Mike McQuaid: And that gives us the information we need, but at the same time it preserves the anonymity of the people who were not getting your configuration from that.

Adam Stacoviak: He has the blowback, I think… Being too open - there’s not so much anonymity, but a certain privacy level of life has its benefits… Especially, like, you don’t know what the future is going to be. So if you’re open now – I know you’re sort of pre-committed to this conversation, and now here on the call, you’re like “For life, I’m going to share my salary.” You’ve laid that down. And in two years from now, something you do could make you super-famous. Maybe that’s cool. Maybe that’s part of like your brand at that point; you’ll just embrace it. And that’s cool. But maybe somebody – like, I’m actually… Jerod knows this, he makes fun of me; I say, absolute things, because I feel so strongly in the moment, and I make like a long-term forever commitment in a way with something I’ll say, and then later on I’m like “Well, my idea run that changed, so now what I said in the past is no longer accurate.” So I try to not be so absolute about things.

My wife and I have a funny thing between us, we always say “Always and every time”, because early in our relationship we would say “You always do this”, or “Every time…” Just these absolute things, that are just totally not true. It’s just our irrational, in-the-moment selves saying things that are not accurate and true about the other person… And then that’s now become like our love language in a way, because we make fun of our old selves, essentially, by saying “You always do this every time”, we always say it back to the just jokingly… But this absolute idea that you’ve done it forever, I wonder how it’ll play out for you long-term, I suppose… Because you’re pretty young… How old are you? Are you willing to share your age?

Techno Tim: That’s right. So I just did kind of a walkthrough of my homelab services or my self-hosted services for 2024, I just released that a couple of weeks ago. It’s kind of a walkthrough of my network, how traffic comes in, what it’s running on, and I have both logical and physical diagrams, and then everything I use. So thinking through that, what I typically use – now, I know you can use tunnels, like you mentioned, Tailscale, or Cloudflare tunnels, or whatever you want, where you expose something externally by creating a secure tunnel from home to your proxy in the cloud, and having that proxy be where it’s exposed, versus exposing it at home. I don’t do that. I guess I do it the hard way; I’d been doing it before tunnels were kind of a thing, these reverse tunnels. I actually use a reverse proxy to do that in port forwarding.

So what I typically do - and I do two layers of it. Firstly, I use CloudFlare, their reverse proxy. So I point all my DNS to Cloudflare’s reverse proxy, which does a couple things. One, it gives me some anonymity. Whoa, peace – oh, that was Apple. I liked that.

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Tejas Kumar: Right, and you can hide behind the anonymity. Or not the anonymity, but the lack of –

Daniel Whitenack: But then it’s a separate thing if you’re streaming up all the audio and all the video, and maybe even detected emotions, along with timestamps and all of that, to the cloud. That becomes a very different scenario. So in these cases, where you’re deploying emotion AI, how have you struck a balance between making sure you’re gathering good data to do well at the task that you’re trying to do, versus swinging to the side of privacy and anonymity, and that sort of thing?

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah, in Second Life. No names dropped here, for scarcity and security and anonymity… But I knew somebody who literally made their income… It wasn’t a ton, but it was enough to live on, from just making in-game art things that you can use, wear, share, ride, horses… All the things, objects in the game that you can use in some way that was unique, because it was by them. Scarce, because they could only make so many, and I suppose artistic, because creativity required.

Daniel Whitenack: Based on what you’ve seen with your current users and customers – like, if I’m a data scientist working on a new project, getting into some new data, do you have any recommendations in terms of workflow with your tools? Like, you know, when I get the data, I’m profiling it, I’m doing some exploratory analysis, where and when should I be thinking about fitting in some of these REST calls, or Python SDK elements into my workflow, so that I can make sure that I’m dealing with maybe both sides of things, anonymity and creating synthetic examples? Maybe more specifically my question would be are you seeing that done in a workflow upfront, and they do this on data, and then they use that data moving forward always? Or are you seeing this as sort of an ongoing part of people’s workflow?

Mark Bates: [28:08] Um, excuse me, that was an exact submission from this year. Almost verbatim. I don’t appreciate your breaking my anonymity here.

Jerod Santo: It’s interesting, there’s a couple kinds of trouble. There’s the kind of trouble where you’re in trouble, but you know you’re in trouble. And then there’s the kind where you think you’re not in trouble, so now you’re brazen and bold… And you actually are. And then you find out. Ignorance is not bliss in this case. So if you think you’re anonymous and you’re being promised anonymity by somebody, or maybe you set it up yourself, like you said, and you’re assuming the anonymity - well, now you can get yourself in all sorts of trouble, because you assume that to be the case and it’s not true. This happens I think a lot.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah… Basically, it’s a person. Or persons. We’re not really sure. They have this level of anonymity. Breakmaster Cylinder is…

Adam Stacoviak: [43:41] Is there ever a point that data – given this concern of anonymity, or very private concerns for your users and whatnot, is there ever a point that data is not anonymous? Are you getting the data and then anonymizing it, or is it always anonymous to you?

Brian Bondy: Yeah, that’s right. It will automatically figure out what to do, and you can set a monthly budget of how much you want to give out… So there’s basically a consolidation period that happens once a month currently; we might lower that to be more frequent later. But once you hit that monthly amount, I think it’s defaulted to maybe 15 BAT that it’ll give out from the 25 BAT that you get for free just by installing it. Yeah, it’ll pay out using the Anonize protocol, so your anonymity is preserved that way.

Jerod Santo: [08:07] And it’s so true. Every once in a while I just kind of think about the power and the beauty of the web, and what it provides to people, in the sense of not even anonymity in this case, but just kind of allowing yourself to kind of define who you are, and giving us the confidence and the ability to say “Yeah, I wanna go after that anyways.” I feel like there’s a liberty that the web provides that is a beautiful thing.

Adam Stacoviak: So in today’s world, or I guess if we’re not talking about cryptocurrency (or that kind of coin), if we’re talking about dollars, just to use this example, my information is not held private, right? If I spend it on a credit card, AmEx knows who I am, they have a profile built around me, that kind of thing. If it’s Bitcoin spent through Bisq, it’s private, right? What’s the point of privacy? Help me and the rest of the world understand the downside of not being private, aside from doxing… Is it the marketing profile? What are the concerns of privacy? Is it just anonymity? Is it doing [unintelligible 00:34:09.24] things? What’s the point of privacy?

Ryan Bigg: Yeah, that’s right; lots of anonymity there.

Brian Ketelsen: Yeah, and just to point a clarification… The reviewers can’t see who you are, and in your proposal you should not mention who you are. But it’s your job to give us an idea that you know what you’re talking about while you write the proposal. It’s a fine line you have to walk not to allow us to know who you are - that gives us anonymity in our review process, but you still have to show that you know your stuff when you’re writing it.

Ben Johnson: I think it is just the anonymity. Because if I go to a conference, no one ever comes up to me and tells me how much it sucks. They say “I had this difficulty with performance, where I did this etc.” And then you have to have a conversation about it.

Jeff Smith: So let me do two things. I’ll take you through the use case. And so I’m now cherry-picking certain data points, and addressing it… But, I mean, the short answer on your question is it depends on your baseline, repeated listening, tilt your mood in a direction, based on certain behaviors you’re doing. So I would say short answer is it depends. And I can kind of walk you through how it works, and then it’ll be fun to get your response on it. And then of course - I mean, that can go into the AI, and what… Let’s start high level.

Music, like AI, artificial intelligence, it’s limited inputs, exponential outputs. If you look at music, there are 12 notes. You’ve got seven letters, you’ve got major/minors, but in the end, you’ve got 12 notes, and that gives you everything from Mozart to Megadeth.

Then you look at music behavior. People on average, like I said, listen to so much music. But then how they’re doing it, when they’re listening to it, their playlist, the repeat, and everything else. And so all that data is there, and we’ve built the engine to capture that, and then AI to analyze, interpret, decode for wellbeing.

And if you look at – I guess on the AI side, you’ve got the traditional to discern the mood of the user from the acoustic features (a lot of what I described from the songs) and then generative to customize messaging, and so what that output is. But if you look at an experience inside of a company, a use case - so you’re an employee at a company, you get an email from HR “Hey, we’ve partner with these rock and rollers of corporate wellness. We care about your personal wellness journey. Opt in with your Spotify, Apple, YouTube, get free perks along the way. Learn more about yourself. All data’s anonymized. We’re looking for trends on how to better serve you, your job and your wellness.”

And so like I said before, we wanted to tap into their current music listening, not create another app they had to download, but it’s just say “Hey, this is the behavior. This is how you’re listening to -” I think say Gregorian chants, and what’s going on in the background.

And so what happens is when that user opts in, there are two paths. One’s for the organization end. The data is anonymized, clustered… They’re looking for trends. This way, an executive/leadership team can look at dashboards, report outs, company-level, department, division, down to team. You don’t want to get to the individual to avoid any liability of selection. “Hey, Johnny [unintelligible 00:26:48.13] was listening to Kid Rock and he got fired.” You want to avoid the one-to-one. But they want a better solution for insights that are one to many. And then you have bespoke recommendations for how to actually intervene or serve those teams.

On the individual side, they’re offering more intel about their emotional buoyancy. After a few weeks, they get a weekly email, encouraging them to check out their E-score. So think of a WHOOP band for mental health. Your sleep score. What does that data point on you? What does it say about you? Because your interaction with music is unique. And they love that, because it’s a data point in their life and wellbeing.

And then we throw in that little added perk, because we do want them to feel seen and heard. “Hey, it looks like you’re feeling a little melancholic this week. Here’s [unintelligible 00:27:31.27] your favorite coffee spot.” How do you actually take that data, not only to be self-aware, but given tools for self-regulation, and everything.

And so when you look at that model, it’s very personal, yet anonymized on the organization side. And so we’ve always had that tension to make sure we have a strong firewall. But then as we work with them and as they listen more and more, it just get smarter, smarter, smarter. It’s fascinating.

[27:59] So to answer your question, I personally don’t know, if you were listening to Taylor Swift this afternoon and then the Wiggles in the morning, how you’re feeling. But I can tell you by running through Chrp for a few weeks, you will see a mirror of your emotion, which is fascinating.

Yasir Ekinci: That was from like a real, actual thing. They obviously anonymize it, because robots have privacy needs, too… [laughter]

David Flanagan: They give people the data that they can under certain data regulations. They can’t tell me the name of everyone that watches it. That’s just never going to happen. However, if I control the pipeline and they’re logged in, I know who they are. I know what technology – like, if you watch 20 videos on my website, I might know that you’re interested in Rust, WebAssembly, Python, whatever. That data becomes useful for me. One, I get to prioritize the content that I’m making and do more of the stuff that people are enjoying… But also, from working with my partners, they might be interested to know that 70% of the people in the last two weeks have been googling Python, or whatever.

There’s very good uses of that anonymized data that doesn’t impeach anyone’s rights… And I want to explore that in an ethical way. And everything that I do – all of my dashboards, my plan is to make them all public. You’ll actually be able to come onto dashboard.rawkode.academy and see anonymized how many people are searching for Python, how many people are searching for this, and build up this really cool, unique data source of developers that want to continue their career and learn new technologies. At least my little bubble of it. I’m not StackOverflow, but you know…

Chris Wanstrath: I will say though, right now a lot of the emphasis and thinking is around the alpha and getting out a browser. There’s a world where when this is released, we are thinking about marketing, and we’re thinking about positioning, and we’re thinking about maybe not what the default features are, but what’s the mode you turn on, or what’s the premier extension? A lot of times an extension is almost like a killer app; a reason to switch to something. And for me, the privacy stuff is super-important. I think it’s only gonna get worse in the sort of LLM world that we’re in right now, and the tracking… And so I think people are going to gravitate towards whatever keeps them private. And selfishly, that’s what I want. I’m happy – in terms of ads and stuff like that, I pay for YouTube premium. I might be one of the only people on the planet. I pay for Apple Music. I’m happy to pay to turn off ads. But the general searching of the web and the tracking and the fingerprinting and things like that - it’s just awful. So if we can offer a private mode or something different than incognito mode, that you could opt into… Apple recently did this with the private relay, where “Do you want to turn this on? We’re going to run all your traffic through our servers and anonymize it”, and that sort of thing. What you’re going to get is a little bit slower browsing experience.

I think that in the future that’s definitely a conversation we can have, about what to offer, what sort of packages that there are, what sort of extensions we promote, and how we distinguish ourself in the market towards regular consumers. And for me, I’m definitely going to push to at least have privacy extensions developed, and made premium, and kept up to date, because that’s what I want.

Birk Jernström: Yeah. So for me in Sweden, it’s at least that when I buy stuff online - this could be like grocery shopping, to clothes, whatever it is - it’s that I can pay and manage payments through Klarna, centrally. And then I have all my receipts and everything that I need through Klarna. And I’d much rather prefer that, versus like my credit card, which is then just kind of anonymized transactions on my bank, and I need to go to my email to dig out these receipts. It’s just not as convenient as Klarna is for me in Sweden. But to be clear, again, I would never use Klarna to pay off something that I wouldn’t be able to afford.

Adam Stacoviak: I do like the idea of a small subset of the dataset, that’s anonymized, or sanitized in some way, shape or form, that’s like “This is the acceptable sample amount required for the study portion, or the modification portion.”

Nadia Odunayo: But two things. One is I wanted to kind of avoid anything that was user data, even though it would have been anonymized, and would have been more trends… But two, I had a chat with a friend, a colleague, kind of sometimes mentor, [unintelligible 00:43:38.21] and he said to me “The best businesses always make money or get value directly from their customers. They don’t have a middle person, a middle entity. And if you’re going down this publisher plan, you’re gonna have a middle entity. It’s not direct.”

Oh, sorry, the other thing is I didn’t want to do ads. That was another thing. If I could avoid ads, that would be great. One of the things that people hated on Goodreads were the ads. So I was thinking “Okay, maybe it’s freemium then.” And so really, the thing that made us start to build out the paid plan was just our costs. We were spending thousands of dollars a month to keep everything running on the highest Heroku plans… And the database - every time we had a spike, we needed to upgrade to the next database. We were getting to the highest tier. What happens when the highest tier runs out? What do we do? And it felt like every time we got an influx of users, our costs went up, so we needed to do something about it.

And so that’s when I just made up a paid plan. Like, I literally made a page… It didn’t exist. I said the “Plus plan coming.” At this point it would have been 2022 – it was in 2021. Oh, wow. I’m like, is it 2021 or 2022? It must have been 2021, because we became profitable in 2022. So in 2020, at the end of 2020, October, I made a page, that app.storygraph.com/Plus. And I said, “Hm…” And I went through and I looked at the features we had, and I thought “How can we enhance these?” Okay, similar books… We’re gonna give you personalized similar books. So you have a unique page just for you, that takes into account your unique preferences, your unique themes, topics and tropes that you’ve told us you liked, and shows you the books similar to this one, but also highlighting the ones that have the things that you like. Cool.

And then it was stats. Everyone loves the stats, but what if you could compare two of the stats pages side by side? So I was just taking the features we had, and just like made up a list of features. And then I said “We’re also going to have a public roadmap on which you can vote, and post. You’re going to get priority support, so we’re gonna [unintelligible 00:45:53.27] And I said, “Pre-order now, it’s $30. After that is $50 [unintelligible 00:45:58.24] And we got over like three months, we got 1,400 pre-orders. 1,400 people paid $30 for something that didn’t exist.

Angelica Hill: I’m kind of biased, because – and I promise I’m not saying this because of the fact that she’s on the call… But Anna submitted a very, very good proposal; it was really interesting, about some research that she was doing. And I don’t know whether you were still doing it last year… I liked it, and I’m gonna ask you to do a TL;DR, because you can give the TL;DR far better than I can on the topic.

But the reason I liked it so much was that it was an area I had not ever seen explored in a talk before, one. Two, she was especially qualified to give the talk. It was very clear, even though it was an anonymized process, this was someone who really knew the subject, was going to be able to talk in detail about it, and it was written really well. So I knew that even though it was a semi-complex topic, because the proposal was so beautifully structured and written very clearly, I had faith that it was going to be able to be given in a way that was clear, concise, and fair.

New people coming in, or experts, they would be able to follow it and get something from the talk. I don’t know whether, Anna, you want to talk about that one… I would be interested to know, in all the proposals you’ve submitted, how you felt about that one… Because I loved it.

Daniel Whitenack: Yeah, I think that there’s all sorts of things at play here on the user side and on the backend system side. There’s certainly things within a system, if you think about even something as simple as how data is transmitted, right? If I’m processing speech on a device, I can choose to transmit that speech up into the cloud, and it’s stored somewhere, and then things happen with it, maybe that I intend and I don’t intend… Or I can choose to process that speech, and maybe only send very anonymized metadata back up to some type of centralized system. So there’s very real implications for how you design a system, and then also, I think there’s real amazing work that can be done on even people that aren’t technical, but realize, like you were talking about earlier - I forget which one of you, about how users can tell developers how a system is failing them or harming them in ways that the developers never even envisioned.

So I think - yeah, there’s a lot of things at play here, for sure, that come into it on both sides of this. And I guess the third side that might be kind of interesting to discuss here is the research side. So research - I think people have always thought, “Well, we should just research things and figure out what’s possible. It doesn’t matter what it is, we just need to figure out what’s possible, and what can we can we do”, right?

[33:42] And something that’s always been fascinating to me is just the extremely short cycle in AI between research and the application in real systems. It’s like a paper is published, maybe even before a conference happens, it’s published on the archive, there’s like seven different GitHub repos that implement the thing… It’s all out there already, and people can just grab it and go with whatever was literally just researched and peer-reviewed… Which is so strange to me, how quickly that can happen. And I know that you highlight certain elements of that also in the report, in the podcast. How often from your all’s perspective – like, as you were working on this, how often did the research side of things kind of flavor, the conversation that research was actually kind of impacting users on a maybe a shorter cycle than people were thinking?

Joe Percoco: [31:49] Launch a product on Titan. You can do it more cheaply, you can stand up the product in a 10th of the time, your customers aren’t anonymized, and you can actually communicate back to them. We have a lot of people who currently manage their product off the mutual fund and ETF, reaching out to say, “Hey, can I launch a product on Titan? Can I launch my product on Titan?” Because you guys know your customers, you can talk to them, you can trade faster. There’s none of this red tape. It’s just entirely a holistic, better experience. Because right now, instead, I have an ETF, and then I try to go build an audience on Twitter to solve for that content thing, but you guys just merge it all together.

Jerod Santo: Well, we first did a show on it in 2017, with Zeke Sikelianos, really a coworker of yours. And in fact, I happened to find he quoted you on that episode of the Changelog. That’s 216. So now that we’re quoting you back to yourself, here’s one. Zeke says, “Actually, my coworker, Jessica L” - see, he kind of anonymized you; I’m assuming that was you… “She described this as ‘This promised land’”. Was that one of your early selling– your taglines?