Category: Computer nerdism

iCloud for Windows creates a single folder with 44,000 items

by philg

Trigger Warning: A First World problem.

A recent example of software engineering from the best and brightest of Silicon Valley is iCloud for Windows version 11. Want to see the picture that you just took on your phone? It will be zapped automatically to \Pictures\iCloud Photos\Photos … where it is mixed in with 44,000+ additional photos and videos that you’ve taken since 2014 (thumbnails only, which load slowly even with a 1 Gbit fiber connection).

Yes, a single flat directory of however many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of photos and videos that you’ve ever taken. Even worse, the software no longer converts from Apple’s unconventional choice of HEIC to JPEG. Except that if you edit the photo on the device, e.g., because the orientation sensor got it wrong, the corrected version comes through as a JPEG. So now you’ve got a directory with a mixture of HEIC and JPEG files.

Is there any way to change this behavior? The 10.x version of iCloud would take the HEIC files captured by the phone, convert them to JPEG, and actually download them into a \Pictures\iCloud Photos\Downloads

Stylish Macintosh users: does it work the same way on the Mac? One enormous flat folder with every photo that you’ve ever taken?

(Maybe Apple is just leading the way into a HEIC future? Apparently not. The Apple-brand silicone case for the iPhone 11 Pro Max failed and I tried to send them a picture of the failure so they’d send me a replacement. Apple support has a web-based system for uploading “files”. If you try to upload a photo that you took with Apple’s own device, from Apple’s own browser (Safari), into Apple’s own server, it fails with no further explanation. If you try to do it from Windows, you get the same unexplained failure. If you convert the HEIC to JPEG on Windows and then upload… it works.)

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Facebook pay cuts for remote employees who move to Nevada or Texas prove that the labor market is rigged?

by philg

“Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts” (CNBC):

The company will begin allowing certain employees to work remotely full time, he said. Those employees will have to notify the company if they move to a different location by Jan. 1, 2021. As a result, those employees may have their compensations adjusted based on their new locations, Zuckerberg said.

“We’ll adjust salary to your location at that point,” said Zuckerberg, citing that this is necessary for taxes and accounting. “There’ll be severe ramifications for people who are not honest about this.”

If there is a market for productivity and accomplishment, the remote worker should be able to get paid the same regardless of location, no? For items where there is a functional market, we can’t say “Oh, this is of excellent quality, but was produced in Cambodia so I am going to pay only half as much as I would pay for the same item, same quality, made in higher-cost China, right?

Readers: Does the fact that Facebook can unilaterally set the price it will pay for labor depending on the cost of housing from which the labor toils show that the market for Silicon Valley labor is rigged?

Related:

  • High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (Wikipedia): High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation is a 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a 2013 civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for alleged “no cold call” agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.
  • Hacker News thread on this post (my favorite: “Supply and demand makes sense as an explanation [for why on-site workers in different locations are paid different amounts], but it doesn’t actually explain this one. If facebook were just charging a market rate determined by supply and demand, then your salary would drop when you become remote, regardless of where you actually live, as your location has nearly no bearing on your productivity or competition for the same job. The fact that Facebook wants workers to report their location, as they cannot easily see the difference, shows their motivation cannot be driven by supply and demand.” Also good: “Salary based on an individual’s needs is quite the ‘hmmmmm’ moment. It is one of the reasons Violet Newstead — Lily Tomlin’s character in 9 to 5 — is given when she furiously demands to know why she was passed over for a fair promotion. The guy who got the job instead? Well had a wife and kids to support. He needed it more.” And quoting American academia’s favorite thinker: “No, it just proves that Marx was right about the nature of the wage/salary. The value of labour power is the cost of reproducing/maintaining that worker at a particular standard of living, not some particular fraction of the value generated at work.”)
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Time for life-sized videoconferencing?

by philg

Is everyone sick of seeing friends and co-workers compressed into a portion of an already-small monitor?

The only good video conference experience that I have had was back in 2000 in Australia. A university with two campuses used the rear wall of a lecture room as a life-size window into a room that was about 20 miles away. People in that remote room appeared life size on the rear wall. The data link speed was, I’m sure, nowhere near as good as the standard fiber-to-the-home services today. The projectors could not have been as good as today’s projectors. But it was surprisingly natural to converse with people who seemed to be just on the other side of the wall.

Multi-city law firms today often have advanced systems. A huge direct-view TV (85″?) on one wall of the room in New York can show what is going on in a similar room in D.C. It doesn’t seem as effective as the system that the Australians had back in 2000, though, because the people who appear on the screen are not as big as the people who are live in the room (or as “live” as anyone can be who is working on a patent infringement question!).

Back in 2003, I wrote up an idea for a infrastructure that would enable a person to work side-by-side with an assistant in another part of the world: “it is as if a wall in one’s office is opened up to the assistant’s office thousands of miles away”. Why not build home offices like this as standard? A window in front and video walls left and right. If the plague returns, everyone who currently works side-by-side in a Silicon Valley coding plantation can go home and still work side-by-side with at least two co-workers at a time.

I’ll cut and paste the research idea from 2003…

Americans make expensive employees. Productivity is measured as economic output per dollar of labor input. In the absence of technological advances, the only way to improve labor productivity is to move the job to a low-wage country. Pairing every American office worker with an assistant in a low-wage English-speaking country (or a low-wage part of the US) would be an excellent way of boosting productivity without exporting jobs, assuming that an effective coordination system can be constructed.

The Labus Novus coordination system will comprise the following components:

  • a life-sized two-way video conferencing system; it is as if a wall in one’s office is opened up to the assistant’s office thousands of miles away
  • an information system that records everything relevant to the high-wage worker’s job, including facts, reference material, contacts, correspondence, appointments, and relationships among these items [like a more sophisticated Microsoft Outlook]
  • robot arms and other robots within the high-wage worker’s office that can be manipulated by the low-wage worker, thus enabling the assistant to pull folders from file cabinets, position papers on a desk, etc., from the other side of the planet

Current state-of-the-art video conferencing systems require 6 Mbits of point-to-point bandwidth. Thus the requirement of extremely high quality video conferencing implies the need for research in video analysis and compression, network protocols and routing, and semiconductors and optics for very bright images.

[Ooops! This is rather unfortunate to read, 17 years later! 6 Mbits?!?]

Outlook-on-steroids might sound straightforward but doing the job right can be as challenging as all of Artificial Intelligence. We are building support for a computer-mediated assistant rather than attempting to build a fully automated personal cognitive assistant. This does not reduce the difficulty of achieving a complete solution but it does increase the utility of an incomplete solution.

A desire to give the assistant the ability to manipulate physical objects half a world away (telepresence) justifies research in broad areas of robotic actuators and sensors.

Funding Possibilities: Phone companies are logical sponsors for this research. Telcos built a tremendous amount of network capacity in the 1990s but then neglected to offer any services besides voice communication, thus resulting in falling prices and bankruptcies. Only about 10 percent of the fiber installed through the U.S. is actually being used. Continuously active high quality video conferences have the potential to consume all of currently unused bandwidth in the networks.

Note that the system could be used domestically, yoking together a worker in an expensive crowded place such as New York City with an assistant in a low-wage uncrowded place such as Iowa.

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Invest in Estonian-style e-governance to be ready for the next plague?

by philg

Quite a few Boston-area businesses have shut down their physical offices. Employees of Amazon, for example, are working from home. Towns and cities, however, can’t close down their respective Town Halls and City Halls because the only way to access quite a few government services is to show up in person. The same enterprise of state/local government that tries, via its public health department, to get everyone to stay home, may ironically end up being one of the only information processing operations that insists that everyone show up and get within contagious distance.

Supposedly Estonia allows citizens to do almost anything that they’d do at a city hall from the disease-free safety of their own homes.

The U.S. track record for government-run IT is admittedly mixed, e.g., with the $1 billion healthcare.gov insurance site. But maybe if we could adopt the Estonian system unmodified for state and local transactions we would be able to save time in non-plague periods and save lives in plague periods.

Readers: What do you think? Should people have to brave coronavirus to get (or issue) a building permit?

Related:

  • “Estonia, the Digital Republic” (New Yorker, 2017)
  • e-Estonia (Wikipedia)
  • e-governance (from Estonians themselves): “Estonia is probably the only country in the world where 99% of the public services are available online 24/7. E-services are only impossible for marriages, divorces and real-estate transactions – you still have to get out of the house for those.” (don’t get too excited about those family law transactions; they are not as lucrative as in the U.S. From a 2017 post: “In all three Baltic countries I learned that having sex with the richest person in the country would yield only about 200 euros per month in child support” (similar to nearby Sweden))
  • “Estonia: Tough campaign stop for Bernie Sanders”
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Iowa Caucuses, Boeing 737 MAX, and Apollo 11: software is usually the weakest link

by philg

From Techcrunch:

A smartphone app tasked with reporting the results of the Iowa caucus has crashed, delaying the result of the first major count in nominating a Democratic candidate to run for the U.S. presidency.

Previously, I wrote about how a handful of lines of code could have prevented the Boeing 737 MAX’s software from trimming the airliner into a dive-bomber-at-Midway nose-down attitude (see “Boeing 737 MAX crash and the rejection of ridiculous data”, for example).

I recently visited the Kennedy Space Center visitor center. In the building housing one of the leftover Saturn V rockets there is a compelling “Lunar Theater” presentation explaining that software overloaded the computer system in the Lunar Module during Apollo 11, the first landing on the moon. According to the dramatic retelling, the mission was saved only because the crew hand-flew the spaceship to a successful landing. In other words, all of the civil, mechanical, electrical, and aeronautical engineering challenges were met, but the software failed.

[Update: See comments below for how the the software in this case may have been blameless!]

The books for sale at the KSC do not encourage young visitors to become computer programmers…

Maybe it is time to switch to Haskell?

Also, what if the Iowa debacle had happened in some other country? Would U.S. media report it as resulting from a fundamental problem with that country’s culture and educational system? Whereas if it happens here in the U.S. it is just an unfortunate freak event?

Related:

  • Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control (WIRED): “The inside story of how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin struggled to touch down on the moon, while their guidance computer kept crashing. Again and again.”
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Masters Thesis Idea: Conversational Flight Planner

by philg

In working on the slides for a flight planning section of our FAA Private Pilot Ground School at MIT (videos and slides available free online), it occurred to me that none of the fancy computer tools were as convenient or efficient as talking to a competent human.

What about a system where the input is, e.g.,”I’m thinking about going from Bedford to Washington, D.C. this weekend.” (could be entered via menus; does not have to be natural language)

The Conversational Flight Planner responds after looking at the voluminous official FAA briefing and some of the long-term weather forecast products, such as MOS:

There will be a strong wind from the north so you should consider paying up to fly into Dulles and land Runway 1R rather than deal with the crosswind at KGAI.

Looks like ice is possible on Sunday evening so you’ll need to depart Sunday at noon.

It will be below freezing overnight Saturday night so you need to arrange for a hangar or a preheater plug-in.

Interesting Master’s Thesis project for a computer science or aero/astro major?

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When does the great age of machine intelligence reach our desktop computers?

by philg

Turning Google Contacts into address labels for Christmas/New Year’s cards is a task that I expected to be simple. The plan was

  • export to “Google CSV” format
  • upload to avery.com to generate a PDF for printing

This fails because the Google export process produces a CSV file with nearly 100 columns, which is too many for the Avery system to handle.

No problem, open in Microsoft Excel and cut down to about 5 columns, right?

What happens when you combine programmer’s from two of the world’s smartest companies? Excel is not smart enough to recognize a column of 5- or 9-digit values as ZIP codes, even if they appear right after a column of two-character state abbreviations. The leading zeros are trimmed off, turning Massachusetts ZIP codes into four-digit values, e.g., “02138” to “2138” (the ZIP code of the great minds of Harvard and Harvard Square, who will soon be tapped by President Warren to optimize our government).

What if we keep this as a Google-only process? The people who built Contacts apparently don’t talk to the people who built Sheets. There is no way to export directly from Contacts to a Google spreadsheet.

Save to the local disk and then upload, right? The behavior is exactly the same as with Excel: leading zeroes of all of the five-digit ZIP codes are trimmed off. This is the company we’re going to trust with medical diagnoses? (“The doctor will Google you now” turning into “The Google will doctor you now.”)

As with most other challenges, if you’re a skilled user of Excel the solution is straightforward: create a blank workbook and then use the Data tab to import “From Text/CSV”. Even on the full automatic setting, it correctly infers that the ZIP column is text, not number. But if the fully automated import works, why doesn’t it work simply to open the CSV file in Excel?

(The whole process ended up taking way longer than if I’d simply addressed 180 envelopes by hand, of course.)

The particular challenge of wrestling with Google Contacts or generating addressed envelopes is not that interesting, but I think it is a good starting point for a discussion of how machine learning and AI can ever be integrated back into the computer systems we use day to day. Google Translate does some impressive stuff, but why isn’t it easy to enhance Google Sheets?

Separately, the Google Contacts software has a long way to go to reach the same level of quality as what Sharp was shipping with the Wizard organizer in 1989. A contact with a single street address, once exported, will appear in a CSV-file row without any street address. Why is it difficult for Google to do what Apple, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, and Sharp were doing successfully in the 1990s?

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Feel better about the time you’ve invested in writing documentation

by philg

During a recent rental car excursion I became curious about the USB-C port in the front of the Nissan Maxima. Could one run a laptop from the car, for example? I decided to open the glovebox and read the specs from the owner’s manual. After one year and more than 20,000 miles of rental by perhaps 100 different drivers…

(still in its shrink wrap)

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Is autocorrect location-aware?

by philg

Annals of our future self-driving overlords… I was at the Burlington Mall with the kids. Apple iMessage exchange:

  • where are you?
  • “in Arhaus” autocorrected to “in Arafat’s”

The Burlington Mall has pretty good WiFi and LTE so I think that the phone should have been able to figure out where it was. Does autocorrect not even try to adjust its behavior based on location?

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Why wasn’t Google Glass popular for translation?

by philg

Aside from missing family and friends and finding that wearing an air pollution mask tended to fog up my glasses, one reason that I was happy to return home from China was that it was no fun being illiterate. WeChat can be used to translate a sign or menu into English, but it is somewhat cumbersome. Same deal with Google Translate, which works to turn English text into characters to show shop and restaurant personnel.

It occurred to me to wonder why systems such as Google Glass hadn’t caught on simply for the purpose of finding text in every scene and translating into the traveler’s home language. Was there simply not enough battery power to have the thing running continuously? It would have added a lot to the trip if I could have just walked around streets and museums and, without having to take any explicit action, seen English language versions of all of the surrounding writing.

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