Scope Creep, 2024-11-22.

Haha, it's Scope Creep Friday! Let's get at it.

SCOPE CREEP.

• It's odd that language, which underpins and enables so much of our lives, is nevertheless so vague, imprecise, insufficient. Take the word heap: If I gathered a million grains of sand and put them in a pile, they could certainly be described as one. Add or subtract a grain — it would still be a heap. We might observe this and infer that if you add or remove a grain from a heap, the result will still be a heap; seems reasonable enough. But beware: If you keep removing grains then at some point you'll end up with a single-grained heap, which suddenly feels wrong.
  
  This is the sorites paradox; the word sorites derives for the Greek word for heap. But heaps are just one example of the sorites paradox. We can fall into the sorites paradox when we consider whether it's okay to drive just slightly faster than the speed limit, or if it's reasonable to show up a few minutes late to work, or if we might slip a fifth person (a child, say, or at least a very quiet adult) into a dinner reservation that was made for four. The sorites paradox exploits the reality that, as this philosophical comic about hot dogs and sandwiches points out, language "doesn't pick out truth propositions about the world at all. Speech acts [are] fundamentally no different than other actions, and [are] merely used in social situations to bring about certain effects." If you promise me a heap of sand and then give me one grain, I would be right to be upset; give me a pile of ten grains and you can expect me to at least furrow my brow.
  
  I will admit that this — the fact that language is not a system of truth and precision — is difficult for me to accept. But it does simplify things a bit: No longer do I need to find words and sentences that correspond with any particular meaning. I simply need to say and write things that make the reader feel, or think, or do something.
• Brave is a web browser that "puts you first." They do this by integrating an ad blocker (which of course hurts any ad-supported publishers) and also by letting users add ads back in, an action for which they are rewarded with... cryptocurrency, which users can then ostensibly give to the publications they want to support.
  
  I suppose that as a publisher who is already supported directly by subscribers, I should feel indifferent about Brave; it's also worth noting that their cryptocurrency is based on Ethereum, which to its credit (not that anyone cares) is dramatically more climate-friendly since switching to proof-of-stake. That said, it strikes me that Brave is perhaps putting users first in the short term, while in the long term they would ultimately undermine the basic economics that make the web possible.
  
  Somewhat related: The Department of Justice requested that Alphabet be forced to sell Chrome and (with some caveats) Android, and to stop paying Apple and others to make Google the default search engine, and allow rival search engines to see and display Google's search results on their own interfaces. If any of this happens, it would be pretty dramatic; in (paywalled) Stratechery, Ben Thomson argues that the Chrome sale would be "unfair" and potentially also counterproductive:

...the only acquirers who would be able to come close to harvesting the value of Chrome would be other Data Factories, which is to say primarily Meta...and even then the fact that Meta doesn’t have a 3rd-party advertising network means it would be less valuable to them relative to Google. It’s a moot point, though, because it seems rather unlikely that Meta would be allowed to bid! That would mostly leave new entrants to the data factory space, like maybe an OpenAI... Of course Chrome could, in theory, be a standalone product, a la Firefox. There’s just one problem: Firefox makes money from Google, via traffic acquisition costs for searches conducted through the URL bar! Is a standalone Chrome expected to do the same? Aren’t Google’s traffic acquisition costs the entire issue in this case?

• Here's a survey on the state of manufacturing in 2024, which you can fill out!
• (Alphabet's drone subsidiary) Wing, in partnership with a startup called Apian, are using drones to transport medical samples between hospitals in London.
• A good blog post on Patagonia's website about how they field test new gear.
• Plants, like animals, use electricity to transmit information throughout their bodies. We can see this by a) pulling a bioluminescence gene out of jellyfish, b) inserting that gene into Arabidopsis so that it glows green in the presence of calcium ions (a sign of electrical activity), then c) damaging a Arabidopsis leaf and watching a wave of green light spread across the plant.
• If you might need to move a bunch of babies at the same time — say you work at a day care center, and want to be prepared to evacuate in case of emergency — then you might consider a baby evacuation apron, which turns the wearer into a makeshift marsupial capable of carrying three twenty-pound tots at a time.