BobbyVoicu.com

Curious about stuff

The iPad software is not where it should

By Bobby Voicu

I love my iPad. I have an iPad Pro 10.5, the last one before the new design of the iPad Pro. I didn’t buy the new one since I didn’t feel like I need it, but I have to say the new M1 iPad Pro sounds really, really good.

But the problem I have with my iPad as a pro machine is the same as previously: even if the new iPad Pro has the same M1 processor in the MacBook Air I’m using now to write this article, the app I use to write (MarsEdit) isn’t available for iPad.

And this is a small issue. Apps like Photoshop or similar on iPad don’t have the full set of features the one on the desktop has. My fiancée owns an iPad Pro 12.9″ (the first that came with the new design) and she still needs to use her MacBOok Pro. Will this change with the new M1 iPad?

Is the future of iPad a problem of software and not of hardware anymore?

The difference in hardware between the 2020 iPad Pro and the 2021 iPad Pro isn’t a small jump, it’s a large leap over the chasm between the Mac and the iPad. That said, I can’t help but wonder what about the software?

These latest iPad Pros aren’t looking to be an improvement in the user experience for the next version of iPadOS 14, but instead it is looking at iPadOS 15 and beyond.

It is almost a given that Apple has another trick or two up its sleeve for the iPad this year. They showed their hand for the hardware in the new iPad Pros but they have yet to flourish what iPadOS 15 will bring.

From here: The iPad needs the software to catch up with its hardware – Tablet Habit.

Hades: One More Time!

By Bobby Voicu

During the past week I watched a NoClip documentary (6 parts) about the development and launch of Hades, the video game created by Supergiant Games.

I don’t normally play roguelike type games (Spelunky, FTL, Hollow Knight and the likes), but I really got interested in this roguelike game with a story behind it.

And I downloaded the game on Switch (I don’t really play on PC and it was the only console where it was available). It also sounded like it made a lot of sense for the Switch, since this type of games have, potentially, unlimited replayability, so a console like a Switch, that you can play anywhere, makes more sense.

That was at 10am in the morning on Saturday. I stopped playing at 6pm. I forced myself to stop, basically, because it was already 2-3 hours since I was saying: “OK, just one ore time”.

It’a really great experience and, if you didn’t play it and look for something that you can come back again and again, Hades is the game. For the moment it’s available on Steam, Epic and Switch.

Here’s the trailer:

Image from Supergiant games.

P.S.: I’m writing this late at night and I’m gonna play “one more time”. See you in the morning, for sure! :)

On the Size of Social Media Platforms and My Blog

By Bobby Voicu

I was an early user on Twitter, on Facebook and a host of other early social networks. I still remember how fun it was in 2008-2009 on Twitter, how many fun conversation I had there.

But Twitter was never meant to stay like that. Once they started to get bigger, problems came along.

Almost every platform that attempts to be a safe place for a certain type of person falls flat on their face with this problem of scale. You can promise to be moderation free, or simply not have the time to do it, but the fact is it’s impossible to run a platform that doesn’t have to do moderation.

Start with the spam you’ll inevitably get once there are enough users. Then the things you legally have to take down — abuse, copyright material etc. Once you reach a critical mass of users, then comes the algorithmic feed decisions due to lack of engagement and inability for users to keep up. This too is an inevitability as users can’t decide if their posts will be seen or not and start to post less if action isn’t taken.

All platforms that need engagement or show adverts will devolve into the same state eventually. Nothing will ever ‘fix’ social media. Scale kills almost everything, there is a huge benifit to not being where everyone is. Stay small.

Quote from Greg Morris and you should read the rest of the article, to get the context.

This is one of the reasons I still have a personal blog, 17 years after starting one. Because it’s my own small space.

Formula1 Portuguese GP Posters

By Bobby Voicu

I didn’t know, but apparently the Formula 1 teams create posters for different Grand Prix races and, since this weekend is the Portuguese one, here are some of them.

Alfa Romeo:

Mercedes:

Ferrari:

via reddit

Basecamp as Villains and an Email Subscription Form

By Bobby Voicu

Basecamp changed some rules about workplace politics discussions, forbidding specific subjects in their main channel in the company. Here’s a quote from Jason Fried’s blog post:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore.

DHH also follows with the message they sent internally, to try to explain the decision even more. Here’s New York Times’s take on it, as well.

Truth is every company gets to a point where some things need to be removed. I remember during the MavenHut days that we had a saying: “That’s why we can’t have nice things!”. There’s always someone trying to game the system and triggering a more strict rule, spoiling the fun for everyone. I assume this is what happened there, as well. Someone kept pushing politics, activism and the likes to everyone in the company and kept doing it even after being asked not to.

What makes Basecamp different is that they were always a champion of the people, of their epmployees. They were seen as the solution to the corporation machine. And I still think they are. But Twitter disagrees.

Other than that, have you seen the subscription form on their HEY World blogs? It’s only slightly skewed, not straight, to drive you crazy and get you to focus on the form. And, possibly, subscribe.

Feeling like in a movie

By Bobby Voicu

Sunday. London. Rain. Bar on the street level. Sitting at a table next to the window, with hot tea in front of me. Looking outside to people walking. Next to me, Cambridge Theater, with a big billboard presenting Chicago – The Musical. Music in the bar: John Lennon – Imagine.

I feel like I am in a movie. What’s next?

2021 update: I wrote the text above in 2008 to the day (Apr 27th, 2008). It was my first time in London and, since then, I visited the city often enough to develop a love/hate relationship with it. But in 2008 it genuinely felt like I was in a movie and that big things were waiting to happen. And they were. I was there for my training with Yahoo!, the company that employed me as their representative for Romania for a year. And it was my first job in a corporation, so I genuinely didn;t know what to expect.

I miss that feeling. One of the places I always felt like being in a movie and waiting for things to happen was a hotel pub in Dublin. Ireland. I went there often during my MavenHut years and I loved the feeling I had in the afternoon or evening when I could relax and enjoy a soup or a hot tea and people watch. And think of the big things that were to come.

Why I miss it? Of course, I miss travel. I miss seeing different people and hearing different languages. And I also miss thinking about the big things to happen, in a bar, at the street level, with a hot tea in front of me.

Oh, and the hotel in Dublin? Grand Canal. The pub: Gasworks Bar. Nothing amazing. But it didn’t matter for me. And their soup with soda bread was amazing.

photo credit, under licence, with no modifications

Short non-fiction books to read

By Bobby Voicu

Some books are long, some books are short. And, if they’re non-fiction books, the shorter, the better. At least for me.

I’ve never thought of books in terms of pages, but it kinda makes sense.

Fergus McCullough started to make a list of the best non-fiction books with less than 250 pages.

  • Allen, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (170)
  • Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (122)
  • Caplan, Open Borders (248)
  • Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (162)
  • Collier, The Bottom Billion (244)
  • Cowen, Stubborn Attachments (161); The Great Stagnation (60)
  • De Solla Price, Science Since Babylon (240)
  • Gibbons, Partition: How and Why Ireland Was Divided (220; h/t Tyler Cowen)
  • Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (72)
  • Jünger, The Forest Passage (120)
  • Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy (176)
  • Knight, Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (158)
  • Krugman, The Age of Diminished Expectations (244); Pop Internationalism (240)
  • Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (128)
  • Machiavelli, The Prince (144)
  • Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (184)
  • Smil, Oil (219); Energy (210)
  • Thiel, Zero to One (210)
  • Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization (239)
  • Weil, Gravity and Grace (183)
  • Wilde, The Critic as Artist (124)

The original article is not online anymore, so I got the full list from archive.org.

Of all these books, the only one I’ve read is Thiel’s Zero to One, so it’s a good list to start with.

Oh, and apparently there’s a reason why some books are bigger than they should: having a bigger spine allows them to stand out in a bookshop. Or that was the thing in 2006.

via Tyler Cowen

Portugal by Car: Cascade Poço da Broca da Barriosa

By Bobby Voicu

I love driving. While living in Romania I was part of a big online promotional campaign that took online influencers driving around Romania to see the great places in the country. It was called Rediscover Romania and I drove a lot.

Now, living in Portugal, I’m trying to do something similar, but the only “influencer” I take to these places is myself.

After being in lockdown for about 3 months (it’s April 2021 now), we finally can drive around and I looked at something close enough to be a day drive. Which is all the country, frankly, if you live in the Northern half, from Lisbon up, and you don’t want to visit the South (Algarve or Alentejo).

I wanted to go to Serra da Estrela, initially, which is the highest peak in continental Portugal, but as I was looking around on Google Maps, my eyes were drawn to something called Poço da Broca (GMaps location). When I saw that it was a nice cascade, I was sold. And the truth is it isn’t just nice, it’s quite beautiful.

Poço da Broca is a series of cascades above schist rock, on the river Alvôco. It’s close to Barriosa village, about an hour of driving from Coimbra, 2 hours from Porto and a little bit more than 3 hours from Lisbon. It actually makes even more sense if you go to some schist villages in the area, as well.

I was there during a Wednesday, on a rainy day, so there were almost no people around, but I heard that even during the peak season it’s not too busy. There’s a restaurant on location, but it was closed when I got there (again, outside of season and just out of lockdown). During the summer there’s a river beach (praia fluvial) around there, apparently, but I didn’t see any.

The place is really chill and I loved walking around, even if the weather wasn’t the great. The sounds of water falling make me happy, so maybe this has something to do with it as well.

This is the text on the tourist information sign:

The Alvôco stream is located on the Southwest flank of the Serra da Estrela Natural Park, representing one of the main tributaries of the Alva river. It flows in an embedded valley, being schist the dominant rocky material, contributing this way to a characteristic sinuous trajectory.

Downstream from the Mountain Village of Alvôco da Serra, the trajectory of the river is largely conditioned by the type of rocks through where the water flows, schist and metagraywacke, resulting in the sinuous profile from the schistosity and fracturing of the present rocks. Over time, the erosive action of water determines the formation of curves so pronounced that the stream can cross the bottleneck zone leaving the old bed as an abandoned meander. In the valley sites where the meanders of the Alvôco stream are tighter, this natural process can be accelerated by the action of the man who, through the opening of channels, diverted the course of the water to take advantage of the old bed.

Here are 2 videos (not mine). Actually, looking at these video I see I might have missed some of it, so there’s a good reason to go back.

And here’s the Google Maps location:

All photos made on an iPhone 12 Mini. What an amazing little phone!

India’s 2nd Wave of COVID: A Lesson in Exponential Growth

By Bobby Voicu

India is going through what is, probably, the worst COVID wave in the world since the pandemic started.

What should make us pay attention, even in the countries that fare better now, is how fast things changed to the worst of the worst: in February India had 11,000 new COVID cases per day and now, in April, has more than 300,000/day.

It’s easy to forget what exponential growth means when you look at 500-600 cases per day in Portugal (where I live), but it’s so easy to get to huge numbers in a short period of time. Actually, Portugal just got out of a 3 months quite strict lockdown. We needed it because we jumped from less than 1,000 cases to 15,000 cases per day in less than 3 months (from late October to end of January), after not locking down for Christmas.

chart from here

Having this many new cases per day also means a better chance for the virus to mutate into a more resistant strain.

India’s total eclipsed the previous one-day high of 300,669 recorded coronavirus cases, set in the United States on Jan. 8, according to a New York Times database, though differences in testing levels from country to country, and a widespread lack of tests early in the pandemic, make comparisons difficult.

Over the past two months, the outbreak in India has exploded, with reports of superspreader gatherings, oxygen shortages and ambulances lined up outside hospitals because there were no ventilators for new patients.

More details on what happens in India here