The WAN Show - Facebook NEVER learns - WAN Show April 12, 2019

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

Squarespace: Visit https://www.squarespace.com/WAN and use offer code WAN for 10% off Displate: Check out Displate's metal posters at https://lmg.gg/displatewan PIA: Sign up for Private Internet Access VPN at https://lmg.gg/piawan Get LTX 2019 Featuring DreamHack tickets NOW at https://dh.je/ltx19 Timestamps (Courtesy of pol bol) 0:00 - WAN show is on time 0:28 - INTRO 1:18 - Valve addressing review bombing 15:49 - Strawpoll do you read reviews 18:30 - Strawpoll results 18:33 - Audio breaks 20:07 - Audio fixed 20:56 - Facebook photos patent 26:57 - Sponsor: Squarespace 28:06 - Sponsor: Displate 29:40 - Sponsor: Private Internet Access 31:12 - Amazon workers listening to what you tell Alexa 43:18 - Super chats 46:38 - Walmart deploying more robots 49:24 - Why we need store employees 49:57 - What is a nubbit? 53:10 - James wants robots instead of people 56:38 - OUTRO (welcome to the Nubbit show) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the WAN Show. It's on time. Weird, isn't it? It's crazy. It's like someone isn't here. We've got some pretty interesting topics this week. Valve to address review bombing in new update to user review systems. Interesting. Also, even potentially more interesting, Facebook patent to use user ads, user photos, as ads. Also, Amazon workers may be listening to you through your Echo device. Done. All this and more.

Roll the intro. Boom! Wow. It's Friday. Squarespace. Squarespace. Private Internet Access. P-I-A.

And I'm trying to do this thing over here. Displate. Displate. Displate. Displate. Displate right here. Displate! Displate! Displate. Displate. Displate. Displate right here. Displate behind me.

Hold on. Let me just make sure this thing is going. Looks like it is, and we're back. We're back, baby. There we go. See Displate? Yes. We'll get to that.

Yeah. But first. Valve addressing review bombing. You see this pretty often, actually. Review bombing, that is? Yeah. Tell us about it. So a new game will come out, especially for smaller games,

where 100, 200 reviews is going to be a very significant portion of the reviews on the platform. You will see brigading, where a group of people decide that they don't like or that they do like. I believe review bombing has happened in the other direction as well. It's something it's probably more common on Amazon. Like we need to, it's basically upvoting it. Let's get this to the front page. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just like how on Amazon people can buy positive reviews.

I don't necessarily know if this stuff is purchased, but you'll get a group of people that, whether they've really played a game or not, they have like one minute on record. They're like, this is the greatest thing ever. Very positive review. So yeah, I think it goes in both directions. And the ways that Valve wants to address this I think are pretty interesting. This is driving me nuts. There's these headphones that are plugged in right now,

and everything we say is coming out of them, and I can just vaguely hear it on the side. So when review bombing happens, is that usually when the game comes out or is it sometimes just randomly like five years later? Yeah, it can happen way later down the line too. One of the interesting ones is like a patch will come out or an expansion or something and it'll get tanked at that point in time. And on Steam you can see all time and recent.

So if you're viewing a game and the all time is very positive, but the recent is very negative, that's pretty bad as well. So it can take a surprisingly low amount of reviews to really sway people's perceptions because if you have enough people to slam a game that's decently old, but you can make the recent go to very positive or very negative or whatever way you want to push it, you can really affect people's

decisions on things. So where are those brigades organized? Does it usually happen on the subreddit for the game or Discord? Gaming subreddits, gaming Discord, there's a bunch of different ways. I think there's also a little bit where like, this is almost more of a mentality thing. I think there's

two other things going on too. One, if you where like, this is almost more of a mentality thing. I think there's two other things going on too. Is one, if you're like, eh, I'm not really sure, and then you see the game and it has mixed reviews, you'll probably go, yeah, and give it a mixed review. If you're like, eh, I'm not really sure, but everyone else is rating it very positive, you might go like, eh, it was pretty all right. So I think there's some that happens

where it's just things are swayed. But another problem that they're going after is something that i saw on um and this actually pissed me off i saw this on a local review of mucho burrito recently okay um some guy rated it one star because he ordered some mucho burrito from skip the dishes and, and the delivery was late or something. Ah, that's weak. That's a completely unrelated thing. And one of the ways that Valve wants to address this is to...

This is actually exactly what they're talking about with this new announcement. They want to deal with off-topic review. Right, so let's just introduce it in terms of the article. Yeah. So in an effort to keep games review scores, which is something we didn't talk about yet, is not only are people leaving reviews,

but the reviews they leave are contributing to an overall review score. In an effort to keep the games review scores as a meaningful indicator for whether or not someone should buy the game, Valve is now rolling out a new review system for Steam that detects off-topic review bombing and removes the impact of these reviews from the game's review store.

Important distinction there. They are not removing the reviews. The reviews are staying on there. You can still read all of them. They're just removing the contribution of those reviews to the overall score. It's not fair. Let's say there's a lot of the off-topic DRM things the contribution of those reviews to the overall score. It's not fair.

Let's say there's a lot of the off-topic DRM things are about DRM. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or in Steam's estimation here, they have a little criteria that they decide. I do kind of think that should affect it personally. Well, this is the meat of this topic. It's the gray area. So we've already defined for you what a review bomb is. Now let's talk about what an off topic review bomb is. Steam says, when the focus of those reviews

is on a topic that Valve considers unrelated to the likelihood that future purchasers will be happy if they buy the game, and hence not something that should be added to the review score. Okay, yeah see, because like, if we pull this away from gaming temporarily, not something that should be added to the review score. Okay. Yeah, see, because if we pull this away from gaming temporarily, if you wanted to review something on Rotten Tomatoes and you went to go review Hellboy,

which is currently 11 out of 100, and you were like... Think about it on both sides. If you wanted to rate a movie a zero, or just don't do it because it's rotten tomatoes because you went to the theater and the popcorn sucked yeah that would be really stupid just like the skip the dishes thing yeah if you wanted to review hellboy as uh definitely go watch it because the popcorn was great that's equally stupid so like i i i like the getting rid

of off-topic things i am going to be very interested in what they deem as off-topic because the DRM thing is extremely on-topic in my opinion. So on their announcement blog, there's a section at the bottom. Underneath where they outline what they're doing, they have a Q&A section and DRM is actually specifically called out there. And the Q part is, I care about some things that I worry other players don't, like DRM or EULA changes.

Review bombs have been... EULA changes are also super important. Review bombs have been about them in the past. Do you consider them unrelated or off-topic? And the answer is, we had long debates about these two and others like them. They're technically not part of the game, but they are an issue for some players. In the end, we decided to define them as off-topic

because the general Steam player doesn't care as much about them. So the review score is more accurate if it doesn't contain them. In addition, we believe that players who do care about topics like DRM are often willing to dig a little deeper into games before purchasing, which is why we still keep all the reviews within the review bombs.

It only takes a minute to dig into those reviews to see if the issue is something you care about. Which basically no one's going to do. Well, they're saying that the people... Fair enough. Sass. Sass face. That's really annoying to me because games like uh i don't even know if this was on steam to be completely honest but the newer assassin's creed games uh origins i believe

specifically had a denuvo or something i think it had like three different layers of drm and it was crippling i i did a stream of that game when it first came out and ran my like cpu usage statistics the entire time I was playing and would go into different areas and look at things as well as benchmarking it. So I was like, holy crap, this thing is thrashing me way harder than it should be and it was really interesting to test.

That doesn't mean it's a good game for people because the system's getting thrashed and I found it interesting. It does not mean it's good for the general person. But I do think a lot of people should know because it was genuinely really hard for people to run if they didn't have a decent enough CPU enough so maybe don't buy it yeah so it's true and that you don't buy a damn game and then there's there's been was it a kerbal space program

or something had a really weird eula update that made it so that like yeah you probably shouldn't buy this game oh wow i don't i don, I could be super inflammatory saying Kerbal Space Program. Now I must know. EULA spyware. EULA. End-user license agreement guys. Kerbal Space Program's new EULA makes it spyware. Take two is not quite the headline. Yeah I don't know very much about this to be completely clear um and i think it's going to take quite a bit to dive into but my stance is just going to be that eula updates are very important okay um and and drm stuff can be very important i think i think people review bombing every single game that comes out that has DRM on it is like maybe a little excessive. But when people are like, the DRM implementation in this game is ridiculous

and extremely detrimental, and we should probably all get very angry about this, I think that's very valid. Well, luckily for people like you and those who share your opinion, you can completely opt out of this. You can entirely opt out. So there's going to be a checkbox, or I think it's there now. There is now a checkbox in your Steam store options

where you can choose to have off-topic review bombs still included in all the review scores you see. Sweet. Cool. Thank you for the option. Yeah, sounds good. So we have a little bit more information about how they're doing this, what their process is.

Basically they made some kind of automated tool that looks at the frequency of reviews. So let's say a game came out, it's been out for two years, and suddenly it gets a huge number of reviews. It'll get flagged, and that's all the tool does. The tool doesn't try to figure out why at all. All it does is say, hey look at this anonymous activity and then a team of humans will then look at it.

And then these people have already been trained at looking at review bombs in the past or off topic review bombs in the past. So they can determine. I mean, because there's review bombs that are normal. You know, like a lot of reviews because the game came out today. And we all love it.

We all want everyone to buy Red Dead or something risk of rain to Drain to was a game that had like almost no marketing and then got Positively review bombed if you want to call it that because tons of people that played it thought it was amazing and then it Sold really well, it's great. Here's another little wrinkle. When they determine that this period of time represents an off-topic review bomb, they don't have much sensitivity in saying which are gonna stay and which are gonna be deemed bad. So it's like, okay, this weekend, this two-day period,

people were, you were getting review bombed, we're gonna remove all of those reviews from contributing to the review score. Well, even if you just legitimately happened to review that day and it was a genuine review that's not about DRM or EULA or something that they think is off topic,

your review is going to get discounted too. That's super bad in my opinion. Yes, it is. But I think it's a drop in the bucket for the overall score. Probably. But that nullifies major, not really because then if the,

so that nullifies major EULA and DRM and whatever else they decide is off topic changes from being noticed by the general public because most people are not gonna, I will, most people are not gonna go into their settings and make it so that this thing doesn't apply to them. And most people, if, let's assume the Kerbal Space Program thing is real. I don't know. I never looked into it too deeply. I just shared it to one of my friends that plays the game.

And I don't know. But let's assume that it's spyware now. I don't know. Hypothetically. Hypothetically. I would want to know that. That EULA is technically unrelated or whatever they called it. So the recent reviews would still show up as very positive, I believe, because I believe that's what Curl Space Program is. But the recent reviews when that came out made it very negative. So the score would be positive. The written reviews would still be negative.

Yeah. But most people aren't going to scroll through the reviews. They're just going to go, oh, all time very positive, would be positive. The recent. The written reviews would still be negative. Yeah. Yeah. But most people aren't going to scroll through the reviews. They're just going to go, oh, all time very positive, recent very positive. Sounds good. Game looks interesting. Let's go. Oh, I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, let's say everyone goes and bombs it. Yeah.

And the score is unaltered because they deemed it off topic. What I'm saying is if there happened to be a guy who came in and just gave a review during that same weekend and was like, and doesn't know. Oh, no, I know. I know. I know. So what I'm saying with that is like, it will nullify any of this news, basically. Because, oh, no. Yeah, I guess because that's. Yeah, no, I guess what I'm saying is pretty off. All right. Sounds good. I just, I guess. I guess what I'm saying is pretty off. All right. Sounds good. It's still valid.

Yeah. I don't like the idea that you're nullifying everything. Because it will make any major change that people like that isn't directly related to gameplay. Because I think that's effectively what they're saying. Is only gameplay things will ever get mentioned. Well, they're not explicitly saying that. That might be de facto what it means. Yeah, definitely. But it feels like that's what it's going to end up being.

Any problem that is ever unrelated to gameplay, I'm assuming at this point, is just going to disappear. So you're saying, by saying that, I think you're indicating that the score is very important. That's the main thing you look at as a Steam user. I would assume it's the main thing that a lot of people look at. Because it's the main thing you look at as a Steam user. I would assume it's the main thing

that a lot of people look at because it's the main thing that's projected. When you go to a game on the store, let's try this out. Let's look at Risk of Rain. That's actually the forecast for this weekend on Saturday. Okay. Let's go to my screen.

Risk of Rain 2. It doesn't have a recent because the game just freaking came out so it makes sense all reviews Overwhelmingly positive 10,000 reviews. I don't think most people are gonna click on this They're just gonna see overwhelmingly positive and go great this game this video. That's auto playing looks interesting It's overwhelmingly positive Maybe scroll down and see like... What do you have to do to get through the... you just scroll down? Couple of my friends play it, whatever. I think you have to go pretty far. Recent updates about the game, key features, system requirements, more like this, what curators say, reviews down here.

I don't think most people are reading reviews. They're super buried. I think you can get there... Straw poll? Sweet. Straw poll. They're they're super buried. I think you can get a whole Sweet straw poll this is going to be so before we do this drop pull I'm gonna say this is gonna be one of the more skewed straw polls that we have Because we're gonna have a whole bunch of power users but if it says a whole bunch of power users are not reading reviews I'm pushing back on that because I don't think you need to be a power user to read reviews because I think we have

Such an e-commerce culture now I always read the views on Amazon I'm used to scrolling all the way to the bottom of an Amazon page to get to the reviews That's a good point because usually I read all the negative reviews on Amazon or I'll read the run the one stars Like you're making a purchasing decision here. I'm gonna read a couple read the top. Yeah, top positive top negative Yeah, let's see in a straw poll. I Think you're right on that one. Okay. Do you read steam in all capitals? Before when you're when you're interested in buying like before you buy do you read a couple reviews or do you just use the

overall score Yeah, I'm doing like a little side test thing. Oh, I see that. Because I'm interested. So we're doing yes, no, and no, but I do on Amazon. Because that's my setup. That's you. And I'm wondering if I'm weird or if that's...

You're definitely weird. Yeah, but like I wonder how much, because do you read reviews for games on Steam? like I wonder how much, because do you read reviews for games on Steam? Well, like, if you've already heard of a game and that's why you're there, then you don't really need to read the reviews. But that's kind of what I'm talking about.

It really depends on how many people are just browsing, when they're like, I want to buy a game, and I'm just going to browse the store and just find something. It seems like usually it's word of mouth like people you know who you game with are playing that kind of game i browse quite a bit sometimes you do word of mouth if i get word of mouth about a product that's on amazon though i still very often read the reviews if i get word of mouth about a game on steam i'll check the positive

negative thing because i want to know if something recent did something bad to it Mm-hmm, because someone might have played a game like Kerbal Space Program, for example Hypothetically so I might have played it and enjoyed it for like a year and then this EULA thing comes out I don't want to spyware game So they don't necessarily know that because they've just been playing they're not checking the store page There's one play the game so that I would be nice for me to know And I just do a little quick check and then move on I wonder I'd like to see the stats on how many people straight up opt out of this. Yes,

that would be really... Put that in your next hardware survey, even though it's not hardware. Chuck it in there. How long do we have to wait before we can look at this poll results? I want to post it in the YouTube chat really quick. I'm trying to get there. Oh, there's so many interesting questions. How do people get new games? Because you're right. Like a lot, especially in the indie space, there's so many new games that don't have a lot of marketing.

But then you get buzzed in other ways. Like Apex Legends, obviously they had influencer marketing, but then... Dude, they had millions of dollars in influencer marketing. Yeah, but a lot of people heard about it from other people getting it popular. Like I heard about it on a Monday when it was like, over the weekend, two million people started playing this game. But that, I think, was a lot of influencer marketing and then people seeing the influencers and then friends telling each other.

It just wasn't spammed in ads here. Wait, let's see the Okay results Do you read game game reviews two-thirds of people say yes buzz in other ways like a pack almost a quarter of people said no But I don't have a marketing and only 12% said millions So I guess a lot of people heard about it from other people getting popular. I heard about it on a Monday when it was like over the weekend 2 million people started playing this game. Because the majority of the time I don't. But that I think was a lot of influencer marketing and people seeing the influencers and friends

telling each other. I'm not too worried about reading the reviews. It just wasn't spamming the ads. If a game is like, has a weird disparity, all time overwhelming recent negative. You know if a game is like has a weird disparity overwhelming Other people have this surprise game you're like Rain is more in If a game is like Oh People started playing this game. Risk of Rain is more indie. Oh no! Did that fix it? Hello?

Did that fix it? We're having a tactical difficulty here. Is it this? It shouldn't be this. You're good now. Oh, we're good. Was it this? It was Twitch over here. Apparently we were getting an echo. It didn't happen last time, which is weird.

But I'm reading my laptop now. You should just mute it on this side. Just mute the Blackmagic device. It's minimumed. It is. Oh, okay, cool. Minimumed? Minimumed. Oh, it's not... Are you sure it's Black Magic?

Did you take the other cards out? Well, then, I don't know. I think that's time to move to the next topic here. Yeah, it shouldn't take audio from there. Anyways, yeah, let's move on. Facebook patent. Thank you, Flowplane Chat, for letting me know that was going on. A new Facebook patent reveals that Facebook is even more out of touch than you could have ever imagined.

Yeah, oh my god. Would you like to read us in? So basically what's going on here is they're going to have an AI thingamajig. Wait, hold on. It's a patent. So first of all, they're thinking about it. They patented it. That doesn't mean it'll ever become a product.

It's not a product right now. They're not doing it right now. Yeah. That's a. They're thinking about it. They patented it. That doesn't mean it will ever become a product. It's not a product right now. They're not doing it right now. Yeah. That's a very good point. But the idea is they could look through profile photos on Facebook and look for photos where someone is prominently holding a product, like a Coke can or a Doritos bag or whatever else where you can clearly see the product and then they would be able to use those photos.

There would be a license to those photos, not to you, by the way, but there would be a license to those photos for ads on Facebook. So they would use machine learning algorithms to identify these photos. I think they already do have... Which would probably not be that hard because you just look for a logo and then they'll train With certain domains first like a can like snacks and stuff seems pretty easy to start with clothing would be way harder They'll do that later. Yeah, but they'll recognize these photos will identify them and then they'll they'll pitch certain clients like hey, coca-cola Here's a bunch of photos of people holding your product. Coca-Cola

would then use those photos as ads that, and here's where I'm not clear, would an ad of me holding a Coke can go only to me and my friends or would it go to the whole Facebook network? What we have written here is from the article, the patent filing suggests that the adverts would only be targeted to a person's Facebook friends if the user had limited their privacy settings that way. That language, from that article anyway, suggests that the default would be that it goes to everybody. If your privacy settings are public, I think it would go to everybody.

I don't really think that makes any sense. I don't think they would do that. It doesn't make sense. But if they found a particularly good one, like a fairly professional photo, they might decide to do it. And you're a babe? Yeah, they might. I don't know. Seems weird.

I actually do see the business sense, as creepy as it is and how we're all mad right now, I could see why they would pitch this as a product. I mean, cold, completely blind to civilization businessman. I completely get it as well because you're showing someone their friends consuming or using a product. That's what advertising has always been like, associating the brand with something you like. You're like forcing word of mouth. The safe bet was always like, okay, use george clooney use someone we all like but now because it's so personal we can say where's this watch hey i happen to know your friends with this person

how about i just show you them or or even yourself like hey remember a year ago when you had all that fun eating those cheesies get cheesies again man, man. That was a good night. I really hope that this goes poorly and there's like someone doing something bad with a product. This is exactly what I think. Like, oh, look at someone drinking Grey Goose. That's my alcoholic friend. Yeah.

That guy's not okay. He's in rehab. Yeah. Like totally shoot yourself in the foot. How are they going to know? There's no way for them to know. I really, yeah, I really, I really hope that if this does get put in place, which I hope it doesn't, but if it does,

I really hope it goes sideways in, like, glorious ways. I don't see how they could ever really implement this because the optics are so bad, and then that's obvious, that's an obvious downside. It could easily happen. Could easily happen. Or like a- And you see the amount of times that,

what was that Microsoft AI that people made racist? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it learnt from the people, and then they pushed it, yeah, yeah. So people love messing with this kind of stuff. Yeah, I'll just upload pictures of me holding Doritos bag and like holding it by my crotch. That won't affect it though because remember,

Facebook identifies it algorithmically and then hands it to the brand. So people are gonna see it. So you can't just troll like that. Unless it's a brand that likes that. If it's like a weird brand, like it's D brand or something and I'm wearing only D brand, they might actually like that. D brand would be like, heck yeah.

D brand's hilarious. So I looked into whether or not, remember a few years ago, this was actually a few years ago, like back when I was in university, maybe almost a decade ago, there was a bunch of stuff going around that was like, did you know that you don't own your photos on Facebook? Facebook owns your photos? So I looked into it, and at least I believe this is source two here.

An article from 2017 said you in fact do own your photos. You own them. And if you take them away, Facebook can't use them anymore. But they can use them while they're on the platform, right? Correct. When they're on the platform, Facebook has total license to do stuff with them, including sub-licensing

them to, say, Pepsi-Cola or whatever. So start deleting the ones you don't... All the times you were photographed holding Doritos or something, just delete them if you don't want this to happen. Yeah, yeah. Or just stop really using Facebook. Delete Facebook. Nice. Heck yeah.

It's so useful in other ways. Basically, the only reason why I have it is getting in contact with people that are sometimes very hard to get in contact with. Because phone books aren't really a thing anymore. Yeah. Facebook's the yellow pages. Yep.

It's really good for those weak ties. Yeah. I don't have your number. Really friends, I met you. You're useful now. Yeah. I don't have your number. Really friends, I met you. You're useful now. Yeah. I wanna get in touch. Here's a message.

Amazon, speaking of. Are we at halftime? Should we? Are we? We are, pretty much. We can do the thing. I don't know what I'm leaning back to do. Squarespace, let's do that.

I'll also lean back. Partway through I was just like, where am I going? I have no idea. Squarespace gives you the tools you need to build and grow your online presence so you could make a really cool website with all your information on it instead of a Facebook page. They've got tons of templates spanning

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and head to squarespace.com forward slash WAN to get 10% off your first purchase. You can see it down here. You get a domain quickly through Squarespace if you need one, or port over an existing domain that you already own. And I believe, this isn't in the notes right here, but I do believe if you sign up for a year, that domain gets thrown in. Yeah, you usually get a free one. In my experience with them, you get it.

Yeah, I think you have to sign up for a year because buying a domain generally lasts for a minimum of a year at a time, so that makes sense. But, yeah. Moving onwards, we have Displate. Displate? Displate? Displate right here. This one? This one?

Displate is a magnet-mounted metal print. Pull it off of there. See you later. Goodbye. And then you could be like, no. Vancouver's upside down. Whoa, the upside down. what do you think about that it's abstract or utilities need to bludgeon whatever you need use the

corner of it really cut into something heck yeah they're durable as you probably just saw you don't need any power tools to hang it would clearly which is cool there's over 260,000 different arts spanning a bunch of different styles and influences with their easy metal, with their easy magnet mounting. There are no holes in the wall and it's replaceable. I'm really trying to serve the OCD people out there. This is going to bother people like probably me. Speaking of that though, if you were going to imba- if you hung it originally like that, unlike a lot of things, you can just turn it back.

I'm gonna try to also do a good job. Good luck, pal. But like, you can make sure it's correct after the fact, which is pretty cool. They also plant 10 trees for each Displate purchased. Whoa, that's a lot of trees per Displate. That's quite a few trees. Whoa. Yeah.

Didn't know that one. Head to our link below and use offer code LTT to save 15% today. There you go. Offer code. 15. Not bad. Plant 10 trees and buy a thing for your wall and save 15% while doing it. Heck yeah.

And pya! We got a new domain thing, which is cool. lmg.gg slash piawan, instead of the crazy long thing it was before. Piawan. Piawan. Piawan. That sounds like an island in the Philippines.

That'd be cool if it was. Private Internet Access supports a variety of VPN protocols and types of encryption and authentication, allowing you to dial in the exact level of privacy protection you need which is cool it has apps for windows mac os android ios it still says linus but linux uh google chrome and support for several other platforms coming soon you connect up to five devices at the same time apps include dns leak protection and ipv6 leak protection this one is my favorite part. Actually, the internet kill switch will block all traffic if the VPN becomes disconnected

unexpectedly. So you don't have to worry about a security hole. If something happens with PIA or something happens between you and PIA, so your connection to them is faulty for a second, no data will go through. So there'll be no data that is unencrypted, which is pretty neat-o. Check it out today at lmg.com slash PIAwan, or Piawan. Piawan. The emphasis matters whether you're talking

about the island or the people that live there. This is a very niche Philippines joke here. Amazon. Speaking of not niche, I don't know. Amazon workers are listening in on Echo Audio, report says. People are mad and I don't know why. It's lmg.gg.

What did I say? lmg.gg? Heck yeah. We do this every week. Get out of here, Jake. Maybe you should have a better domain. We're past that stage. We're talking about Amazon now.

Yeah. Apparently it's lmg.gg, and I said com. Sorry about that. See, my website is cool and has a.com, fullplane.com, go subscribe. Heck yeah. Anyways, Amazon workers are listening to what you tell Alexa. What did you say? You're wondering why people are mad? Yeah. Well, let workers are listening to what you tell Alexa. What did you say? You're wondering why people are mad?

Yeah. Well, let's talk about it. Yeah. Bloomberg reports. Okay, first of all, Bloomberg lately, I think they've eroded their trust. You know who's been way more off the board than Bloomberg, in my opinion? Forbes. Oh, I don't know.

I'm just... Weird stuff. I'm not talking about weird topics. I'm talking about trust because it started with that report they made about the, sorry, Forbes, I don't know. The Chinese like microchip spying. A lot of people were like, I don't know.

Doesn't sound credible. And then from there, oh, they had a recent one. And now this anyway, Bloomberg reports. I don't think Forbes is necessarily non-credible. They just do weird stuff now. They Bloomberg reports, Amazon tasks outside contractors, as well as full-time Amazon employees,

to comb through snippets of audio from Echo devices to help train, A-L-E-X-A, the company's voice-enabled assistant. The clips include both explicit commands and background conversations. Presumably background conversations that are caught happening after you say the hot word.

Probably kind of whenever. Just whenever? Yeah. What? Why not? What do you mean why not? There's nothing that stops them from doing it whenever. Well, it's not supposed to connect to the servers

until you say the hot word. Sure. I'm sure they could do it absolutely whenever. And they're trying to train it to be better, right? So they could be trying to train it to pick up hot word. Sure. I'm sure they could do it absolutely whenever. And they're trying to train it to be better, right? So they could be trying to train it to pick up the word. The thing is, I don't think they have to. I don't think... Okay, I hear what you're saying there.

Like, what if someone says the hot word, but then they want to hear 10 seconds before that to see if it took that person 20 tries? And then they can learn, oh, okay, you're Scottish, and this is how you say it. You're a weirdo. Or if someone was trying to say it and failed and gave up. This is what I'm saying.

And then just. Little tinfoil hat. I think they don't have to. I think they could. Because there's so many commands every day. But you could go with false matches that are fairly high percentage. Yeah, okay, okay.

So they think you might have tried, but it wasn't good enough for them to actually activate, they could still listen to those periods of time. But how, they wouldn't be able to identify those because it's only gonna connect to the service and it'll only record when you actually did make a match. Is that 100% true? Are you sure it only records when you fully make a match?

Yeah, like if you say like, hi Google, then it's like, nope. Like I have my Google Home set to go after I say it. And there are times where I'm watching a movie and someone just says something totally, they'll say

like, yes please. But they say in a way that sounds like the hot word and it'll go, when I'm just watching a movie. Because I know, probably They'll say like, yes, please. But they say it in a way that sounds like the hot word. And it'll go, ba-dink, when I'm just watching a movie. Because I know, probably not right now. Someone in chat's like, hi, Google. I know probably not right now, but for quite a while there, the biggest concern was it not detecting when people were trying.

So I would expect them to try to find the ways that people were towards the audio, but it doesn't do a command yeah they could happen like I'm not saying they're gonna I'm not they record every single word anyone ever says anywhere near them and they might but I kind of doubt it from an engineer perspective it's like a lot of these are the weak points yeah and you would want to learn how to improve that yeah so I could definitely see them passing through recorded audio and being like what was this was this supposed to be an accurate match? Did our system rate it maybe a little too highly? Was it someone on a TV show saying something completely unrelated? Another related issue to that was, I mean, we haven't really even explained the whole story yet.

You get it though. They want to train this machine to do a better job and surprise, they're using humans to do that. You thought maybe they were just putting more computers on it, but obviously humans are really good at speaking. So if you want to train this thing to speak better, you just take the snippets that you're giving the machine and let humans annotate to tell the machine how to do it better. It's pretty obvious they're using humans, but I guess Amazon never explicitly said they were doing that. On their website, it says that user requests are applied to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.

It doesn't say with humans, but it also doesn't not say that. So I think if you think about it for a bit, you would assume that they're using humans. Yeah, no, I'm not surprised at all. And I always thought they were. And it's not say that. So I think if you think about it for a bit, you would assume that they're using humans. Yeah, no, I'm not surprised at all. And I always thought they were. Yeah, and it's not just Amazon. They're all doing this. Apple does this.

Google does this as well. I'm very surprised this was news, because how else are you supposed to know? Yeah, of course, that's why I sound like duh. Yeah, it's pretty weird. I think one thing that does concern me is, like, do they sell this data? Because they're super unrelated, and this might – I don't really use these devices too often, so I don't know.

But I have one, but I just – it's right by my computer, so I usually just end up using a browser anyways. I don't know, whatever. But, like, do outside apps have listened i guess but like read access to these files effectively uh i don't like could an app that ties into your echo get read access to your voice to try to figure out uh its side of things better i don't think so probably not no i don't think so i think not? No, I don't think so. I think it...

But like that, so my reference for this very shot in the dark thing, and I'm not surprised you say I don't think so, but my reference for that is the Gmail thing that happened forever ago. People were personally reading those emails and there was apparently accounts of people finding funny videos and emails

and sharing it to each other for laughs and stuff. So first of all, it would be... This is pretty unrelated. This would be text, right? Because it's going to go to Google servers and be transcribed as text. And then they wouldn't even get the raw text, I wouldn't think. Or I would think they wouldn't get the raw text because Google would have to say, oh, audio, turn it to text, and then determine, oh, this text is relevant to that third party, and then hand that command over.

So they probably do get the text, but they almost certainly don't get the voice. I don't think they even get the raw text. I think they get the determination of what that text was. And there are some commands you have to issue on random TVs, I've seen this, where you have to be, hi, Google, ask third party to do this. Like like hi boogal ask LG to turn off the lights Okay And then that's this like maybe in that case because you're explicitly saying ask LG then LG would get the full thing I don't know. I'm not sure how these interactions work. Well one point I wanted to make was You would think intuitively that when they're listening to these

These voice clips, that they would be a random sample, a big swath from all the users. But maybe it's not. Maybe there are some users that they're listening to more. Like maybe if you have a Scottish accent or an accent that has conventionally been very difficult for these, they're like, oh, that guy's great. We're going to train on that guy. I mean, there's overfitting problems in machine learning if you only use a few examples like that,

but it might be a subset of the population that's getting listened to more often. Yeah, I suspect it would be. If you have a super generic voice for an area that has a very high population, it's less likely that, I guess, yours would be used for sampling super often. Yeah, or if they're trying to break into a new market

or they know that they suck at that market, and they only have a few users. And you're on the forefront of technology in that area. Yeah, you're like, well, we only have 10 people from Glasgow, we're gonna use all of them a lot. But there's some other interesting things in this story. The big question in everyone's mind right now is probably like, hey, when they're listening

to this voice clip of me, do they know it's me? In the case of Amazon, it appears that they know your first name and there's a product serial number or something, but they don't have your last name or any other identifying things. In the case of Apple, I think they have less than that. They don't have your first name and they have a randomly generated number

to associate to your account. So it's pretty safe. That said, the clip can contain uh sensitive information i could be talking about my friend's full name i could be talking about my bank stuff i could be talking about anything i looked into my own this was years ago uh it's probably better at detection now but i looked into my own like uh hey google information that probably worked actually yeah i say that's why you say hi that's why i said hi. Anyway. My bad. But I looked into like all the different audio snip recording things. The amount

of times that I was in the car and just like an audiobook or the radio was on where definitely no one said that and it just has a recording of that is insane. The amount of recordings there are of me not trying to interact with it is wild. Wow. Like many hundreds. Well, you don't- how do you know for sure that definitely no one said that? Because I believe that after the hot word, then there's a delay and then the recording, so the audio book- I would be silent in the car. The audio book could have said it like a second before. They're like Star Wars audiobooks, generally. You would be surprised, like I said, mine's beside my couch and I can hear it when it gets activated and you'd be surprised sometimes what activates it. I'd be like, I'm sure, mine's beside my couch and I can hear it when it gets activated and you'd be surprised sometimes what activates it. I'd be like, I'm sure there's a sound that sounded something like whatever. Mm-hmm.

Maybe some alien has a weird name in Star Wars. But like the amount of times, what all I was saying is unintentional stuff that ends up in there. Yeah, yeah. And you were saying like personal information. Obviously Star Wars doesn't count for that. But there was a lot of other recordings as well where it's just like a random, I can barely even remember the conversation but it's clearly

a random conversation between me and a friend and we're clearly not trying to interact with Google at that time. I see what you're saying. A lot of what happens to me is I'll have people over

at like a dinner party or something. I'll interact with it to change the song and then I know I can just kind of turn away and keep talking and I know that the machine will know that what I'm talking about now isn't

relevant so even though even though the lights still blinking it'll be like yeah and I can just keep having my conversation but that's gonna be recorded yeah there's give me an extra eight seconds of me talking about tacos yeah I don't know this is the kind of stuff we're like a lot of a lot of modern technologies in various ways, you give up certain privacies or securities to have those technologies. And this is one of them. If you want to have a smart speaker in your home, just understand this stuff and move forward. Caring about your security is very important. It's probably fine though.

Well, Salt, they were told eventually that Amazon, it was not Amazon's responsibility to take action. So, you know, they go to their manager, you guys, someone at the company has the means to find out who this is, like should we tell the authorities and say, you know, like someone got beaten up here, like they should get a record or something like that. One of the big problems with this is just like role play BDSM, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We're like, it could be totally above board. And now there's the police knocking on your door because you have an AI helper robot thing. Yeah.

And you never authorized. Maybe it's a movie. Yeah. I totally appreciate the idea of reducing those types of things. But the minority report also freaks me the hell out. And there's a lot of stuff that could make someone think that that are okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is not their responsibility.

I think I agree with Amazon. It can be used as evidence. But I think that's... It is not their responsibility. That is true. I think I agree with Amazon. It can be used as evidence. But I think that's... Whether you think that's okay or not,

that is definitely a totally different thing. They're not being proactive. They're reacting to law enforcement. Like, it's... Whether you think it's okay or not, I think they're in totally different segments. I agree with you there. Yeah.

Super chats? Super chats. Let's go. They're like normal chats, but Uber. Super. A bunch of people chats, but Uber. Super. Bunch of people sending $1 with no text. I appreciate it. Very nice. Appreciate you.

Someone's asking about some lag on Flowplane. I think we know what's going on there, but it seems like it did go pretty well today. Every week it's improving a little bit. It did go pretty well today. Every week it's improving a little bit. I like the pictures you guys have on the wall. Cool.

Go to Flowplane and buy Luke a better office. Heck yeah. I like my office right now, but we do have to move because LMG is expanding so darn fast. You guys got to move? Eventually. Because you guys are going to be out of space. Yeah. Like, actually. of space. Yeah. Like, actually.

Good God. Yeah. The rate at which LMG is hiring is just wild. And Floatplane's hiring, too. And I'm trying to bring people in locally. Like, there's one, Will, is moving here very soon. Holy. One of the new hires that we have is a Canadian who will be moving here locally.

So, like, within the next six months, we'll probably have two more people locally. And there's other people moving in locally. That's all it takes. We're already oversized at that point. Between the two companies, there are six more people, it'd be over. Done, yeah.

And that's going to happen really soon. Yeah, so I'm actively looking for other places. It's going to be really weird, but oh well. Are you still going to come over for Friday Wands? It'd be sweet if you guys were just in this complex or something.

So I wanted that too, but realistically, these are all... These buildings aren't suited for that, really. Yeah, we just need office space. Yeah. So it's like probably...

You should go downtown and be one of those exposed brick, polished concrete, super hip. So expensive. Yeah, you're a startup though, baby. Get that investor cash.

There's a, just reading about people in our space, not even necessarily competitors, but in our space, that are like, oh yeah, they just got like 20 to 40 million dollars in VC funding. I'm like, oh, oh jeez. Yep. People talking about the audio. Apparently the focus was screwed up like the whole show. the focus is for like the back of our chairs so when when you and i are leaning forward we're like

super focused oh well so that sucks um did they offline us no he was away and then his plane came in late i believe oh i didn't know that um i don't think he was planning to come ever though probably not because like he was in england today So his time shift is gonna be super weird. I dare you guys to eat the Carolina Reaper Savage jerky. I don't think they were sponsored this week so we don't have any here, but we've done it before. On my very first WAN I did that. Oh damn.

Alexa and Google Home do save recordings where nothing happens. I just researched this and tested it for a class project. Send us your paper, bro. Yeah, I'm interested. Do it up. Email me your thesis. Luke, from one broadcast, dye your hair green.

Oh, I think green is the ugliest hair color. And love from India. Well, it actually depends on the green. I think it can be, definitely. It can be. Yeah. Anyways, that's it for Super Ch the green. I think it can be, definitely. It can be. Yeah. Anyways, that's it for Super Chats.

I believe we're... Wait, are we done? No. We have one more topic. Yeah. There's one more. Oh, I see what people are talking about. Sorry about that.

There you go. What is the one more? Walmart adding more robots. Walmart already employs many robots. They're getting lots more. They have announced that they will deploy 1,500 new Auto-C autonomous floor cleaners. You know, like those floor cleaner things that people ride on, like kind of like those Zambonis? I think they don't need those anymore. But 1,500. How many Walmart locations are there?

There's not very many in the grand scheme of Walmart. Walmart's are large, though. I'm going to make a guess. How many Walmart locations are there? There's 50 states. They're in multiple countries. I'm going to say 3,000. 4,700.

That's actually... I guess it's more than you thought. So this is pretty significant. I was guessing around 6K. Do you think that they're going to get one floor cleaner per store? Like in their test, the subset of stores that are testing this, do you think they're getting more than one? Yeah, no, I think they'd just get one. Just one, okay.

Because if it's automated, it can cruise around and do whatever. All night. Yeah. So Walmart is getting 1,500 Auto-C Autonomous Floor Cleaners. They're getting only 300 Auto-S Shelf Scanners. What does that thing do? Probably just check inventory. How?

I'm picturing those surveillance drones in Star Wars that are like those balls with all the antennas just hovering down the aisles. Beep, bop, bop. That'd be awesome. I suspect it's just going to ride along the ledge of the shelf. You think it's...

I don't know. I don't know. I'm really not sure. They're getting an additional 1,200 fast unloaders to scan and sort items as they come off delivery trucks. This one's interesting. Plus, to streamline online orders,

it'll have 900 pickup towers, so customers can order something on the company's site and pick it up from a vending machine at their nearest Walmart. Oh, that's less interesting than what I thought it was. I thought Walmart was like building towers across the country. I'm just like, this is getting very medieval corporate. It's just a big lockbox. And it's at a Walmart location.

It's really not that interesting at all. Just buy from the store. Yeah, holy cow. The idea is that by pushing menial tasks to the robots, Walmart's human employees can spend more time helping customers and preparing online orders for pickup. That is sweet. Bull crap.

Yes. They'll just fire them. They'll replace them eventually. Yeah. But it is, at least for now. I guess in the meantime while they're unsure. In the meantime it's like, hey, you don't have to do this anymore so you can just help people, which is cool. We got a few years of awesome. Yes! And then a lot less people have jobs. It sucks when you're walking around a store and you're like, who works here?

And then you see someone who works there and they're doing something. And you're like, hey, can I bug you? And they're like, I guess. One thing I've always wanted, especially at Home Depot, is like, and Home Depot has an app, and I believe it's supposed to do this, but last time I tried it, it sucked. But maybe it's gotten better, because I haven't tried it in forever. But I want to be able to be on my phone in the store

and just be like, where the heck is this thing? And have it tell me. Turn left. Because that's pretty much the only reason why I ever need store employees. Yeah, for sure. Where the where the heck is this like the last thing i needed was like a shelf peg it's like where where would that be a shelf peg yeah like and then like like the little like clear plastic little l-shape thing that you put in the hole on a shelf to hold the individual. Oh, like a bracket, like a, that you put shelves on. No, no, no, but they're like super tiny.

Oh. Like this big. It has a little metal nubbit, and there's a hole drilled in the shelf. Did you just say nubbit? Nubbit, I don't know what to call it. Okay, I wouldn't know where to buy that either, dude. Right, it's, it's.

Hardware in the. Canadian Tire has it. Aisle and shelf, that's cool, that's sweet. But like, do you have to install an app? I Tire has it. Aisle and shelf. That's cool. That's sweet. But do you have to install an app? I know I just said. Does Nubbit have two Ts? What even is?

New Bits. World's best stable digital currencies. Nubbit. Two Bs maybe? N-U-B-B-I-T? What is a Nubbit, dude? Urban Dictionary. Nubbit.

Oh, geez. It's a word now. Yeah. Someone make a new entry. Yeah, nubbit. Oh, jeez. It's a word now. Someone make a new entry. Yeah, there we go. A nubbit. Make it not the one that's on there right now. It's like a nubbin. No, just their site.

Okay, that's cool. Being able to use, apparently, Canadian Tire website to look for an item. It'll let you know where it is. But how do they let you know? They say aisle and shelf. That's good enough for me. No, that's pretty good. Yeah Can I just say I'd like to have a beep I'd like to have a warmer colder Is that an alien

They're really close to us Maybe I think so think that's the original aliens. Yeah, I don't think that's predator So yeah, I think so But I like one thing that's Predator. So yeah, I think so. But I like, one thing that I think is pretty important too though, is that it needs to be able to be pretty good at guessing what the heck you're talking about. Yeah. Because especially in a place like Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever where it's like hardware, the amount of people that are

going to go in there and be like, I need a screw. It's like, what screw? It's like, uh, this one. Like, I don't know. It would be cool if you can take a picture or something like well you bought is even remotely close to what you search they'd like ah that's what he meant by nubbit so we can learn what the heck nubbit is over time shelf nubbits heck yeah I I I called them it's the reason why I'm like particularly triggered about this shelf peg thing

is because I it took me I think four or five employees to find it oh yeah because I'd ask one and they'd send me somewhere and I'd get in there

and I'd be like this is planks of wood this is not plastic things with little metal things coming out of them they just they didn't accompany you

they just sent you and see you later but like honestly they're so freaking busy each one of them were helping like three or four people. They couldn't move.

I didn't blame them. They need more auto C's and auto S's to help them. Come on, Home Depot, figure it out. But yeah, you're right. Eventually it'll just be no one working the checkout. It'll be guest service and a couple of people walking around. And that's it. Yeah.

And even then, that'll, it's just an AI that just rolls around. How are you doing today? And if they have to, you can do a live chat. You just get someone up on the screen. Yeah, you just have a call setting effectively. What do you need? How did you get elevated to this?

The Nubbits are over there. Why did you press zero five times? Come on, give me a break, it's a Friday. Yeah. I's a Friday. Yeah. I don't know. I kind of, is it, I don't know if I'm naive or just a butthole, but I kind of welcome the disappearance of jobs. If you go to a grocery store that has automated checkout, really, that's not the direction I thought you were going. Yeah, like I've been to a McDonald's once in Australia, and these... We use the self-menu thing.

Save someone's job and go up there. And I was like, nope. I would like to send the signal that I prefer this. I don't think anyone should work at the front of this. I don't know. I think maybe because... How do you want to solve that problem? I'm a techno-optimist. Yeah, yeah.

Because I like to believe that problem? I'm a techno-optimist. Yeah, yeah. Because I like to believe that in the eventual future where no one's working there, the people that are working are getting paid a lot, and the people that aren't working are on a beach playing guitar. I love this idea, but how do you fund those people? Corporate taxes. Corporate taxes. I don't have all the answers man i'm not like no uval harari or whatever but i think one of my problems there is like you would need this is

going super off topic and the show's almost over so we can cut it pretty quick but like how aggressive are your allowances for small business then because there's a lot of industries like the one float plane is trying to get into now that to penetrate properly you're going to have to get relatively large yeah you mean stuff like content if we had super aggressive corporate taxes so the people that would be working at mcdonald's and they don't actually need to do that job because that should be automated relatively quickly because we're wasting human potential, can go sit on a beach or make art or whatever if our corporate taxes have to pay for that. We're screwed when we have to go up against these giant companies.

Sure. There's other proposals. Someone had a proposal about making robots pay income tax. I think The Economist magazine was like, that's a bad idea. I read that article, I don't remember why. It's a bad idea. But I'm not saying that the tools we have now are gonna be sufficient in that world.

I think, I am very strongly in agreeance that like, wow, we're going way off topic here. But like, just the mass waste of human potential is amazing. Just what the lengths people will go to. And the fact that, like, someone can be very good at something, but modern hiring processes have not really gotten much better in, like, a really long time. So you have to, even if you're an extremely skilled person at something you probably have to go through the walmart or mcdonald's or whatever grind so that you can like

eventually land a job somewhere good like like placement of very skilled people is not very good yeah especially if you're an immigrant yeah yeah there's a lot of different i'm an engineer i'm a doctor i'm driving a taxi. Taxis, that should probably be automated. Why? We're so close to that being done. The whole transportation industry is just going to poof. Maybe that's good.

Driving a vehicle is not. Driving a vehicle on most situations, there are obviously certain situations where it's extremely highly skilled. But in most people's day-to-day, driving a vehicle is a task yeah automate that stuff get people doing things but it's just how do you support those people anyways it's gonna be short-term hard yeah short-term extremely difficult for individuals whose lives matter yeah so let's end the show yeah thanks for tuning in folks outro oh geez i didn't set it back there There we go. One more plopper display right here. Yeah When when when some guy made an account Another person just made straight up just another now bits Ian anotherubbits. Ian Nubbit, you're a legend. Frodo Nubbits.

There's so many Nubbits. The Mark Nubbit. What's happening? I didn't notice this at all. Welcome to the Nubbit show. Heck yeah. Everybody make the name something and end with Nubbit. It will be our inside joke.

Not inside joke anymore. Very outside. Display, PIA, Squarespace. Squarespace. Reset. We're out of here. Later.