the joy of random newsletter subscriptions

I've spoken before about my love of municipal building supplies newsletters (fruit of a period of time I shared a name and city with someone in the business who got me onto lots of mailing lists), but for sheer excellent read-this-during-the apocalypse, which-apocalypse?, doesn't-matter-just-pick-one value, nothing beats my newsletter subscription to the the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).

I don't know how I got subscribed to them. Maybe I knew someone working there for a while (it's in one of the home town constellation cities) or maybe I saw a news story; maybe I took part in a survey or some online research. I am, after all, apocalypse-interested. In case you're unclear about what they, do, they are an interdisciplinary research centre dedicated to the study and mitigation of existential risks, and in case that is not clear enough for you, they are in the business of the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse.

They're often quite focussed on AI, but this month the CSER newsletter has linked through to a big list of 313 potential non-medical methods for reducing transmission of Covid. Some of these are very bleak:

• Discourage unnecessary speaking when people are in close contact.
• Constrain ‘long’ connections between people in different social groups who seldom or rarely interact.
• Split and separate teams doing key work in case one team gets infected.
• Design system so doors automatically shut once numbers exceed a given threshold as detected by phone signals.
• Individuals queue online and are told when their turn is to leave house, office or desk for e.g. doctor’s appointment or lunch.
• Encourage or enforce walking clockwise around shared spaces.
• Eat at own desk where possible.

But others are intriguing and imaginative, narrowing in on the CSER's central premise; that the fear of impending apocalypse is a great motivator for creative problem solving.

• Create convention that different people touch different areas of objects, for example design refuse bins so collectors touch different areas from householders (e.g. centre element of handle red and marked “do not touch” or designed with separate handle)
• Store items that could be contaminated (e.g. shopping bags) so the one stored longest is taken first.

There are also a few in the can't-believe-this-isn't in-place-already area such as:

• Encourage or require people to stop spitting in public places.

But lock-down traffic silence means that the sound of people spitting is carrying quite a way, and I can confirm that I have regularly heard people spitting in public places during the pandemic, and I really wish that they wouldn't. We have no "No spitting" signs in the UK as local social convention prohibits spitting in any case, but maybe we need to come up with some wording?

"We appreciate that you would never under normal circumstances consider spitting in public, but should you find yourself in a position where this is impossible and you absolutely have to spit (for example while jogging, or as a result of hayfever) make sure you carry a suitable receptacle and dispose of it in safely, your household rubbish."

Reassuringly, the rest of the CSER newsletter is the same tone as usual; how to make AI "trustworthy", biosecurity issues, alternative food production (algae!) to reduce carbon footprint, antibiotic resistance, and generalist doomsday pathogens.

Sounds intriguing? Sign up here.

leave me alone with your frivolous segmentation

Two events recently have focused my annoyance on the phenomenon of market segmentation.The first involved an email from a popular mailing list service provider. They'd sent me an urgent email explaining how updates to their system involved changing how certain aspects of their segmentation worked. It's a service that adopts a chummy, familiar tone, which does actually generally work in reducing the colossal annoyance of composing, analysing and maintaining mailing lists. But in this case, the chirpy apology for using the marketing jargon caused a wearying explosion of annoyance. "If you don't understand, please pass it to the person on your team who does deal with such things," oh ho ho. There's a sort of self obsession here which probably makes perfect sense from their perspective; after all, I'm sure they do have a department which deals in segmentation. But for those using their service, is this always the case? Is it not vastly more likely that their customers are juggling not just segmentation, not just this product, but the entire concept of online marketing with a host of other responsibilities and duties? Tread gently when you mock our ignorance of your specialisms; lest you discover where priorities truly lie.

And speaking of lying, the other vast explosion of annoyance at segmentation occurred as a mailing list I had been previously signed up to split into some fifteen-odd sub-lists, most of which I still needed to read. A sweary run through repeated triple-verified sign-up processes ensued as I tried to follow their reasoning (and the lack of a "just send me everything" tick box. Leave me alone with your frivolous market segmentation; mostly if I have signed up to it, I'm interested in it; and if something does fall a touch flat for me, hey, I really do have a nice handy right-there delete button.

developing backwards

At the moment I'm typing this while flicking back and forth to the tab containing emusic, where I'm previewing a random pile of notes, recommendations and more. I have to keep flicking back and forth because unless you have their overly needy tab at the front, the volume of their preview player reduces to an irritating whisper. So, in order to multitask, I have to keep on flipping back to it, each click-back accompanied by a little stab of complex disappointment, which ranges from irritation at how dark and gloomy the site is since the redesign, to musings on how bugs get sold to site owners as features, to a slight sadness at how this is a literal performance of the myth of multitasking. I'm  very fond of emusic (and frequently recommend it -- their long tail is very long, and they have a great selection of rarities, and most labels remember to put their singles up on it, but if you are signing up be aware that their album releases run a little later than other providers and there's typically no album discounts) but...

Music sites in particular seem to be prone to developing backwards. As legitimacy and commercial interest catch up with the bleeding edge the sites get more strewn with logos and disclaimers, the supply of downloads dries up, and sweet deals (that are perhaps more sweet for the owners than the customers) begin to clutter the original offer.

I'm currently wavering over RCRDLBL, for example, originally a hot daily download that has mutated over a few years, sometimes offering more, sometimes less (the buggy Bing-branded music player a particular nadir) but often the place to find sweet remixes that for some reason were not making commercial release. They've shaken off Bing, but recently it's gone a bit streamy (enabled by Spotify and Soudcloud) and expanded their recommendations. But other people's lists of things they like are not that much more exciting than your own, and the more third-party systems involved and the longer the list, the bigger the administrative task. On the other hand, they have lead me to treasures and precious jewels in the past, and still do with a bit of careful trawling - if I ever find the time.