Devyn Cairns & Jakub ŽádnĂk join Justin & Autumn to talk about building a new kind of cross-platform shell that provides easy extensions with traditional command compatibility. That’s no easy feat!
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Autumn Nash: Eye-free. So you don’t need to – you know, accessibility for visually-impaired people.
This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about how we can get back to that “new good internet.” Cory’s new book The Internet Con offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism, and all the ways enshittification is enabled. Cory also shares his experience recording his own audio book under the direction of Gabrielle de Cuir at Skyboat Media, and what’s to come from his next Science Fiction book The Lost Cause.
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Cory Doctorow: And you know, one of the reasons that we historically took aim at monopoly formation, which is – this is the really the change that we had, is we used to… Until Carter and Reagan, we used to say “Don’t let monopolies form.” And then afterwards, this thing called the consumer welfare doctrine said “Well, maybe monopolies are good. What about the monopoly that occurs because people just love what the company is selling? Do you really want to punish people by taking away the thing they love best? Let’s allow monopolies to form, and then afterwards, if they’re bad, we’ll stop them.” Well, the problem with that is that it’s very hard to stop a monopoly once it exists. I told you about how Google and Facebook are able to ignore the GDPR.
In 1970, the DOJ took action against IBM, which had been just kneeling on the throat of the American tech industry for like a generation, stopping anything from getting off the ground. And for each year for the next 12 years, until 1982, IBM spent more on outside lawyers to fight the DOJ than all of the lawyers in the Department of Justice antitrust division, fighting every case in America accounted for. They outspent the US government for 12 consecutive years. They call it antitrust’s Vietnam.
[01:00:11.29] So once the monopoly exists, it’s really hard to stop, or to check. This is why we prevent monopoly formation. And look, if you’re a small government, kind of Ayn Rand-reading libertarian, you should want anti-monopoly laws. Because even if the only thing that you think a government should ever do is enforce a contract, the only way the government can enforce a contract is if it is larger and more powerful than the contracting parties. The referee has to have more power than the teams. And that means that the smallest government that you can have has to be bigger than the biggest company you’re allowed to form. And so the secret to a small government is smaller companies. One way or the other, there’s no good case for this oligarchic arrangement of economics.
This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that’s climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, “We’re all fighting the same fight.”
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Cory Doctorow: No, it’s not self-regulation? No, no, no. Like actual democratically accountable regulation. And one of the things that makes regulation suck is when companies are really big. Because regulation - it’s like science, right? To do science, you have to ask what’s going on, you have to ascertain what’s going on, and you have to hazard an intervention that will change what’s going on to produce an outcome that you desire. And so in an adversarial process, which is like adversarial peer review, when you do science, where you write a paper and the people who hate you and want you to fail get to critique it… When you’re doing policy, you hold these truth-seeking exercises, where you go “Is net neutrality good?” And then you invite everyone who’s got an opinion to show up and tell you whether network neutrality is good. Well, if the entire sector consists of three cable companies and two legacy phone companies, all of whose executives used to all work with each other at various times in their lives, and they’re like godparents to each other’s kids, and walked each other down the aisle at their weddings, or whatever - they’re all going to show up and they’re going to go “No, net neutrality is terrible. We can’t do network management with net neutrality.” And everyone on the other side is going to be like either running like a WISP or they’re an academic, or they work for civil society, or whatever… And the regulator, who is almost always going to be a veteran from one of those five giant firms, because when there’s only five of them, the only people who understand how they work are their own executives, the regulator is going to go like “Ah, I’ve listened to the evidence, and I guess we don’t need net neutrality.”
Now, if there are 100 companies in the sector, not only they’re not gonna be able to agree on what their lobbying position is, they’re not going to be able to agree on how to cater their annual meeting, right? Half of them are going to show up and say, “Oh, you couldn’t ever manage a network if you had net neutrality.” And the other half are gonna show up and they’re gonna be like “We advertise ourselves as the neutral competitors to those jerks. And we offer net neutrality to people who understand what it means. We’re the most hard-charging, bandwidth-hungry, bull-goose tech weirdos that you can imagine, and we don’t have this network management problem that they’re talking about. So they’re full of it.”
[01:14:05.06] So the only way you get the facts and evidence, the only way you get good state regulation is if the companies themselves are weaker than the regulator. The same way that the only way a ref can referee a game is if the players are weaker than the ref. If the players pay the ref salary, then you will not get an honest game, right? The refs have to not just declare their neutrality… Or like, it is amazing that you have politicians who declare their neutrality after working in industry, or regulators who declare their neutrality after working in industry. Like, these are lawyers who themselves, if they were like getting a divorce, and they and their ex both wanted to hire the same lawyer, and that lawyer said, “Oh, I can work for both of you. I’ll just declare my conflict of interest and firewall it within me.” It would be like, “Um, no.”
With the recent proliferation of generative AI models (from OpenAI, co:here, Anthropic, etc.), practitioners are racing to come up with best practices around prompting, grounding, and control of outputs.
Chris and Daniel take a deep dive into the kinds of behavior we are seeing with this latest wave of models (both good and bad) and what leads to that behavior. They also dig into some prompting and integration tips.
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Daniel Whitenack: Yeah. And I can say a few things that I’ve seen… Even in the past week or so, I saw some demos of different things people were building. There was a hackathon that I participated in remotely in San Francisco from Latent Space Demo Days, and Jeremy Fisher built this automated D&D referee, that was – I think it’s Dungeons and Dragons Infinity… And it essentially lets someone play Dungeons and Dragons infinitely. It never generates the same text, so you can play it forever, and there’s like an image component, there’s a text component…
I think this represents very much what people are finding so appealing about these things. In one respect, one aspect of what they’re finding appealing is the sort of endless creativity it seems, both on the image generation side and on the text generation side. But that’s sort of like - Dungeons and Dragons app, people might find that very engaging, but then you think about, okay, well, if I can do that, what does that mean for advertising and copywriting? Well, I can write up prompt to generate a blurb for an ad, and then I can write a prompt to summarize that blurb into a headline for my ad, and then I can use that headline in another prompt to generate an image for my ad. Right?
So people are building kind of this chain functionality that really does powerful, useful things, but there’s this other side of it where every once in a while you kind of get these scenarios that are either very disturbing, or you get output that that isn’t desirable, or people illustrate the sort of biases of these things… What have you seen on the more - I don’t want to say sad side, but on the unwanted behavior side. What is the behavior – so if we like this generative, creative behavior, and the utility that that can provide, what’s the other side of it? What’s the unwanted behavior that you’ve seen?
We’re talking with Woody Zuill today about all things Mob Programming. Woody leads Mob Programming workshops, he’s a speaker on agile related topics, and coaches and guides orgs interested in creating an environment where people can do their best work. We talk through it all and we even get some amazing advice from Woody’s dad. We define what Mob Programming is and why it’s so effective. Is it a rigid process or can teams flex to make it work for them? How to introduce mob programming to a team. What kind of groundwork is necessary? And of course, are mob programming’s virtues diminished by remote teams in virtual-only settings?
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Woody Zuill: So finding a way – I would really want to stress this… Finding a way to think together well is something that’s extremely valuable. We kind of ignore that. Now, I have plenty of examples in my past work where I worked on teams that were real teams. So when I was really young, I played music. We had a band. Nobody wanted to hire the bass player. “Well, we’re going to have a dance, but we can’t afford the whole band. We’re just going to get a bass player.” Somebody might want that. But at a time when I was really young and I was playing bass, I never got hired to be a solo musician. But with a band, now you have something. The bass and the drums provide the rhythm and part of the drive. You want that in the band. But you also want a couple good singers, and maybe a good guitar player, and in those days, maybe some other instruments. Nowadays I think that all limits are off, but you get the picture. Yeah.
So there are things that having the band is good for, and there’s things that you don’t need the whole band. And I would say other things I’ve done, I remember in– so I ran track in high school. I wasn’t a particularly good runner, but I was part of a team. And that team really mostly was a bunch of solo efforts brought together. Now, here’s something my coach did and it was really brilliant. He couldn’t depend on me to win what my specialty was, which was the two-mile. Nobody knows what a two-mile is anymore, because you don’t do those. So that’s what I chose to do for mine. And I couldn’t always win. But what he would do, he would get to the track meet… I haven’t told many of this story. I think it’s really quite good. He’d to the track meet, and when you go with the other coach to the referees that are doing it, you make sure that everybody on the roster is there, and that they’re on the list of things to do. And he would look for the events where there were only two competitors, because there’s always a first place, a second place, and a third place, and he would write my name in for the third place. So if I could pick up five points–
How reflective are you with the thoughts you think? In this episode, Mireille and Adam talk through a few more cognitive distortions. These “distortions” are general tendencies or patterns of thinking that are false or inaccurate, which also have the potential to cause psychological damage. Generally speaking, people develop cognitive distortions as a way of coping with adverse life events. The more prolonged and severe those adverse events are, the more likely it is that one or more cognitive distortions will form. By recognizing these patterns in our thoughts and possibly how, when, or why we’re prone to use them, like many things, we create the opportunity to change them.
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Mireille Reece, PsyD: But you know, without somebody sort of being a mirror and a referee, we might not be aware of the thoughts that we think, and that’s why we’re having a conversation like this, to recognize “Hey, do I do this?” I mean, I can’t even tell you how many times while I was in graduate school and learning certain things, and in therapy myself, that I was like “Oh my gosh, I did it. Oh, I did that again.” Because it’s like I’m putting a different lens on the way in which I think, to be able to see what I’m doing that’s working well for me, and what I’m thinking that isn’t working well for me.
Mireille and Adam discuss shame as an emotional and experiential construct. We dive into the neural structures involved in processing this emotion as well as the factors and implications of our experience of shame. Shame is a natural response to the threat of vulnerability and perception of oneself as defective or inherently “not enough.”
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Adam Stacoviak: It also gives you feedback. The self-regulating referee inside of us - that's a feedback loop as well, but sometimes isn't as kind or compassionate as we would desire. But the feedback loop of our tribe, our people connection is enough to remind us that our crazy isn't as crazy as we think it is. Our imposter syndrome isn't true, and they remind us that these truths you're thinking are true, are actually false.
We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella’s first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.
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Julia White: Right, no one wants that. So we had to do some just core matching the tech; so there was work to be done just to make sure we had equivalent technology from the VMs, networking storage, that kind of thing. But then we just stopped and really – and it was the entire leadership team, and it was a pretty long process, because it had to be true and authentic, because people had to buy into it. We kind of like had to earn our own stuff internally, to get everyone on board…
And we started with just what’s going on in the industry broadly, what are the topics from a trend and a technology perspective… But then it really got into these in-depth, long, over dinner sessions with customers, and we’d wallow with them… And you’d start with tech, and then you’d stop, and you start more talking about like “What about you? What do you want as a human?” Really getting on this other level of conversation with developers, with IT admins, with business decision-makers, and the thing we kept hearing was “This is a little scary and a little overwhelming.”
[24:00] After you got past the idea of like “This is awesome! There’s so much cool tech! It’s super great! I can’t wait to do event-driven! Containers are awesome!” and then they’d be like “And I think it’s a lot of work, and I don’t know which one I should be using, and everyone thinks I should know, and I don’t know, and I’m kind of scared by that.”
I remember a couple guys, they would pause and they were kind of like “I just have impostor syndrome all the time. That’s how it feels.” To me, those were gems of like, okay, there’s tech and all this stuff, but then there’s this truth, and this quiet place inside, of like “What are you gonna do about that?” So that’s what we grabbed on to… Like, “Hey, we can understand that, we can empathize with that in a way that I think other companies who are newer and haven’t been through the journey that we’ve been, and the humble self-reevaluation that we went through as a company, that gives you a new perspective on the world, versus the hubris of never making mistakes…” So I think it allowed us to hear that in a different way, so that’s where we started re-centering.
Then we had this conversation like “That’s the history of our company. That’s been true of our DNA since the beginning of time”, and one of the engineering leaders that works for Scott starts saying “Let’s help our customers fall into the pit of success. How do we find that in like this Pit of Success idea?” Anyway, so it was long – you know, we iterated, iterated, where it really started to get to the point where we’d talk to anyone across the team and you’d just see them get it, and they were like “Yeah! That’s what we are! That’s how we’re different! That’s what we stand for! That’s how we’re gonna change the world!” and it started to emotionally hook them. You kind of see it.
So that culmination over it, like the whole course of the time - it was probably nine months of really iterating, spending time thinking like is that quite right, not quite right, move forward, and kind of picking our spot.
Since airing this show, Pieter passed away due to his battle with a metastasis of bile duct cancer in both lungs. But rather than listen to this show with sadness, listen with a happy heart and let’s celebrate Pieter’s life, and what he has accomplished. Thank you Pieter from the bottom of our hearts for your time on this show and for all that you are. You are loved by us my friend. This show will forever be a very special show for us.
Pieter Hintjens is the creator of ZeroMQ and The Collective Code Construction Contract (C4), a writer of many books and protocols, as well as a developer with decades of building software and communities – he’s someone who’s given so much, and continues to give - even up until the time he is planning for his death.
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Pieter Hintjens: My three lovely little kids. Well, I have time actually, because I’ve kind of stopped programming for the moment. I don’t think I’ll start again. I’m still writing… I got a delivery today from China, a thing called Freewrite which is this bizarre, steampunk typewriter which I’m trying out, and it’s quite fun.
So I’m writing, and I have time, and to be on the podcast with you guys is just absolutely awesome. I would do this every day if I could, seriously.
