Category: Technology

I Actually Love Targeted Ads

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About ten to twelve years ago, I found some free Tower Defense game on the App Store. It was challenging enough to keep me interested, but not so difficult I’d bang my head against the wall, and it became my goto game when waiting in the airport or when I wanted some mindless downtime.

It was free, but supported by advertising. This was the heyday of games like FarmVille. Fun Fact: In 2011, the developer of FarmVille, Zynga, made up 19% of Facebook’s entire revenue! So ad supported games were not only common then, they were considered the best way for mobile games to monetize.

After every Tower Defense level I completed, an ad would show as the next level loaded. Except these weren’t your normal ads. They were awesome. They marketed stuff that I actually wanted to buy. With each ad displayed, I could mark it as relevant or not, and as I fed back to the ad network (whose name I can’t remember anymore), the ads became even more tailored. I ended up buying more stuff from that game than I’ve ever bought from any advertising medium, ever. All of the stuff I bought was relevant, high quality, and I was pleased with every purchase. And here’s the thing – I actually enjoyed seeing the ads! Kind of like how I enjoy the ads in hyper-targeted magazines I subscribe to like Model Railroader – they’re all super relevant and help build awareness about products I might like.

At some point, the ad network folded, and the developer of the game went bust, and while I’ve moved on to other tower defense games, I often think about that ad network. I was using an ad blocker on my web browser even back then, and today, the the only real exposure to web ads I get is via YouTube, Instagram, and a couple newspapers I subscribe to like the New York Times. Everything else is blocked.

I have two YouTube accounts, and two Instagram accounts, and both have very focused personas and interests, but the thing is – the ads I’m served there just completely suck. They’re not relevant (marking them as such does nothing to change this), and at least half of them are retargeting from websites I’ve already bought something from (the ad shows up AFTER I’ve converted, for the first time). Perhaps worst of all, they are shown at a frequency that is just insane – like back to back or multiple times in a 2-3 minute scrolling session.

1.5 Billion in market cap and 163,000 employees between them, and Google and Facebook can’t even get my profile right. Perhaps most bizarrely, they don’t even ask me what I’m interested in apart from maybe inferring my interests based on the accounts/topics I follow or the videos/posts I like..

Why?

This reminds me of the age-old comment proffered by Folks Who Don’t Like Ads on the Internet. Why can’t we just pay a fee to get rid of ads on Facebook or Instagram or <insert social network here>? I used to ask this question, and it’s a good one. The answer is that in 2015, a Facebook user was worth $3.73 per quarter (roughly $15 bucks a year). Well, I’d happily pay fifteen bucks a year to get rid of ads and disincentivize all of the rampant fake news and destructive political advertising that channels through social media! Except there’s a problem – by the end of 2017, the value was up to $6.18 per user per quarter, an increase of 165% in to years.

In 2021 a Facebook user is projected to be worth $56 per quarter ($226 per year) and an Instagram user is worth $31.5 ($126 per year).  Note the vaguely disappointed tone of that article when discussing the fact that Instagram just hasn’t managed to generate as much value per user as Facebook yet. Tsk tsk!

That’s a growth rate of 15x in four years, and oh by the way, has significantly outpaced my desire (or ability, and, I’m guessing, yours too) to pay to remove those ads. Paying to remove ads will actually lose Facebook money, because their overall audience would get smaller, and they’re forfeiting the future growth they could generate off your account. In other words, you are just one single customer representing one sale of your account, but they can almost-infinitely sell you to almost-infinite ad buyers out there, so your account’s value will, over time, asymptotically approach infinity. Or so the well-vetted financial model somewhere says. Not understanding this dynamic, by the way, is probably why my beloved (yet forgotten) ad network went bust.

Back to the original point – the reason none of the major ad networks allow us to actually feed in our preferences is driven by the same desire – if I told Facebook/Instagram that I only wanted to see ads about Lego or model trains, I would have removed myself from the pool of folks who might potentially be interested in jeans or a TV show or whatever. In other words, I limit down the potential buyers for myself, and that’s the last thing they ever want to happen.

What’s the point of all this? Well, I think this is an increasingly dangerous game to play – intentionally introducing a bit of old fashioned friction and obfuscation between users and advertisers, for the sole purpose of maximizing future revenue growth. Ad blockers are now more common and available on more platforms (including mobile) and the reason is that all the ads suck! Advertisers don’t push the envelope here and demand well qualified eyeballs because that would skew their metrics too, and the reality is that online advertising is about the only real solid metric most marketers have. It’s a combination of “it’s in budget” and “it’s better than the alternative” thinking.

As we head into the worst global recession since we, uh, understood that we lived on a globe, I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen when ad budgets get cut everywhere. Will some upstart come out of the woodwork that can actually show us some ads we want to watch, that take curation cues from us directly, and make everyone’s life on the internet better (except of course for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like)?

Probably not, but I wish they would. In the meantime, the great cat and mouse game continues between ad blockers and social media networks, and the internet just continues to get a little worse each day.

I guess in that way, it’s kind of like a game of Tower Defense.

How to Solve Sonos Playbar Speech Issues with the Apple TV

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A couple months ago, I purchased a Sonos Playbar to replace a Bluetooth Samsung Soundbar I had, as I wanted to integrate the living room audio setup with the rest of my house, which is all Sonos.

Probably due to over-exposure to loud music from playing in rock bands through highschool and college, I really struggle to hear conversation in noisy environments like pubs, and this issue extends to hearing speech in movies unless I’ve got a dedicated speech channel. My hearing seems fine overall (famous last words I guess), just differentiating speech within noisy backdrops is annoying.  Modern flat screen TVs really exacerbate this issue as their speakers aren’t great anyway, let alone for pushing out a nice clean speech channel.

The sound you get from the Playbar (and two Play 1s for surround sound) is great for music, but the results I’ve had regarding speech during movies have absolutely sucked.  It’s kind of surprising when you start seeing threads like this one where there’s dozens of people complaining for years, with no real response / solution.

Here’s how to solve this situation:

You need to bypass any potential pre-processing that might happen to the audio signal.

If you have a receiver it’s probably a safe bet your signal is clean, but like most people, I just have a TV and a bunch of HDMI inputs.  I had them plugged into my Samsung 4k Smart TV and I had the optical audio connected from the TV to the Sonos Playbar.  I had the TV correctly configured to bypass any audio processing and it was only shunting the audio out to the optical port.  Except it wasn’t.

To inexpensively solve this issue:

  1. Buy an HDMI splitter with an audio optical out, like this one.
  2. Hook your AppleTV (which doesn’t have an optical out) and any other devices (BluRay, etc.) into the splitter.  Hook the optical from the splitter into the Playbar.
  3. Turn on the Speech Enhancement on the Sonos App and Night Mode.
  4. You’re done! You now have clean audio and a functioning Dolby 5.1 signal that has clear dialog.

I’d like to point out here that the true villain of this story is Samsung for essentially lying about the pass-through capability of the TV.  Sonos should bear some blame here too – it could easily better educate customers and include some common troubleshooting advice either online or in the documentation.

Hope this helps!

Visiting the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT

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Last night I experienced the privilege of visiting the Tech Model Railroad Club on MIT’s campus.  As an avid model railroader, computer science major, and great admirer of books like Hackers and Accidental Empires, I’ve heard of the TMRC for most of my life.  As a kid, my parents bought the 1986 edition of World Book, which underneath the entry “Model Railroads” included a picture of the TMRC layout, something I’ve never forgotten.

tmrc station

The first chapter of the book Hackers tells how some of the earliest computer science pioneers were involved in the TMRC .  A few of the notable members were Alan Kotok from DEC, Richard Greenblatt the coinventor of the MIT LISP machine (which is housed next door in the MIT Museum), John McCarthy who coined the term Artificial Intelligence and helped developed the LISP language, and Jack Dennis who was one of the founders of the Multics Project (the precursor to Unix).  These members along with others helped coin the term “Hacker”, and inscribed within the “Dictionary of the TMRC language” was the (now immortal to all computer scientists) phrase “Information wants to be free.”  These guys were budding computer scientists, brilliant minds, mischievous hackers, and they were serious about controlling model railroads.

The first chapter of Hackers describes the interplay between trains, their control, and what the TMRC meant to different students:

tmrc-overpass

“There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Wernher von Braun, and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes “gronked”—in club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use.”

tram system

For model railroaders, the TMRC is probably in the top 10 most famous layouts in the world along with names like John Allen’s Gorre & Daphetid, George Sellios’ Franklin & South Manchester, and famous club layouts like the San Diego Model Railroad Museum.  For techies, there is no other layout in the world of interest that’s anywhere in the TMRC’s league.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that model railroading and computers have always been bedfellows – even today model railroading has led the way in developing standards around Digital Command Control, interfacing locomotives, signalling, and other controls to a computer, and the Java Model Railroad Interface has provided us the world’s first successful test case of the Gnu Public License (the GPL), the open source software license that Linux and much of open source code relies on!

card operating schemeWith all of this background, I probably undersold the importance of the whole thing to my college roommate and his wife who live in Boston.   When they asked me what I wanted to do during our afternoon together it struck them as a bit odd that I’d already emailed the club from Scotland, had the phone number, and was anxious to make sure we didn’t miss the window.

Walking into the layout room we were met by the wonderful MIT alumnus and club member John Purbrick. He proceeded to give us an hour long tour showing us the various control systems, buildings, car card operating scheme, points of interest on the layout, and description of future plans.

custom built throttleTMRC uses a home grown software system (written in Java with the fronted in Python, all running on Linux) to run the trains.  The layout is still using DC block control, and trains can be run via the main computer system, or engines can be assigned to one of the many hand-built walk around throttles.  All turnouts are computer controlled and electronically operated, none are hand thrown.  For each yard or town area, there’s a diagram of the track layout with numbers on the left and right hand sides.  By keying in the number 0 on the left, and the number 5 on the right for example, the turnouts are all automatically thrown to present a route between the two points.  It’s simple, elegant, and impressive for a home built system.  As Mr. Purbrick put it, “We use a home built system on this layout because here at MIT, we have some experience with software.” Trains are detected by the software using electrical resistance, so operators can see from the software whether a train is on a siding, train with engine, or no train at all.

The main level of the layout is mostly complete, but there are plans for additional levels, and the layout features several huge helixes.  All visible mainline track is Code 83, sidings are Code 70, and there is some Code 55, and all visible turnouts are hand built.  There’s also a tram system that runs on one part of the layout.  Rolling stock varies but includes locomotives from Atlas, Athearn, and Kato. The president of Kato has visited from Japan and brought with him a gift of a few locomotives and some passenger cars.

soda machine

The TMRC receives no financial support from MIT other than free use of the space.  Just like in the late 50s (and covered in the book Hackers), the TMRC is supported from the proceeds that are made by selling soda from a machine in the hallway, and they turn a tidy profit according to Purbrick. A hand scrawled note affixed to the machine explains where the profits go and encourages patrons to email soda suggestions to the club for inclusion on the menu.

These days there aren’t many members left, apparently.  Maybe a dozen or so, although anyone can join. There was only one other member there while we visited, and the club struggles to get enough people together for operating sessions. Apparently there are several other thriving clubs in the area, but I wondered if there wouldn’t be a population of students out there who might not know of the TMRC’s heritage, it’s incredibly complex computer control system, and its delightful layout?

playing tetris on a buildingAs we made our way out at the end of the tour, Mr. Purbrick told us that we couldn’t leave without seeing the Tetris building.  From the hallway looking through the windows onto the layout, there is a control box.  When activated, the iconic tetris music begins to play, and the windows of the skyscraper light up to represent tetris blocks, which descend.  You can play a game of tetris represented on the windows of a building modelled by the TMRC, all powered by custom software and hardware components.  The creator of Tetris himself has been by to see this particular implementation, and while it wasn’t quite finished, he is said to have given it his approval.

“It’s one of our better hacks,” said John Purbrick, and I couldn’t agree more.

We Need Viable Search Engine Competition, Now

johnjpeebles11 Comments

It’s become clear to me that we desperately need a viable competitor (or two) in the search engine space. A somewhat related thought I’ve been having is the (probably inaccurate) sensation that bringing out a viable competitor to Google may not be nearly as hard as it has appeared for the last decade.

We need competitors now. Most websites see more than 80% of their search engine traffic arriving from just Google, and this is not a good long term recipe for a vibrant internet.

Inherent Conflict of Interest
Google’s revenue model of placing paid ads next to organic search results operates under the (publicly accepted) belief that there’s a secure “Chinese wall” between the paid and organic functions. It was even more secure, some argued, because ultimately the short-term conflict between receiving revenue for rankings (paid) vs. displaying the best rankings (organic) was not a long-term conflict. Better organic results were always in Google’s interest, because these competitive results maintained their dominance and user’s trust. And so we believed. To be fair, I feel that Google does a somewhat decent job in this area, but I continue to feel that the user experience of Adwords exhibits various dark patterns (more about this here) and Google’s corporate inertia seems to be focused on a walled garden approach with G+ and Android. Lets just say that I’m no longer going to blindly trust Google in the face of a worrying conflict of interest that’s central to their most valuable product. Declining empires under siege are the ones you have to be careful of, after all.

Vulnerabile to Manipulation
Is there anything worse than “SEO”? The very idea of this industry, filled with people whose sole job is to attempt to manipulate Google is bad enough, but the fact that “black hat” SEO can produce material gains is genuinely worrying. Having had to clean up a mess created by a black hat (who insisted he wasn’t) and now in the middle of another mess of toxic back links that may or may not be generated by a competitor, the whole thing is just annoying, wasteful, and embarrassing for Google. I get that they’re trying to clean this up with Penguin and Panda and the various versions therein.

Arbitrary and Corrupt
When RapGenius violated Google’s SEO guidelines, they were only caught due to a public revelation on Hacker News, then immediately penalised by a human (to compensate for where their algorithm failed), then they were permitted to communicate directly with google to discuss ways out of this mess. Not it appears they’ve been fast-tracked back into the listings, albeit at somewhat of a disadvantage.

All aspects of this rub me the wrong way –

  1. Google is making arbitrary rules on how sites should behave, because they have a monopoly. If they didn’t have a monopoly, they might not be able to make these arbitrary rules, and others might not follow them.
  2. Google needs these rules, because Google’s rankings are apparently trivial to game. Build a ton of links and make sure you don’t over-optimise your link text. That’ll do it for most key phrases, apparently, as long as you’re not completely obvious. There’s a clear incentive for “Bad Guys” to win using“Bad Ways”, that penalises good sites just trying to get on with business. Does anyone actually believe that the ridiculously obvious, poorly written link farms that Google catches periodically are the only examples out there? Smarter people doing a better job are gaming google all the time, and it appears to be getting worse.
  3. Google feels the right to at any time, and with zero due process, transparency, or appeal, to manually penalise sites who successfully ignore their rules yet exhibit a high ranking. This is not transparent, fair, or reliable. It is scary for legitimate businesses, and this kind of instability should not be the norm, but it is.
  4. The only organisations or individuals who can actually engage with Google over a penalisation or problem in any meaningful way are Silicon Valley favourites or companies backed by influential VCs, or [insert some other not-avaible-to-the-public recourse here]. This is the definition of corruption.

We Need A Competitive Alternative
Competition could provide a healthy response to many of these items. I don’t think regulation is the answer, but it may become one if these trends continue and intensify. A different revenue model could remove the conflict of interest, a better or different algorithm could be less prone to manipulation, and a search engine that prided itself on a transparent and efficient arbitration process for disputes with regards to rankings could win users trust. Of course, Google could also work on these problems themselves, but it seems like they’re more or less happy with the current state of affairs.

Is PageRank really the indomitable tech of our generation? Nobody can do better algorithmically, or integrate some kind of crowd sourced feedback, or measure browsing time and habits, or simply hand tune some of the most competitive key phrases? I’m sure I’m oversimplifying, but I wonder if we haven’t all been hypnotised by the complexity, much of which is marketing hype, and have missed the enormous opportunity that exists right in front of our noses. Does the next search engine have to be as big, involved in as many things, employ as many people, and fight on the same footing to be accomplish the goal of providing a counterpoint to Google?

Time will tell.

Missing the Point on Electric Cars

johnjpeebles4 Comments

2013 Tesla Model S

I feel like a lot of people miss the point on electric cars.  I see all kinds of debates about whether they actually get 100mpg or if this is some kind of synthetic and propped up metric designed to delude eco hipsters into thinking they’re more green then they really are.

Who cares?

The point of an electric car isn’t that it’s greener (although it may be, and is nice if it is) and it isn’t about range (most people don’t drive far enough regularly enough to really need to worry about range), it’s about the fact that the fuel can be generated through a variety of different mechanisms.

Do you like nuclear power? Or wind? Or solar? Or wave energy? Then electric is the car for you.  If you believe we need to invest in a range of different energy generation schemes in order to burn less oil, then electric is the car for you.

To me, the flexibility on fuel source is the entire point.

Random Point of Ignorance: Keyboards

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I keep finding these little areas of ignorance that surprise me.  Today’s episode: British (UK) Keyboards are different from American (US) keyboards.  I never in my wildest dreams thought this would be so, but it’s true.  Instead of the @ sign being above the 2 key, it’s above the Right Shift and shares a key with the single quote.  The Enter key is smaller too, and the double quotes is above the 2 key.

I just thought they’d replace the $ sign with the £ and call it a day.  Oh well, the more you know!

I’ll Probably Never Hire Another Pure SysAdmin

johnjpeebles3 Comments

NOTE: Updated Oct 17, See Below

This is a thought that’s been percolating around in my head for the last year or so, but has recently become even more crystalized: I’ll probably never hire another Systems Administrator.  A corollary to this thought would be: if you are currently a Systems Administrator or want to be one, you need to seriously begin planning on how to manage a career that will be mostly deprecated within the next 10 years.

Take a look at the current state of the art in cloud computing:

  • Spin up a server at your favor cloud provider (AWS, Rackspace, etc.), then use Puppet or Chef to deploy your software stack.  Now you’re done.
  • OR, Spin up an App at your favorite cloud platform provider, then push your code out using Git.  Now you’re done.
  • For both solutions, plug in some off-the-shelf monitoring, and you’re operating.

What’s missing here is the configuration, setup, provisioning, doc writing, black magic and/or prayer of setting up the software, hardware, and getting the code running that used to be the domain of the Systems Administrator.  In just a couple of years, deploying a web application has now become almost identical to deploying a desktop application – instead of an installer we’re using Git or Puppet/Chef. Instead of a customer’s computer we’re using a cloud platform or cloud server.

There’s plenty still to do on the networking side, but that’s headed in the same exact direction due to the same exact reasons: we want to be able to clearly define and programmatically execute the deployment of complex networks, just like we can with complex server offerings.

All of this falls under yet another buzzword: Dev/Ops.  Just like the cloud, we’re seeing this being adopted by smaller, nimbler organizations that are focused on web products, but the trend is clear, and there’s really no benefit in doing things the Old Way.  Even if you’re still running your own physical metal servers, you’re going to want to make sure that your own datacenter can leverage this type of workflow.  Now, the watchword to the development team is: it’s not done until I can one-click deploy it.

The laggards on this will be those industries that have regulatory or legal hurdles to overcome with using cloud services (read: healthcare) or the very large companies with services and technology that’s dozens of years old with no migration plan.

SysAdmins and future SysAdmins, you need to figure out where you’ll live in this new workflow.  Probably in the margins around monitoring or desktop support.  Possibly serving as the gatekeeper in a sort of “operations Q/A” role.  Expect small companies to have SysAdmin openings dry up over the next 5-10 years and get prepared.

Updated October 17: Hello Reddit/r/programming and Hacker News!  I wanted to take a few minutes and respond to a few themes that seemed to pop up in comments on HN and Reddit.

  1. I’m not saying Sysadminning is dead – just that the role is quickly changing.  Seems like a lot of people (anecdotally, many Sysadmins) thought I was saying the entire profession is dead.  Yes of course we’ll still need Sysadmins on some level, but the crucial difference is that for many areas of a business these needs will be less and much much different.
  2. Software development is changing too.  On complex deployments, developers can’t absolve themselves of the responsibility to design infrastructure considerations into the solution they’re building on the front end.  It’s a scary thought to think that organizations are out there that don’t have this level of partnership between ops and the devs.  This is why the puppet scripts should be written first and deployed on a test environment that’s identical in as many ways as possible to the ultimate operating environment (another benefit of using the cloud).
  3. Of course, any more complex deployment will need devoted SysAdmins, but like I said above, the skillset and day-to-day job will be dramatically different when wrestling with hundreds of servers instead of dozens.  More and more programming will become the norm and more and more upfront input into the solution will be an absolute requirement.
  4. I received a very thoughtful email from a former SysAdmin of mine (previous company) who pointed out that the job is much more along “system integrator” lines now, and that the internal vs. external network distinction is essentially going away.  I agree.
  5. Whenever your’e generalizing, counter examples abound.  Sure big companies and certain computing environments will still do things the Old Way but I’d challenge readers to objectively think if most business decision makers really want to hire someone and run their email server internally or just pay Rackspace/Google/Whomever to do it and worry instead about their money-making applications.  Even those organizations that need their clusters in house will invest in tech that allows them to mimic cloud operations on their own bare metal infrastructure.
  6. A couple of amusing anecdotes – the comments on HN immediately became more positive after a well known commenter defended the post, and a Googler chimed in as well.  That’s when the upvotes really started coming it seems.  On Reddit, the story was quickly downvoted!  Most users chose either a “genius” or “idiot” assessment of the post.  No real middle ground.