Podcasts about Usenet

What drives someone to publish 600+ issues of a Postgres newsletter for over a decade? In Episode 28 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Peter Cooper—creator of Postgres Weekly—shares how his days of rustic programming and QBASIC fanzines on Usenet led to a newsletter empire that now reaches nearly half a million developers each week. We dig into the BBC's "big tent" editorial influence, an accidental business model that just worked, and the perils of "temporary" hacks. Plus: spam filters, a Photoshop addiction, and one very cheesy story (dairy-free).Links mentioned in this episode:Newsletter: Postgres WeeklyCooperpress: List of newslettersNewsletter: Latest issue of Postgres Weekly on Jun 19, 2025Newsletter: Postgres Weekly issue with horrible graphicNewsletter: Very first issue of Postgres Weekly on Mar 13, 2013Newsletter: Ruby Weekly, the first Cooperpress newsletterBook: Beginning Ruby Third Edition, by Peter CooperPodcast episode: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David RowleyFeed reader: FeedbinGitHub repo: feedbin/feedbinFeed reader: FeederEmail testing software: LitmusGitHub repo: MGML markup language for emailPaper: The Design of PostgresGitHub repo: PGRX for building Postgres extensions in RustPodcast news: Podnews.net for daily briefings about podcastsWikipedia page: BBC MicroWikipedia page: ZX SpectrumCal invite: LIVE recording of Ep29 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Jul 9, 2025

Episodio 316.Un señor que ya vivió la vida la última vez que dijo “teníamos un pollo espectacular” fue en 1896 en el medio de la nada haciéndose un huevo frito. Yo ahora los quiero llevar a 1786 a una emergencia extrema donde pasan muchas idioteces que sorprendentemente se resolvieron con una linternita mística y, coño… velas… buena idea.

Liz takes a deep dive into Usenet archives and tells Anika about fandom's earliest discussions of Star Trek: Deep Space 9! (Please note, we are still having audio problems -- despite literally nothing changing in our set ups, Liz's feed is echoing on Anika's channel. This means Anika had to be muted for a lot of the time. At this point we may have to get two tin cans and a really big ball of string to record…)  What was Usenet? (Please do not fact check Liz on the technical details.) And who was using it? The initial response to DS9 before "Emissary" aired… …and after. Here's Roger Tang's 5 January 1993 post with his impressions: "EMISSARY betrayed far too many of the storytelling flaws that have plague[d] TNG over the last two-three years." The very gendered language of the era: Picard and Bashir are "weenies", Dax and Kira are "chicks", but Dax is also a "bimbo" or "airhead" and Kira "has balls". And that's before we get to the slurs… Anika defends Terry Farrell from the Trekkies of 32 years ago. We may not be a Pittcast, but we ARE ride or die for Trinity Santos, thank you for asking. Michael Lee Jacobs' commentary on "Emissary": "It was almost painful to watch TNG right after the two wonderful hours of DS9 this evening." How much are these Usenet posters representative of the wider fandom? Where were other conversations taking place?  Babylon 5 was The Orville of the 1990s, in terms of its fans coming into Star Trek spaces to say, "Stop watching that new Trek with the Black lead, this show with the white dude is way better!" A really fascinating (and incomplete) debate about whether the Garak/Bashir interactions in "Past Prologue" were intended as a homophobic depiction of queerness. A bunch of straight men say no!  The one thing from this era (and the years following it) that we would like to bring back is people sharing their long-form thoughts on new episodes of TV. Like this post on "Duet" which Liz didn't get around to talking about! Finally, shout out to this prediction, a week after "Emissary" aired, which was completely wrong but also … kind of right?

Patrick Schreurs, mede-oprichter van News Service Europe, vertelt over de opkomst en ondergang van zijn nieuwsgroepenbedrijf en de slepende rechtszaak met Stichting Brein die daarop volgde. De aflevering schetst een tijdsbeeld van de internetcultuur rond Usenet, hoe nieuwsgroepen functioneerden als voorloper van sociale media en waarom ze ineens onder vuur kwamen te liggen. Met technische uitleg, historische context én juridische diepgang. Van pionieren in de Watergraafsmeer tot procederen tot aan het Europese Hof: dit is het verhaal van een digitale strijd.In het gesprek worden niet alleen de juridische stappen ontleed, maar ook de maatschappelijke discussie over auteursrechten, netneutraliteit en platformverantwoordelijkheid. Patrick deelt openhartig zijn persoonlijke ervaringen, hoe hij uiteindelijk jurist werd door deze zaak, en wat dit alles betekent voor innovatie versus regelgeving. Een fascinerende mix van tech, recht, geschiedenis en emotie, met ruimte voor nuance en terugkijken op een digitale tijd die we bijna vergeten zijn.ShownotesUsenetStichting BREINEuropese wetgeving over hostinguitsluitingNotice and takedownBorn to Be Alive (jaja, niet de Village People!)The Pirate BayTijdschema0:00:00 Voorstellen: Patrick Schreurs0:0:06 De Ontstaansgeschiedenis van Usenet0:3:08 Hoe Werkt Usenet?0:7:57 De Impact van Retentie0:10:55 Het Veranderende Gebruik van Usenet0:14:36 Oprichting van News Service Europe0:17:42 Kosten en Opslag van Data0:19:36 De Rol van Stichting Brein0:23:00 De Rechtszaak Tegen News Service0:28:36 Aansprakelijkheid en Neutrale Tussenpersonen0:36:44 Het Hoger Beroep en De Uitspraak0:52:15 Schadevergoeding en Toekomstige Stappen1:02:18 Lessen uit de Rechtszaak1:07:33 Afsluiting en ToekomstplannenZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this insightful episode of the Real BOSSES series, Anne Ganguzza and Tom Dheere delve into the unpredictable landscape of social media and its implications for entrepreneurs. As platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok face increasing political and operational challenges and changes, The BOSSES discuss the importance of adapting business strategies to ensure continued success. They share actionable insights on how to diversify marketing efforts and build resilient communities, emphasizing the significance of maintaining control over one's audience through robust mailing lists and finding alternate platforms. 00:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Let's create your next demo together. As an award-winning demo producer, I'll work closely with you to craft a demo reel that showcases your unique talents and strengths. My personalized approach is going to ensure that your demo stands out from the crowd and gets you booked. Book a free 20-minute consult today and get started at anneganguzza.com.  00:28 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss, a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Hey, hey, everyone.  00:45 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Welcome to the VO Boss. Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Hey, hey everyone. Welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the Real Boss series. I'm here with my good friend, Tom Dheere. Hey, Tom, how are you?  00:55 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I am good, how are you?  00:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I'm doing good, but I'll tell you what. Social media is kind of a mess lately, isn't it?  01:04 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Oh my God, yeah it, oh my God, yeah. Oh my God, to say the least, it has been insane the past couple of weeks.  01:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, TikTok shutting down people fleeing off platforms. It's been insane and I think something that, as business owners, we've used for years right to promote our businesses is now somewhat becoming unstable and unpredictable, and I think we should chat about this. What can we do to kind of counteract?  01:31 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) that that's a great question. Well, I will say that literally this morning on Facebook, I saw two friends of mine who run Facebook voiceover groups who basically posted the same exact post, which was we know a lot of you are leaving Facebook right now. It's gotten very politically charged, it's gotten very toxic. You've all mentioned that how your feeds are changing and it's just getting really, really weird. And they both did the same thing in that they said we will continue to be loving and supporting of all voice actors, regardless of your affiliation, regardless of what's going on in the outside world. And there was a chorus of support and concern at the same time.  02:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, I think the community that we feel that we've established on these platforms is, and now the platforms are unstable or toxic. And so now our community because we work independently and our community has been online for all these years and now, all of a sudden, it's just become a place where maybe not everybody wants to hang out anymore.  02:28 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, there's four platforms which everybody seems to be sharing the most concern about Facebook, instagram, because those are both owned by the same company Meta Twitter, now known as X, which has been a point of concern for a couple of years now, since it was purchased. As X, which has been a point of concern for a couple of years now since it was purchased, and, like you just said, tiktok, because of the concerns that have been expressed and the affiliation that it has and the fact that it went down for less than 24 hours and then it was rescued.  02:57 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It was like a mass hysteria. Well, you know what else? It wasn't just TikTok, it was anything owned by TikTok, which I was aware, but I kind of forgot. I use CapCut, which is the video editing program, and I spent a considerable amount of time like learning it and all of a sudden my CapCut was gone and I'm like, oh no, I guess I need a new video app.  03:15 It was kind of good in a way, so that we all could step back and say, all right, let's not put the proverbial all our eggs in one basket, like we've always been saying about pay-to-plays. Right, you don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket with pay-to-plays. That can't be your only way to make income, and social media may not be the only way that we can have community. So let's talk, tom, about how we might be able to incorporate community and also incorporate. Let's say how are we going to market to our potential clients? What can we do to create a sense of community? And I mean my first idea that comes to mind is let's go back to old school, right? Let's create a mailing list, right? That's something that we own. We're not dependent upon a social media platform that we don't own. We own our own lists.  03:59 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yes, when it comes to that, both social media and curating lists of potential, current and past clients both fall in the bucket of self-marketing. Having a social media presence, creating a sense of community, trying to interact with clients potentially that's a form of indirect or passive marketing. And then curating lists of clients cold calls, cold emails, newsletters those are all forms of direct or active marketing strategies. So both of them have their merits. But to your point, if the four, at least the four social media platforms that we just talked about, are unstable on both a cultural view, political, socioeconomic, logistical and technological view, because one of them was taken down and then went back up and goodness knows how many millions of dollars was potentially lost by the TikTok users who monetize? Yeah, absolutely.  04:54 So, this is creating uncertainty in the market, so looking for more stable practices is a very good idea. So, if you have been able to cultivate any relationships with any potential or current or past clients through social media platforms and I'm not just talking about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, which are the four that seem to be the most worrisome or in flux right now- Well, they're the largest.  05:18 They are also, interestingly enough, the largest, and Facebook's been around since what? 2004? Tiktok's pretty new and Twitter's been around since around 2008,. 9, 10. And Instagram is a few years after that, so some of these have been around for quite some time.  05:33 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Well, let's not forget about our old friend YouTube, which right now doesn't appear to be affected so much.  05:37 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) YouTube seems to be relatively stable and actually YouTube has been growing quite steadily.  05:49 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Youtube is the number one streaming platform. I think that that can be an option for people who are looking for community or trying to establish a community. I mean, really, what do you need to establish a community? There's community number one, just community for ourselves, right, because I need my colleagues. I need to be able to communicate with my colleagues and just kind of like just say hey, how's it going, or what are you doing, or just that kind of like at the water cooler sort of thing. And then we also need the community of where can we put ourselves out there, where can we promote and market our materials, if the online community is now threatened?  06:17 I think, I mean, I know, for many years, you know, social media has always been quote unquote, free, right, always been free, and the Internet's been free. And now, all of a sudden, there's a potential to maybe it not being there or free, or we don't know really what's going to happen. So we need to come up with our plan B. I think it's always important that, as business owners, we have a plan B or we have an alternate plan, so that we're not throwing all our eggs in one basket, right? What can that be, tom?  06:45 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) All right, so I have many answers.  06:47 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I have many answers and ideas.  06:48 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Me too. Okay. So because there's a difference between fostering or being part of a community of fellow voice actors on a social media platform and looking to network with potential clients. Yes, despite all the weird that's been going on, linkedin is still the number one social media platform to be connecting with and developing relationships with clients.  07:10 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Except it's got spammy lately.  07:12 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It's gotten very spammy and I've seen a lot more politics on my LinkedIn feed.  07:16 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, but still it's better.  07:19 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It's better. It may be a short-term consequence, it may re-stabilize I'm not sure, but LinkedIn is the number one source for that Twitter was a pretty good source for that too.  07:29 Yes, because also everybody knows that LinkedIn is the professional social media platform, whereas Facebook is the social. It's literally called the social network. It's a social platform. You can be social on a professional platform and you can be professional on a social platform. But all of these different social media platforms were designed with a specific intent in mind. Instagram was all about photos, and now it turned into video as well to compete with everybody else, and then YouTube made shorts to compete with Instagram reels and they're all watered down and they can all do all of those things, but what the thrust of it is?  08:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Before I forget, I do want to like throw in another social media platform that can generate community on a more professional level and that would be Substack.  08:08 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yes, that's definitely one.  08:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That's kind of like here. If you want to sign up and subscribe to my newsletter on a professional basis, there is Substack and I think that might be gaining popularity as well.  08:17 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Slack is another one that is gaining popularity. I have not ventured into Substack or Slack, but the one that I have been exploring lately when it comes to community is Discord.  08:29 Yep, absolutely what's interesting about Discord is what separates it from all of the other social media platforms is it doesn't have a feed. It doesn't have this torrential river of content that you can doom scroll through. For those of you who aren't familiar with Discord, discord has what are called servers. Think of them as like Facebook groups, except that they are generally invite only, though many of them have a public invite where they publicly promote a link or a QR code where you can scan and then you can potentially get admitted into that Discord server. There's usually a number of questions that you need to answer and a code of conduct that you need to adhere to before you'll be admitted into that individual server, and there are a ton of voiceover-related Discord servers. Many of the voiceover groups that you find on Facebook and all of the organizations that you're familiar with in voiceover groups that you find on Facebook and all of the organizations that you're familiar with in voiceover circles, have a Discord server, and within those servers are little threads or sub-servers.  09:33 Sub-threads yeah, Sub-threads where you can talk about whatever subject matter.  09:37 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Then it becomes like the old school Usenet. Oh my God, I'm showing my age. Do you know what I mean? Because people post about topics. It's like a forum yeah it becomes like a forum which Usenet? Do you know Usenet?  09:50 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Or am I even showing my age with you? Yeah, that was way back when I am showing my age with you.  09:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's Usenet back in the day, oh my goodness, yeah. Topic-based.  09:56 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Discord definitely has a. It's also got a bunch of emojis and badges and avatars and all these things that you can do with it.  10:19 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I would say for communities. If you're looking for a community, feel that the Facebook groups if you don't want to be on Facebook anymore at all or you're disliking things about Facebook, in particular, discord for community, I think is a really good way to go. And I think people are just kind of waiting it out a little bit at this moment in time, because Facebook really was for many, many, many years. It was a great community gatherer, and so I think that people are just kind of sitting back, waiting and seeing, or they're fleeing. Some people are going over to Blue Sky, but then again people will say that that is also politically motivated, and so really it just becomes like where are you going to go and where are you going to find the groups? And I think it's one of these things, tom, that we have to just kind of wait and see a little bit. But I would say, professionally, if you want to create that community, start gathering your own mailing list of your current clients and get something going on your website that invites people to subscribe to your email list, and that way you will always have a way to professionally market to that list or communicate with that list. And then, when it comes to community, like colleague and that type of group, I have a wait and see.  11:12 I've kind of have my accounts on all different platforms and I'm just going to join them all and see where I feel that people are kind of migrating to. I know that for me, I've done a lot of work creating groups. I have a VOPs group that has thousands of members. I have business pages on Facebook that have thousands of members and followers. In reality, I have to look at that and say, well, it's possible that my groups have been disbanded and in a way, this is a time where I feel like I can kind of clean up in a way and so things that have grown, maybe possibly stagnant over time, where maybe people are members but maybe they're not engaged members. You know, maybe it's time to really just sit back, take a look, see where things go and really try to engage a quality community right, not necessarily a quantity, remember before it was all like, oh my God, well, I have 90,000 people on my Facebook group, but are they all engaged?  12:03 - Intro (Announcement) Yeah.  12:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So I think now's the time to really start building that community that know, like and trust you, and I feel like that's not just for sales, that's also for people that you interact with on a day-to-day basis. Like Tom, you and I like you're my know, like and trust and I would be like Tom, I want to be where you are so that we can continue our relationship right. So I feel like that's an important criteria for any group that I migrate to or that I create, and then it becomes a build process again.  12:30 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Yeah, I agree. So, bosses, if you've been listening to what Anne's been saying, she's making two extremely important points. One is do not be dependent on any one social media platform for community or for establishing and maintaining relationships with clients. Those are two different things that you can do on all of these social media platforms and the advice of going through all of your social media platforms and keeping track of where all your potential, current and past clients are on all these social media platforms. Make sure that you have all their contact information and get them into your CRM, which is a VO boss conversation that we had very, very recently.  13:15 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) That was the acronym. Party the acronym party. So check out that episode.  13:19 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Absolutely Use that CRM, because it's also a way to cultivate relationships with all of your clients. It's also a way to cultivate relationships with your fellow voice actors. There's nothing stopping you from sending out a newsletter to fellow voice actors, not to tell them about whatever voiceover you've done recently, which they may or may not be interested in, but just talk about concerns or topics of interest to you that may be of interest to them as well. You could also do that through blogging, because your blog posts can have different audiences. You can have blog posts where the audience is your voice seekers and you can have one where your audience is voice actors. To find another way to create a non-social media dependent community and culture.  14:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I think the vlog might be making a comeback. I mean, I think it was always a thing right. But I think a blog I mean I do a Teachable Moment every week and I do shorts every week those are videos that I put out to the community and that can also be part of my blog. There's a lot of those that are part of my blog as well, so people can subscribe to that blog and you can talk about whatever topic floats your boat, floats your passion, and I think that more of the social communities like TikTok and again, you know TikTok is up for now, but again, if you're using it to monetize or using it to try to really sell, just be careful that you're not putting all the eggs in one basket. And so I just say, if you've got good video content right, you can now maybe put that on multiple platforms, right, or the platforms that you feel are right to gain the audience that you want. So just know that your video it turns out to be stuff that you own.  14:51 Stuff that you create is stuff that you own. So if you create videos, put them in a place where you have control over them. Put them on your website, put them in a blog, put them on YouTube if you have a YouTube channel. But if YouTube were to blow up tomorrow, you've got your own server, you've got your own web server that you can put your videos on, and so creating that content that is distinctly something that is owned by you gives you more semblance of control in regards to promoting your services, promoting your voice, promoting your product out there and also fostering a sense of community, even though it may not be engaging, but you can have people like subscribe to your blog, create comments, have engaging comments back and forth.  15:29 And again, there's lots of different places. There's Zoom workspace, there's Slack. There's lots of places where you can have video meetups and create that community there as well, and that's something to think about is to have a Q&A or have a water cooler, like, basically, there's that Zoom water cooler, that's out there, and so how are you going to promote that community water cooler? Well, that can be through a list, a mailing list that you own, or you can continue to put posts out on social media, and again, it just don't depend on that social media to be your one and only way to communicate with your potential clients or your colleagues.  16:05 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) There's also, if you remember, clubhouse and how popular that was during COVID, that became a real great place where a great sense of community that may come back.  16:14 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) This is exactly why.  16:15 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) I'm bringing it up, anne is that Clubhouse may be a place to go back to, because there's no social media feed. There's really not much of a space for flaming trolling spamming.  16:27 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Interesting thought there, because I've done a Thursday VIP room Voices in Podcasting room and we actually were thinking about going away from it, doing Zoom live streaming, zoom on Facebook, which is just another way of doing it. But you're right, clubhouse could be making a comeback.  16:42 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) Well, video, and I'm sure the reason was you know as well as I do is that video has more of a potential for engagement on a human level and on an algorithmic level than pure audio or just photos or just text.  16:55 So yeah, it makes a lot of sense to be on Zoom, but, like for voice actors, sure On Clubhouse. That seems like a really natural fit. There's one other social media platform that I wanted to mention, and that's Reddit. I've had a Reddit account for a few years now, but I just recently decided to start getting in there and seeing what's going on, and it has its level of weirdness, like any other.  17:20 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Again like a Usenet. Sorry, I'm showing my age again. It's like it's a forum.  17:24 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) It's got a forum Usenet kind of feel to it but like any subject matter, personal or professional, that you can think of is there and there's a group of dedicated and a lot of them very social and often supportive people that are talking about any given subject.  17:42 So I've been spending a lot of time on there and, just as a quick side note, just a couple of interesting things that have happened on. There is one there was a high school student who was required to interview a voice actor for a paper that they had to write. So I volunteered and they sent me the questions, answered the questions and they got an A.  18:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I love that you helped someone get an A Tom.  18:02 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) That's great, yeah Now is that going to help my voiceover career? No, no, but that's a good thing, but it's being a part of the community. The other quick example is and I can't say much is that a journalist went on a subreddit who needed to interview certain kind of people to write an article about a particular subject, and I was right for it. So I messaged them and, as a result and DA much.  18:23 And as a result, we had it was a Zoom or a Google Meet meeting for about a half hour, asked me a bunch of questions and in the past week or so they followed up with a bunch of follow-up questions. They wanted to flesh out parts of the conversation and confirm some details and stuff like that, and I think the article comes out next week, so I'll be happy to talk about it then and promote it, because it's a very very, let's just say.  18:50 it's a topic that's extremely relevant to the voiceover community and has been for a couple of years and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. But I wouldn't have gotten that without being on a social media platform and availing myself to what could just come my way, and it's going to turn into a nationally published article from a reputable news organization.  19:08 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Excellent. Now the other thing is yes, we're talking about the social media chaos and what we can do about it. Now the other thing, too, is, if you're finding that social media has become to the point where, if you're doom scrolling and it is doom scrolling and it is becoming mentally difficult right to read things on it, then I would say, for your own mental health, step back, take a break. It's not a critical part of you know. You have your circle of friends. I have, like Tom, I can get in touch with you in lots of other ways other than social media if I have to. So, really, guys, when it comes to your health and the health of your business, if you need to step back absolutely. It's not the be all end all.  19:49 Social media is not the be all end all to your business. It is a method that we have used for many years to promote ourselves. And I remember gosh, back in the day when social media was just becoming popular and there was Instagram and Facebook, and then it was like, oh my God, we can actually like, advertise our businesses on here. And that wasn't so long ago, or maybe it just seems like time has flown by, but I remember back in 2004 or five or six, and doing like a class on, like social media and how to advertise your business. And so 20 years has gone by, it's evolved, it's turned into a very different animal, and so I think, think again, very similar to how technologies evolve and things happen. We need to evolve with the time. So if you need to step back, absolutely for your health, absolutely step back.  20:38 I honestly don't think that it's going to be the destruction of your business unless you have monetized on a platform that is closing down or is one of those platforms that is now you, you know, in chaos, and so really try to diversify.  20:50 Think about how you can keep in contact with your current clients, how you can reach out to other clients, and again, I'm going to just say the good old school, like create a list for yourself. There's not one website software out there that doesn't have a way where you can invite people to become part of your list and you just have a checkbox that says I agree to allow you to send emails and people give you permission, and that becomes, I think, one of the best tools that you have, right for, let's say, maybe a professional way of marketing yourself and also a way of becoming closer to your community of professionals so that your business can stay afloat and with colleagues right. Gather those colleagues close to you. Already now there's multiple. I mean, we all do have phones, we all do have homes, we might live near each other, we all have ways to text and stay in communities together and, I think, don't rely on anyone. Get yourself prepared to not depend on any one method of acquiring clients or communicating with your colleagues at large.  21:58 - Tom Dheere (Co-host) That makes so much sense. I'll leave everybody with one thing Think about why you're on social media. Because it just kind of showed up and everybody just started using it. And nobody took a class or read a manual, they just started messing around on there. So if you're on social media for community and the communities are failing you in one social media platform, go to a different one. If you're going there to look for clients and develop relationships with them, if the social media platforms that you've been on aren't conducive for that they never were or they aren't anymore go to a different social media platform. If you are on social media for purely non-voiceover reasons you're just there to be entertained, amused or inspired or educated, and those aren't working anymore go to different ones. If you're doing it, you just find yourself going like this on your phone and none of those motivations are there. That means the really awful psychology, algorithmic things have got their clutches in you. Yeah, get off. Read a book, take a walk, go have coffee with a friend.  22:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, I love that. That's a great way to end that, tom. Thank you so much. Yeah, bosses, be safe and be healthy with social media. All right, great conversation, tom. I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. Find out more at IPDTLcom. You guys have a great week and connect up with us in multiple ways. Tom and I are available and we have email addresses. You can even email us and you can, for sure, just keep listening to our podcast. So you guys have an amazing week and we will see you next week. Bye.  23:31 - Intro (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguzza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL.   

Pink Floyd's Division Bell album was released in 1994. Shortly after their tour was announced an anonymous person under the name of Publius began a decades long chase for an unspecified prize. Was the secret message pointing to things to come, the new world order, or something else? Let's look into the puzzle and enigma that was and still is Publius Enigma!Email us at: downtherh@protonmail.com

This week's episode brought to you by Indy Wrestling US, Slice on Broadway, Sidekick Media Services and listeners like you at www.Patreon.com/AwesomeCast Join hosts Michael Sorg and Dave Podnar in this week's episode of AwesomeCast as they dive into a snowy night in Pittsburgh and geek out over the latest tech trends, gadgets, and nostalgic throwbacks. Packed with engaging discussions and actionable insights, here's what you'll discover:Main Topics: • Teaching Podcasting at Point Park University • Michael Sorg shares his journey as an adjunct professor teaching podcasting. • Insights into modern classroom technologies like Canvas and how education has evolved. • TikTok Ban and Alternatives • Analysis of the potential TikTok ban in the U.S., legal complexities, and its impact on creators. • Discussion of alternative platforms, including Red Note and Lemon8, with insights into their functionality and challenges. • Learn More https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2475l7zpqyo • Satellite AI Dog Collars • A look at cutting-edge smart collars that use satellite technology for tracking and activity monitoring. • Perfect for adventurous pet owners who hike or camp. • Explore the Tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEMqSmAIqOg • Limo Robot Mower • Revolutionary lawn care with AI-driven, wire-free perimeter robot mowers. • Successful Kickstarter campaign and its implications for yard maintenance. • Read More https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-5UBTTYbww • Doom Captcha: Gaming Meets Verification • A quirky, fun captcha system that requires you to kill three enemies in Doom to verify your identity. • Try It Here https://doom-captcha.vercel.app/ • Retro Tech Nostalgia • A nostalgic dive into CES memories, from Nintendo Power to 90s internet technologies like Usenet and Napster. • Reflection on how past tech shaped today's innovations. Feel free to adapt or request further customization!Subscribe to the Podcast: awesomecast.com Sorgatron Media Podcast Network Feed: sorgatronmedia.fireside.fm Join our AwesomeCast Facebook Group to see what we're sharing and to join the discussion! You can support the show at Patreon.com/awesomecast! Special Thanks to kidmental for the new AwesomeCast Sounds! Visit him at www.kidmental.com

This week's episode brought to you by Indy Wrestling US, Slice on Broadway, Sidekick Media Services and listeners like you at www.Patreon.com/AwesomeCast Join hosts Michael Sorg and Dave Podnar in this week's episode of AwesomeCast as they dive into a snowy night in Pittsburgh and geek out over the latest tech trends, gadgets, and nostalgic throwbacks. Packed with engaging discussions and actionable insights, here's what you'll discover:Main Topics: • Teaching Podcasting at Point Park University • Michael Sorg shares his journey as an adjunct professor teaching podcasting. • Insights into modern classroom technologies like Canvas and how education has evolved. • TikTok Ban and Alternatives • Analysis of the potential TikTok ban in the U.S., legal complexities, and its impact on creators. • Discussion of alternative platforms, including Red Note and Lemon8, with insights into their functionality and challenges. • Learn More https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2475l7zpqyo • Satellite AI Dog Collars • A look at cutting-edge smart collars that use satellite technology for tracking and activity monitoring. • Perfect for adventurous pet owners who hike or camp. • Explore the Tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEMqSmAIqOg • Limo Robot Mower • Revolutionary lawn care with AI-driven, wire-free perimeter robot mowers. • Successful Kickstarter campaign and its implications for yard maintenance. • Read More https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-5UBTTYbww • Doom Captcha: Gaming Meets Verification • A quirky, fun captcha system that requires you to kill three enemies in Doom to verify your identity. • Try It Here https://doom-captcha.vercel.app/ • Retro Tech Nostalgia • A nostalgic dive into CES memories, from Nintendo Power to 90s internet technologies like Usenet and Napster. • Reflection on how past tech shaped today's innovations. Feel free to adapt or request further customization!Subscribe to the Podcast: awesomecast.com Sorgatron Media Podcast Network Feed: sorgatronmedia.fireside.fm Join our AwesomeCast Facebook Group to see what we're sharing and to join the discussion! You can support the show at Patreon.com/awesomecast! Special Thanks to kidmental for the new AwesomeCast Sounds! Visit him at www.kidmental.com

alt.horror.werewolves was once a place where Usenet members could post about werewolf movies. Then a bunch of furries took over and started talking exclusively about being werewolves. In order to get people to stop expecting discussion about horror movies and instead expect serious discussion about someday seeing the real them in the mirror and how […]

I social media sono più antichi di quanto si possa pensare! Dobbiamo tornare indietro fino agli anni '70 per trovare i primi prototipi: Usenet, IRC. La comunicazione online si è trasformata nel tempo. Ma le basi della socializzazione digitale di oggi erano già presenti molto prima dell'avvento di Facebook e di Twitter.Tutti i miei link: https://linktr.ee/br1brownTELEGRAM - INSTAGRAMSe ti va supportami https://it.tipeee.com/br1brown

The Age of Transitions and Uncle 10-24-2024 Eray ÖzkuralAOT #439This week's episode of The Age of Transitions podcast is an interview of Eray Özkural. An AI professional, transhumanist, and all around free thinker, he has a lot of first hand experience from within the world of artificial intelligence technology that he talks about here.Topics include: Marvin Minsky, Usenet, philosophy of mind, machine learning, biocomputing, history of AI, AI research shut down on purpose, AI Winter artificially induced, experts can be fooled by propaganda, misinformation, science of influence, media, examachine, Open AI, scare tactics to keep tech in hands of a few, Sam Altman, free marketsUTP #349Uncle does his show while World Series game one ends. Chuck helps out with a little bit of play by play, and Ed comes on the line to give some post game commentary.Topics include: low numbers of live listeners, World Series game one, LA Rams, exciting game, Dodgers, Yankees, Isaiah popular name, extra innings, overlap of every sport, pitching changes, Freeman, grand slam home run, digital score boards, Ed calls, Uncle's team allegiances, pitching, Bronx Bombers, Brooklyn bums, ankle injuries, unique quality of game of baseball, pitch clock, squirrelslinks to Eray Ozkuralhttps://x.com/examachinehttps://examachine.net/blog/scratch-artificial-is-intelligence-an-existential-risk/FRANZ MAIN HUB:https://theageoftransitions.com/PATREONhttps://www.patreon.com/aaronfranzUNCLEhttps://unclethepodcast.com/ORhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/uncle-the-podcast/FRANZ and UNCLE Merchhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/support-the-podcasts/KEEP OCHELLI GOING. You are the EFFECT if you support OCHELLI https://ochelli.com/donate/Dallas Marriott Downtown Virtual Tickets starting at 74.99In-Person Tickets start at 144.99Student Price is 39.99, must show proof of being a studentTickets on sale atassassinationconference.comUse codeOchelli10for 10% off your ticketDallas Marriott DowntownRoom prices starting at $169 per nightTo book a room call Marriott Reservations at1 (800) 228-9290 or (214) 979-9000and mention the November in Dallas Conference Group RateIf you would like assistance finding discount flights to the conference or activities for your spouse to do in Dallas reach out to Gabbie's Getaway Adventures through Facebook or emailgabbiesgetawayadventure@gmail.com

This week's episode of The Age of Transitions podcast is an interview of Eray Özkural. An AI professional, transhumanist, and all around free thinker, he has a lot of first hand experience from within the world of artificial intelligence technology that he talks about here. Topics include: Marvin Minsky, Usenet, philosophy of mind, machine learning, biocomputing, history of AI, AI research shut down on purpose, AI Winter artificially induced, experts can be fooled by propaganda, misinformation, science of influence, media, examachine, Open AI, scare tactics to keep tech in hands of a few, Sam Altman, free markets

Brad's back from Western North Carolina, so it's time for a casual debriefing on being out there for two and a half weeks dealing with the Hurricane Helene aftermath, with a focus on all sorts of technical subjects like portable lighting strategies, acquiring and hooking up a generator in a hurry, making sense of the wiring layouts in older houses, remote work with almost no connectivity, dehumidifying and remediating a flooded basement, and, yes, some of the sillier computing artifacts that emerged in the course of the cleanup.The links for emergency and offline maps we mentioned that were sent in by a listener:http://cellmapper.net/https://atlas.eia.gov/apps/all-energy-infrastructure-and-resources/explorehttps://organicmaps.app/ Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, a monthly bonus episode, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Source: Universal Guide to Popular Cultural, Internet, Online, and Political Jargon The sources explore the complex and ever-evolving world of jargon, encompassing a vast spectrum of terms from internet slang to political rhetoric to cultural movements. The excerpts provide a glimpse into how language shapes online interactions, political discourse, and cultural understanding in the digital age. One key aspect highlighted is the impact of jargon on online communication. From the early days of BBS, IRC, and USENET to the dominance of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, internet jargon has evolved to reflect the changing landscape of digital interactions. Terms like "DDoS," "flame war," "sockpuppet account," and "TL;DR" illustrate the specific ways in which language is used to navigate online communities, express emotions, and engage in discussions. The sources also emphasize the significance of jargon in political discourse, where terms are often weaponized to promote specific ideologies or discredit opposing viewpoints. This is particularly evident in the politically charged language surrounding figures like Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. Conspiracy theories, such as Pizzagate, and discussions about Jeffrey Epstein and the Clinton Foundation further exemplify how jargon can be used to fuel cultural and political tensions. The sources provide examples of terms that illustrate the power of language in shaping perceptions of political figures and events. For instance, "crooked Hillary," "Obamacare," "MAGA," and "deep state" demonstrate how labels and slogans can be used to either praise or vilify individuals and policies. Furthermore, the sources highlight how language plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of global events, particularly in the context of war and conflict. The framing of terms like "WMDs," "Shock and Awe," and "yellowcake uranium" in the lead-up to the Iraq War underscores how jargon can be used to influence public opinion and justify political actions. The sources also touch upon the use of language in debates surrounding terrorism, such as the controversial phrase "enhanced interrogation" as opposed to "torture." Overall, the sources underscore the importance of being critically aware of the jargon we encounter in the digital age. They encourage readers to develop "information hygiene," which involves being cautious about sensational headlines, verifying sources, and engaging in critical thinking when encountering new information. By understanding the nuances of language and its potential to both illuminate and obfuscate, we can become more informed participants in online and offline discussions. Please note that the sources focus primarily on providing a lexicon of jargon terms and their definitions, rather than offering an in-depth analysis of their usage or implications. Therefore, further research and critical thinking are necessary to fully grasp the complex role of jargon in shaping our understanding of the world. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/chrisabraham/support

NET.SPACE! This week, Emily and V surf their way to the earliest days of being able to connect with other human beings in cyberspace, and also, once again bow to the king of fandoms that takes place in actual space. First, Emily explains the pure haterade that was the Die, Seven, Die! Challenge after the series finale of Star Trek: Voyager. (Also, we looked up how to pronounce "Chakotay.") Then, to give some context for this unconstrained summer hatefest of fun, we look into what, exactly, Usenet was, and why Alice was the fucking best. Did you Usenet? Were you a September nuisance? This Week In Fandom History is a fandom-centric podcast that tells you… what happened this week in fandom history! Follow This Week in Fandom History on Tumblr at @thisweekinfandomhistory You can support the show via our Patreon at http://www.patreon.com/thisweekinfandomhistory.  If you have a fannish company, event, or service and would like to sponsor or partner with TWIFH, please contact us via the Tumblr link above. Please remember to rate the show 5 stars on your listening platform of choice!

On this week's Watchcast we dive deep into the movie that kicked off Tom Cruise's obsession with crafting exciting near death experiences for himself in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible! CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 89: Mission: Impossible (1996) (00:00:36) - Intro. (00:02:03) - What is our familiarity with any version of Mission: Impossible. (00:04:54) - A little bit of M:I history. (00:11:14) - How this movie came to be (and some discussion of The Tom Cruise Experience). (00:19:24) - Talking about writers, and writing. (00:25:43) - Pressing the Tom Cruise button. (00:28:41) - Last production notes. (00:32:32) - How did the TV cast feel about this movie? Well... (00:36:50) - Break! (00:37:13) - We're back! Let's dig into everything going on in Mission: Impossible. (00:43:05) - Setting up the next (and final) mission for some of this team. (00:53:43) - Time to go to work. (00:56:47) - EVERYBODY'S DEAD. (01:02:18) - M:I gadgetry. (01:04:25) - Tom Cruise discovers Usenet. (01:11:40) - Claire's back, so let's go meet Max. (01:21:02) - The Langley Job. (01:37:21) - We have a NOC list, and suddenly, Jim Phelps! (01:48:37) - Let's jump on a train. And off a train. And onto a helicopter. And then off the helicopter back onto the train. (02:06:12) - Folks, we have a franchise. (02:08:10) - Final thoughts. (02:15:38) - Talking about next week's film: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. (02:20:10) - Outro.

An airhacks.fm conversation with Gil Tene (@giltene) about: starting with hacking adventure games on a VAX-11/780 as a teenager, building computers and making money in high school, providing access to Usenet, early programming experiences with Pascal and C/C++, moving to Silicon Valley in 1994 and witnessing the rise of Java, working on fault-tolerant computer systems at Stratus Computer, co-founding Azul Systems and developing the Vega appliances to virtualize Java applications, the technical details of how Vega appliances worked by running JVMs on specialized hardware, the evolution of Azul to focus on pure software solutions such as Zing and supporting openJDK, Gil's continued involvement in coding and maintaining open-source libraries Gil Tene on twitter: @giltene

From malware developers targeting child exploiters with ransomware, to major cloud services exposing credentials, learn how digital vigilantes and technological oversights shape online security. Featuring insights on the United Nations' latest ransomware dilemma, uncover the intricate web of cybersecurity challenges faced globally. URLs for Reference: Malware Dev lures child exploiters into honeytrap to extort them AWS, Google, and Azure CLI Tools Could Leak Credentials in Build Logs United Nations agency investigates ransomware attack, data theft Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_daily_decrypt/ Thanks to Jered Jones for providing the music for this episode. https://www.jeredjones.com/ Logo Design by https://www.zackgraber.com/ Tags: cybersecurity, ransomware, malware, cloud security, digital threats, cyber vigilantes, tech giants, United Nations, cyber attack, data theft, CryptVPN, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, CLI tools, BleepingComputer, The Hacker News Search Phrases: Cyber vigilante justice malware extortion Cloud CLI tools security vulnerabilities United Nations cyberattack investigation CryptVPN ransomware against child exploiters AWS, Google, and Azure CLI tools leaking credentials Impact of ransomware on global organizations Cybersecurity threats in cloud computing Cybersecurity tactics against illegal online activities Data breach at United Nations agency New trends in cyber threats and digital security Transcript: Apr22 Malware developers are now targeting individuals seeking child exploitation material, employing cryptVPN ransomware to extort them by locking their systems and demanding payment, as revealed by Bleeping Computer. What methods are these developers using, and why do I want them to succeed? Leaky CLI, a vulnerability discovered by Orca in AWS, Google, and Azure CLI tools, is exposing sensitive credentials in build logs, putting countless organizations at risk of cyber attacks. What measures can organizations take to prevent sensitive credentials from being exposed by build logs? Finally, hackers have infiltrated the United Nations Development Program's IT systems, stealing sensitive human resources data from its global network dedicated to fighting poverty and inequality. You're listening to the Daily Decrypt. Malware developers are now turning their tactics against individuals seeking child exploitation material, specifically targeting them with ransomware designed to extort money by feigning legal action. This new strain of malware, dubbed CryptVPN, was recently analyzed by Bleeping Computer after a sample was shared with the cybersecurity researcher MalwareHunterTeam. CryptVPN tricks users into downloading a seemingly harmless software, which then locks the user's desktop and changes their wallpaper to a menacing ransom note. The ploy begins with a decoy website that impersonates. Usenet Club, a purported subscription service offering uncensored access to downloadable content from Usenet, which is an established network used for various discussions, which unfortunately also includes illegal content. The site offers several subscription tiers, but the trap is set with the free tier, which requires the installation of the CryptVPN software to access the supposed free content. Now to be honest, I feel like I don't even want to give away these clues to any child predators that may be listening. So I'm going to stop there as far as how the attack works, but I'm really glad that attackers have found this vector because people who are partaking in illegal activities have a lot to lose and are often pretty scared, you know, unless they're complete psychopaths. And and so if someone's able to get the information or lure people into these websites You know, this reminds me of something that happened to me back in my single days. And those of you who know me personally can validate the authenticity of this story, but it might sound a little crazy to just an average listener. But swiping on Tinder, matched with someone, they didn't really want to chat too much, they just wanted to start sending nude photographs. And I personally, it's not my thing, but let's just say I'm not going to unmatch this person for offering. And so nude photographs came through, there was no exchange, but they did ask for photographs of myself, which I was not interested in sending. And in fact, I wasn't really interested in pursuing anyone who would just jump in and send nude photographs. So I stopped talking to them. And about a couple of days later, I got a phone call from a Someone claiming to be the police department, saying that they had gotten my number from this girl's dad, and she's underage, and now they have proof that I've been sending nude photographs to this underage person. Well, I don't know. They accused me of that and that never happened. So immediately I knew it was a scan. But let's just say hypothetically that I had sent pictures to this person. I would be pretty scared receiving this threat. Because my whole life would change, right? If I became a child predator or a sexual predator or whatever it's called, then like a lot of stuff changes. And at the time I was in the military, so that was the end of my military career or whatever. So it's a very similar to that. If you're doing something wrong. And you get caught in a trap, you're very likely to pay the ransom. So first of all, don't mess around with children online. Don't do illegal sexual things. And you have nothing to worry about with this scam. So please stop doing that. Don't do that. And you've got nothing to worry about, it's been recently unveiled that command line interface tools from the tech giants such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are susceptible to exposing sensitive credentials in the build logs, presenting a substantial security hazard to enterprises. This vulnerability is a Which the cloud security firm Orca has dubbed Leaky CLI, involves certain commands on the Azure CLI, AWS CLI, and Google Cloud CLI that could reveal environment variables. Roy Nizmi, a prominent security researcher, highlights in a report to the Hacker News that, quote, some commands can expose sensitive information in the form of environment variables, which can be collected by adversaries when published by tools such as GitHub Actions. In response, Microsoft has proactively addressed this security lapse in its November 2023 update, designating it with the CVE identifier 2023 36052, which carries a critical CVSS score of 8. 6 out of 10. Conversely, Amazon and Google view the exposure of environment variables as an anticipated behavior, advising organizations to refrain from storing secrets within these variables. Instead, they recommend using specialized services like AWS Secrets Manager or Google Cloud Secret Manager, which is a great recommendation. Furthermore, Google has advised users of its CLI tools to employ the dash dash no dash user output enabled option, which prevents the printing of command output to the terminal, thereby mitigating the risk of data leaks. Orca has also identified several instances on GitHub where projects inadvertently leaked access tokens and other sensitive data through continuous integration and deployment tools, including GitHub actions, CircleCI, TravisCI, and CloudBuild, which is always going to be a problem. Take those. Pull request reviews, seriously. Nimzy warns, if bad actors get their hands on these environment variables, this could potentially lead to view sensitive information, including credentials, such as passwords, usernames, and keys, which could allow them to access any resources that the repository owners can. He added that CLI commands are by default assumed to be running in a secure environment. But coupled with CICD pipelines or continuous integration, continuous development, they may pose a security threat. This ongoing issue underscores the critical need for heightened security measures within cloud computing environments. Go out there, get you a new cloud job, my guys. Finally, the United Nations Development Program, or UNDP, has launched an investigation into a significant cyber attack where intruders compromised its IT systems, resulting in the theft of critical human resources data. So, human resources data sounds It's pretty benign to me, like, the way that that's framed seems like nothing, but think about what the data Human Resources has. It's the crown jewels. They've got your social security number for your W 2 form, they've got your previous jobs, they've got your address, they've got your email address, they've got everything. So Human Resources data is nothing to bat an eye at. The agency, which is a cornerstone of the United Nations efforts to combat poverty and inequality worldwide. Confirmed the breach occurred in late March within the local IT infrastructure for the United Nations. Following the detection of the breach on March 27th, thanks to a threat intelligence alert, UNDP acted swiftly. Quote, actions were immediately taken to identify a potential source and contain the effective server as well. As to determine the specifics of the exposed data and who was impacted. The ongoing investigation seeks to fully understand the incident's nature and scope, as well as its impact on individuals whose information was compromised, but to further complicate some matters, the eight base ransomware gang, a group known for its broad attacks on various industries, claimed responsibility for the data theft. On the same day as the breach, they added a new entry for UNDP on their dark web leak site. The documents leaked, according to the attackers, contain a huge amount of confidential information, ranging from personal data to financial records and employment contracts. This cyberattack is not the first the United Nations has suffered. Previous breaches have struck the United Nations Environmental Program and key United Nations networks in Geneva and Vienna, showcasing ongoing vulnerabilities within UNIT systems. Meanwhile, the 8Base group, which claims to target companies neglecting data privacy, continues its surge of attacks, having listed over 350 victims on its data leak site to date. So if you're listening and you know your company is rejecting some data privacy protocols, maybe use this story as incentive to get them to pay more attention to this. That's all we got for you today. Happy Monday. Thanks so much for listening. Please head over to our social media accounts, Instagram, Twitter, Twitter. com. Youtube Give us a follow, give us a like, and send us a comment. We'd love to talk. And we'll be back tomorrow with some more news.

Everyone has that show.. you know that show – the one you were the repository of knowledge for. The show you didn’t miss week to week. You were on the Usenet forum, had built a vanity page for it on AOL, your entire Livejournal icon system was built around your favorite character’s moods. You WERE this show… which apparently aired in 2005. Anyway, as the years went on, you started to feel that maybe.. just maybe.. it got a bit long in the tooth. Then the tooth turned into a tusk. This week, we are discussing shows that overstayed their welcome – maybe by a year, maybe by a decade. Grab a fish biscuit, and settle in for Shows That Went On Too Long… And please, make sure to listen all the way through, the last selection may shock you. Ok, here we keep going… Full Episode

Pablos: People are pissed off about social media all the time. They think that Facebook is making people vote for the wrong person. It's still very difficult to find somebody who thinks they voted for the wrong person because of Facebook, but they think everyone else did. Never mind that, there's this kind of, uh, very popular sensibility, which is to blame Facebook for all the problems in the world. They're doing fake news, they're doing, disinformation they're doing , every possible thing that could be wrong. Everybody wants to blame Facebook for getting wrong or Twitter or, any of the other social platforms. So if you think about it, in one sense, , yeah, Facebook got everybody together. I'm just going to use them as the example, we can extrapolate. They got everybody together. They, ended up getting too much content. you and your friends are posting too much shit. Nobody has time to see all of it. So you need the magical algorithm, which you should do like triple air quotes every time I say algorithm. They're like, the algorithm is supposed to figure out, okay, of all the shit that's supposed to be showing up on your feed, what's the coolest, or what's the stuff that you're gonna like the most? That's the job of the algorithm. And of course, we all believe the algorithm is tainted. And so, it's not really trying to find the things I care about the most or like the most. It's just gonna find the things that piss me off the most so that I get my, outrage, dopamine hit and keep coming back. So, which may all be true. We don't know. But, the point is, there's a fundamental problem, which is you cannot see everything that gets posted from all the people you follow. So, there does have to be some ranking. And then the second, thing is that you want that ranking to be tuned for you. And I think the thing that people, are missing about this is that you've got to have, a situation where it is very personalized because, not everybody's the same. Even if you and I followed the same thousand people, it doesn't mean we have identical interests. There are other factors that need to play into determining like what I want to see and what you want to see. And then I think that there's a whole bunch of things that, are classified as societal evils, that Facebook has to decide are not okay for anybody to follow. So if you have posts about Hitler, nobody should get to see those. Even if you're a World War II historian, nope, you don't get to see it. So there's a kind of, problem here, which is that all of this flies in the face of actual diversity, actual multiculturalism, we have 190 countries in the world. We have a lot of different peoples, different cultures, you and I just had a huge conversation about, different cultures and how they drive, we don't agree about these things. We have different ideas in different places in the world, even whole societies have different ideas about what's okay, and what's not okay, and that is the definition of Culture that is the definition of multiculturalism is valuing that that exists and letting everybody have their own ideas And and make let these different people operate in the way that suits them And when you travel, you get beaten over the head with that because, I can appreciate that people drive like this in Bangkok. That's not how I want to do it , that's kind of the fundamental point here. So anyway, what I'm trying to get at is you cannot create one set of rules for the entire world. That is not okay. Ash: 100% Pablos: And so what Facebook has chosen to do is try to create one set of rules for the entire world, at least the two billion people that are on Facebook. Ash: But then you become the government of Facebook. Pablos: You become the government of Facebook. And it's and we're all pissed off because they keep choosing rules that some people don't like or whatever. And so I think this is untenable and I don't think there's a solution there. I think it is a fool's errand and what I believe is, has gone wrong is that Facebook made the wrong choice long ago and they chose to control the knobs and dials and now they're living with the flack that comes with, every choice they make about where to set those knobs and dials. And what they should have done is given the user the knobs and dials. They should let me have buried six pages deep in the settings, have control over. What do you want more of? What do you want less of? Ash: More or less rant. Pablos: Yeah, They try to placate you with the like button and unfollow and all that, but it's not really control. So, contrast that with, the other fork in history that we didn't take, go back to like 2006, in the years before Facebook, We had this beautiful moment on the internet, with RSS. So RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, that hardly matters, RSS was an open standard that allowed any website to publish the content in the form of posts in a kind of machine readable way. And then you could have an RSS reader that could subscribe to any website. So we didn't have the walled garden of Facebook, but, you remember all this, of course, but I'm just trying to break it down here. What we had was, this kind of open standard. , anybody in the world could publish on RSS using their website, all the blog software did this out of the box. WordPress does it out of the box. In fact, most websites, would support RSS. And then you had a reader app, that could be any reader app. This is again, open standards so get any reader you want. And if you just subscribe to any website in the world, you are following them directly. When they publish a post, it show up in your feed. And when you followed too many people, you could start making filters. So I've been making filters. I still do RSS. So by the way, all this machinery still works 15 years later. The machinery still works almost any website if you just put /RSS or / feed on the domain name you'll see an RSS feed and you can subscribe to that so it goes into my reader app And then I've been building filters over the years. So I have filters like -Trump because I got sick and tired of all this bullshit about Trump regardless what you think about Trump I just wanted to think about other things and it was painful to have a feed filled with Trump during the election So I have also -Biden, I have -Kanye, I have -Disney, I have minus all kinds of shit that I don't want to see, I still follow the publishers, but it's weeding out articles that are about those things. And so I get this feed that's pretty curated for me and my interests, and I get more of the stuff I like and less of the stuff I don't like, but I'm responsible for the knobs and dials, I'm controlling the settings, and I get to have my own autonomy about what I think is cool and not cool. And if I don't want Hitler, I can easily just -Hitler. And what we did instead is we kind of signed up for this sort of, babysitter culture of having Facebook make those choices for us. And people not, taking responsibility for their own choices has put us in this situation where we just have an internet full of people want to blame somebody else for everything that they think is going wrong. What we need to do is, figure out a way to, shift the world back to RSS. And out of the walled garden. So that's my, that's where I'm at, and I have ideas about that. Ash: And it's interesting, go back to Delphi, So Delphi internet... Pablos: One of the first, before, before internet, this was like an ISP, like a, like AOL. Centralized ISP. Ash: Right. So, so Delphi was sold to Murdoch, to News Corp and, and then the founder, Dan Burns brought that back. He purchased it, he re acquired the company and then invited a couple of ragtag individuals, myself and, and Palle again, and Rusty Williams. Chip Matthes, and we had like, you know, a room with a VAX in the back. I was doing a lot of the stuff, but we were running forums. Dan had this crazy idea. It was like, Hey, what if you could just make your own forum? And this would be like way pre Facebook, it's like 97, 98. And 98, we started supplying that ability to websites. And the first one we did was a guy named Gil . And like we said to him, it's like, Hey Gil, like you guys really should have some forums, like, yeah, we totally should be. Wait, so how do we do that? And we wrote like a little contract, right? like the first, I think, business development contract that you could probably make. He was head of, , business development, eBay. Right. So he did that. I mean, he's very well known sort of angel kind of lead syndicate guy. Now I like an angel is for like for, for ages. Pablos: Oh, Penchina. I know who you're talking about. Yeah. Ash: We still have like the first document, you will do this. I will do this. I will give you a forum. You will use it for people to talk about, I don't know, the, the, their beanie baby or whatever they were selling back then. And the, the reality was that that took off and then we started supplying this technology, which we then enabled, we RSS enabled it, by the way, of course, at some point, right. When it was, when the, when the XML feeds were like ready to go, we upgraded from XML And then we, we, we took that and we said, all right, let's go, let's go for it. And at some point we're doing 30 million a month, 30 million people a month. Unique. We're like on this thing and we never governed. You could, you could go hidden, right? Kind of like your locked Instagram page versus not, but we didn't govern anything. Forums had moderators, they were self appointed moderators of that domain of, of madness. So if you didn't like that person's moderation, You know, like, all right, screw this guy. You know, like, I don't, I don't want to listen to you. You're crazy. And what we found, and this was the piece of data that I think that was the wildest. Servers are expensive back then. You actually have to have servers. Or in our case we were beating everyone else. Cause we had a VAX that was locked in a, Halon secure room. No, because it came when we repurchased it for a dollar. Like the VAX was still there and Lachlan Murdoch's, office became our like conference room. No, I'm not kidding. It was, it was really crazy. There was a, it was just a VAX sitting there and, Hey, look, you could run UNIX on it. We were good. We didn't care. It loved threads and it was good. And it could do many, many, many, many threads. So we were running this, this thing highly efficiently. There's six people in a company doing that much. That was the company, literally six. I look today and how many people we hire and I'm like, there were six of us. It was wild, the iceberg effect took place. So what ended up happening is the percent, and this is where I think Facebook can't do or doesn't want to do, is how do you advertise below the waterline? And when we were sitting there with the traffic, we're like, dude, why is there so much traffic, but we can't see it, right? It looked like we only had 20, 000 forums or something, and there was like all this mad traffic going on. And. It was something like the 80, 20 rule the other way. It was like 20 percent was indexable that you could see that you could join a forum. And it was 80 percent were, were insane things like Misty's fun house. That by the way, is a legitimate. Forum at one point, right? It was Misty's fun house. So I'm just saying, cause we're trying to figure out what was going on. Where were the people chatting and talking? And that's what we did. We let them bury themselves deeper and deeper and deeper. Usenet did that. If you just go back in time, what do you think BBSs were? It's the same. Pablos: Exactly. Ash: We always love talking. Pablos: Yeah. People love talking. Ash: You just figure out which one you want to dial into. Pablos: Nobody's pissed off about who they're talking to really. Usually they're pissed off about who other people are talking. They're pissed off about some conversation they're not really a part of. Or a conversation they can be a spectator on, but doesn't match their culture. That's one of the big problems with Twitter it's like BBSs, and it's BBS culture. Elon was the winner of the Twitter game long before he bought Twitter, because, that's just BBS culture that he had in his mind, IRC or whatever. All kinds of people who are not part of that culture, are observing it and think that it's a horrible state, of society that people could be trolling each other and shit. And that's just part of the fun. You have this problem when you try to cram too many cultures into one place, it takes a lot of struggle to work that out if you're in, Jamaica, Queens, then you're gonna, you're gonna work it out over time, with a lot of struggle, you're going to work it out and the cultures are going to learn to get along. But in, but on Twitter, there's no incentive. Ash: That's why we still have states. The EU still has, like, how many languages? That's why we have Jersey for New Yorkers. Pablos: The EU in their way has figured out how these cultures can get along. I think there's a real simple fix to this. The big death blow to RSS in some sense was that the winning reader app was Google Reader. And so the vast majority, of the world that was using RSS was using Google Reader. And then I don't totally have insight on how this happened, but, Google chose to shut down Google Reader. And I don't know if they were trying to steer people into their, Facebook knockoff products or whatever at the time. in a lot of ways I think what it did is it just handed the internet over to Facebook. Because anybody who was being satisfied by that, and just ended up getting, into their Facebook news feed instead. So it just kind of ran into a walled garden. I don't really blame Facebook for this, the way a lot of people want to. I blame the users. You've got to take some responsibility, make your own choice, choose something that's good for you, and most people are not willing to do that. But, I think to make it easier for them, and there is a case to be made that , people got better things to do than architect their own rSS reader process, but we could kind of do it for them. And so I think there's one, one big kingpin missing, which is you could make a reader app that would be like an iPhone app now. And you could think of it as like open source Instagram. It's just an Instagram knockoff, but instead of following, other people on a centralized platform by Instagram, it just follows RSS. And then it only picks up RSS posts that have at least one picture, right? So any RSS post that has one picture and then the first time you post it automatically makes a WordPress blog for you, that's free. And then, posts your shit as RSS compliant blog posts, but the reader experience is still just very Instagramesque. So now it's completely decentralized in the sense that like you own your blog, yeah, WordPress is hosting it, but that's all open source. You could download it, move it to Guam if you want, whatever you want to do. So now all publishers have their own direct feeds. All users are publishers, which is kind of the main thing that Facebook solved. Ash: Content is no longer handed over to someone, right? That's the other big thing. Pablos: Exactly. The content is yours and then your followers are yours, right? When they follow you, they follow you at your URL. And so you can take them with you wherever you go. And then to make this thing more compelling, you just add a few tabs. You add the Twitteresque tab. You add the TikTokesque tab for videos. And, add, the podcast tab. So now, posts are just automatically sorted into the tab for the format that matches them. Because people have different modalities for, for consuming this shit. So, depending on what you're in the mood for, you might want to just look at pictures because you're on a conference call. Fine. Instagram. Or, you know, you might want to watch videos because you're on a flight. Who knows? So, the point being, all of this is easy to do. You and I could build that in a weekend. And then the reason that this works, the reason this will win is because you can win over the creators, right? Because the sales pitch to a creator, and those are the people who drive the following anyway, you see TikTok and everybody else kissing the ass of creators because that's who attracts the following. The creators win because they're not giving anything up to the platform. Because they make money off advertising. So fine. We make an advertising business and we still, take some cut of what the creators push out. But if they don't like us, there's a market for that, right? The market is I'm just pushing ads out along with my content to my followers. Some of them watch the ads. Some of them don't. I have this much of an impact. And so now you get the platforms out of the way. Ash: If you do it right, Google has ad networks that they drop everywhere. Pablos: Everybody has ad networks already for websites. You could just use that. Amazon has one. So you can sign up for that if you want. Or the thing that creators want to do, which is go do collabs, go do direct deals with brands. Now you're getting 100 percent of that income. You pump it out to your fans. And there's no ad network in the middle. Nobody's taking a cut. Alright, if you could cut your own deals, then great, but you're in control and you can't be shadow banned, you can't be deprioritized in the feed, because that's the game that's happening. These platforms, they figure out you're selling something, you immediately get deprioritized. And so the creators are all pissed off anyway. So I think we can win them over easily enough. And then the last piece of it is, there's one thing that doesn't exist, which is you still need to prioritize your feed. You still need an advanced algorithm to do it. You don't want to be twiddling knobs and dials all day. You might put in -Hitler if you want. But what should happen is you should also be able to subscribe to feed ranking services. So that could be, the ACLU, or the EFF, or the KKK, whoever you think should be ranking your feed. Ash: Well, I was actually thinking you could subscribe to a persona. So people could create their own recipes. So this is the world according to Ash, right? Here you go. Like, I've got my own thing. I've done my dials, my tuning, my tweaks, my stuff. And you want to see how I see the world. Here we go. The class I teach, that's the first day I tell people, take Google news and sit down and start tuning it. And everyone's like, well, let me just start to just add, put ups and downs, ups and downs, add Al Jazeera, do whatever you want. Just do everything that you want, just make them fight and put all of that in and then go down the rabbit hole. But there's no way to export that. When we start class, I always talk about viewpoints And how all content needs a filter because we are filter. But if I want to watch the world as Pablos, I can't, there's no, you can't give me your lens. So if we look at the lens concept, today you can tune Google News, there is a little subscribe capability, but you could tune it and poke it a little bit, and it will start giving you info. It's not the same, quite the same as RSS, but it's giving you all the news feeds from different places, right? Could get Breitbart, you could get, Al Jazeera, you could get all the stuff that you want. And if you go back in time to, to when I was working with the government, that was actually my sort of superpower, writing these little filters and getting, Afghani conversations in real time translated. And then find the same village, in the same way. So then I would have two viewpoints at the same time. The good thing was that when you did that what I haven't seen, and I would love, love this take place, is for someone to build a, Pablos filter,? And I could be like, "all right, let me, let me go see the world the way he sees it." his -Hitler, his minus, minus, -election, - Trump, -Biden, that's fine. And then, and now I have a little Pablos recipe. I can like click my glasses, and then, then suddenly I see the world, meaning I filter the world through Pablos's. Pablos: Yeah, I think that, I think we're saying a similar thing because then what you could do is you could, subscribe to that. You could subscribe to the Pablos filter. You could subscribe to the... Ash: exactly, I'm taking your ACLU thing one step further. I think ACLU is like narrow, but you could go into like personality. Pablos: You could even just reverse engineer the filter by watching what I read. My reader could figure out my filter by seeing the choices that I make. Ash: Yeah, if it's stored it right, if we had another format, but let's just say that we had an RSS feed filter format. 'cause it's there. It's really the parameters of your RSS anyway. But if you could somehow save that, config file, go back thousand years, right? If you could save the config.ini, that's what you want? And I could be like, Hey, Pablo, so I can hand that over. Let's share that with me. And now what's interesting is works really well. And it also helps because each person owning their own content, the, the beauty of that becomes, you never, you never filtered, you never blocked you, you, you're self filtering. Pablos: That's right. Ash: We're self subscribing to each other's filters. Pablos: Publishers become the masters of their domain. If you've got a problem with a publisher, you've got to go talk to them, not some intermediary. The problem is on a large scale, control is being exercised by these intermediaries. And they have their own ideas and agendas and things. The job here is to disintermediate - which was the whole point of the internet in the first place - communication between people. Ash: Then the metadata of that becomes pretty cool, by the way. If I figured out that, okay, now it looks like 85 percent of the population has, has gone -Biden, -Trump. Let's think about that. Suddenly you've got other info, right? Suddenly you're like, Oh, wait a minute. and if you're an advertiser or you're a product creator, or you're a, like just sitting there trying to figure out how can I get into the world, that becomes really valuable, right? Because you could. Go in and say, people just don't give a shit about this stuff, guys. I don't know what you're talking about. Whereas when you have one algorithmic machine somewhere in Meta/Facebook, whatever we want to call it, pushing things up, it could be pushing sand uphill, right? It could be like stimulating things that you don't necessarily know you want. The structure that you just described flips that on its head because it says, Hey, I just don't want to listen to this shit, guys. Like, I just could not give a crap about what you're saying. Pablos: Right. Ash: And if enough people happen to do that, then the content creators also have some, some idea of what's going on. We try to decode lenses all day long,? We spend our life, like you said, in meetings or in collaborations or business development. What do you think we do? We sit there, we're trying to figure out the other person's view. We're trying to understand if you're a salesperson, "Hey, can I walk a mile in that guy's shoes" or speak like that person, I've never heard of anyone sort of selling me, lending me, letting me borrow their RSS, like, their filter. That would be phenomenal, that'd be great. And I bet you, if you did it right, you might even solve a lot of problems in the world because then you could see what they see, you know, I don't want to touch the topics that we know are just absolute powder kegs, but every time we get to these topics, I always tell the person, can you show me what you, what are you reading? Pablos: Yeah. Ash: Like, where did you get? Pablos: Yeah. Ash: You ever, you ever asked someone like, "where did you get that?" and then they show you, they show you kind of their, feed. And you're just like, what is going on? Like, if you, if you go to someone, whether they're pro or anti vax, it doesn't matter where it is. And just look at their feed, look at what they're listening to, because it's not the same thing I'm listening to, because the mothership has, has decreed which, which one we each get. But you look at it and then you're like, okay, maybe the facts that they were presented with were either incomplete and maybe not maliciously? I get it in the beginning of this, you started like, okay, is it malicious and didn't do it would get changed. But if you just cut out, I don't know, let's just say there's like 10 pieces of news, but I only give you five and I give the other person the other five. And they're not synchronous, you're going to start a fight. There's no question. What we don't have is the ability to say, Hey, like, let me, let me be Pablos for a second before I start screaming, let me see what he sees. that will probably change that could change a lot. Pablos: Think it could. That and certainly there's a cognitive bias that feels comfortable in an echo chamber. This is one of the issues that we're really experiencing is that, the process of civilization, literally means "to become civil" to do that. It's sort of the long history of humans figuring out how to control obsolete biological instincts. We've been evolved to want to steal each other's food and girlfriends. That's not specifically valuable or relevant at this point. We've had to learn how to get along with more people, we've had to learn to become less violent, we've had to learn to, play the long game socially, those things. And, there's work to do on that as far as like how we consume all this, this information, all the media. You're using the wrong part of your brain to tune your feed right now. You're using the lazy Netflix part of your brain to tune your news, and that's not really , how are you going to get good results. There's work to do to evolve the tools and work to do to evolve the sensibilities around these things. And so, you know, what I'm suggesting is like, we're not going to get there by handing it over to the big wall garden. You got to get there through this, again, sort of. Darwinian process of trying a lot of things and so you've described some really cool things that we'd want to be able to try that are impractical to try because things are architected wrong and using Facebook is the central switchboard of these conversations or Twitter or whatever and so you know what we need is a more open platform where like you know we can all take a stab at figuring out how to design cool filters that express our point of view and share them. And that's not possible in the current architecture. I think the last thing is, there are certainly other frustrations and attempts to go solve some class of these, some subset of these problems. You've got Mastodon, of course, and the Fediverse, and you've got Blue Sky trying in their way to make a sort of open Twitter thing. And then you've got, these other attempts, but a lot of them are pretty heavy handed architecturally. As far as I can tell, most of them end up just being some suburb of people who are pissed off about one thing or another that they get its adoption, right? So, Mastodon is basically a place for people who are, backlashing against Twitter. As far as I can tell. Ash: Yeah, and we even worked on one, right? Called Ourglass. Pablos: I don't know that one. Ash: It was coming out and we actually did an entire session on it. I actually worked on some of the product thought design on, on how that works. , it was like, it's all on chain. Part of the, the thing that, we did was very similar to what you're talking about. You wanted the knobs and the controls, and you wanted people to rant in their space. I know it gets pretty dark when you say, okay, but what are they allowed to talk about in in the dark depths of that sort of internet and and I say, "well, they already talk about it, guys" Whether they get into a smoky back room or, there's somewhere else that if they don't say it, I feel we get more frustrated. Pablos: The fundamental difference here is between centralized services. That's certainly Facebook and Twitter, but it's also Delphi and AOL, versus open, decentralized protocols and the protocols in time win over the services like TCP/IP won over AOL, AOL was centralized service, TCP/IP, decentralized protocol. At the beginning it was a worse user experience, harder to use, but It's egalitarian and it won and I think that that's kind of the moment we're in right now with with the social media. We're still on centralized service mode and it needs to be architected as decentralized protocol and we had a chance to do that before Facebook and we lost and so now there's just like the next battle is like how do we get back on the track of decentralized protocol, and I think if we just define them... That's why I think RSS won because it's called Really Simple Syndication for a reason. Because it's really simple. It was easy for any developer to integrate. Everybody could do it. And so it just became ubiquitous almost overnight. You could design something cooler with the blockchain and whatnot. But it's probably over engineered for the job. And the job right now is just like, get adoption. Ash: We started going down that path. So Delphi's sort of twin. Was, called Prospero. So Prospero was, little Tempest reference, was designed. As a way that you could just adopt it. That was that, that first eBay deal. And then we did about.com and most of the stuff. And right now you see Discuss. It's at the bottom of, of some comments. It's a supported service where, you had one party taking care of all of the threads and handles and display methods and posts and logins. And, you were seamlessly logged into the other sites. MD5 sort of hash and we did the first single sign on type nonsense, and we used to build gateways between the two, you're going to go from one to another, but the whole idea was that you provide, the communication tool, As a, as an open or available service. And you could charge for for storing it. And then what happens is you don't do the moderation as a tool. That's your problem. You strip it back to "look, I'm going to provide you the car and I don't care how you drive it." Go back to our story, whether you're in Vietnam or Riyadh or whatever you're doing, we're going to, we're not there to tell you which lane to go into, but that's, that's your problem. I think that one of the challenges with like RSS, cause we were RSS compliant, by the way. I'm pretty sure Prospero and I'm sure it's still around because it went XML to RSS. And I remember the fact that you could subscribe to any forum that was Prospero powered. You could subscribe to it a lot, like directly through your RSS reader. And I remember what was great about it is that people were like, "we don't want, your viewer." Just like we didn't want your AOL view of like, "you've got mail." I want my own POP server and then IMAP or whatever it is. I think there does need to be, like you said, someone putting together a little toolkit that's super easy. They don't need to know it's got RSS. They don't need to know anything. But it's like, "own your post." it can be like an Own Your Post service. And then the Own Your Post service happens to publish RSS and everything else, and it's compliant. Pablos: I think you just make an iPhone app and when you set up the app it just automatically makes you a WordPress blog and if you want you can go move it later. Ash: You got it. All that other stuff is just automated. Pablos: You don't even have to know it's WordPress. It's behind the scenes. Ash: If you were going to do this, what you would do is you'd launch and I would launch it like three different companies. Like three different tools. I've got a, "keep your content" tool and the keep your content guys are something compliant, RSS. You keep bringing it back. It's published, it's out there and then some new company, Meta Two, Son of Meta, creates a reader. Anyone that's got a RSS tag on it, we're a reader for it. So anyone using Keep Your Content or, whatever. the idea being that now you're showing that there's some adoption. You almost don't have to rig it. There is a way to do this because no one wants to download a reader if there aren't sources. Pablos: The thing can bootstrap off of existing sources because there's so much RSS compliant content. You could imagine like day one. If you downloaded this reader today. You could follow Wall Street Journal and just everything online. And some of it you have to charge for it. Like Substack has RSS. I follow Substacks. You could just follow those things in the app Substack has a reader, but it only does Substacks, and probably Medium has one that only does Medium. But we have one that does both, plus New York Times and everything else. So now, like any other thing, you just follow a bunch of stuff. And then, there's a button that's like post. Sure, post. Boom. Now that fires up your own WordPress blog. Now you're posting. All your content's being saved. You control it. You got some followers or if you have this many followers, here's how much you can make in ad revenue. Boom, sign up for ad network. Now you're pushing ads out. All This could be done with existing stuff, just glued together, I think, and with the possible exception of the filter thing, which, needs to be more advanced probably worth revisiting. Ash: I think what You could do is maybe the very first thing you do, create the filter company, like your RSS glasses. So instead of having to do that heavy lift, curate Pablos's, I would love to get your RSS feed list. How do you give it to me? How could you give me your RSS configured viewer? Pablos: A lot of RSS readers make it really easy to like republish your own feed. So like all the things I subscribe to, then go into feed... Ash: But then, that's blended, right? Pablos: Oh, it's blended. Yeah, for sure. Ash: Is blended, right? So now it becomes your feed. I'm saying, can I get your configuration? Pablos: I don't know if there's a standard for that. Ash: I'm saying that's maybe the thing you create a meta, Meta. Pablos: Honestly, I think these days what you would do is just have a process that looks at everything I read, feeds it into an LLM, and tries to figure out like how do you define what Pablos is interested in that way. You probably would get a lot more nuance. Ash: That's to find out what you're interested in. Pablos: It's almost like you want your feed filtered through my lens. Ash: That's exactly what I want. I want to read the same newspaper you're reading, so to speak. So if you assume that that feed that you get is a collection of stories. That's your newspaper, the Pablos newspaper, right? That's what it is, Times of Pablos and you have a collection of stories that land on your page, right? It's been edited. Like you're the editor, you're the editor in chief of your little newspaper. If you think of all your RSS feeds ripped down your, your own newspaper, I'd like to read that newspaper. How do I do that? That doesn't exist. I don't think that's easy to do. And if I can do that, that'd be great. Pablos: If you're looking on Twitter and people are reposting, if I go look at your Twitter feed and all you do is repost stuff and then occasionally make a snarky comment, that's kind of what I'm getting. I'm getting the all the stuff you thought was interesting enough to repost and I think that's a big part of like why reposting merits having a button in Twitter because that's the signal you're getting out of it. I don't love it because it's part of what I don't like about Twitter is I'm not seeing a lot of unique thought from the people I follow. I'm just seeing shit they repost. And so my Twitter feed is kind of this amalgamation of all the things that were reposted by all the people I follow and and to me, that's what I don't want. I would rather just see the original post by those people. Twitter doesn't let me do that, so I'm scrolling a lot just to get to the, first person content. I think it is a way of substantiating what you're saying, though, which is "There's a value in being able to see the world through someone else's eyes." Repost might just be kind of a budget version of that. Ash: The reason I say that it's valuable, it's like the old days you'd sit on train and maybe even today and you had a physical copy of the New York Times, and everyone, and you could see who reads the New York Times and who reads the Journal. Right. And who reads The Post and The Daily News, that's what you can tell. And those people had their lenses, you go to the UK and everyone, this is the guardian, the independent, whatever. And you were like, Oh, that's a time, Times reader. That's a Guardian reader or someone looking at page three of the sun. I have no idea what they're doing, but, you knew immediately where they were. Pablos: It's the editorial layer. Ash: You got it. Pablos: it's what's missing in today's context. What's missing now is you got publishers, and you got the readers. but the editor is gone. Ash: Well, it's not gone, that's the problem, right? So what we did is , in the, in the world of press, there was a printing press and an editorial group took stories and they shoved them through the printing press. And then, the next minute, another editorial group came in and ran it through the printing press. so if you went out , and you were making your sort of manifestos, the printing press probably didn't care, right? The guy at like quickie print or whatever it was didn't care. Today, Facebook claims it's the place to publish, but it's not. Because it's editorial and publish so that so what they're doing is they're taking your IP They're taking a content and then there's putting their editorial layer on it. Even if it's a light touch or heavy touch, whatever it is. But it's sort of like if the guy that was the printing press like "I don't really like your font." " Dude, that's how I designed it." I want the font. Like I like Minion, Minion Pro is my thing, right? That's what I'm going to do. But, but if they just decided to change it, you'd be really pissed off. Now, Facebook claims to be an agnostic platform, but they're not an ISP. They're not a, an open architecture. like we would have had in the past where like you host what you wanted to host. There, you host what you want to host, but they're going to down promote you. They're going to boost you. They're going to unboost you. So wait a minute, hold on a second. You're, you're not really an open platform. And I think that's what you're getting at, which is, either you're a tool to publish or you're the editorial, the minute you're both. You're an editorial. You're actually no longer a tool. Pablos: That's exactly right. I think, that's the key thing, we've got to separate those things. Ash: That's the element. And I think that that tells you a lot about why we get frustrated. If Twitter was just a fast way to shove 140 characters across multiple SMS, which we didn't have, because we're in the U.S. We were silly and we didn't have GSM. That's what Twitter was, right? Twitter was kind of like the first version of like a unified messaging platform. Cause it was like, you could broadcast 140 characters and it would work on the lowest common denominator, which was your StarTAC flip phone. So the point was that Twitter was a not unmoderated open tool. Then it got editorial. And now it's then it's no longer. And I think that's the problem, right? It used to be, you had a wall on Facebook and you did whatever the hell you wanted to. And then Facebook said I need to make money and it became the publisher, became the editorial board. Pablos: Okay, so we have a lightweight plan to save the internet. Let's see if we can find somebody to go build this stuff. Ash: If you could build that last thing, I think it's not a, it's not a complicated one, but they, I think they just need to sit down and, grab your feed. Or someone can come up with a collection of, Mixtapes, let's call it. Pablos: Yeah, cool. Mixtapes, I like that. Ash: Internet Mixtapes. There you go.

Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them Don't Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids Sports Illustrated Thrown Into Chaos With Mass Layoffs Is it time to give up on old news? Instagram's new 'nighttime nudges' aim to reduce teens' time on the app The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams The FTC orders Intuit to stop promoting its products as "free" unless they are actually free for all consumers, after an FTC judge found TurboTax ads misleading An online pastor indicted in a $1.3 million crypto scam releases video explaining that God told him to sell crypto and spend proceeds on home remodel The TikTok 'Tunnel Girl' Is Not Alone Rat selfies Disney offers an elegant solution to VR's movement problem Starting Feb 22, you can no longer use Google Groups to post to Usenet, if you were still doing that The Traitors (on Peacock) is actually quite good Herman Miller power boxes Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: kolide.com/twig

Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them Don't Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids Sports Illustrated Thrown Into Chaos With Mass Layoffs Is it time to give up on old news? Instagram's new 'nighttime nudges' aim to reduce teens' time on the app The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams The FTC orders Intuit to stop promoting its products as "free" unless they are actually free for all consumers, after an FTC judge found TurboTax ads misleading An online pastor indicted in a $1.3 million crypto scam releases video explaining that God told him to sell crypto and spend proceeds on home remodel The TikTok 'Tunnel Girl' Is Not Alone Rat selfies Disney offers an elegant solution to VR's movement problem Starting Feb 22, you can no longer use Google Groups to post to Usenet, if you were still doing that The Traitors (on Peacock) is actually quite good Herman Miller power boxes Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: kolide.com/twig

Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them Don't Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids Sports Illustrated Thrown Into Chaos With Mass Layoffs Is it time to give up on old news? Instagram's new 'nighttime nudges' aim to reduce teens' time on the app The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams The FTC orders Intuit to stop promoting its products as "free" unless they are actually free for all consumers, after an FTC judge found TurboTax ads misleading An online pastor indicted in a $1.3 million crypto scam releases video explaining that God told him to sell crypto and spend proceeds on home remodel The TikTok 'Tunnel Girl' Is Not Alone Rat selfies Disney offers an elegant solution to VR's movement problem Starting Feb 22, you can no longer use Google Groups to post to Usenet, if you were still doing that The Traitors (on Peacock) is actually quite good Herman Miller power boxes Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: kolide.com/twig

Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them Don't Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids Sports Illustrated Thrown Into Chaos With Mass Layoffs Is it time to give up on old news? Instagram's new 'nighttime nudges' aim to reduce teens' time on the app The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams The FTC orders Intuit to stop promoting its products as "free" unless they are actually free for all consumers, after an FTC judge found TurboTax ads misleading An online pastor indicted in a $1.3 million crypto scam releases video explaining that God told him to sell crypto and spend proceeds on home remodel The TikTok 'Tunnel Girl' Is Not Alone Rat selfies Disney offers an elegant solution to VR's movement problem Starting Feb 22, you can no longer use Google Groups to post to Usenet, if you were still doing that The Traitors (on Peacock) is actually quite good Herman Miller power boxes Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: kolide.com/twig

Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them Don't Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids Sports Illustrated Thrown Into Chaos With Mass Layoffs Is it time to give up on old news? Instagram's new 'nighttime nudges' aim to reduce teens' time on the app The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams The FTC orders Intuit to stop promoting its products as "free" unless they are actually free for all consumers, after an FTC judge found TurboTax ads misleading An online pastor indicted in a $1.3 million crypto scam releases video explaining that God told him to sell crypto and spend proceeds on home remodel The TikTok 'Tunnel Girl' Is Not Alone Rat selfies Disney offers an elegant solution to VR's movement problem Starting Feb 22, you can no longer use Google Groups to post to Usenet, if you were still doing that The Traitors (on Peacock) is actually quite good Herman Miller power boxes Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: kolide.com/twig

Most Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them Don't Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids Sports Illustrated Thrown Into Chaos With Mass Layoffs Is it time to give up on old news? Instagram's new 'nighttime nudges' aim to reduce teens' time on the app The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams The FTC orders Intuit to stop promoting its products as "free" unless they are actually free for all consumers, after an FTC judge found TurboTax ads misleading An online pastor indicted in a $1.3 million crypto scam releases video explaining that God told him to sell crypto and spend proceeds on home remodel The TikTok 'Tunnel Girl' Is Not Alone Rat selfies Disney offers an elegant solution to VR's movement problem Starting Feb 22, you can no longer use Google Groups to post to Usenet, if you were still doing that The Traitors (on Peacock) is actually quite good Herman Miller power boxes Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Paris Martineau Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: kolide.com/twig

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: the subreddit size threshold, published by bhauth on January 24, 2024 on LessWrong. Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Yogi Berra In the early days of the internet, people on Usenet complained about the influx of new users from AOL making it worse. I always thought the evolution of online communities with growth was an interesting and important topic. Do they really get worse with size? According to who? Why would that happen? What can be done about it? Today, Reddit has over 1 billion monthly active users. It's divided into smaller communities called subreddits, all using the same software. This provides an unprecedented amount of data on the dynamics of online communities. I haven't done a systematic study of every subreddit, but sometimes I read things on Reddit myself. I mainly do that by using a browser shortcut to see the weekly top posts of a particular subreddit, using the old site version. In doing that, I've gotten a decent idea of how particular subreddits differ, and I've noticed that very large subreddits tend to have lower quality than smaller ones. I'm not the only one; this has been widely noted. Naively, one might expect that the week's best posts from a larger group of people would be better, and that does seem to be the case up to a point - and then the trend reverses. At 100k users, the derivative of quality vs size is clearly negative. That raises the obvious question: why? Why would large subreddits be worse? Here are the possible reasons I've thought of. reasons for decline selection bias Maybe I'm selecting high-quality subreddits to read, and there are more small subreddits, so some of them will randomly be better. I certainly do select what subreddits I look at, but I don't think that's the reason here, because: I've seen changes in quality over time as subreddits grow. The variation seems mostly consistent across different ways of selecting subreddits to read. memes A common thing that relatively high-quality larger subreddits do is remove meme posts, which are mostly popular images with a few words added on them. I think the problem with those meme posts is that time spent on posts varies but every upvote is worth the same. Most people who see posts don't even vote on them, and there's some fraction of people who will see a meme, look at it for 2 seconds, upvote, and move on. That upvote is worth the same as an upvote from someone who spent 10 minutes reading an insightful essay. A similar problem happens with titles that confirm people's preconceptions. For example, if someone really hates Trump, and sees a title that implies "this shows Trump is bad", they might upvote without actually looking at the linked post. There have been a few attempts at mitigating this by making vote strength variable. Some sites have "claps" instead of "likes", which can be clicked multiple times. There are sites like LessWrong where users can make stronger votes by pressing the vote for a couple seconds. The problem I have with such systems is, while individual votes more accurately represent the voter's opinion, the result is a worse average of overall user views. For example, there might be a thread of 2 people arguing, and then 1 person strong-downvotes every post of the other person to make their argument look relatively better, and then the other person gets mad and does the same, and then those strong votes can outweigh votes from other people. new post visibility When you make a new post on a smaller subreddit, it goes directly to the front page, where ordinary users see it and vote on it. On a larger subreddit, new posts are only visible on a special "new" page, which only a small fraction of users visit. One uncommon thing TikTok did was showing new videos from creators with few followers to a hundred or so people. Videos that got some like...

Thank you for being part of the conversation. This is Play It Forward. Real people. Real stories. The struggle to Play It Forward Episode 609 Is With Computer Scientist Walter Scheirer The Author Of A History Of Fake Things On The Internet As all aspects of our social and informational lives increasingly migrate online, the line between what is "real" and what is digitally fabricated grows ever thinner-and that fake content has undeniable real-world consequences. A History of Fake Things on the Internet takes the long view of how advances in technology brought us to the point where faked texts, images, and video content are nearly indistinguishable from what is authentic or true. Computer scientist Walter J. Scheirer takes a deep dive into the origins of fake news, conspiracy theories, reports of the paranormal, and other deviations from reality that have become part of mainstream culture, from image manipulation in the nineteenth-century darkroom to the literary stylings of large language models like ChatGPT. Scheirer investigates the origins of Internet fakes, from early hoaxes that traversed the globe via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), USENET, and a new messaging technology called email, to today's hyperrealistic, AI-generated Deepfakes.

This week on Tech's Message:Bedfordshire Police use AI to save hours on admin dutieshttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-67680698https://docdefender.nethttps://rivengroup.comhttps://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14734000/officersGoogle Groups losing Usenet integrationhttps://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/24002220/google-groups-is-about-to-drop-support-for-posting-to-or-browsing-usenethttps://archive.org/details/usenetThe extended, ad-free version available via Patreon subscription includes extended sections, outtakes, as well as additional discussions about:On The Death of E3https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/how-the-internet-killed-e3/Become a supporter to unlock bonus content and listen live — join our Patreon.Full show notes, subscription options and more available at https://www.uktechshow.com.TECH'S MESSAGE IS:Hosts: Nate Lanxon, Ian MorrisProduction and Editing: Nate LanxonMusic: Audio Network & Pond5Certain Artwork Elements Designed By: macrovector / FreepikPublisher (Free Version): AcastCopyright © Nate LanxonAds (on free version) are not endorsements, nor controlled by Tech's Message. Read Nate's ad policy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As all aspects of our social and informational lives increasingly migrate online, the line between what is "real" and what is digitally fabricated grows ever thinner-and that fake content has undeniable real-world consequences. A History of Fake Things on the Internet takes the long view of how advances in technology brought us to the point where faked texts, images, and video content are nearly indistinguishable from what is authentic or true. Computer scientist Walter J. Scheirer takes a deep dive into the origins of fake news, conspiracy theories, reports of the paranormal, and other deviations from reality that have become part of mainstream culture, from image manipulation in the nineteenth-century darkroom to the literary stylings of large language models like ChatGPT. Scheirer investigates the origins of Internet fakes, from early hoaxes that traversed the globe via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), USENET, and a new messaging technology called email, to today's hyperrealistic, AI-generated Deepfakes. An expert in machine learning and recognition, Scheirer breaks down the technical advances that made new developments in digital deception possible, and shares behind-the-screens details of early Internet-era pranks that have become touchstones of hacker lore. His story introduces us to the visionaries and mischief-makers who first deployed digital fakery and continue to influence how digital manipulation works-and doesn't-today: computer hackers, digital artists, media forensics specialists, and AI researchers. Ultimately, Scheirer argues that problems associated with fake content are not intrinsic properties of the content itself, but rather stem from human behavior, demonstrating our capacity for both creativity and destruction.

Robert Logan has to make NOAPOLOGIES for today's crossword, a fine Friday, challenging but accessible, with  some shorter toeholds conveniently located everywhere in the grid. There were a lot of fascinating factoids in today's puzzle, such as 30A, Artist of "La Maja Desnuda" and "La Maja Vestida", GOYA;  48A, ____________ Amendment (2010s extension of the Kyoto Protocol), DOHA; and 47D, Entertainment reference that began as a Usenet group, IMDB. There were many more educational and entertaining clues, and to hear all about 'em , you know the drill: download, listen up, and enjoy!Today's show notes image: La Maja vestida, by GOYAContact Info:We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com.Also, we're on FaceBook, so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!

Joe Karlsson, Data Engineer at Tinybird, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it's like working in the world of data right now and how he manages the overlap between his social media presence and career. Corey and Joe chat about the rise of AI and whether or not we're truly seeing advancements in that realm or just trendy marketing plays, and Joe shares why he feels data is getting a lot more attention these days and what it's like to work in data at this time. Joe also shares insights into how his mental health has been impacted by having a career and social media presence that overlaps, and what steps he's taken to mitigate the negative impact. About JoeJoe Karlsson (He/They) is a Software Engineer turned Developer Advocate at Tinybird. He empowers developers to think creatively when building data intensive applications through demos, blogs, videos, or whatever else developers need.Joe's career has taken him from building out database best practices and demos for MongoDB, architecting and building one of the largest eCommerce websites in North America at Best Buy, and teaching at one of the most highly-rated software development boot camps on Earth. Joe is also a TEDx Speaker, film buff, and avid TikToker and Tweeter.Links Referenced: Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/ Personal website: https://joekarlsson.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Are you navigating the complex web of API management, microservices, and Kubernetes in your organization? Solo.io is here to be your guide to connectivity in the cloud-native universe!Solo.io, the powerhouse behind Istio, is revolutionizing cloud-native application networking. They brought you Gloo Gateway, the lightweight and ultra-fast gateway built for modern API management, and Gloo Mesh Core, a necessary step to secure, support, and operate your Istio environment.Why struggle with the nuts and bolts of infrastructure when you can focus on what truly matters - your application. Solo.io's got your back with networking for applications, not infrastructure. Embrace zero trust security, GitOps automation, and seamless multi-cloud networking, all with Solo.io.And here's the real game-changer: a common interface for every connection, in every direction, all with one API. It's the future of connectivity, and it's called Gloo by Solo.io.DevOps and Platform Engineers, your journey to a seamless cloud-native experience starts here. Visit solo.io/screaminginthecloud today and level up your networking game.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and I am joined today by someone from well, we'll call it the other side of the tracks, if I can—Joe: [laugh].Corey: —be blunt and disrespectful. Joe Karlsson is a data engineer at Tinybird, but I really got to know who he is by consistently seeing his content injected almost against my will over on the TikToks. Joe, how are you?Joe: I'm doing so well and I'm so sorry for anything I've forced down your throat online. Thanks for having me, though.Corey: Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. No, the problem I've got with it is that when I'm in TikTok mode, I don't want to think about computers anymore. I want to find inane content that I can just swipe six hours away without realizing it because that's how I roll.Joe: TikTok is too smart, though. I think it knows that you are doing a lot of stuff with computers and even if you keep swiping away, it's going to keep serving it up to you.Corey: For a long time, it had me pinned as a lesbian, which was interesting. Which I suppose—Joe: [laugh]. It happened to me, too.Corey: Makes sense because I follow a lot of women who are creators in comics and the rest, but I'm not interested in the thirst trap approach. So, it's like, “Mmm, this codes as lesbian.” Then they started showing me ads for ADHD, which I thought was really weird until I'm—oh right. I'm on TikTok. And then they started recommending people that I'm surprised was able to disambiguate until I realized these people have been at my house and using TikTok from my IP address, which probably is going to get someone murdered someday, but it's probably easy to wind up doing an IP address match.Joe: I feel like I have to, like, separate what is me and what is TikTok, like, trying to serve it up because I've been on lesbian TikTok, too, ADHD, autism, like TikTok. And, like, is this who I am? I don't know. [unintelligible 00:02:08] bring it to my therapist.Corey: You're learning so much about yourself based upon an algorithm. Kind of wild, isn't it?Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I think we may be a little, like, neuro-spicy, but I think it might be a little overblown with what TikTok is trying to diagnose us with. So, it's always good to just keep it in check, you know?Corey: Oh, yes. So, let's see, what's been going on lately? We had Google Next, which I think the industry largely is taking not seriously enough. For years, it felt like a try-hard, me too version of re:Invent. And this year, it really feels like it's coming to its own. It is defining itself as something other than oh, us too.Joe: I totally agree. And that's where you and I ran into recently, too. I feel like post-Covid I'm still, like, running into people I met on the internet in real life, and yeah, I feel like, yeah, re:Invent and Google Next are, like, the big ones.I totally agree. It feels like—I mean, it's definitely, like, heavily inspired by it. And it still feels like it's a little sibling in some ways, but I do feel like it's one of the best conferences I've been to since, like, a pre-Covid 2019 AWS re:Invent, just in terms of, like… who was there. The energy, the vibes, I feel like people were, like, having fun. Yeah, I don't know, it was a great conference this year.Corey: Usually, I would go to Next in previous years because it was a great place to go to hang out with AWS customers. These days, it feels like it's significantly more than that. It's, everyone is using everything at large scale. I think that is something that is not fully understood. You talk to companies that are, like, Netflix, famously all in on AWS. Yeah, they have Google stuff, too.Everyone does. I have Google stuff. I have a few things in Azure, for God's sake. It's one of those areas where everything starts to diffuse throughout a company as soon as you hire employee number two. And that is, I think, the natural order of things. The challenge, of course, is the narrative people try and build around it.Joe: Yep. Oh, totally. Multi-cloud's been huge for you know, like, starting to move up. And it's impossible not to. It was interesting seeing, like, Google trying to differentiate itself from Azure and AWS. And, Corey, I feel like you'd probably agree with this, too, AI was like, definitely the big buzzword that kept trying to, like—Corey: Oh, God. Spare me. And I say that, as someone who likes AI, I think that there's a lot of neat stuff lurking around and value hiding within generative AI, but the sheer amount of hype around it—and frankly—some of the crypto bros have gone crashing into the space, make me want to distance myself from it as far as humanly possible, just because otherwise, I feel like I get lumped in with that set. And I don't want that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. I know it feels like it's hard right now to, like, remain ungrifty, but, like, still, like—trying—I mean, everyone's trying to just, like, hammer in an AI perspective into every product they have. And I feel like a lot of companies, like, still don't really have a good use case for it. You're still trying to, like, figure that out. We're seeing some cool stuff.Honestly, the hard part for me was trying to differentiate between people just, like, bragging about OpenAI API addition they added to the core product or, like, an actual thing that's, like, AI is at the center of what it actually does, you know what I mean? Everything felt like it's kind of like tacked on some sort of AI perspective to it.Corey: One of the things that really is getting to me is that you have these big companies—Google and Amazon most notably—talk about how oh, well, we've actually been working with AI for decades. At this point, they keep trying to push out how long it's been. It's like, “Okay, then not for nothing, then why does”—in Amazon's case—“why does Alexa suck? If you've been working on it for this long, why is it so bad at all the rest?” It feels like they're trying to sprint out with a bunch of services that very clearly were not conceptualized until Chat-Gippity's breakthrough.And now it's oh, yeah, we're there, too. Us, too. And they're pivoting all the marketing around something that, frankly, they haven't demonstrated excellence with. And I feel like they're leaving a lot of their existing value proposition completely in the dust. It's, your customers are not using you because of the speculative future, forward-looking AI things; it's because you are able to solve business problems today in ways that are not highly speculative and are well understood. That's not nothing and there needs to be more attention paid to that. And I feel like there's this collective marketing tripping over itself to wrap itself in hype that does them no services.Joe: I totally agree. I feel like honestly, just, like, a marketing perspective, I feel like it's distracting in a lot of ways. And I know it's hot and it's cool, but it's like, I think it's harder right now to, like, stay focused to what you're actually doing well, as opposed to, like, trying to tack on some AI thing. And maybe that's great. I don't know.Maybe that's—honestly, maybe you're seeing some traction there. I don't know. But I totally agree. I feel like everyone right now is, like, selling a future that we don't quite have yet. I don't know. I'm worried that what's going to happen again, is what happened back in the IBM Watson days where everyone starts making bold—over-promising too much with AI until we see another AI winter again.Corey: Oh, the subtext is always, we can't wait to fire our entire customer service department. That one—Joe: Yeah.Corey: Just thrills me.Joe: [laugh].Corey: It's like, no, we're just going to get rid of junior engineers and just have senior engineers. Yeah, where do you think those people come from, by the way? We aren't—they aren't just emerging fully formed from the forehead of some god somewhere. And we're also seeing this wild divergence from reality. Remember, I fix AWS bills for a living. I see very large companies, very large AWS spend.The majority of spend remains on EC2 across the board. So, we don't see a lot of attention paid to that at re:Invent, even though it's the lion's share of everything. When we do contract negotiations, we talk about generative AI plan and strategy, but no one's saying, oh, yeah, we're spending 100 million a year right now on AWS but we should commit 250 because of all this generative AI stuff we're getting into. It's all small-scale experimentation and seeing if there's value there. But that's a far cry from being the clear winner what everyone is doing.I'd further like to point out that I can tell that there's a hype cycle in place and I'm trying to be—and someone's trying to scam me. As soon as there's a sense of you have to get on this new emerging technology now, now, now, now, now. I didn't get heavily into cloud till 2016 or so and I seem to have done all right with that. Whenever someone is pushing you to get into an emerging thing where it hasn't settled down enough to build a curriculum yet, I feel like there's time to be cautious and see what the actual truth is. Someone's selling something; if you can't spot the sucker, chances are, it's you.Joe: [laugh]. Corey, have you thought about making an AI large language model that will help people with their cloud bills? Maybe just feed it, like, your invoices [laugh].Corey: That has been an example, I've used a number of times with a variety of different folks where if AI really is all it's cracked up to be, then the AWS billing system is very much a bounded problem space. There's a lot of nuance and intricacy to it, but it is a finite set of things. Sure, [unintelligible 00:08:56] space is big. So, training something within those constraints and within those confines feels like it would be a terrific proof-of-concept for a lot of these things. Except that when I've experimented a little bit and companies have raised rounds to throw into this, it never quite works out because there's always human context involved. The, oh yeah, we're going to wind up turning off all those idle instances, except they're in idle—by whatever metric you're using—for a reason. And the first time you take production down, you're not allowed to save money anymore.Joe: Nope. That's such a good point. I agree. I don't know about you, Corey. I've been fretting about my job and, like, what I'm doing. I write a lot, I do a lot of videos, I'm programming a lot, and I think… obviously, we've been hearing a lot about, you know, if it's going to replace us or not. I honestly have been feeling a lot better recently about my job stability here. I don't know. I totally agree with you. There's always that, like, human component that needs to get added to it. But who knows, maybe it's going to get better. Maybe there'll be an AI-automated billing management tool, but it'll never be as good as you, Corey. Maybe it will. I don't know. [laugh].Corey: It knows who I am. When I tell it to write in the style of me and give it a blog post topic and some points I want to make, almost everything it says is wrong. But what I'll do is I'll copy that into a text editor, mansplain-correct the robot for ten minutes, and suddenly I've got the bones of a decent rough draft because. And yeah, I'll wind up plagiarizing three or four words in a row at most, but that's okay. I'm plagiarizing the thing that's plagiarizing from me and there's a beautiful symmetry to that. What I don't understand is some of the outreach emails and other nonsensical stuff I'll see where people are letting unsupervised AI just write things under their name and sending it out to people. That is anathema to me.Joe: I totally agree. And it might work today, it might work tomorrow, but, like, it's just a matter of time before something blows up. Corey, I'm curious. Like, personally, how do you feel about being in the ChatGPT, like, brain? I don't know, is that flattering? Does that make you nervous at all?Corey: Not really because it doesn't get it in a bunch of ways. And that's okay. I found the same problem with people. In my time on Twitter, when I started live-tweet shitposting about things—as I tend to do as my first love language—people will often try and do exactly that. The problem that I run into is that, “The failure mode of ‘clever' is ‘asshole,'” as John Scalzi famously said, and as a direct result of that, people wind up being mean and getting it wrong in that direction.It's not that I'm better than they are. It's, I had a small enough following, and no one knew who I was in my mean years, and I realized I didn't feel great making people sad. So okay, you've got to continue to correct the nosedive. But it is perilous and it is difficult to understand the nuance. I think occasionally when I prompt it correctly, it comes up with some amazing connections between things that I wouldn't have seen, but that's not the same thing as letting it write something completely unfettered.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. The nuance definitely gets lost. It may be able to get, like, the tone, but I think it misses a lot of details. That's interesting.Corey: And other people are defending it when that hallucinates. Like, yeah, I understand there are people that do the same thing, too. Yeah, the difference is, in many cases, lying to me and passing it off otherwise is a firing offense in a lot of places. Because if you're going to be 19 out of 20 times, you're correct, but 5% wrong, you're going to bluff, I can't trust anything you tell me.Joe: Yeah. It definitely, like, brings your, like—the whole model into question.Corey: Also, remember that my medium for artistic creation is often writing. And I think that, on some level, these AI models are doing the same things that we do. There are still turns of phrase that I use that I picked up floating around Usenet in the mid-90s. And I don't remember who said it or the exact context, but these words and phrases have entered my lexicon and I'll use them and I don't necessarily give credit to where the first person who said that joke 30 years ago. But it's a—that is how humans operate. We are influenced by different styles of writing and learn from the rest.Joe: True.Corey: That's a bit different than training something on someone's artistic back catalog from a painting perspective and then emulating it, including their signature in the corner. Okay, that's a bit much.Joe: [laugh]. I totally agree.Corey: So, we wind up looking right now at the rush that is going on for companies trying to internalize their use of enterprise AI, which is kind of terrifying, and it all seems to come back to data.Joe: Yes.Corey: You work in the data space. How are you seeing that unfold?Joe: Yeah, I do. I've been, like, making speculations about the future of AI and data forever. I've had dreams of tools I've wanted forever, and I… don't have them yet. I don't think they're quite ready yet. I don't know, we're seeing things like—tha—I think people are working on a lot of problems.For example, like, I want AI to auto-optimize my database. I want it to, like, make indexes for me. I want it to help me with queries or optimizing queries. We're seeing some of that. I'm not seeing anyone doing particularly well yet. I think it's up in the air.I feel like it could be coming though soon, but that's the thing, though, too, like, I mean, if you mess up a query, or, like, a… large language model hallucinates a really shitty query for you, that could break your whole system really quickly. I feel like there still needs to be, like, a human being in the middle of it to, like, kind of help.Corey: I saw a blog post recently that AWS put out gave an example that just hard-coded a credential into it. And they said, “Don't do this, but for demonstration purposes, this is how it works.” Well, that nuance gets lost when you use that for AI training and that's, I think, in part, where you start seeing a whole bunch of the insecure crap these things spit out.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I thought the big thing I've seen, too, is, like, large language models typically don't have a secure option and you're—the answer is, like, help train the model itself later on. I don't know, I'm sure, like, a lot of teams don't want to have their most secret data end up public on a large language model at some point in the future. Which is, like, a huge issue right now.Corey: I think that what we're seeing is that you still need someone with expertise in a given area to review what this thing spits out. It's great at solving a lot of the busy work stuff, but you still need someone who's conversant with the concepts to look at it. And that is, I think, something that turns into a large-scale code review, where everyone else just tends to go, “Oh, okay. We're—do this with code review.” “Oh, how big is the diff?” “50,000 lines.” “Looks good to me.” Whereas, “Three lines.” “I'm going to criticize that thing with four pages of text.” People don't want to do the deep-dive stuff, and—when there's a huge giant project that hits. So, they won't. And it'll be fine, right up until it isn't.Joe: Corey, you and I know people and developers, do you think it's irresponsible to put out there an example of how to do something like that, even with, like, an asterisk? I feel like someone's going to still go out and try to do that and probably push that to production.Corey: Of course they are.Joe: [laugh].Corey: I've seen this with some of my own code. I had something on Docker Hub years ago with a container that was called ‘Terrible Ideas.' And I'm sure being used in, like—it was basically the environment I use for a talk I gave around Git, which makes sense. And because I don't want to reset all the repositories back to the way they came from with a bunch of old commands, I just want a constrained environment that will be the same every time I give the talk. Awesome.I'm sure it's probably being run in production at a bank somewhere because why wouldn't it be? That's people. That's life. You're not supposed to just copy and paste from Chat-Gippity. You're supposed to do that from Stack Overflow like the rest of us. Where do you think your existing code's coming from in a lot of these shops?Joe: Yep. No, I totally agree. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out with, like, people going to doing this stuff, or how honest they're going to be about it, too. I'm sure it's happening. I'm sure people are tripping over themselves right now, [adding 00:16:12].Corey: Oh, yeah. But I think, on some level, you're going to see a lot more grift coming out of this stuff. When you start having things that look a little more personalized, you can use it for spam purposes, you can use it for, I'm just going to basically copy and paste what this says and wind up getting a job on Upwork or something that is way more than I could handle myself, but using this thing, I'm going to wind up coasting through. Caveat emptor is always the case on that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and talk about ethics. I believe strongly in doing the right thing. But I'm also not worried about whether I'm able to make rent this month or put food on the table. That's a luxury. At some point, like, a lot of that strips away and you do what you have to do to survive. I don't necessarily begrudge people doing these things until it gets to a certain point of okay, now you're not doing this to stay alive anymore. You're doing this to basically seek rent.Joe: Yeah, I agree. Or just, like, capitalize on it. I do think this is less—like, the space is less grifty than the crypto space, but as we've seen over and over and over and over again, in tech, there's a such a fine line between, like, a genuinely great idea, and somebody taking advantage of it—and other people—with that idea.Corey: I think that's one of those sad areas where you're not going to be able to fix human nature, regardless of the technology stack you bring to bear.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: So, what else are you seeing these days that interesting? What excites you? What do you see that isn't getting enough attention in the space?Joe: I don't know, I guess I'm in the data space, I'm… the thing I think I do see a lot of is huge interest in data. Data right now is the thing that's come up. Like, I don't—that's the thing that's training these models and everyone trying to figure out what to do with these data, all these massive databases, data lakes, whatever. I feel like everyone's, kind of like, taking a second look at all of this data they've been collecting for years and haven't really known what to do with it and trying to figure out either, like, if you can make a model out of that, if you try to, like… level it up, whatever. Corey, you and I were joking around recently—you've had a lot of data people on here recently, too—I feel like us data folks are just getting extra loud right now. Or maybe there's just the data spaces, that's where the action's at right now.I don't know, the markets are really weird. Who knows? But um, I feel like data right now is super valuable and more so than ever. And even still, like, I mean, we're seeing, like, companies freaking out, like, Twitter and Reddit freaking out about accessing their data and who's using it and how. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of action going on there right now.Corey: I think that there's a significant push from the data folks where, for a long time data folks were DBAs—Joe: Yeah.Corey: —let's be direct. And that role has continued to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways. It's never been an area I've been particularly strong in. I am not great at algorithmic complexity, it turns out, you can saturate some beefy instances with just a little bit of data if your queries are all terrible. And if you're unlucky—as I tend to be—and have an aura of destroying things, great, you probably don't want to go and make that what you do.Joe: [laugh]. It's a really good point. I mean, I don't know about, like, if you blow up data at a company, you're probably going to be in big trouble. And especially the scale we're talking about with most companies these days, it's super easy to either take down a server or generate an insane bill off of some shitty query.Corey: Oh, when I was at Reach Local years and years ago—my first Linux admin job—when I broke the web server farm, it was amusing; when I broke part of the data warehouse, nobody was laughing.Joe: [laugh]. I wonder why.Corey: It was a good faith mistake and that's fair. It was a convoluted series of things that set up and honestly, the way the company and my boss responded to me at the time set the course of the rest of my career. But it was definitely something that got my attention. It scares me. I'm a big believer in backups as a direct result.Joe: Yeah. Here's the other thing, too. Actually, our company, Tinybird, is working on versioning with your data sources right now and treating your data sources like Git, but I feel like even still today, most companies are just run by some DBA. There's, like, Mike down the hall is the one responsible keeping their SQL servers online, keeping them rebooted, and like, they're manually updating any changes on there.And I feel like, generally speaking across the industry, we're not taking data seriously. Which is funny because I'm with you on there. Like, I get terrified touching production databases because I don't want anything bad to happen to them. But if we could, like, make it easier to rollback or, like, handle that stuff, that would be so much easier for me and make it, like, less scary to deal with it. I feel like databases and, like, treating it as, like, a serious DevOps practice is not really—I'm not seeing enough of it. It's definitely, people are definitely doing it. Just, I want more.Corey: It seems like with data, there's a lack of iterative approaches to it. A line that someone came up with when I was working with them a decade and change ago was that you can talk about agile all you want, but when it comes to payments, everyone's doing waterfall. And it feels like, on some level, data's kind of the same.Joe: Yeah. And I don't know, like, how to fix it. I think everyone's just too scared of it to really touch it. Migrating over to a different version control, trying to make it not as manual, trying to iterate on it better, I think it's just—I don't blame them. It's hard, it really takes a long time, making sure everything, like, doesn't blow up while you're doing a migration is a pain in the ass. But I feel like that would make everyone's lives so much easier if, like, you could, like, treat it—understand your data and be able to rollback easier with it.Corey: When you take a look across the ecosystem now, are you finding that things have improved since the last time I was in the space, where the state of the art was, “Oh, we need some developer data. We either have this sanitized data somewhere or it's a copy of production that we move around, but only a small bit.” Because otherwise, we always found that oh, that's an extra petabyte of storage was going on someone's developer environment they messed up on three years ago, they haven't been here for two, and oops.Joe: I don't. I have not seen it. Again, that's so tricky, too. I think… yeah, the last time I, like, worked doing that was—usually you just have a really crappy version of production data on staging or development environments and it's hard to copy those over. I think databases are getting better for that.I've been working on, like, the real-time data space for a long time now, so copying data over and kind of streaming that over is a lot easier. I do think seeing, like, separating storage and compute can make it easier, too. But it depends on your data stack. Everyone's using everything all the time and it's super complicated to do that. I don't know about you, Corey, too. I'm sure you've seen, like, services people running, but I feel like we've made a switch as an industry from, like, monoliths to microservices.Now, we're kind of back in the monolith era, but I'm not seeing that happen in the database space. We're seeing, like, data meshing and lots of different databases. I see people who, like, see the value of data monoliths, but I don't see any actual progress in moving back to a single source of [truth of the data 00:23:02]. And I feel like the cat's kind of out of the bag on all the data existing everywhere, all the time, and trying to wrangle that up.Corey: This stuff is hard and there's no easy solution here. There just isn't.Joe: Yeah, there's no way. And embracing that chaos, I think, is going to be huge. I think you have to do it right now. Or trying to find some tool that can, like, wrangle up a bunch of things together and help work with them all at once. Products need to meet people where they're at, too. And, like, data is all over the place and I feel like we kind of have to, like, find tooling that can kind of help work with what you have.Corey: It's a constant challenge, but also a joy, so we'll give it that.Joe: [laugh].Corey: So, I have to ask. Your day job has you doing developer advocacy at Tinybird—Joe: Yes.Corey: But I had to dig in to find that out. It wasn't obvious based upon the TikToks and the Twitter nonsense and the rest. How do you draw the line between day job and you as a person shitposting on the internet about technology?Joe: Corey, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, too. I don't know. I feel like I've been in different places where, like, my job is my life. You know what I mean? There's a very thin line there. Personally, I've been trying to take a step back from that, just from a mental health perspective. Having my professional life be so closely tied to, like, my personal value and who I am has been really bad for my brain.And trying to make that clear at my company is, like, what is mine and what I can help with has been really huge. I feel like the boundaries between myself and my job has gotten too thin. And for a while, I thought that was a great idea; it turns out that was not a great idea for my brain. It's so hard. So, I've been a software engineer and I've done full-time developer advocacy, and I felt like I had a lot more freedom to say what I wanted as, like, a full-time software engineer as opposed to being a developer advocate and kind of representing the company.Because the thing is, I'm always representing the company [online 00:24:56], but I'm not always working, which is kind of like—that—it's kind of a hard line. I feel like there's been, like, ways to get around it though with, like, less private shitposting about things that could piss off a CEO or infringe on an NDA or, you know, whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah, trying to, like, find that balance or trying to, like, use tools to try to separate that has been big. But I don't know, I've been—personally, I've been trying to step—like, start trying to make more of a boundary for that.Corey: Yeah. I don't have much of one, but I also own the company, so my approach doesn't necessarily work for other people. I don't advertise in public that I fix AWS bills very often. That's not the undercurrent to most of my jokes and the rest. Because the people who have that painful problem aren't generally in the audience directly and they certainly don't talk about it extensively.It's word of mouth. It's being fun and engaging so people stick around. And when I periodically do mention it that sort of sticks with them. And in the fullness of time, it works as a way of, “Oh, yeah, everyone knows what you're into. And yeah, when we have this problem, reaching out to you is our first thought.” But I don't know that it's possible to measure its effectiveness. I just know that works.Joe: Yeah. For me, it's like, don't be an asshole and teach don't sell are like, the two biggest things that I'm trying to do all the time. And the goal is not to, like, trick people into, like, thinking I'm not working for a company. I think I try to be transparent, or if, like, I happen to be talking about a product that I'm working for, I try to disclose that. But yeah, I don't know. For me, it's just, like, trying to build up a community of people who, like, understand what I'm trying to put out there. You know what I mean?Corey: Yeah, it's about what you want to be known for, on some level. Part of the problem that I've had for a long time is that I've been pulled in so many directions. [They're 00:26:34] like, “Oh, you're great. Where do I go to learn more?” It's like, “Well, I have this podcast, I have the newsletter, I have the other podcast that I do in the AWS Morning Brief. I have the duckbillgroup.com. I have lastweekinaws.com. I have a Twitter account. I had a YouTube thing for a while.”It's like, there's so many different ways to send people. It's like, what is the top-of-funnel? And for me, my answer has been, sign up for the newsletter at lastweekinaws.com. That keeps you apprised of everything else and you can dial it into taste. It's also, frankly, one of those things that doesn't require algorithmic blessing to continue to show up in people's inboxes. So far at least, we haven't seen algorithms have a significant impact on that, except when they spam-bin something. And it turns out when you write content people like, the providers get yelled at by their customers of, “Hey, I'm trying to read this. What's going on?” I had a couple of reach out to me asking what the hell happened. It's kind of fun.Joe: I love that. And, Corey, I think that's so smart, too. It's definitely been a lesson, I think, for me and a lot of people on—that are terminally online that, like, we don't own our social following on other platforms. With, like, the downfall of Twitter, like, I'm still posting on there, but we still have a bunch of stuff on there, but my… that following is locked in. I can't take that home. But, like, you still have your email newsletter. And I even feel it for tech companies who might be listening to this, too. I feel like owning your email list is, like, not the coolest thing, but I feel like it's criminally underrated, as, like, a way of talking to people.Corey: It doesn't matter what platforms change, what my personal situation changes, I am—like, whatever it is that I wind up doing next, whenever next happens, I'll need a platform to tell people about, and that's what I've been building. I value newsletter subscribers in a metric sense far more highly and weight them more heavily than I do Twitter followers. Anyone can click a follow and then never check Twitter again. Easy enough. Newsletters? Well, that winds up requiring a little bit extra work because we do confirmed opt-ins, for obvious reasons.And we never sell the list. We never—you can't transfer permission for, like that, and we obviously respect it when people say I don't want to hear from your nonsense anymore. Great. Cool. I don't want to send this to people that don't care. Get out of here.Joe: [laugh]. No, I think that's so smart.Corey: Podcasts are impossible on the other end, but I also—you know, I control the domain and that's important to me.Joe: Yeah.Corey: Why don't you build this on top of Substack? Because as soon as Substack pivots, I'm screwed.Joe: Yeah, yeah. Which we've—I think we've seen that they've tried to do, even with the Twitter clone that tried to build last couple years. I've been burned by so many other publishing platforms over and over and over again through the years. Like, Medium, yeah, I criminally don't trust any sort of tech publishing platform anymore that I don't own. [laugh]. But I also don't want to maintain it. It's such a fine line. I just want to, like, maintain something without having to, like, maintain all the infrastructure all the time, and I don't think that exists and I don't really trust anything to help me with that.Corey: You can on some level, I mean, I wind up parking in the newsletter stuff over at ConvertKit. But I can—I have moved it twice already. I could move it again if I needed to. It's about controlling the domain. I have something that fires off once or twice a day that backs up the entire subscriber list somewhere.I don't want to build my own system, but I can also get that in an export form wherever I need it to go. Frankly, I view it as the most valuable asset that I have here because I can always find a way to turn relationships and an audience into money. I can't necessarily find a way to go the opposite direction of, well have money. Time to buy an audience. Doesn't work that way.Joe: [laugh]. No, I totally agree. You know what I do like, though, is Threads, which has kind of fallen off, but I do love the idea of their federated following [and be almost 00:30:02] like, unlock that a little bit. I do think that that's probably going to be the future. And I have to say, I just care as someone who, like, makes shit online. I don't think 98% of people don't really care about that future, but I do. Just getting burned so often on social media platforms, it helps to then have a little bit of flexibility there.Corey: Oh, yeah. And I wish it were different. I feel like, at some level, Elon being Elon has definitely caused a bit of a diaspora of social media and I think that's a good thing.Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I hope it settles down a little bit, but it definitely got things moving again.Corey: Oh, yes. I really want to thank you for taking the time to go through how you view these things. Where's the best place for people to go to follow you learn more, et cetera? Just sign up for TikTok and you'll be all over them, apparently.Joe: Go to the website that I own joekarlsson.com. It's got the links to everything on there. Opt in or out of whatever you find you want. Otherwise, I'm just going to quick plug for the company I work for: tinybird.co. If you're trying to make APIs on top of data, definitely want to check out Tinybird. We work with Kafka, BigQuery, S3, all the data sources could pull it in. [unintelligible 00:31:10] on it and publishes it as an API. It's super easy. Or you could just ignore me. That's fine, too. You could—that's highly encouraged as well.Corey: Always a good decision.Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I agree. I'm biased, but I agree.Corey: Thanks, Joe. I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me and we'll, of course, put links to all that in the [show notes 00:31:26]. And please come back soon and regale us with more stories.Joe: I will. Thanks, Corey.Corey: Joe Karlsson, data engineer at Tinybird. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that I'll never read because they're going to have a disk problem and they haven't learned the lesson of backups yet.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started. Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/ Personal website: https://joekarlsson.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and I am joined today by someone from well, we'll call it the other side of the tracks, if I can—Joe: [laugh].Corey: —be blunt and disrespectful. Joe Karlsson is a data engineer at Tinybird, but I really got to know who he is by consistently seeing his content injected almost against my will over on the TikToks. Joe, how are you?Joe: I'm doing so well and I'm so sorry for anything I've forced down your throat online. Thanks for having me, though.Corey: Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. No, the problem I've got with it is that when I'm in TikTok mode, I don't want to think about computers anymore. I want to find inane content that I can just swipe six hours away without realizing it because that's how I roll.Joe: TikTok is too smart, though. I think it knows that you are doing a lot of stuff with computers and even if you keep swiping away, it's going to keep serving it up to you.Corey: For a long time, it had me pinned as a lesbian, which was interesting. Which I suppose—Joe: [laugh]. It happened to me, too.Corey: Makes sense because I follow a lot of women who are creators in comics and the rest, but I'm not interested in the thirst trap approach. So, it's like, “Mmm, this codes as lesbian.” Then they started showing me ads for ADHD, which I thought was really weird until I'm—oh right. I'm on TikTok. And then they started recommending people that I'm surprised was able to disambiguate until I realized these people have been at my house and using TikTok from my IP address, which probably is going to get someone murdered someday, but it's probably easy to wind up doing an IP address match.Joe: I feel like I have to, like, separate what is me and what is TikTok, like, trying to serve it up because I've been on lesbian TikTok, too, ADHD, autism, like TikTok. And, like, is this who I am? I don't know. [unintelligible 00:02:08] bring it to my therapist.Corey: You're learning so much about yourself based upon an algorithm. Kind of wild, isn't it?Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I think we may be a little, like, neuro-spicy, but I think it might be a little overblown with what TikTok is trying to diagnose us with. So, it's always good to just keep it in check, you know?Corey: Oh, yes. So, let's see, what's been going on lately? We had Google Next, which I think the industry largely is taking not seriously enough. For years, it felt like a try-hard, me too version of re:Invent. And this year, it really feels like it's coming to its own. It is defining itself as something other than oh, us too.Joe: I totally agree. And that's where you and I ran into recently, too. I feel like post-Covid I'm still, like, running into people I met on the internet in real life, and yeah, I feel like, yeah, re:Invent and Google Next are, like, the big ones.I totally agree. It feels like—I mean, it's definitely, like, heavily inspired by it. And it still feels like it's a little sibling in some ways, but I do feel like it's one of the best conferences I've been to since, like, a pre-Covid 2019 AWS re:Invent, just in terms of, like… who was there. The energy, the vibes, I feel like people were, like, having fun. Yeah, I don't know, it was a great conference this year.Corey: Usually, I would go to Next in previous years because it was a great place to go to hang out with AWS customers. These days, it feels like it's significantly more than that. It's, everyone is using everything at large scale. I think that is something that is not fully understood. You talk to companies that are, like, Netflix, famously all in on AWS. Yeah, they have Google stuff, too.Everyone does. I have Google stuff. I have a few things in Azure, for God's sake. It's one of those areas where everything starts to diffuse throughout a company as soon as you hire employee number two. And that is, I think, the natural order of things. The challenge, of course, is the narrative people try and build around it.Joe: Yep. Oh, totally. Multi-cloud's been huge for you know, like, starting to move up. And it's impossible not to. It was interesting seeing, like, Google trying to differentiate itself from Azure and AWS. And, Corey, I feel like you'd probably agree with this, too, AI was like, definitely the big buzzword that kept trying to, like—Corey: Oh, God. Spare me. And I say that, as someone who likes AI, I think that there's a lot of neat stuff lurking around and value hiding within generative AI, but the sheer amount of hype around it—and frankly—some of the crypto bros have gone crashing into the space, make me want to distance myself from it as far as humanly possible, just because otherwise, I feel like I get lumped in with that set. And I don't want that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. I know it feels like it's hard right now to, like, remain ungrifty, but, like, still, like—trying—I mean, everyone's trying to just, like, hammer in an AI perspective into every product they have. And I feel like a lot of companies, like, still don't really have a good use case for it. You're still trying to, like, figure that out. We're seeing some cool stuff.Honestly, the hard part for me was trying to differentiate between people just, like, bragging about OpenAI API addition they added to the core product or, like, an actual thing that's, like, AI is at the center of what it actually does, you know what I mean? Everything felt like it's kind of like tacked on some sort of AI perspective to it.Corey: One of the things that really is getting to me is that you have these big companies—Google and Amazon most notably—talk about how oh, well, we've actually been working with AI for decades. At this point, they keep trying to push out how long it's been. It's like, “Okay, then not for nothing, then why does”—in Amazon's case—“why does Alexa suck? If you've been working on it for this long, why is it so bad at all the rest?” It feels like they're trying to sprint out with a bunch of services that very clearly were not conceptualized until Chat-Gippity's breakthrough.And now it's oh, yeah, we're there, too. Us, too. And they're pivoting all the marketing around something that, frankly, they haven't demonstrated excellence with. And I feel like they're leaving a lot of their existing value proposition completely in the dust. It's, your customers are not using you because of the speculative future, forward-looking AI things; it's because you are able to solve business problems today in ways that are not highly speculative and are well understood. That's not nothing and there needs to be more attention paid to that. And I feel like there's this collective marketing tripping over itself to wrap itself in hype that does them no services.Joe: I totally agree. I feel like honestly, just, like, a marketing perspective, I feel like it's distracting in a lot of ways. And I know it's hot and it's cool, but it's like, I think it's harder right now to, like, stay focused to what you're actually doing well, as opposed to, like, trying to tack on some AI thing. And maybe that's great. I don't know.Maybe that's—honestly, maybe you're seeing some traction there. I don't know. But I totally agree. I feel like everyone right now is, like, selling a future that we don't quite have yet. I don't know. I'm worried that what's going to happen again, is what happened back in the IBM Watson days where everyone starts making bold—over-promising too much with AI until we see another AI winter again.Corey: Oh, the subtext is always, we can't wait to fire our entire customer service department. That one—Joe: Yeah.Corey: Just thrills me.Joe: [laugh].Corey: It's like, no, we're just going to get rid of junior engineers and just have senior engineers. Yeah, where do you think those people come from, by the way? We aren't—they aren't just emerging fully formed from the forehead of some god somewhere. And we're also seeing this wild divergence from reality. Remember, I fix AWS bills for a living. I see very large companies, very large AWS spend.The majority of spend remains on EC2 across the board. So, we don't see a lot of attention paid to that at re:Invent, even though it's the lion's share of everything. When we do contract negotiations, we talk about generative AI plan and strategy, but no one's saying, oh, yeah, we're spending 100 million a year right now on AWS but we should commit 250 because of all this generative AI stuff we're getting into. It's all small-scale experimentation and seeing if there's value there. But that's a far cry from being the clear winner what everyone is doing.I'd further like to point out that I can tell that there's a hype cycle in place and I'm trying to be—and someone's trying to scam me. As soon as there's a sense of you have to get on this new emerging technology now, now, now, now, now. I didn't get heavily into cloud till 2016 or so and I seem to have done all right with that. Whenever someone is pushing you to get into an emerging thing where it hasn't settled down enough to build a curriculum yet, I feel like there's time to be cautious and see what the actual truth is. Someone's selling something; if you can't spot the sucker, chances are, it's you.Joe: [laugh]. Corey, have you thought about making an AI large language model that will help people with their cloud bills? Maybe just feed it, like, your invoices [laugh].Corey: That has been an example, I've used a number of times with a variety of different folks where if AI really is all it's cracked up to be, then the AWS billing system is very much a bounded problem space. There's a lot of nuance and intricacy to it, but it is a finite set of things. Sure, [unintelligible 00:08:56] space is big. So, training something within those constraints and within those confines feels like it would be a terrific proof-of-concept for a lot of these things. Except that when I've experimented a little bit and companies have raised rounds to throw into this, it never quite works out because there's always human context involved. The, oh yeah, we're going to wind up turning off all those idle instances, except they're in idle—by whatever metric you're using—for a reason. And the first time you take production down, you're not allowed to save money anymore.Joe: Nope. That's such a good point. I agree. I don't know about you, Corey. I've been fretting about my job and, like, what I'm doing. I write a lot, I do a lot of videos, I'm programming a lot, and I think… obviously, we've been hearing a lot about, you know, if it's going to replace us or not. I honestly have been feeling a lot better recently about my job stability here. I don't know. I totally agree with you. There's always that, like, human component that needs to get added to it. But who knows, maybe it's going to get better. Maybe there'll be an AI-automated billing management tool, but it'll never be as good as you, Corey. Maybe it will. I don't know. [laugh].Corey: It knows who I am. When I tell it to write in the style of me and give it a blog post topic and some points I want to make, almost everything it says is wrong. But what I'll do is I'll copy that into a text editor, mansplain-correct the robot for ten minutes, and suddenly I've got the bones of a decent rough draft because. And yeah, I'll wind up plagiarizing three or four words in a row at most, but that's okay. I'm plagiarizing the thing that's plagiarizing from me and there's a beautiful symmetry to that. What I don't understand is some of the outreach emails and other nonsensical stuff I'll see where people are letting unsupervised AI just write things under their name and sending it out to people. That is anathema to me.Joe: I totally agree. And it might work today, it might work tomorrow, but, like, it's just a matter of time before something blows up. Corey, I'm curious. Like, personally, how do you feel about being in the ChatGPT, like, brain? I don't know, is that flattering? Does that make you nervous at all?Corey: Not really because it doesn't get it in a bunch of ways. And that's okay. I found the same problem with people. In my time on Twitter, when I started live-tweet shitposting about things—as I tend to do as my first love language—people will often try and do exactly that. The problem that I run into is that, “The failure mode of ‘clever' is ‘asshole,'” as John Scalzi famously said, and as a direct result of that, people wind up being mean and getting it wrong in that direction.It's not that I'm better than they are. It's, I had a small enough following, and no one knew who I was in my mean years, and I realized I didn't feel great making people sad. So okay, you've got to continue to correct the nosedive. But it is perilous and it is difficult to understand the nuance. I think occasionally when I prompt it correctly, it comes up with some amazing connections between things that I wouldn't have seen, but that's not the same thing as letting it write something completely unfettered.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. The nuance definitely gets lost. It may be able to get, like, the tone, but I think it misses a lot of details. That's interesting.Corey: And other people are defending it when that hallucinates. Like, yeah, I understand there are people that do the same thing, too. Yeah, the difference is, in many cases, lying to me and passing it off otherwise is a firing offense in a lot of places. Because if you're going to be 19 out of 20 times, you're correct, but 5% wrong, you're going to bluff, I can't trust anything you tell me.Joe: Yeah. It definitely, like, brings your, like—the whole model into question.Corey: Also, remember that my medium for artistic creation is often writing. And I think that, on some level, these AI models are doing the same things that we do. There are still turns of phrase that I use that I picked up floating around Usenet in the mid-90s. And I don't remember who said it or the exact context, but these words and phrases have entered my lexicon and I'll use them and I don't necessarily give credit to where the first person who said that joke 30 years ago. But it's a—that is how humans operate. We are influenced by different styles of writing and learn from the rest.Joe: True.Corey: That's a bit different than training something on someone's artistic back catalog from a painting perspective and then emulating it, including their signature in the corner. Okay, that's a bit much.Joe: [laugh]. I totally agree.Corey: So, we wind up looking right now at the rush that is going on for companies trying to internalize their use of enterprise AI, which is kind of terrifying, and it all seems to come back to data.Joe: Yes.Corey: You work in the data space. How are you seeing that unfold?Joe: Yeah, I do. I've been, like, making speculations about the future of AI and data forever. I've had dreams of tools I've wanted forever, and I… don't have them yet. I don't think they're quite ready yet. I don't know, we're seeing things like—tha—I think people are working on a lot of problems.For example, like, I want AI to auto-optimize my database. I want it to, like, make indexes for me. I want it to help me with queries or optimizing queries. We're seeing some of that. I'm not seeing anyone doing particularly well yet. I think it's up in the air.I feel like it could be coming though soon, but that's the thing, though, too, like, I mean, if you mess up a query, or, like, a… large language model hallucinates a really shitty query for you, that could break your whole system really quickly. I feel like there still needs to be, like, a human being in the middle of it to, like, kind of help.Corey: I saw a blog post recently that AWS put out gave an example that just hard-coded a credential into it. And they said, “Don't do this, but for demonstration purposes, this is how it works.” Well, that nuance gets lost when you use that for AI training and that's, I think, in part, where you start seeing a whole bunch of the insecure crap these things spit out.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I thought the big thing I've seen, too, is, like, large language models typically don't have a secure option and you're—the answer is, like, help train the model itself later on. I don't know, I'm sure, like, a lot of teams don't want to have their most secret data end up public on a large language model at some point in the future. Which is, like, a huge issue right now.Corey: I think that what we're seeing is that you still need someone with expertise in a given area to review what this thing spits out. It's great at solving a lot of the busy work stuff, but you still need someone who's conversant with the concepts to look at it. And that is, I think, something that turns into a large-scale code review, where everyone else just tends to go, “Oh, okay. We're—do this with code review.” “Oh, how big is the diff?” “50,000 lines.” “Looks good to me.” Whereas, “Three lines.” “I'm going to criticize that thing with four pages of text.” People don't want to do the deep-dive stuff, and—when there's a huge giant project that hits. So, they won't. And it'll be fine, right up until it isn't.Joe: Corey, you and I know people and developers, do you think it's irresponsible to put out there an example of how to do something like that, even with, like, an asterisk? I feel like someone's going to still go out and try to do that and probably push that to production.Corey: Of course they are.Joe: [laugh].Corey: I've seen this with some of my own code. I had something on Docker Hub years ago with a container that was called ‘Terrible Ideas.' And I'm sure being used in, like—it was basically the environment I use for a talk I gave around Git, which makes sense. And because I don't want to reset all the repositories back to the way they came from with a bunch of old commands, I just want a constrained environment that will be the same every time I give the talk. Awesome.I'm sure it's probably being run in production at a bank somewhere because why wouldn't it be? That's people. That's life. You're not supposed to just copy and paste from Chat-Gippity. You're supposed to do that from Stack Overflow like the rest of us. Where do you think your existing code's coming from in a lot of these shops?Joe: Yep. No, I totally agree. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out with, like, people going to doing this stuff, or how honest they're going to be about it, too. I'm sure it's happening. I'm sure people are tripping over themselves right now, [adding 00:16:12].Corey: Oh, yeah. But I think, on some level, you're going to see a lot more grift coming out of this stuff. When you start having things that look a little more personalized, you can use it for spam purposes, you can use it for, I'm just going to basically copy and paste what this says and wind up getting a job on Upwork or something that is way more than I could handle myself, but using this thing, I'm going to wind up coasting through. Caveat emptor is always the case on that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and talk about ethics. I believe strongly in doing the right thing. But I'm also not worried about whether I'm able to make rent this month or put food on the table. That's a luxury. At some point, like, a lot of that strips away and you do what you have to do to survive. I don't necessarily begrudge people doing these things until it gets to a certain point of okay, now you're not doing this to stay alive anymore. You're doing this to basically seek rent.Joe: Yeah, I agree. Or just, like, capitalize on it. I do think this is less—like, the space is less grifty than the crypto space, but as we've seen over and over and over and over again, in tech, there's a such a fine line between, like, a genuinely great idea, and somebody taking advantage of it—and other people—with that idea.Corey: I think that's one of those sad areas where you're not going to be able to fix human nature, regardless of the technology stack you bring to bear.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.[midroll 00:17:30]Corey: So, what else are you seeing these days that interesting? What excites you? What do you see that isn't getting enough attention in the space?Joe: I don't know, I guess I'm in the data space, I'm… the thing I think I do see a lot of is huge interest in data. Data right now is the thing that's come up. Like, I don't—that's the thing that's training these models and everyone trying to figure out what to do with these data, all these massive databases, data lakes, whatever. I feel like everyone's, kind of like, taking a second look at all of this data they've been collecting for years and haven't really known what to do with it and trying to figure out either, like, if you can make a model out of that, if you try to, like… level it up, whatever. Corey, you and I were joking around recently—you've had a lot of data people on here recently, too—I feel like us data folks are just getting extra loud right now. Or maybe there's just the data spaces, that's where the action's at right now.I don't know, the markets are really weird. Who knows? But um, I feel like data right now is super valuable and more so than ever. And even still, like, I mean, we're seeing, like, companies freaking out, like, Twitter and Reddit freaking out about accessing their data and who's using it and how. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of action going on there right now.Corey: I think that there's a significant push from the data folks where, for a long time data folks were DBAs—Joe: Yeah.Corey: —let's be direct. And that role has continued to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways. It's never been an area I've been particularly strong in. I am not great at algorithmic complexity, it turns out, you can saturate some beefy instances with just a little bit of data if your queries are all terrible. And if you're unlucky—as I tend to be—and have an aura of destroying things, great, you probably don't want to go and make that what you do.Joe: [laugh]. It's a really good point. I mean, I don't know about, like, if you blow up data at a company, you're probably going to be in big trouble. And especially the scale we're talking about with most companies these days, it's super easy to either take down a server or generate an insane bill off of some shitty query.Corey: Oh, when I was at Reach Local years and years ago—my first Linux admin job—when I broke the web server farm, it was amusing; when I broke part of the data warehouse, nobody was laughing.Joe: [laugh]. I wonder why.Corey: It was a good faith mistake and that's fair. It was a convoluted series of things that set up and honestly, the way the company and my boss responded to me at the time set the course of the rest of my career. But it was definitely something that got my attention. It scares me. I'm a big believer in backups as a direct result.Joe: Yeah. Here's the other thing, too. Actually, our company, Tinybird, is working on versioning with your data sources right now and treating your data sources like Git, but I feel like even still today, most companies are just run by some DBA. There's, like, Mike down the hall is the one responsible keeping their SQL servers online, keeping them rebooted, and like, they're manually updating any changes on there.And I feel like, generally speaking across the industry, we're not taking data seriously. Which is funny because I'm with you on there. Like, I get terrified touching production databases because I don't want anything bad to happen to them. But if we could, like, make it easier to rollback or, like, handle that stuff, that would be so much easier for me and make it, like, less scary to deal with it. I feel like databases and, like, treating it as, like, a serious DevOps practice is not really—I'm not seeing enough of it. It's definitely, people are definitely doing it. Just, I want more.Corey: It seems like with data, there's a lack of iterative approaches to it. A line that someone came up with when I was working with them a decade and change ago was that you can talk about agile all you want, but when it comes to payments, everyone's doing waterfall. And it feels like, on some level, data's kind of the same.Joe: Yeah. And I don't know, like, how to fix it. I think everyone's just too scared of it to really touch it. Migrating over to a different version control, tr

Are you ready for a podcast filled with verbose discussion interrupted by digressions into random topics? You've come to the right place! We've got Security nightmares, Gaming updates, Starfield lunacy, regular lunacy, Intel Arc news and even Usenet!00:00 Intro01:41 Food with Josh03:18 Radeon review - take one (with odd CPU cooler digression)05:11 The actual Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT review24:23 Josh reviews the XFX QICK 319 Radeon RX 7700 XT Black Edition36:34 More RX 7700 XT price puzzlement38:58 One more look at that Starfield bundle eBay auction40:48 Podcast sponsor - Hello Fresh42:13 Mandatory Arc News - the Starfield driver issue46:41 A brief digression into old graphics APIs48:22 Intel Core i9-14900K Geekbench leak50:47 Usenet is still going strong52:41 Podcast sponsor - DeleteMe54:26 Security Corner1:04:25 Gaming Quick Hits1:10:59 Picks of the Week1:20:14 Outro ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The audio starts off kind of spotty but it gets better as it goes along I promise!!! Previewing the 1999-2000 NBA season for every team in the Western Conference's Midwest Division: The Vancouver Grizzlies (3:09), the Denver Nuggets (20:50), the Dallas Mavericks (32:46), the Minnesota Timberwolves (47:00), the Houston Rockets (56:00), the Utah Jazz (1:04:56), and the San Antonio Spurs (1:16:09). ⁠Please fill out this survey to help me make this podcast better!⁠⁠ ---  An NBA history podcast about the 2000s NBA. Hosted by Lew⁠ ⁠@L0GICMASTER⁠⁠ Social media links:  Phone/Voicemail: (405) 466-7623 Twitter:⁠ ⁠RimDynastyNBA⁠⁠ Instagram:⁠ ⁠RimDynastyNBA⁠⁠ TikTok:⁠ ⁠RimDynastyNBAPod⁠⁠ YouTube:⁠ ⁠RimDynastyNBA⁠⁠ Stats from Basketball Reference and NBA.com. Transaction info from prosportstransactions.com and Basketball Reference.  Intro music: “L'Amour Toujours” by Gigi D'Agostino. © Broadcast Music Inc., LatinAutor, Warner Chappell. Sources: Deseret News, ESPN.com, Los Angeles Times, NBA.com, New York Times, The Province, Salt Lake Tribune, Sporting News, Usenet, Vancouver Sun

Before the World Wide Web, savvy computer users were flocking to USENET to participate in discussions on everything from the latest advance in computing to the worst jokes you could imagine. USENET is still around today. So what the heck is it?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ripped from Usenet by Floyd PinkertonA frightening experience by an electrician while in the basement of a cult.Transcript and info at: https://www.creepypastascarystories.com/creepypasta/ripped-from-usenet/Background:Don't Go Around That Corner by SpookyBooRhodesDeep Web Background by SpookyBooRhodesMy Amazon Books: https://www.scarystorytime.com/amazonYouTube: http://www.splatterdaynightmares.comPatreon: http://www.spookyboo.clubTwitter: https://www.twitter.com/spookyboorhodesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/spookyboorhodesTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/splatterdaynightmaresFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/boorhodesFacebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/splatterdaynightmaresThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3577322/advertisement

Are you ready for a trip down memory lane? We kick things off with a discussion on the resurgence of USENET, exploring why it's making a comeback and how it has evolved over the years. Join us as we unravel the history and significance of this online forum, shedding light on its enduring relevance in the digital age.We'll also give you the latest news from around the Apple world, including Apple putting the 2017 MacBook Pro into "Vintage" status, and a preview of the "Wonderlust" event coming up on September 12th, where Apple will announce new models of the iPhone and Apple Watch, and tell us the release dates for the new operating systems. Speaking of those, Jeff gives us an update on how the betas are progressing.We wrap up our discussion by exploring the potential of the iPad as an "only computer" device. Should you do it? Can you do it? Well, it depends, and we're here to help you figure it all out. Links from the show:USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar now considered ‘vintage' and won't get macOS 14Apple EventGiving up the iPad-only travel dreamContact Us Drop us a line at feedback@basicafshow.com You'll find Jeff at @reyespoint on Twitter and @reyespoint@mastodon.sdf.org on Mastodon Find Tom at @tomfanderson on Twitter, and @tomanderson on Threads Join Tom's newsletter, Apple Talk, for more Apple coverage and tips & tricks. Show artwork by the great Randall Martin Design Enjoy Basic AF? Leave a review or rating! Review on Apple Podcasts Rate on Spotify Recommend in Overcast Intro Music: Psychokinetics - The Chosen Apple Music Spotify Show transcripts and episode artwork are AI generated and likely contain errors and general silliness.

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on August 31st, 2023.This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai(00:40): When your coworker does great work, tell their manager (2020)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340010&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:09): CT scans of coffee-making equipmentOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37341799&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(03:54): Ghostfolio: Open-source wealth management softwareOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37337482&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(05:28): Teaching with AIOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340314&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(07:05): Social media decline: Users are shifting to messaging apps and group chatsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334737&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(08:53): UTM – Virtual Machines for iOS and macOSOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37333404&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:41): USENET rises again?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336606&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(12:16): The Terraform Registry Terms of Service have been updatedOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37334486&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:48): Shell abandons its plan to offset CO2 emissionsOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336299&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(15:45): *@gmail.comOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37333848&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

Documentarian Alex Winter visits the show to discuss his history with Usenet and Napster, and his new documentary The YouTube Effect. The film covers the history of the platform and its transformation into a massive vector of disinformation. Our conversation goes through that and much more, including the future of Section 230, and the media's focus on TikTok and Facebook over YouTube.

Documentarian Alex Winter visits the show to discuss his history with Usenet and Napster, and his new documentary The YouTube Effect. The film covers the history of the platform and its transformation into a massive vector of disinformation. Our conversation goes through that and much more, including the future of Section 230, and the media's focus on TikTok and Facebook over YouTube.

From the intrusion kill chain model, the delivery of a “lure” to a potential victim by pretending to be some trustworthy person or organization in order to trick the victim into revealing sensitive information. According to Knowbe4, the word “phishing” first appeared in a Usenet newsgroup called AOHell in 1996 and some of the very first phishing attacks used AOL Instant Messenger to deliver fake messages purportedly from AOL employees in the early 2000s. The word is part of l33tspeak that started in the early days of the internet (1980s) as a shorthand to let readers know the author was part of the hacker community. In this case, the letters “ph” replace the letter “f” in the word fishing, as in “I fish, with an ‘f,' for bass in the lake.” In hacking, “I Phish, with a ‘ph,' for login credentials from key employees at my target's organization.

From the intrusion kill chain model, the delivery of a “lure” to a potential victim by pretending to be some trustworthy person or organization in order to trick the victim into revealing sensitive information. According to Knowbe4, the word “phishing” first appeared in a Usenet newsgroup called AOHell in 1996 and some of the very first phishing attacks used AOL Instant Messenger to deliver fake messages purportedly from AOL employees in the early 2000s. The word is part of l33tspeak that started in the early days of the internet (1980s) as a shorthand to let readers know the author was part of the hacker community. In this case, the letters “ph” replace the letter “f” in the word fishing, as in “I fish, with an ‘f,' for bass in the lake.” In hacking, “I Phish, with a ‘ph,' for login credentials from key employees at my target's organization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Up until the late 1990s, the internet was somewhat uncharted territory for many people and the landscape was very different back then. Twitter, Facebook, and even MySpace were things that had not been invented yet. Social media simply didn't exist the way that it does today and what modes of communication did exist took a small amount of technical knowledge. Private email groups and local BBS message boards were still the primary mode of communication by the time a service known as Usenet began to gain popularity. These newsgroups made it simple for the public to create an alias and post a public discussion; not unlike a primitive, stripped-down version of Reddit. And much like the early days of Reddit, topical groups available through the service ranged from the ordinary to shocking levels of depravity. There were no videos, gifs, or emojis as we see today as part of chat apps. This archaic online world was all ASCII and imagination, but for someone like Sharon Lopatka the online world was one of adventure and excitement. A world that she believed would fulfill all of her deepest desires, and one that ultimately lead her down a path of darkness. Visit us online at : Disaster Episode Sponsor: Go to Talkspace.com/DISASTER to get $100 off of your first month

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on May 11th, 2023.(00:33): What Wikipedia DidOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35935714(01:58): Run Llama 13B with a 6GB graphics cardOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937505(03:23): The networkQuality tool on macOSOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35936999(04:39): The World is Built on Probability (1984)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937375(06:11): OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime timeOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35936044(07:33): 47% of all internet traffic came from bots in 2022?Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35938433(09:07): Are We Sixel YetOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35936331(10:33): Fall of the Berlin Wall on Usenet (1989)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937637(12:00): Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp (1999)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35936463(13:41): Building a front end framework – Reactivity, composability with no dependenciesOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35937464This is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

The new LP by industrial legends Laibach is the subject of this week's podcast. The band has perhaps never been more active, releasing a slew of soundtracks and other releases, but Sketches Of The Red Districts finds the band returning to both tWe're also talking about the new single from (occasional labelmates of Laibach) Depeche Mode.

Michael pores over a cryptic message written in Latin that he discovered on the Usenet, desperate to decipher its secrets. Just as he's about to give up, a tip from a stranger sets him on a new path. Mackenzie grows concerned when Kendra misses school for the third day in a row.

Desantis vs Disney :: Social Security :: World GDP vs New Hampshire :: Chinese Cold War? :: Google Bard to Compete with ChatGPT? :: Copyright Cartel :: Chinese Spy Balloon :: Entreprenur Sarah? :: Copyright Cartel vs USENET :: 2023-02-10 Ian, Chris W. Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/crblake86 Send Bitcoin: 1MnoYoPirXQHfhknDxbDHhLsF9u7kUggKy Send Bitcoin Cash: qpp62s8uupdqkrfew7vgp805pnsh5jk2ncnfkndwrd Dash: XpApo1jcPzTJyLLB6G8GJ7DoW9CGjcV5xT Ether: 0xFb1a23163bea743BB79B93849D864ad070597855 Lightcoin ltc1q6ygsamrkwl0at93datyqfh47z4crg4jkg4fx30

Desantis vs Disney :: Social Security :: World GDP vs New Hampshire :: Chinese Cold War? :: Google Bard to Compete with ChatGPT? :: Copyright Cartel :: Chinese Spy Balloon :: Entrepreneur Sarah? :: Copyright Cartel vs USENET :: 2023-02-10 Ian, Chris W.

This fortnight, we're joined by sociologist Marc Smith, whose appearance on IT Conversations with Doug Kaye was the subject of this podcast's first episode (First Podcast). Marc generously joins the Buddies (Kelly, Chelsea, and Nate) to talk about the future of social media, and his work to create a brighter, better internet for all. We also play I See What You Did There! Check out Marc Smith on IT Conversations: https://archive.org/details/etech2004-smith, and at the Social Media Research FoundationHave a First for us to discuss? Tweet at us @debutbuddies!Listen to Kelly and Chelsea's other show, Never Show the Monster.Check out Kelly and Cabe on Thirteenth Depository.Get some sci-fi from Spaceboy Books, including Nate's new book.Get down with Michael J. O'Connor's music!Next week, we're talking about Rankin/Bass's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)... the FIRST HOLIDAY SPECIAL (or at least the first claymation holiday special)!

Elon Musk is still causing chaos at Twitter (and it's beginning to impact users), are scammers selling your house without your permission, and Google gets stung with a record-breaking fine.All this and much much more is discussed in the latest edition of the "Smashing Security" podcast by computer security veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault, joined this week by The Cyberwire's Dave Bittner.Plus don't miss our featured interview with Pentera's Shakel Ahmed talking about automating continuous cyber defence validation.Warning: This podcast may contain nuts, adult themes, and rude language.Episode links:Graham offers Dave Bittner some advice on “Welcome Datacomp”... in 1995! - Usenet.Elon Musk apologises to users for Twitter being slow - Twitter.Former Twitter employee doesn't think Elon Musk knows what he's talking about - Twitter.Eric Frohnhoefer says Elon Musk is wrong - Twitter.Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move - The Register.Elon Musk says that he is turning off microservices “bloatware” - Twitter.Twitter's SMS Two-Factor Authentication Is Melting Down - Wired.Elon only trusts Elon - Platformer.Elon's paranoid purge - Platformer.Google to pay nearly $400 million over deceptive location tracking practices - The Record.Follow Smashing Security on Mastodon.South Bay Man Pleads Guilty to Participating in a Multimillion-Dollar Real Estate Scam Involving Fake Open Houses at Not-for-Sale Homes - Justice.gov.A South Bay man accepted hundreds of offers from open houses. But the homes weren't for sale - LA Times. The typing of the Regex.Fesshole - Twitter.If Books Could Kill -...