Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
About 40 minutes in: excellent discussion and particularly panel! Lisa and Cathy in particular have both the right arguments and a certain tone of rightful (while professionally subdued) enragement in their voices that make me think that the network still has ample critical voices to be heard.
I know this is not intended to be a political podcast network. Still, it has been at least considerably mindful towards society and societal implications in the past. Since the inauguration it has, from my vantage point, increasingly turned into an AI-Hooray-Fest and has done away almost spookily with the societal and sometimes even political angle. I can even understand that - it’s just an ungodly overload and I can just say: if I’d pray, I’d pray for you guys across the pond. And probably all of us around the world.
It’s good to see that the critical perspective creeps back in - be it in Security Now with trusted and legendary Steve highlighting the risks or here with one of the many, many, many discussions on tech laws and regulations which simply don’t make an ounce of sense any more if the new government sets itself above the law. There will be no governance on tech if one tech giant owns the president and all other tech giants kiss the ring.
So: very much looking forward to the rest of the show - thank you for gradually coming back, TWiT (in my mind). I know you guys provide a TECH podcast network. I like tech. However, tech NEEDS a strong sense of society, community, and governance - not just VCs, quarterly results, winning, and reckless innovation because it’s going to be “so interesting”.
I learned from Leo a couple of years back that “interesting times” is a Chinese curse, not a blessing. I hope this take wasn’t taken out during the move to the attic. Considering the saying a curse, to me, always was kind of TWiTs “Don’t be evil”. Excitement and giddiness about tech stuff, yes, but founded in a cautiously optimistic take of the future. Future’s going to be great - if we’re doing sensible stuff. It’s not going to be great automatically if we just drop the reins. How do we know? State of the planet, doomsday clock, every year a bit warmer, etc etc - take your pick. The time of mindless thrashing forward must come to an end if we really are to consider ourselves an intelligent species. I fear the day when AI aces the AGI test, but we humans do not, any more.
Who taught me that? Leo and his great panels.
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Given that it would be impossible to put a back door in the existing iCloud backup software (E2E version), I can’t see how they will be able to release a back doored version and keep quiet about it, it will leak within hours or days of it being released.
The better solution, for Apple, is to stop providing iCloud services to the UK… Maybe the uproar would cause the UK government to sit up and realise they are being stupid.
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I suppose that, on the DEI point, people might conflate DEI policies with quotas, i.e., you have to have a certain number of DEI employees, which is where we get into an issue. I do not want to feel like the only reason I am there is so that you can tick a box from your government.
That’s even if they’re doing it at all. It is only a leak after all. As ffor the uproar causing the government to take notice, I highly doubt it given everything else that is going on.
As much as I agree on the return to office point, is there not an arguement that there is a social aspect to being able to bounce ideas off your coworkers, as opposed to having to send a message on teams or email and wait for them to reply. I can also see how it would help you focus, and seperate work from your home life.
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Yes and yes.
We were here throughout the pandemic, we are a production company and they obviously couldn’t stay at home. Offices had a single person in them - each department had to have at least 1 person on-site, more if they had separate offices and wanted to come in - and those on-site were then rotated. When things settled down a bit the IT department was back with 2 people in the office and 2 in home office - that meant, if the team on site caught COVID, the other team was still there to take over.
Then, 2022/2023, we went back to full time on site. To be honest, I didn’t really miss home office, it was much nicer having people to talk to and you overheard conversations that made you sit up and think.
We have the option to do home office on a limited basis, but everybody is in the office most of the time - one of my guys had a burst pipe and had a day at home waiting for the plumber to come and install wall driers and today he has taken half a day leave, because the decorater is coming, another is in home office tomorrow, because the water board is coming to test the drinking water (whether there are lead pipes, microbes etc.) and I’m in home office one day next week due to the gas company switching us from soft gas to hard gas (no, really!), but other than that we enjoy being in the office all the time, shooting the breeze and calling questions back and forth.
I also had 2 new employees start working for me at the end of last year. It has been very helpful having everybody in the office, there have been a couple of times where they were answering calls and were either giving the wrong information (or information they weren’t allowed to pass on) or they were being talked into doing things without going through the proper channels, or seeing them leaving punctually, when there was a big problem that needed fixing - we have an 8 hour day, but if there are big problems, it is expected that people work longer & then leave earlier the next day. At least in the probationary period, it is a good idea to have people in the office, at least for a large percentage of the time, until they are really used to the job.
The break, riding my bike to work and back, also helps me unwind and separate my thinking processes from home to office and back again.
They could remove Advanced Data Protection in the UK which is already opt-in. That being said, I agree that they should pull out of the UK rather than kill encryption for everyone. The law is absurd and is a Stalin level power grab.
Agree with everything you say, but at the same time I’d argue that flexibility is important, and recognition that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. On the other side of the coin, I spent some time working for a tech multinational where I was the only person in the team based in the UK. The rest of the team were in various locations in California, the contractor whose work I was monitoring was on the US East Coast, and the software people mostly in eastern Europe. There was very little point in going into the UK office, except to say hi to people I’d worked with in the past. Once I started having to deal with operating system teams in China, product teams in India and stakeholders in Australia, I could only do the job from home.
Then a bit more recently I did some work for a government department, and none of the team or other people that I worked with were based in the same location, they were located all round the UK. If I went into the nearest office, it was only to sit on Teams meetings with people in other locations.
Along the way I discovered I was good at building remote relationships and produced some of my best work from a home office (often working odd hours), but I know that’s not best for everyone. I remember a colleague who was so pleased when lockdown ended because they could get back to having the mental stimulation of working amongst other people that they needed to do their best work.
In the end I think that what we need is less of the sweeping statements like “working from home is the future!” or “everyone should be back in the office!” and more recognition that flexibility benefits all the different working needs out there.
Yes, it really comes down to what you are doing.
We are a manufacturing company, so those in production were looking at the back office people in home office as “those scivers watching Netflix all day long”… It really didn’t help with team building.
My employer is also very strict about working hours, sickness and leave.
If we do any overtime, you have to balance it out by the end of the month - although you can carry a maximum of 8 hours a month over automatically and I did about 10 hours overtime in the last week of November and a quick note to HR got that carried over into December.
Likewise, we have to take all 30 days leave within the calendar year, if the company sets deadlines which mean you can’t take your leave, you can carry it over until March 31st - but if you just didn’t take the leave, you will lose it.
They are very hot on sick leave as well. If you are ill, from a cold to a serious operation, you are expected to stay at home and recover fully, before returning to work - they don’t want us at half-strenght and they definitely don’t want us infecting other employees! Likewise, if it was a broken bone, cancer or burn out etc. that caused a long absence, they will work out a plan to ease you back into your role, starting as part time or light duties and working back up to full time or full duties - E.g. if you broke an arm, you won’t be expected to carry heavy barrels until your arm is back up to full strength.
In that sort of environment, most people are very happy to come into work every day. And, as I said, if we need to, we can work from home - our dog is old, blind and senile and when my wife went on a training course (she works until 14:00 usually), I worked at home for the week, to ensure the dog was looked after.
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I envy your civilised commute, though. Despite living in London with excellent public transport, most of the jobs I got were based in “business parks” - those out-of-town collections of offices thrown up on farmland in remote locations around outer London. Only reachable by car, and always involving the M25, that wonderful orbital motorway which seemed to attract all the worst drivers, especially at times of high traffic. There were so many stoppages caused by accidents every day, and they just seemed to be worse the earlier I started the journey:
Leave home at 8 - get to the office at 9:30.
Leave home at 7 - get to the office at 9:30.
Leave home at 6 - get to the office at 9:30.
I’m so glad I don’t have to do that any more!
I used to commute from the New Forest to South every day for about a year, that was hard, and I only had a bit of the M25 to go around. I used to ride my motorbike on Fridays, when the weather was dry. It would make about a 4 hour difference over driving with the car.
Now, it is 12-15 minutes on the bicycle.
@Leo it is Gouda cheese, not gooder 
pronounced more gowdar that gooder.
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Regarding Meta and illegally downloading books and training in general.
If I walk into a bookshop and start reading all of their books from A to Z, they would very quickly ban me from the shop. I don’t see anything different with the AIs, if they are reading the books, they should license them.
The other part is that they are trained in everything they can crawl, whether it is a serious source or a spammer of fake news, hate or whatever and, from what we know, no weighting of those sources, to keep the knowledge of fake news as fake and can be referred to in that context, but not pulled into serious answers…
It is simply a case of garbage in, garbage out. The garbage is free to suck up and the quality information costs money and is either stolen or ignored, depending on how easy it is to find a way of avoiding having to license it.
I want to like AI, but the companies behind it aren’t exactly doing themselves any favours…
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I get the argument that parents should ultimately be the ones deciding whether their child can access certain websites. Being a parent myself - I want that judgment.
With that said, many parents are not as immersed in technology as we are. They are accountants, plumbers, carpenters, check-out people, teachers, government employees, bankers, and so forth. They lack the depth of knowledge to make an informed decision, which is what we really want out of a parent. It’s no different than me paying an accountant to prepare my taxes. Why? Because I’m not an expert on the tax code. It’s why I engage an attorney to prepare my will or power of attorney.
The premise that parents can make informed decisions works only if the parent has the expertise and knowledge necessary to make that informed decision. It’s not just their awareness of the child’s maturity - it’ s their comprehension of the technology and how it impacts their child. A parent cannot teach what they do not know or understand. Many of us put things on Facebook and Myspace and other social media before we truly understood exactly what we were doing. Many people still don’t understand - or worse, like Leo and what the government is doing - have given up trying to do anything about it.
I don’t have a solution, but I know the discussion is worth having.
I would also like to say - while I appreciate someone playing the Devil’s Advocate some of the time, I think that the Devil tends to have enough advocates already.
Many times - it’s obvious why a person or company is doing something awful. I don’t necessarily need one more person to take their side just for the sake of a ‘balanced’ discussion.
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Too much politics. Turned it off after 15 or so minutes.
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Yeah, that’s really the problem with TWIT, too much politics with no diversity or inclusion of other perspectives in the discussion, they all agree on the same progressive ideology. So boring.
To bring some diversity to the discussion. The disagreement on DEI Diversity Equity and Inclusion is over the E Equity. Our country was founded on the principle of Equal Opportunity. Not on Equity of outcome. No business will stay in business long if they don’t hire the best people possible for a job.
Leo I’ve been listening to you for decades, I’m tired of what the show has become, the constant liberal mental masturbation going on, the political sky is falling instead of a discussion on technology, and the big ideas. You’re stuck in a rut and that I think is part of the reason your loosing audience.
Novel idea! How about an actual discussion with people doing the real work, and what they think and want to have happen with new technology. Bring back the Technologizer! Stop with the leftist journalists as the only commentators, talking about solving problems we don’t have in ways we don’t care or alienates the audience. Or just make it entertaining! I want to see the show continue but not in its present form.
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Thank you. I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Edit: I’m replying to veronivincent, not thecastle.
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The “E” is about opportunity, and not outcomes. Feel free to disagree with anything, but that is a key tenant. It’s about widening your net to find and the best and most deserving no matter race, religion, etc. For too long (and we are going back there again) people in hiring positions would narrow the field.
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Not to mention, the parent who works 3 jobs on top of being a parent might not have the same ability to monitor everything as someone who has the luxury of being home more. We have a ton of rules/laws already. My parents would have let me go to see a rated R movie with friends, but that is not “allowed” based on a system in place. I could not by cigarettes at 15 or beer at 17. Why not let parents do the deciding there? I can make a researched back argument that algorithm based social media is as addictive and harmful to children as nicotine. This would be based on brain development.
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Personally, I enjoy the political aspect of discussions. Technology has become almost meta in a way - it is a part of everything, and politics is no exception to that. The uses to which we as people and a society put technology is worth discussing as much as the technology itself. The questions that are raised and that we individually and collectively have to answer are worth discussing. It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoy Corey Doctorow, Amy Webb, and Cathy Gellis (and Lisa Schmeiser is no slouch in this area either).
People like to believe that tech, isolated and alone, is the only thing worth discussing. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We split the atom for both energy and for destruction - yes, the science is fascinating, but the uses have to be considered as well.
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When my kids (both age 11) play with their friends online, I’m always surprised as it seems we are the only ones who set time limits.
We have Apple, Google, and Microsoft families set up but none of them works perfectly. I swore I turned off reddit in Apple’s but that didn’t take. They know they can get around youtube limits by playing the videos in a browser search. While Apple’s is pretty good, they don’t offer the same app limits on the TV, so it’s constantly chasing them to get off youtube there. And while Google has device time limits, they don’t offer account level time limits.
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