Category: computer

Breaking Up with Big Tech: Ditching Gmail for Proton

For most of us, it seems impossible. A few of you are still using Yahoo or Hotmail addresses, but pretty much everyone uses the Big G. You know which one I mean. I understand; I’ve been a Google fan since before they IPO’d. Since before Gmail came out. I read John Batelle’s The Search with a starry-eyed breathlessness. Information wanted to be free, and radical free ubiquitous access to information was going to free the world and bring together humanity like a modern-day Tower of Babel.

As so often happens with history, I was wrong. Google quietly dropped their employee-chosen ethos (“Don’t Be Evil”) as they crawled into every corner of our lives. A few John The Baptist-types like the Electronic Frontier Foundation were out there warning us of the dangers attending our lack of privacy. As is usually the case with prophets, we either mocked them or ignored them. As is usually the case with prophets, they were right in the end.

I chose (and encouraged others to choose) Google Workspace for email domains, Google Photos for memories, and Google Phones for our pockets and hands. The litany of Google products I’ve used (and loved) is long. Wherefore Art Thou, Stadia? Whence thy code, Google Reader?

But as Google matured, they changed “privacy for free stuff” bargain. They altered the deal – I prayed they wouldn’t alter it further. My prayers went unanswered. My super-cool custom Shinnphoto.com Gmail account went from free to expensive. But I was so invested in the Google ecosystem that I didn’t think I could get out. It was like being in a once-loving abusive relationship.

Then, one day, I found an alternative: Proton Mail. Proton’s mail focus is privacy, which sounded pretty good. They’re hosted in Switzerland and subject to Swiss privacy laws. Email is encrypted, trackers are blocked, and there are no ads. And they have integrated Calendars for free. If you pay for an account (which I recommend), you also get a password manager, a VPN, shared documents, and lots of other stuff.

I’ve been using Proton for a year now. They have an app for your phone, a desktop app for your computer, and you can also access Proton on the web. It features everything you’d want from a modern email tool, like AI-assisted writing and labels. And there are other features that make Proton better than Gmail: the ability to quickly unsubscribe from newsletters along with throw-away alias emails. I almost never give anyone my real email address any more – everyone gets a customized alias address that I can deactivate if they leak my email or if I don’t want to hear from them any more.

Switching is easy – you can bring all your email history (and even your labels) from Gmail. Setting up an account is free. You should try it out.

Use this link for 2 weeks of free service on your chosen plan: https://pr.tn/ref/0DJ9P4XW. You and I both get 20 bucks toward Proton’s service. But I’m not sharing for the 20 bucks – I’m sharing this because Proton makes my email life better, and I want you to know you have options.

The big tech companies have made a lot of things better in the world. But many of us are increasingly finding that the price you pay in privacy isn’t worth it any more. Opting out doesn’t mean you have to stop showering, train a carrier pigeon, and avert your eyes from any and all pixels. You can still be part of modern life, but you can also do it on your terms, with your privacy intact.

The Rise of AI: a 3-Way Reaction

We just finished watching the show Hello World on YouTube, hosted by journalist Ashlee Vance. This episode was entitled The Rise of AI, and was about the emergence of the artificial intelligence industry in Canada.

Below I’ll post some of my thoughts, along with written pieces by Liam and Clara, who watched the episode with me.

Clara’s Reaction

I just finished watching “The Rise Of AI” on Youtube. There were a couple of people who talked to the main person (Ashlee Vance, see below) about Artificial Intelligence (AI for short). It was very interesting. If you would like to watch it, click here. Here are the speakers (listed order of appearance).

Ashlee Vance

Ashlee Vance was born in 1977. He is currently 42. We follow him around Canada as he talks to the people listed below.

Jeffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton has held onto the idea of neural networks for 40 years. In other words, making a computer think like a human. People call him the godfather of Artificial Intelligence. Geoffrey Hinton can’t sit down, otherwise, his disk comes out.

Suzanne Gildert

Suzanne Gildert started the company Kindred. At Kindred, they use trial and error to train their robots. She talked about her robots. My favorite was the cat robot. Hers is also the cat robot. In the video, there were robot pilots. You’ll have to watch the video to get the whole story.

Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau is the current Prime Minister of Canada. He is mentioned three times in the video. He is married to Sophie Grégoire Trudeau who is currently 44. He was born December 25, 1971. He is currently 47 years old.

Richard Sutton

Richard Sutton was born in the US, but Canadian politics brought him over to Canada. He wanted to get away from difficult times in the US. He says in the video that he didn’t like that the United States was invading other countries and that he didn’t care for all that.
My favorite bot was Blueberry. He’s so cute! Watch the video to find out more. I think that AI could be good and bad. Ashlee Vance records some responses to his mom talking, and then he calls her. He used his responses to talk to her, then picks up the phone and actually talked to his mom. He asked her if that was scary. She said it would have been if it had been an emergency. Click HERE to go to that part in the video. Overall, I think this was a good video.

Liam’s Reaction

I just watched a YouTube video called The Rise of AI. It was an hour long documentary about the history of AI, what people are doing with it now, and where it might go. There are many different ways that AI could evolve. Humans could co-exist with AI, or AI could take over the world.

I had trouble finding evidence for AI co-existing with us, because as they become as smart and then smarter than us, they might start to think of themselves as the dominant sentient beings, with a kind of Divine Right of Kings sort of belief. They might start to think that since they are smarter than us, it is their job to take care of us, or maybe they will see the damage we have done to the environment and decide that the planet as a whole would be better off without humans. There was a company mentioned in said video that is called Lyrebird. Lyrebird creates realistic artificial voices. In other words, they can clone your voice. Imagine if someone cloned the president’s voice and then made him say something that threatened the security of the country. Kindred AI is working on AI that can sort stuff such as clothing. It is a real possibility that robots could take over the world.

I know that I have been very negative about AI so far, but there is really no way that we can know what AI will do. Instead of eradicating us because of the way we treat the environment, they might help us fix it. Instead of affixing their dominance over us, they might decide to live with us. There is really no way to know which path AI will choose. That is why I am hoping for the best.

Andrew’s Reactions

AI is an endlessly fascinating topic. There are so many angles from which to approach it: the ethics of AI, a map of the realities of AI, the probable futures of AI, the people behind AI, the implications for future economies and governmental systems, what it means to be human in the age of AI, and more.

I’ve been reading about AI recently. I read Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, and Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Of the three, Lee does the best job of explaining how AI actually works. Tegmark lays out the most compelling explanations of possible AI futures.

Ashlee Vance (and the rest of the team behind Hello World) chose to focus on the unique contributions of Canada to artificial intelligence. He interviewed pioneering researchers in AI, did a decent job of explaining how the technology works, talked with a few startups commercializing AI, and talked briefly with AI skeptics about some of the possible future dangers.

The portrayal of Geoffrey Hinton was especially touching. Hinton is a computer science researcher at the University of Toronto who, along with academic collaborators, was the first to use a deep neural network approach to AI. He believed in the concept from the late 1980s until 2006, when data processing and data availability were able to prove his ideas valid. His triumph is a testament to both sheer stubborn will and the willingness of universities to employ academics for long periods of time without any evident fruit. It’s a perfect test case of the need to fund basic research.

Amara’s Law states that we overestimate the short-term impact of technology while underestimating the long-term impact of technology. I know the first part of this ‘law’ is true with AI: while startups like Lyrebird are a bit creepy, they don’t represent a Terminator-esque nightmare scenario. But I’m not sure if we’re underestimating the long-term impact of AI. When you read this in the future, you’ll have to leave a comment to let me know!

What will tomorrow’s web be like?

I see four trends converging, and I want to make a prediction about how they’ll collide to provide a type of experience that we’ll have on the web of tomorrow.  Those four trends are:

  1. Immersive
  2. Mobile
  3. Video
  4. Immediacy

Immersive

Many developers are striving to provide a more immersive experience.  Whether it’s better

use of space within web sites and web apps, fullscreen options on everything from video players to desktop applications, it seems everyone is looking to add a fullscreen button to their users’ experience.  Users have become intuitively conditioned to look for indicators of this immersive-style experience.  How to do I know?  W

hen I’m using a computer, tablet or mobile device with my children, they constantly scan for the fullscreen button, and ask (beg) me to use it.  I can hear their little voices chanting, “Fullscreen, fullscreen!” in a half-cute, half-annoying chorus of kid-tech-love.

As a matter of fact, I’m composing this blog post in WordPress’s Fullscreen, distraction-free writing experience.

Mobile

We’ve been hearing for years that someday more people will be accessing the web via mobile phones.  Well, someday has arrived.  According to a Pew Internet and American Life Project study from two years ago, 28% of Americans access the web primarily from their mobile phones.  And 68% of American smartphone users access the web via their smartphones every day.  And this is in the US, where broadband mobile penetration is growing slower than in Africa and Asia.

Video

Cisco estimated in 2011 that the sum of all video content will make up 86% of internet traffic by the year 2016.  When I visit a web site to learn about something, my first instinct now it to look for a 2-minute intro or example video.  Video is increasingly a big deal.

Immediacy

When I talk about immediacy, what I’m really referring to is the low latency of internet-delivered content.  That means that people are figuring out how to deliver content is ways that don’t make you wait around, watching the content load.  Our attention spans are being conditioned to this kind of experience. Designers and developers will continue to push forward our expectations for a low-latency experience.

Where it’s all leading

So when you smash these trends together, what do you get?  The potential for some very interesting stuff.  I think we’re going to see immersive content that blends video with vector-based artwork that we’ll experience on mobile devices (tablets, phablets, Google glass, etc.).  Essentially, we’ll be able to watch little pieces of non-square video in cartoon-like worlds that load quickly on mobile devices in immersive viewing formats.

How will this happen?  That’s the interesting part.  I think it’ll be achieved using HTML5 (or its successor language).  Right now, HTML5 has canvas tags for displaying video content without using a browser plugin.  I predict that these tags will take on more and more attributes, and we’ll start to see blends of little pieces of video, along with vector-style artwork.  Vector is low-latency, and video is rich in experience.

This will happen in much the same way that javascript went from a language for adding simple interactivity to web sites (like a simple submit button) to a full-blown webapp-programming framework (that render products like Gmail).  I don’t think anyone expected the complexity, or the code libraries and other support tools, that we’ve seen emerge from javascript, which started as a more basic programming tool.

In the same way, HTML5 (and its offspring) will bring us some very interesting experiences in the future.  Ever wanted to live in a cartoon?  You may get that chance in the future.

Goals

(Insert standard statement about the time between blog posts, along with inevitable apology, here.)

I’m reading about goals for a leadership and organizational behavior course I’m taking.  The reading is a little academic in nature, which I really appreciate.  Some of the important things I’ve learned (that are borne out by actual, peer-reviewed research):

  • People tend to set higher goals for themselves in the workplace than their supervisors would have set.
  • Higher goals lead to higher achievement.
  • Goals that are shared are more likely to be accomplished.
  • The process of setting and working on goals, not the prospect of reward, is what actually improves performance.

So what personal goals am I working on?  I’ll share a few.

  • To study 64 hours for each of the two classes I’m taking this semester.  It should probably be more, but this is the amount I feel I can actually achieve.
  • To exercise at least 5 days per week.
  • To be consistent with reading the Bible.
  • To avoid checking my e-mail (and looking at Facebook) before 1pm.

Lofty goals, you say? Aye, say I.  They wouldn’t be worthy if they weren’t.  So what am I doing to achieve these goals?  Well, setting them was a good start.  But I didn’t stop there. Measuring them is the next step.  Here’s where to tech comes in.  I use a series of specialized iPhone apps to record my progress. (Click on each app name for a link to the Apple App store.)

I use iGoal Pro 2 to track my study progress.  It allows you to easily set time-based goals, then run a timer track your progress.  It allows for pretty-looking  charts and graphs, which are all-important to a data hound like me.  Progress so far? I’m 6% of the way finished with my study goal for one class, and 4% of the way toward my other class.  Not bad so far, but I need to pick it up if I’m going to hit 128 hours.

I use iFitness to track my exercises.  (This has since been removed from the iTunes App store, but I still use it.)  iFitness is great for tracking both which days I make it to the gym and what I do while I’m there.  Again, it has pretty charts and graphs.  Pretty is important, and it helps me to make sense of the data.  How am I doing so far?  Well, I’ve been to the gym 29 times (and I’ve been running twice) since January 1st.  If you include the running, that’s just barely more than 5 days per week.  Besides tracking, I also set out my gym clothes next to the bed before I go to sleep.  Help me to actually get up and get it done in the morning.

I use the great Bible app from YouVersion.com to both read the Bible and track my progress.  They have pre-built reading plans to help you set and achieve goals with your Bible reading.  There’s also a feature that will actually read the Bible to you, and this is what I use.  I have a set time every day when I listen – it’s first thing in the morning.  I listen while I get dressed, get to the gym, and warm up.  My only beef with this app is that the audio tends to cut out about 2/3 of the time if you change internet sources (ie move from wi-fi at the house to a 3G connection as you travel.  How am I doing on progress toward this goal? Well, this measure is a little more tricky.  I’ve started and re-started this goal several times.  But I CAN tell you that I’m 24% of the way through the Bible.  In the books of Judges and Luke, specifically.

I’m using Evernote to track my fourth goal.  Evernote is actually a note-taking program, but I’m using it because of it’s ubiquity.  It has free apps for the Mac, iPhone, and the web. So I can pretty much always  able to log my progress, no matter where I happen to be working.  This one is a little less automated, but it’s still working.  I use Text Expander and a keyboard shortcut to automatically insert a datestamp and timestamp. (The keyboard shortcuts are ‘ddate’ and ‘ttime’.)  How am I doing with this goal so far?  I’ve only been tracking this since the beginning of February, but here’s a screenshot of my log.  This goal might bear some explaining.  I’ll keep it short: I get more work done when I’m not living or working out of my e-mail inbox.  Hence the goal.  (Also, don’t expect a reply from me on anything first thing in the morning.)

That’s long enough, but I hope you picked up a tidbit or two about goals.  And feel free to ask me how I’m doing with any of my goals.  That’s part of the reason I’m sharing them!

 

We’re back online!

Hi, Shinnfans! I apologize for our absence, but our server went down. You’re looking at andrewandlisa.org on a brand new server. It probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but this represents a WHOLE LOT OF work for me. I have to go work on other people’s web sites now. Whew!

See you around the interwebs,
Andrew

We’re famous on the interwebs

My office was featured on some random web site about home technology. Here’s the link: www.unplggd.com/unplggd/final-frame/flickr-finds-shinns-take-on-glassy-classy-085084.

How I read the web

I don’t mean to belabor this, but I do want to share this ULTRA-COOL TIMESAVING tool I’ve been using (and loving).  Here’s a video that explains how to use Google Reader.  Though the video never mentions RSS, that’s exactly what makes all this work.  Enjoy!

Liam uses both a PC and a Mac – in the same day

This morning, while using the PC, he showed a consistent ability to type the letters in his name – in the right order. By the afternoon, he was editing spreadsheets and conducting his banking online. I have no idea where he got the money in his bank account, but I know he’s managing it! I have video proof.



Political research in the internet age

I’ve always been interested in politics.  As a young child, one of my main questions (that was never satisfactorily answered) was this: ‘How do you do political research?’  I come from a family that highly values informed civic participation.  But I knew that people make all kind of political claims.  I came to learn that you could find out about politics by reading the newspaper or by looking at voting guides put out by everyone from the California Teacher’s Associaton to the National Association of Evangelicals.  That last voting guide was distributed from time to time in our church bulletin.

But both of these sources of political information were filtered; they came from secondary sources: interest groups that focused heavily on this issue or that.  Of course, you could watch the presidential debates if you happened to have the television on for one of the several evenings they occurred.  Or you could hear the candidates speak once if you were lucky enough to be in a town on the campaign trail.  I still remember the hoopla when Dan Quayle visited my home town of Lodi, Calif.  But these were still limited, one-time opportunities.  Candidates, if they were slippery enough, could couple together a few area-relevant soundbytes and curry favor with voters everywhere they went.  The epitome of this was Hillary Clinton’s claim that she was both a lifelong New York Mets fan and a lifelong New York Yankees fan when she spoke at two different events.  But the ubiquity of today’s news media made that kind of campaign-trail stumping less effective, and Hillary (still a product of old-tyme politics) got burned.  24-hour news and a proliferation of news channels changed the world of politics.

The internet has further changed today’s political landscape.

Did you happen to miss the presidential debates (or are you part of the increasingly large population that doesn’t watch television anymore in favor of internet-delivered content)?  No problem.  You can still watch the debates on Youtube (www.youtube.com/youchoose), who co-sponsored the debates this year.  Incidentally, those videos will still be available after the election is over.  If a candidate made a campaign promise, the world will be able to look back at that promise and hold the candidate accountable after he (or she) is elected.

Would you like to know about a candidate’s stance on a particular issue?  Go to John McCain’s Issues page: www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues or Barack Obama’s analogue: www.barackobama.com/issues.  There’s a lot of information there; more than you can shake a stick at.  Not that you’re the type to shake sticks at web pages, but you get my drift.

Would you like to read comprehensive campaign coverage?  No problem.  Go to everyone’s favorite news aggregator, Google News, at http://news.google.com/?topic=el.  In my opinion, there’s a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio there, but it’s still a legitimate source of coverage.

Blogging took off first in two worlds: the technology world, where every geek seems to be publishing stuff (…ahem…) and the political world, where every wonk (and Wonkette) has their own lane in the information superhighway.  Here’s a search on Google blog searches for ‘2008 presidential election‘.

With so much information out there, it’s more important than ever that you trust your information gatekeepers.  That’s why we here at andrewandlisa.org are running for ….. um ….nothing.  Sorry, I guess I got a little carried away with all the political commentary.

But seriously, folks, in today’s internet age, where it easier than ever to be informed and easier than ever to engage in thoughtful dialogue, we should be using the internet to make us more informed citizens.  Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a more informed race.  I think the quality, peculiarity and non-polarity of our two presidential candidates is already a result of and testament to this great world-changing new media.

Cool video intro to one of my favorite tools

OK, so I love Google Docs.  But I have a hard time explaining to people why it’s so much cooler than Microsoft Word or another offline text-making tool.  Mostly I say ‘collaboration’ and ‘cloud computing’ and people either scratch their heads or run away screaming.  Here’s a great video that breaks it down in plain English.  Enjoy!