Not the best anagram, but it kind of fits.

An ex-Amazon employee who now works for Google told me that every year the Product Managers have to come up with ideas for new products or product lines. The trick he said was that those PM's just look through all the sales data at what is doing well and take the best selling items or services. It's done on the retail side and on the AWS side.

There's plenty of evidence that this approach is approved of or endorsed by management though. In the retail world, home brands usually don't try to piss off the national brand or "genuine article" because those sellers pay for shelf space, placements and ads, but it seems like with Amazon they don't care and are just happy to wipe them out and take it all. After all, who gets on the front page of Amazon so much? Amazon shit. If Amazon could sell you an Amazon version of every top selling item or service, they would. The only down side is that they are killing off the companies that actually come up with new ideas. If your skill is just ripping off innovators, then you'd think you'd kill off the innovation. Unfortunately, as Amazon is the 500lb gorilla, there are plenty of suckers who want to sell through them.

I used to work for a big Californian smartphone chip maker and every quarter we'd have division execs give the employees a state of the nation presentation. It was clear that they never adjusted their slides or speaking points from what they had just told investors on the earnings call. There was no understanding that the audience had changed and that employees cared about completely different things. They didn't even try and were often shocked by the venomous questions in the Q&A sessions (there's nothing a semi-retired engineer loves other than to tell it how it is). The reward structure for a lot of execs is all geared around Wall St numbers, their own personal stock plans, and zero to do with the actual business of making products or employee morale. Thankfully, at least one doofus exec was ousted - but like almost all execs - they don't actually get fired, they just transfer to a different Santa Clara chip company where their toxic vision could continue. I quit and joined a startup and have never looked back!

If the music on a twitch stream is just In the background, then Iâ(TM)d like to see at AI engine replace it with something else, maybe a cover version that has more permissive licensing. Iâ(TM)m pretty sure that once music has been identified, it should be possible to extract it from the stream and replace it with something else. Then all the clips could be kept. Indeed, you could even have listeners decide which background music to listen to when viewing. I know it wonâ(TM)t solve actual game play music, but a lot of streamers stick music on in the background while they play so itâ(TM)s solve this problem. I bet Twitch could invest in some academics to get this done if they wanted.

It uses its turn signals...

I assume that there's some part of the generation algorithm that does some sanity checking on the output. Now what we need is that part to be amped up into a bot of its own that will evaluate what was written and give feedback on whether it's worth a damn.

Indeed. This ranking is silly. It's like saying Philips head screwdrivers are more popular than flat head screwdrivers. They are for different purposes.

Indeed. I believe the same thing happened when Google started to scan books. As soon as they became accessible the trolls came out of the woodwork.

My first job out of college was for Mitsubishi Electric in Japan. I was recruited to help internationalize the workforce and encourage them to do simple things like take holidays and finish work around 5pm. I was an electronic engineer and I'd just come from the UK with a degree specializing in micro-electronics, VSLI design, and other specialities. I was excited to go to the home of consumer electronics having grown up with brands like Sony, Sanyo, Hitachi, Panasonic, Toshiba, Casio and Mitsubishi. I thought it'd be like a ballet dancer going to Paris, the chance to work with the best of the best. Holy crap. It was like going back in time. Everything was paper-based. Circuit design was done on paper. PCBs were laid out on tracing paper, one for each layer. Reports were hand written and submitted each week. You bought your own notebooks and 0.5mm pencils. The idea of using CAD, or simulators, was unheard of. Thankfully, I had worked at GEC-Marconi Research in the 80s and learned how to make technical drawings and my written Japanese was not too bad, so I survived. However, it was all grind. The highest technology they had was an ISDN fax machine that could send pages through extremely fast. It was a sight to behold.

At first, none of us had computers. The programmers had them, but electronic engineers had nothing. There were old HP Apollo workstations in a computer lab that could be used. They were also connected to the internal IP network. There was no external network access, but weirdly, you could receive emails from outside the company. One day, I found out that my American friend who worked at a Mitsubishi site in Kobe could send email outside the company. After some research (no WWW back then, so I just read books), I found out that I could send email outside the company if I added the domain name of the Kobe facility to the end of the outbound email address, for example anon@foo.com@kobe-mitsu.co.jp. This was in the days before spam and when smtp servers would forward anything. As I could receive email directly, this enabled me to have an active working email! The next step was to get a tool chain for the workstations. To do that DEC had an FTP by email service. You'd send a bot a request to FTP something for you and then it'd email it to you in unencoded chunks of emails. I downloaded gcc and other tools and managed to build a number of binaries to run on the work station. However, what I wanted to do was have a way to get email on my newly acquired Compaq black and white passive matrix LCD laptop that was at my desk back in the main work hall (a place of about 500 desks full of people where I worked every day). My laptop was on the same LAN as the Apollo workstations, but it was running Windows 3.1 and DOS. I had an email client called Eudora (or something similar) that I wanted to use. The issue was that I needed something to run on the workstation that I could talk to. I found what I needed - Popper, a POP3 compliant postmaster app that would enable me to access the email on the workstations. However, it needed to run as root.

After hacking around on the system for a week or so, I managed to find out that the /etc/rc directories were actually world writable! This was incredible, because anything placed in them would be executed as root on boot up. I didn't have the ability to reboot the workstations, but I had access to the power cable. So, I stuck scripts in there, yanked the power cord (sorry hard disk) and power cycled. Popper was installed and suddenly, the whole section had email at their desks. No one asked me how I did it, but they were all using it.

After about a year, the local IT folks suddenly got the message that sending email externally was something that would actually be useful for work and so we were told they would enable it. However, they would only allow it on a white list basis. You had to provide a list of email addresses that you wanted to send email to and have it approved by your boss. It all had to be printed out, prefaced with the appropriate request cover sheet, stamped and then sent via internal mail to the IT people. By then I was on a number of mailing lists and had healthy conversations going with a number of folks external to the company so I'd say I had about 50 to 100 email addresses on my list. I dutifully printed them all out and submitted them. After about a week the rejection came through - too many. I didn't care much because I was already bypassing their firewall.

During this time, consumer internet and the WWW arrived. I had signed up at home and my top of the line imported Pentium 120MHz Gateway 2000 was regularly dialing up gol.com (Global Online) Osaka's finest ISP pretty much every night. I found myself dying to use tools like AltaVista (at the time, the fastest search engine out there) at work to find out answers to technical problems. I purchased a 3COM PCMCIA modem for my craptop and surreptitiously would remove the RJ45 cable from the shared office phone to dial up my own ISP from work. One day I was doing a search when I felt the presence of someone looking over my shoulder. As we had no cubes, everyone could see everything you did, but as most of my work was in English, they never bothered much, but Mr. Tanaka was a smart, but elderly chap who was pretty good at English and my web browsing had caught his eye. Mr Takana was technically a section chief (Kacho), but he did not have any section to manage. Some of the older managers ended up in a special area in the great hall where they would have the nice desk, the chair with arms, and even a secretary, but no actual section. I was told they were parked there and they did their own thing, not really reporting to anyone or responsible for anything, but still part of the overall department. Anyway, he really was a nice guy and just at that moment I had done a search for something and ended up on a German web site where I was sifting though some academic paper on the topic I was searching for. He asked me what I'd done:

"cliff jumper-chan, what did you just do?"
"Oh, I wanted to find out about this topic, so I did a search for it, then I clicked on the link and got to this document"
"But it looks like it is in Germany. Is it really in Germany?"
"Yes, but I'm not actually dialing Germany, it's using a network that passes on packets of data so, it's um, kind of free"

At this point, I thought I was for the chopper and there was going to be a huge explosion of misunderstanding. Back then, the whole concept of the Internet was not widely understood but people did understand international telephone calls and that they cost a LOT of money. Instead, he said with huge eyes "but it is sooo quick! How does it work? Can you search for something for me?"

After that, I showed him how quickly it all worked. Altavista would show you how quickly a search took under the results and how quickly, even at 14.4K documents from anywhere in the world could be viewed. He was stunned. But then he leaned in close and said "You better not show this to anyone else. I don't think it is allowed!" And so I nodded, disconnected and counted myself lucky. That gaijin (foreigner) get out of jail free card had paid off again.

After I left I went to work in the US and there too there were fits and starts with Internet freedom at work. We had Slotus Notes for a while which would cache everything anyone asked for (yes, I would look through the cache and peruse the pron others thought no one knew they were viewing). We also veering into too much access where you could put machines outside the corporate firewall if you knew how. But in the end, we ended up in a reasonable situation where most US companies will have a guest WiFi network for visitors and employees have WiFi and VPNs from home, etc. But not. in Japan.

I still go to Japan regularly and held ANA top status (not any more, thanks Covid) and the IT policies that Japanese employees have to put up with fall strongly in line with Dilbert's Mordac, preventer of information services philosophy. For a long time, WiFi was forbidden. You could only connect over Ethernet and then only with an approved MAC address. Once you connected, there was a captured portal for any web address that would require you to login with your employee id number and password. After that, all web traffic would be proxied, but with a really ancient, horribly incompatible proxy, so only web browsing would work and not much else. Any website that had any possible entertainment aspect would be blocked. When I started trying to share YouTube videos with staff in Japan to share unboxing videos of our competitor's products, I'd receive polite requests to send the URL to their personal email addresses because YouTube is blocked in most Japanese companies.

Visit a Japanese company today and you'll be lucky to get guest WiFi. It's best to take your own hotspot with you instead. This is just par for the course. Japanese companies cannot handle the idea of anyone using their Internet. Even "free WiFi" in Japan is mainly just for foreigners who suitably register to get it.

I have seen some Japanese workers manage to bypass corporate IT in clever ways. One group I worked with had a meeting room that had a DSL modem in it to a local ISP. It enabled them to use Skype so they could do cheap video conferences with the US. Skype was banned for employees, but this secret internet connection enabled them to get around that and do the calls with their US partner. In another instance, the Japanese team was so unable to spend any money that the US partner bought them a speaker phone so they could do teleconferences.

I should stop rambling, but here's my take away:

1. They are incredibly risk averse and the Internet is full of risk
2. They have very little budget for anything, even basic items like notebooks, pens or office furniture is rarely bought.
3. They are really bad at adopting new thing or changing processes. The rule is that the 2nd time though, it's easy, but the 1st time is impossible.
4. They are not as high-tech as you'd expect. A lot of the innovation came in the 80s and since then, it's been all about perfecting what already exists, to the nth degree.

I'd love for Japan to get back to being super high-tech. I wonder if they'll ever get back to that.

I totally agree with you. When I got sick once I assumed there would be a bug tracker equivalent where Iâ(TM)d be assigned to different DRIs who would have me on their todo list until I got well. Not only was there not such thing but I was the only DRI who cared about me. I had to be the squeaky wheel constantly trying to get seen by various specialists. I work in tech and we find, fix and resolve bugs all the time. Weâ(TM)ve developed practices and technology to do that and we do it all day every day. Unless there are some doctors who came from tech (Iâ(TM)ve seen the other way around) I donâ(TM)t think they are benefiting from all these possibilities. The only time they seem interested is when itâ(TM)s to satisfy legal requirements.

The vast majority of connected devices connect to a server somewhere. That server costs money to run and for a lot of companies, the whole thing is a pyramid scheme where newer buyers fund the service. It's not just this business either - years ago the Guardian Newspaper sold their mobile app for $14 - a one time fee. However, users could keep the app going for years, never paying more than the original $14. Great deal for the users, bad deal for the newspaper. The business model opted for short-term gain and kicked the can down the road on how to grow the business. Another example, Owlet, a smart baby sock company that measures baby heartbeats. Fantastic idea. So good that when your baby grows up, you give your cool bit of kit to your sister, or you sell it 2nd hand. You make some money, but Owlet doesn't. I wonder how many years those things get used for over their lifetime.

There are three answers to this:

1) Subscription model
2) Kill the service after a period of time, either explicitly or by making the item just fail.
3) Use a gadget backed by a company who will be around

Subscriptions have been incredibly difficult to make work for smart devices, but do exist. Usually, there's a freemium model where you get something for "nothing" and pay extra for premium things, like recordings. See NestCam/DropCam, etc. If you get enough paying subs, then this can work, just about. Cameras are particularly hard because they use so much bandwidth.

The second option is that you get the service for a period of time, and then it stops. Maybe you have to pay for it to continue, but basically, the online part of the system goes away. BMW tried to make their online car be subscription after a year, and even though that is LTE enabled, the uptake is very low. Tesla give it away, but exchange it for all the data they get from the fleet. The fear is that if people knew their camera would stop working after 1 year, they wouldn't buy it in the first place.

The 3rd option is that you go with a company that you know will stick around. However, even this doesn't guarantee anything. Google bought Xivly a while ago and shut it down sending a number of customers into a panic. Backend service can be very expensive, both to design right, manage and operate. Cheap Chinese gadget makers and 24x7 five 9's service don't go hand in hand. Services are emerging, backed by heavyweight companies who have an interest in making this a success though so watch this space. Fundamentally, the money has to make sense. One thing has to pay for the other.

Now, there are some other potential options:

  - build it yourself - engineers love to do this, but the whole maker thing in IOT is small potatoes. Millions of lightbulbs are sold every year. It's a tiny percentage of folks would would set up their own IOT system. If you know someone who has their own mail server, or flashed their own router with Tomato then you know that type of person.
- Pseudo P2P - this is especially popular for cameras because of the high bandwidth. You run a matchmaking service that enables a user's iPhone to link directly with the NannyCam. You still have to handle the matchmaking, but it's low bandwidth compared to storing video. A lot of the cheaper cams use this.
- Real P2P - this is the nirvana of the IOT zealots (hey, it's called "Internet-of-Things" NOT "Things-Connected-to-a-server!") - a decentralized, open standards based, P2P system with no dependencies. Sounds great, and it'd be good to make it happen, somehow. But companies who sell *products* want products that work and can be tested, so you don't see a lot of P2P smart gadgets for sale, yet. Also, you'll still need someone to provide security updates and things like mobile app updates and those have to be paid for somehow. Tech is a moving target and so are the hackers who would love to turn on every single AC in the EU at once.

The final option is to go low-tech and not connect. However, there is definitely value to connecting some things (except dishwashers - this was researched and there is no value in connecting these, ever. Evaaar!). What I would look for is what the UK is making a requirement and that is for manufacturers to declare up front how many years any particular device will receive software updates. That will give you an idea of how long the thing may operate. I expect it'll be typically the same as the warranty, but we might see some vendors going for it like the Japanese and Korean car makers did with their car warranties and we'll see 10-year software update guarantees. That will sort the sheep from the goats and help consumers judge for themselves.

I have a smell in a room in my house that I really want to identify, and more accurately find out where it's coming from so I can remove it. I've tried a lot of different approaches - using paper towels taped to spots around the room with aluminum foil on the back. You wait a few days and then remove them and take a big sniff. Ideally, you wear a respirator between sniffs for about 20 minutes so your nose gets completely cleared of ambient smells. This didn't reveal anything. I repainted the whole room, but there's still the smell. I've been under the room in the crawl space and no dead animals and I've checked the vents with a camera and those are clear too. I suspect it may just be in the wood flooring because the previous owner used the room for smoking. I thought there would be a sniffer tool to identify smells but there isn't! Well, not one I can buy at Home Depot anyway. Maybe one day a thing like this will tell me what the stink is.

For anyone interested in this topic in science fiction: Tal M. Klien's "The Punch Escrow" has teleportation as the core of the book. In it a company - International Transportation - claims to have solved the issues of teleportation such as this via a thing called the "punch escrow" and in the process has become the most powerful corporation in the world because everyone now uses teleportation to get around. Everything is hunky-dory until some terrorist blows up a teleportation station mid-transport and the hero of the story accidentally duplicated while teleporting.

This is fascinating and I never knew about this variation and the reasoning. Back in the 90's I loved chess and wrote chess games for the early handhelds that were out then, e.g., Handspring Visor, Compaq iPaq, T-Mobile Sidekick, etc. My focus was on the front-end and for the back-end, I used GNU Chess. The trick was to run GNU Chess on a server hosted in "the cloud" (actually a rack server at a local ISP) and have it equipped with a huge "book" of opening moves and games - something that would never have fit on these rinky-dink devices of the time. Then the lightweight frontend would just display the outcome on these devices. For the iPaq, and PC's, I was able to use Flash (Flash Lite) and the graphics and animations were excellent. I was also able to extend the approach to games like Backgammon and even Pool/Billiards. However, during that time of testing and playing, I realized how sterile the computer chess play was and how to win I would have to at least memorize the opening book. The disillusionment set in and I gave up chess. Nowadays I still play a lot of board games but never chess. This version though sounds like it could be a good idea to try!

Years ago, I caught a ton of flack from my peers for applying for a job at Microsoft. I was accused of joining the "Death Star". More recently, but still pre-Nadella, I worked with a number of Microsoft teams and found them sadly, highly dysfunctional and full of infighting. I was told it was partly due to the stack-ranking system that would actually make people glad to have a dumb ass join the team. Since Nadella really took over, I've seen significant strides in the right direction in terms of Linux and Android. In comparison with their neighbor Amazon, it now seems like a much better place to work and to work with. I'd be interested to hear what others think.