Nothing new since January? Indeed. It's been an 'interesting times' start to 2023, very much in that pejorative sense. So over the last few months I've been focused on only and exactly the work that is required to drive Byteside (the business) and have left a big cognitive gap to ensure all those 'interesting' things have had the space they need.

Byteside continues to deliver great content services to our clients around the world, offering up great ghostwriting, case studies, podcast productions and more. But we're taking a big break as an editorial project.

There'll be new things down the road – with no set schedule for return. You can't rush greatness. But for now, please accept the quiet as a feature and not a bug.

- Seamus

Howdy! It's been a while since I've curated links to great stories, so let's rectify that situation to close out the "everything goes slowly" phase of the Australian summer and prepare to get Back To Work next week.

There's a lot of big, big tech news right now. Here's some of the best writing I've seen on a lot of the subjects I think will define much of 2023 and beyond.

'Enshittification'

It's only January, but we need to make this a contender for 2023's Word of the Year. Brought to us by the team behind the new book Chokepoint Capitalism, it describes that journey many online platforms take from being amazingly fun and useful, which grows the audience, but then shifts the experience to serve corporate interests instead of users.

It's a concept we've all seen in action over the past 15 years of socials.

The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

Or how, exactly, platforms die.

WIREDCondé Nast

TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral

Your For You page isn’t entirely automated.

The VergeMitchell Clark

Taste a good metaverse experience this weekend

Every Fortnite concert experience is incredible. If you have any interest in the future of entertainment experiences that blend art, music, and 3D worlds, these events are the perfect example for what's possible.

This weekend The Kid LAROI is the star. Usually these events last just a few days at most, but this time you have until April. But don't wait. Just install Fortnite (it's free) and check it out. Get a kid to help if you're scared of games for some reason.

The Kid LAROI announces ‘Fortnite’ experience featuring unreleased songs

The Kid LAROI has confirmed details of his Wild Dreams ‘Fortnite’ experience, which will include unreleased music

NMEAli Shutler

Media and AI on a collision course

CNET copped a lot of flack over the use of AI in producing finance articles for its money section. And rightly so in some regards. I don't hate the idea of using AI to do heavy lifting work in repetitive writing. But you really, really, REALLY need to get your disclosure right AND be carefully copyediting and verifying the output. That did not happen to an appropriate degree. There's a valid path to take here, but when you sit on the Journalism side of writing it feels like shaky ground to fail to carefully monitor what you publish.

CNET’s AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism

CNET’s AI-generated articles appear to show deep structural similarities, amounting to plagiarism, with previously published work elsewhere.

FuturismJon Christian

But then we have BuzzFeed talking about using AI to generate quizzes and this makes so much more sense. Cannon fodder content that is pure fun? I don't care who wrote it. Get the process right and it sounds fine to me.

BuzzFeed will start using AI to write quizzes and other content

Nothing like a spokesperson issuing assurances that BuzzFeed “remains focused on human-generated journalism” to make you feel good about the future of the news industry, right? The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a staff memo at BuzzFeed that laid out plans for the digital med…

Nieman LabLaura Hazard Owen

Humans vs AI

Here's a few more fun stories on the battle between AI and humanity.

The Chess World’s New Villain: A Cat Named Mittens

A ruthless bot with an innocuous avatar is driving chess players crazy.

The Wall Street JournalAndrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson

Flamboyant Italian clothes defeat facial recognition without masks

They may be a little brutal on the eye, but Capable says its visually confusing and extremely pricey cotton knits are designed to throw off AI facial recognition systems, by fooling machine learning systems into thinking you’re an animal and not a human.

New AtlasCap_able

Wi-Fi Routers Used to Detect Human Locations, Poses Within a Room

Wireframe images generated by AI look pretty accurate compared to ground truth video feeds.

Tom's HardwareMark Tyson

Google taking fire on two fronts

Google has a lot to lose when it comes to its dominance in the search industry. This first piece puts things very clearly on what's been feeling wrong with Google Search for a long time and why the likes of ChatGPT can change our experience of hunting for answers online.

Google vs. ChatGPT told by aglio e olio

I hate monopolies and welcome our AI overlords

Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can DurukCan Duruk

With search ads being Google's digital version of the 'rivers of gold' from the newspaper classifieds era, it's interesting that they're now being sued over their dominance of the category.

Sometimes it feels like these lawsuits arrive at moments that feel like an inflection point – when maybe the scales were about to tip in a new direction anyway.

Google sued by US Dept of Justice over web ad monopoly

I’m feeling yucky

The RegisterThomas Claburn

Facebook is still a mess

Elon Musk has been doing Twitter plenty of favours to pull attention away from Facebook's track record on being a good and positive platform. But...

Facebook approved ads calling for murder of Brazilian president’s children | Boing Boing

Facebook’s gol’ durn algorithm is acting up again, say humans working at Meta, who apparently have no control over the automated system that approved ads calling for the murder of Brazi…

Boing BoingMark Frauenfelder

For Facebook addicts, clicking is more important than facts or ideology

Once clicking “share” becomes habitual, the content of what’s shared matters less.

Ars TechnicaJohn Timmer

This also leads into other interesting thinking on the question of misinformation.

Good news: Misinformation isn’t as powerful as feared! Bad news: Neither is information.

To people who publish facts, it’s appealing to think of them as powerful. But people’s belief systems go a lot deeper than facts.

Nieman LabJoshua Benton

And Finland has great lessons for us all on how to build media literacy into education from an early age – and why it's so important to do so.

How Finland Is Teaching a Generation to Spot Misinformation

The Nordic country is testing new ways to teach students about propaganda. Here’s what other countries can learn from its success.

NYTimesBy

Speaking of Twitter...

I check it now and then, but very rarely anymore. My daily drive is very much Mastodon now, with the arrival of Ivory by Tapbots really making it a pleasure in the way Twitter once was for me.

This story is a great piece looking at how the arrival of viewcounts does the opposite of what Musk thought it would do.

Twitter Tumbleweed Watch

The “view” count reveals a different story than Elon intended

The Future, Now and ThenDave Karpf

What the kids are up to??

I kept thinking Samsung's new Fold would be the next big thing in phones. Turns out an older kind of flip phone is back in fashion!

Gen Z has a new ‘vintage’ technology to obsess over | CNN Business

First, it was disposable cameras. Then it was low-rise jeans. Now, Gen-Z’s latest “vintage” obsession is the flip phone -- that mid-1990s era phone that has suddenly become oh so popular with millennials.

CNNRamishah Maruf

Let me know if you want more of these curated posts more often. Replies and reacts are great, but paid subs are best of all for helping me carve out more time to hunt down the most insightful and interesting coverage on what's next in digital.

If you're seeing this on the web or received a forward, hit the button to subscribe.

I recently posted to my LinkedIn page (where I'm sharing more short ideas than Twitter these days):

Saw an article headlined "AI is the end of writing". I'd argue it's the end of BAD writing. AI will deliver better than bad, and human writers will need to be great to be worth the premium over AI. (LinkedIn link)

The more I think on it the more I see a future where we do end 'bad' writing but we also see a surplus of deeply average work that starts to become highly identifiable and becomes the new white noise.

Canva has been a wonder for raising the baseline of DIY design. Good designers were as worried about it as some writers are now about what happens in an AI copy world. It automates a lot of basic design work so you can present an idea, social post or flyer with above average quality. But it hasn't and doesn't deliver the end of great, premium design.

Every industry has its practitioners who overcharge and underdeliver and both graphic design and copywriting have more than their fair share. Seeing these people pushed aside by smart tools that help people get more of the basics without spending big is a good thing.

But it's also true that you can quickly start to see Canva templates across the web. There's now a broad base of good-but-similar designs that do the job required but don't cause a beautiful friction in the mind to make you pay attention that great design achieves.

The thing is, plenty of great work is also being achieved through Canva. It just takes a little more time and more thought to use a good tool to achieve great results. Spending time to refine a design and set it apart from the stock templates can make all the difference.

I don't doubt the same path is ahead for AI copywriting. Lots of words that start to feel like a template. People who learn to use these tools to push for deeper quality and then refine and edit the first drafts will see better results.

Above that, there remains room for a tier of great work that is carefully crafted to capture attention and engage a reader with careful thought and useful provocation.

We still have craftspeople even as furniture has been industrialised. It's a very different business today. It's a smaller business today (hello media industry). But great craftspeople still shine bright.

We're just a few years past the 200th anniversary of the Luddites smashing looms over the industrialisation of textile work. Manual jobs have certainly been lost through industrialisation again and again. But the new processes also create new opportunities for great minds to explore.

(A gross simplification of the issues of the Luddites – the problem wasn't the tools so much as the shift toward a system where the people were no longer respected as experts and were now treated as menial machine workers as factory owners took all the profits for themselves...)

If you can think of past skills that have all but disappeared due to automation I'd love to hear them. Cobblers? Milliners? Are these due to automation? Or globalisation and disposable clothing standards? As ever, the line between whether an issue lies in the technologies or in the social systems is a tricky one.

Hit me with your own thoughts.

I'll never forget underestimating the potential of flash memory cards.

It was 1999, and I had just heard about the Sony Memory Stick. At sizes from 4MB to 128MB at launch, I just couldn't see how this little card would be able to handle the memory needs of the future.

That version of my brain spent a lot of time thinking about how many you would need to carry around, or keep in storage with your backups. It was right around the time we were moving on from 100MB Iomega Zip drives and writeable CDs and DVDs were making fixed storage relatively easy to have Gigabytes at your fingertips. What use was a few megs in a tiny plastic shell?

Obviously, the problem I had was failing to conceive of how quickly flash memory would double and double and double its way into the gigs, making the need to ever take one out of a device practically unnecessary for all but the most serious professional use cases. Flash read/write speeds are far better than optical media, and far more robust in rugged conditions.

In a nutshell, flash memory cards rule. But in 1999 I just couldn't see how that nascent storage format would find its place in the world.

In some ways there was some awkward marketing that pitched the Memory Stick to a variety of uses. I did get distracted by those ideas of using these relatively expensive cards as archival storage, which seemed crazy – and certainly didn't play out over the long run.

Many technologies and platforms face that challenge. A great solution in search of the right problem. The marketing team needs to fire a few flares until the right market fit embraces its full potential.

The potential of the New Thing

If you like playing the New Thing game, it's important to consider which features make something special and which drawbacks could evolve over time to either fade into the background or become the extra features that push the New Thing over the top.

I really do come back to my Memory Stick error a lot. If I'm ever in the process of dismissing something new very quickly I try to step back and think about what aspects of the idea would be great if its shortcomings got out of the way. What does the version 4 look like?

It certainly means I try to take an optimistic view on a lot of new tech. Aiming to see potential is certainly a lot more fun – and a better mental exercise. I've kept a view since the early days that there is long-term potential in blockchain as an immutable ledger of tokens – not as a replacement for currency and speculative money making. Independently verified scarcity in a digital world can become a feature, but probably only after the era of HODL insanity is left behind.

By aiming for the longer view, it also helps to see past short-term hype. For mine, it helped me see Clubhouse was just a feature, not a product. (Slack Huddles is my favourite professional implementation of the feature). And why I have always maintained that 8K televisions are a joke under all but the most extreme circumstances.

Virtual Reality hasn't quite played out as I had hoped. Mass adoption is hard for a tech that has failed to scale its hardware to something cheaper and easier to use, and for social features we're still a long way from the install base that makes it come to life for the average user. But for those who love VR, the experience right now is great – it hasn't failed as a user experience for enthusiasts, in the same way that Linux serves its core audience perfectly well.

Comparing VR to Linux might sting a little – on either side of that line.

AI right now is in that space where there is so much potential that it can be hard to see the long future. The 21st Century calculator for language and art? A plagiarism service? A knowledge engine? All can be true. But I do feel baffled when I see some folks describing it as little more than a clever trick.

Of all the technologies today that speak to a very different future in coming years, the arrival of powerful new AI models holds the greatest revolutionary potential. That doesn't mean entirely good. It can mean wonderful and terrible things all at once. Just like the Internet itself. Just like social networks.

As each aspect grows and emerges, it's important to consider the long view on how they are managed and regulated and integrated into our work and our lives.

In Neal Stephenson's fifth novel The Diamond Age, a girl in some not-too-distant future is given a stolen copy of a very special educational device – "The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".

This book is designed to deliver self-directed learning that adapts to the girl's existing knowledge and take her on a journey to become a powerful and independent woman.

“If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.”

If AI language models were a band, the past few months have been one of those "overnight success" moments. Years in the making, indeed two years since the GPT-3 model first emerged, the arrival of the simple ChatGPT user interface has made Open AI's work a revelation.

Interface is everything, though. So it's a perfect time to think about what a just right interface applied to a Large Language Model (LLM) AI can achieve in the years ahead.

There's a lot of talk about its potential to destroy jobs, ruin education, and overwhelm the Internet with misinformation. All this and more is possible. I believe this is a true 'next era' turning point, set to be remembered alongside the arrival of the internet and then smartphones. And like those other technologies, it's the 'when' of significant change that remains the big question.

What excites my noodle so much is how a shift in our search paradigm can create a new 'knowledge engine' experience that has been held back by the existing revenue model at the biggest search company in the world.

Engaging a Knowledge Engine

Today, when we ask a question in the world's biggest search engine we get a list of links. The top few links have paid to be there, and it's up to us as users to scan the titles and snippets to see if a click will lead us to the information we seek.

In some cases, Google also offers a very short answer to our question, drawn from a partner website. These short answers have arguably been bad for the rest of the web. Google saves the user a click, delivering less traffic to the source it was drawn from, but making the user happier on that occasion that they learned what they needed with a minimum of fuss.

But Google also knows that delivering nothing but answers would kill its revenue. It only gets paid when people click on an advertiser link. If Google became a one-stop shop for answers... where would it make its money?

People have been wowed by ChatGPT's ability to generate high school quality essays on seemingly limitless topics. And a focus of this capacity has been on what it means for users to be able to quickly 'cheat' their way to paragraphs of text that they can reuse instead of writing their own from scratch. I'll dig into that theme another day, but it's this assumption about generating copy to be used elsewhere that I want to deflect today.

The ability to reveal useful, readable knowledge in an instant holds amazing potential for quickly cribbing information to build our own understanding of a topic – without sifting through lists of links and websites to hopefully find someone who knows what they're talking about.

This capacity for distilling collective knowledge into succinct, digestible information is what excites me the most. Do you prefer a 1,000 word essay or a three paragraph summary? Would you prefer a list of bullet points or information displayed in a table format? Ask and you will receive.

Of course, right now the scariest problem is ChatGPT's ability to sound incredibly authoritative even as it fabricates lies or gets its facts mixed up. It isn't really a knowledge engine. It's an expert at guessing which words belong near each other when asked about a given idea. But it has no expertise in validating what it's producing.

Not yet.

Learning how to learn

One of the concerns I keep mulling over is on how the next generation of junior staffers in many fields will get their chance to climb the ladder as LLMs start performing a lot of junior-level work. Drafting copy. Outlining plans. Suggesting potential strategies.

But as I come back to this Knowledge Engine idea I think the most important skill in an AI-powered future is to enhance our ability to learn. To use these very same tools to not just generate words but to read what it generates, to keep asking questions and to keep building our own knowledge. If used effectively, we should be able to accelerate what it means to be a 'junior' and raise the baseline for the work we can perform and the creativity we can apply to the elevated basics made possible by a language model.

In The Diamond Age, the book – an incredibly powerful knowledge engine – adapts to the girl's needs to meet her where she is in order to carry her toward the kind of person it can help her to be.

In our world, we know AI is filled with inherent biases and lacks a great deal of nuance and is very unlikely to lead us to where we need to go. But by learning how to ask the right questions, how to verify the knowledge it reveals, and how to go beyond regurgitation of what it said and truly retain the insights offered, there is a path toward knowledge AI is about to make possible that could be so much better than anything we've seen before.

I'd forgotten some of the details of what exactly happened in The Diamond Age, so I asked ChatGPT for a three par summary. Within seconds it triggered the memories I was looking for. Better than scouring a search engine for a page that might have offered something remotely similar.

Usually I spend my time on the Byteside podcast chatting to creatives or engineers about things they've been hard at work building for the future. So on the surface it seems strange to say we're here to talk to two people from the Wizards of the Coast marketing team.

But, for me and many others, Greg Tito and Shelley Mazzanoble come to the show with the same sense of creative energy.

As the co-hosts of Dragon Talk, the official Dungeons & Dragons podcast, they do a lot more than just talk about the latest news and new release updates about the game.

They have spent 7 years and 350+ episodes becoming part of the heartbeat of D&D, interviewing the team behind the scenes and introducing us to guests from across the worldwide to deepen our shared love of the game and its community.

The podcast has been so wonderful they are just about to release a book about the Dragon Talk podcast and the lessons they've learned about the game but also life, the universe and everything else.

Our conversation with Greg and Shelly is a fun chat about their history with the show, as well as why the podcast has come to be a lot more than just a game marketing exercise.

Also... if they could invite anyone to a D&D game - who would it be?

The nature of trust and security online has been a big challenge throughout the pandemic, but the events of 2022 have tested these issues like never before.

We had been planning this sponsored episode for many months, but when it fell into place this turned out to be an excellent time to talk to Chris Hockings, APAC CTO at IBM Security about the state of security and trust in Australia today.

This episode is sponsored by IBM.

We're talking to Elaine and Craig Beckett from Sydney's Trackdown Studios about how the studio has built a stellar reputation across the world for the quality of its audio production for film, TV and videogames.

From Mad Max Fury Road to The Crown, World of Warcraft to The Boys, Trackdown has been involved with making some of the world's biggest productions sound their very best.

Last week I was arguing that a certain sense of urgency was probably required to put Twitter on a better path. It had been long stagnant in business terms and the new boss needed to make some serious inroads on pushing revenue north.

But after the first full week of Elon's Twitter is there any better description than 'shitshow'?

The chaos engine he has installed has done nothing but burn through the good will of top users and precious advertisers. It's one thing to reset management, it's another to reset every stakeholder relationship established over the past 17 years.

The stories pile up around the treatment of staff and advertising agencies, all in the midst of non-stop Elon meme tweets and on the fly public decision making. If you've been struggling to keep up, here's some key news:

• Musk brought trusted Tesla engineers to Twitter to help
• Blue checkmarks are 'bullshit' and every subscriber can have one
• But the Twitter Blue subscription won't get free articles from publishers anymore
• Musk spread homophobic disinformation about the Pelosi attack
• The maths on Twitter verification monetisation doesn't look good
• Musk never communicated with staff in the entire week before firing approximately half the team on Friday
• Those who kept their jobs don't know who else did and are scrambling to find out who still works there and what to do next
• Musk blames 'activists' for a massive drop in advertising revenue since he took over
• They realised they fired too many key staff and are now asking some if they would please be unfired
• Musk tweets that any account 'impersonating' another account without saying 'parody' will be permanently suspended without warning

It's impossible to keep up right now, or to find the right moment to try to encapsulate a clear theory of how things are being run. The way Musk has treated the very real humans who build and run Twitter has been appalling. And his inability to grasp that if he tweets trollish commentary on 'what advertisers should really want' then he might be responsible for many of them pausing their big value ad campaigns.

In the latest instalment, today's rapid pivot away from "comedy is legal" Twitter to "parody accounts will be permanently banned" Twitter has been really something.

Love the free speech. Love the comedy. Except if it's people mocking me.

That's an important factor that can't be stated too lightly. The entire decision to start suspending accounts – accounts of verified users, often comedians – was because they changed their profile name (not username) to Elon Musk as a joke.

It's not to protect democracy or Wall St or human rights. It's a decision via tweet to protect his ego.

Dave Karpf's poker analogy is very well placed.

One thing you sometimes see at the card table is a pretty good player who, once they’ve lost a good chunk of money, starts trying too hard to win their money back very fast. Bad luck early begets bad decisions late.

This was always meant to be a fun lark for Musk. But the market turned, he wished he could quit the deal then realised there was no chance. Not even a billionaire can escape Delaware corporate law.

It is absolutely true that Musk loves Twitter. Really loves it. Loves to post on it. Would love to make it a great business.

But right now he's chasing the pot. There's a lot on the table. He still finds time to tweet memes. But it doesn't look like he's having fun anymore.

In all my time on Twitter (I joined April 2006) I've never seen as many friends and colleagues, who have loved it in spite of its flaws, exploring alternatives. But the fact is there will never be another Twitter. Whether the alternatives can be 'enough' is the big question.

We were already living in this weird time when social media platforms were having a rough time of things. But it does seem like we're arriving at a decoupling of social media and the spaces most users send most of their attention. And that's a critical thought for business and society. What comes next?

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The Elon Musk era of Twitter has kicked off with a bang. Top executives out. The board is dissolved. He is truly Chief Twit now. The Main Character Energy he has craved is now in his hands.

In the first few days he has overseen a chaotic spaghetti on the wall approach to coming up with the next era for the social media platform beloved by media professionals and misinformation specialists alike.

Twitter's history is a litany of disappointments for both shareholders and fans of the platform. It holds incredible sway because of its intensive media industry usage, but it has eternally struggled to work out how to make money.

It's also the One True Real-time platform. The 'Home' feed might be algorithmic like all the others, but it has still foregrounded an emphasis on what is happening right at this moment. Go to Facebook or LinkedIn and you can find yourself replying to week old updates because of how they reheat posts over a much longer window than Twitter shows any interest in.

You don't 'live Facebook' something you're watching over a series of posts. But Twitter is designed to encourage and reward such serialised tweeting.

So Twitter is differentiated. It just isn't that interesting to more people than its core user base of 200 million. A number that it first reached in 2013 before climbing to over 300 million but then stagnating and falling backwards.

The Twitter board was full of people who didn't really use Twitter. The company has tested ideas and pivoted from new feature to new feature like a basketball player trapped in a corner, searching for anyone to pass the ball to.

No platform has faced such a delta between its cultural impact and its economic success.

All that is to say... Elon Musk is probably right to move swiftly to clear house and rapidly iterate on solutions to build real revenue on the platform.

It's also fair to say the manner in which he has conducted his first few days there will result in significant harm to the teams that work there and the final shreds of trust anyone has had in the platform and its commitment to fighting disinformation and harmful behaviours.

This really is the biggest test of Elon Musk as a business leader to date.

Tesla was a huge win but has struggled to deliver on its bullish views on self-driving features, and Musk's public persona has started to tarnish the reputation of that company. SpaceX has been his real success story, delivering incredibly successful space transport vehicles that has helped push new opportunities forward for government and private sectors. Add in The Boring Company and the incredibly narrow tunnels it has created to little real benefit and his reputation as a modern industrialist hangs in the balance.

Twitter will be his most visible win or fail. The entire media world is watching. All those power users who generate the tweets people want to read are watching. When even small changes make people scream about how much they hate it (but they don't stop using), what's going to happen when big changes land?

Chasing down a recurring revenue model makes lots of sense. Twitter Blue has always felt like a half-hearted attempt at asking people to pay while not really offering much value to the kinds of users who love Twitter enough to pay for it. But with everything from Verification to less ads to longer video posts – to flat out 'priority' visibility of posts – there could be a lot of reasons for people to part with their US$8/month.

At very least, I don't doubt Musk will keep tweaking and pivoting what he's offering to power users if that's what it takes to bring money in the door.

It's just a question of whether his love of acting like a petulant billionaire on the platform can be replaced by an even greater love of creating a stable and powerful new era for Twitter that balances trust and safety with the free speech he loves so much.

Welcome to another fine Friday!

In some ways it is a sad occasion, though, as Byteside's fab Content Producer, Chris Button, is off on a new adventure next week. Huge thanks to Chris for all his work published on the site, his work behind the scenes, and his dulcet tones on this year's edition of the High Resolution podcast.

Here's what we've found interesting around the web this week.

Byteside latest

PAX Australia 2022 looked different, but does it hurt the show’s future?

The biggest platforms and developers weren’t on the show floor in 2022. But does the spirit of PAX protect it against the changing nature of games marketing?

BytesideSeamus Byrne

Google Pixel 7 & Pixel 7 Pro review: because you love Google’s brains

The same price in an inflationary market and some solid updates in camera and features makes it a good year to upgrade if you’ve been waiting for a few years.

BytesideSeamus Byrne

Brain food

Is Spotify’s podcast exclusivity strategy working?

The open podcast ecosystem isn’t dead yet.

Simon Owens's Media NewsletterSimon Owens

Good analysis of what's gone right and wrong when Spotify has bought successful podcast companies and then forced their existing shows into platform exclusives.

AI tools fail to reduce recruitment bias - study

Artificially intelligent analysis of job applications or videos is “pseudoscience”, researchers say.

BBC NewsChris Vallance

Shout it again for those up the back. AI is not bias-free!

The Hottest App Right Now? One Where Teens Have to Say Nice Things About Each Other

Gas is topping Apple’s App Store charts even though it’s live in fewer than a dozen states.

The Wall Street JournalAnn-Marie Alcántara

Always interesting to see where new social apps are finding cut through. Can positivity win? Or will the kids always find a way to turn good vibes into a new vector for bullying or ostracism?

YouTube more likely to recommend conservative vidoes to all

There goes Woke Big Tech again, downplaying traditional liberal views

The RegisterKatyanna Quach

No matter your preferences, all roads seem to lead to conservative videos.

Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter

We’re more predictable than we thought.

The AtlanticKaitlyn Tiffany

A very interesting look at the Twitter accounts that rehash videos, quotes and trends and mine attention for follows.

Big news

What we know about the Medibank cyber attack and what to do if you’re a customer

Medibank, which has more than 3.7 million customers, says a hacker claims to have stolen 200GB of data and given 100 policies as proof. Here’s what we know.

ABC News

I was on ABC with Richard Glover discussing this one yesterday. Maybe there's a little less identity theft at stake here, but there's also a much deeper level of private information that the attackers are threatening to exploit. The potential to reveal private medical insights about high profile individuals is a very nasty threat to make. And it's the kind of data we should be able to trust an insurance provider to hold on our behalf as needed.

Inquiry ‘absolutely necessary’ after Optus breach: Dominello

A national inquiry into identity and data sharing is “absolutely necessary” in the wake of the Optus data breach, according to New South Wales Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government Victor Dominello. With investigations into Australia’s largest data breach since 2018 now underway by pr…

InnovationAus.comJustin Hendry

Tied together with the above, there really should be audits and investigations that are triggered automatically against companies that are holding critical personal information and are hit by a breach. It feels like the news cycle is ready to leave the Optus situation in the past and everyone just shrugs and moves on. We need real transparency and real accountability when big companies fail at security.

Your ads, your choice

Today, Google is starting to roll out My Ad Center, a new way for users to control the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Discover.

GoogleJerry Dischler

New tools are going to make it easier to control ad tracking without having to shut off other useful features within the Google experience. Progress.

Chrome for Android Gets Some Tablet-Friendly Touches

The update brings abilities like tabs and a drag-and-drop mode, but it’s for Android tablets only.

GizmodoThe A.V. Club

In other Google news, these new tablet-friendly features are another win for the Android ecosystem. With the Pixel tablet on the way too, delivering a better experience that embraces larger and wider screen formats will help people to see the value on choosing such devices.

Jack Dorsey-Founded Bluesky Unveils Roadmap for Decentralized Social Networks - Decrypt

The group, formed within Twitter, is building a decentralized protocol that limits corporate and governmental influence on social media platforms.

DecryptSander Lutz

I hadn't read much into Bluesky before, but this latest update does speak to a social protocol that holds great potential as a truly open platform. 'Decentralised' doesn't have to mean crypto. Email is a wonderful decentralised, federated means of communication everyone can use. Getting it right in a similar fashion for social could be great.

Meta gives up fight to get $400m Giphy buy approved

Facebook to dump GIF super-gallery after just enough pestering from UK

The RegisterPaul Kunert

"OK, you can have Instagram, but a searchable index of GIFs is a bridge too far."

Secret agents targeting drug cartels in Australia exposed in data hack

A massive leak of classified government documents has exposed the identities and methods of secret agents working to stop major drug importations to Australia.

The Sydney Morning HeraldNigel Gladstone

A leak in Columbia has put Australian feds at risk. The ripple effects of cybersecurity cross the world.

USB 4 Version 2 Doubles Transfer Speed to 80Gbps -- even 120Gbps if You Push It

The new data transfer tech could arrive in late 2023, but you’ll only get top speeds when you upgrade all cables, peripherals and PCs.

CNETStephen Shankland

Think about the timeline from here to 2030. A few more generations of USB, all based on the same USB-C port. It seems like we'll 'save on cables', but there will absolutely be some cables that are more USB-C than others, and knowing which is which will get harder by the year.

1,090 days. That was the wait fans endured between the end of PAX 2019 and the beginning of PAX 2022. For gamers, nerds and geeks of all persuasions who love this show that puts a "Welcome Home" sign on its front door, it was a long, long wait indeed.

The show has always pitched itself as being about a sense of community. It isn't about the latest games, it's about the people who love games. And not just videogames either. Card games, boardgames, roleplaying games, miniatures wargaming, retro games, pinball... if it's a game, it has a place at PAX.

Coming back together after three years apart, the community story felt as strong as ever. An atmosphere of friendship pervades all areas of the show and it makes you feel good just walking the halls and seeing random encounters, broad smiles, and a sense of joy to be together again.

But what we saw in those halls, the big booths and experiences on offer across the show floor, had changed a lot since 2019. And it speaks to significant changes in how the games industry is sold and marketed.

AAA for absent

In years past, PAX was a great opportunity for fans to get hands on with major new games from the world's biggest developers. Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo would have the biggest booths at the show, with Ubisoft the other 'biggest booth' contender over the years.

All were missing from the show floor in 2022.

It may be four booths out of many dozens, but these were the gravitational booths where fans would queue for hours to get 10 minutes hands on with game previews months ahead of their final release.

In 2022, there were long queues at a new Sega booth to try out Sonic Frontiers, but elsewhere the biggest queue was for the PAX Merch booth, not any other games.

Looking back at maps from 2017 and 2019, the wider mix of booths is very similar to what we see in 2022. Lots of PC technology booths from the likes of Intel, AMD, Lenovo, Asus, Logitech, HyperX, and other peripherals makers.

It's those big "latest game" booths that had disappeared, replaced by the likes of Aussie Broadband who put out a big arcade of fun machines like air hockey and other social arcade games that were busy all weekend. People were here to get together and play whatever they could play.

Overall, this was likely a great year for the indie developer zone of the show. Gamers want to game, and in the absence of Big New Titles to queue for, many attendees probably had more time available to go check out the brilliant indie titles on show instead.

The Direct effect

What changed in the past three years? You know, apart from a global pandemic keeping us apart for so long?

The most significant shift in the games industry has been toward the big publishers and platforms creating highly produced video updates where they speak directly to fans via Twitch, YouTube, and the wider social media universe. It's far cheaper than paying five-figure sums to just rent a booth space – and then the same again to make that booth space worthy of attention.

Nintendo blazed the trail with its Nintendo Direct events, and the other big platforms have followed suit. These kinds of video events also hit the E3 industry trade show hard – that same question of what's worth the investment making the direct approach making far more sense in a deeply digital world.

Add in the new push from PlayStation and Xbox to build recurring revenue models through their Plus and Gamepass subscriptions and the industry is moving away from trying to win your pre-order dollars for the next big tentpole. It becomes about that ongoing relationship with every 'member' of the service, where those constant conversations through digital channels become the most meaningful place to connect.

A few clever big ticket developers were still in town for Melbourne International Games Week, inviting fans to come to bars or other events to catch up with their communities. Putting money behind a bar instead of into a booth seemed a smart play for some when they knew their fans would be in town anyway.

But does the change hurt PAX?

Shifting trends in how the industry operates may have brought E3 to its knees, but does the disappearance of the biggest brands really do the same to PAX?

As I said at the top, PAX has always foregrounded community. The games are what unifies people who love the show, but it isn't the only reason they come. They come to hang out, and to attend panels where people discuss games of all kinds, or to meet up with diverse communities. People come to be with their kind of people.

It's also a well diversified event for the kinds of games people come to play. In 2022, there seemed to be more tabletop games stands than ever before, with a lot of games designed right here in Australia. That indie scene isn't only for videogames anymore!

From opening to closing late at night, the board game, miniatures and card game areas were always packed. In the middle of the day, in a gigantic hall in the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre, you can struggle to find a table if you want to grab a game and play.

PAX always foregrounded the people who come together through their love of games. In the absence of the biggest games of the year, the vibe may be different when looking at the biggest stands on the show floor, but what makes PAX PAX is still deeply present.

The trends in the industry might hurt for the most laser focused videogame fans, and the events that are entirely about these things. But for PAX, it feels like its welcoming idea for what games are really about will keep it in a good place for years to come.

With the Pixel 7 & Pixel 7 Pro smartphones, Google is hitting a sweet spot in its effort to truly offer an ecosystem of its own devices and perfectly integrated services.

Where Apple and its iPhone are all about hardware and software on a journey toward adding more services (and the related recurring revenue win that brings), Google has always been about the services, with its journey through Android hardware having had its ups and downs.

Android was led by HTC handsets in the early days, then Samsung came to dominate this side of the phone wars. But Samsung always needs to put its own spin on Android to find those extra ways to connect with the user as a brand. It doesn't want to be a commodity piece of kit sold on behalf of Google and its services. That works great for many users, clearly – Samsung dominates the Android world.

My preference has always been for a cleaner stock Android experience because I do want it to serve me up the most direct path possible to the world of Google's apps and services.

Computational photography

With the Pixel 6, Google kicked off an era with its own chip design driving the hardware. With a focus on complex tasks that benefit from machine learning systems – a lot of which applies to making photos look great – it has helped the Pixel line of phones stand out as a leader in computational photography. Samsung and Apple might do more with lenses and camera hardware, but Google knows how to get software to refine images and give us the most amazing low-light photography through its Night Sight mode.

This isn't to say the Tensor chips are suddenly supercomputers in your pocket. The trick with machine learning models is to refine them through rapid iteration on those hyperscale server farms in the Googleplex, then distill the essence of the model into algorithms that run beautifully on a chip that's designed for the task.

With that in mind, the Pixel 7 series of devices has a second generation Tensor G2 processor, and all those clever photography features happen faster than ever now. Night photography used to require you to hold steady for a 'few' seconds, now it feels like it's just a very slight moment of holding steady before you get the amazing results Pixel phones are known for.

In daylight images are also looking fabulous, and I'll leave it to the serious pixel (small p) afficionadoes to debate which smartphone has the most perfect image performance. I find the Pixel 7 delivers a 'natural' feel that I like in most circumstances, while others might feel it's a little muted compared to what you get from an iPhone 14. Sometimes phones can feel like they're getting too 'computational' in the way they boost an image by default, so I quite like the style Pixel 7 delivers.

The new Super Res Zoom feature can also enhance the image quality across a wider range of zoom lengths. Through a mixture of using sections of the image sensor along with the other lenses all blended with those Tensor smarts means you can get better images at 2.5x zoom or 10x zoom (on the Pro) and even out to 30x with less image degradation when you're outside the perfect scale of each image sensor.

Lastly, the new Unblur feature feels like a very cheeky move to take something Google could easily offer via the Google Photos service on a web browser and make it an exclusive feature of the Pixel 7 phones. Surely the algorithms to do this would run even better in the cloud than on the phone? Regardless, it's a great feature you'll get a lot of value from if you steadily work through your archives and tidy up any old pics that were taken on a big night out or of fast moving kids and animals. It can't work miracles, but it is pretty incredible how sharp and natural it does make many blurred images.

There's also a Magic Eraser mode to cut out people or features in a photo you don't want to keep, video mode gets HDR-10 for superior colour accuracy, and a new Real Tone upgrade to Google image processing to better reflect people's true skin tones in all light levels.

Finally, a shout out to the new Guided Frame feature for vision impaired users. It's a great unlock for many folks who want to enjoy taking selfies anywhere, anytime and every step forward for accessibility of cool features should be encouraged. (Note that iPhone has a similar feature available through the VoiceOver accessibility tools in iOS).

Beyond the cameras

These machine learning centred features do go beyond just the camera tech. There's new features on offer like Audio Message Transcription, so you can have your voice messages converted to text, plus a Recorder mode that now transcribes what you're recording in real time.

Google also announced that the Pixel 7 series will soon get a new VPN by Google One feature – a truly anonymised VPN to keep you safe and secure online.

A new bedtime mode options lets you track your sleep quality by listening for coughs and snores. A nice alternative to needing to wear a tracker (though I do use the very excellent Withings Sleep Monitor which sits under the mattress and provides wonderfully detailed sleep reports – but that's a different investment).

There are also new battery saving settings including Adaptive Battery Saver to more intelligently manage battery life, plus an Extreme Battery Saver option where you can select specific apps that you want to allow if you are trying to eek out that last few percentage points of power late in the day.

The ecosystem era for Pixel

If you've been sitting on a Pixel 4 or earlier, this is a very good year to upgrade. The features are strong, the hardware is crisp, and you'll be well set with a good new baseline for the next 3-5 years of your smartphone lifestyle.

With the arrival of the Pixel Watch alongside the Pixel 7 series, we also see Google eager to build a truly unified hardware environment.

Its acquisition of Fitbit suddenly makes more sense, and this first Pixel Watch is a really nice piece of hardware. Sadly, this version one product isn't that great with battery life, which is a problem and probably makes it worth a skip until the Pixel Watch 2, but it speaks to a big step toward a full integration across its hardware and its services.

Add in the Nest side of Google's smart home and how it is all so easily controlled from your Pixel phone and the ecosystem is stronger than ever.

Pixel 7 is a top recommendation

As of today, when I'm recommending a new smartphone I'll ask someone two questions.

1. Do you like to use Apple or Android?
2. Do you like the idea of the return of the flip phone?

If the answers are 'Android' and 'not really' then the Pixel 7 series is the way to go*. They're well priced, they're well made, and they are the best expression of living in and loving the Google ecosystem.

Big kudos to Google for also maintaining the same price for the Pixel 7 launch as for the Pixel 6 launch last year (from $999 for Pixel 7 and $1299 for Pixel 7 Pro). It's been a big year for inflation, especially in technology components. In real terms this acts as a price drop – and the USD to AUD price conversion is very fair in current exchange (+GST).

Buying the 7 Pro is all about that upgraded camera hardware. If you can spare the extra $300 then that 5x optical lens is a powerful upgrade. If you're not too concerned with that extra lens, the Pixel 7 is an excellent phone at an excellent price.

* I think the Samsung Galaxy Flip 4 is a wonderful new form factor that more people are going to fall in love with the more they see them in the wild.

I've been travelling a lot this past week and a half which has been quite the interrupt. But here's a big list of juicy stories that have dropped over the past two weeks.

Back to a usual routine next week!

Brain Food

The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time

An obscure software system synchronizes the network’s clocks. Who will keep it running?

The New YorkerCondé Nast

AI music generators could be a boon for artists -- but also problematic

Stability AI is funding an effort to create a music-generating system using the same AI techniques behind Stable Diffusion.

TechCrunchKyle Wiggers

Big News

Facebook’s Legs Video Was A Lie

A subsequent statement from Meta says ‘the segment featured animations created from motion capture’

KotakuThe A.V. Club

Matter inches closer to its formal debut, as 1.0 standard launches and certification opens

The next generation of the smart home is coming to a head, as Matter 1.0 has launched its final spec today with certification for devices.

9to5GoogleBen Schoon

Social media firms ‘monetising misery’, says Molly Russell’s father after inquest

Coroner finds harmful online content likely to have contributed to Molly’s death ‘in a more than minimal way’

The GuardianDan Milmo

No, Bruce Willis has not sold his “digital likeness rights” to a deepfake company

A rep for Willis has denied that a “digital twin” of the actor is about to start starring in movies on his behalf

The A.V. ClubThe A.V. Club

The computer errors from outer space

The Earth is subjected to a hail of subatomic particles from the Sun and beyond our solar system which could be the cause of glitches that afflict our phones and computers.

.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}Chris Baraniuk

Trends

Instagram Food Is Having a Vibe Shift

The food blogger aesthetic has given way to something more realistic and DIY: Laissez-faire Instagram food is here

EaterBettina Makalintal

Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots

A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which…

Krebs on SecuritySkip to content

How Bots Corrupted Advertising

Botmasters have created a Kafkaesque system where companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots. And everyone is fine with this.

WIREDCondé Nast

The GIF Is on Its Deathbed

The internet’s file format has been diagnosed as “cringe,” but there are other threats to its existence.

The AtlanticKaitlyn Tiffany

Analysis

AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability - Waxy.org

Tech companies working with AI are outsourcing data collection and training to academic/nonprofit research groups, shielding them from potential accountability and legal liability.

Waxy.orgAndy Baio

Stadia died because no one trusts Google

No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.

TechCrunchDevin Coldewey

What happened to the virtual reality gaming revolution?

VR hasn’t taken over the world, but that doesn’t mean it has failed.

Ars TechnicaSteve Haske

Good tweets

After some queries, I'll also make all Premium posts free through November to build a clear sense of what people will get for their subscription. I'll use this time to also write some foundational content around my big thoughts on the state of the industry and the future of tech and media ecosystems.

High Resolution podcast

Xbox’s brilliant accessibility strategy explained

Learn what drives the Xbox team’s passion for accessibility in an interview with Anita Mortaloni, Director of Accessibility.

BytesideChris Button

A great chat by Chris for the High Resolution podcast with Anita Mortaloni, Director of Accessibility at Xbox. Really insightful on the way Xbox has been approaching accessibility within its platform and the extended benefits of serving those who can really use the extra features.

Brain Food

Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine

As the conflict raged, Ukrainian tech workers at Respeecher hurried to bring back James Earl Jones’s legendary voice for Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Vanity FairCondé Nast

This Controversial Artist Matches Influencer Photos With Surveillance Footage

‘The Followers’ uses artificial intelligence and facial-recognition technology to comment on the surveillance state

Smithsonian MagazineSmithsonian Magazine

Flooded with AI-generated images, some art communities ban them completely

Smaller art communities are banning image synthesis amid a wider art ethics debate.

Ars TechnicaBenj Edwards

New toys

Amazon Official: Introducing Halo Rise - Bedside Sleep Tracker with Wake-up Light and Smart Alarm

Amazon.com: Introducing Halo Rise - Bedside Sleep Tracker with Wake-up Light and Smart Alarm : Sports & Outdoors

Bedside Sleep Tracker with Wake-up Light and Smart Alarm

Introducing Kindle Scribe (16 GB), the first Kindle for reading and writing, with a 10.2” 300 ppi Paperwhite display, includes Basic Pen : Amazon.com.au

Introducing Kindle Scribe (16 GB), the first Kindle for reading and writing, with a 10.2” 300 ppi Paperwhite display, includes Basic Pen : Amazon.com.au

Amazon released a bunch of new gear this week. The Halo and Scribe really stood out for me as the most interesting. Smarter sleep tracking with a nice light-based alarm feels great. And a Kindle that is also a note-taking tablet? Yes, please.

Big news

Optus cyber-attack: company opposed changes to privacy laws to give customers more rights over their data

In its submission to Privacy Act review telco said giving people right to erase personal data would involve ‘significant’ hurdles and costs

The GuardianJosh Taylor

There's so much we still don't know, but there's a lot of problems at both a government and corporate level around how much data is sitting around due to retention mandates and/or companies arguing that it's just too hard to clean up user data.

It's been a mixture of understatement and hyperbole from many angles around this breach. But knowing which is which yet is still awfully difficult.

DALL·E Now Available Without Waitlist

New users can start creating straight away. Lessons learned from deployment and improvements to our safety systems make wider availability possible. Sign up Starting today, we are removing the waitlist for the DALL·E beta so users can sign up and start using it immediately. More than 1.5M use…

OpenAIOpenAI

Podcasters Are Buying Millions of Listeners, Raising Questions About Marketing Tactics

The podcast networks that are actively mining downloads in the mobile game space are doing so through an intermediary company, called Jun Group

TimeAshley Carman / Bloomberg

This is a massive scandal for the podcast industry. Feels like it's on the wrong side of the fine line between 'clever new paths to discovery' and 'pump those numbers'.

A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy

We’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.

GooglePhil Harrison

One of those deeply euphemistic headlines that buries the fact Google is closing Stadia. The fact they're refunding all software and hardware bought through Google Store is a solid way to maintain confidence that you can go on the journey and not be left in the lurch if things don't work out.

Google has definitely gained a lot of valuable new tech through building this game streaming project. Stadia might be dead but the tech will appear in many different places in the years to come.

Brave browser to start blocking annoying cookie consent banners

The Brave browser will soon allows users to block annoying and potentially privacy-harming cookie consent banners on all websites they visit.

BleepingComputerBill Toulas

Cookie consent banners are a mess of dark patterns and obnoxious interruptions. But they're also a helpful step forward compared to 'cookies everywhere'. If Brave can get the balance right here to essentially say yes/no on your behalf to the right cookies that let websites work without the interruptions it's a path forward for letting users set defaults for wherever they go online.

Call on Meta to provide reparations to the Rohingya community

Inspiring people against injustice to bring the world closer to human rights & dignity enjoyed by all.

Amnesty International

"The Rohingya community are determined that Meta be held accountable. Showkutara, a 22-year-old living in Cox’s Bazar, says “Facebook must pay. If they do not, we will go to every court in the world. We will never give up in our struggle.”

Announcing the all-new Substack Reader for web

Revenge of RSS

On SubstackOn Substack

Obviously we've left Substack, but it offers a great reading experience and now it also lets you add RSS feeds. So if you miss Byteside on Substack, you can add us to your Substack Reader!

(I still love Feedly as my RSS reader of choice, but more options is a win for all.)

Good tweets