Patch Notes #15

Hacking, the internet, formality

I was going to send this earlier but something, something, CrowdStrike destroying the fabric of the internet as we know it. (Actually this is not true, it seems appropriate to honor the “largest IT outage in history”.)

Anyways, onwards with Patch Notes #15:

• In a previous Patch Notes I joked about how Sam Altman and Patrick Collison’s complaint about a lack of young founders was… unfounded; it’s just that a lot of them seem to end up committing fraud and going to jail (SBF, etc). Here is The Diff agreeing that average tech founder age seems to be going up, but that one area where there is still room for young founders is hacking:

  The average age of prominent tech founders seems to have gone up a bit in the last decade. There are plenty of very prominent thirty-and-over founders, but fewer wunderkinder than in the early days of social. There is still one area where people in their early twenties can end up running large organizations: the head of the Scattered Spider hacking group was arrested, and turned out to be 22.

  Scattered Spider was the group behind the data ransom attacks at MGM and Caesar’s last year, as well as MailChimp, LastPass, Signal, and Twilio. Pretty impressive! Maybe it says something that smart tech-savvy youth are going down the path of fraud, hacking, and crime instead of founding tech companies. It certainly doesn’t seem like lack of ambition or skill.

• Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd says your dating ‘AI concierge’ will soon date hundreds of other people’s ‘concierges’ for you:

  “If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your [AI] dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge,” she told host Emily Chang. “Truly. And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will scan all of San Fransisco for you and say: ‘These are the three people you really outta meet.'”

  I wrote about AI’s writing and reading to each other awhile ago, and well here we are. There is something kind of odd about this idea though, besides the obvious dystopian vibes. If my AI concierge goes out and talks to other AI concierges and comes back with some matches, at what point is it materially different from any existing matching algorithm today? Dating sites already do some behind the scenes work to find good you potential matches—is this somehow better?

• AI-Generated Version of Al Michaels’ Voice Will Deliver NBC’s Paris Olympics Recaps

  The veteran sportscaster will deliver personalized recaps of the media company’s coverage, all of it tailored to fans’ specific interests. Each morning, NBC’s Peacock streaming hub will deliver a video summary of the last day of coverage, built out of clips and a high-quality AI re-creation of Michaels’ voice, which was trained using past appearances on NBC and matches his signature way of speaking.

  
  “When I was approached about this, I was skeptical but obviously curious,” said Michaels — presumably the real one — in a prepared statement.

  In my memory, there is a long-running joke about how they kept Dick Clark in cyrofreeze, and wheeled him out each year for Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve, which explained how he was somehow always there, and perpetually the same age.¹ Anyway with AI now it’s even easier! Maybe they’ll bring him back this year.

• We Need To Rewild The Internet is a long piece lamenting the current state of the tech monopoly-driven internet versus the golden years of the open internet:

  The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

  I’m sympathetic to this view—I worked on Google Reader during the heyday of the “blogosphere”, a now hilariously archaic word. The early internet did feel magical and original. That was in part due to how difficult it was to make anything: In a world before the nth JavaScript framework, or GitHub (or git!), or React, or nocode, or Shopify, or AWS, the internet had a sort of homespun, artisanal quality to it.
  
  But creating the tools and platforms to make the internet flourish wasn’t free. The tech giants built things—open source or otherwise—because they believed that as long as the internet grew, they would grow with them. And they were right, it worked! But it wasn’t just a tale of rampant pirate capitalism; we liked what the internet became. Ben Thompson has written extensively about this on his newsletter Stratechery. Here’s a recent piece:

  In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power; the digital world is defined by abundance, which means discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of power. The result is that consumers have access to anything, which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been flattened.

  He goes on to give a bunch of examples: Amazon created the “Everything Store” with practically every item on Earth and the capability to deliver it to your doorstep; Google broke down every publication in the world into individual pages; search results didn’t deliver you to the front page of a newspaper or magazine, but rather dropped you onto individual articles. And so on. Most people would not choose to go backwards to the old way!
  
  I agree that something feels amiss with the modern metrics-driven internet. (I wrote about it recently!) But I am always torn when I read articles like this one because it tells a story that we as internet consumers were hoodwinked and “herded into rigid tech plantations” that isn’t entirely honest. Most of us went willingly.

  

  The piece also compares rewilding the internet to scale of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone, which I think is a poor comparison. Ecological conservation has been largely about cordoning off areas from development. It’s much harder to rewild areas where humans and infrastructure already exists. Maybe the better analogy is public green spaces in cities, but those don’t feel particularly wild either. (Photo by Lucas on Unsplash)

• I Cannot:

  Last year, a formal tone that sounded nothing like my speaking voice started to sputter out from my cursor and onto the page: “I cannot think about it now,” “I journeyed back to my abode.” Words elongated, and phrasings—strange ones—appeared. I watched the sentences extend, and noticed they were saying very little, but that they were saying this little in very mannered ways.

  I loved this piece, and am guilty of doing this at times, along with many other writing sins. But the story is about more than just formal writing:

  Like many phenomena noticeable for their formal gestures at nostalgic extremity—the starched high-collared dresses, breakfast cereal made from scratch, the handlebar mustaches—the slightly formal essays point toward, I think, the threat they are meant to oppose: a feeling that things are too much online, that things are too casual and must be elevated.
  […]
  Amidst the tone of graven importance the writers of these essays, maybe there’s not much to say that feels new—or if there is, we are often side-stepping it. In her book Hole Studies, Hilary Plum points out how contemporary essayists, she says, write “I’ve been thinking a lot about . . .” and “then just virtuously mention a subject, not saying one thing of substance about it, moving on before we have to do any work.”

  I have nothing to add except that I really think it is so good and so I will say nothing of substance and instead tell you to just go read the whole thing.

1. A quick Google search shows this memory is a made up figment of my imagination, but I stand by it.