In my day job as a consultant, I often joke that “it depends” is my default answer to any question, much as Ben Goldacre made a catchphrase out of “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

I’m here today to tell you that it’s both absolutely true, and not at all true.

The truth is that, given a complex problem, the correct answer almost always is “it depends.” Without knowing all the constraints, all the things that have been considered and rejected, and all the things that affect the solution, it’s vanishingly rare that there is one, objectively correct answer that you know from the top of your head.

I’m a big fan of William Boyd. Late last year, I went to the Wimbledon Book Festival to see him interviewed and talk about “Gabriel’s Moon,” his new book. The event wasn’t just about the book, though he did read the prologue. I was predisposed to like him, of course, but I thought he came across well. Smart but not pretentious, aware of his success but hadn’t let it define him. Although I hadn’t planned to, I bought a copy of the book and got it signed.

I don’t blame him, but Ian Dunt started his column last week with this:

Somewhere along the line, technology went from something hopeful to something threatening.

Given the continued overreach of the trillion Dollar companies (Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) this is understandable. Whether we like it or not, these companies have an outsized influence on the technologies we use. Their success allows them to push into even more niches, from your phone, to your watch, to your speakers, to your car, to your fridge. When they collectively decided that AI was the next big thing, they subjected us to it, whether we wanted it or not. These companies farm your personal information so they can sell advertising¹, and obscure what they do to make it impossible to opt-out or give informed consent.

As Tim Minchin cynically notes in the prologue [affiliate link], universities hand out honorary degrees for good PR. As a well known, articulate, and talented individual, Minchin has received a number of them and this book is the transcript of the speeches he gave when accepting three of them.

If you’ve seen any of his live performances, you’ll be able to hear him speaking as you read through. Each has that easy flow that makes his work so good. Of course, anyone who has written or performed knows that kind of “easy flow” takes a lot of work. Effortless is difficult.

After exceeding my goal of twelve books last year, I went in completely the other direction in 2024 with only five books completed.

I did, however, read an unusual mix by my standards. Only two of the books were non-fiction. So, even with the smaller number, I still managed to read more novels than I normally do. And the standard was high, too. I don’t think any of them were classics but I enjoyed them all. Not bad result!

You can’t say this book [affiliate link] lacks ambition. Jon Alexander describes the next phase of organising a society.

The challenge is that some of the definitions are quite subtle. They’re well argued in the text, but if you asked me to relay that information, I’m not sure I could. Or at least, it wouldn’t be concise or easy to digest.

He starts by defining what a Citizen is. It’s not about the country you live in, or voting or paying taxes. Rather, it’s what comes after the Subject Story (ruled by monarchs) and the Consumer Society (ruled by choice).

Welcome to the new site! To paraphrase Eric Morecambe: there’s all the same content here, but not necessarily in the same order.

Actually, that’s not completely true. There are a few posts with photos that I’ve not (yet) managed to migrate over. Most of those I’ve hidden, but there may be a few posts with breakages. Bear with me.

But what motivated this change? Largely it’s a desire for something a bit simpler. I do have misgivings about how it’s all being managed recently but, honestly, Wordpress the software when self-hosted is still really nice. It’s just… a lot. It’s a full CMS and supports all kinds of interactive stuff, magic SEO and a bazillion plugins (one of which I maintain).

I remember alternately loving and hating HotWired. So clever and futuristic… yet it pushed the state-of-the-art to the point that it sometimes barely worked, even on reasonably decent hardware.

https://www.wired.com/story/we-were-wrong-oral-history-hotwired/

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I’m surprised this didn’t get more of a response when I posted it on Mastodon, to be honest. A while ago I was talking about sci-fi books with a colleague. He was amazed I had a copy and practically begged to borrow it. (Unlike Peopleware, I did get it back!)

It is the definitive collection of cyberpunk short-stories. Much of what I wrote about Neuromancer could be written about Mirrorshades [affiliate link], so I won’t repeat myself.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I lent “Peopleware” [affiliate link] to a friend at some point but never got it back. I supposed they valued it as much as I do. I should probably buy the newer edition at some point.

I’m not sure if this book was the epiphany or it just happened around the same time, but at worst it was a major influence. The epiphany was that the really hard challenges in computer science were not the technical ones but the ones around people. It doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to work on technical problems or solve them. But the challenges organising and getting people to communicate and work together effectively and build the right thing (rather than the interesting thing that we want to build) are also important, possibly more important.