Just got back from a trip to Japan (hope to write much more about that in the near future). One of the stand-out experiences was using a [Suica] (https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/pass/suica.html) card for transit, storage lockers, and a few other purchases.

If you setup the card on your iPhone, you can turn on “Express Transit” mode, which lets you tap your phone on the terminal without having to unlock your phone. It’s a super convenient, fast way to move through the system.

Using this all over Japan got me curious about some of the technology behind it all. I haven’t been able to sift through all the details, but here’s what I’ve found so far:

• Apple covers the security angle of Contactless passes in the Apple Platform Security Guide here.
• The Apple VAS (Value Added Services) protocol has been reverse engineered with details on GitHub here.
• If you want to use your own passes with hardware, you’ll need some certificates from Apple (see the security guide, above). Depending on who you are/what you’re doing, it might not be worth the hassle. There are companies like Pass Ninja who you can piggy-back off. (I have not used Pass Ninja and cannot recommend them; they might be great, they might be terrible.)
• You’ll need hardware that has compatible software for ECP (Enhanced Contactless Protocol). You can find the reverse-engineered details in this guide, which includes sample code you could use on an Arduino.
• You can probably make the software work with this NFC reader from Adafruit.
• This tech is used by much more than Suica. There are office badges, car keys, gym passes, and more.

Sitting on the Shinkansen drinking a beer at 175mph. This is incredible.

Here’s my text for this test post. Let’s see if this works.

Turns out the ISS is leaking

in February of this year NASA identified an increase in the leak rate from less than 1 pound of atmosphere a day to 2.4 pounds a day, and in April this rate increased to 3.7 pounds a day. Despite years of investigation, neither Russian nor US officials have identified the underlying cause of the leak.

I love the intention behind this law in California banning the use of “Buy” and “Purchase” in cases when you’re merely licensing the underlying item. Haven’t read the actual law, so I have no idea if this will make a difference, but I’m a big proponent of this idea.

I appreciated this overview of Kubernetes. I learned a bit, and still have no desire to go down this path at all.

I like this idea by Jake ay Polymathematics. It’s a fun take on a web ring idea, imagining it as stops along a subway. An implementation that didn’t require JS would be even better. :wink:

Ben Thompson’s latest piece, Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI is an interesting (and long) take on how he imagines AI being built into the real world.

It’s worth reading, but I think an item from the summary stands out to me:

My core contention here, however, is that AI truly is a new way of computing, and that means the better analogies are to computing itself. Transformers are the transistor, and mainframes are today’s models. The GUI is, arguably, still TBD.

(Emphasis mine).

I’m not convinced (yet?). I still have not seen an implementation that demonstrates substantially different capabilities than previous tools, with two exceptions:

• Visual media manipulation (generate images, videos, remove objects)
• Slop text generation

While visual media manipulation is impressive (I use the latest features in Lightroom all the time), it still feels augmentative more than generative so far as it’s impact. I’m probably under-appreciating the degree to which “generate an image of X for me” will be impactful, but it feels like the outcome is far more likely to be more images generated than it is replace the human who builds our UI¹.

Same with text generation: How many people are actively writing slop right now, who are in danger of being replaced by a computer doing it? More than zero, I’d wager, but this doesn’t seem society-transforming (maybe in its annoyance, but that’s something else).

Neither of these feel like “a new way of computing” to me. So perhaps this AI future is in “Agents”. But where is the demonstration that this technology can lead to these agents existing, let alone working well enough to be considered a paradigm shift?

The improvement curve of these LLMs seems to be flattening, and having the LLM run it’s own multi-shot answer to each question (like o-1 is doing) might be more effective, but it’s hardly a game-changer, IMO. So where are the orders-of-magnitude improvement going to come from?

I’m open to the idea it could happen, but I’m not seeing it as remotely inevitable along the existing axes of improvement.

Maybe Ben’s right, and this really is a generational transformation, in which I’ll struggle to adapt, if I adapt at all, and that I’m too entrenched in existing ways of computing to think outside the box.

Or, maybe this is more like grocery store self-checkout, where every large organization will, behind the dream of free labor, spend considerably more money than they could ever hope to save building complex, obnoxious contraptions that fail to do the job as well as a 17-year-old clerk.

MidJourney is every going to be, IMO.

A blast from the past.

Finally started playing around with Tailscale recently, and I’ve really been enjoying it. It feels like exactly the kind of computer technology I always love: make an annoying problem dead-simple to solve, and leave it at that.

So what is Tailscale? For me, it’s a dead-simple way to setup a VPN for my home network and then access that network on any of my devices, from anywhere.

Hello World!

It’s nice to be here.