Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and special guest presenter Jeff Atwood present Bad Voltage, in which we all had baby hacker names, burner phones are probably not required, and:
[00:21:23] Open Source Project Communication: historically open source projects used mailing lists and IRC. These days people use Slack and forums. What's the future of communication for these kinds of projects, particularly given the balance of openness vs convenience?
[00:46:00] Ads vs Recommendations: Google Home devices start doing ads for films, and everyone's pretty upset. But these aren't ads! They're recommendations. According to Google at least. Is this a legit argument? Where is the blurry line between an advert and a helpful suggestion?
@jonobacon said we donât have a chat room. We do #badvoltage@irc.freenode.net though I have not seen anyone using it recently: mainly because IRC is not the most user friendly environment.
Chat rooms serve a useful purpose and I believe they should keep a log of what was said but only for a relatively short time, say a few days before the information is deleted. Much of what is said in chat is not well thought out as people are trying to clarify ideas in their own heads or tangential to the discussion, not relevant in hindsight.
For example I was recently in a discussion regarding a hardware project I am working on with others and it was decided a face to face meeting was required. In recording the results of this discussion in a company blog. The need for a face to face was relevant and included in my blog. The discussion of which bar we should hold it in and the best hotels for those travelling in was not. It is very difficult to see how the process of formally noting outcome of the meeting can be automated by some AI as @sil would like but the chat log was very useful for me when recording the ideas discussed and future actions agreed upon.
I thought Iâd try and win the Dell laptop so i watched the live show on YouTube. Diligently listened and documented all fruits. Then found out that the competition was for US citizens only.
Still, great show, guys. Nice to hear from @codinghorror, too.
Not intentionally dissing IRC at all I use it my self but to get the most of its features there are several commands you need to learn such as â/joinâ , â/nickâ. â/msgâ etc. Not difficult but it puts the non technical user off.
Great show as always. @codinghorror was great, very insightful points throughout, would welcome listening to him more in the future.
Ads vs Recommendations:
@jonobacon mentioned that he enjoyed some of the recommendations. Being outside of the US, and being a little on the cautious side when Google asks me to turn on things, can you let me know what sort of recommendations you find useful.
The articles you mention are all a little off for me. They are always something that Iâve either already read about (the same sports story except on a different site, or similar with tech).
One thing that occurred to me when listening to this segment (which I really enjoyed by the way) was whether you could flip online advertisement on its head a little and determine a way that a user could broadcast to the ad platform what they are interested in (in a broad way, or perhaps in a configurable granularity) and this would choose what sort of ads you see.
There is obviously a lot of challenges with this, however, it would mean that it takes some of the control/your data out of the vendors hands and into yours.
The whole entire advertising industry is oriented around showing you things that youâre actually interested in but donât know youâre interested in. And theyâre not wrong in this â theyâre not totally evil here So thereâll be lots of resistance to this planâŚ
Surely the real draw for the advertising industry is getting click through that ends in sales. This means they can charge more for their advertising space. I never click on advertising currently, its never been interesting to me. It chases me with things Iâve bought months ago. If there was a way for me to control the list of topics Iâm interested in, I think there is higher chance I would pay attention. There is no reason this list needs to be static. It can be pulled from many sources, local and remote. E.g I opt into advertising in what I search on google. Opt into advertising based on the websites that I search.
Iâm not convinced there is a business model for this, as it doesnât come without setup which usually means itâs dead in the water. However it could be layered on top of the current advertising.
Thatâs what the link above is for â https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated. It shows you what Google thinks youâre interested in, and lets you alter, subtract from, and add to that list. Give it a try and see if you start to pay more attention, and report back?
(this wonât affect all the advertising you see â Google isnât yet an ad monopoly â but itâll affect a lot.)
I gave it a try. Itâs wildly inaccurate as mentioned.
This is different despite the output ( a list of preferences) being the same.
The key thing is how that list is generated. Currently itâs generated by Google analysing all your interactions when you use their services. When that list is generated client side, thatâs no longer part of it, which adds a strong privacy component.
Ah, I was meaning something different. Certainly the list as derived from your visits is unlikely to be as good as it could be. What I meant was: if you manually set your list of preferences to be solely things you are definitely interested in, and then you browse the internet for a few weeks, do you find yourself paying more attention to ads? Itâs a test of your statement âIf there was a way for me to control the list of topics Iâm interested in, I think there is higher chance I would pay attentionâ, which I think is a plausible theory but is just speculation, and Iâd be interested in a report of whether it turns out to be the truth.
I played an MMO once where in-game chat was controlled by âcirclesâ; you click on someoneâs avatar and walk up to them, now the game draws a circle on the ground in between you. Now another player can click on that circle to walk up and join it, etc. Normal chat messages are limited to the players standing around that circle, approximating a real-life room of people where you choose what conversation youâd like to participate in.
Is there a general-purpose chat system today that puts lots of people in the same room but provides some mechanism for segmenting multiple simultaneous conversations? Turning the question inside-out, is there a way to participate directly in one or more specific conversations with a second-class awareness of ânearbyâ or otherwise-related other discussion?
I think this is what Slack are trying to do with âthreadsâ â if thereâs a conversation about a specific topic, it gets segregated away into a âthreadâ which is not shown to others (although still accessible to them if they want it). I find it really annoying (because I never remember to look at the threads), but itâs one attempt at solving this I think.
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