In this episode of "What A Lot Of Things", Ian and Ash celebrate their podcast's return to a regular cadence, with episodes now coming out every two weeks.

The duo cover two main topics - local democracy and the backlash against social media algorithms. On local democracy, Ian discusses his experience running for town council, the arcane rules and challenges involved, and his belief that more ordinary citizens should get involved to make local councils less political and more pragmatic.

The conversation then shifts to the pros and cons of social media algorithms. Ash and Ian examine how platforms like TikTok and YouTube quickly learn user preferences, sometimes recommending questionable content, and debate whether such algorithms ultimately benefit users or simply enable more effective advertising and "shitification". They also discuss some emerging alternatives that aim to provide more transparent, human-curated social media experiences.

Ian and Ash conclude by sharing the best way for listeners to get in touch with their thoughts and feedback. Another thought-provoking installment of "What A Lot Of Things"!

Links

• Leeds Testing Atelier
• Manifesting Agency and Days, Ian’s other podcasts.
• The famous meeting of Handsforth Parish Council at which it turns out that Jackie Weaver did in fact have the authority.
• Flatpack Democracy
• Ian’s website made for Ilkley Community Alliance
• Play Rock Paper Scissors with CGP Grey
• Wired: The Latest Online Culture War is Humans vs Algorithms
• pi.fyi, Spread Social and the Prosocial Ranking Challenge.
• Ian's Ilkley Community Alliance website (and, through the magic of Vercel, here is the version from the time of the election)
• WSJ: How TikTok's Algorithm Figures You Out (Youtube)

In this latest episode of the "What A Lot Of Things" podcast, hosts Ian and Ash explore intriguing aspects of technology and its broader implications. They delve into the evolving career paths for testing specialists, discussing how testers can navigate organizational challenges and develop fulfilling careers. The conversation shifts to a significant security furore involving the XZ compression tool, where they unpack the complexities of open-source software maintenance and the vulnerabilities introduced by subtle malicious contributions. Throughout, the hosts' lively banter and insightful anecdotes make for a thought-provoking listen that bridges technical details with broader tech culture reflections.

Links

• Guardian TechScape: How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English and "ChatGPT cliches" gist
• iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S22+ (better link for the Samsung?)
• 2030 Status meeting with Mother Nature video from Apple.
• Pachyderm and Hachyderm.
• Agile Testing Fellowship
• Maaret Pyhäjärvi's post on LinkedIn quoting Anna Baik, plus a Youtube video on how to pronounce Pyhäjärvi. We will do better next time! We can find other people quoting Anna saying this, but not the original source for the quotation.
• Articles for Thing One:
  • Ministry of Testing: Navigating a Career Path in Software Testing
  • TechBeacon: Two years with no testers: What I learned
  • Dan Ashby: Dispelling the misconceptions #5 – “Lets 100% automate everything and get rid of all our testers”
  • TestFort: AI in Software Testing: A Silver Bullet or a Threat to the Profession?
• Eton College King's Scholarship Exam, General Paper I
• Accessibility testing specialist, Ady Stokes on LinkedIn
• The best step-by-step story I found for the XZ backdoor was Everything I know about the XZ backdoor by Evan Boehs
• XKCD: All Modern Digital Infrastructure
• XZ maintainer Lasse Collin's page on the backdoor
• Andres Freund's email to the OSS Security mailing list on discovering the backdoor
• Dosubot, an AI-powered Github maintainer agent used in Langchain's repos.
• The story of `left-pad`

...and our new email address: technologyeeyores@whatalotofthings.com

In this episode, Ian and Ash delve into the complexities of managing IT service providers, exploring the challenges and strategies of working with consultancies and independent contractors. They also discuss the cutting-edge topic of AI voice cloning, examining its potential uses and ethical implications. From historical pirate accents to futuristic technology, join them for a thought-provoking discussion on how these technologies impact our work and the broader implications they hold for society.

Our shiny new email address, as promised in this episode, is... technologyeeyores@whatalotofthings.com

Links

• OpenAI, and the not particularly relevant to this episode but still oft-mismentioned OpenAPI.
• Be More Pirate, the book where Ian found out why we think pirates all had British West Country accents
• Pigeon Keeping – Wikipedia
• Diagram Industries blog, where Ash documented his learnings from the Ministry of Testing's "30 Days of AI In Testing" event.
• NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month)
• LinkedIn is experimenting with a TikTok-like video feed in its app – TechCrunch, 27th March 2024
• hachyderm.io, the Mastodon server that Ian fruitlessly recommended to Ash
• Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Synthetic Voices, OpenAI Blog, 29th March 2024
• Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation - speech providing an early overview of the Free Software movement, delivered by Richard Stallman on 29th May 2001.
• Crack Version 4.1: A Sensible Password Checker for Unix [PDF], white paper by Alec Muffett (estimated date, November 1991)
• Open LLMs – Wikipedia, a list of open source LLMs, including Meta's Llama 2 as mentioned.
• How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript, The Register, 23rd March 2016
• Everything I know about the XZ backdoor, a rather heroic and very detailed explanation last updated (at the time of writing) on 8th April 2024
• AI Voice Cloning news links
  • OpenAI deems its voice cloning tool too risky for general release – The Guardian, 31st March 2024
  • OpenAI’s voice cloning AI model only needs a 15-second sample to work – The Verge, 29th March 2024
  • OpenAI is pitching Sora to Hollywood. Creatives are fighting back – Mashable, 25th March 2024
  • Resemble AI Creates Synthetic Audio Watermark to Tag Deepfake Speech – voicebot.ai, 2nd February 2023
  • Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should – Know Your Meme

In this episode, Ian and Ash delve into the evolving landscape of social media, examining the implications of TikTok's potential ban in the U.S., the integration of AI in testing, and the shifting dynamics of platforms like Twitter (now X). They share personal anecdotes, discuss the significance of data privacy, and explore the future of social media engagement. The conversation also considers the challenges and opportunities presented by these digital shifts, offering insights into the broader tech community's response.

Links

• On the TikTok saga:
  • TechCrunch: TikTok ban: How Congress could force ByteDance to sell or push the app out of the US
  • Spiceworks: There's Nothing Confusing About TikTok's Security Risks
  • The Guardian: TikTok has been accused of ‘aggressive’ data harvesting. Is your information at risk?
  • NY Times: House Passes Bill to Force TikTok Sale From Chinese Owner or Ban the App
  • Cory Doctorow: TikTok's Ensh*ttification
• Vine, the story of its demise, and Ian's vines archived on the old site.
• Postman and PostBot
• 30 Days of AI in Testing from Ministry of Testing
• The Leeds Testing Atelier, at which Ash has performed the role of Testing Game Show Host.
• How To Archive Your Tweets With The Wayback Machine
• The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit (which runs on ActivityPub)
• Ivory for iOS client for Mastodon, from TapBots
• Threads from Meta.
• Bluesky which runs on the AT Protocol
• The late, lamented Apollo Reddit client
• The celebrated What A Lot Of Things LinkedIn Group

You can find our social media links (or link, in the case of Ash) on the website.

This episode of the podcast features Ian and Ash in a humour-filled comeback, diving into the fascinating world of generative AI and the impact of Baldur's Gate 3 on the gaming industry. They explore the nuances and controversies surrounding AI, from its potential to enhance creativity to the ethical concerns and the skepticism it faces. The discussion also highlights the importance of corporate culture in producing quality work, as exemplified by Larian Studios' success with Baldur's Gate 3. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, gaming, and creativity, offering insightful and engaging perspectives on contemporary digital phenomena.

Links

• A Wizard is never late
• Gartner Hype Cycle Research Methodology
• Anthropic, their product,Claude, and their Constitutional AI research.
• The Turing test
• Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
• Other AI platforms mentioned: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot
• AI image generation: Midjourney, DALL·E
• New York Times: Bing’s AI Chat: I Want To Be Alive
• IBM watsonx
• IA Writer
• Hemingway
• Dungeons and Dragons
• Stardew Valley
• Skull and Bones
• Larian Studios and Baldur’s Gate 3
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Sendmail
• Loot boxes
• What A Lot Of Things – LinkedIn

Ian and Ash talk about those pesky testers forming communities and taking on toxic cultures, plus forming a dilapidated mind shack using personal knowledge management tools like Obsidian.

Links

Zettelkasten - Slip Box not SlipKnot
More Zettelkasten
Obsidian Home Page
Ian's Thoughts on Obsidian
Testers walkout after layoffs in the QA Team
Raven testers form a union
NFT grifters have terrible culture - not causation yet, but the correlation is hard to ignore.

Ian and Ash talk about the (mis)use of metrics, including the big four and happiness indices plus how proud Ash was of his Certified Scrum Master qualification but now bashes Scrum with everyone else.

Links

• Here I Belong by Matt Hartley
• Douglas Adams: How to stop worrying and learn to love the Internet
• RFC 821 - Simple Mail Transport Protocol (not RFC 822, as Ian thought, which is closely related being about the format of the files containing the messages that get transmitted over SMTP). Still, not the perfect accompaniment to a discussion about Ian’s rightness.
• Myth: If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It
• DORA (Google DevOps Research & Assessment (Team)) Metrics
• How to measure developer productivity - and how not to by Isaac Sacolick
• Scrums Allegiance Website
• I've sold agile to to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook
• Owl asking Winnie the Pooh to leave his house for saying Agile Scrum

Links

• Team Guide to Testability Publishers Page
• The Great Post Office Scandal Publishers Page
• Scandal at the Post Office Panorama BBC TV Episode
• The Great Post Office Trial BBC Radio 4 Serial
• The Great Post Office Scandal Author Nick Wallis
• 39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question
• My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike
• Web3 is going just great
• An extremely casual code review of MetaMask's crypto by Matthew Green