Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/11 - @Jack Wants to Decentralize Social Media

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Wednesday, December 11th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. A bold new proposal to decentralize social media from Jack Dorsey. YouTube bans malicious insults. You can only clean your pro display XDR with a special cloth. Silicon Valley is no longer everyone's favorite place to work. And the big tech companies whistled past their troubles this year. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So I guess my running joke about who put the B in Jack Dorsey. Bonnet is kind of running stale at this point. This morning, Jack released a pretty ambitious Twitter thread outlining how Twitter intends to fund the development of a project known as

Starting point is 00:01:18 Blue Sky, an independent effort to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. Let me just quote. Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. Twitter was so open early on that many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard like SMTP, the email protocol. For a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly centralized Twitter. But a lot has changed over the years. First, we're facing entirely new challenges.

Starting point is 00:02:00 Centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address, abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long term without placing far too much burden on people. Second, the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal and towards recommendation algorithms directing one's attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary and one can't choose or build alternatives. Yet, third, existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage rather than conversation which informs and promotes

Starting point is 00:02:38 health. Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there, end quote. Skipping down a bit. Quote, why is this good for Twitter? It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of

Starting point is 00:03:04 public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past. There are many challenges to make this work that Twitter would feel right becoming a client of the standard, which is why the work must be done transparently in the open, not owned by any single private corporation, furthering the open and decentralized principles of the internet. We'd expect this team not only to develop a decentralized standard for social media, but to also build open community around it, inclusive of companies and organizations, researchers, civil society leaders, all who are thinking deeply about the consequences, positive and negative.

Starting point is 00:03:43 This isn't going to happen overnight. It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed above. Our commitment is to fund this work to that point and beyond, end quote. Jack went on to name Parag Agrawal as the lead of the project. So a few ways to look at this. Number one, I've said for years that Twitter is really just a protocol disguised as a company, and frankly, smarter minds than me, have said for years that social media, had it been invented a decade earlier, would have been a protocol.

Starting point is 00:04:24 Things would be a lot more efficient at this point if it had. admin. And of course, you can still build massively successful businesses off of protocols. I mean, just look at Amazon and Google. And second, you could look at this as Twitter's version of Libra, but in a way, a more ambitious and radical project. Also, you could see this as Jack's version of Zuck's vaunted pivot to privacy. As Alex Stamos pointed out on Twitter, both companies want to be out of the controlling what people say business. Lots of folks, including, including the official Mastodon Twitter account, pointed out that projects like this already exist. But it is super interesting that it's one of the existing platform plays that is inspired to blow up the status quo of massive platforms parasitically strangling the open internet.

Starting point is 00:05:15 Sort of reminds one of this scene from HBO's Silicon Valley. So then I thought there's what, billions of phones all around the world with the same computing power just sitting in people's pockets. So then I thought, what if we use all those phones to build a massive network? And here's the kicker. We use my compression algorithm to make everything small and efficient to move things around. And if we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the world. word. You want to build a new internet.

Starting point is 00:06:01 Yes. Richard, I like it. That I would fund. I'd play the rest of that clip, but then I'd have to break the streak of never having a curse word appear on this podcast. YouTube is changing its user policy to ban videos that, quote, maliciously insult people based on their race, gender, or sex. The change comes after there was controversy surrounding a. comedian's anti-gay slurs aimed at a journalist. Quoting BuzzFeed News, beyond threatening someone, there is also demeaning language that goes too far, reads the statement by YouTube's Vice President Matt Halperin. Quote, to establish a consistent criteria for what type of content is not allowed

Starting point is 00:06:49 on YouTube, we're building upon the framework we use for our hate speech policy. We will no longer allow content that maliciously insults someone based on protected attributes such as their race, gender expression or sexual orientation. This applies to everyone from private individuals to YouTube creators to public officials, end quote. The company also said, YouTubers who, quote, repeatedly brush up against the harassment policy will also be removed from the platform partner program and will lose the ability to make ad revenue from advertising on videos, end quote. Quoting Charles Arthur on Twitter, looking forward to lots of YouTube chin stroking on what crosses the line of maliciously insult and what is just insult, end quote.

Starting point is 00:07:41 According to Apple's own support documentation, if you buy that new Pro Display XDR monitor and you plump for the extra thousand dollar nanotexture glass, you are only supposed to clean that glass with a special Apple provided cloth and no other, and you are. And no liquids or water should ever be used, quoting Mac rumors. Apple warns that Pro Display XDR owners should never use any other cloths to clean the glass. And if the included dry polishing cloth is lost, Apple's support should be contacted so another cloth can be ordered. There's no word yet on what Apple is charging for replacement cleaning cloths. Apple also has specific instructions for washing the polishing cloth, which includes using dish soap and water.

Starting point is 00:08:33 rinsing thoroughly and then letting it air dry for at least 24 hours. The standard Pro Display XDR glass can be cleaned with a standard microfiber cloth and a small amount of water, while the casing can be cleaned using a soft, slightly damp, lint-free cloth, end quote. Anand Tech has seen a slide produced by an Intel partner named ASML, which reveals Intel's project roadmap going forward for the next decade. TLDR. Intel expects to have seven nanometer EUV in 2021, then five nanometer in 2023, three nanometer in 2025, two nanometer in 27, and 1.4 nanometer in 2021. By the way, 1.4 nanometers would be the equivalent size of 12 silicon atoms across, like, you know, pretty, pretty small.

Starting point is 00:09:35 Quoting Anantec. In between each process node, as Intel has stated before, there will be iterative plus and plus plus versions of each in order to extract performance from each process node. The only exception to this is 10 nanometers, which is already on 10 plus, so we will see 10 plus plus and 10 plus plus in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Intel believes they can do this on a yearly cadence, but also have overlapping teams to ensure that one full process node can overlap with another. The interesting element to these slides is the mention of backporting. This is the ability for a chip to be designed with one process node in mind, but perhaps due to delays can be remade on an older plus plus version of a process node in the same time frame.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Despite Intel stating that they are disaggregating chip design from process node technology, at some point, there has to be a commitment to a process node in order to start the layouts in Silicon. At that point, the process node procedure is kind of locked, especially when it goes to mask creation. In the slide, it shows that Intel is going to allow a workflow such that any first-gen-gen-7-nanometer design could be backported to a 10-plus-plus, plus. Any first-gen-five nanometer design could be backported to 7-plus-plus and so on. One can argue that this roadmap might not be so strict with the dates. We have seen Intel's 10 nanometer take a long time to bake. So expecting the company to move with a yearly cadence on plus updates alongside a two-year

Starting point is 00:11:11 cadence with main process technology nodes would appear to be a very optimistic and aggressive cadence strategy, end quote. Google has rolled out Chrome 79, which has added security features like notifications for data breaches affecting your passwords, a ban on loading HTPS mixed content, new fishing prevention tools, and tab freezing. I guess the biggest news is the password checkup utility getting integrated into Chrome itself. The next time you use credentials that are known to have been compromised, Chrome will notify you and beg you to change the.

Starting point is 00:11:50 password at least. The predictive fishing tool will also alert you if you enter passwords into suspected fishing sites in real time. But what is tab freezing? Quoting ZDNet. This new feature works by unloading all tabs that have been inactive for more than five minutes. This frees up CPU and RAM system resources for other tabs and other locally running apps, end quote. Which I sort of thought Chrome already did, but okay. Anyway, as you know, I'm in a brave new word. world now, literally, Brave browser. And I ain't coming back because using Brave is just like using Chrome, but without all the Google surveillance crap. According to Glass Door, Google and Facebook have dropped out of the top 10 of its annual best places to work list. Google has dropped

Starting point is 00:12:46 to number 11 on the list, and Facebook is down to number 23. Microsoft was the only tech giant that saw its rankings improve, which long. winds up with the personal experience I've had over the year, as I've seen lots of people going to Microsoft with enthusiasm. Quoting Bloomberg, HubSpot, a cloud computing software company, grabbed the number one ranking while tech firms docusign and ultimate software were three and eight, respectively. Facebook, which has been rated as the best place to work three times in the past 10 years, was ranked 23rd. It's the social media company's lowest position since it first made the list in 2011. as the top-rated workplace. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, was ranked seventh last year.

Starting point is 00:13:30 Google voted Best Place to Work in 2015, and a top 10 finisher the previous eight years came in at number 11 on Glassdoors list. Apple, once a consistent top 25 finisher, was ranked 84th. Amazon, which has never been known for a positive internal culture, failed to make the list for the 12th straight year, end quote. Finally today, I went on another. podcast this afternoon and they wanted me to talk about the three biggest tech stories of the year and I had a hard time coming up with a list. Partially, this was for the same reason that

Starting point is 00:14:09 when someone asked me what I talked about on the show today, I can usually never remember anything because when you do this every day, it all tends to blur together in your mind. But one of the narratives of the year was tech under siege, right? Regulatory scrutiny, trade war concerns. and yet, as the New York Times points out, all the tech giants have seen their stocks soar this year, as investors have basically ignored any headwinds. This year, the S&P 500 tech sector is up more than 40 percent, handily outpacing the 25 percent gain for the benchmark index overall, which is itself the third best annual return of the past two decades. Apple stock is up 70 percent, and it set a high watermark last week. Google's parent company Alphabet is up 28.5% and set its own record on Monday. Microsoft shares have soared 49% in 2019, and Amazon is up 16%.

Starting point is 00:15:04 And Facebook, whose chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, has spent much of the past two years telling lawmakers why his company can be trusted on issues, as varied as personal data and cryptocurrency, is up 53%. Indeed, even a chipmaker like AMD, which you would think would be super sensitive to tariff. tariffs and supply chain disruption concerns was the best performing stock in the S&P 500 this year. Lamb Research, another semiconductor company, was the second best performer, up 90%. But the rise of just the big five, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, accounted for more than 20% of the S&P's total return this year, all by themselves. That is all for today. As always, I've been Brian McCullough.

Starting point is 00:15:57 Thank you for listening. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show subreddit is our slash ride home, where you can pitch me story ideas. The bottom link in the show notes allows you to subscribe to the ad-free version of the show right there in your podcast app. And if you want to buy a classified ad to tell your fellow listeners about your latest project, email classifieds at ridehome. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/11 - @Jack Wants to Decentralize Social Media

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