Daniel Barca

Blog

  • Digital media ownership

    As a tech enthusiast in Spain, I was amongst the first to learn about the Netflix streaming explosion in the US during late 2000’s. I waited patiently until the service came here, and was one of the first subscribers in the country in 2015.

    Since then, we never stopped consuming streaming services. We now have Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and iterate through other services whenever we want to consume some specific show or movie.

    But there’s a catch with all these services. They get to decide what you can see and when. What if I want to see «Tais-toi!» (in English «Shut up!»), an hilarious french movie starring Jean Reno and Gerard Depardieu? I’m just out of luck.

    Since I’m a believer in owning media, I started moving away from subscription streaming platforms and buying some of the movies I watch on platforms like Apple iTunes, YouTube movies, or Amazon Prime.

    But there’s a limitation will all these services. What happens if some of these platforms decides to shut-down, or if they just decide some movie I bought shouldn’t be on their platform anymore? In these kind of platforms you’re not *buying* digital media, you’re just long-term renting it.

    So what can we do about it? Physical ownership. I had lots of VHS tapes during my childhood, and DVDs after that. The good part of physical media is that no one can limit how you consume it. You just have it: if you want to see it, you insert the disc in a player and it’s there. And there’s hardly any movie you can’t find at least on DVD, so it’s the perfect format for someone who cares about ownership.

    Also, physical media is quite easy to digitalize and (legally, since I own and keep the original movies) store in a Plex server to create some sort of personal streaming service. Easy to access and under my control.

    Next problem? Trying to digitize my parent’s huge DVD library into a Plex server I realized they basically look like shit now. DVDs aged quickly in terms of quality.

    I’m amazed that new DVDs are still produced and sold nowadays, in what I consider a huge scam. It’s not some slight difference that only tech nerds will notice: literally anyone will see the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray movie.

    And after Blu-ray we got 4K Blu-ray. How long will it be until we have 8K Blu-ray, or something similar? I recently started collecting Blu-ray and 4k Blu-ray discs. Will they become obsolete whenever a new format arises?

    My honest opinion is: NO. For the first time in a while, it seems like the formats getting obsolete story is over. Someone who enjoys collecting Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray discs is not going to feel obsolete whenever something new comes for a simple reason: it’s not getting much better after 4K.

    I see little motivation to upgrade to a 4K movie if you already own the standard Blu-ray version. The difference is not going to be big. You’re certainly not going to enjoy it much more than you already did on Blu-ray. The difference is going to be even smaller with any future format that comes. The only exception, if you’re a big enthusiast, is the 4K treatment some old movies are getting, which are generated from the original film tapes and look absolutely amazing. But it’s not like Blu-ray versions looked bad, as DVDs do, if you just want to see a movie you’re not missing anything.

    Sure, they will probably invent something new, like 3D movies, in an attempt to keep the wheel spinning. But there’s no 8K or 16K or 32K that will make Shawshank Redemption look better than it does on 4K (unless, maybe if you have a 300+ inch screen? In which case you’ll be happy to upgrade I guess), and nothing they invent will make it better than watching it as the creator intended: in a 2D screen a few meters from your face. If you own the 4K version of a classic movie you already own the best possible version of it.

    I think, for the first time, we can peacefully collect our favorite movies without fear of future take-backsies. Let’s hope 4K Blu-ray keeps succeeding and players become as ubiquitous and cheap as DVD players are today.

  • Barcelona’s sunset

    Barcelona's sunset seen from a boat. You can see Wella hotel on the left side of the image, the cableway tower on the right side, and Tibidabo's skyline on the background.

  • Predicting the future collectively

    In the recent craze about the discovery of a new superconductor, there’s a bunch of tweets that stood out around that story (yeah, I refuse to call them x’s for now). Those were tweets about some site called Manifold Markets.

    At first I thought it was some kind of crypto bullshit so didn’t pay much attention to it. I’m actually interested in crypto, but I’m really wary of anything that smells like it, because of all the shady stuff that orbits around it.

    Turns out Manifold Markets has nothing to do with that. This site is more like some sort of game. You get fake money (called Mana), and are supposed to bet it by answering all kinds of questions suggested by other users.

    There is no way to redeem or get any goods for that money, so ultimately it’s not about the money at all. The idea is that by playing the game users will try to optimize their answers to make as much mana as possible. You get to test your prediction skills against reality itself.

    If you get the correct answer to a question, for example, Will the LK-99 room temp, ambient pressure superconductivity pre-print replicate before 2025? then you will get more mana in exchange. If you got it wrong, you lose it all. More interestingly: if you bet against what most people answered, you’ll get even more mana.

    Every question in the app behaves like a market, and in the end the answers are supposed to converge to the actual chances of that question answer being «yes» or «no». By betting more mana you increase your risk, and by doing so the market updates to reflect your decision. By observing how the markets evolve you can either increase your stakes or get out of it and search another question in which to bet.

    I’ve become absolutely addicted to the site. It’s extremely rewarding to get right the answer of a question that many people got wrong, and also humbling to realize that my vision in many questions was not as precise as I thought. Observing the convergence of answers and how they update when new information appears is a great way to get informed and have a glimpse into potential futures.

  • Are we in a Black Swan decade?

    According some random definition found on Google, a Black Swan event is: an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.

    Classic examples of Black Swan events are inventions or discoveries like computers and the Internet, Steam machines, electricity or fire. Each of these changed the course of history forever, and no one could have ever predicted them.

    Black Swan events are a beautiful paradox: you can’t reasonably expect them, but they need to be accounted for if one wants to make precise predictions about the future. You can’t really know what will be the one thing that changes everything, but you’ll be a fool to think that nothing will change everything at some point.

    I think this is an interesting thought because Black Swan events are often overlooked by most people. Whenever we try to predict how things will be in the future, people have a tendency to focus in the current state of things and ignore any kind of technological development that could potentially happen in the future. To some people, any kind of tech improvement is a Black Swan event: that’s the reason why people fail to see the innovation in developments like the smartphone (when they came out) or electric vehicles.

    It’s really hard to envision a world where everybody drives an electric vehicle if you do so in the current context. There’s no way to charge an electric vehicle nowadays in 5 minutes, just like we do with petrol cars, and we don’t have the necessary infrastructure to feed our whole current vehicle pool only from our current electric grid, let alone energy sources. But it’s foolish to think that this is how we’re supposed to do such a transition.

    To envision the future we need to acknowledge how society, habits, and technology are going to reshape in the following years. We’re going to change how we get energy, distribute it and spend it. Energy generation and storage, at the current rate (we don’t even need a Black Swan event here) is going to get progressively cheaper in the following years. Electric vehicles, an obscene luxury only with lots of inconvenients a few years ago, are nowadays already commonly seen in the streets, and are only subjectively more expensive than a combustion model with similar characteristics. This will only get better in the following years.

    A Black Swan event, like the potential discovery of a room temperature superconductor material, could accelerate all of it exponentially. If the current studies on superconductor materials are fruitful, we could see a similar or bigger reshape of our reality than the one caused by the Internet or television. We could see electric vehicles that charge almost instantly or electric infrastructure that generates no heat or resistance at all. For now this is just speculation, of course, but we could

    Another, more realistic, example of a Black Swan event is the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). They’ve actually been around for a few years already. I had the chance to experiment with the precursor of ChatGPT a few years ago, and now use LLMs everyday for all sorts of daily tasks.

    Before, if you wanted to communicate with a computer, first you needed certain knowledge about computer science. You needed to know the extremely specific way of telling the computer what you wanted. Otherwise, you needed someone who could develop an interface that was easier to understand, and then you still needed to learn how to use such an interface.

    Now, with Natural Language Processing, you can just tell what you need and expect your computer to just understand it and act accordingly. The ability of not only understanding commands, but also context, is going to (and already is) change dramatically the way we interact with computers during the next decade.

    We’re going to witness a race to integrate this technology into all kinds of applications. It really is so good, that any existing application could see potential benefits in implementing it. Even if it means the market gets saturated for some time, as we’re also seeing lately.

    It’s for sure an exciting time to be alive. The current context is the prefect breeding ground for all sorts of developments that could reshape our life in the following years.

  • My new hobby: taking care of plants

    I’ve always been a «fake plastic plant» kind of guy. Never cared too much about what plants needed to be alive, and watering them was just not in my schedule.

    Since I hate anything that is fake, the result is that I didn’t have plants at all, neither real nor plastic. Apart from an almost dead sanseviera and a couple lucky bamboos.

    Recently I took some determination to actually take care of plants, and found myself actually enjoying it. I was able to resurrect some of my absolutely neglected plants and am now actually getting new ones. Turns out the Sanseviera is an astoundingly resilient plant: it has the ability to overcome serious droughts. So after watering it down a bit and removing the ugly leafs, it now looks gorgeous.

    Since I don’t have the slightest clue about plants, and everything in my life needs to have some amount of technology, I looked towards my phone for help. I found an app that lets you snap an image of any plant, and detect its species. Then, I get instructions on how to take care of it, and reminders of when the plant needs to be watered or fertilized. It’s kind of a swiss knife that detects plant’s illnesses, problems, lack of light, etc. I don’t want to mention the specific app because I know there’s many alternatives out there, but it will take you less than 2 minutes to find it on the iOS App Store.

    It’s impressive how much life a bunch of plants can inject in your house. It’s no wonder all interior design catalogs incorporate them: they can turn a cold impersonal space into a cozy and familiar «home». It makes life better in a way that probably goes into our subconscious, into some deep primitive instinct that connects us with nature. If that makes any sense, and I’m not the kind of person who’s into new-age crap.

    It’s also helped me on a personal level: all the hobbies I’ve ever had always had some connection with technology. Taking care of plants only takes a few minutes a day (at most) and is an activity that lets me disconnect from technology and the negativity that can come out of it.

  • The comment section passionate writer

    Writing is hard. You need to figure out what you want to write about, find time to actually do it, find out how to structure your ideas in an interesting manner and finally, actually get to it.

    Intending to do that with any kind of regularity (let alone to do it daily) is hard. Really really hard.

    Regularity has always been my weakest point. I’ve always thought highly of myself, and have some notion of what I could achieve if I got to find some kind of regularity in my life. If I was able to spend some amount of time, every day, focused on achieving a specific goal, I’m pretty sure I would eventually achieve it.

    But that’s where things get hard. You can start writing in your blog for one day, two days, a week, two weeks. When will engaging in such an activity become too unmotivating? When will booting up the game console become much easier than writing?

    My bursts of determination inevitably end up converging in a specific kind of activity. I’d call it something like «the comment section passionate achiever». It’s what happens after 3 hours of not doing what you should be doing on the Internet. You enter a post about a topic you’re interested in, you enter the comment section, and find out someone (usually an anonymous commenter just like you) had the courage to be wrong on the Internet.

    What follows is a no less than 35 or 40 minutes session of passionate writing. I find myself effortlessly articulating my opinion about the topic. Not only that, I find myself looking for the perfect structure to make sure that my comment leads to any reader’s conclusion that this guy is incredibly wrong.

    After that, I realize I have done it: I fooled myself into being productive. I just did what I was supposed to do regularly and didn’t even blink an eye. Of course, I did all of that in the one place where it cannot possibly lead to anything that makes it worth it. My comment will get lost in the bast abyss that is the Internet, and the other guy will, in the best case scenario, diagonally read my opinion without and of course he won’t change his opinion in the slightest.

  • The best user experience for iPad is to uninstall apps and stay on the web

    iPad is one of my life’s constant love/hate relationships. Its OS gets better every year and I keep improving the profit I take from it, but Apple is reaaaally slow to fix (sometimes very obvious) stuff.

    This one is probably the most stupid issue I found with iPadOS, so stupid, that it actually encourages me to uninstall apps as much as possible. Whenever you visit a site on Safari, the browser checks if there’s an existing app installed for that site, and if so it recommends you to open the app directly, instead of staying in the website.

    In theory I guess that should be a «feature». If you took your time to install a native application, it makes sense that the OS prefers you to use it. But in practice it encourages me to uninstall any application that could collide with my daily browsing.

    The thing is, for many applications (like WordPress or Twitter X), the web is the best possible user experience you can get from them. And for some reason Apple in its immense wisdom determined there should be no possible way of disabling the popup that suggests us to open an app. The only way of hiding it is *scrolling* down the site, which doesn’t always work, and on top of that causes the browser top UI to hide.

    The result is an incredibly bad user experience and the only real solution is to uninstall the app, stopping Safari from suggesting such an alternative.

    So it’s one of those rare cases where to get the best possible experience you need to do exactly the opposite of what the OS manufacturer would like you to do.

  • Why I switched back to WordPress

    A few years ago I decided to host my blog in a static GitHub pages generated through Jekyll.

    I had a bunch of really good reasons to do that. I sincerely believe that we often abuse dynamic sites these days, and that a personal blog is a use-case that can be perfectly addressed with a static site.

    Why spend a huge amount of resources every time you load a site, if you can go through all of that once, and just serve the same result every time someone asks for it? I think platforms like WordPress are missing an opportunity to save lots of resources by pre-generating all the content that is not supposed to change in a site.

    The only part of a website that could require some dynamic load in a blog is the comments section, which due to user’s interactions, would be potentially impractical to pre-generate every time someone adds a comment. And even in this case I have some ideas about it: the backend could save a copy of the generated comments section every time someone contributes, and keep it until there’s a new one.

    There’s lots to be explored in this area and we don’t even need to give up many of the features that we enjoy on dynamic sites, but seems like there is no platform like that nowadays.

    The process to write a post using Jekyll was cumbersome: it required to remember too many steps, I had to think about Markdown, git repositories, compiling Jekyll… It’s by no means a complicated process: for someone like me with a career in computer science, it’s really easy to understand. But it’s cumbersome.

    Having to go through this whole process meant that I rarely wrote posts. And what’s the point of having a super-efficient blog engine if I don’t write posts at all?

    WordPress, on the other hand, has a beautiful editor, with automatic draft saving, an actual UI to set up tags, attributes, images… God, even something as basic as the post date setting up automatically to the date when I publish my posts (this is something that I need to manually setup on Jekyll).

    Another feature that I didn’t realize I was going to miss so much are statistics. For my Jekyll page I basically gave up to have any kind of stats. I had analytics through Cloudflare’s platform, but these were basically useless. Most hits came from search engines or web crawlers. I tried to use Google Analytics as well, with similar results; GAnalytics seems to be great but also too complex for a simple blog. WordPress analytics turn out to be an awesome noise filter and the ones that better represent actual people entering my site.

    I figured I would be able to write blog posts «only for myself», and not care at all about who reads it. In practice the lack of feedback makes it extremelly unmotivating and even worse. Just knowing that someone got to open it and saw that I wrote something (let alone read it) is so much better.

    The truth is that having a platform designed to write and manage posts is a frequently overlooked key benefit of a specialized tool like WordPress. Being able to code-less configure every aspect of my site, or change its appearance on the fly; as well as understanding the level of reader engagement and recognizing what you’re doing right or wrong.

    Sometimes you need to lose something to appreciate what it’s worth. I still firmly believe in the benefits of statically hosted sites, but in the future I will be mindful of all the other needs I must meet.

  • Aliens?

    Yesterday, several military personnel and a former intelligence agent were interrogated by politicians in the US. The interrogators were trying to figure out if the US was secretly in possession of information about extraterrestrials, UFOs.

    During the questioning and under oath, these individuals clearly stated that the US is in possession of not only information, but also crashed UFO material and non-human bodies. They also described an aerial incident in which they had contact with a pill-shaped UFO that had

    What’s special about this occasion is that never before such claims have been made under oath. If this were confirmed to be true, we’d be in front of the biggest event in the history of humanity. The existence of not only life, but another intelligent civilization would have massive consequences in our society.

    Sadly, my personal bet is on the pessimistic side of the story. Most people are really excited about this news and they are too eager to trust anything that confirms their personal point of view. Sadly, «wanting to believe» is not enough to make something true. I think that for something like this to really be confirmed, we’d have to go through a battle against odds.

    These individuals might be straight out lying: money is a good reason to position yourself as the *one* individual that knows «the truth». Even under oath. A couple books, TV interviews and Podcasts and you have your retirement secured. Their arguments are built over a conspiracy as base, so no matter what you do, it can’t entirely be disproved. Any effort to disprove a conspiracy could be explained by the fact that you’re part of such conspiracy.

    Even if they’re not lying, there’s a good chance they «want to believe» too hard, or that they’re not smart enough to know what they saw. Maybe the UFO was just some secret military prototype that they shouldn’t have seen, and the bodies could be just anything. A strong reaction from superiors after knowing could have fueled the fantasy.

    The pill-shaped UFO could be an instrument artifact paired with an optical illusion. Any artifact during a mission, however unlikely, pales under the unlikeliness of seeing an alien spaceship.

    Truth is, the US is not the only capable military force in the world, so even if they made a huge effort to cover the presence of extraterrestrial individuals, it’s also hard that such encounters wouldn’t be experienced by another nation with less inclination for secrecy. ¿Maybe all nations are in the conspiracy? The bigger a conspiracy is, the harder it is to believe.

    It’s also hard to believe that with the technologic boom we’ve gone through during the last few decades, there’s no good material to hold onto. We all have a 4k resolution camera in our pockets, and the skies are explored better than ever. As years pass it becomes harder for anything to become unnoticed, but there’s still nothing solid regarding extraterrestrial life.

    There’s a bunch of possible explanations that, although harsh, have immensely higher chances to be true than «aliens».

    But I don’t want to be the one to spoil the party. I am really excited to learn about these questionings and really looking forward to see what comes out of it. Hopefully we can beat all the odds and be in front of the most important thing that has ever happened to us. Maybe I just want to believe, a little.

  • Reinventing Twitter

    Twitter, as we know it, is coming to an end. They recently announced a total rebranding to what we’ll know as x.com from now on. It’s an interesting decision coming from Elon Musk, who intends to turn Twitter into some sort of «everything app».

    It’s easy to dismiss anything Elon Musk does as folly, but the truth is that it doesn’t matter how much you dislike the guy: he’s one of the greatest achievers of our time. He’s been at front of several of the greatest companies of our time, and no amount of luck could make a fool accomplish all that.

    I think it’s clear that Elon Musk has a very specific vision of what he wants Twitter to become, and it’s something that appears hard to visualize for everyone else.

    All the apocalyptic predictions coming from his detractors have turned to be wrong. Twitter was supposed to implode technologically following the layoff of several thousand employees. Advertisers were expected to abandon the platform in droves, and users were supposed to flock to other platforms like Mastodon or Threads. By now, Twitter should be a desertic wasteland.

    But the truth is that, 10 months into Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, none of that, except for a couple brief moments of panic after some big change.

    On the other hand, Twitter’s rebranding has turned out to be somewhat… rustic. Personally, I would’ve never anticipated such a sloppy transition: if this isn’t Twitter anymore, how do we call tweets and retweets? What’s the logo like? What’s their website domain?

    They merely swapped their website logo to the one proposed by the first commenter in Musk’s post announcing the brand change, and then redirected x.com to twitter.com. So the site is still full of references to twitter, tweets, and birds.

    In the process, they effectively obliterated one of the most iconic and enduring brands on the internet. Twitter has been with us for the last 17 years, few brands on the internet are so resilient, and now it’s just vanished.

    Musk could have planned a smoother transition. Lots of people are going to have a bad time understanding that Twitter doesn’t exist anymore, and that they are now supposed to refer to it as just X.

    Despite this, I’m looking forward to see what X becomes. Truth is they still have the userbase and the reputation. It’s pretty amusing to see how Musk’s detractors like to rant about how Twitter’s doom… on Twitter itself. There’s clearly some sort of friction that makes it hard to find somewhere else to talk about it.