Ian Betteridge Profile Photo

Ian Betteridge

I fought the law and the law won. And then I made up my own law, and it was good.

Writing

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    Ten Blue Links, literary salon Edition

    1. Apple’s built in apps can do (almost) everything

    One of the characteristics of hardcore nerdery is the tendency to over engineer your systems. People spend a lot of time creating systems, tinkering with them, making them as perfect as possible, only to abandon them a few years down the line when some new shiny hotness appears.

    I’m as guilty of this as the next nerd, but at least I’m aware of my addiction. It’s one of the reasons why I have spent time avoiding getting sucked into the word of Notion, because I can see myself losing days (weeks) to tinkering, all the while getting nothing done.

    That said, if you are going to create an entire workflow management system and you’re in the word of Apple, you could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of Joan Westenberg’s book and use all Apple’s first party apps. They have now got to the point where they are superficially simple, but contain a lot of power underneath.

    The downside is it’s an almost certain way of trapping yourself in Apple’s ecosystem for the rest of time. Yes, Apple’s services – which lie behind the apps – use standards and have the ability to export, but not all of them, and for how long?

    It’s a trade off, and from my perspective not one that really works for me right now. But if it does for you, then it’s a good option (and better than Notion).

    2. Juno removed from the App Store

    AKA “why I do not like any company, no matter how well intentioned, to have a monopoly on software distribution for a platform.” Christian Selig created a YouTube player for the Apple Vision Pro. It doesn’t block ads or do anything which could be regarded as dubious. But Google claimed it was using its trademarks, and Apple removed it.

    Why is this problematic? Because it’s setting Apple up as a judge in a legal case. YouTube could, and should, have gone to a judge if it believed it had a legal case for trademark violation. That’s what judges are for. Instead, probably because it knew that it wouldn’t win a case like that, it went to Apple. Apple (rightly) doesn’t want to get involved in trademark disputes, so it shrugged and removed the app.

    This extra-legal application of law is one of the most nefarious impacts of App Store monopolies. And if it continues to be allowed, it will only get worse.

    3. The horrible descent of Matt Mullenweg

    You will be aware of the conflict between WordPress — by which we mean Matt Mullenweg, because according to Matt he is WordPress — and WPEngine. I have many opinions on this which I will, at some point, get down to writing. The most important one is simple: if you make an open source product under the GPL, you don’t get to dictate to anyone how they use it and don’t get to attempt to punish them for not contributing “enough”. Heck, you don’t get to decide what “enough” looks like.

    The whole thing has brought out the worst in Mullenweg, as evidenced in his attacks on Kellie Peterson. Peterson, who is a former Automattic employee, offered to help anyone leaving WordPress find opportunities. Mullenweg decided this was attacking him, and claimed this was illegal. I don’t know about you, but when a multi-millionaire starts to throw around words like “tortuous interference” I pay attention.

    As with many of that generation of California ideologists Mullenweg appears to have decided that he knows best, now and always. Yes, private equity companies that use open source projects and contribute nothing back are douchebags, but they’re douchebags who are doing something that the principles of open source explicitly allow them to do. Mullenweg’s apparent desire to be the emperor of WordPress is worrying.

    4. OpenAI raises money, still isn’t a business

    Ed Zitron wrote an excellent piece this week on the crazy valuation and funding round which OpenAI just closed, pointing out that (1) ChatGPT loses money on every customer, and (2) there is no way to use scale to change this: the company is going to keep losing money on every customer as models get more compute-hungry. Neither Moore’s Law nor the economies of scale which made cloud services of the past profitable are going to come riding to the rescue.

    I think Ed’s right — and it’s important to note, as Satya Nadella did, that LLMs are moving into the “commodity” stage — but one other thing to note is that many of the more simple things which people use LLMs for are being pushed from cloud to edge. Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” is one example of this, but Microsoft is also pushing a lot of the compute down to the device level in the ARM-based Copilot PCs.

    This trend should alleviate some of the growth issues that OpenAI has, but it’s a double-edged sword because it makes it less likely that someone will need to use ChatGPT, and so even less likely to need to pay OpenAI.

    5. Why I love Angela Carter

    I think I first read Angela Carter during my degree, one of the few books that I bothered to read for my literature modules1. This piece includes possibly my favourite quote from her: “Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”

    And the point is: sometimes it’s fine not to be subtle. Sometimes it’s fine to be overblown. Sometimes the story demands it, like a steak needs to be juicy.

    6. And speaking of writers I love

    I can’t tell you enough to just go and read M John Harrison. Climbers is sometimes regarded as his best novel, and this essay on why it’s the best book written about 21st century male loneliness despite being written in 1989 captures a lot of it. I like the line from Robert Macfarlane’s introduction: “To Harrison, all life is alien”. Amen to that.

    7. No really this week is all lit, all the time

    Olivia Laing is another writer that makes me salivate when I read her. Like Harrison and Carter, her prose is as good as her fiction, and her recent book The Garden Against Time – an account of restoring a garden to glory – is one of the best yet. If you need any further persuading, you should read this piece in the New Yorker.

    8. Down in Brighton? Like books?

    Next weekend is the best-named literary festival in the world down in Brighton. The Coast is Queer includes loads of brilliant sessions including queer fantastical reimaginings, the incredible Julia Armfield on world building, Juno Dawson’s trans literary salon, and the unmissable David Hoyle. I’m going, you should go.

    9. Harlan the terrible

    Like Cory Doctorow, I grew up worshipping Harlan Ellison. And like Cory, as I’ve grown older I have see that Harlan was an incredibly complicated person. Cory has written a great piece (masquerading as just one part of a linkblog) which not only looks at Harlan, warts and all, but also talks about the genesis of the story he contributed to the – finally finished! – Last Dangerous Visions.

    10. Argh Mozilla wai u doo this?

    No Mozilla, no, online advertising does not need “improving… through product and infrastructure”. Online advertising needs to understand that surveillance-based ads were always toxic and the whole thing needs to be torn up. I agree with Jamie Zawinski: Mozilla should be “building THE reference implementation web browser, and being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.”

    To be clear: I think Mozilla’s goals are laudable, in the sense that at the moment the choice for people is either accept being tracked to a horrendous degree or just block almost every ad and tracker. But you can’t engineer your way around the advertising industry’s rapacious desire for data. It’s that industry which needs to change, not the technology.

    1. I read a lot, I just didn’t read a lot that was actually on the syllabus. ↩︎
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    Weeknote, Sunday 21st January 2024

    So much blood this week. Fortunately, all of it was removed from me under medical supervision. On Tuesday, I had a bit taken for blood tests. I have been feeling a bit run down, and was wondering if my iron levels were falling. Turned out they were fine, but my glucose levels are a bit elevated – not to the diabetes stage, but heading in the wrong direction, so I will have to get more diet and exercise. Yay.

    Then on Wednesday, more blood, this time donating. I love giving blood. It's such a tiny thing to do but such a wonderful little symbol of your commitment to other people, for no reward other than an orange Club biscuit at the end.

    Oh, and I finally deleted my Substack. Everyone who was subscribed to it should have been ported over to WordPress. I am, though, considering whether I should move to Ghost. Because hey, who doesn't love a bit of tech-related shenanigans?

    This morning we went to see Poor Things, at a 10am showing (which feels almost naughty). If you haven't been, you should go: it's the most brilliant film I've seen in a long time, with fantastic directing and performances. I could spend a couple of days trying to unpick all the threads from it, and it still wouldn't scratch the surface. Plus, Emma Stone should be a shoo-in for the Oscar.

    The three things which most caught my attention

    1. If you're not reading Rachel Coldicutt's occasional newsletter, you should be.
    2. I have many feelings about the work from home vs return to office wars, but the biggest one is this: it's not a war.
    3. This is from last year, but basically Andrew Ridgeley is a lovely man, and what a loss to music George Michael was.

    Things I have been writing

    One of the biggest concerns I have about the current AI-mania is the lack of understanding of what a major change it is. Now that Microsoft has started to roll out Copilot for Microsoft 365 to all sizes of business, it's likely that more and more will turn it on (at $30 a licence) and think that's their "AI stuff" sorted. And then, of course, lay off 10% of the workforce because what their spreadsheet reckons is the "efficiency gain".

    That, of course, is bunk. Using AI in your business is about people, and how you train them, and it demands a change from a "one and done" training approach to a continuous structure learning system – something that's not easy.

    I also wrote a related piece about using the ADKAR change management framework to roll out AI. The point that I wanted to get across was that you are committing to a major strategic change, and you need to do that formally – and manage it, rather than just imposing it on teams. ADKAR is great for that, and, as I note, if you do it well it's not actually going to be cheap because you need potentially new roles to implement ongoing optimisation of the way you work with AI. Interesting times: it reminds me of the early days of the web.

    Things I have been reading

    I finished off Neal Asher's Jenny Trapdoor, which was… OK. I spotted the end coming about 20 pages in, which in a novella is always possible but a bit disappointing anyway.

    Then I started and rapidly finished Stephen Baxter's Creation Node, which was very Baxter, with all that entails. I felt in places like it was a cosmology lecture masquerading as a novel, there were aspects of it which made no sense at all from a plot perspective, and had I been editing it I would have wanted some of it to just get dropped. It felt, at the end, like Baxter had created an interesting backdrop for a story but not really put much of a story into it. Which, as I said, is very Baxter.

    ∞

    On the fine art of not finishing

    I learned, over time, not to be a finisher. I would start grand projects, read the first 20 pages of a hundred books and write the beginnings of a hundred blog posts (much like this one). All of them are fragments -- I have a folder on my computer called "fragments" -- and none of them is finished.

    It took me a long time to learn this, using the power of habits to make myself a master at the heavenly craft of completing nothing. I wasn't always great at it, but through the sheer application of walking away from things I start, I have come to the point where I can consider not finishing what I started as my profession, my true calling.

    And now, I am ready to take the next step and make this my full-time job!

    Failing to finish things gives you an amazing feeling of accomplishment. The words you would have written but never got around to are the most perfect ones you can imagine. The exceptional middle and ending of the work, which you just couldn't put to paper or screen, will always beat anything you ever actually wrote.

    I would recommend failing to finish things to anyone. You will never have a greater sense of achievement. Go forth, young person, and stop when you feel like it.

    ∞

    On Michael Moorcock

    I once wrote a letter to Michael Moorcock. I have no idea how I found some kind of address for him -- possibly via the Hawkwind fan club I was a member of -- but found it I did. And sometime later, he was kind enough to write back.

    I have almost no recollection of what I asked him (probably something trivial about Elric), but I recall that I had asked him if he would read a story I had written. He politely declined, explaining that not reading other writers' unpublished work was his number one rule. I think he said something encouraging about continuing to write.

    There was, of course, a certain element of teenage braggadocio involved in this. I had not written a story at all. In fact, I had never written a story, not a word of fiction. But I reckoned that if Moorcock did want to have a read of something, I could probably rattle something out fairly sharpish and get it back to him. How hard could it be?

    Moorcock has remained one of the touchstone writers of my life, and his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (and associated short stories) remains a sequence of books that I return to repeatedly. His association with New Worlds also connected me to Ballard, M John Harrison, Samuel Delaney and many others I have read throughout my life.

    There are three lessons that I learned from Moorcock.

    Don't let the confines of genre bind you

    Moorcock is a genre writer, with much of his output coming from fantasy and science fiction's weirder end. However, he hasn't let himself be limited to this, playing with the forms of the modern novel and writing things which have as much in common with Iain Sinclair as Edgar Rice-Burroughs. His real theme isn't fantasy, but the fantastical, something which can be found in everyday life.

    Tolkien was the worst thing to happen to fantasy

    I might be exaggerating: I am sure that even Moorcock would say that other writers (cough Hubbard, Lovecraft cough) were worse people and worse writers. But, while acknowledging Tolkien was a pleasant enough man and very welcoming towards him when they met, he certainly had no time for Tolkien's fiction:

    "It would be the same if we were talking about Warwick Deeping or RC Sherriff. It's the British character sentimentalised, the illusion of decency, that whole nonsense of 'no British boy would do this sort of thing'. It was also the tone of the BBC when I was growing up. I hated it.

    Middle Earth is a place which celebrates the pre-industrial hobbits while the rabble -- the orcs -- are notable only for their brutality. When Saruman's orcs are creating machinery, they are a pretty thinly disguised analogue of the industrial working class. But they are regarded as brutes, and their enslavement by Saruman is barely acknowledged.

    It took me a long time to realise how odious Lord of the Rings was: Moorcock led the way.

    Write, write and keep writing - but plan first

    In his early years, Moorcock was capable of writing 15,000 words in a day , an insane amount of words unless you're writing something that is unpublishable. Not only was his writing publishable, but it was also published.

    How did he maintain that pace? As he told Hari Kunzru, mostly, it was all in the planning:

    "It's all planning. I'd have been in bed for three days, during which I've had time to sketch out the story. Then I spring out of bed and I've got a straight nine to five – or nine to six or seven – regime, which frequently includes taking the kids to school, then I just sit down and go through with an hour break for lunch. When you write that fast the book really does start to write you, you get high on the book. It's partly lack of sleep, it's partly the sugar – in my case I only had strong black coffee because it kept me going."

    ∞

    A letter to my 23-year-old self

    Dear Ian,

    Congratulations on leaving Hatfield and getting a pretty good degree! I’d like to say that you worked hard for it, and you certainly put the effort in over that last semester. You’re a bright lad and you have come a long way. You didn’t have many expectations of yourself when you started this journey but I hope you have come to realise that you’re cleverer than you thought you were.

    Thirty years later, I think that I’ve learned quite a bit more about life. I know you’re not good at taking advice, but I thought that I would put this letter in a time bottle and throw it overboard. Perhaps by some kind of temporal miracle it will reach you and change how you think about a few things. But I guess that I know already that it didn’t. Unless that many worlds interpretation of quantum theory is correct, in which case this is another future you who never existed typing this, and there’s a different future me trying to whisper to another me in not-his past.

    This whole time stuff is confusing.

    Anyway, this is as much about me as it is you which means I’ll write it anyway. That’s the first lesson by the way: it’s never always about you.

    When we look back at our past selves it’s easy to become either condemnatory or nostalgic. What a prat I was. Or on the other hand how full of youthful energy, how lacking in fear!

    Like most views of the past, no one can never really know which is more true, but I suspect that actually neither is all that accurate. So, I’m not going to judge you and find you wanting, or lionise you and wish I was you, again.

    Instead, I’m going to write about a few things that I’ve learned more about since I was you, and hope you can consider them. Feel free to reject them — I probably would, and I was you once — but also think about them often.

    The first thing I would say is to care less about what people think and more about what people feel. When I was you, I was obsessed with reason and thinking. I was very much a rationalist, even though I thought of myself as a renaissance man. Spending your time obsessing about what people think about you is less important than making them feel good about themselves. People are always more insecure than that look. You can capitalise on that, but to be honest that makes you a bit of a bastard. Lift people up. Make them feel like they are the most important person in the world.

    Remember too that love is something that requires nurturing, and expect it to change. You don’t love people in the same way all the time. Love ages, and like all things that age that can either mean it withers and dies or it becomes deeper and more seasoned. But it never stays the same, and harking back to how a love was is to choke it with the thorns of your memories.

    Take some risks. You have time on your side here, but no matter what age you are you can always shake things up a little. Don’t do it for the sake of it, but remember that life is change: the more you hold on to it the more quickly it will slip away from you.

    Grasp opportunities — but only if they are something you want to do. Just because someone else presents with you with a chance to do something doesn’t mean you have to take that chance. Of course, that depends on you knowing what you want…

    To understand what you want, you need to be more reflective. I know it feels like navel-gazing, but without understanding what you want you can never have it. It’s only recently that I’ve understood that failing to think about what you want is really all about being afraid: afraid that if you find what you want, you might not be able to have it.

    Academic philosophy is not for you. You’ll find this out of your own accord, of course, and it all turns out absolutely fine. But I think you probably know this already.

    Remember that friends are not hot-swappable. Moving away doesn’t have to mean moving on. It will take you a long time to realise how much you miss people but you’ll get there in the end. Getting to it earlier will save you a bit of anguish.

    Do more art! Don’t be afraid to call yourself an artist. You can write and you’re a good communicator, but keep practicing. Art is a practice, but that means you have to keep flexing those muscles. Put the words out daily, and never be afraid to show your work in progress.

    You’re a good lad, and you are still such a lad in so many ways. Not a boy, not really yet a man, but very definitely a lad.

    I would say all the best at this point, but I know that you don’t get all the best. No one does. But I still wish it for you.

    So, all the best,

    You + 30.

    ∞

    Writing with the Freewrite

    For anyone that has spent the last 20 years or so typing on ever less satisfying keyboards, writing with the Astrohaus Freewrite is a strange experience. In fact, in some ways it is profoundly disconcerting. Going back to a normal computer keyboard and regular large screen is like emerging from a wilderness retreat.

    Like a wilderness retreat, the Freewrite is an attempt to regain some simplicity and with it that often talked of but little understood condition of flow. Flow has attained almost mystical status in the productivity and artistic communities as a kind of meditative state in which, thanks to an extreme of focus, the words just come. In an age when your phone goes ping and there’s an incoming message request every few seconds from one or more demanding social networks, flow is power.

    So, how does this relate to the chunky little box on which I’m typing this draft? It helps at this point to describe what the Freewrite is and what it’s intended to do. Launched in 2017 by a small company called Astrohaus, Freewrite is a combination of excellent mechanical keyboard and e-ink screen, all in a box which looks like a steampunk typewriter. You type, words appear on screen. That, in a nutshell is what Freewrite is and does.

    Hardware

    Compared to any computer you’re likely to use daily the Freewrite is an absolute chonk. It weighs around four pounds and the case is made from some kind of metal — probably aluminium but whatever it is it’s substantial. The base is plastic with a slightly grippy feel, which obviously ensures it firmly stays even on your expensive executive glass meeting room table, Mr Hipster Executive.

    Everything about this machine is designed to look and feel analogue. The switches which allow you to change which folder you’re writing in and turn Wi-Fi on and off are big, mechanical beasts rather than wimpy little buttons. The power switch is a red button with a satisfying push to it.

    Then, of course, there is the keyboard. It’s mechanical and uses Cherry MX Brown switches. For those relatively new to technical switches, the Brown switch is often favoured as it has a relatively short depth of travel before the key is activated, but then an extended depression which gives it a satisfying thunk if you bottom it out. In other words, you can go relatively gently on it and be about as quiet as a mechanical keyboard can get, or you can hammer it a little harder and thunk to your heart’s content. Because the activation depth is relatively short, if you are coming from a normal computer keyboard it will not feel like you have to do insane finger workouts before you can actually type anything at speed.

    Just as importantly, like all quality keyboards (and like no laptop keyboards) this is raked at an angle, which gives your hands a more comfortable position and lets them travel across the board a little faster. Once you get used to it, don’t be surprised if your typing speed goes up, but do be prepared to make many errors in the meantime. If, like me, you have typed millions of words on laptop keyboards and just got used to them, it will take a while to adjust. But it’s worth it in the end. Your hands and your typing speed will thank you.

    The screen

    The screen on the Freewrite is a pair of e-ink panels. The top one, which is about the size of a small smartphone, is where your words appear as you type. As you would expect from an e-ink screen it is a little laggy, but not dramatically so. There’s a backlight for typing in dimmer conditions, or you can turn that light off and it’s perfectly readable in almost every light.

    The second screen just underneath serves as an information panel, giving you useful information like a word count, a timer, or a couple of different kinds of clock. I suspect that for me this will stay on the word count permanently. I don’t often need a timer, and annoyingly the timer isn’t persistent. If the company upgrades the software, I would love to see an information panel which combines word count and timer, which I think would be the most useful option of all.

    A digression

    While I was finishing off that sentence I heard the “bong” of Outlook demanding my attention on my laptop and quickly had to break to answer an email. And I instantly realised that this keyboard is going to spoil my experience of my lovely new MacBook Pro unless I get an external Cherry MX Brown keyboard to go with it. The feeling is that different, and even now I can tell it’s that much better. Which leaves me wondering why I resisted getting into mechanical keyboards for this long?

    Software

    In line with the rest of the device the software on the Freewrite is minimal. In fact, there really isn’t anything which anyone raised typing on computers would recognise as software. There are no apps. You just type, and words appear on the screen. That’s it.

    You have three folders to store files in and you access them not through a fancy touch screen but by moving a mechanical switch. You turn it off and get a screensaver. Turn it on and you are back where you left off in whatever document you’re working on. There’s no spell check, no grammar checker, nothing which could potentially get between you and writing.

    The philosophical typewriter

    This is because, unlike most devices, the Freewrite is opinionated about the way you should work. Computers, particularly modern ones, are built on the principle that the user is always right, at least about the way they want to work. Don’t like this word processor? Fine! Use this other one instead! Like to write and edit as you go along? Word will let you do that all day long, with its squiggly red lines and attention-grabbing autocorrects.

    The Freewrite does not care about your approach. It is built for one approach and one only: you draft, by writing in an uninterrupted way as possible. Then you use another tool to edit and turn your steam of consciousness and raw words into something polished.

    Freewrite has absolutely no aspirations to be a device that you edit on. It lacks every editing capability except for a backspace key to get rid of that typo in the previous word. There are no arrow keys. Although you can page up and page down if you want to look back into your text, there’s no cursor that you can more anywhere backwards.

    Like I said, the Freewrite has an opinion about the way you should write, and if you don’t like that opinion you should go somewhere else.

    However, the Freewrite does have another trick up its sleeve: it does everything possible to make sure that you can get your words into another tool for editing which suits you.

    Postbox and sync

    On the back of the Freewrite is a USB Type-C port which you can use for charging the device, or for connecting it to a computer and pulling files off it. However, remember that Wi-Fi switch? It’s there to connect you with Postbox, which is Astrohaus’ cloud sync service. When connected to Wi-Fi every thirty seconds or so Freewrite connects to Postbox and syncs the latest version of your document to the cloud. From there, you can sync it to Google Drive or Dropbox, and these synced versions are in Word format. This means you can seamlessly move from drafting with the Freewrite to editing in Word, with all its excellent editing features.

    There’s just one caveat: it’s not really sync as you normally understand it. Although Postbox includes a capable little distraction-free writer called Sprinter, changes you make in Sprinter are not synced back to the Freewrite. In fact, if you open a Freewrite-originated document in Sprinter it moves it to a different folder which the Freewrite can’t even access, and removes it from your device.

    This is a bit of a shame. It’s not that I want to get into a cycle of drafting then editing on the Mac then back to the Freewrite, but there are times when an idea appears while I’m in front of the Mac and I would like to jot it down quickly there and then and expand it later on the Freewrite. But I can’t — yet. There have been some murmurings that it might be possible in the future to edit and roundtrip documents to and from the Freewrite through Sprinter, but it’s not there yet, and if that feature never comes along at all, I won’t be crying over it.

    Conclusions

    When my friend, colleague and now published author Thomas McMullan reviewed the Freewrite a few years ago, he concluded with this:

    It is easy to write the Freewrite off as an expensive oddity, angled to nostalgic retirees and well-heeled posers, but it shows that the progress of writing technology doesn’t need to travel in a straight line. With its USB Type-C port and automatic cloud syncing, the Freewrite doesn’t ignore internet connectivity, but instead keeps it under tight control. It shows an alternate path, perhaps into a cul-de-sac, where typing doesn’t happen across 20 tabs.

    Other critics gave the device a lot of stick, arguing it was a bit of a hipster toy, but I think Tom was on to something. There is a lot more to the Freewrite. Or rather: there is a lot less to it. It is devoted to one task and one task alone: hammering out a first rough draft of whatever you’re writing. I wrote the first draft of this review on the Freewrite and the experience of it was excellent. Not the experience of the device: the device just got out of the way. What was delightful was the experience of the writing itself. I don’t think I have actually enjoyed the physicality of writing quite so much for years.

    In and hour and a half, I’ve written as little over 1800 words on the Freewrite and I have experienced a sense of flow while I’ve been doing it. That is well worth the money this machine cost. Now you’ll have to excuse me — I’m off to order a decent keyboard for the Mac too.