Content and services

Many companies, mostly larger ones but also some smaller ones, now offer live chat. It's the most soul-devouring time waster, and I groan every time I just want some simple pricing or product detail. It is obvious most chat is outsourced to a chat farm. The people you end up talking to typically just have a script of common questions and answers, and often can't provide much more than "I'll take your name and email and have someone get back to you."

YouTube has announced a price hike> for their streaming TV service to $83/month.

This is now as much a a traditional package of cable TV programming. YouTube offers a wide variety of streaming channels, some of which are hard to get on some other streaming packages (e.g. local traditional TV channels), but this seems high. Business must be good enough that they think they can jack up prices this much. I'm so old I can remember when YouTube TV was available for $49/month.

The very savvy Doc Searls has issued a call for open source AI tools. His argument is that all current AI is just another Software as a Service (SaaS) under the control of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Apple. As such, the owner of the service gets to decide what kind of answers it provides.

It's not hard to smoke out the bias built into all of the AI services just by asking a few questions from opposing viewpoints. You can quickly see how the AI has been programmed.

Cord-cutting is rapidly increasing, with the cable companies losing millions of TV subscribers. But just switching to streaming video is producing more of the same. I'm reading more and more articles about the cost of Internet service creeping up with the same $5 increase year over year that we saw with the TV packages. And the streaming services are also hiking prices.

techdirt has an interesting analysis of recent moves by Netflix, which include a crackdown on password sharing and price hikes.

Companies have been promising digital headsets for years. Facebook's Meta headset has been available for a while, but it does not seem to have many users.

That may change with the imminent release of Apple's Vision Pro headset. The were digital music players before the iPod, but they were clunky, hard to use, and had limited storage. The iPod was easy to use and had massive storage compared to the competitors at the time.

Here is a mostly non-technical explanation of how "AI" works. The phrase "artificial intelligence" is a bit of a misnomer, because software programs like ChatGPT are not "thinking" at all. The technical term for them is Large Language Models, or LLMs. Large language models process enormous amounts of written material and then use some sophisticated math to analyze that material and then be able to reformulate it into coherent text based on a user query.

Elon Musk has renamed Twitter to 'X.' This is part of his strategy to add more features and functionality to the platform, and ultimately, make his purchase profitable. It will be interesting to see how that goes. Mark Zuckerberg and his Threads platform was developed to compete with Twitter, but Threads is actively discouraging political commentary and is censoring lots of other kinds of discussion, according to user reports. Since Twitter (X) has lots of political commentary, it is hard to understand how Zuckerberg plans to compete.

The Tucker Carlson debut on Twitter yesterday gathered more than 60 million views in the first 14 hours. Whether you are inclined to listen to his political views or not, this is astounding. On his former Fox News show, on a good night, he had about three and a half million viewers. Granted there is a little bit of apples and oranges comparison since the Fox show was an hour and Carlson's Twitter program was just ten minutes.

But the cable news networks should a) be terrified, and b) be putting together a team to take key programming to Twitter.

Here is an interesting article from Ars Technica. A senior software developer has quit and written a lengthy critique of what he views as some challenging internal problems at Google. The Ars Technica article is an interesting summary by itself, but if you follow the link in the article to the original blog post, there is even more detail about Google's challenges. One might infer, after reading this, that Google may not always be the top dog in the Internet world.

David Strom reports on data that suggests that company meetings are taking up enormous amounts of business time that could otherwise be focused on getting things done.

Remote working seems to explain part of the phenomenon, and tools like Slack and Teams also seems to encourage more meetings and less work. How much more time are we talking about? Strom reports on a survey of Microsoft Teams users, who reported a 252% increase in weekly meeting time, and a 153% increase in the number of meetings.

Over the weekend, I decided to try the new experimental AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine called Chat GPT. It is designed to respond to a wide variety of questions and inquiries, and can parse all sorts of conversational queries.

Amazon's Alexa is ten years old! How time flies! I might have guessed the old girl was seven or eight years old. But she's been around for ten years, and apparently is a big loser--as in "billions and billions."

Substack is becoming increasingly popular as a place for a wide range of commentary and information, often in what I would call "long form magazine style" writing, or basically longer articles with deeper dives into whatever the topic of the article happens to be.

I have paid about as much attention to the metaverse as I have to the price of Xbox games, which is to say, none at all. This is an interesting story about what is described as "a sandbox environment that allows users to buy and sell virtual real estate." Whoa! Be still my beating heart! Why just yesterday I was thinking, "I don't have enough to do in real life, so I'd like to go into a virtual world and pretend to buy and sell fake real estate."

Mediacom essentially has confirmed what I and many others have been saying for more than a decade, which is the cable HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) network is twentieth century technology that is not able to support the growing demand for bandwidth.

Stop the Cap! recently cited a Mediacom customer who got a letter and a phone call from Mediacom to complain that the customer was using too much bandwidth.

The "big three" of social media--Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube--have become the targets of increasing criticism around the way they choose to allow some users to post "acceptable" content while censoring other types of content. The companies' defense is to claim the protection of Section 230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

I would like to meet the person that convinced Google that there would be big demand for a phone app that lets you hum a song and have the Google InnerTubes tell you what the name and artist of the song is.

This strikes me as yet another example of bored Google software engineers without enough to do rolling out stuff that no one really wants. Does this really make anyone's life better?

A lot of people who used videoconferencing only lightly or never at all have acquired a crash course in it over the past month. Because Design Nine and WideOpen Networks have had staff distributed around the country for years, it was not a challenge for us.

Microsoft is developing a new glass-based storage technology that can hold many gigs of data on a small glass plate. We need something like this because all of the magnetic-based storage (e.g. hard drives) and DVD/CD disks eventually degrade and fail.