Tech Time by Tim #50

I wonder if they were playing any music at India’s space agency when they watched their craft touch down on the moon’s surface. If so, perhaps it was ‘fly me to the moon?’ Today’s newsletter talks about that, addiction toggle trials, and Arm’s precarious position. Also blasting off are HashiCorp hijinks, new cybernetics breakthroughs, and uh…the line’s getting a big grainy here, damn dialup-dependencies…

At A Glance

A quick overview of this week’s content

·?????? The Week that Was: Indian Moonshots And Russian Ghost Ships, The Addiction Toggle Test

·?????? Walled Gardening: Arm(ed) and Endangered, HashiCorp Hijinks

·?????? Rules of Engagement: Talk To Me Mentally, Dial-Up Dependencies

The Week that Was:

A look back at the tech world of the past week

Indian Moonshots And Russian Ghost Ships:

Observers watched with bated breath as India conducted its first successful lunar landing (earlier probes aren’t counted). This was also the first-ever successful landing on the moon’s south pole. It was initially a race between Russia and India, but the Russian attempt ended in failure as Luna-25 crashed into the moon’s surface. Luna is Latin for ‘moon.’ So in a sense, the Russians crashed a moon into the moon. I guess the lunar invasion is going about as well as the Ukrainian one.

I was half joking when I called this a ‘lunar invasion.’ Back during the Cold War, getting to the moon was a matter of pride, and that was it. This current space race is about establishing a permanent presence on the moon. The South Pole was a target for landing this time because of intent to research its pools of ice. Investigations will at least in part focus on whether that ice might serve as a viable water source for long-term settlements or not. Furthermore, if ample supplies of hydrogen and oxygen are also discovered, these could potentially be used as rocket fuel, making the moon a potential staging area for expeditions to say…Mars.

My stance on this recent space race is that it is a distraction from all the things we should be paying attention to and funding back here on earth. It’s fine to gaze at the stars and want to reach for them. But there are plenty of problems down here on Earth that we ought to solve before racing space yachts to infinity and beyond. Russia’s spaceships might not be doing so hot at staying in touch, for example, but that’s precisely the point for the nation’s ever-evolving grain smuggling operation. The boring old naval ships might not draw headlines, but they do draw a whole lot of stolen grain away from one-grain shed and into another. If you’ve not heard of Bellingcat, they’re an award-winning group of investigative journalists. And if you’re interested in just what a fleet of Russian ghost ships was up to whilst its spaceship was ploughing the moon…here you go! LINK

The Addiction Toggle Trial:

Like TikTok before them, other social media platforms are rolling out their own toggles for the highly addictive algorithms that allowed these companies to rise to prominence in the first place. They are doing this to comply with the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Initially, the following companies will have to comply, with all companies falling under the new ruleset by February 2024 (the smaller their customer base, the longer companies have to prepare). Examples of companies that will have had to comply as of Friday, August 25th, are Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Google for services such as the app store and YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, Booking, AliExpress, Zalando, Wikipedia, Apple for its mobile app store, and Microsoft with Bing.

I’ve made my stance clear on these algorithm toggles in previous newsletters, saying “if you could simply opt out of addiction, no one would ever need rehab.” To what extent choice and ‘user’ agency play a part in addiction has, for decades now, been fiercely debated. This is exactly what interests me most about what, to me, feels like a large-scale clinical trial. The clinical trial is about whether, when given the choice, a significant number of users will actively choose to turn off their algorithms or not. Furthermore, it will be a test of the extent to which EU regulators will actually be able to monitor, and if necessary, sanction offending companies.

Many articles and much research cover the supposed negative impact of excess screen time on users, especially young ones. These discussions are mostly focused on, but not limited to social media. There are indeed a lot of problems here, first and foremost, the addiction thing. But that also makes this such a complex and loaded mess to try and clean. For example, let’s ask what it would mean for such lines of reasoning as those in the previous two sources if users chose to leave the algorithms on. One of the major pillars of the DSA is to ‘Increase user empowerment’ but that’s somewhat paradoxical if we proceed on the assumption that a user can now actively choose to let social media companies ‘prey on them,’ so to speak. What would that mean for DSA style tech interventions going forward? Regardless of where you stand, how the DSA ends up working in practise is important to pay attention to exactly because it will show the strengths and limitations of tech intervention in its present guise. LINK

Walled Gardening:

Observing walled gardens and monopolies in the tech world

Arm(ed) And Endangered:

All right, let’s talk some more about that Initial Public Offering (IPO) by Arm! This is the prominent British semiconductor and software design company that I wrote about previously. I still believe things could go very well for Arm if they play their cards right, but there are also some risks:

·?????? Despite being called “Arm China, ” and accounting for around 25% of annual revenue, Arm only has a minority stake in this middleman company necessary for doing business in China. Back in 2021, former Arm China CEO Allen Wu went rogue, only being ousted after a bitter and protracted series of legal battles. Having such a volatile and unpredictable ‘subsidiary’ in a time of high geopolitical tensions is less than ideal.

·?????? Nvidia is trying to render ARM processors obsolete by pushing for a shift towards Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based computing. Nvidia calls this ‘accelerated computing.’

·?????? The mobile phone market is saturated and key customers are increasingly looking towards proprietary solutions that will cut Arm out of the equation. To be fair though, it’s more likely that the royalties will simply drop on a device by device basis. But what makes investors really made really fast? Lower revenue.

Indeed, that’s part of the reason why we’re suddenly seeing so many handheld gaming computers. This represents a newly created market that’s yet to be saturated. Unlike handheld gaming consoles, handheld computers are fully functional computers that happen to have the form factor of a gaming handheld. Due to how compact these systems have to be, System on a Chip (SoC) solutions are getting extra momentum.

Meanwhile, to add further pressure on the mobile front, cloud giants such as Amazon and Microsoft are using gaming as a spearhead onto mobile via their respective cloud infrastructures. Things are tense, they are competitive, but possibilities also abound. That’s why, supposing ‘Arm’s China Problem’ blows up, it would leave a gaping hole in the company during the worst possible time. Arm really can’t afford to be caught with its pants down during a dual shift in both major production processes and major hardware paradigms (way of seeing and doing things). LINK

HashiCorp Hijinks:

HashiCorp is the company that owns the popular Terraform, a so-called infrastructure-as-code tool. If that sounds a little confusing, let me briefly explain. What this does is take various different Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) needed to communicate between different services, and it integrates these into one neat, easier-to-work-with environment through the use of code. It is primarily useful for, here we go again, cloud infrastructure. Terraform minimises the resources needed to actually keep things running smoothly, resources that are ideally sold to customers.

So the thing here is, HashiCorp did it’s IPO in 2021, shortly before the big tech turmoil started rocking the world (of tech). It was not, and still is not, profitable. Meanwhile, and you can probably see the trend here, major cloud providers using Terraform and other open-source software power users are likely making HashiCorp management quite bitter indeed. It’s hard to stay open source when mega corporations just take all that work and integrate it into their products without supporting further development. ‘Your Product as Their Service’ (YPTS).

So I do get where they’re coming from here. They want to make money off of their product. Except, if we’re really being honest here, the community is upset because of the old Reddit problem. When the community generates your value, and your product is technically your community, locking things down makes you the YPTS, the culprit rather than the victim. Open Source software is the backbone of the digital world. If Open Source development becomes untenable, you’ll see a cascade of infrastructural collapses that would rouse Rube Goldberg from the grave just to point out that ‘this was all a little excessive to be honest, even for me.’ That’s how complex and wildly impractical the endless layers of infrastructural interdependencies have become over time.

This latest situation is yet another wake-up call for why we need to, as a society, properly address the monetisation issues inherent to Open Source development. Business Source Licenses (BSL) are symptoms of this malaise, not the cure. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement

Talk To Me Mentally:

Longtime readers of the newsletter will know that I like to keep up with developments in the field of cybernetics, periodically giving a status update in that regard. This past week, several overlapping articles discussed the state of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI’s) whilst a PR stunt by Apple showed just how far prosthetics development has come… for pets!

Though used for pets, the Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) techniques applied to making better-fitting animal prosthetics could lead to further progress in the field of human prosthetics as well. Better fits, greater comfort, lower weight etc. Though it’s not just missing limbs that science is working to compensate for. BCI research is focused, in large part, on providing relief to those suffering from conditions such as full-body paralysis. Sayings such as “go out and touch some grass” refer to people who spend too much time indoors, looking at screens, and getting worked up over irrelevant things. Yet they also betray the fact that many of us take for granted what people with complex medical conditions can only dream of. It’s pretty hard to go out and touch some grass with the aforementioned paralysis, for example. It is admittedly funny to read headlines like ?‘leading eye doctor confirms that going out and touching some grass counteracts myopia (extreme nearsightedness).’ But we shouldn’t take such findings for granted.

Which is why researchers keep trying to replicate the human brain, they want to better understand how it does, or at times no longer, works. When successful, such findings can lead to new records for synthesised speech accuracy. Who knows, ‘just thinking out loud’ might end up more literal than figurative sometime in the future. LINK

Dial-Up Dependencies:

You’re going to have to bear with me for a moment here. Investors are so excited about Nvidia’s performance that some are even proclaiming it the most important company to civilisation. But I think it’s interesting to see what Nvidia thinks is most important, whom Jensen Huang, the CEO will prioritise, given the tight constraints largely expected to be imposed on available stock for the foreseeable future. It’s VMware, a cloud company being acquired by American digital infrastructure provider Broadcom. Huang prominently mentioned VMware several times when answering AI-related questions.

There was some confusion and disappointment that the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Google were mentioned so relatively little in relation to a seemingly bit player that’s about to get eviscerated by its ‘new’ parent company. But do you know what all cloud companies need as much as humans need oxygen? Internet. And you know who, especially in the USA, has an iron grip on the internet? Telecom providers! To borrow Huang’s own words:

"In order for enterprises to do it (AI), you have to support the management system, the operating system, the security and software-defined data centre approach of enterprises, and that's called VMware," he went on to note that Nvidia would offer generative AI libraries in the form of a special “SKU by VMware's sales force, which is, as we all know, quite large because they reach some several hundred thousand VMware customers around the world."

This is clever in two ways, first and foremost because it furthers Nvidia’s ambitions to swim upstream and become critical infrastructure. Second, because many Telecom providers that could otherwise use their internet control as leverage over Nvidia are themselves largely dependent on VMware and Broadcom products and services. Not just them though. Digital Nomads are a constantly growing, yet elusive demographic, that needs powerful internet and is eyeing generative AI with ravenous hunger. In major growth markets such as India, digital nomads are already pricing locals out of the housing market. By gaining leverage over telecom providers, or at the very least coming to an understanding with them, aspiring infrastructure as service providers like Nvidia gain leverage over digital nomads too. LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web

Kirigami Construction LINK

Drone Build Kit LINK?

Parmesan DRM LINK

€216,000,000 Wine LINK

Intel About Intel LINK

Foxconn Presidency LINK

Delete This LINK

Social Media Ad Guide LINK

The Deep End:

A weekly batch of long-form content recommendations

Tears of A Get rich Quick Guru:

In in-depth look at the world of get-rich-quick influencers in Pakistan. LINK

Your Brain On Emoji:

So what kind of effect do Emoji actually have on people? LINK

Where’s Your Proof?

So you want to see ‘the research’ for and against social media’s negative health impact do you…? LINK

Armored Core Retrospectives:

Two retrospectives about a formative series for FromSoft, the now famous developers of games such as Dark Souls. LINK + LINK

One More Thing…

So my friends keep asking me how far I am in Armored Core 6…I keep having to tell them I’m barely into chapter 2 because the building aspect keeps distracting me. For those that don’t know, the Armored Core series is not just something that triggers my OCD because ‘armour’ needs a ‘U’ in it. It is also a game about piloting your very own (digital) hand-made robot through a series of punishing encounters as a mysterious dystopian narrative unfurls before you. The series had been dormant for like 10 years before this latest release, which now benefits from all the experience and insight developer FromSoft has gained from its work on Dark Souls, Sekiro, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. If this is starting to sound like a review, it isn’t but since I get to do whatever I want with one more thing, this one more thing is about me finally being able to indulge my enjoyment of model kits without the ruinous financial burden and ample space requirements!

In other news, the 3D printers have also arrived now, mercifully free of major bugs and issues. No printerminators marching through the offices yet. The workspace these printers are to be a part of is shaping up nicely as well. It’s very enjoyable for me to be around the people responsible for it right now. They are in such high spirts (logistical stresses notwithstanding) that it can’t help but rub off on me a little. That, or perhaps I just leaned against some paint without noticing…bugger.