Do you need Powerpoint?

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While slide decks can be a useful tool in some presentations, Steve Jobs was famously against them. When having staff present him with their arguments for or against certainly decisions, he famously believed that:

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need Powerpoint

If you need to make an argument about an upcoming direction, then you should make your point and have a discussion about it rather than going through a bunch of slides.

Ultimately, it’s not unlike the idea of only using paper for proposals after a deal has been reached. Have a discussion, figure out the direction, and then just write down the results.

No slides?

Of course, Steve Jobs famously used slides in his major presentations, but I think those are different for two reasons:

  1. His slides were very simple, more of just emphasis on his words than on presenting content.
  2. In those situations, a discussion with a room full of hundreds of people wasn’t feasible anyhow.

I see Seth Godin do something similar. He’ll use slides for many of his talks, but they’re very simple slides — the majority are simply an image to go along with whatever story he is telling at the time.

In fact, in his “Nine steps to Powerpoint magic” post from years ago, his very first suggestion is to not use Powerpoint at all! He says:

Most of the time, it’s not necessary. It’s underkill. Powerpoint distracts you from what you really need to do… look people in the eye, tell a story, tell the truth. Do it in your own words, without artifice and with clarity. There are times Powerpoint is helpful, but choose them carefully.

We have a variety of slide decks that we use in our business, and we’ll continue to use many of them, because there are cases when walking through some slides can be a great way to explain an idea with visuals. In most of our meetings, though, we try to simply have a discussion with the other party to help us all understand what the other is looking for and to plot the best path forward. In those cases, slides just get in the way.

Folders are slowly going away

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Over the past decade or so, and more noticeably in the past few years, younger users are ignoring the concepts of “files” and “folders” when it comes to saving their work on a computer.

A recent article in The Verge dug into this, and an early example in the article sums it up well. When helping students track down their files, it led to an interesting exchange:

She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

In a world of search, why worry about where a file lives?

Gmail Folders

I first noticed this in my own work back in 2009, when I advised readers to give up using folders/tags in Gmail. Why worry about it? You’ll spend dozens of hours a year carefully sorting your emails into folders and subfolders, and the time you save as a result will just be a fraction of that.

Roam and mymind

I’m noticing this in new tools as well. You know I love Roam Research, and it literally doesn’t have a way to save things in a traditional hierarchy. You link from one item to another, and use search to find the rest.

The popular bookmaking app mymind works similarly. There are no folders or organization to deal with. They even promote that their system is “For those who move too fast to be bothered with folders, labels and systems.“

Google Photos

Yet another example is Google Photos. While you can organize your pictures into albums (and you can make a case that it’s worth the time to do that), I’d wager that 99%+ of photos in Google Photos are just loose. Even with no tags or folders, thanks to Google’s AI I can quickly search for “beach” or “campfire” or “Kelly Mellen” or “Nashville” and Google can come up virtually every photo I’ve taken that matches that criteria.

Teams are different

When it comes to files for teams, though, I think things are a bit different — at least for now. When it comes to organizing information for our team, whether it’s in a familiar setup like Google Drive or something newer like Notion, we try to keep a well-constructed file hierarchy. It’s one thing to keep my data un-foldered, but for a team it’s still good to have everyone follow the same idea. Tools like Roam Research are still very single-player focused, though I suspect that will change in the coming years.

I encourage you to read the full article over at The Verge, but they end it with my exact sentiments in this quote from professor Peter Plavchan:

Get ready. “This is not gonna go away,” he says. “You’re not gonna go back to the way things were. You have to accept it. The sooner that you accept that things change, the better.”

Al Gore and the internet

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As we all know, Al Gore invented the internet. Or maybe he didn’t invent it, but he said he did. Or maybe that’s not even true…

I still see this come up fairly regularly, and I kind of feel bad for Gore about it. He indeed did great work to help the internet grow, and he never directly claimed to have invented it. This was really a case of opponents creating a fake story out of a somewhat-accurate quote and then getting everyone to run with it.

The initial confusion came out of a 1999 interview that Gore had with Wolf Blitzer. You can read the full transcript of the interview here, but this is the part that was pulled out:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

His wording of “creating the internet” is the tricky part, and it wasn’t well-worded by him. However, it’s not too inaccurate. In 2000, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf (two very important figures in the development of the internet) wrote a strong response supporting the impact that Gore had. It included:

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively “invented” the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore’s contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

It can be cute to poke fun and say things like “I’m glad Al Gore invented the internet because I love using x”, but just know that he never really made that claim, though he did play a major role in shaping the internet that we know and love today.

Why can’t we just “shut down” child porn?

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Child pornography and human trafficking are major problems across the world, and the web helps to facilitate both to a rather large degree. Whenever some website gets taken down (or blocked on a site like Facebook), you’ll often see memes like this start to float around:

At first glance, it seems like a solid question. Why can’t they? There are a few reasons.

Do you see much porn on Facebook?

The first revolves around who “they” are. When “big tech” shuts something down, it’s usually just that company removing specific content from their servers, like when Twitter kicked Donald Trump off their platform.

In these cases, child porn already isn’t a problem. Content moderation on social media is a huge ugly problem to solve, and those companies work hard to keep things clean and tend to do a pretty good job of it. I suspect you’ve not seen any child porn on Facebook or Twitter, probably ever. They keep their networks pretty clean (arguably to a fault at times, but it’s a tough job).

Bad stuff goes underground

The problem with stopping major problems such as a child porn is that it’s not published in a place that’s controlled by big tech. This stuff is often on servers in foreign countries where the local authorities really don’t care. If some guy has a server full of that trash operating out of Tolyatti, Russia, how do you stop him from here? It’s not easy.

Going a step further, much of this stuff is moving to the dark web where it’s almost impossible to track. Every site on the dark web is accessed by bouncing around to a bunch of different servers between you and them, making both identities nearly impossible to determine.

There’s no good solution

When people understand that, the cry is then to “nerd harder”! Certainly Google or Facebook could do something about this, right? Not really. Again, if a dude sets up a nasty server in a foreign country, Google and Facebook can easily block that content on their platforms, but it’s still out there on the web for others to access.

The solution to fix that is a nationwide firewall, similar to what China has, where the government controls what you’re able to see. Even with the best of intentions behind it, that would be a very slippery slope with awful consequences.

I’m sorry to say, but I don’t have anything resembling an answer to this problem. Just know that big tech indeed works very hard to “shut down child porn” on their platforms, but have little control to stop it everywhere else.

Trusting authentic recommendations

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Over at GreenMellen, we don’t host websites. We help people choose hosting, and we take care of all of the technical work, but we want our clients to have ownership of their sites. We do this for their long-term benefit (owning your own stuff is a good thing), but recently I’ve noticed a great side benefit of doing this.

Because we don’t host sites, we have no financial incentive to ask clients to move. If we see a situation where a client should move to a different web hosting company to help with the performance of their site, our suggestions are generally accepted because we have nothing to gain financially from their move, which makes our recommendation much more trustworthy.

This is kind of like when Yogi would tell me not to get new tires. It’s a bit of a different angle, as he had financial incentive behind his decisions, but he did a good job of proving that his recommendations could be trusted, and I absolutely trusted what he had to say.

If you can often say “no”, it can help your “yes” gain more weight, but if you can clearly remove your financial incentives for suggestions that you provide, it makes your credibility even higher.

You don’t need to build your own server

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With the continuing fight that many are facing against “big tech”, a growing group of people are building their own servers to host their websites and content. There are really two reasons you might want to do this:

Servers for your media consumption at your house, such as music and movies. If you can’t get a reliable internet connection at your house, this could be a good way to go. It has a lot of limitations, but some advantages.

Servers for your website, so you’re not relying on others to host it for you. For almost all of us, this is overkill.

When the whole Parler debacle surfaced in late 2020, it made big news because most companies refused to host their website. Because they relied on other companies for hosting, they were in a tough spot — but they were very much an exception. A site like theirs requires a massive, custom setup, and there are relatively few viable options.

For sites like mine here, there are literally thousands of hosting providers to choose from, almost all of which are under $15/mo. If somehow my current host got mad at me for some reason, it would be relatively trivial to move this site to another host. For most of us, you just need two things:

  1. A backup of your site, which you should be keeping no matter how things are set up.
  2. Your own domain name (like “mickmel.com” for me). If I was using a completely free service, like “mickmel.wordpress.com”, my options become much more limited.
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In this scenario, the weak link is the domain ownership. If I got in big enough trouble, I could get my domain name taken away and find myself in a tough spot. Historically, that has happened very infrequently, and hopefully remains that way. Even with the big stink made about Parler, they were never in danger of losing their domain name.

Build a server?

If you want to tinker and build your own server to host your sites to help increase your security, go for it. In the grand scheme of things, though, it really doesn’t offer much additional protection for you. Find a decent host, keep good backups, and don’t worry about “big tech” trying to stop you — because they can’t.

Reducing and syncing notifications

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I’ve talked a good bit about smartwatches on here over the years, from my first Google-vs-Apple post back in 2015, to recurring posts about how Pebble stuck around longer than we thought it might.

I recently picked up a Galaxy Watch4, and it’s excellent. As I’ve been getting things set up, though, it’s helped me rethink how I manage my phone.

For me, the best thing about a smartwatch is notifications. The other apps on the watch can be helpful at times, but I want to quickly glance down and see who is calling or texting without having to get my phone out. It’s great! The growing annoyance for me, though, was when I’d hear my phone buzz but then nothing would come through to my watch so I wouldn’t know what the notification was for. This was by design, as I didn’t want my watch buzzing for every little notification, but the disconnect between them wasn’t good.

I figured I had two options to get them to sync:

  1. Enable all notifications on my watch.
  2. Eliminate the other notifications from my phone.

Option 2 sounded great, so that’s what I’ve done. The easy win, and something I should have done a while ago, was to remove social media notifications. When I hop on Facebook or Twitter, there will always be notifications waiting for me, so having them ping my phone/watch every time was silly.

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Beyond that, it was just cleaning up some of the random ones that were left over. I went through the full list of allowed notifications on my phone and turned off almost all of them. Most were infrequent (HBO Max, Spotify, etc), so I disabled almost everything.

Now I’m seeing far fewer notifications on my phone, but I can see all of them on my watch. It’s a good setup, and I hope to continue to trim them down on both devices over time.

Protect your community

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There is a good chance you found this post through an online community that you’re a part of, possibly Facebook or Twitter. While having a community on sites like that is a great thing, it’s also incredibly fragile.

Social media accounts get shut down constantly; mostly for good reasons (spammers, etc), but normal accounts can get caught in the crossfire and it can be very difficult to get them back. Your account (or mine!) could be taken down tomorrow, for no good reason and with no recourse.

In many cases, it’s more of an annoyance than anything. Most social media accounts are for social fun, and having to recreate them would be a pain, but not a serious issue. My wife lost her Twitter account for a few months, and while she eventually got it back it was far more of an annoyance than a major problem.

However, if you’ve built up a healthy community online you’ll want to make sure to have solid control of it in case something goes sideways. Chris Garrett sums it up nicely, with three thoughts:

  1. Build a list. Have an email list outside of your community that you can call upon when needed.
  2. Build a web asset that you own. I’ve talked about this a lot, but it’s huge. Having something that you own is essential for any real community to be secure.
  3. Attract and retain. Don’t stop. Continue to use social media and other tools to grow, but always work to take people across that public to private bridge.

Check out the full post from Chris for more great info.

Don’t change your password without a good reason

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A common security measure that institutions push is to force users to frequently change their password. When discussing this with my bank recently, they simply said “For security purposes, we require you change your password every 90 days.“

For security purposes, that’s not a helpful thing to do.

Microsoft calls periodic password changes “ancient and obsolete” and the FTC is not encouraging it either. So what should you do?

Well, sometimes change it

There are some cases when you indeed should change your password, most notably when you are concerned that it may have been compromised. For example, go check out have i been pwned to see where your accounts may have been hacked. Forcing users to change their passwords every 90 days is silly, but changing your password when it may have been exposed is crucial.

Protect it

The bigger issue for a lot of folks is the strength of their passwords. If you can remember your password, it’s probably not strong enough. Perhaps more importantly is that you shouldn’t use the same password for multiple accounts. Thankfully, there are easy solutions to this with products such as LastPass, Dashlane or others that have free versions (and paid versions for under $5/mo). Let those system create super complex passwords, and then they help you pull them in the moment you need them.

It’s impossible to stay completely secure online, which is why things like backups are so important. That said, it’s foolish to be lazy with your security, and passwords are a pretty easy thing to keep strong. Use a password manager to create long, unique passwords for every account you have, but don’t waste your time changing your passwords unless you have a reason to do so.

You won’t notice the first time you get in a self-driving car

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When I get in discussions with people about the future of self-driving cars, people often raise concerns and say something like “I’m not sure I’ll be comfortable the first time I get into a self-driving car.” I think they’re wrong, but for different reasons than they’re likely thinking.

I suspect when someone “won’t be comfortable”, they’re picturing a self-driving car with no steering wheel coming to pick up them up next year and how strange that would be, and they’re right — it’d be really strange! The thing is, it won’t happen that way.

Really, it’ll be a very gradual change, kinda like this:

  1. Your car can stay at a set speed automatically: this is just cruise control, which we’ve had for years.
  2. Your car can stay at a set speed, but slow down when traffic is in front of it: this is adaptive cruise control, which many cars have.
  3. Your car can stay in its own lane: some cars do this now.
  4. Your car can navigate down the highway without your help: some cars can do this now, but you still need to be in control.
  5. Your car can navigate down the highway without your help at all: not too far away.
  6. Your car can navigate almost everywhere, and requests human intervention every now and then.
  7. You car can navigate everywhere, and you’re not needed.
  8. The steering wheel is removed since it’s never needed.

Step #8 seems really scary, and I think it would be if I hopped in an Uber next week and it was driverless and steering wheel-less. #8 is a long way off. Before that happens, we’ll have #7 in our lives for years. We’ll very slowly get used to being driven around by self-driving cars. At some point, the steering wheel will have the ability to retract when not needed, and then at some point later it’ll go away and we won’t really notice.

When does it happen?

So in my list above, when are you “getting into a self-driving car”? Maybe around step #6? Perhaps #7? It’s going to happen so slowly that we won’t even notice, so for the vast majority of people there won’t be a big “Ooh, my first time in a self-driving car!” moment — it’ll just happen.

Of course, it doesn’t stop with step #8 above. I think there is one more huge step, but we’re likely 30-50 years away from it:

9. No human drivers allowed on the roads: they can go to special “driving parks” or something.

The future of self-driving cars is amazing. We’ll each save hundreds of hours per year, and collectively we’ll save millions of lives. Getting there will be fun to watch, but don’t expect a big “ah-ha!” moment.