Tech Time by Tim #32

This week we’ll be looking at Web Scraping’s double standard and the Schumacher Scandal. Moving on, we’ve got Work Wars – The Employer Strikes Back, and the aftermath of Apple’s pyric victory over Epic in their long, long legal battle. There’s also some flipping between pages and screens, looking at the formative experiences of children and teenagers of today. Last but not least the SpaceX starship launch, new brain scan techniques and… taxidermy drones…?

At A Glance

A quick overview of this week’s content

·??????The Week that Was: Web Scraping Double Standards, The Schumacher Scandal

·??????Walled Gardening: Work Wars – The Employer Strikes Back, Ecosystem Lock-in

·??????Rules of Engagement: Caught Between Page And Screen, Brain Scans, Fireworks, And Bird Drones

The Week that Was:

A look back at the tech world of the past week.

Web Scraping Double Standards – Crawling Towards Closed-Source Databases:

Reddit and Stack Overflow are closing their API’s, which is to say, they will start charging for access. They don’t want to be scraped anymore. For those that don’t know, scarping is usually part of the act of crawling. This is an open secret of the internet. To define crawling in the simplest terms, it involves going through databases with automated tools. Scraping involves downloading any useful data, ‘scraping’ from the database if you will. This process allows companies to spin up a new product or service using information that already exists, rather than having to develop it all from scratch themselves.

So what is the double standard? Everyone crawls, no one wants to be crawled. Major players such as Adobe and Universal Music Group (UMG) are well-established and have a wealth of proprietary resources. With the advent of generative AI, they now also have extra motivation to try and stop the cycle of crawling. To give an analogy, it would be like cutting down a rope bridge after you’ve safely crossed it yourself.

Open-source and non-profit initiatives are at risk of becoming collateral damage. They will struggle to pay for access at scale to closed-source data. ?Similarly, they will be less resilient against the legal and financial burdens legislation such as the EU’s proposed Cyber Resilience Act. Why were these organizations included in the first place? Because some of the biggest power users of open-source software are…you’ve guessed it, haven’t you? Big tech. Thus, whilst certainly important, the request for ‘fair treatment of open-source developers’ is a lot more complicated than it might seem. That’s the problem, as well as what is at stake. What is to be considered ‘fair’ and who gets to decide? LINK

The Schumacher Scandal – Parasocial Name Image Likeness (NIL):

This past week German magazine Die Aktuelle published a fake AI-powered interview with Michael Schumacher, the famous F1 driver that disappeared from the public eye after a tragic skiing accident. Until now! Or so the magazine boldly proclaimed. Chief Editor Anne Hoffman was ultimately fired over this, and the Schumacher family is pursuing legal action against the magazine.

Nominally, this is a tale of a magazine using AI for a tasteless publicity stunt. Digging a little deeper though, it is also a story about Name Image Likeness (NIL). Paparazzi violating the privacy of celebrities is nothing new. What is new is that there isn’t any need to have direct contact anymore. Indeed, that’s the truly interesting part here. NIL also means ‘zero’ which can be understood as ‘nothing’. To create from nothing, in Latin, is ‘Ex Nihilo.’ This brings us to the concept of the parasocial relationship. A parasocial relationship is, in essence, a strong emotional bond with a famous person created ex nihilo.

What people want is two-way contact with whomever they’ve entered into a parasocial relationship with. This is, I would argue, a main driver behind AI impersonation of musicians. Some artists are now embracing this and giving direct permission for their NIL to be used by fans. What might come out of such two-way creative interaction is anyone’s guess, but I think it is worth keeping an eye on. LINK

Walled Gardening:

Observing walled gardens and monopolies in the tech world.

Work Wars – The Employer Strikes Back:

Back when I wrote about the mass firings of ground floor workers in previous newsletters I predicted that the firings would work their way up the food chain. And so they have. Though middle managers and technical staff are the primary targets now, the gradual uptick of top-level talent and executives being axed is continuing as well.

In fact, there were two major upsets in media in that regard this past week. Pulitzer prize winning Buzzfeed News was shut down in its entirety and Fox News’s star performer Tucker Carlson was unceremoniously fired as well. The firing was seemingly conducted right after his usual prime-time slot on Friday. Now, to be fair, Carlson and Fox News were the subject of plenty of controversy. That said, it remains unclear to what extent Fox’s settlement with voting company dominion might have played a part in Carlson’s departure.

One thing that is clearer is that orders to fire Carlson appear to have come all the way from the top, from Fox owner Rupert Murdoch himself. That is relevant here because CEO’s clashing with personnel is a major part of the work wars. One aspect in which these clashes occur is on the work from home front. In that sense it makes sense for the boss to want personnel using extremely expensive office space again. Yet critics of these vocal CEO’s accuse them of hypocrisy on the wage front. The accusation is that rank-and-file employees can’t delegate most of their work to subordinates, nor do they earn bonus packages and salaries in the millions or even hundreds of millions. LINK

Ecosystem Lock-in, Apple’s Epic Win Comes With Caveats:

A new report caught my eye recently with regards to how frequently iPhone owners tend to upgrade across various age groups. The reason being that I’d just finished with another report about the 16% year over year (YoY) growth of refurbished iPhone demand. I couldn’t help but notice that the refurbished sales appeared to be cannibalising new sales to a certain extent. One risk of refurbished electronics though, is battery health, something few companies appear to be as aware of as Uber. Say hello to battery percentage-based surge pricing.

Imagine, you’re in an unfamiliar place, your battery is about to die on you, you need to quickly book an Uber to get home and… as the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers… This dynamic is also at the heart of Apple vs. Epic. Epic accused Apple of abusing a captive audience of users to force unfavourable conditions on companies using its platform. The verdict’s in and Apple got a pyric victory (a win you can’t enjoy because of what it cost you). According to this most recent verdict, Apple does not count as a monopolist under “either federal or state antitrust laws.”

So what did this victory cost Apple then? The company may no longer block app developers from linking to alternative payment platforms, and it might be forced to allow sideloading (getting apps from alternative app stores). This highlights a very important technical detail though. ‘according to law’ Apple is not a monopoly, just like how image hosting site Imgur would likely not be considered a monopoly. But if Imgur were to say, I don’t know, ban porn, what would services reliant on it for their image uploads do?

That’s the issue with Ecosystem lock-in, the singular points of failure. So consider me curious to see how far the steam deck movement towards portable, highly configurable devices with flexible software support will go. If it works, we could see a move away from infrastructure bottlenecks, if this movement fails, there will simply be a slight reshuffle of who owns the bottlenecks. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement.

Caught Between Page And Screen:

We’ve known for some time now that, on average, extreme views are more attractive than moderate ones. New research on the topic therefore comes as little surprise. More interesting are findings that US teens report negative effects of social media on others more strongly than they experience these negative effects themselves. Similarly, social control and effective moderation are perceived to be both highly effective, but also in need of careful calibration and management.

Mental health apps, a booming business segment, have potential to make a meaningful difference here. The dark side of these apps would need to be brought under control first though, no easy task. Similarly, user curation and social control are also difficult to get right. On social media platform Weibo, influencers curate, translate and, edit content banned by the state censorship apparatus. This is good for freedom of information, yet it could also endanger users if authorities choose to crack down on them, or if users choose to share harmful subject matter via similar methods.

And so it goes that these Virtual actions can have real world consequences. That’s somewhat dramatic but it does point to how tightly the virtual and physical worlds have become intertwined as far as children’s education and other formative experiences are concerned. LINK

Brain Scans, Fireworks, And Bird Drones:

SpaceX had their big Starship launch this past week and it can best be described as ‘mission failed successfully.’ The rocket exploded, yes, but it managed to take off properly and showed mission critical points of failure in a relatively risk-free test flight. It did still explode though, and engine reliability issues persisting this far into development are raising questions from onlooking experts in the field. At least things are looking better for Starship than they are for Ariane 6.

Speaking of flight, let’s talk about taxidermy. Yes, the practise of stuffing and preserving dead animals or… apparently turning them into drones. I’m not sure how I feel about this as an animal and nature lover. From a purely mechanical perspective though, it certainly is quite rational and clever. Scientists are using nature’s very own solution to issues such as aerodynamics to look for ways to try and improve human aviation.

For those wondering what’s going on in the head of someone that thinks “hey, let’s stuff a drone up this bird’s butt,” maybe you’ll be able to find out some time soon. Brain images just got about 64 million times sharper. Just in time for the 50-year anniversary of the MRI scan. LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web.

Truly Alien LINK

Antheld LINK

Life With Penguins LINK

Weed Science LINK

Windows File Paths LINK

Sakurai’s Column LINK

Tripping With DALL-E LINK

Soy Gadgets LINK

StableLM LINK

The Deep End:

A weekly batch of longform content recommendations.

Anime And Apocalypse:

The cultural impact of how anime depicts the apocalypse and post-apocalypse. LINK

AGI Scepticism:

What is AGI and why are some experts sceptical of it? LINK

Navigating A World Filled With Phantoms:

What it’s like to navigate the world when your senses conjure up phenomena that others can’t perceive. LINK

Shou’s Plea For TikTok:

TikTok CEO Shou Chew gives a sales pitch for TikTok and combines it with his attempts to defend the platform against a ban during this TED talk. LINK?

A Look At LAION’s Creator Christoph Schuhmann:

A look at the creator of the LAION database LINK

One More Thing…

So apparently I know how to swear in 6 different languages. I found this out when the fire alarm kept going off at home. I was hyper-focussed on my writing, so when it went off, it scared me more than it usually would. I’m fairly certain that I jumped up out of my chair with enough force to crush a piece of coal into a diamond. There was no fire, it was a false alarm.

Don’t you just hate false alarms though? What gets me about them is that you can’t let your guard down because you never know when it’ll be a real situation you have to deal with. And yet there’s this sense of betrayal as the adrenaline subsides and you try to calm down… and then it goes off again, the little bastard. They say the third time’s the charm, but this was anything but charming.

On a much more positive note, my sister visited me over the weekend and brought me some snacks, I was happily munching them whilst working on this very newsletter in fact. After managing the mischievous alarm of course.

There are two celebrations to fit into this newsletter as well. In the Netherlands we have a holiday called king/queen’s birthday today, on April 27th. It depends on what monarch we have at the time whether it is the queen’s birthday or the king’s birthday. I also heard from a Muslim friend of mine that Ramadan concluded on the 21st of April. So I’d like to wish all Dutch readers a happy King’s Birthday, and Eid Mubarak to my Muslim readers in and outside the Netherlands!