Bad Voltage

By Bad VoltageComedy Society & Culture Technology

Bad Voltage episodes

October 19, 2023 3×62: Class One Catastrophic Hypercredibility
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! @[email protected]!
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!
41 min
August 26, 20233×61: A Room of Dalmatians
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! @[email protected]!
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!
52 min
August 13, 20233×60: Never Eat Shredded Wheat
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! @[email protected]!
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!
1 hr 4 min
June 16, 2023 3×59: Addition Edition
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! @[email protected]!
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!
57 min
May 19, 20233×58: Large Langridge Model
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! @[email protected]!
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!
1 hr 2 min
March 31, 20233×57: Conspiracyers
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! @[email protected]!
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!
42 min
March 02, 20233×56: Hyperbole is the Magic Word
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! @[email protected]!
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!
1 hr 2 min
February 18, 2023 3×55: Don the Mast
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! @[email protected]!
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!
1 hr 9 min
January 20, 20233×54: The Joe Dolce Music Theatre
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!
55 min
December 23, 2022 3×53: Representative but not Shining
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!
1 hr 4 min

About Bad Voltage

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Every two weeks Bad Voltage delivers an amusing take on technology, Open Source, politics, music, and anything else we think is interesting, as well as interviews and reviews. The show is presented by…

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