Linkblogs
Ten Blue Links, “gosh is that the time” edition
1. Who among us has not been surprised by needing people to do things
Spotify's Daniel Ek is shocked, shocked I tell you, that laying off 1,500 workers has actually made the efficiency of his company worse. It's almost as if those people did things which were, perhaps, important to the business. Seriously though, if you allowed your company to hire 1500 people who weren't actually needed, then you're a bad leader and should pay the price for that. What actually happens because capitalism, is that the leaders get a bigger bonus for “taking the hard calls” even when it was their decision to approve those hires in the first place.
2. Just how bad are the tech barons?
Bad enough to want to subvert democracy and establish their own dictatorships. Balaji Srinivasan is one of the worst, but he's not alone in this endeavour: Marc Andreessen is equally awful. As an internet veteran, I always feel I should apologise that we didn't spot these men -- and it's always men -- were this terrible a lot sooner. But we were all carried away in fever dreams of tech utopianism for a while. Sorry.
3. Remember, a sustainable society is a bad society
Speaking of Andreessen -- yes, I know you don't want to, but to stop things going completely to shit, we must -- this article about a dinner with him is full of moments of hilarity and absolute horror. Here is a man with few redeeming qualities, who used government funding to create a web browser which he turned into a large pile of cash for himself, railing against the government. You might as well print t-shirts with his chubby, milk-fed face on it and the words “why you should be a communist” on them.
4. Speaking of cheating
The part of me that loves sensational counter-narratives would love this story to be true. Qualcomm cheating on the benchmarks for its upcoming “nearly as good as Apple's chips, no really, this time we're not lying” Snapdragon X Elite would be a fantastic scoop. But I don't believe it. Why not? Simply because the stakes are too high, and the rewards too low, for it to be worth Qualcomm doing it. As soon as the new ARM-based Windows computers come out, everyone will benchmark them, and if they don't perform anywhere near as well as touted, the company will not get another chance.
5. That sound you hear is your old iPhone being shredded without mercy
When you trade in an iPhone for recycling, it's basically shredded. Why? Because Apple desperately wants to avoid parts from old phones getting back into the market to be used for repair by third parties, who will do the job more cheaply than Apple. Why does it want that? Because it wants you to buy a new iPhone, rather than getting your perfectly good one repaired. If there isn't a more obvious symbol of why the present system is broken and isn't going to stop climate change, I don't know what it is.
6. I feel seen
I posted about this one all over the social medias but reading it back again it still hits home. I'm in the home stretch of my career, too, and the best advice I can give anyone is to realise early on that some day your career will end. Don't get so drawn into it that you have no idea what to do when it does – or how to wind it down gently.
7. The man who killed Google search
It's a beautiful shared truth that Google's search has, for the last few years, been getting worse. You'll hear it from experienced SEOs, publishers, and normal users too. But why has it happened? Ed Zitron wrote a good piece which not only explains the “why”, but accuses the “who”. The key question now is: How does Google get out of this mess – and, in fact, does it even want to?
8. And speaking of dreadful corporate behaviour
HERE'S GOOGLE AGAIN! Like lots of corporations, Google had rules about how its suppliers treated their workers. Unlike plenty of corporations, as soon as that became a problem, it changed the rules so it could work with suppliers who paid worse wages, didn't provide health insurance, and so on. Google, of course, is blaming someone else – in this case the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled that these rules meant Google was effectively a co-employer of its partners' staff. Blaming other people is, of course, standard corporate behaviour these days. Corporations who want to take responsibility for their actions are a dying breed – if they ever existed at all.
9. I will laugh so hard I'll poop
Could Tesla go bankrupt? Motorhead neatly avoids Betteridge's Law by adding “The odds are rising” on to this headline, but I would have been willing to extend an indulgence to them because yes, Tesla could indeed go bust. The company has a weak product pipeline – the Cyberdog… sorry Cybertruck is a distraction – and its share price has collapsed because it's no longer considered a growth stock. This is why Musk is desperate to pivot the company so it's seen as an AI leader, which would hitch it firmly on the latest bubble of excitement rather than the old hat that is electric vehicles.
10. And speaking of Elon
Former US secretary of labor Robert Reich points out the obvious: that what Elon Musk indulges in isn't capitalism. Essentially, it's extortion.
Ten Blue Links, “my, how you have changed!” edition
1. Four years is a long time in tech punditry
I'm going to break one of my self-imposed rules and include a link to a piece I wrote, on how John Gruber's attitude towards Meta's privacy-violating monopoly has changed over the past four years. You can work out what changed John's mind. I couldn't possibly comment.
2. Why we do reviews
It's not for of the companies whose products we look at. Back when I was starting Alphr, MKBHD was one of the reviewers we looked to as the gold standard: approachable, accurate, personal. Nothing has changed on that score, he's still superb at what he does.
3. This week's “no”
4. The rot economy is real
Ed Zitron has been writing so much good stuff lately, and this piece delivers. As he notes, venture capital doesn't reward “good” companies – it rewards companies that can be profitably flipped. The system is broken.
5. Tesla was always a bubble stock
The Wall Street Journal does something that's long overdue and has a look at the inside story of Tesla's fall to earth. Technology companies are often valued by their potential for future growth, and Tesla was no exception. But at one point it was also valued at more than the rest of the car industry put together. That's well beyond potential future profits and into bubble territory – unless you believe that at some point in the future, Tesla would have had a monopoly on cars. Now, of course, it faces competition, and unsurprisingly, the traditional carmakers build better quality vehicles than Tesla, and the Chinese companies build them cheaper AND better. Even Elon Musk's ability to make himself the main character every day isn't going to save them.
6. The internet is broken
“Your Uber driver is lost because his app hasn’t updated and keeps telling him to turn down streets that no longer exist. You still give him five stars.” File this under “I wish I had written it.” Brilliant.
7. There is no EU cookie banner law
No, really, there isn't. I think the biggest mistake of GDPR was not being tough enough.
8. CEOs are just as dumb as everyone else
Just as likely to fall for conspiracy nonsense, just as likely to repost it. And in tech, they're terminally online, too, which makes them even more likely to fall for bullshit.
9. Welcome to the new feudal era
If you want a clear explanation of how and why we are falling back into feudalism, Cory has you covered. This is why the EU DMA is so important: it's an attempt to wrestle us back from the edge of rentiers and liege lords and into competitive markets again.
10. Nilay
If MKBHD was one of our touchstones when building Alphr, The Verge was the other. This is a great, long interview with Nilay Patel, AKA the smartest man in tech journalism. If you're in any kind of journalism, you should read it.
Ten blue links, it's been a while edition
Yes, it really has been a while. Sorry about that: I started a new job and have been knee-deep in the glorious moment called "the first couple of weeks", when all things are possible and there needs to be much planning. But here we are again, and I'm going to resume normal service from next week.
1. The AI hype machine rolls on and on
David Gerard spent a good deal of time debunking the crypto hype machine, and he's turned his eye to AI, with predictably good results. The use cases of crypto always seemed to fall into one of two categories: things which actually had no use to anyone apart from people investing in crypto, and things which were already better served by existing technology. I think there are some legitimate interesting uses for LLMs, particularly when they're used as conversational interfaces to existing pools of data rather than do-everything content creation machines. But their problems are many.
2. The UK CMA is doing terrific hidden work
As Cory Doctorow has noted many times, the UK Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) and its digital markets unit is "arguably the most technically proficient regulator in the world" and it uses its skills and knowledge a lot to help other antitrust regulators. The degree to which regulators are working together to solve problems which otherwise wouldn't be fixable shouldn't be underestimated, and a good example of that came this week with a CMA presentation to an antitrust conference in Washington DC. We all feel that the nascent AI market is already being dominated by large tech companies, but the CMA has actually done the work and found that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have already effectively carved up AI in ways which are probably anticompetitive now, and will definitely be in the future.
3. Repairable products in "not sucking" shock
Fairphone has released the Fairbuds, a set of ear phones which focus on being as repairable and recyclable as possible, and it turns out they're pretty good. One of the great lies of tech over the past few years is that small, tightly integrated products have to be glued together and almost impossible to fix if they go wrong. Companies like Fairphone, of course, have already demonstrated that isn't true, but it's remarkable how, faced with new laws which encourage repairability, companies which previously made shitty throwaway products are now finding new ways to fix them if they go wrong.
4. Laws work, shock, horror
Really odd that Apple makes no mention of the Oregon law against parts pairing which has clearly led to their “decision” to “allow” used parts in repairs.
5. Got to love juries
One of the rights of juries which the government would love to remove is the ability to bring in a “perverse verdict” (known in the US as jury nullification), where the accused is guilty, but the jury decides not to convict. That's basically what the jury did for Blyth Brenthall, accused of "possessing articles to commit criminal damage", which is one of those laws that governments love because it's basically vague enough to catch anyone.
6. Software harm
As Baldur points out, we ban harmful products all the time. Why should software be different?
7. Why I don't (want to) use Windows, part 889
Microsoft really really really wants you to use Edge. And if you would rather not use Edge, it is going to make you use Edge anyway.
8. Vice: "a fucking clown show"
Such a good article about a company that always smelled bad to me.
9. Britain is so bad even the NYT has noticed
"High levels of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of London, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is a joke. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, told me. “It’s just not that productive an economy anymore.” Yeah, and that doesn't even scratch the surface.
10. With Elon Musk, does the good outweigh the bad?
No.
Ten Blue Links, Country Life Edition
Currently holed up in Suffolk. And I almost got away without mentioning Apple…
1. The Atlantic gets it
AI "will change the way people find us, it will change all the architecture of the media business, and we’ve got to figure out how to continue to succeed in it,” says Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. And he's absolutely right. He's also right to focus on high-quality writing, because one of the things which AI means for publishers is no more mass-market cheap traffic.
2. Twenty five years
Meanwhile Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison for 25 years, and Molly White wrote a great piece in The Guardian pointing out that, in real terms, nothing in the industry has changed. The only lesson that people in the crypto world learned was "I'm smarter than Sam so I won't get caught".
3. The decline and fall of Elon
I've noted before that the main reason Elon Musk wanted to borg OpenAI into Tesla was he knows that the car company is moving beyond the point at which it will be regarded as a "growth" stock, and he needs to maintain its massive and entirely unwarranted share price. Ed Zitron wrote a great article on Musk's finances which, I think, backs up that point: Musk is almost entirely dependent on Tesla's share price for his wealth, because he has a lot of loans secured against Tesla stock. If Tesla starts to be valued as what it it – a mid-tier company in a much more competitive market – he could soon find himself with debts he can only sustain with difficulty.
4. Britain is so screwed
I have some sympathy with Labour's constant refrain that there's "no magic money tree". The point isn't that the government can't invest: it's that fourteen years of Tory mismanagement has left virtually every part of public infrastructure in desperate need of investment. Schools, transport, NHS, higher education: you name it, it's basically been run down, sometimes for idealogical reasons and sometimes because of sheer ineptitude. The week, it's water taking a turn, and Adam Almeida wrote a lovely piece about the absurdity of London's water being run for the benefit of Canadian pensioners.
5. Masters of the universe, apparently
Speaking of Sam Bankman-Fried, it's well worth reading this 14,000 word hagiography of him which appeared on the website of Sequoia, one of the idiot VC firms that tried to hype FTX stock, just a few short months before the whole thing collapsed. These are people who are so smart that when SBF appeared on a call playing League of Legends and giving the most basic answers to questions, they decided he was a genius. "I LOVE THIS FOUNDER" indeed. And these people think they're smart.
6. AI loneliness
There's a lot of really interesting research starting to appear about the second-order effects of the adoption of LLMs (and AI more broadly). I'm generally a long-term optimist, but there's a plethora of societal effects which are less predictable and will need to be taken into account. This paper looks at how using LLMs (or "AI chatbots" as they call them) affects the social lives of students. Well worth a read.
7. Amazon spends a lot of money
One hundred and fifty billion dollars, in fact, on datacentres intended to provide the cloud and AI services of the future. All of which points to one conclusion: where the personal computer revolution rewarded the individual, the cloud computing and AI booms put the power firmly back into the hands of companies capable of raising vast amounts of capital. We're entering a feudal era.
8. Frank Sinatra has a cold
You have all read this, right? If not, do so now and enjoy what good magazine writing looks like.
9. Speaking of classics
Another one to spend some time reading: Wired's nearly 50,000 word piece from 2000 about the Microsoft antitrust trial. So much good stuff in this.
10. And speaking of feudalism and classics…
This article by Bruce Schneier from 2012 notes the similarity between the way that some commentators think about computer security and feudalism: you are expected to pledge your allegiance to one of the big companies like Apple, Google or whoever if you want to be secure from "the bad guys" out there. But sooner or later, King Richard wanders off and King John arrives in his place…
Ten Blue Links, AI is bad now edition
First up, apologies that there's been no long form post this week. I've had some family stuff which had to take priority over writing. Normal service should be resumed from next week.
And now on to the good stuff…
1. The last refuge of the desperate media
Ahh, low rent native ads — the kind that are designed to fool people into clicking by appearing to be genuine user or editorial posts. Always a sign that a company is desperate for revenue, any kind of revenue, and never mind the longer-term implications on quality. Now, why would Reddit want to do that?
2. Repeat after me: AI is not a thing
More specifically, AI is not a single technology, and what we talk about in the media as “AI” is, in fact, quite a limited, relatively new tool coming out of AI research — the Large Language Model, or LLM. Why does this matter? Because (how shall I put this?) less technically educated executives are likely to read articles like this one, about the successful use of AI in the oil industry, and think that they need to jump on the AI bandwagon by adopting LLMs. These are two very different things: Robowell, for example, is a machine learning system designed to automate specific tasks. It learns to do better as it goes along — something that LLMs don't do.
3. Tesla bubble go pop
The notion that Tesla was worth more than the rest of the auto industry combined was always bubble insanity, and it looks like the Tesla bubble is finally bursting. And this, of course, is why Musk is grabbing on to AI and why he proposed OpenAI merge into Tesla: AI is the current marker for a stock to end up priced based on an imaginary future rather than its current performance. Musk needs to inflate Tesla again, and just being an EV maker won’t now do that.
4. This is fine
I'm almost boring myself now whenever I post anything about the era of mass search traffic for publishers drawing to a close. But then someone comes up with a new piece of researching showing an impact of between 25-60% traffic loss because of Google's forthcoming Search Generative Experience. The fact that Google effectively does not allow publishers to opt out of SGE — you have to opt out of Googlebot completely to do so — should be an indication that Google has no intention of following the likes of OpenAI in paying to license publisher content, too. And I think the SGE is just the first part of a one-two punch to publisher guts: computers and how we access information is going to become more conversational and less focused on searching and going to web pages. As that happens, the entire industry will change, and it could happen faster than we think.
5. Feudal security
I often link to Cory Doctorow's posts, and it's not just because he's a friend -- it's because a lot of the things that he's been talking about for years are beginning to be a lot more obvious, even to stick-in-the-muds like me. This piece starts with a concept that I have struggled to articulate -- feudal security — and sprints on from there.
6. LLMs are terrible writers
Will Pooley has written a terrific piece from the perspective of an academic on why LLMs just don't write in a way which sounds human. They don't interrogate or question terms (because they have no concepts, so can't), there is no individual voice, they make no daring or original claims based on the evidence, and much more. My particular favourite — and one I have encountered a lot — is that LLMs love heavy sectionisation and simple adore bullet points. I've got LLMs to write stuff before, specifically telling them not to use bullet points, and they have used them anyway. As Tim succinctly put it in a post on Bluesky, LLMs create content which is “uniformly terrible, and terribly uniform”.
7. Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto
Craig Wright spent a lot of time claiming he was the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and suing people on that basis. Finally, a court has ruled that he was lying. Whoever Nakamoto is/was, he's probably on an island somewhere drinking a piña colada.
8. Google updates, manually hits AI-generated sites
You might have noticed that Google did a big update in early March, finally responding to what everyone had been saying — that search had become dominated by rubbish for many search terms. Smarter people than me are still analysing the impact of that update, but one thing which stood out for me is there was a big chunk of manual actions to start. Manual actions are, as the name suggests, based on human review of a site, which means they are a kind of fallback when the algorithm isn't getting it right. And guess what the manual actions mostly targeted? AI content spam. All the sites that were whacked had some AI-generated content, and half of them were 90-100% created by AI. Of course, manual action is not a sustainable strategy to combat AI grey goo, but it should be a reminder to publishers that high levels of AI-generated content are not the promised land of cheap good content without those pesky writers. If you want to use it, do it properly.
9. The web is 35 years old, and Tim Berners-Lee is not thrilled
The web was meant to be a decentralised system. Instead, it's led to the kind of concentration of power and control that would have made the oligarchs of the past blush. That's just the starting point of Tim Berners-Lee's article marking the web's 35th anniversary, and he goes on to provide many good suggestions. I don't know if they are radical enough — but they are in the right direction.
10. A big tech diet
It's a long-standing journalistic cliché to try some kind of fad diet for a short period of time and write up the (usually hilarious) results, but in this "diet" Shubham Agarwal tried to drop products from big tech companies, and of course, it proved harder than you would think. Some things are pretty easy — swapping Gmail for Proton isn't hard (and Shubham missed out some tricks, like using forwards to redirect mail). But it's really difficult to avoid some products, like WhatsApp or LinkedIn, because there are few/no viable alternatives. That, of course, is just how the big tech companies like it because they long-ago gave up on the Steve Jobs mantra of making great products that people wanted to buy in favour of making mediocre products that people have no alternative to using.
Ten Blue Links, Too Much Apple Edition
It's FRIDAY!
1. Substack now has three million paid subscribers
I left Substack because I didn’t want to stay on a platform which lied about its status as a social network (mates, you have algorithmic recommendations – you’re a social network) or which was relaxed about out-and-out Nazis using it to radicalise people. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it seems to be doing OK, with three million subscribers in total. Of course, we are in the early stages of a cycle that should be familiar to everyone, where Substack will bend over backwards to get creators on the platform, then at some point pull the rug from under them by giving them less of a proportion of that subscriber money.
2. Why now?
I don’t often link to anything on LinkedIn, which has become the haven for the more serious end of the influencer spectrum, but this post from David Ruddock is an excellent summary of the forces which are pushing numerous online publishers to the brink, and leading to many lay-offs.
3. Meanwhile, The Verge gets it
Pushed down an article about promotions at The Verge was this: “This new leadership team will be tasked with continuing to grow The Verge’s direct loyal audience, a project Patel and Havlak believe to be critical to the future of The Verge’s journalism and business. The Verge has already made considerable progress against this goal in 2023 after an ambitious site redesign in late 2022.” The Verge gets it: the future is direct, loyal traffic rather than one-and-done SEO or Facebook. Everyone, of course, pays lip service to this, but few actually go all out to get it. The temptations of Google are generally too much.
4. How and why Apple gets the EU so, so wrong
You might have noticed that Apple has been acting a little weird lately. Baldur Bjarnason wrote the post I was going to create, which is good as I didn’t have the time. The short version: Apple doesn’t understand that regulating markets and preventing them from splitting away from the single market and into the control of private companies is an existential threat to the EU. The EU was founded to bring peace through a single market. It’s really not going to let Apple, or Google, get away with this.
5. Programmatic, CPMs, and other such barrels of laughs
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote something about the state of programmatic revenue, illustrated by the actual numbers from his site. Falling from nearly $1.7m in 2016 to just $75,000 in 2023 is quite the decline. There are many factors involved, and as Josh notes, they have focused much more heavily on subscribers than programmatic, but even so, that’s a lot of money to lose in a relatively short amount of time.
6. “If Steve were alive…”
I’m not generally a fan of the “if Steve Jobs was alive this would never have happened” approach to Apple punditry, but there is something in the view that the current shenanigans with the EU would never have happened if Steve were still around. Make no mistake: Steve Jobs was no saint. But his focus was very much on simply making better products than anyone else. This applied to making an App Store in the first place: anyone old enough to remember the pre-iPhone era of mobile software can remember how dreadful discovery, payment and so on were. Having an App Store was a huge step forward. These days, app stores are the default and everyone makes one – but not on iOS because rather than compete to make the best App Store, Apple has chosen to try and maintain a monopoly for its own financial well-being. I like to think that Steve wouldn’t have done that.
7. No, really you should look at LibreOffice
I have grown to love Paul Thurrott. He was once a bit of a nemesis, and a pugnacious one too. Back in the mesozoic era of blogging, I’m pretty sure I spent a fair few words on some punchy opinions about his articles.
These days, there isn’t that much on which Paul and I don’t see eye to eye. We inched a little closer a few days ago, when he wrote a post about how LibreOffice Writer is a viable alternative to Microsoft Word. And he’s right! If you haven’t looked at LibreOffice for a while, I would recommend you do because it’s basically all the good bits from Microsoft Office without the tying to other Microsoft services, constant nags to move things to OneDrive, and so on. And it’s free.
8. How much do developers already pay Apple?
This should really have been a “APPLE WTF?” special edition. In The Guardian, Alex Hern makes the excellent point that even if you assume developers “owe” Apple something for making great software which makes platforms more attractive to users (I do not think this), then they are already paying out quite a chunk of money. Of course, there’s the $99 developer fee. But developers also need to buy Macs to make iOS/iPadOS apps: someone like Spotify might be spending millions of dollars per year with Apple.
9. Is GenAI’s impact on productivity overblown?
A rare Betteridge’s Law exception: this pretty detailed look from the Harvard Business Review shows that yes, it is overblown. And there are consequences further down the line which businesses should be taking account of. Even summarisation, which you would think was low-hanging fruit for LLM use, is risky.
10. The money is in all the wrong places
I love long form writing, and this piece is just a really nice read. It also makes some serious points: the amount of money that creative people earn has stagnated in actual terms, which means it has declined in real terms. Freelance writing is a good example of this. I’ve done work for publications where the word rate hasn’t inched up in 20 years. I know because I literally have the receipts, as I worked for them back in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, executive salaries in creative industries have… well, let’s just say they aren’t having to sell the second home.
Ten blue links, Folsom Prison Blues Edition
1. Oh, WordPress!
Not content with their CEO getting into a stupid public spat with a user and apparently revealing information about them which should have remained private, WordPress announced it was doing deals to give access to their customers' posts and content to train "selected AI partners" (although not, at all, people hosting their own version of WordPress, so please shut that rumour down). The most charitable interpretation of this is that the company messed up its comms. The least is that it's started into an enshittification spiral, which will ultimately lead to it becoming the same kind of terrible service as everyone else. Related: I'm pondering whether I should start self-hosting again.
2. Good bus services or a tunnel that sets your skin on fire? Who knows which one is best for America
The Boring Company was always a joke, producing precisely one usable tunnel with money that should have been spent improving public transport infrastructure. Now its one tunnel is causing maintenance workers to get chemical burns from toxic waste. Go Elon. Where's my pitchfork?
3. Apple gets stuck in traffic
Apple's car project was a legacy of the era when Jony Ive ruled the roost and had decided he could design better products than anyone else in the world. I'm actually quite surprised that it lasted as long as it did after he left the company. And now, apparently, it's finally dead. From a business perspective, it never made any sense: historically, car manufacturer margins have been far smaller than the 30-40% that Apple wants. Tesla had higher margins than everyone else mainly because it bilked the government of the US for massive subsidies, cut corners in its manufacturing, and did everything possible to avoid providing any kind of proper customer service. While I'm sure Apple would have loved some of those sweet, sweet corporate welfare cheques, the rest of the Tesla Method of Business™ is probably not where it wants to be.
4. How publishing is losing its soul
There have always been publishers whose relationship with advertisers was a little too cosy. Even back in the days when selling ads was like shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka, ad sales people would try a little “friendly chat” with a journalist to "check in and see how product X is doing". Most journalists always told them, in a friendly way, where to get off. But as times get tougher and things get more desperate, it's natural that executives are going to lean on journalists to "do the right thing for the company" rather than for their audience. This piece, from a year ago, is about CNET, but I guarantee they are not the only ones doing the same. Private equity companies only care about getting a return on their investment as soon as possible. They aren't concerned about the long-term viability of a brand — and they definitely aren't concerned about the people reading the content. Of course, once they have fired all the journalists and replaced them with “prompt engineers” that will be problem solved because there will be no one left to complain.
5. Prison laptops are a thing?
I didn't know they were, until I read this Twitter thread. Amazing.
6. Desperate times make desperate publishers
It's not that long since publishers were wary of getting into a legal tangle with the likes of Google because they wanted to keep the provider of most of their traffic onside, but these days things are different. I don't know whether this will be successful or not — despite my 'O' level in law, I am not a lawyer — but I'm absolutely certain that Google's 50,000 gorilla-like presence in the adtech market distorts it in a variety of ways. Let's not even start on Facebook. Yet. The one caveat to all this is that $2.3bn is 1% of the amount the company made from advertising last year, so it's another case of what sounds like a high number to publishers actually being cost-of-business to Google.
7. At last, the worst use of AI (special government edition)
I'm not against the use of LLMs for summarisation. In fact, sometimes it's one of the best uses for it. LLMs can be really good at picking out the salient points of an email, for example, and if you have ever worked in a corporate environment you know quite how much long emails are used to hide important points. But using it for creating drafts of routine responses and to summarise reports for ministers is a recipe for worse government. Why? Because good ministers get into the details of this stuff. Yes, they have many decisions to make, but not getting into the details of your brief leads to awful, hand-waving, big-picture-details-are-for-losers government. Most ministers don't know enough about the topic area when they start — this will only encourage them not to be immersed in it.
8. How not to do layoff communications
One of the things I studied on my leadership masters was how to manage layoffs, and later on, I saw at first hand how excellent leaders and managers do it. I've seen the seriousness and discipline it takes to so redundancies in a way which is humane, deeply considers how the communications will work, and also looks hard at the effects of redundancies on the remaining part of the business. It's always horrible, but it doesn't have to be either deliberately cruel or handled ineptly. So, I wonder, what is it about tech companies that makes them so awful at it? My gut feeling is that it's partly down to the culture of the hero founder/CEO: basically, leaders who are not prepared to listen to anyone with actual experience of doing this stuff professionally.
9. Green trade rules are "biased"
When Piyush Goyal, India's trade minister, told the FT that rules inserted into trade agreements with his country designed to reduce carbon emissions were "biased" he got a lot of stick, and a lot of it was classic “greedy Indians” racist nonsense from people who should know better. The fact is that he's mostly right: the West is expecting India (17% of the world's population, 3% of its carbon emissions) to stop lifting people out of poverty while the US (4% of the world's population, 15% of its emissions) doesn't reduce its emissions anywhere near fast enough. As Goyal put it, "all the environmental damage that has been done in the past has still not been made up for. What about that? Before we add new environmental issues, let’s first sort out who is responsible for the environmental degradation. Certain promises were made in Paris. They have to be delivered upon.” Just as it would like everyone to forget quite how much of its wealth came from colonialism, the West would love people to ignore how much it has benefited from pumping vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere we all share. Climate colonialism is alive and well and living… well, here.
10. How the Tories radicalised me
I often note how the government's Prevent programme, designed to stop radicalisation, ought to look at the role of the Tory party. Recently, Tory party membership has been a bigger marker of someone being against traditional British values like free speech and the right to protest than anything else. Lewis Goodall wrote a very good piece about the radicalisation of the Tory party, and how it's now more or less in thrall to conspiracy theories. Certainly, 14 years of Tories has radicalised me: I've gone from soft left to full-on "end capitalism now", which is an unexpected return to my politics of 40 years ago. I should, at least, thank the Tories for opening my eyes again.
Ten Blue Links, "Gloom and doom" edition
It's been a gloomy week. Sorry.
1. Surprise! Apple’s sync stuff is entirely cryptic
The magnificent Howard Oakley, who knows more about the technology in the Mac than any man has a right to know, has been digging into the way iCloud sync works, and found it imposes some completely invisible quotas. This is the flip side of Apple’s “it just works” philosophy – it works, but Apple is not going to make it easy for you to troubleshoot if it ever doesn’t.
2. Google, the most disappointing monopoly
Google, on the other hand, loves being open. It publishes papers about AI, takes part in academic malarkey, and generally is open and lovely and cuddly. Except for one area: search, where its openness definitely has some limits. Cory Doctorow, as always, is on the money with his criticism of how big tech companies are enshittifying their products. Search is just the latest, and it won’t be the last.
3. Free money rots your morals, say people who have rotten morals
Some weirdo Republicans in the US are trying to proactively prevent anyone from implementing universal basic income (UBI), because they want wage slaves to stay in their place or something. Like the four day week, UBI is one of those things where no amount of actual tests and data will convince right wingers that it’s a good thing.
4. It shouldn’t need saying, but it does need saying
Corporations are not to be loved. Even the good ones.
5. Measles infected kids can skip quarantine in Florida
I could make this post into ten things which demonstrate that Republicans are stupid, ignorant, and liable to get people killed. They really are the worst.
6. And speaking of not loving corporations…
One of the things that amateur commentators about the EU DMA Apple shenanigans don’t appear to have understood is that the EU aren’t going to start investigating whether Apple is complying until after the deadline on 7th March. The pundits currently doing victory dances about how the EU can’t write clear laws or about how Apple has done an end run around them are going to end up amending a few blog posts.
7. Leadership is in the details
On a very different topic, this article from Gaël Clichy on Pep Guardiola’s leadership style is well worth a read. What often gets lost in leadership theory is the role that attention to detail plays. Pep gets it.
8. Federation, uh huh. Federation
Bluesky is finally federatable. This is a big deal: federated services are the future, and I always had some doubts over whether Bluesky would, in fact, ever release it. I take my hat off to them, and possibly eat it too.
9. Google to Apple: "hold my beer"
Google, which generates 30 percent of its sales from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, views the DMA as disrespecting its expertise in what users want.
I am so looking forward to the flurry of investigations which start after the 7th March deadline for DMA compliance. I wonder if the big tech companies are just thinking that if they're all shady about the way they comply, the EU just won't have enough people to investigate them all?
10. VICE pivots to… not posting
Remember VICE? The company that pivoted to a strategy of giving its senior executives big bonuses days before it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy? Well it's latest pivot is to not posting anything on its website, and becoming a "content studio" (whatever that is) which licenses its content to other publishers. No, I have no idea what that means either, other than it undoubtedly means more layoffs in an industry that has already seen quite a lot this year. And it's only February.
Ten Blue Links, 12 Feb 2024: the work from home edit
I like links. You like links. Everyone likes links!
1. The dirty fight of "return to office"
I've written before that if you can't lead teams remotely, that's your problem, not your team's. Of course, getting some face-to-face time is useful and valuable, but mandating a set number of days per week isn't actually that useful. What's interesting is that the evidence suggests there's no basis to the idea of increased productivity in the office. So what is causing the race to bring people in?
2. The AI data centre boom must be stopped
The amount of energy required by AI is absolutely eye watering, and it's fuelling (sic) what might turn into an energy crisis.
3. The story of Mitchell Cole
I hadn't heard of Mitchell Cole before, but I'm glad I read this. Cole was a 27-year-old footballer who was forced to quit the game owing to a heart condition, and died while having a kickabout with his mates.
4. Betteridge's Law strikes again
5. Apple confirms no more web apps for naughty Europeans
Last week I mentioned I wasn't going to assume malice by Apple breaking web apps on iOS in a new beta. This week, they have confirmed that's precisely what it is. When Apple says it can't "securely" provide both web app support and alternate rendering engines, it's using the meaning of "securely" which refers to securing their income streams, not actual computer security. Pathetic stuff from Cupertino.
6. The iMessage Halo Effect
I think John Siracusa is exactly right: it's the iPhone which gives iMessage its cachet, not the other way around. It's not too late for the company to develop iMessage for other platforms.
7. AI companies lose value after Microsoft and Google quarterly earnings
Losing $190bn in stock market value seems a little careless to me. But the point really is that we are right at the start of learning to use LLMs in creative ways. Replacing cheap copywriters is not where the real action is, but currently that's all everyone is fixating on.
8. Citizen Musk
We all know that Elon is an idiot, but this article shows just how much he's been drawn into a universe of misinformation (or, as we used to call them, "lies"). I'm not sure if he's stupid or venal, or both. Probably both.
9. How the government captured the BBC
Alan Rusbridger pointing out how the BBC editorial standards committee now has just member who is both uninvolved in daily decision-making and has a background in news, and that's Robbie Gibb, who also happens to be Theresa May's former director of communications. The BBC isn't alone in this (Reach plc has no one on its board with any newspaper/online journalism experience), but it's remarkable how much the Tories have worked to subvert the public service bodies of this country.
10. Amazon to customers: have a worse service, and we're putting up the price
Amazon has been doing enshittification since before it was fashionable, but this is definitely their boldest move yet.
Ten Blue Links, "Tech is Bad Right Now" Edition
I remain a technology optimist, but weeks like this give even me an “are we the baddies” moment or two. On to the links.
1. Sam wants more more money
Sam Altman wants $7 trillion. Not to transition the planet to a carbon-free economy, end poverty, or provide universal healthcare to every person on the planet — all of which could be done with that kind of money — but to build AI chips. When I mentioned this on Threads, some dude popped up to helpful educate me that AI would enable us to do all those things. Mate, we don't need AI for any of that. We just need to end capitalism.
2. Apple broke web apps
I'm not going to rush in and say that breaking support for progressive web apps — one of the few ways to distribute apps on the iPhone without giving Apple its tithe — was deliberate. While I'm not inclined to assume malice about bugs in beta software, I would very definitely assume malice if this made it into the release version.
3. Remember when VCs were supposed to be smart?
The savaging that Chris Dixon's silly little book defending crypto has taken is entirely justified. Pushing said book on to the New York Times "bestseller" list by bulk ordering, when you know that bulk ordering gets publicly noted, shows either the kind of “I don't care you're not the boss of me” attitude of a 14-year-old boy, or just stupidity. Fair play to Penguin Random House, though: they must have known that whatever they paid Dixon for this laugh-a-minute publication would be easily recouped by copies bought for his worshippers at the firms his company has thrown money into.
4. Enshittification, FT-style
I was literally about to mail Cory saying “ha ha you got the attention of the FT” when I spotted he'd actually written the piece himself. As he rightly says, we are in the enshittocene.
5. My printer hates me
It's taken a while, but it looks like mainstream publications — OK, The Atlantic — are taking note that just because you buy a product doesn't mean you own it. Printers are just one example, and not even the most egregious. Every large corporate has spotted that charging rents is easier than making good products and competing in a free(ish) market. The surprising thing, to me, is how many people think this is a good idea for ordinary people.
6. App stores keep us safe, Redux
I've spent far too much time over the past couple of weeks arguing with people who believe that Apple is entirely correct to face off against the big bad tech-hating European Union about app stores. Without Daddy Apple keeping us all safe, someone might download a malicious app! The problem is, of course, is that app stores don't really keep you safe, something we saw again this week. What they do is make you believe that it's someone else's responsibility to keep you safe, lulling you into a false sense of security. Oh, and of course, they keep developers paying rent to platform owners.
7. You will be wanting to buy this book
Kara Swisher has written a book. You want to buy this book because if it's anything like the extract, it's going to be a doozy. And in the spirit of this article, you should pre-order it from Bookshop.org rather than Amazon.
8. Comic Sans is a good font
Yes. It is. I will not be taking questions at this time.
9. British Universities are a mess
Gaby Hinsliff's article on the problems of UK universities is well worth a read, but I don't entirely agree with it. I have heard too many horror stories from academics who have been “encouraged” to ensure that foreign students (who pay a lot of money) pass courses. Like much of the Tory legacy that Labour will inherit, it will take decades to undo the horrific damage this government has done to higher education. The entire system of funding both institutions and students needs dismantling and rebuilding.
10. Sup with a long spoon
Reach has reached (ahem) a deal with Amazon to give away its crown jewels to make a few pecks of corn. I had thought that publishers might have learned that collaborating with big tech platforms never means they get a good deal, but here we are. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me ten times, I'm probably a publisher.
Things you might be interested in - 31/7/23
Cory has a new book coming out which builds on his work on "enshittification". You can pre-order it as DRM-free audiobook (and no it's not on Audible), ebook, and even as a good old fashioned paper book.
David Allen Green makes the very good point that Keir Starmer's background as former prosecutor explains his incredibly cautious approach. In legal cases, it's usually the team which makes the fewest mistakes that wins -- and Starmer is aiming to do exactly that, removing every possible attack line of the Tories with things like his criticism of Sadiq Khan's ULEZ policy. The problem, as David points out, is that politics is not the law.
Terence Eden -- who is well worth a place in your RSS reader (you do have one don't you?) -- is very disappointed with Google over this "Web Environment Integrity" nonsense. And he's entirely right. As he says "Google desperately needs to be broken up. It's simply untenable to have the largest browser in the hands of the largest web advertising firm." Plus of course it's the largest source of traffic to pretty-much every web site on the planet, and the owner of the most widely-used smartphone operating system, and the only game in town for web video creators (forget it TikTok, you know your creators want to "graduate" to a YouTube channel). And, as Terence points out, there is nothing individuals can do about this. Thank whatever deity you believe in for the EU's antitrust team.
On the same day that Elon Musk threatened to sue a non-profit which investigates the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter and other platforms, Apple made an exception to its very strict app store rules to allow the company to rename its app "X". We shouldn't be surprised: despite that fact that Twitter is full of hate speech and porn, Tim Apple obviously loves it. On the positive side, the rebrand seems to have possibly the world's worst strap line. Having said that, "blaze your glory" would be prefect for Tesla, given their cars' habit of bursting into flames.