Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we look to the year ahead (well, the 10 months ahead) and predict what will happen in the tech industry and the world in 2024.

2024’s predictions:

• [00:00:00] Intro
• [00:02:49] Jeremy: Sundar Pichai will not be CEO by end of 2024
• [00:06:55] Jeremy: At least one major streaming service will be shut down, or acquired
• [00:11:30] Jeremy: Elon Musk Sells X, or X goes public
• [00:13:42] Jeremy: Bonus
• [00:17:29] Stuart: Film studio to release movie with AI-revived deceased actor
• [00:21:08] Stuart: Fusion reactor generates surplus power for practical use, ready for widespread deployment
• [00:23:05] Stuart: A nuclear weapon is detonated
• [00:26:23] Stuart: Bonus
• [00:30:45] Jono: Tesla to release budget EV ~$30k
• [00:35:22] Jono: Google Gemini will get shut down and replaced
• [00:39:53] Jono: VR photorealistic avatars
• [00:46:35] Jono: Bonus
• [00:47:41] Gemini predictions
• [00:49:23] Outro

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!

Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which in traditional Christmas style we look back on our predictions for 2024 and Jono whines about half points. More successfully than usual this year, admittedly.

Have a happy holiday season! We’ll be back in the new year.

• [00:00:00] Intro
• [00:01:44] Jeremy: Tiktok gets banned in the USA
• [00:05:59] Jeremy: Hidden Crypto Risks in a Traditional Financial Institution
• [00:07:17] Jeremy: Netflix gets acquired
• [00:08:26] Jeremy: AI’s Swift Progress Hits a Clear Slowdown
• [00:21:42] Jeremy: Web Splinters into Sino, Euro, and American Blocs
• [00:22:09] Jeremy: Mastodon Peaks Early, Declines Afterwards
• [00:24:28] Jeremy: Significant Equity Stake Acquired in Canonical
• [00:25:29] Stuart: Texas HB20 Social Media Law Heads to and is Upheld by US Supreme Court
• [00:28:01] Stuart: Global daily Twitter users will drop a minimum of 10% by the end of 2023
• [00:29:53] Stuart: AI-Generated Song Enters the Charts
• [00:33:40] Stuart: Apple to Permit Sideloading or Third-Party Browser Engines on iOS
• [00:34:49] Stuart: Someone buys Netflix
• [00:35:59] Jono: Meta to Announce Large-Scale Layoffs in Metaverse Division
• [00:37:45] Jono: Twitter to Introduce Long-Form Video Platform with Monetization Options
• [00:41:31] Jono: Anticipated Legal Restriction in US or EU for ChatGPT & Large Language Models
• [00:42:56] Jono: Apple’s AR/VR Headset Earns Praise Despite Lingering Viability Doubts
• [00:47:20] Jono: Potential Reasons for Trump’s Election Exit: Claims of Persecution or Legal Hurdles
• [00:48:36] Jono: Bing Introducing ChatGPT-Like Features, Expects Substantial Growth
• [00:53:51] Outro

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/3×64-cassandra-go-home/12525

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

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

Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which Jeremy is temporarily not present, website hosting issues are acknowledged and briefly discussed, and:

• [00:00:00] Intro
• [00:01:16] New York intends to have air taxis by 2025, including bonus London Illustrated News content
• [00:10:23] Microsoft Teams announce upcoming 3D meetings in VR, including a Lex Friedman/Mark Zuckerberg interview
• [00:24:32] As Nikki Haley pushes for “algorithm transparency” and banning anonymous accounts, we dive a bit into the murky waters of legislation of social media networks and what various governments want from that
• [00:45:27] Outro

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!