Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • The case for a pyjama phone

    The case for a pyjama phone

    Maybe you will call it something else in the future. But I know you need it. I have used a pyjama phone from the first time I swapped up my mobile phone. That previous model seemed fine up until yesterday, it did the same stuff more or less, maybe a bit slower.

    1. Are you worried about your battery? You haven’t decided if it should stay on the charger all night or not, maybe you want it to stop at 80% charge, whatever you like. Get home, switch off your main phone and plug it in to exactly the level you think best. In the meantime….
    2. …relax. Your pyjama phone has only the apps you need at home. Only what you choose to use, the rest can wait. It has to wait, you haven’t even installed it. Instant recallibration.
    3. Take a load of your main phone. A whole lot of apps are only useful when you are home. Why carry them around all day and weigh down your main phone (and your brain) with them? Numerous chat apps or social media I only have on my pyjama phone. If you message me on Viber I won’t see it until I get home. TikTok is not something I need to be seeing all day.
    4. Test and play with stuff you aren’t sure about. That app you read about (on your pyjama phone at night, on that news app you wouldn’t install on your main phone) and are curious? Just try it out.

    There are a lot of uses for a pyjama phone. But the main objective is to create a “safe place”, a calm place, you are not going to switch off all phones completely like they say you should, so at least have a phone which is automatically set up to be closer to whatever you want to feel like doing at home.

  • You are all wrong about Google. 2-5 years wrong.

    You are all wrong about Google. 2-5 years wrong.

    It is fascinating to watch the media, analysts or financial whiz kids try to explain how and why Google does anything. How they enjoy the “failures” or run through the “threats” to the company. “Google just can’t seem to get it together in messaging apps” writes one guru. “Privacy issues could damage its advertising revenue” another. “Pixel phones never got market share” proclaims a title.

    How little they know.

    The only way to explain how Google does business is to imagine you are a two year old child. And Google is the adult. Not even any adult, a really smart and fit adult. Say you are playing catching and throwing a ball. You can hardly manage it, the ball falls out of your hands, you fall over trying to run to it. And Google will pretend to be at the same level of incompetence as you are for a while just to keep you happy.

    We get glimpses of this at times. But Google is a pretty smart adult and doesn’t rush into giving things away. When pressed by the stockmarket or developments it releases something that wows us. Or something to distract attention. Take Apple’s privacy war for example. First move was the Pixel 3a. Easy. Destroy Apple’s margin by bringing the whole smartphone market to a much lower average price point. But Apple insisted. No problem. Google doesn’t need old fashioned methods of tracking users. Just burn the whole thing. Google has tools to track which are far more advanced. Much like the stupid European GDPR fuss, Google will always come out on top. It now announced it is reducing its cut of Play Store app and digital goods sales from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million of revenue a creator earns each year. Big deal! That will be around 600 million of just 1.6 billion in revenue a year. Drop in the pond. Whatever keeps the kids happy.

    Because it is only pretending to be dumb when playing catch with you.

    I reckon Google is 2-5 years ahead of most of its competitors in most important fields of whatever it does. And even if it isn’t, it can make up for it with other tools or knowledge to the same end. It is just carefully cherry picking so that we don’t all figure it out. Elon Musk is a brash three year old in comparison. He makes a big fuss about buying into cryptocurrencies. Google founders made moves in the same field long ago quietly. Because with the amount of data and the AI they have, they know things a long long time before anyone else.

    So when online booking for hotels was announced recently, free for all, and retail shopping….soon free for the whole planet, well you see where it is going. Google decides when and how to release tools that can totally dominate. Don’t mess with the adult or they will get out the adult tools.

    Feel free to drop the ball now.

  • How many people have cheated their way to the vaccine?

    How many people have cheated their way to the vaccine?

    The answer to this question is much more complicated than it seems. In fact despite its dreadful toll in human lives and economies, the pandemic is a wonderful opportunity to see societies, governments and well, all organized systems in our world, tested.

    Capitalism or globalization or whatever you want to call it was already in trouble before all of this. Demonized and blamed for all sorts of problems. But if it was all about money, rich people all over the world would just buy a vaccine, wouldn’t they? We all have a sneaking suspicion many of them have, but then what about…

    … the rule of law? Because sure, you could get your hands on a couple of doses but then how would you do the paperwork? I am pretty sure that in Greece thousands of people have been vaccinated much earlier than they had the right to. They jumped the line by using political connections even though they are 40 or 50 years old. This should be impossible because of…

    …transparency and digital accountability. It is after all a most valuable item, every dose of vaccine should be on a computer system and accounted for. But it isn’t. Nobody wants the bad press that would accompany news that 1000 doses expired unused due to a mistake and in very few countries do governments allow their citizens access to such data.

    Social cohesion has been tested in these conditions. You can bad mouth Sweden all you like about the way they handled the pandemic, but you have to admire them in this respect. Depending where you live you have a very different approach to what you consider “normal” in terms of somebody jumping the line to get vaccinated before you. In Greece we consider it almost normal but…

    …group country behavior was spectacular. The European Union flexed its muscles to protect its members. It seemed a wonderful move which would protect smaller countries. It backfired. Other, small countries in the region did better. But like with masks and PPE, the gloves came off when it mattered, global cooperation went out the window when it mattered. So efforts like the…

    …green passport are in great danger of proving to be a joke. If I live in a country where I can get vaccinated just because I know a politician or a journalist, of course they can also produce any fake document or assurance with any dates they like afterwards. It will only work within countries, for their own use, like they did in Israel.

    So I don’t know exactly how many Greeks cheated their way into getting the COVID-19 vaccination before me. I am pretty sure it is several thousand. But I am even more sure we will never find out. If you live in a country which inspires more certainty you are lucky.

    Hopefully this pandemic will teach us all the value of institutions we can trust.

  • Who gives a sh*t management advice

    Who gives a sh*t management advice

    It is now almost a week without power, thankfully water is back on.  As usual on TV and social media everyone is playing the blame game.  And you know you can’t win.  As different types of information flies around, the complexity is overwhelming and usually nothing changes.  In any organization, family or simple task where a group of homo sapiens must collaborate and share the workload , things get complicated.

    WHO GIVES A SH*T?  I often get the urge to shout it in business meetings.  Now let me take my example here in the cold while I watch my freezer contents melt to try and dissect how nobody gave a SH*T and we ended up like this.  In fact I think this will become a huge management guru type moment, if we survive please invite me as a motivational speaker to come and explain how it will solve all your organization’s problems.

    Ι live in a rich suburb of Athens, a European capital, the year 2021.  It is in fact probabl;y in the top 10 richest areas in Greece, a beautiful residential area full of trees.  Pine trees.  Why pine trees?

    1. NOBODY GAVE A SH*T as our environment was degraded from beautiful indigenous species, to pine trees.  They act like cockroaches, incredibly sturdy and adaptable.  After every forest fire that wiped out biodiversity pine trees appeared first.  Most people were just happy to see anything green grow.  Unfortunately pine trees are not well adapted to snow fall.  So they break easily.  And when they fall, they take with them the power lines.

    Now it gets complicated.  An American would say “buy yourself a chainsaw and clear that damn tree yourself!”  If we lived in frontierland and were all physically able and strong enough, maybe it would be an option.  As a kid I remember many a Saturday with my siblings and father clearing trees either for the fireplace or for safety.  Taller trees were a bit tricky, thankfully we had no major accidents.  Then the local authorities decided that they should tackle trees near power lines.  It made sense.  Then they stopped doing it.  We called and reported danger spots, they said they had done all they could.

    1. NOBODY GAVE A SH*T as these requests piled up.  The local authorities made their own interpretation of a recent legal change to power distribution and decided it wasn’t their job.  They acted as if they had no right to interfere while they clearly had both a right and an obligation to deal with those danger spots.

    So it snowed and the trees broke and power supply was disrupted. Elderly people in my area were left with no heating, no telephone, no power, stuck in roads with no access, buried under heavy snowfall and blocked by fallen trees.  How did all the guilty parties react?  The local authority applied to put us in a state of emergency.  Great, that takes the responsibility out of their hands.  Pass the hot potato, why not?  So they announce that the Army, Fire Dept and every other special unit is coming to save us.   Government acted like they have solved the problem.  And…nothing.  Six days into the problem and nobody has knocked on doors to check if the people in the houses are alive.  Single parents with kids huddled around fireplaces burning furniture, desperate but unable to brave the cold or leave the kids alone while they go for help.

    1. NOBODY GAVE A SH*T.  You imagine the control center of a special unit in a tent and some commander shouting out orders.  You imagined wrong.  That “can do” attitude, you know when the boss says “I don’t care HOW you do it, just GET IT DONE!”  That is the “who gives a sh*t” moment when boss shows he gives a sh*t.  That is what makes a boss.

    I could continue breaking down the thousands of people that didn’t give a damn, a hoot or a sh*t but my netbook battery won’t last forever.  Please.  Be part of the solution.  It is a lovely sunny day here in Dionysos, Greece, but around 5pm it starts getting cold and by 7pm it is freezing with no power.

    Be a leader.  Be a doer.  

    Give a sh*t.

  • Big Tech saves lives – 911 calls need to change

    Big Tech saves lives – 911 calls need to change

    If and when you are psychologically up to it, listen to some 911 calls. It is not just good indirect experience in case you are ever in a desperate situation but also heart warming to know that so many ordinary people can turn into super heroes when the need arises.

    It is also absolutely infuriating.

    As a person that always looks for the optimal solution to problems, I often find myself wanting to scream at either the caller or the operator. 911 (or 112 if you are in Europe, or other numbers in other countries) is an amazing feat of collaboration and government actually managing to do something useful which generally works well. The history of getting different carriers to maintain an emergency service is fascinating.

    But it is far from enough.

    In the recent pandemic we initially all discussed contact tracing. Apple and Google silently yet amazingly, produced a way to use our smart phones. They got little credit for it mainly because they are so afraid of the privacy backlash. But maybe emergency calls is a way for us all to reap the benefits of this work in the long term.

    Have you ever dialed in an emergency? Here’s what happens. Regardless of whether or not you have paid your bill, or even if you are near a cell tower of the company you buy service from, your route gets patched through to a central service. (In the U.S. it is a bit more complicated due to different State laws and histories with telcos.) Your phone sends your location to the person picking up your call to save everyone time.

    So why just location? Your phone battery levels might be useful for emergency services to know. But what would be really great would be access to your cameras. Oh, you are worried they might abuse it? Well listen to the lady that drowned in her car because 911 didn’t believe it was filling up with water. In fact why stop at your cameras, based on location in case of emergency, 911 should be able to ask bystanders’ smartphone cameras to switch on. You get an emergency notification and accept if you want. It would help in a lot of situations. All available data from smart phone sensors of the person calling 911 as well as people nearby could save a lot of lives and energy.

    One of the biggest problems with 911 calls is pranksters. Again, there are tech solutions. Because if the call also send a log of recent activity, emergency services could much more quickly and reliably assess if you are serious or a ten year old playing a bad joke. It could be with your approval, a message on your phone saying “we need to access your internet history and app usage to make sure your emergency call is valid”. If my kid was in danger or my car is half fallen down a cliff I am pretty sure I won’t mind them seeing whatever else I did today to prove I am serious.

    In the early days of the internet, I had suggested public use of banners on websites for announcements that are important to society. It would a kind of online ad tax to help find missing children or spread awareness for important topics which don’t get enough funding for communication. Maybe 911 calls can start something which brings back the concept of public dogoodery in a new way again.

  • No serious user (let alone a company) should trust Apple silicon, here’s why

    No serious user (let alone a company) should trust Apple silicon, here’s why

    Let me explain how the tech world works for Intel.  It isn’t that they made “a wrong decision” or “were late embracing new materials” or whatever journalists wrote recently under the influence of the Apple marketing machine.  Sure, we all would have loved a David and Goliath story, or something truly exciting and revolutionary in the processor world.

    But it doesn’t work like that.

    The tech world has suffered too much from “move fast and break things”.  Apple’s M1 chip is a typical example of just that.  They botched a way to make it sort of work well enough on some applications.  Including Intel memory ordering or dedicating cache to Javascript however won’t cut it when you are making a serious buying decision.  It hardly makes it for a private user if you think about it.  I outlaid some of my objections here in a way that anyone that has seen Apple operate before should understand and believe.

    There is a reason the planet does not run on Apple machines.  And it was never about price.  Apple simply hasn’t got the people, resources or will power to collaborate on the global scale that Intel does.  Most people don’t even see this work.  While Apple toys with its users by changing power adaptors or connectors, Intel has people on committees making sure that the new USB will work on 90 percent of the planet’s computers.  Not work “sometimes”, not “work pretty well”, it has to work exactly as expected every time.  Apple can shoot off variations of Bluetooth of its own.  Their iPhone users will put up with it.  Intel can’t and won’t.  From space exploration to bank infrastructure, our planet relies on technological solutions that  have been developed through long term collaboration.  And that is never, ever from Apple.

    Serious tech companies work with other serious tech companies to ensure that everything works.  I remember putting my ten year old IBM laptop next to a fully loaded Mac G4, both had been bought around the same time.  My PC ran everything perfectly, even MS DOS software written decades ago.  The Mac was practically useless.  Microsoft and Intel are boring.  Yeah, sure.  If you consider reliably working boring.  They don’t just announce that 64bit is the future and throw a switch.  They find ways to communicate with tens of thousands of other companies.  Through trade shows, committees, working groups and a million other ways.  There are many candidate technologies.  Most fail.  Somehow we need  to make sure that the ones that really fit best are the ones that are supported.  Yes of course, that delays implementation.  And so it should.

    Sure, if you have a very small investment recoup window and a very specific task in hand that justifies an M1 laptop, go ahead.  If only you depend on the acquisition, play with it all you like.  But if you need to bet your life, company or future on the silicon you are about to buy, Apple is definitely not the company to trust.

    Apple was, is and will remain a fringe player.  Don’t be fooled by the hype.  They may make loads of money but it is from their lifestyle products, not their RnD.   We all know the ARM moves were through acquisition, nothing internal. Apple doesn’t innovate technologically but in marketing.  They bought a chip company and used them for this gimmick now like they have done with many other companies over the years.  Look again at the numbers.  Whether it is iOS or personal computing, they never get a big piece of the pie.  They don’t want to.  They can’t handle it.  The company recently paid a fine for batterygate and laughed at the amount it came to in total.  But that is only because their user base is so small.  90percent of the planet doesn’t care, we don’t use Apple devices and never will.

  • What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    The entire industry has gone crazy about the “phenomenal” performance of the new Apple computers. As I predicted, under Tim Cook Apple is indeed changing. But not nearly enough. And don’t be fooled like all those tech “experts” who make money from click baiting you with the impressive titles about “PC killing performance”. When Cook first took over I famously wrote that I might buy an iPhone in a couple of future iterations. I stand corrected. Tim Cook disappointed me, he didn’t turn it into the best version of IBM. This is a company with no mission statement that simply doesn’t have any technological innovation of its own. Apple is not about technology, it is more of an American stock market game that moves the i-Goalposts as much as is needed to fool enough of the people.

    So before you rush out to buy one of these new laptops everyone is raving about, let me tell you why you will regret it. Let’s look at a two year scenario. What could go wrong with this lovely new Apple laptop in the next two years?

    1. If anything isn’t working, well, you’re on your own. Apple users have been crying over faulty keyboards forever and the company didn’t even acknowledge them, let alone fix it for them. The “you are holding it wrong” mentality is still strong at Apple.
    2. Accessories – they have you by the balls! Even when Apple pretends to follow a standard, they twist it into something proprietary. Whether it is power, Bluetooth, storage, or even simple cables, they always find a way to make you pay more and restrict your choices. Apple can make even buying a webcam a difficult task while the rest of the planet simply plugs and plays.
    3. We know that the gimmicks might disappear. They put that bar on the top of the keyboard, made you pay extra for it, you showed it off to your friends the first day, and then what? Other companies will at least make an effort to support it a few years into the future, Apple takes pride in not giving a damn about you and how much you loved or hated something on their machines.
    4. We burn Pentiums to the ground. We have seen this exact scenario before. Apple had moved to IBM made processors. For a very short period they had a bit of an edge in performance. It wasn’t like for like if you also considered price, but it was close. Almost immediately however Pentiums took over. As the benchmark test showed Apple falling much behind even on Photoshop and other staples of the designer world Apple simply disregarded them. After years of pretending they finally switched to Intel. 95% of the planet works on PCS. That is where science develops everything, that is where serious businesses invest. It is simply a matter of time for the serious users to overtake any minor party trick Apple comes up with.
    5. It has got a bit easier to go IN their walled garden but remains almost impossible to get OUT of the Apple ecosystem. They are making money from services now, trying to reduce their dependency on iPhones. So YOU are the product. Buy those much cheaper Apple speakers, wow, they are a third of the original price, why? Because much like Amazon they just want to get you into their world of services. (I can export everything from twenty years of living with Google with one click and take them to any other IT system as they are openly accessible formats.)
    6. Apple has no friends. I watched the company enter the video business. They never innovated, simply bought other companies, used them to gain market share. They made a big fuss about entering the broadcast business, then suddenly gave up and left everyone high and dry with no support. Even Final Cut Pro languished unloved and unsupported. They don’t share with partners, they don’t invest in retail channels. That is how Apple rolls. It never includes your best interests.

    Indeed Apple has written the book on “how to do something that really screws your customers and get away with it”. They stop supporting something you love all of a sudden with no explanation. It might be that they make no new drivers for your printer, it might be that they stop working completely with a peripheral company you had already bought everything from. When they switched to 64bit machines, yes, we all knew that sooner or later the industry was heading that way. But only a selfish idiot would force that on us. Even now millions of people rely on 32bit solutions thanks to the incredible backwards compatibility of Windows. When Steve Jobs announced he was killing Flash he was no prophet; he was a disgustingly selfish businessman trying to bully the planet through marketing gloss. I hate Flash as much as anyone, probably more, but it is still around for good reason and it outlasted Jobs. Acting selfishly is part of their charm according to their fans.

    Well, if you like that sort of thing and have plenty time and money to waste, run along and buy a new MacBook. I warned you.

  • Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    I couldn’t help it. The English in the post was so bad I had to state the case. Sure, it only had one “like” and probably almost nobody had seen it, but all the same, it cried out “auto-translate”. The sentence structure was not blatantly incorrect, just…off. Sure, there were several actual mistakes, but they were the sort of thing that you would find in a Google search.

    But in a different context.

    This particular post was promoting a content marketing seminar or something like that. Some self-professed expert selling expertise. It was full of hashtags and the actual words were possibly spurted out by some paid service of other experts. The Facebook page had several thousand “likes” but the actual post just one which is fairly typical of this level of wannabees. But it is indicative of a larger problem.

    While we discuss politics and how, when, if and what the platforms should censor or not in public dialogue, this is what is happening in the background. If they make their algorithms so they favor tags, well, tags is what users will give them. Even Apple has started using tags on their YouTube channel. They won’t get high in search ranking without them. Plain and simple.

    So the post with terrible English attracted the attention of the owner of the page. He initially said it was correct, then said it might have been a typo. He then set his lawyer on me with threats to delete it. In a way this behaviour is entirely consistent with all the other things he has copied and pasted in order to present himself as an expert. That is how it works. A pecking order of ignorance. In the fast-changing world of social media, you can be an expert as long as you find customers with less knowledge or desire to keep up with the latest trends. Threatening to sue is standard operating procedure and we are all the poorer for it.

    For what is the value of social media if I can’t freely post on my wall and discuss with my friends without fear of litigation? Should we all end up using it simply as content marketing, ever promoting something and seeing it simply as yet another channel? Social networks should actively protect our right to write freely and without fear or the content will simply become pointless. Even public figures should have the right to discuss freely on social media with their friends.

    As well as all other problems, the actual language will end up being computer code compatible with whatever indexing mechanisms they use. Humans like to communicate. Stop policing it and enjoy.

    Oh well, at least he corrected his post the next day. ; )

    FOR THE RECORD: Ι flagged the comment where I was threatened with litigation to Linkedin but have not received an answer.

  • The Queen’s Gambit isn’t just bad. It is proof that Netflix has made us stupid.

    The Queen’s Gambit isn’t just bad. It is proof that Netflix has made us stupid.

    You will be extremely hard-pressed to find a negative review of “The Queen’s Gambit”, a Netflix series about a chess prodigy. So let me do my best.

    We are living in a cinema-free pandemic period with limited choices. Important major international releases are frozen, production of new ones restricted seriously. Netflix can sit at a table with the producers of the new 007 and ask for it at a ridiculously low price because it is going stale and they don’t have many options. So let me start another way around. How did I hear about the Queen’s Gambit?

    It was on Netflix’s reccomendations. We all know that it is a bad reccomendation engine but what other options do we have? Check it out on IMDB? That is getting worse every day as Amazon hasn’t spent time improving it in ages. First reviews? Always gloating for any old crap. So we take the bait, the Netflix promo on Netflix makes it look better than others, you see the first episode and then, well, the rest, because you are on the binge machine that is Netflix. Worse still, friends and family are also stuck in the same rut so we are not even cross checking. The Emperor has no clothes but, meh, let’s wait till the parade is over before saying it. And when you have invested eight hours on the parade of the mini series you are highly unlikely to admit it was wasted on mediocrity.

    I will go further than that. The Queen’s Gambit is downright insulting and dangerous. Take for example the topic of substance abuse. The way it is presented we are left with the impression that it is a) easy to control b) useful for chess playing and c) with no long term consequences. Or maybe let’s see how the series portrays a woman entering a male-dominated realm: a) everything is polite b) nothing particularly nasty happens to her and c) grandmasters lose to her and immediately offer to help train her for her next challenge. This level of lying is insulting to millions of women of that era and even today. Women’s rights organizations should be an uproar.

    In fact all the topics touched by this series are done in such a superficial way that it is problematic. Take the scene where she visits a hippy house to enjoy marijuana for example. It is the cleanest and least messy den ever shown on television to represent a hippy household. My daughter didn’t even understand the point of the scene as our heroine hoovered and tidied the place after a one night stand , also confusingly presented. This isn’t political correctness, it isn’t the opposite. It is just terrible movie-making that fails to really touch the audience in any meaningful way.

    The Queen’s Gambit is an insult to so many great chess movies, so many true chess stories, to the heroes that battled hate in the Cold War. It isn’t just bad TV, it has a negative impact. People won’t start playing chess because of it, they will start pretending to play chess for a while maybe.

    So my movie review would be like this: “If you are really bored with the pandemic in lockdown and have no access to anything else other than Netflix, if you want to mindlessly waste 8 hours of your life without learning anything of consequence, don’t miss it!”

    The serious social and technological problem remains: how will we fix recommendation engines? If we introduce a social aspect to them, can we as a society, ensure we hold ourselves up to any level of intelligent critique? Or do we just want to have fun? Well the Queen’s Gambit is not even fun.

  • Messages and Music: Google doesn’t care

    Messages and Music: Google doesn’t care

    Tech pundits have often bashed at Google’s ever-changing messaging solutions array. Let me assure you: Google simply doesn’t care. There is little useful data in your silly little chats. It will not help the algorithms improve, it will not help them serve better ads.

    I know, I know, this is just a theory. Nobody knows how Google decides things, not even most of the people working there. But I know because I just spent some time trying to reorganize the way I handle music. Google decided to end Play Music, a service many of you don’t even know existed other than the shortcut on your phone if it was an Android. But I loved it. I could upload endless mp3 files (50,000 actually was the limit) and have them available on all my devices. I could also just click on an album name or folder full of lectures I want to hear while running. That is the same thing as what Spotify charges you 10 bucks a month to do. Only free. It integrated stuff online with offline life almost perfectly. Much like the very excellent and underrated Google Play Books service which is – as far as anyone can tell – also without limit in terms of number of books you can have on it for free.

    There was actually a good working model in all these. One service for everything. You want a book? Add it to Play Books. You want it on your device? Just click “download”. You want to see it from any other device? No problem. It is actually the model most users want. All in one. Limitless. And free.

    Google gives you infinite space on Google photos. Infinite Google Docs. Infinite books to upload and enjoy. Common denominator? You are helping them get more data. The sort of data they like and can use to improve their all-knowing God-like algorithms. Messaging is obviously not useful or they would have introduced a killer app ages ago. They have the users, they have the tech, they have the power. But now we know that music is also useless in that respect. So don’t bother with YouTube music folks. It will fold and fail like so many other Google experiments before it.

    If you’re not part of the solution, you probably don’t even know what the problem was.