Notes
“Move fast and break things”. - Silicon Valley’s mantra. I call bullshit.
It’s been the mantra for some time now in the valley. Everyone benefits by moving fast and breaking a couple of things because we move faster at a quicker pace. But is that true?
My take: It’s bullshit and always has been.
On inspection, this mantra should actually be:
Break things and move fast.
Silicon Valley and all the poor copycats dotted around the planet are causing untold harm on a social level, let alone on an economic one.
Don’t believe me or think that I’m being alarmist?
Have a read of this article from Jon Haidt.
Conclusion: Social Media Is a Major Cause of Mental Illness in Girls, Not Just a Tiny Correlate
On the financial side.
FTX, SVB. I could go on.
As for “move fast”, that really means “run away” and blame others or deny responsibility.
13 March 2023 — French West Indies
Facebook tests deliberately drain phone batteries
As reported by 9to5 Mac from an article in the New York Post —I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that— Facebook seems to have been conducting A/B testing that can drain the battery on your smartphone.
They raise important points about safety and transparency, as well as moral issues confirming that Facebook continues to show that it is morally corrupt (link).
But there’s another aspect.
This might seem picky and a little silly, but this is deliberate damage to a device. Accidental damage, we can all pass off; it happens. A drop or an app that goes haywire through some random bug. No real problem.
But deliberately draining the battery, which has a finite lifespan of around 500 charges to 80% of the battery capacity, is intentionally damaging the battery, ensuring the affected users will have to either replace their phones or their phone batteries before it can be reasonably expected.
The tests might be limited and, therefore, not affect too many people, so this is a small-scale panic. Still, Facebook should be absolutely upfront about this and offer compensation for those affected.
What they should have done, as responsible citizens (which they are not currently), is contact users requesting authorisation to be included in the test, guaranteeing batteries would be replaced free of charge.
What a shitty company, through and through.
2 February 2023 — French West Indies
The End of Writing
From ia.net.
Soon, you won’t need to write much anymore. Artificial Intelligence will do it for you. With all the free time we will have, we could try to rethink how we learn, work, and how we communicate.
An excellent blog post from the developer of a fantastic writing application. One that requires good old sweat and tears. None of this prompted 12-year-old-level gibberish produced by Open AI’s latest baby.
30 January 2023 — French West Indies
The enshittification of air travel
Ever since the horrendous attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the airlines and various states’ security organisations trusted with guaranteeing security have gone into overdrive to enshittify air travel.
From condescending orders barked at you by barely-trained staff with no interest in making their job easier on themselves to the already frustratingly-long queues to get past that hurdle of show and tell. A burden that was already astonishingly tedious, usually as a direct result of a passenger not understanding that metal detectors detect … wait for it … metal!
A Swiss hacker reports that he/she/they discovered a file containing all the names and other information on the US Government’s “No Fly List”. A list that, like the first rule of fight club, no one talks about.
If that wasn’t bad enough, consider that on that list, there are children as young as four years old, according to those that have seen the list.
But here we reach a new low.
The name of the “database” of names?
NoFly.csv
Yep, you got that right. A fucking comma-separated file.
Words cannot describe the level at which this is unacceptable, regardless of circumstances.
… but wait. It does get worse.
I’ll let you read on through the Techdirt article for more analysis.
24 January 2023 — French West Indies
Revenue haemorrhage at Twitter.
From The Information:
A senior Twitter manager told employees that the company’s daily revenue on Tuesday was 40% lower than the same day a year ago, underscoring the crisis facing its core ads business, according to a person with direct knowledge.
In a staff meeting on Tuesday, Siddharth Rao, an engineering manager overseeing the engineers working on Twitter’s ad business, also told employees in a presentation that more than 500 of Twitter’s top advertisers have paused spending on Twitter since Elon Musk took over in October.
I fear for the poor engineers that —outside of their control— are suffering and will suffer job losses due to Elmo’s stupidity and revolting attitude.
I only hope that it affects Elmo’s pocket even more.
18 January 2023 — French West Indies
The Before. A curated playlist of samples and originals
I’ve been having a lot of fun curating a playlist of songs and the corresponding tracks they sampled from. Well, that’s not entirely fair. Some of the tracks are inspirations or plain remakes.
Much of it is hip-hop, unsurprising for any fans of the genre. Hip-hop pretty much defined sampling, getting the biggest artists and labels into trouble back then. Things have changed, and declarations and authorisations are required to be granted before a track is released. There is a perverse net negative result to that for the artists, but that can wait for another day.
I’ve been a hip-hop fan since I first heard some early tracks in 1980/1981 when I got deep in the weeds of hip-hop for more than 15 years. To this day, it has a special place in my heart.
So when a friend recently told me about a playlist on Spotify (I’m not a subscriber), I asked him to export the tracklist so I could manually recreate it using Apple Music.
That playlist was featured in a New York Times article, giving me inspiration for my own take on the idea.
My list is currently a work in progress with 49 songs and lasts 4:19 hours, although that is likely to grow. It features several types of music, from Rap, Jazz, Reggae and Ska. The goal is to have one or more original tracks directly before the track that uses its samples from the previous track(s).
It’s called, The Before. I described it as:
Many popular tracks stand on the shoulders of previous songs. This playlist gives you the originals before they were sampled, covered, or otherwise copied.
If you want the playlist, let me know.
16 January 2023 — French West Indies
Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio
Via Ars Technica:
On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person's voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone.
The possibilities for this technology are pretty endless. Good and bad.
As we move forward deploying and using these products, I don’t think we place enough emphasis and what the bad could be. I’m reminded of that quote from Jurassic Park
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
I’m convinced there’s plenty of good to come from this and similar technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, but I’m equally convinced that the bad stuff might be so bad that its effects on society could be disastrous.
This is why I believe regulation should be one of the first priorities for the world’s governments surrounding the use of these tools.
Regulation is coming, but too little and too late. Governments need to work to internet assumptions, not 20th Century ones as they currently do.
14 January 2023 — French West Indies
AI is coming for the Lawyers too
The term “low-hanging fruit” tends to invoke a particular disdain from me, given that it has been overused throughout the tech bro sphere.
Still, I can’t see a more fitting term in this case. From Gizmodo:
An AI-based legal advisor is set to play the role of a lawyer in an actual court case for the first time. Via an earpiece, the artificial intelligence will coach a courtroom defendant on what to say to get out of the associated fines and consequences of a speeding charge, AI-company (sic) DoNotPay has claimed in a report initially from New Scientist and confirmed by Gizmodo.
From the website of DoNotPay:
DoNotPay utilizes artificial intelligence to help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and suing robocallers.
DoNotPay’s goal is to level the playing field and make legal information and self-help accessible to everyone.
Low-level lawyers and legal advisors should probably start looking to move up the stack in the coming years.
This is a theme of AI, and much like the automation of assembly lines, AI is coming for the low-hanging fruit.
11 January 2023 — French West Indies
A brief history of maps
From archdaily:
When in what was called Junior School at the time, ages 7 to 10, our teacher took us to a small village and got us started on a project to map the surroundings.
We drew the roads (there were two, a crossroads), the stream, buildings, and plenty of distinguishing features (trees, postbox, etc.) and added any relevant information we could think of.
We visited several times, adding more and more data to the documents we were collecting and drawing by hand. We even did a topology study using basic tools, but it was enough for us to get a rough 3D model of the village built as the final conclusion to the project.
I’ll never forget that experience. During the project and again at the end, my teacher told me I would make a good Cartographer. I didn’t know what that word meant at the time, so I looked it up in the dictionary. The definition in my crappy dictionary was “Map Maker”.
I didn’t turn out to be a “map maker”. However, I have continued to enjoy maps, and these articles are catnip. Enjoy.
7 January 2023 — French West Indies