Roblog

Roblog is… navigating uncertainty

Roblog is a blog written by Rob Miller.

It's all about uncertainty, creativity, and sustainability. It helps you (and me!) make sense of a complex world.

Featured posts

New here? You can browse by topic, or these featured articles might be a good place to start:

Recent posts

  • Filed under: food

    Saint Cavish at Gem Garden

    One of my favourite YouTube channels at the moment is @saintcavish, Christopher St. Cavish’s explorations of Chinese cooking. Christopher is no mere visitor, dipping in briefly and superficially to a vast and almost-unknowable cuisine; he has lived in Shanghai for over twenty years, and so is able to delve deep into culinary traditions and gain access to remarkable places, like this visit to a Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant in Shenzhen.

    The production values are perfect. There are no showy Netflix-style visuals or overly dramatic score. It’s just exceptionally clean, well-graded footage – shot by a single camera operator, Graeme Kennedy – of remarkable chefs cooking remarkable food, all with St. Cavish’s thoughtful commentary. Not one to watch while hungry. #

  • Filed under: design

    Elizabeth Goodspeed on imperfection as design strategy

    Creatives’ social media accounts are awash with lo-fi, analogue aesthetics, most of which are created digitally, often with cookie-cutter kits that undermine the whole idea of what “analogue” is supposed to represent. Elizabeth Goodspeed understands why:

    “The practical reality is that most people no longer have the time, tools, or support to make fully analogue work, even if they want to. The creative infrastructure that would make it viable – materials access, slower timelines, financial stability – isn’t widely available. Designers and illustrators are stuck in a bind: analogue signals value, but digital is what’s feasible. The result is a kind of strategic mimicry. The market is looking for particular cues, and designers have to find a way to hit them. It doesn’t help that glossy, computer-made work can now be mistaken for AI either; clean, high-fidelity digital craft has become suspect by default, making handmade a safer choice. You can think of adding in fake ink splatters a bit like penciling in a beauty mark: an intentional imperfection done to signal authenticity, rather than the byproduct of a real nuisance.”

    Rather than using these analogue cues for merely surface-level styling reasons, or to signal “this isn’t AI”, Elizabeth hopes that we can use this analogue fixation as part of a broader reckoning about how and why creative work is made, and to whose benefit:

    “When analogue collapses into surface style, it stops applying pressure to how work is made and valued. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Arts & Crafts movement, for instance, emerged alongside mass mechanisation and responded not with nostalgia, but with structural reorganisation. Designers and makers pushed back against the factory’s division of labour by reasserting continuity between thinking and making. Objects were produced slowly, often collaboratively, with an emphasis on material knowledge and visible decision-making. They were sold through guilds and exhibitions that foregrounded craft as labour, not just aesthetic, and delivered tangible financial benefits to the people who made them. There’s a version of today’s analogue fixation that could move in this direction.”

    #

  • Filed under: sports

    The Mundanity of Excellence

    Via Matt Webb, from his broader (and fascinating) post about the nature of work and what the roboticisation of domestic labour might take from us, comes this topical and counter-intuitive nugget about Olympians. How is it that they bring themselves to do the presumably mad levels of hard work and training that are required to get to the tops of their games? Well, because they enjoy it:

    “The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring – swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say – they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. … It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.”

    It’s from a 1989 ethnographic study on Olympic swimmers by Daniel Chambliss. The central premise is that levels of sports are discontinuous, and that, while putting in more and more effort can make you better within a particular level of performance, it isn’t what progresses you to the highest heights:

    “Having seen that ‘more is better’ within local situations, we tend to extrapolate: if I work this hard to get to my level, how hard must Olympic swimmers work? If I sacrifice this much to qualify for the State Championships, how much must they sacrifice? We believe, extrapolating from what we learn about success at our own level, that they must work unbelievably hard, must feel incredible pressure, must sacrifice more and more to become successful. Assuming implicitly that stratification in sports is continuous rather than discrete (that the differences are quantitative) we believe that top athletes do unbelievable things. In short, we believe that they must be superhuman.”

    Neither talent nor hard work are good explanations for their success. Instead, Chambliss argues, the cause is more qualitative than quantitative; the extremely successful do different things rather than more things, and keep doing them to a habitual and mundane degree.

    “After three years of field work with world-class swimmers… I wrote a draft of some book chapters, full of stories about swimmers, and I showed it to a friend. ‘You need to jazz it up,’ he said. ‘You need to make these people more interesting. The analysis is nice, but except for the fact that these are good swimmers, there isn’t much else exciting to say about them as individuals.’ He was right, of course. What these athletes do was rather interesting, but the people themselves were only fast swimmers, who did the particular things one does to swim fast. It is all very mundane. When my friend said that they weren’t exciting, my best answer could only be, simply put: that’s the point.”

    #

  • Filed under: politics

    Was the green lantern a good chap?

    Dan Davies has written about how many systems (including the British constitution) use what he terms a “good chap” regulatory system: i.e. they rely on the system being mostly populated by decent people who obey the rules, even though they don’t technically have to.

    That has obvious flaws, like when someone (Boris Johnson, say, or more disastrously Donald Trump) comes along who decides not to be a good chap. But, Dan argues, there’s a certain advantage to the naïveté:

    “It is always possible to break norms, if you’re really determined to. Everything does, in fact, depend on having people in positions of power who respect the rules of the game. The British ‘good chap’ system is just much more blatantly in your face about it.

    “Which might account for the longevity of the Westminster system. It is incredibly fragile, but it’s obviously fragile, and in this way achieves a sort of paradoxical antifragility. In a ‘good chap’ system, when a bad chap shows up, all the good chaps know that they have to band together and oppose or get rid of them, because they know that there are no systemic constraints on badchappery. In a system that’s meant to be full of checks and balances, it is much easier for a kind of bystander effect to develop, where everyone waits for the system to protect itself without understanding that the system is just them.”

    The contrast with the US in its current mode is striking; I definitely see that bystander effect, where people continually expect some kind of check or balance to take effect. It certainly hasn’t yet. #

  • Filed under: design

    It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

    A brilliant takedown of the menu icons in the latest version of MacOS, a version I’m still steadfastly refusing to upgrade to, from Niki Prokopov.

    Apple decided to do a thing that was both impossible and undesirable, then did it badly:

    “In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

    “But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

    “And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.”

    In referencing the Human Interface Guidelines from 1992, Niki makes a point that many people would do well to remember:

    “…is an interface manual from 1992 still relevant today? Haven’t computers changed so much that entirely new principles, designs, and idioms apply?

    “Yes and no. Of course, advice on how to adapt your icons to black-and-white displays is obsolete. But the principles – as long as they are good principles – still apply, because they are based on how humans work, not how computers work.

    “Humans don’t get a new release every year. Our memory doesn’t double. Our eyesight doesn’t become sharper. Attention works the same way it always has. Visual recognition, motor skills – all of this is exactly as it was in 1992.”

    #

  • Filed under: technology

    Jevons only knows

    Jevons paradox gets thrown around a lot in the context of AI, but it’s a useful lens through which to view an industry or a role. Should you run towards or away from what you’re currently doing?

  • Filed under: film

    Chain Your Heart to a Star: Fee Warner and the Marc Bolan Rock Shrine

    A couple of months ago I made my first documentary film: Chain Your Heart to a Star. It’s the story of Fee Warner, who for 48 years has been visiting the site of Marc Bolan’s death in south-west London. There she has built, and continues to maintain, what has become a shrine to Bolan and T. Rex. The shrine is visited by people from all over the world, and is enduring evidence of the depth of feeling we humans have for music and musicians. #

  • Filed under: ai

    Investigating a possible scammer in journalism’s AI Era

    Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Local exhibits more diligence than most publications in tracking down the source of an AI-written pitch:

    “I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where ‘health and money collide,’ flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.”

    Such grubby scams are, he thinks, reflective of the diminished media environment we live in:

    “Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud – where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more ‘content’ have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.”

    Immunisation against these sorts of scams and misinformation is possible, as Hune-Brown demonstrates with his dogged investigative work. But the skills needed are precisely the ones that the media have spent the last decade or two gutting. It does not bode well. #

  • Filed under: sustainability

    Brett Christophers on waste

    This whole piece, about what happens to the waste our modern economy produces by the billions of tons, is fascinating. But I particularly liked this bit as a novel and useful explanation of something I’ve thought about before, but not in these terms:

    “Three other insights about value from political economy are helpful here. The first is that use value and exchange value are not equally important under capitalism – or, more precisely, are not of equal importance to capitalists. Marx showed that where the two are in tension, as they often are, exchange value overrides use value: the imperatives of competition and accumulation mean that commodities must be produced principally for sale. What counts as ‘waste’ comes to be decided by reference to wealth creation and preservation. This is what Locke was doing when he justified the European annexation of Indigenous territories on the grounds that they were not being used ‘productively’: the land was, in other words, being wasted, and should be brought into the ambit of capitalist modernity and its calculus of value. In a present-day example, Franklin-Wallis describes seeing a batch of unused TVs from a major manufacturer at a US electronics ‘recycling’ plant waiting to be destroyed in order not to act as competition for the same manufacturer’s new line of products. In 2020 Apple sued a Canadian recycler for selling off some of the half a million unsold devices it had sent to be shredded. In July 2018 it was reported that Burberry had incinerated ‘deadstock’ worth £28 million in the previous financial year to prevent its being sold at discounted rates. And so on.”

    #

  • Filed under: technology

    AI-powered nimbyism

    As Frederik Pohl said, “a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

    Lots of optimism about AI in its early days focused on how it might make the job of people in bureaucratic roles much easier, as it massively increased their information-processing bandwidth. But here is the flipside:

    “A new service called Objector is offering ‘policy-backed objections in minutes’ to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.

    “It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to ‘influence councillors’.”

    This is the tricky future we must navigate. One particularly unsavoury detail:

    “Kent residents Hannah and Paul George designed the system after estimating they spent hundreds of hours attempting to navigate the planning process when they opposed plans to convert a building near their home into a mosque.”

    #

  • Filed under: technology

    Four theories of Meta

    Jeremiah Johnson with a dystopian piece on the seeming contradiction between Meta’s unstoppable financial success and its obviously corrosive social impact, with a depressing conclusion:

    “The only thing scarier to me than a mega-billionaire shoving pornified-AI bots down society’s throat is the idea that even if Zuck wasn’t doing that, we’d be clamoring for someone to step up and do it in his place. And that theory of Meta is what I ultimately think is the correct one. Why did Meta shift from promoting human connection to promoting porny AI chatbots? Because they have access to better data than anyone in the world about what people actually want, and that’s what the data tells them. The terrifying truth might be that even if Meta closed up shop tomorrow, their vision of an AI future would come to pass regardless. Maybe the people just want what they want, and they’re going to end up getting it good and hard.”

    #

  • Filed under: crime

    Fugitive father shot dead by NZ police

    Last year I linked to a Slate story about Tom Phillips, a New Zealand father who disappeared with his kids into the bush. Back then, the story was complex enough, with unclear motivations, a potential custody battle, and an underlying theme of hardy, resilient bush men resisting the opressively civilising influence of modern society and government forces. Some argued Phillips was essentially kidnapping his own children; others that he was a modern-day “man alone”, teaching his kids an admirable sort of self-reliance.

    The story ended tragically today; Phillips was shot by police during a bungled burglary in which he fired at officers with a rifle. #

  • Filed under: technology

    My stance on AI

    Staking out a position in an evolving world; trying to figure out whether ethical AI usage is possible; charting a course between the doomsters and the boosters.

  • Filed under: politics

    The radicalisation spiral (£)

    Sam Freedman on the high-speed pipeline that seeems to funnel certain people towards predominantly right-wing online propaganda:

    “Over the last few years I’ve watched a disturbing number of people I used to know fall victim to the radicalisation spiral. It’s unnerving watching acquaintances who seemed relatively normal suddenly become obsessed with antivaxxer propaganda or start retweeting Tommy Robinson. I suspect many readers know someone, even if only tangentially, who’s disappeared down an online rabbit hole.”

    #

  • Filed under: art

    Dust – what time does to art

    A thoughtful and moving piece by Tom Cox on the effect of time passing on art, as experienced when watching Get Back:

    “It’s something very rare: a largely unaltered portrait of newborn art before any dust has settled on it. Time will make its refinements and adjustments to that art, just as it always does. You don’t have any control over that, even if you’re the most famous band in the world. All you can do is try to be as free as possible, give yourself space to fail, which is the same space that could very likely also permit you to flourish. Then it’s up to your other collaborators, which are the years that stretch out in front of you. They could be looked on as a kind of invisible post-production. They’ll sort it all out. They always do, even if they’re sometimes cruel or unsympathetic to your personal circumstances while going about it.”

    #

  • Filed under: technology

    Commons over, baby

    AI is the latest technology to threaten our digital commons, and culture more broadly. Can we stop it destroying what we hold dear? Or is the juice worth the squeeze?

  • Filed under: technology

    Flipping the switch on far-UVC

    A fascinating post from Richard Williamson about far-UVC, a technique that uses ultraviolet light to kill pathogens in the air without harming people or other organisms:

    “One of the best shots we have at turning the page on airborne disease is an emerging type of germicidal UV (GUV) light called far-UVC. Over the last decade, researchers have documented its ability to eliminate pathogens while being safe for humans. A landmark study from 2022 found that far-UVC reduced the concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4 percent in a room-sized chamber, all while operating within safe UV exposure limits. Compared to standard ventilation, this was the equivalent of changing the air completely over in the room 184 times every hour. To put that in perspective, the CDC recommends 5 or more air changes per hour in the workplace. Even hospital operating rooms in the US only require 20. Far-UVC is effective against viruses too; airborne coronaviruses are more susceptible to far-UVC than the same bacteria used in the other study.”

    If it’s so simple, why hasn’t it been adopted yet? Richard argues that the problem is partly regulatory: there is no straightforward approval pathway for a device like this, like there would be if it were a drug. That means that people can just implement it (good) but also that there’s no rigorous trial process that proves its efficacy (bad). Without that proof, large institutions are unlikely to invest in a rollout of something that might be hokum.

    Why doesn’t someone pay for a rigorous trial, then? The other problem is that UVC isn’t patentable (it’s already generic, there’s lots of prior art), so if a manufacturer made the huge investment in proving UVC’s efficacy then its competitors would be able to free-ride off the back of its work.

    This is one of those posts where I have a slight amount of epistemic learned helplessness; I don’t know enough about the science to know if the bold claims of efficacy are true, or if there are unforeseen consequences or side-effects lurking here. But there’s something interesting in Richard’s proposed solution, which is to set up a non-profit to validate the claims so that everyone can benefit. I wonder what other inventions and breakthroughs have this same shape of coordination problem preventing their widepsread adoption? #

  • Filed under: biology

    The case for subspecies – the neglected unit of conservation

    I’ve always found useful the idea of people temperamentally being either “lumpers” and “splitters”. Lumpers are those who assign things broadly and generally, valuing similarities over differences, and splitters are those who assign things narrowly and precisely, valuing differences over similarities. XKCD described the distinction well.

    This fascinating essay by Richard Smyth is about the very real consequences of lumping and splitting in the world of conservation, and about how our decision whether or not to assign an animal its own taxonomic category can have transformative consequences for its chances of survival:

    “Similarly, a segment in the BBC’s recent wildlife series Asia highlighted the grave plight of the Gobi bear. There are, Sir David Attenborough told us, fewer than 40 Gobi bears left. It’s a miserable statistic. But it’s worth thinking about exactly what’s being said here. The Gobi bear is, as it happens, a subspecies, a significant sub-population of the brown bear Ursus arctos. But what if it wasn’t? ‘There are 40 Gobi bears left’ lands a little differently than ‘There are 40 brown bears left in this part of the Gobi desert’; the former sounds like a call to action, no time to lose! – whereas the latter is more, well, who cares? What’s a few brown bears, here or there?

    “What this boils down to, again, is the question of what’s real – what’s significant, what means something.”

    #

  • Filed under: culture

    We don't need more cynics. We need more builders.

    I wrote recently about the “vibe shift” that’s currently underway, and how we might build out way out of it. Joan Westenberg hits on a similar theme, and makes a powerful call for “pragmatic meliorism” – that is, neither deluded optimism nor destructive cynicism, but rather a pragmatic belief that “things are broken, AND they can be fixed; people are flawed AND capable of growth; systems are complex AND can be improved.”

    It’s hard not to be cynical in a world as seemingly screwed up as this one, but Westenberg’s case against the cynics is convincing:

    “Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed.

    “But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.”

    #

  • Filed under: politics

    What Britain looks like after Brexit, by Daniel Hannan

    Shortly before the Brexit referendum in 2016, Dan Hannan – one of the most unserious people ever to briefly be taken seriously by the British establishment, proof alongside Boris Johnson that a plummy accent and the occasional Latin phrase are all you need to appear an intellectual titan in British politics – wrote a vision of what life would be like in Britain in June 2025, nine years after the referendum.

    The whole thing is worth reading, to remind yourselves of what these charlatans promised us, but I particularly hated this bit. It combines a level of oversimplification that is almost beautiful with a complete failure to understand both one’s own bargaining position and the priorities of the other side. In hindsight, it’s almost funny:

    “The last thing most EU leaders wanted, once the shock had worn off, was a protracted argument with the United Kingdom which, on the day it left, became their single biggest market. Terms were agreed easily enough. Britain withdrew from the EU’s political structures and institutions, but kept its tariff-free arrangements in place.”

    Almost funny.

    Perhaps I’m being unfair; we do still have six months left for Hannan’s vision to come true. I’m not holding my breath. #

  • Filed under: film

    Wim Wenders’s Tokyo-Ga

    I watched Wim Wenders’s 1985 documentary Tokyo-Ga this week. It chronicles his trip to Japan in search of the Tokyo of film director Yasujirō Ozu, whom Wenders idolises. Will he be able to catch glimpses of Ozu’s city, or will it have been buried under the frantic rebuilding of postwar Japan? Along the way he meets Chishū Ryū, who starred in 14 of Ozu’s films; Yūharu Atsuta, Ozu’s cinematographer; fellow German director Werner Herzog; and countless others. Wenders’s open-minded and slow-paced journey is all the more remarkable for being filmed at a time of great western anxiety about Japan. Well worth a watch. #

  • Filed under: planning

    How to solve the £100m bat tunnel problem

    The UK has been attempting to build a high-speed railway line called HS2 for years. Its development has been dogged by all sorts of problems, but perhaps the most farcical was the revelation that it had spent £100m on a 1km long tunnel for bats, in an area that was home to around 300 bats – an insane £300k per bat.

    In this great post, Sam Dumitriu talks about why decisions like that get made, but also digs into some of the planning changes the government have made to hopefully make them less likely to happen in the future.

    The plans seem to be better both from a “getting stuff built” perspective and a “preserving nature” perspective, which seems like a rare win. But it’s not over the line yet; it needs legislation to pass, which means getting it past lobby groups that are invested in the status quo.

    “Wasteful spending on fish discos and bat tunnels should infuriate everyone whether their priority is world-class infrastructure or protecting endangered species. By fixing the Habs Regs, we can cut the cost of building new clean infrastructure and go beyond preserving the nature we have to actually enhancing and restoring it.”

    #

  • Filed under: technology

    Machinery hurtful to commonality

    A new generation of Luddites stand against the big streaming platforms and AI companies. What happens next?

  • Filed under: crime

    Sophie Smith on the Pelicot trial

    One of the most powerful things I’ve read in ages: Sophie Smith on Gisèle Pelicot and what her experience tells us about humanity, and men, and complicity.

    “What are we taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’ that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?”

    #

  • Filed under: culture

    Navigating the vibe shift

    Should we be optimistic in the face of a shift in culture that feels like it will be for the worse? Can we be? How?

  • Filed under: economics

    Dan Davies on farming and inheritance tax

    The streets of London were crawling with tractors recently, protesting the changes to inheritance tax on farms. (Previously farms were exempt from inheritance tax; now farms worth over £1m will be subject to it.)

    My initial response was to buy the line that this would only affect a tiny minority of farms, and that it was shutting a pretty egregious tax loophole exploited by the likes of James Dyson and Jeremy Clarkson.

    It has felt impossible to find a nuanced view because of the strength of feeling on both sides. But in this article Dan Davies thoughtfully explains the economics of it, and why my gut feeling was actually wrong:

    “In the thirty or so years since Agricultural Land Relief was brought into the tax code, the price per acre of farmland has gone up roughly fourfold, and according to credible numbers I’ve seen, there are plenty of farms which, considered as businesses, are earning a return on assets of less than 1% (£35,000 of annual profit on a farm valued at £3m is apparently pretty good going).

    “In that sort of situation, you have to value the tax shield separately – what the yeopersons of Olde Englande actually own might be a farm worth about £700,000, with a mortgage on it, and a £2.3m tax asset. So if the tax position changes, the value of the farm should be expected to plummet, and they go from being asset-rich—cash-poor to just poor.

    “And this matters a lot… The asset value of a family farm, although it’s for the most part not realised or consumable wealth, is potentially a big part of the contingency reserve of that family against uncertainty. If things get really bad, either in a business context or some other family emergency, you can borrow against the value of the land or, in extremis, sell off a few acres.

    “There’s a lot of uncertainty in farming! If the backstop of being able to sell bits of tax-advantaged assets isn’t there, then rather than being gradually eroded over four or five generations (which seemed like the natural outlook for the small farm sector), you’re likely to see lots of them wiped out suddenly in the next drought or foot & mouth disease outbreak.”

    #