Majorana 1 is a new processor that would be used in a quantum computer. Majorana 1 is an 8 qubit processor. This is a relatively modest processor, IBM’s Heron processor clocks in at 156 qubits. The reason why creator Microsoft was excited about Majorana 1 was about the underlying mechanism. This depends on a ‘topoconductor’ – a new type of material that provides better control and scalability. So Microsoft envisages with topoconductor million plus qubit systems that would fulfil the full potential promise of quantum computing.
Majorana 1 is viewed as having potential to move current work on artificial intelligence further. Generative AI is essentially probabilistic in nature. There is an almost Bayesian relationship happening as an LLM guesses based on its training data to date. Quantum computing promises exploring multiple options all at once, which would aid probabilistic problem-solving.
Thankfully, Microsoft’s video explanation of Majorana 1 provides a good primer on how quantum computing works and the role that a topoconductor plays.
Majorana 1 is named after Italian physicist Ettore Majorana who theorised about the particle being used.
Ben Miles has covered the skepticism around the science underpinning Majorana 1.
40 billion enemies
This Westinghouse film from the 1940s on refrigeration and the dangers of diseases made me wonder about what the film-makers would have thought about our current wellness crazes including RFK Jr’s prognostications on vaccines and pasteurisation.
The diesel-punk aesthetic is strong in the vehicles portrayed at the start of the film from trains to propellor powered planes and a clean-looking semi-wagon design. And it has some great life hacks for getting the most out of your refrigerator, some of which I didn’t know and my Mum loved the tips.
The Pisanos
It isn’t often nowadays that you see ‘spec’ ads any more. This spec ad including the behind the scenes documentary afterwards were all created using Google Deep Mind Veo 2 to create all the characters and shots.
There are still tell-tale elements that the video is based on generative AI. Part of the reason for the swift editing is the gradual breakdown due to the probabilistic nature of the generative AI process to do what is being asked for it.
In the Mood for Love & 2046
I had never seen many of these interviews that provide an oral history of In theMood for Love&2046 by Wong Kar wai. It goes into more depth on the creative process of films than I had seen previously. I also didn’t realise how much these films overlapped on the shooting schedule.
There is no way in the AI augmented film industry that anything could happen like In the Mood for Love could happen now. As a bonus here is a 2024 Olay advert that featured Maggie Cheung.
A Skype retrospective was called for once I read that the service was being closed by April 2025.
Skype retrospective origins.
Skype was a thing right from the get-go when it launched in August 2003. There had been voice-over-IP (VoIP) services before Skype. Full disclosure, I worked on Deltathree; an Israeli predecessor of Skype.
About this time, if you needed to make cheap overseas call, you would dial in to a special service and then dial the overseas number. This would relay your call via VoIP. These calls were also facilitated direct from a PC as well using VoIP.
Previously, telephone calls were charged per voice minute. The further away the call was, the more expensive it was. VoIP disrupted the telecoms cost model.
Enabling technologies.
As broadband networks became more prevalent and Wi-Fi meant that you were no longer tethered to the ethernet connection of your router. At the time homes had an area delegated for internet access. Laptops were much less commonplace.
The original iMac was a success because it was a plug-in and play solution for internet access. It’s iconic ‘candy design’ helped differentiate it from the competitors beige PC.
By the time Skype was released I had an Apple iBook, a consumer laptop that pioneered the adoption of Wi-Fi, back in 1999, but my first broadband router at home didn’t support Wi-Fi. Broadband, Wi-Fi and 3G networks facilitated the start of Skype. Those networks provided the always-on connectivity to get the most out of the app.
Low-key start.
If there was any ‘thought leader’ on VoIP at the time, it would have been Jeff Pulver. Pulver didn’t bother discussing Skype at the time. Instead he was focused on expected government regulation, Vonage, PC VoIP software X-Lite and Windows Messenger.
Skype first appeared on Pulver’s radar in December 2003, after Red Herring announced that they had secured a first round of venture funding. Pulver praised their ‘viral marketing’.
It wasn’t obvious that Skype would be a winner.
Messaging at the time.
The primary messaging platform at the time in Europe was SMS. Instant messaging was starting to be used informally in workplaces. It was as much about the community norm as anything else. I started off using ICQ with Israeli clients, then Yahoo! Messenger, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and MSN Messenger. It was all a bit messy, so I pulled all my accounts together using Adium.
Take-off.
Skype quickly took its place on my laptop when it released its first Mac client in March 2004. By the summer, one of my clients at the time got rid of their desk phones when they moved office and had employees do internal and office-to-office calls via Skype-to-Skype instead. Giving someone your Skype ID became as common as giving out your email.
At the time Skype offered encrypted voice calls held over a peer-to-peer network. The encryption was contentious as it something of Skype’s own design and wasn’t audited.
In 2005, Skype was sold to eBay. The synergy between them wasn’t clear.
Joost
A year later, the Skype founders left and founded The Venice Project aka Joost – a peer to peer video platform. It was a photo-streaming platform. I liked Joost for its sub-Amazon Prime Video film library including obscure 1970s English language overdubbed martial arts films. But there was also Viacom content available.
Meanwhile under eBay’s ownership, Skype incorporated video calls into its offering. I ended up in a long distance relationship with a Hong Kong-based fellow Mac user and we ended up talking every day via Skype. It even worked when she visited across the border in Shenzhen.
Mobile impact
You can’t write a Skype retrospective without talking about its role on mobile.
Hutchison 3G (known as Three), was a cellular carrier brand put together by CK Hutchison to build a global 3G network in Asia and Europe. In 2007, Three launched Skypephone with Skype. The key part of this as an unremarkable looking candy bar handset.
The Skype phone allowed you to see the status of your Skype contacts on the phone, allowing for presence on the go, in real time (network permitting) which was revolutionary. But we take it for granted on WhatsApp now. There was a couple of forums that gave out widely copied workarounds for the clunky implementation of Skype.
For some reason Hong Kong always got the best features. You could have two numbers on your phone there. The first number was your proper mobile phone number that worked like you would expect it to. The second was your ‘SkypeIn’ number – a soft telephone service.
I had worked on pioneer mobile app Yahoo!Go previously, which only allowed email and no VoIP calls. The Skype phone was a major leap forward because it allowed synchronous communications when connected to a network.
There would have been no WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat or LINE without Skype leading the way.
A nerdier fact was that the Skype phone ran on the BREW application development platform by Qualcomm. It allowed Java apps to be downloaded directly from early app stores before the iPhone. At the time I was side loading apps from my Mac on to my Palm and Symbian phones.
Beginning of the end.
The peak of my Skype use was keeping in touch with my parents when I was working in Hong Kong. Video calling made the world feel closer and they got to see some of Hong Kong with me because of its higher quality 3G network.
Soon after I got back, we switched to FaceTime. This was for a couple of reasons. Skype had an increasing number of spam accounts and phishing attacks. Secondly, FaceTime had an easier to use interface.
This is the point in the Skype retrospective when I think that the rot started to set in.
From a software point of view a big decline occurred in 2016, Microsoft had settled into their purchase of Skype and decided to re-architect the system. Out went the peer-to-peer connections and the system moved onto Microsoft servers to mediate Skype-to-Skype calls.
The irony of it all is that the distributed web is now the technology du jour.
Microsoft messed with the user experience and I distinctly remember moving from one version to another and hated the new layout. From then on, it didn’t improve. Skype’s ability to dial out to international numbers was still something that I put to good use, pretty much up to the time of writing. But like an old cheque book, I came to use it less-and less often; knowing that I could still use the service, allowed Skype to be a back-up to a back-up of a back-up.
At the time I was also using Skype for Business in the office where I worked. It was shambolic with each call timing out around the 30-minute mark.
Skype, was once a beloved product, one that I loved using every day. It was a product I wrote about long before it was trendy. I sent the team feedback. Like all tiny apps that are good at what they do, it became popular and grew really fast. It was sold to eBay, and then re-sold to Microsoft. And that’s when the magic disappeared. Through series of mergers and managers, Skype became an exact opposite of what I loved about it — independent outsider which was great at — chat, messaging and phone calls. It had just enough features, and its desktop client was minimal in its perfection. Now, as I tweeted in the past, it is “a turd of the highest quality.”
The final bow
A Skype retrospective would be remiss, if we didn’t cover the impact that the service has had. While Skype has struggled with scammers and Microsoft’s sub-optimal operation, its legacy lives on.
The culture of desktop video calls started with Skype. Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack are its spiritual successors. A combination of software capability, hot-desking, hybrid working and COVID resulted in long term business behaviour change.
As I write this, IAG – owners of British Airways, Aer Lingus and Iberia admitted that “business travel had settled into a ‘new normal’ that involved fewer one-day trips with flights, in part because of video meetings.”
Skype had some current cultural relevance, particularly on TV where presenters would interview someone from outside the studio, for instance an expert calling in from home, Skype would still be the client used.
At the time of writing, I am looking at Rakuten Viber to substitute my need for a ‘SkypeOut’ analogue.
She Who Became the Sun was a book that I had on my to read list for a while. It glared at my from my must-read stack. Its bright red spine a constant reminder that I hadn’t read it yet.
I have seen it categorised as ‘transgender fiction’ and fantasy. I thought of it as being closer to the historical fiction genre, a middle-kingdom analogue of Dan Jones’ Essex Dogs trilogy. The protagonist of the book takes on her brother’s name not to identify as male per se, but as a security mechanism, initially finding refuge in a monastery and then concealing her real identity as a soldier.
At least one of the supporting characters is homosexual, but that reflects the diversity in society at large. Parker-Chan is a fictionalised version of Chinese history, but not one that Louis Cha Leung-yung would have written. It’s for this reason that I reject the notion of the fantasy label from being attached to She Who Became the Sun.
Like Dan Jones’ work, Parker-Chan does a good job of capturing the grim reality of being poor, the austerity of being religious and the horror of battle. Parker-Chan plays with who gets to be a hero, or a villain and the strong hand of fate throughout the story.
GLP-1 permission as a post came out of a walk in west London. Chelsea is a wealthy area of the city, with neighbourhoods made up of hedge fund managers, hereditary rich locals, captains of industry like INEOS’ Jim Radcliffe and wealthy foreigners who live in the UK on a seasonal basis.
Zeitgeist
This means that health clinics and pharmacies in the area can successfully sell services to private customers. So I wasn’t surprised to see a pharmacy offering a service to help with weight loss. These adverts are tapping into a global need to combat obesity. A sign of how big using GLP-1s for weight loss and weight management was an advert run during the Super Bowl by Hims & Hers. GLP-1 pioneer, Novo Nordisk for a brief time was the most valuable company in Europe, even more valuable than French luxury conglomerate LVMH.
And for well-off people, going private gives GLP-1 permission when used under the guidance of a healthcare professional to be used for aesthetic reasons rather being solely focused on the medical benefits of reducing obesity.
All of which makes sense why you would see weight loss consultations / services promoted at a pharmacy in Chelsea.
What the advertising got right?
Looking at the copywriting itself, it is solutions-focused with a clear call to action to speak to a member of staff to find out more. The copywriting is very much in line with CAP guidelines and ABPI guidelines.
What the advertising got wrong?
Policing of UK advertising seems to have created a belief that we suddenly operate in a more permissive regulatory and legal environment. GLP-1-based treatments have had some of the biggest commercial and cultural impact since Pfizer launched their erectile dysfunction treatment Viagra.
But despite these medicines being in the cultural zeitgeist there isn’t some exemption, a GLP-1 permission. GLP-1 weight management treatments are still prescription-only medicines and are still governed by the regulations that restrict branded communications to healthcare professionals (doctors, specialists, nurse prescribers, pharmacists) and patients that have already had the medicine prescribed to them.
Take this particular photo of the earlier poster series, In it you can clearly see the logos for both GLP-1 based weight management treatments. Both are prescription drugs, rather than over the counter medicines. This is illegal in the UK (and many other countries outside the United States).
At least we can say with some confidence that the notices were likely produced by the pharmacy, rather than facilitated by the pharma companies involved.
No pharmaceutical company would be pleased seeing their brand given equal treatment with a competitor.
If you are doing marketing for any business like this in the UK, know your CAP and ABPI codes.
Clutch Cargo was an animated series first broadcast on American television in 1959. Clutch Cargo was created by Cambria Productions – who were a start-up animation studio. Cambria used a number of techniques to radically reduce the cost of producing the animated series.
A key consideration was reducing the amount of movement that needed to be animated. There were some obvious visual motifs used to do this:
Characters were animated from waist height up for the majority of the films, this reduced the need to animate legs, walking or running.
Much of the movement was moving the camera around, towards or away from a static picture.
To show an explosion, they shook the camera, rather than animate the concussive effect of the blast.
Fire wasn’t animated, instead smoke would be put in front of the camera. Fake snow was sprinkled so that bad weather didn’t need to be drawn.
Cameraman Ted Gillette came up with the idea of Syncro-Vox. The voice actors head would be held steady, they would have a vivid lipstick applied and then say their lines. Gillette then put their mouths on top of the animated figures. Cambria made use of it in all their animations with the exception of The New Three Stooges – an animated series that allowed Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita to be voice actors after their movie contracts finished and they were affected by ill health.
These choices meant that Clutch Cargo cost about 10 per cent of what it would have cost Disney to animate. The visual hacks to cut costs were also helped in the way the scripts were developed. Clutch Cargo avoided doing comedy, instead focusing on Tin-Tin-like adventures. ‘Physical’ comedy gags create a lot of movement to animate. By focusing on the storytelling of Clutch Cargo. The young audience weren’t bothered by the limited animation, as they were captivated into suspending their beliefs.
Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back. – The New York Times – Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food-industry executives had been calling him. “They are scared about it,” he said. Around the same time, Walmart’s chief executive in the United States, John Furner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn. By one market-research firm’s estimate, food-and-drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before.
Ozempic users like Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant.
Apple resumes advertising on Elon Musk’s X after 15-month pause – 9to5Mac – the negative reaction to this that I have seen from Mac and iPhone users that I know is interesting. It’s the scales have dropped from their eyes about Apple’s performative progressive values. Yet the signs have been out there for years – in particular with regards anything that is even tangentially connected to China.
Zuckerberg’s rightward policy shift hits Meta staffers, targets Apple | CNBC – employees who might otherwise leave because of their disillusionment with policy changes are concerned about quitting now because of how they will be perceived by future employers given that Meta has said publicly that it’s weeding out “low performers.” Meta, like many of its tech peers, began downsizing in 2022 and has continued to trim around the edges. The company cut 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023. Among those who lost their jobs were members of the civic integrity group, which was known to be outspoken in its criticism of Zuckerberg’s leadership. Some big changes are now taking place that appear to directly follow the lead of Trump at the expense of company employees and users of the platforms, the people familiar with the matter said.
