Tech Time by Tim #46

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away… some aliens apparently decided to take a trip to Earth. Or so two whistleblowers in the US Army claim. That’s not all though, Stack Overflow is getting in on the AI game as the water demands for data centers cause tech stacks to overflow at the cost of drought-stricken communities. Thinking of calling the cops on the heavy water users, yeah, about that… for those that haven’t quite had their fill of DRM yet, here’s another heaping helping. And last but not least, we’ll be looking at a new way to play tag, as well as reading between the lines of Meta’s latest Llama release.

At A Glance

A quick overview of this week’s content.

·??????The Week that Was: Aliens and Alienation, Mine Stack Overfloweth

·??????U And I: Call The Cops, Web DRM

·??????Rules of Engagement: Tag! You’re It, Step Into My Parlour Said The Llama To The Dev

The Week that Was:

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

Aliens And Alienation:

Two whistleblowers from the US military are demanding their government talk about keeping ET’s family trapped in the proverbial basement . Though no longer in active service, the high ranks of these whistleblowers raised some eyebrows after the obligatory chuckles had been chuckled and people realized these two men were being deadly serious. TicTac was apparently a code used to refer to UFOs which led to much confusion amongst journalists and readers alike initially. I suppose that old ‘TikTok’ joke of mine’s come full circle now huh? How weirdly the monkey’s paw curls.?Supposedly the US government has genetic material of the aliens as well, which makes me wonder what kind of state it is in. I have no idea what kind of natural environment these life forms come from, though I do know that some pretty weird stuff can happen to the human body when someone dies in space…

Given the recent Titan submarine accident, some scientists have taken to wondering again whether deep-sea exploration or space exploration is more dangerous . Many of the same engineering principles and risks apply, yet space exploration has almost always enjoyed far greater prestige and accompanying budgets. Perhaps many humans feel like we’ve already conquered the oceans for having sailed across them for so long, even inviting air travel to take oceans out of the travel equation entirely.

Priorities are weird like that, a lot of the time they feel entirely arbitrary. Not only that, but motivations are easily mistaken. When we’re talking about suspicious metal orbs scanning unwitting humans, for example, it isn’t just aliens, but also other humans eager to gather data. Worldcoin, for example, is somehow not only still around, but making impressive progress in its mission to scan as many irises as possible. It turns out that offering disadvantaged people money to do stuff they don’t understand the implications of still works as well as it ever has… Is that really what we want to show potential interstellar visitors though, is that really putting humanity’s best foot forward? LINK

Mine Stack Overfloweth:

There’s a very curious new paper out and about that has the physics community abuzz with both excitement and skepticism. Referred to as LK-99, this supposed new material would be the first superconductor - something that conducts electricity without friction - able to work at room temperatures and under a relatively amount of pressure. Superconductors normally need near absolute zero cold or extreme pressure to remain stable, making them unusable outside of extremely niche, highly controlled lab environments and specialist devices. Since LK-99 is still being investigated, and the circumstances of its reveal are highly controversial, we’ll need to wait a while to cover it in depth, if at all.

It's important to talk about why LK-99 could be such a huge deal though. During use, normal conductors generate friction. This doesn’t just lower overall efficiency, it also generates heat. Generated heat needs to be dealt with somehow so that machinery can maintain stable operating temperatures. For large-scale facilities such as datacentres dissipating this heat tends to involve a lot of water . LK-99 would, assuming it is real, remove the need for some, potentially all of the 5.6 billion gallons of water necessary for just one company's yearly cooling.

All tech stacks are racking up increasing thermal issues, both because of how resource-hungry new technologies such as AI are, but also because this past July may well have been the hottest in about 120,000 years . The competition is heating up in more ways than one though, as not only Meta, but also Stability AI (the company behind Stable Diffusion) have released big updates to their respective AI products. This, on top of all the other rivals in the space, mean that Stack Overflow, popular Q&A forum for programmers, has its work cut out for it, trying to carve out a niche that will allow it to survive in a space it’s gradually being pressured out of by so called ‘copilots.’ LINK

U And I:

How UI and UX mediate our relationships with both technology and each other.

Call The Cops:

Though I normally focus more on international affairs and whatever dumpster fires happen to be blazing over in the US, a local news item this past week stuck out to me. Dutch police complained that their radios were too unreliable and glitchy. As the lifeline of many officers on the front lines, it’s kind of important for these things to work. To paraphrase the police leadership’s response ‘the radios work fine, you’re just too demanding.’ Oof. For a second there I thought I was watching an item about PC gaming performance . The two might not seem related, but they are. A recently released game, Remnant II, was mostly well received, but also criticised for its dreadful performance. Allegedly the developers used upscaling technologies meant to enhance what already works as a crutch for a game that couldn’t function on its own. Similarly, the police leadership appears to be mistaking ‘it (barely) functions’ for ‘it performs well.’

Performance is such a nebulous term for how central it is to our overall relationship with technology. For example, it could relate to hardware, software, people, infrastructure, or protocols, to name just a few. Performance is a long chain comprised of all of these variables, yet a chain is only ever as strong as its weakest link. Too often, these only get measured at the end of the chain, rather than inspecting each link for potential issues. Perhaps with more thorough inspection of weak links, the latest ‘critical compromise ’ of US Airforce communications systems could have been avoided.

To give an example of checking for weak links and acting to strengthen them, I have an example. Researchers recently found deliberate backdoors in police radio encryption algorithms. Ideally, a team of developers would immediately be engaged to close that backdoor. Swift, thorough, reliable. That’s that we want for and from the people ensuring our safety, no? Indeed, whilst it might seem counterintuitive, researchers finding major flaws and vulnerabilities is actually great, assuming the stewards of such systems act with due haste and diligence. Better a researcher discover and disclose than a threat actor discover and exploit. LINK

Web DRM:

Digital Rights Management for the Internet (Web DRM) could potentially accomplish a lot of very valuable and useful things, such as cutting down on misinformation, toxicity, and crime. So why are efforts to implement it faced with such hostility? It all comes back to credibility. Silicon Valley, to be blunt, has none.

As a tech analyst I love Silicon Valley’s finest, I have tremendous respect for the Google’s of the tech world. They have brilliant people making brilliant things that are both useful and worth writing about. As a user of hardware and software, my feelings are much more conflicted. The problem isn’t the intention of Google’s developers, I believe these to be pure. The problem is Google’s famous motto ‘don’t be evil.’ That sounds great and lofty on paper, but none of the sector’s leadership has truly defined what they consider evil to be, what it means to commit an evil act. General promises of?‘being responsible’ and vague gestures towards ‘the ethics’ are nowhere near good enough.

As such, ‘don’t be evil’ is little more than philosophical smoke being blown up our collective asses. A necessary component of credibility is accountability, and tech titans have long since transcended the ability of anyone to exercise power over them. That’s why tax breaks and other incentives exist. To lure them to particular countries. If tech titans don’t like what a country is asking of them, they can simply leave. How this relates to Web DRM, according to critics, is that it gives companies in charge of administering such mechanisms the power to decide what is understood as ‘evil.’

The reason this upsets critics as much as it does is that the arbiters of such a truth would exist beyond it, they’d be ‘meta,’ if you’ll pardon the pun. Which is to say, if a company like Google were to define the good and evil of the internet, they themselves would not be beholden to their own rules. For a glimpse at what web DRM might look like in practise, keep an eye on the advertising space and its gradual phasing out of 3rd party cookies. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement.

Tag! You’re It:

AirTags are very popular for how precisely they allow the owner to track whatever or whoever they’ve put the tag on. Whilst the small print during the initial release of AirTags back in 2021 told them they were not to be used for people or pets…that small print hasn’t stopped the gadget from being widely used for, among other things, stalking. It’s not all gloom and doom though, as these small round devices are also used for more noble purposes, such as foiling burglaries and as a debatable means for smartphone weary parents to keep track of their kids .?

Children’s safety, both on and offline is a major talking point as far as tech legislation goes because both kids and adults alike are struggling with historic mental health crises. In the US, two new bills were recently passed with the intent of addressing the mental health impact of technology upon children. The bills in question are the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and version two of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0).

KOSA and COPPA 2.0 represent an interesting contradiction. To ensure the children are safe, these rules may actually force social media companies, among others, to violate children’s privacy much like the AirTag strategy used by some parents. It’s the age-old question of “do the ends justify the means?” LINK

Step Into My Parlour Said the Llama To The Dev:

Meta is attempting to use open-source as a means of bootstrapping its AI efforts, putting the Llama 2 Large Language Model (LLM) in the hands of as many developers as possible. Meta’s reputation with regards to openness is not the best, so there was little surprise when the fine print revealed that anyone making more than $700 million a year would need to pay a fee. Innocuous on the surface , yet conveniently excluding all existing rivals, whilst putting a definitive growth cap on any upstarts intending to use Llama.

The reason why I refer to open-source as a shield for large tech companies is because it shields them from accountability to a certain extent whilst also leveraging the creativity and free man hours of 3rd party developers. The problem with the current platform lockdowns is partially that the greatest beneficiaries of open-source efforts are now shutting the doors behind them. The goal is to secure their future edge over competitors as well as to lock in the value of their existing assets. Another part of the issue with open-source regulation is that the arguments made by the likes of GitHub are very valid, speaking to the synergy between large corporations and open-source developers that got us to this point of advanced technological capability in the first place.

Will lawmakers or the industry itself win the race to regulate AI? It’s still too early to tell, yet what is becoming ever more apparent is that human-AI synergy is continuing its gradual move towards equilibrium. I continue to believe that the upheaval caused by generative AI has great potential to be a net positive for creatives and society in general. AI has forced radical renegotiations between those who generate and those who extract value and is also continuing to fuel a deluge of think pieces about the value of art, about previously unseen or ignored nuances within creative expression.

The danger of overly centralised AI is that all individuality is eventually bleached out of human creatives as they are outcompeted by models trained off of them. Yet there’s also the possibility of human creativity gaining gradually more value and prestige as people look for that elusive spark. As education slowly progresses towards embracing support AI’s , students may even learn more about just what kinds of knowledge and expertise go into making high quality art, becoming inspired to pick up new hobbies or integrate creative approaches into their future workflows. LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web.

Tilted LINK

Talking Trees LINK

Fried Brains LINK

Body As Beholder LINK

Community Building LINK

Internet Caffes LINK

Third Eye LINK

Super Plasters LINK ?

Fly Brains LINK

The Deep End:

A weekly batch of long-form content recommendations.

The Faults In Our Starlinks:

Just how much coverage would Starlink really have when fully operational? Might that be a problem? LINK

Galaxy Unpacked:

Recording of Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event for those that like to watch industry events. LINK

Deep Learning Deep Dive:

Ever wanted to see a detailed comparison of consumer accessible GPU’s for deep learning? Here you go! LINK

Why Bother With The Karamazov’s:

An explanation of why The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevski influenced certain historical figures so profoundly. LINK

The Art Of Loss:

On Simone de Beauvoir’s explorations of her existentialism. LINK

One More Thing…

I bought a Digital To Analogue Converter (DAC) this past week. A veteran audiophile friend helped me choose the right one. I trusted him and bought this particular DAC, at the company he recommended, because of his credibility. Spoiler, he didn’t disappoint me, he so seldom does. Buuuuuut this also gets at why user retention is so expensive and difficult. Credibility is hard to build and easy to destroy, especially for those that have long histories of unscrupulous practises, or a big body count of discontinued products and services.

So how was the DAC? It was a complete and utter pain in the ass. The protective case was damaged out of the box and the device itself only came with a single flimsy cable for charging. Said cable was a micro-USB (In 2023, really?) about as short as my attention span when I’m tired. Not only that, but to get the device running properly on my devices of choice required so many dongles (that I had to go out and buy separately) that I had to double check if I hadn’t just bought an Apple device.

This is why Web DRM concerns me, the complete arbitrariness with which a company might decide you don’t have the right ‘connection.’ I eventually got the DAC working, but it had really soured me on what was otherwise a pocket sized little miracle of audio engineering. I stuck with it because I trusted my friend, and he was absolutely right about the quality of its sound. His credibility thus remained untarnished because he steered me true. Yet both the device’s laborious setup and the retailer he recommended disappointed me; I would not recommend them to others. Credibility is such a fickly thing.