Bad Voltage

Latest Episodes:

3×62: Class One Catastrophic Hypercredibility Oct 19, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we do a bit of a deep dive into the (semi-)recent trend of finding new ways for creators to get paid. Patreon’s been around for a long time (but could be doing better), and the idea of making a thing and getting paid for the thing has been around for considerably longer, but it’s a relatively new innovation for platforms to encourage payments and share revenue with creators. Or is it? Is this actually new? Is this what was there already but in a superficially different outfit? And… will it work?

We’re on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://join.slack.com/t/badvoltage/shared_invite/zt-1porzolgy-eNrK6wREoVIINTbLi_kbsg!

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×61: A Room of Dalmatians Aug 26, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we revisit an old friend, Room 101, the place where all the things we hate should be banished. At least according to each of us: whether the other two can be so convinced is another thing entirely…

[00:04:07] Jono: All videoconferencing except Zoom
[00:11:04] Stuart: overly chummy email spam
[00:16:16] Jeremy: Influencers
[00:19:59] Jono: Marketing Gurus
[00:25:07] Stuart: “we are experiencing unusually high call volumes”
[00:29:26] Jeremy: Mozilla
[00:37:55] Jono: Men who wear scarves inside
[00:42:16] Stuart: “join our discord”
[00:45:25] Jeremy: a secret extra!

We’re on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://join.slack.com/t/badvoltage/shared_invite/zt-1porzolgy-eNrK6wREoVIINTbLi_kbsg!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×54-the-joe-dolce-music-theatre/12476

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×60: Never Eat Shredded Wheat Aug 13, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which multiple minutes of pre-show work are awkwardly wasted, we haven’t got a sign on the roof, and:

[00:01:39] GPTBot is launched to crawl your websites and add their technological distinctiveness to its own model, and there is discussion of robots.txt changes
[00:11:08] MDN, the central resource for web documentation, added LLM stuff which caused a lot of pushback (and a Mozilla postmortem)
[00:24:30] Apple announce a new VR headset, the Vision Pro
[00:40:34] Instagram Threads starts up, Reddit is… hard to say, Bluesky seems to have not set the world alight… now that we’re a month or two in to all this, what’s going on in social media land? Everything’s all over the place
[00:52:13] $5 billion lawsuit with Google over incognito mode tracking moves closer to trial

We’re on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://join.slack.com/t/badvoltage/shared_invite/zt-1porzolgy-eNrK6wREoVIINTbLi_kbsg!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×60-never-eat-shredded-wheat/12509

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×59: Addition Edition Jun 16, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we discuss ad-supported services and the (potential?) rise of subscriptions. Have ads gone away, or started to? Are social media networks being supported by ads now pivoting to something else? And are Patreon and sponsorships mostly a boon for small creators, or a seed of a shift in the culture of how businesses and services work online?

We’re on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://join.slack.com/t/badvoltage/shared_invite/zt-1porzolgy-eNrK6wREoVIINTbLi_kbsg!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×54-the-joe-dolce-music-theatre/12476

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×58: Large Langridge Model May 19, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which there is unsceptical intensity, we are all eaten by a T-1000, and we have collected a list of concerns about Large Language Model-based AI, which we’re going to dive into!

[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:04:30] The “free software” concern: it normalises inhaling information for free and then renting out access to it. Upcoming EU regulation requires LLM creators to declare copyrighted material used in training corpora
[00:09:30] The automation one: puts lots of mid-level workers people out of a job, with zero provision for what should happen to those people
[00:25:25] The costlessness one: if it’s free (or at least easy) to generate text (and images and sound and so on), it becomes easy to flood places with it, which leads to finding hotels online being even more difficult, more fake news sites, students submitting LLM-written essays, etc
[00:30:40] The inaccuracy one: LLMs “hallucinate”, meaning that they make up lies and present it with as much confidence as actual information, so it’s very hard to tell the difference, which is problematic when it’s relied upon and can be downright defamatory (as in the case of Jonathan Turley, law professor, on an LLM-generated list of “lecturers who have sexually harassed their students” which he didn’t)
[00:33:35] The magnification of existing bias one: generated text embeds existing biases
[00:53:30] The creativity one: where does the next generation of music and art and writing come from if this generation is written largely by LLMs?

Also, we’re now on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://join.slack.com/t/badvoltage/shared_invite/zt-1porzolgy-eNrK6wREoVIINTbLi_kbsg!

https://community.badvoltage.org/

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×57: Conspiracyers Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which there’s more smoky back rooms than usual, everyone’s on Orkut, and:

[00:01:14] Who likes Microsoft Teams? Microsoft promises it’s made Teams less confusing and resource hungry, while Teams surprisingly now has 270m users to Slack’s 20m.
[00:08:21] An “open letter” from tech pioneers calls for a halt on AI development
[00:20:31] USA wants to ban TikTok: is this tech, security, or geopolitics?
[00:33:25] Google Search Adds Features for Info Verification: will this work? can this work?

Also, we’re now on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://join.slack.com/t/badvoltage/shared_invite/zt-1porzolgy-eNrK6wREoVIINTbLi_kbsg!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmX7qyr1nV4 https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×54-the-joe-dolce-music-theatre/12476

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×56: Hyperbole is the Magic Word Mar 02, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we spend a show inventing topics which need a whole other show to talk about, we reminisce about Google Plus, and:

[00:01:36] Twitter Blue, Meta Verified: the social networks go premium. Is it going to work?
[00:35:45] The FBI recommend that everyone uses an ad-blocker
[00:45:16] Salesforce pays Matthew McConaughey $10M/year
[00:52:47] LastPass hack, allegedly via a senior developer’s Plex?
[00:57:11] Reddit does comments search!

Also, we’re now on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://join.slack.com/t/badvoltage/shared_invite/zt-1porzolgy-eNrK6wREoVIINTbLi_kbsg!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×54-the-joe-dolce-music-theatre/12476

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×55: Don the Mast Feb 18, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we look, as has been threatened a bunch recently, at Mastodon. What’s it all about? Is Mastodon the new Twitter, and is it trying to be? And how far have we got into it?

Also, we’re now on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×54: The Joe Dolce Music Theatre Jan 20, 2023

Show notes

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we create predictions for 2023! What will happen over the next twelve months in the world of tech? Here’s what we think…

Stuart: the Texas HB20 social media law will come before the US Supreme Court, and the US Supreme Court will uphold it as constitutional
Stuart: Global daily Twitter users will drop a minimum of 10% by the end of 2023
Stuart: A song claimed to be composed and performed entirely by AI will get in the charts
Stuart (Bonus): Apple will either allow sideloading or allow third-party browser engines on iOS
Stuart (Bonus): Someone buys Netflix
Jeremy: Tiktok gets banned in the USA
Jeremy: At least one traditional financial institution will have taken on substantial crypto risk that wasn’t fully disclosed
Jeremy: Netflix is acquired
Jeremy: The rapid advances in AI slow down in a very obvious way
Jeremy (Bonus): the web starts fragmenting into 3 distinct blocs: sino, euro, americano
Jeremy (Bonus): Mastodon usage peaks in the first half and drops steadily from there
Jeremy (Bonus): someone takes a large equity stake in Canonical
Jono: Meta will announce significant (1000+ peolpe) layoffs in their Metaverse division
Jono: Twitter will launch a YouTube competitor. Users will be able to upload long-form videos (1hr+), monetize their videos with ads, and see a video view
Jono: There will be at least 1 legal regulatory requirement be put into practice in the US or EU that restricts the use of ChatGPT and/or Large Language Models
Jono (Bonus): Apple will release their AR/VR headset, will garner positive reviews for the product, but press will still question the viability of AR/VR
Jono (Bonus): Donald Trump will drop out of the election for one of two reasons: (1) claims of persecution, or (2) a legal decision prevents him from running
Jono (Bonus): Bing will launch with ChatGPT-like functionality and see significantly increased growth. Significantly increased = 30%+

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×54-the-joe-dolce-music-theatre/12476

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

3×53: Representative but not Shining Dec 23, 2022

Show notes

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage for the last time in 2022, in which we take a look back at our predictions for this year and review how we did. Surprisingly… not as badly as last year. Although as you may expect there is shameless jockeying for extra points. How did you do by comparison?

We’ll see you in 2023!

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×53-representative-but-not-shining/12473

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

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