Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a public relations firm based in Las Vegas. He's best known to me as the most entertaining critic when it comes to technology, particularly Silicon Valley technology companies. His newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, and podcast, Better Offline, are both worth subscribing to.

He made 2 memorable podcast appearances this week. The first was as a replacement for Leo Laporte, who is on holidays, on This Week in Google on the TWiT podcast network. The second was as a guest on the Tech Won't Save Us podcast hosted by Paris Marx.

Ed can be too caustic for some people. He can be insulting about people he doesn't like and is more confrontational when products don't meet the hype. There is a danger in this approach that you can be too dismissive of new technology that is not ready for prime time. However, he seems to be right about cryptocurrencies and the metaverse at this point in time. I'm not sure he's wrong about AI yet.

One of the topics covered included an interesting story from The Information about Amazon and Google trying to quietly bring down expectations on generative AI.

Cory Doctorow delivered the Marshall McLuhan lecture in Berlin on January 30th, 2024. It was recorded and posted on YouTube. There are also contributions from Frederike Kaltheuner and Helen Starr.

transmediale McLuhan Lecture 2024 with Cory Doctorow and Frederike Kaltheuner.

Justin Garrsion wrote a really interesting article on how Amazon have used their return to office (RTO) policy to quietly lay people off. I heard about while listening to his interview on The Changelog podcast "Amazon's silent sacking with Justin Garrison" which is an excellent interview about the topic.

A prediction he makes is that AWS will have a major outage in 2024 as a result of these layoffs.

Many of the service teams have lost a lot of institutional knowledge as part of RTO. Teams were lean before 2023, now they’re emaciated.

...

I suspect there’ll be a major AWS outage in 2024. No amount of multi-region redundancy will protect you.

There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.

Amazon's Silent Sacking (Justin Garrison)

AWS provides the resources for a surprisingly large portion of the internet that when it goes down, it can cause major problems for other businesses like it did in 2021 and 2023. Netflix wrote about what they learned from an AWS outage in 2011 but their service still went down when AWS did in 2021.

Amazon used to speak of their "customer obsession" and "customer-centric innovation" but cutting teams in the knowledge that AWS services are going to degrade doesn't seem obsessed by the customer. It looks more like another step on the road to "enshittification" that Cory Doctorow wrote about.

The fact that a large part of the internet is built on such a fragile foundation is a problem but that isn't the real issue.

The real issue is how they treat their employees. The stories of how badly they treat their warehouse workers and delivery drivers are common. I know that a software engineer losing their job because they can't or won't go into the office is not the same.

It's still is a family losing an income. It's someone worrying that they can't make rent or a mortgage payment. It's struggling to find work to replace the salary you lost. Being laid off is hard enough. Pretending that it's a breach of the RTO policy for the company to save face is insulting.

404 Media reported on a study published by German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence titled "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines".

Google isn't the only search engine dealing with this issue. Jason Keobler writes:

Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures.

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

The research does highlight how much damage search engine optimization (SEO) has done to the ecosystem of the internet. The release of generative AI is only going to make the problem worse. Amazon is dealing with product titles and reviews being generated using ChatGPT.

David Roth had a good piece on Defector about the promises made by the developers and boosters of AI and its actual use in the present day.

One reason it is not very interesting is that everything they have touted as the future of some essential human thing or other—the future of art, or money—has mostly crashed out in ways that left behind very little useful residue. Another is that the ways in which AI is used in the present, by your lower-effort plagiarists and scammers, are so manifestly not the future of anything that works, but rather both the present and the future of shitting-up web search results, which is roughly analogous to saying that robocalls about homeowners insurance are the future of human communication.

The Future Of E-Commerce Is A Product Whose Name Is A Boilerplate AI-Generated Apology (David Roth/Defector)

This is the talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the DEF CON Conference earlier this year. The whole talk is a lot of fun. A room full of hackers is a receptive audience for his message. It's well worth watching or listening to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4