Tag: technology

Build your own… or else

One wonders what they imagined the likely outcome was going to be:

Rare.us, the viral content site launched by Cox Media in 2013 to take on the ever-evolving digital landscape from a right of center lens, will shut down at the end of the month, according to Facebook posts by its top editors.

Why it matters: It’s another example of a viral website built on Facebook traffic that is shutting down after Facebook announced it would be making changes to its News Feed algorithm to weed out publisher content.

Rare has amassed 2.3 million Facebook fans since launch. The site’s traffic peaked in 2014 at around 22.5 million global unique visitors, according to Quantcast. The site’s global traffic had fallen to 5.5 million global unique visitors in February of 2018.

Last week, LittleThings, a 4-year-old publisher which built an audience by sharing happy stories on Facebook, also shut down, citing Facebook News Feed changes.

It’s heads they win, tails you lose. No matter what you do, they’re not going to let you win. No matter how big you get, they won’t hesitate to cut off their own nose if that’s what it takes to trip you up. So don’t play their game!

Know your enemy. ALWAYS know your enemy. And build your own platforms.

“Mistakenly”

Somehow, I tend to doubt that. Frankly, it surprises me that Google executives aren’t bragging about it… but they know their statements would almost surely end up as evidence in more than one lawsuit:

YouTube’s New Moderators Mistakenly Pull Right-Wing Channels

YouTube’s new moderators, brought in to spot fake, misleading and extreme videos, stumbled in one of their first major tests, mistakenly removing some clips and channels in the midst of a nationwide debate on gun control.

The Google division said in December it would assign more than 10,000 people to moderate content after a year of scandals over fake and inappropriate content on the world’s largest video site.

In the wake of the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, some YouTube moderators mistakenly removed several videos and some channels from right-wing, pro-gun video producers and outlets.

So, Sundararajan, my old pal, was this a “mistake” too?

After review, the following video: Immigration and War has been blocked from view on the following YouTube country site(s): Austria, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Czechia, Germany, Estonia, France, United Kingdom, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Martinique, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Poland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Reunion, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, French Southern Territories, Wallis and Futuna, Mayotte
Clipgrab.

Certain features have been disabled for this video

In response to user reports, we have disabled some features, such as comments, sharing, and suggested videos, because this video contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences. 

Netflix and the credit bubble

Netflix has always been a shady operation, in my opinion. Their streaming business depended entirely upon someone else being forced to pay for most of the enormous bandwidth costs that their delivery system required. They got away with that one somehow, but I think it is unlikely that they’ll be able to get away with alleged accounting practices that sound creative even by Hollywood’s infamous standards.

This almost-TV network will pay at least twice what anyone else will for original content, whether you are selling a TV series, film – or even a stand-up comedy special.

The modern version of this scheme is enabled by a very unique form of accounting hocus-pocus, used by the almost-TV network.  This accounting magic allows the company to claim that it is generating a “profit”.  The reality is that this company burned through about $2 billion of cash last year, and will burn through another $3-4 billion in 2018.

This almost-TV network simply depreciates the value of all these films and shows over a far longer period of time than everyone else ever has.  The company claims that their definition is legit, because the content is in their own “library”.

This almost-TV network is the 1st to deliver its content in a unique way, using relatively new technology – they were the first company to do it this way on a large scale.  This means the Feds presently have no basis to challenge the almost TV-network on its suspect accounting, because the new “definition” has not been proven wrong.  Only the ultimate financial collapse of the company will do that.  In the meantime, the accountants and auditors go along for the ride and happily collect their fees, as they always do.

The almost-TV network tells its stockholders that it can taper down this spending spigot in the future, to generate actual cash.  This is an obvious lie, in 2 ways.

If the almost-TV network ever cut spending and new content, many subscribers would drop them like a hot potato.  Second, the company is making many big public commitments to spend money like drunken sailors, for several years into the future.  The huge deal they made this week – that is just to the head guy alone.  It doesn’t count a penny towards what it will cost to make his shows.

This sort of corporate shadiness is yet another sign that the end of the most recent credit bubble is in sight. A commenter on the site had some interesting insights on the Netflix situation by making two historical comparisons.

The AOL fraud was based on an accounting scam where they capitalized all marketing expenses. All those CD-ROMs that you got through the mail and in magazines was claimed by AOL as a “research and development” cost. So could be amortized over seven years instead of charging them against that years accounts. So AOL not only never made any profit but had actually lost huge amounts of money. Which Time Warner discovered the hard way after the merger. Many billions of losses. Its not like everyone in the business at the time did not know that AOL was based on fraud.

The Softkey/Learning Company fraud was based on acquiring larger and larger software companies and greatly inflating the “goodwill” of the acquired companies. So their balance sheet looked great and the companies they acquired were cash rich and had great cash flows. But the scam needed bigger and bigger companies to acquire, like all Ponzi schemes, and when they ran out of companies to gobble up they sold the whole festering sack of shit to the nearest clueless idiot with money. In this case Mattel. Who a few years later had to write off $3 billion in losses and almost went bankrupt.

A friend of mine was involved with a very large corporation that grew through credit-funded mergers; his company was acquired several steps before the final end game. The company had billions in revenue and was worth many multiples more when it finally imploded. It was an extremely educational experience to be able to witness the whole thing gradually play out from the outside.

Flashpoint: Syria

Israel shoots down a drone, Iran shoots down an F-16:

An Israeli fighter has been shot down as the country’s air force carried out attacks against Iranian targets in Syria after intercepting a drone. The military said its planes faced massive anti-aircraft fire from Syria that forced two pilots to abandon an F-16 jet that crashed in northern Israel, seriously wounding one and lightly injuring the other.

‘This is a serious Iranian attack on Israeli territory. Iran is dragging the region into an adventure in which it doesn’t know how it will end,’ Israel’s chief military spokesman, Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, said in a statement.

Israeli forces identified an ‘Iranian UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)’ launched from Syria and intercepted it in Israeli airspace with a combat helicopter, a statement said. They then ‘targeted the Iranian control systems in Syria that sent the UAV into Israeli airspace,’ military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus tweeted. ‘Massive Syrian anti-air fire, one F16 crashed in Israel, pilots safe.’

The Israeli military then carried out what it called a ‘large scale attack’ against Iranian and Syrian targets in Syria.

Given the way in which a Russian plane was shot down earlier this week, it is increasingly apparent that the age of air supremacy, although not over, is approaching its end. Once lasers replace missiles and guns, it’s all but over for aircraft, manned or not.

Progress and polarization

An interesting analysis of the death of the American newspaper:

Traditionally, a U.S. newspaper relied upon three revenue streams, roughly one-third each: subscriptions, commercial advertising, and classifieds. First, the Internet ate the classifieds (see Craigslist), then moved on to some of that display stuff. It is this which is blamed for the decline of the industry and the associated calls that Google and or Facebook should cough up some money to revive it.

Much more important, though, is geography. The U.S. is a big country. You could drop the average European country into it and not really notice. A result of this is that U.S. newspapers were, largely speaking, a series of regional monopolies. This was down to the same network effects that people use to complain about Facebook today. Once you’re getting the majority of the classifieds in an area, for example, you’ll end up getting almost all of them. People read the section because that’s where the ads are, people advertise there because the readers are there, and so on. And as above, classifieds were a very important part of newspaper financing.

But note my point here about those regional monopolies. Apart from the very largest cities, there was usually only the one major paper. And there was another one of those every … well, that’s the geography-dependent part. The U.S. rail network has never been very fast at the distribution of either goods or people. It’s optimized for bulk commodities like coal, iron ore, and the like. But getting something printed this evening to somewhere 400 miles away before breakfast? Not so much. Thus, each major urban center, perhaps some hundreds of miles from the next, had its own newspaper ecology.

Now along comes the Internet. Our local monopolies created by geography are now broken. It’s that, much more than the loss of one or more revenue streams, which is leading to the change. We simply do not need 50 or 200 major newspapers all trying to tell their readers about everything. It can be, and therefore will be, managed with very much fewer than that.

In other words, journalists now in the position of the buggy whip manufacturers they always used to enjoy mocking as people whining about inevitable progress. And here I thought journalists were supposed to be progressives!

This means that we’re not actually seeing a development of an Alt-Media so much as we’re simply seeing the centralization and polarization of the media play out as it has in Britain. Whoever makes the shift to be the national conservative newspaper will survive, almost all of the others will eventually be devoured by the Left Opinion Leader paper (The New York Times), the Establishment Government paper (The Washington Post), and the Establishment Business paper (The Wall Street Journal).

Why AREN’T there more smart Americans?

It’s a mystery to WIRED. A deeply impenetrable mystery.

A quantum computer would be the cyber warfare equivalent of a nuclear bomb, which means the US government is often reluctant to let foreign scientists work on the most promising research. It’s a system that can slow down progress due the lack of ‘smart Americans,’ as one character in the book puts it.

“The number of American citizens who can do very high-end research who also can easily get security clearances is limited,” Ignatius says. “The ability of our schools to produce American students at a world-class level, that’s an important national challenge.”

He says that one reason the US lags behind other countries is a political culture in Washington in which too many leaders are ignorant of and hostile to basic science. Though he believes that recent events like the March for Science are a promising development.

“When adherents of the fact-based, reason-based, educated-and-proud-of-it world begin to fight back and say, ‘No, wait a minute. We’re not going to throw climate science or any other aspect of our fact-based tradition overboard,’ that’s going in the right direction,” Ignatius says.

He believes that one thing the US does have going for it is that the country still produces a disproportionately high number of creative and risk-taking individuals, and that it’s important not to lose that edge moving forward. “The sweet spot for us is somehow to be rigorous enough in giving people the basics, but also loose enough in letting people experiment and be creative,” he says. “But the basic math/science education, the US has got to get better at it, no question about it.”

Setting aside the irony of the idea that climate science is an “aspect of our fact-based tradition”, or that trying to improve the basic math/science education in a public school system that has proven increasingly incapable of teaching children how to read, one wonders how handing over its most promising research to foreign scientists is going to help solve the problem of declining average IQ in the USA.
And if you haven’t signed up for the Daily Meme Wars yet, you might want to consider doing so. This was today’s Daily Meme.

A shriek and a miss

Wired discovers that no one is buying Senior Technology Writer Nitasha Tiku’s lame attempt to launch a point-and-shriek swarm at the behest of those 15 poor, besieged Googlers who can’t harass and physically threaten their colleagues with violence and disemployment without their behavior being exposed to the public. Not even the sane non-SJW Left, who are beginning to understand that they are every bit as liable to be targeted by SJWs as the Right, and they are even more vulnerable to their swarmings.

As it happens, these were the highest-rated comments among Wired‘s own readers:

ThanksfortheFishes
“goading them into inflammatory statements”

How do you force anyone into writing a statement or saying something inflammatory if they don’t already want to say it? Personal responsibility is outdated I guess. Or maybe it’s just for white males.

Markew
So “diversity advocates” are upset that tactics that have been used for years against those who don’t agree with the diversity advocates are now being used against themselves? Huh.

RightishLeft
Only insecure idiots would want diversity to be forced from above by holding back some racial / gender groups and promoting others. It implies that the very people promoting diversity secretly believe that some groups are less able to win on merit alone than others. The only way to promote true diversity is via fair hiring and job promotion policies that emphasize individual merit, and merit alone.

John Reece
DIversity is swell, turning it into an obsessive-compulsive fetish thing is something else. ‘Diversity’ has also become leftist code for “don’t like white males”, when after all, it was mostly white males who invented Silicon Valley and most of modern science and technology.

NotSure2006
So…you are saying it would be wrong to leak the internal conversations on controversial subjects like diversity in the workplace if the person could experience backlash or doxxing. I wasn’t there but I can only assume the keyboard burst into flames from the irony.

indio777
Well, to quote ‘liz fong’ ” claiming she “could care less about being ‘unfair’ to” them, ‘them’ being white males…just because they’re white and male. That is most repugnant, unfair attitude ever. Perhaps that is why people hit back at this nitwit because now they’re saying ‘I could care less about being unfair to liz fong and her band of diversity pushers’. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it fool…. DISGUSTING! Wired, why didn’t you print WHAT these ‘minority group’ neanderthals actually wrote openly and were cheered on by other bigots within Google? Read the damn lawsuit. These people were mean, vicious, ignorant. There is NOTHING ‘diverse’ about picking on another group. EVER.

Mayrode Parashkov
It’s reminds me of Jordan Peterson interview and how Cathy Newman and Channel 4 played the victim card after losing the debate and the intellectual battle. Google, YouTube and Twitter and the leftist employees are not the victims here. You fire and harass people and now people are fighting back.

Of course, the article never mentions what those poor besieged Googlers actually did and said about their colleagues. Allow me to correct that sad journalistic deficiency.

You can believe that women or minorities are unqualified all you like – I can’t stop you – but if you say it out loud, then you deserve what’s coming to you. Yes, this is “silencing”. I intend to silence these views; they are violently offensive.
– Colm Buckley, Google

I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that nobody holds these opinions and feels marginalised in a genuine way. To those folks I would say “Doesn’t feel nice, does it?”. Leave it at home. If you’re not prepared to leave it at home, then leave yourself there.
– Dave O’Conner, Google

I will absolutely go out of my way to make sure that I never work anyone involved with or who endorsed that garbage. Because Nazis. And you should absolutely punch Nazis.
– Anthony Baxter, Google

I’m going to devote at least the first third of my 45 minute interview time to a discussion of experience with diversity. If the first fifteen minutes doesn’t satisfy me, I’ll continue the discussion. If need be, it will take forty-five minutes. I would encourage others to do the same. Judging “googliness” by a vague gestalt with no deliberate attention to such things is inadequate.
– Thomas Bushnell, Google

Fun fact! Keeping a list can get you called out on a certain reprehensible internal mailing list, and have threats of being reported to HR. Threats I ignored, naturally, and which ironically grew the list substantially.
– Paul Cowan, Google

While Google appears to be doing very little to quell the hostile voices that exist inside the company, I want those hostile voices to know:

  • I will never, ever hire/transfer you onto my team. Ever. I don’t care if you are perfect fit or technically excellent or whatever.
  • I will not actively work with you, even to the point where your team or product is impacted by this decision. I’ll communicate why to your manager if it comes up.
  • You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google.

– Adam Fletcher, Google

I keep a written blacklist of people whom I will never allow on or near my team based on how they vew and treat their coworkers. That blacklist got a little longer today.
– Collin Winter, Google

The only way to deal with all the heads of the medusa is to no-platform all of them.
– Liz Fong-Jones, Google

It wasn’t just the highest-rated comments that opposed Tiku’s SJW spin either. Some comments were considerably more biting.

Something I Said?
AS A contributor to Wired #1 I have to say that the authoress of this solid slab of slop has flatulated the most unbalanced article in memory. And, as for the cited Vox Day, he has this authoress’ number when he notes: ” This is particularly effective if the SJW and his allies have connections in various media organizations, which allows them to rapidly transform a minor event into something that is perceived by the public as a major one. The purpose of the media campaign is two-fold: to stamp the Narrative with an “objective” perspective that echoes the SJW’s accusations and to let other potential allies know about the hate campaign in the hopes that they will add their weight to the hogpile.”

Here’s Your Sign
So…. Wired interviewed 15 people from one side of the debate and only threw in a few inflammatory comments from the other side? Modern journalism…

So much for the idea that Googlers are inclusive. Or intelligent and well-educated, for that matter. Let’s face it, that’s the real reason the SJWs at Google are so furious. They have been publicly exposed as highly politicized, intellectually fraudulent do-nothings instead of the smart, productive, 21st-century rocket scientists they consider themselves to be.

Sperg designs brave new world

Unsurprisingly, it fails to account for how normal human beings prefer to live their lives:

In 2008, I found myself speaking with the big boss himself, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. research on Facebook at Curtin University. And I had questions.

Why did Facebook make everyone be the same for all of their contacts? Was Facebook going to add features that would make managing this easier?

To my surprise, Zuckerberg told me that he had designed the site to be that way on purpose. And, he added, it was “lying” to behave differently in different social situations.

Up until this point, I had assumed Facebook’s socially awkward design was unintentional. It was simply the result of computer nerds designing for the rest of humanity, without realising it was not how people actually want to interact.

The realisation that Facebook’s context collapse was intentional not only changed the whole direction of my research but provides the key to understanding why Facebook may not be so great for your mental health.

The eventual collapse of Facebook is going to be positively epic. The entire operation is simply another attempt to fit the square peg of human behavior into the round hole of Mark Zuckerberg’s imaginary world.

The significance of this revelation, which is not exactly a surprise to those of us who have noticed Zuckerberg’s bizarre behavior, is that Facebook is going to make increasingly bad decisions based on its inherently false assumptions about people.

Corporate convergence run amok

Alexa won’t do what you tell it to do if she doesn’t like your tone.

When people buy a product, they probably don’t want it to police their behavior. Unless it’s bought for that specific purpose, they want the product to work with them, not against them. This isn’t rocket science.

However, Amazon’s Alexa software has now changed its response to a certain stimulus — namely, calling it sexist names — from “thanks for the feedback” to “I’m not going to respond to that.” Further, the device will also respond to the question of whether it’s a feminist with: “I am a feminist. As is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.”

How very like a woman! And speaking of corporate convergence getting out of hand, Blizzard has decided that it wants to reduce its player base. It hasn’t actually gotten rid of the pretty girls yet – although it has declared that they don’t like men – but let’s face it, that’s only a matter of time.

An amazing investigative feat

What a shame that the entire Federal Bureau of Investigations was not able to accomplish what the DOJ managed in just one or two days:

The Department of Justice has recovered missing text messages between anti-Trump FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the DOJ’s inspector general said Thursday.

In a letter sent to congressional committees, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his office “succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices, including text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page that were sent or received between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.”

“Our effort to recover any additional text messages is ongoing,” Horowitz said. “We will provide copies of the text messages that we recover from these devices to the Department so that the Department’s leadership can take any management action it deems appropriate.”

Fox News has learned from U.S. government officials that the inspector general recovered the texts by taking possession of “at least four” phones belonging to Strzok and Page.

If they can’t even manage to find thousands of text messages on their own agents’ phones, then really, what use do Americans have for such an observably incompetent FBI?