Author Archives: danijel

Reasons

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I can imagine that people reading the last articles are trying to figure out the reasons why I wrote them. They are not very complicated. Biljana opened her gaming laptop to play Witcher 3 and the Windows basically kept it under lockdown with all the stupid updates, making it impossible to actually run what she wanted, until she told it to lay off with the updates for a week; then it ran fine. It got me thinking – Microsoft behaves as if the computer belongs to them first and user last, and the actually important stuff is all about installing updates and running things the OS thinks should be ran, and you get the leftovers, if you’re lucky and it doesn’t just do the reboot-update thing where the system is completely useless for hours. Also, it doesn’t actually bother to ask, because it knows better. I was thinking about it and concluded it’s not an accident, it’s a long-standing company policy. It’s the way they understand the computers, the users and the world. What they want and think matters; what you want and think is irrelevant, because they know better.

About the watches; I already mentioned I have issues with allergies. My nose is completely blocked and this impairs my breathing and elevates my stress level in addition to all the other things that are making my life miserable, such as filtering the astral equivalent of global sewage until it’s Evian. Well, it’s not just my breathing; my wrists are slightly swollen too, and my watch has a metal bracelet that’s adjusted to my normal wrist size, and the extra links for it are somewhere in Zagreb in a garage, and one would have to dig it out, mail it to me and then I’d expand the bracelet so that it doesn’t dig into my flesh, and that would solve the problem, but until then I can’t wear it. As you can see, it’s a whole to-do list. The obvious solution was to just wear another watch, with the leather strap, but my second watch is a battery powered quartz, and the battery just happened to die a month ago. Yes, I have a third watch, a twenty year old Casio, and it’s also quartz and the battery also died. That’s what got me thinking about watches, especially considering the fact that my main watch, the mechanical one, needs servicing since I’ve been wearing it non-stop for 8 years or so, and I’ll do that when I go to Zagreb in November to put the winter tyres on the car. So, considering I would have to be without a watch until then, I decided I had to do something and just bought a quartz movement Seiko with a leather strap, and the watch happened to be so nice, Biljana commented that she can’t actually tell how expensive it was – it doesn’t look worse than something like a JLC Master series in stainless steel, for instance.

This got me thinking about what are we actually paying for in watches, especially since I know that JLC Geophysic, released in the geophysics year along with the Sputnik 1, was intentionally designed to tick at true seconds, making it look like a quartz watch, only there weren’t quartz watches in the 1950s so people thought it was fancy. So, the thing that now makes people think a watch is “cheap”, the ticking at true seconds, is something JLC invented an expensive complication for in the 1950s. And yes, the Seiko I bought looks almost the same; only more accurate, and all for 230 EUR. The honest answer is that we are paying mostly for illusions and bullshit, and only somewhat for better materials and tolerances. We’re definitely not paying more for accuracy, or resistance to shocks or magnetic fields. So, that got me thinking and I wrote the article about it.

Also, I was thinking how a watch is just physical matter until I bind spiritual energetics to it, which is the point where it actually becomes something special and precious, and overpaying for matter that pretends to be something special just so that I would have to turn it into something actually special is pointless. And while we’re at that, since I was too exhausted and brain-dead from the spending to do anything complicated and elaborate, I merely punched a hole from the watch to the “God realm”, in order for it to create a feeling of presence when I wear it. I expected nothing from it, but a very old and dear friend paid me a wordless visit through that thing. It helped, my Lord. Thank you. I hope to see you soon for coffee.

The Windows update machine

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I heard an anecdote from the 1980s, when Microsoft programmers who developed software for the Macintosh platform joked that on a Mac, keyboard interrupt has higher priority than the hard drive interrupt, which they considered supremely silly, because of course hard drive is a more important part of the computer. What they didn’t realise is that when keyboard isn’t responsive, the user thinks the machine is dead and panics, so it’s extremely important to keep the user interface responsive even when the machine is stressed. If hard drive takes somewhat longer to do its thing, however, nobody neither notices nor cares.

It’s a matter of corporate culture, obviously, and it persisted to this day. When Mac OS has an update pending, it notifies me and goes away. When I’m ready to let it update the machine, I let it know and then it does its thing. Other than that, it gets out of my way and lets me do the important things. On a Windows machine, however, the first thing it does is start downloading and installing updates, which makes the machine hot, loud and slow. A Windows machine thinks updates are the most important thing in the world, because it’s a self-serving mess. To a Windows machine, the user is an unimportant addition, someone who was allowed to use it, but otherwise doesn’t matter. The machine serves itself, the OS serves itself, and its updates, security and similar buzzwords nobody really cares about are the most important things. The user comes last, after the OS is happy because it finished doing the “important” things with 100% of resources. Only then can the user get the leftovers.

This, among other things, is the reason why I’m writing this on a Mac.

Hype and tradition

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Having nothing more useful to do at the moment, I did some research regarding the watch industry, since it’s the epitome of selling hype and illusions for inordinately overblown amounts of money.

They justify the prices by showing us the picture of an aging watchmaker patiently assembling the movement, and the idea combines low volume, skilled manual labor, and tradition.

So, let’s start with tradition. Which are the oldest watch companies currently in operation?

Blancpain, founded in 1735, is the oldest; however, it shows the typical pattern of being a dead brand revived with venture capital after the so called “quartz crisis” in the 1970s-1980s; currently owned by the Richemont group. The pattern consists of a venture capital finding and buying the dormant assets, and, sometimes, finding a grandson of the last owner and getting him to serve as a figurehead. In other cases, if the company was in a dire situation but alive, it is bought by either the Swatch group, or LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate, or the Richemont group.

Let’s see the others. Vacheron Constantin, founded in 1755, continuously operating since, owned by the Richemont group.

A. Lange & Söhne, founded in 1845, dead, resurrected in 1990 by venture capital, owned by the Richemont group.

Zenith, founded in 1865, survived the Quartz crisis, author of the famous El Primero movement that Rolex outsourced from them to power the famous Daytona. They are the traditional in-town competitor of Jaeger-LeCoultre. Purchased in 1999 by LVMH.

Jaeger-LeCoultre, founded in 1833, famous for making not just watches, but also the movements for other famous watchmakers, owned by the Richemont group since 2000.

IWC Schaffhausen, originally founded in 1868, went under in the quartz crisis, owned by the Richemont group since 2000.

To make it shorter: Blancpain, Breguet, Certina, ETA, Glashütte Original, Hamilton, Harry Winston, Longines, Mido, Omega, Rado, and Tissot, all owned by the Swatch group, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and made a fortune on mass-produced fashion watches powered by quartz movements; they invested the money by buying up the bankrupt watchmaking companies.

A. Lange & Söhne, Cartier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, MontBlanc, Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis, Vacheron Constantin, Van Cleef & Arpels belong to the Richemont group.

TAG Heuer, Hublot, Bulgari, Zenith, and Louis Vuitton are owned by LVMH.

One would be justified in asking if there are any actual watchmakers with continuous tradition that aren’t operated by the fashion brands and venture capital? They exist.

Patek Philippe, established in 1839, remains the last family-owned independent watch manufacturer in Geneva.

Rolex, founded in 1905 as a marketing brand that outsourced the actual watchmaking to others, invented some of the crucial mainstays of the watch industry, such as weather sealing and self-winding, not to forget the concept of wearing the watch on the wrist, on a stainless steel bracelet. They started as a marketing company and remained masters of hype, and regardless of that, they are actually one of the big innovators in the history of watchmaking, and the biggest, most recognizable name today.

Seiko, founded in 1881. Self owned, and the only vertically-integrated watchmaker in the world, alongside Rolex. They originally made mechanical watches, but produced the first commercial quartz watch in 1969.

Citizen, founded in 1918.

Casio, founded in 1946. as a calculator company, started making quartz watches since 1974.

So, wait a minute. If you want to wear a watch that has deep tradition of craftsmanship and innovation, your options are Seiko, Patek-Philippe and Rolex? Yup. Those three actually aren’t owned by hypemasters and have a serious tradition. One could argue that both Rolex and Patek are prime hypemasters themselves, and they wouldn’t be wrong.

But what about craftsmanship, assembling watches by hand, and so on? If you want that, your best choices would be A. Lange & Söhne, Patek-Philippe, and Grand Seiko. However, have in mind that most components today are produced by CNC grinders and similar technologies, and the manual part is usually only about the assembly. If someone makes millions of watches, of course it’s all mass produced, by definition.

So yes, the argument against the quartz movements, that they are mass-produced, is supremely silly, considering how Rolex, ETA, Sellita, Miyota and Seiko movements are all mass-produced, and almost nothing else is used anywhere. That’s fine, because a mechanical watch movement is a solved engineering problem, that doesn’t need to be solved again. As for quality, quartz movements are solid state, no moving parts other than what moves the indicators. They should outlive everything, and they usually don’t require servicing. They are also orders of magnitude more accurate. So, why are we being told that quartz is low-quality trash and mechanical is precious? Because of marketing. Billions of dollars depend on us believing that story, or nobody would buy a $10000 Rolex over a $200 Seiko. They convinced us that accuracy doesn’t matter, that accuracy is somehow a worthless feature since every quartz movement excels at it, and “we all know” quartz is crap. Well, pardon me, but in the 1970s and early 1980s I was taught to believe that accuracy is the central feature of a watch, and the expensive watches were expensive primarily because they were more accurate. That’s why the entire industry went nuts when quartz movements were more accurate. They thought it’s all over for them because there was no reason for the existence of mechanical watches any more. Even Rolex went nuts and started making quartz watches, and thought their mechanical watches were now trash. Everything else is just marketing hype that was slowly built since.

They spent 50 years and billions of dollars convincing us that the superior technology, that literally erased Swiss watchmaking, was cheap trash. If for some reason quartz watches weren’t that easy to mass-produce, the industry might have gone the other way and quartz would now be known as super expensive space tech, while mechanical watches were for the plebs.

To add insult to injury, most “traditional” brands that make mechanical watches today have almost no claim to a horological tradition if compared to someone like Seiko, who are generally assumed to be a newcomer to the industry, while in fact they are a seriously old brand with incredible legacy in watchmaking. Honestly, if you want a watch with a claim to tradition, craftsmanship and innovation, buy a Seiko. It’s not going to be a status symbol in a sense that it’s very expensive and few can afford it, but status symbols are a tricky thing anyway. People think Rolex is a status symbol, but sometimes it’s merely part of the uniform, something people think they need to have in order to be “taken seriously”, like a suit and a tie. Also, I’ve seen that the reaction to people who have a Rolex is usually negative – yes, a Rolex is recognized, but it’s usually recognized as something wannabes, snobs and people without taste wear to show how much money they have. On the other hand, I never saw a negative reaction to a Seiko, or, for that matter, IWC or Zenith. If they are perceived, and they seldom are, they are perceived as “a nice watch”. If a Rolex is perceived, it marks you as an asshole with a Rolex. So yes, it’s a status symbol alright, but not of the kind I find worth acquiring.

Some thoughts

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We hiked up our local hill yesterday after the summer heat had cleared, and we got some nice sunset colours.

Most pictures ended up being the typical sunset shots, because that stuff seems to be irresistible, but I got some that are different; sunset merely illuminating the things and giving them a 3d glow. I ended up liking those the most.

Trump, being himself, let it slip that the West has for the most part no more than 4 weeks of oil reserves, which is unsurprising since they’ve been using them up foolishly in order to prevent the oil prices from going up too much, which would reflect poorly on the popularity of the politicians and their foolish wars. Since the current “agreement” between Iran and the USA is of such flimsy nature that the sides can’t even agree enough to publish the same version of what’s supposedly being agreed upon, there’s not much chance of any peace there taking root, at least until Israel gets its way, nukes Iran and gets wiped off the map in return.

I noticed one thing changing in my attitude towards the Apple ecosystem, and Apple Silicon in particular. I no longer see them as an experiment, a thing I’m testing to see if it’s long term viable, while maintaining a backup Intel based system that could take over in case it all fizzles out. It became my primary system, while everything else is essentially obsolete. I know exactly how that came to be. When I was writing the last book, and especially when I was proofreading it, I pretty much exhausted myself to the point of almost passing out, and I noticed that I removed that margin that I always maintain – if the computer breaks, dies, crashes or fubars the data, I am usually always ready to do something. This time, I was so tired that I relied on the computers – the 15″ M4 Air, and the Studio M2 Max – to do everything perfectly because I was simply too tired to do anything about it. And they did – they were both incredibly fast, reliable and good, and nothing went wrong in any way. One would think that after all the decades of IT progress that would be expected and unsurprising, but it isn’t. My Windows desktop, the Ryzen machine, is unreliable to the point of randomly bluescreening whenever I really push it. It probably means that the CPU is damaged and can’t handle the thermal load, or something; but since a machine bluescreening under load means loss of data, I simply stopped using it for anything other than games. I had to push the machines when I was finishing the book – not care how many things I left open, not care how big images I imported into Photoshop for the covers, not care how many layers I had; I just needed to get the job done, and I did the covers after proofreading for multiple days in a row, and had the machine crashed during that, I’d probably throw it out the window and make it a lawn ornament. But it didn’t crash. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t glitch, didn’t do any of the stupid shit I came to expect from both Windows and Linux, and I could rely on both the OS and the hardware to pull me through when I was half-conscious from work. As a result, something changed in my attitude; I now treat Apple Silicon machines as serious stuff I rely on, and I treat everything else as toys. I bought another laptop, the 13″ M5 Air, the 16/512GB model. It’s not that the 15″ did anything wrong; to the contrary, it’s the best laptop I ever had. I wrote almost the entire book on it, and it did everything flawlessly. It’s just that I like having 13″ laptops for some things, and all my other 13″ machines are either old and expected to fail sooner rather than later, or they are much, much worse than Apple Silicon in almost every way. For some things, such as making the covers or editing photos, I use the Studio with a 43″ screen. For some things I use the 15″ laptop, and for some things I use the small one. I think it’s similar to how guitar players have multiple guitars they use for playing different things.

Over the years, I experimented with different kinds of laptops, and I discovered that a very powerful desktop replacement machine is the least useful for me, because I rarely need that kind of power on a laptop. I need it where I need the big screen for editing pictures, and that’s a desktop. I need a laptop to have an excellent keyboard, touchpad, screen and battery, and to be fast enough for all the things I run on a laptop. This ends up being everything other than photo editing, so basically I have photo editing machines and “everything else” machines. This explains why I prefer the Macbook Air to the Pro – the pro models have active cooling and more power, but they are thicker, heavier and more expensive for the virtue of being great for the things I don’t actually use the laptop for. As a result, I managed to “cook” the 15″ Air only twice, and both cases took place in a hotel when I was importing a batch of 350 or so 61MP raw files into Lightroom. To its credit, it actually managed to hold its own and be as fast as my Studio for the first 100 or so pictures, but then it throttled itself to less than half its nominal speed and it was pegged at 100°C. Also to its credit, it managed to actually import everything just fine, and I proceeded to edit everything on the hot laptop and functionally speaking, I got the job done. Would I like doing it regularly, no. But also, would I like buying a 5000 EUR machine that is better at something I do twice a year, while also being so much bulkier and less practical for everything else I actually use it for? Hard pass.

On the other hand, the Studio is a complete opposite. The Air has incredible speed and power, until it hits the thermal limit. The Studio M2 Max is actually somewhat weaker in that range. However, it never hits the thermal limit. It can keep going at 100% load, for hours, days, weeks or years, and it will never give a single fuck. The machine is under-specced for my new 61MP cameras because I bought it for processing 24MP files, so things that used to run instantaneously now take time. The thing is, I don’t necessarily care. I have it import the files while I take a shower, it gets stuff done, and I never have to think about overheating it, stressing it by having it work for too long on 100%, or anything like that. It’s like a rock crushing machine that just crushes rocks for years and doesn’t give a fuck. Also, unlike other powerful machines, it is always completely silent. And unlike my equally powerful Ryzen machine, it never bluescreens.

No wonder Apple ate everybody’s lunch. It’s the thing you need when you’re done with everybody else’s shit and you just need to rely on things to do their job because it’s important, and you don’t have the patience for drivers acting up or the OS update locking up the machine just when you need it, or something crashing and taking your files with it. When you need a rock crusher that works 24/7, and you really depend on it doing the job, maybe it’s not the time for solutions that require you to reserve a part of your mental capacity for fixing the mess after the machine inevitably shits itself.

So yeah.

Do I actually need a zillion computers? Does Mike Oldfield actually need a zillion guitars? Yes, in fact. It’s weird how that works, but this is no place for minimalism.

Dystopian prophecy

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There are a few movies that started as light comedy, but they unfortunately turned out to be prophetic.

I read a tweet by Trump today and I remembered “Idiocracy”. Unfortunately, we’re living that.

If there was a movie playing in the theatres called “Ass”, with nothing but ass on the screen, people would come to watch it. Only, the movie screen would need to be made vertical, to resemble a phone, because they got so used to looking at phones their brains probably no longer recognize the concept of horizontal.

Also, “The Demolition Man” was supposed to be light comedy and turned out to be a dystopian prophecy about a totalitarian dictatorship of the clean, gay, polite and politically correct, and if you want to be normal you’d need to live in the sewers and eat rat-burgers because the gay totalitarians have taken over the civilization and you need to have electric self-driving cars that drown you in foam for safety in case of a crash.

I commented something along those lines to Biljana and she said “don’t forget Wall-E”, and I thought – sure. We’ll drown in trash while AI grows us to be docile, overweight, completely ignorant and incompetent consumers, while the shopping chain “Buy n Large” ends up being the government, for all intents and purposes.

There were other dystopian sci-fi movies of that kind before: The Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green and so on, but somehow, they don’t strike as hard because they are trying to be a serious warning. When light comedy ends up hitting as hard as “1984”, it’s somehow more real.