3×33: Eternal Bronze Medallists

Explicit content warning

08/05/21 • 54 min

Bad Voltage

Stuart Langridge and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono is away, you too are not an astronaut, and:

[00:02:00] Shares slide after China brands online games “electronic drugs”
[00:03:50] The US FAA changes the definition of “astronaut” after Bezos and Branson go into space, LOL
[00:06:25] Machine learning sucks at covid
[00:12:15] Sinclair are 60, and some thoughts on retro computing popularity prompted by @popey
[00:15:45] The Pixel 6 has been announced; what’s the score? They’re being a bit close-mouthed about it, but it’s apparently a real flagship this time, whatever that means
[00:23:00] Firefox lost 50M users since 2019, down from around 250 million
[00:26:25] Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Winners, although this is decided by facial recognition
[00:30:00] Facebook creates new unit to build a “metaverse”
[00:34:50] Scarlett Johansson sues Disney over streaming of Black Widow
[00:42:45] Netflix Plans to Offer Video Games in Push Beyond Films, TV
And we said we’d look into Amazon revenue per business unit, and an infographic from “visual capitalist” suggests that it’s 50% from their selling on Amazon.com (and .co.uk, etc) plus another 20% from third-party sales through amazon.com (etc). AWS is about half of the remainder (12.4% overall), and the remainder is divided roughly evenly between subscriptions (Prime), real-world stores (Whole Foods), and other, all at about 5% overall each.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×33-eternal-bronze-medallists/12430

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

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

Stuart Langridge and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono is away, you too are not an astronaut, and:

[00:02:00] Shares slide after China brands online games “electronic drugs”
[00:03:50] The US FAA changes the definition of “astronaut” after Bezos and Branson go into space, LOL
[00:06:25] Machine learning sucks at covid
[00:12:15] Sinclair are 60, and some thoughts on retro computing popularity prompted by @popey
[00:15:45] The Pixel 6 has been announced; what’s the score? They’re being a bit close-mouthed about it, but it’s apparently a real flagship this time, whatever that means
[00:23:00] Firefox lost 50M users since 2019, down from around 250 million
[00:26:25] Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Winners, although this is decided by facial recognition
[00:30:00] Facebook creates new unit to build a “metaverse”
[00:34:50] Scarlett Johansson sues Disney over streaming of Black Widow
[00:42:45] Netflix Plans to Offer Video Games in Push Beyond Films, TV
And we said we’d look into Amazon revenue per business unit, and an infographic from “visual capitalist” suggests that it’s 50% from their selling on Amazon.com (and .co.uk, etc) plus another 20% from third-party sales through amazon.com (etc). AWS is about half of the remainder (12.4% overall), and the remainder is divided roughly evenly between subscriptions (Prime), real-world stores (Whole Foods), and other, all at about 5% overall each.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×33-eternal-bronze-medallists/12430

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

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

Previous Episode

3×32: Trigger’s Broom

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which God is not our co-pilot. Instead, Github Copilot is. What’s the deal with this thing?

Copilot is “an AI pair programmer that helps you write better code”, according to Github themselves. “GitHub Copilot draws context from the code you’re working on, suggesting whole lines or entire functions.” Is this useful? Is it good? Is it good for open source?

Matthew Garrett wrote a thing about Copilot which is worth reading, especially if your basic feeling is that it takes our open source code against the licence and that’s bad.

And what about the bigger picture? Github — well, Microsoft — are one of the biggest players in the world; is this what they should be doing? And if it isn’t... what is?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×32-triggers-broom/12429

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

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

Next Episode

3×34: The Days To Come Will Be Filled

Stuart Langridge and Jono Bacon present Bad Voltage, in which Jeremy is away, there used to be a star and now there isn’t, and we devote the whole show to a discussion of Apple’s recent announcement that your iPhone will now scan some of your photos and report them if they’re child porn. This has created quite a lot of discussion (ZDNet, EFF, Forbes). In particular, the concern from most is that this is the top of a slippery slope. We’ll dig into this a bit; when the former CSO of Facebook is writing New York Times editorials there’s a discussion to be had, at least, and when seventh-graders now think that Apple is looking at their photos, the message has got a bit out of control, especially as it may relate to Apple’s relationship with governments, especially the Chinese government. Let’s see what all this is about, and whether we’re merely one more screeching minority for asking questions.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×34-the-days-to-come-will-be-filled/12432

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

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