In this episode of "What A Lot Of Things", Ian and Ash celebrate their podcast's return to a regular cadence, with episodes now coming out every two weeks.

The duo cover two main topics - local democracy and the backlash against social media algorithms. On local democracy, Ian discusses his experience running for town council, the arcane rules and challenges involved, and his belief that more ordinary citizens should get involved to make local councils less political and more pragmatic.

The conversation then shifts to the pros and cons of social media algorithms. Ash and Ian examine how platforms like TikTok and YouTube quickly learn user preferences, sometimes recommending questionable content, and debate whether such algorithms ultimately benefit users or simply enable more effective advertising and "shitification". They also discuss some emerging alternatives that aim to provide more transparent, human-curated social media experiences.

Ian and Ash conclude by sharing the best way for listeners to get in touch with their thoughts and feedback. Another thought-provoking installment of "What A Lot Of Things"!

Links

• Leeds Testing Atelier
• Manifesting Agency and Days, Ian’s other podcasts.
• The famous meeting of Handsforth Parish Council at which it turns out that Jackie Weaver did in fact have the authority.
• Flatpack Democracy
• Ian’s website made for Ilkley Community Alliance
• Play Rock Paper Scissors with CGP Grey
• Wired: The Latest Online Culture War is Humans vs Algorithms
• pi.fyi, Spread Social and the Prosocial Ranking Challenge.
• Ian's Ilkley Community Alliance website (and, through the magic of Vercel, here is the version from the time of the election)
• WSJ: How TikTok's Algorithm Figures You Out (Youtube)

In this latest episode of the "What A Lot Of Things" podcast, hosts Ian and Ash explore intriguing aspects of technology and its broader implications. They delve into the evolving career paths for testing specialists, discussing how testers can navigate organizational challenges and develop fulfilling careers. The conversation shifts to a significant security furore involving the XZ compression tool, where they unpack the complexities of open-source software maintenance and the vulnerabilities introduced by subtle malicious contributions. Throughout, the hosts' lively banter and insightful anecdotes make for a thought-provoking listen that bridges technical details with broader tech culture reflections.

Links

• Guardian TechScape: How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English and "ChatGPT cliches" gist
• iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S22+ (better link for the Samsung?)
• 2030 Status meeting with Mother Nature video from Apple.
• Pachyderm and Hachyderm.
• Agile Testing Fellowship
• Maaret Pyhäjärvi's post on LinkedIn quoting Anna Baik, plus a Youtube video on how to pronounce Pyhäjärvi. We will do better next time! We can find other people quoting Anna saying this, but not the original source for the quotation.
• Articles for Thing One:
  • Ministry of Testing: Navigating a Career Path in Software Testing
  • TechBeacon: Two years with no testers: What I learned
  • Dan Ashby: Dispelling the misconceptions #5 – “Lets 100% automate everything and get rid of all our testers”
  • TestFort: AI in Software Testing: A Silver Bullet or a Threat to the Profession?
• Eton College King's Scholarship Exam, General Paper I
• Accessibility testing specialist, Ady Stokes on LinkedIn
• The best step-by-step story I found for the XZ backdoor was Everything I know about the XZ backdoor by Evan Boehs
• XKCD: All Modern Digital Infrastructure
• XZ maintainer Lasse Collin's page on the backdoor
• Andres Freund's email to the OSS Security mailing list on discovering the backdoor
• Dosubot, an AI-powered Github maintainer agent used in Langchain's repos.
• The story of `left-pad`

...and our new email address: technologyeeyores@whatalotofthings.com

In this episode, Ian and Ash delve into the complexities of managing IT service providers, exploring the challenges and strategies of working with consultancies and independent contractors. They also discuss the cutting-edge topic of AI voice cloning, examining its potential uses and ethical implications. From historical pirate accents to futuristic technology, join them for a thought-provoking discussion on how these technologies impact our work and the broader implications they hold for society.

Our shiny new email address, as promised in this episode, is... technologyeeyores@whatalotofthings.com

Links

• OpenAI, and the not particularly relevant to this episode but still oft-mismentioned OpenAPI.
• Be More Pirate, the book where Ian found out why we think pirates all had British West Country accents
• Pigeon Keeping – Wikipedia
• Diagram Industries blog, where Ash documented his learnings from the Ministry of Testing's "30 Days of AI In Testing" event.
• NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month)
• LinkedIn is experimenting with a TikTok-like video feed in its app – TechCrunch, 27th March 2024
• hachyderm.io, the Mastodon server that Ian fruitlessly recommended to Ash
• Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Synthetic Voices, OpenAI Blog, 29th March 2024
• Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation - speech providing an early overview of the Free Software movement, delivered by Richard Stallman on 29th May 2001.
• Crack Version 4.1: A Sensible Password Checker for Unix [PDF], white paper by Alec Muffett (estimated date, November 1991)
• Open LLMs – Wikipedia, a list of open source LLMs, including Meta's Llama 2 as mentioned.
• How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript, The Register, 23rd March 2016
• Everything I know about the XZ backdoor, a rather heroic and very detailed explanation last updated (at the time of writing) on 8th April 2024
• AI Voice Cloning news links
  • OpenAI deems its voice cloning tool too risky for general release – The Guardian, 31st March 2024
  • OpenAI’s voice cloning AI model only needs a 15-second sample to work – The Verge, 29th March 2024
  • OpenAI is pitching Sora to Hollywood. Creatives are fighting back – Mashable, 25th March 2024
  • Resemble AI Creates Synthetic Audio Watermark to Tag Deepfake Speech – voicebot.ai, 2nd February 2023
  • Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should – Know Your Meme