empty ChatGPT window?

AI can do anything too.

But I opened my ChatGPT just now, and look how hard they work to give you ideas of what to do. Mine suggests: Write an email, create a painting, give me ideas…

If the hourglass timer were designed like that, they would print on the side:

• For eggs
• For rice
• For pasta
• For reminding me how long I have till my program is on.

So cumbersome.

Whereas!

The egg timer that is shaped like an egg.

Form follows function – but also where and when and how.

And then once you have timed your eggs, you have in your mind this new hammer of “timing” and you see immediately everything else you can time.

So another motivation for form is to imply the first context of use, even if - and especially if - the product can be re-purposed or adapted for other contexts by the end user, once they have internalised the function of it.

It is genius. I aspire to design a product this perfect.

The egg timer shaped like an egg was invented and patented by Lucio Oliveri in 1982. U.S. Design Patent No. D276,705 (expired).

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