Bus factors & conspiracy theories (Friends)

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34:34All right, next up, the GitHub plugin, my coworkers asked me not to write. The GitHub plugin. Shea Arison wrote a GitHub plugin to calculate the bus factor or truck factor on GitHub repositories. Of course, we all know what a bus factor is. This is the minimum number of team members you can have on a project who can disappear before the thing becomes not driven anymore. It stalls out or it fails or it dies. And so the worst bus factor you could possibly have is one. And the best bus factor you could possibly have is infinity, I guess. I don't know. One is bad. More than one is generally better.

35:24That's right. Here's a story. In 2015 or so, Shea's employer had layoffs. One of them was the only contributor to part of the code base that made money for the company. He remembered reading about truck number, which is the same thing. It's just trucks instead of buses. And thought it'd be fun to write a GitHub Enterprise plugin that calculates who you can't afford to fire. Shea found a research paper called the Truck Factor Research Paper, which actually went through this in a somewhat vigorous way. I started writing the plugin and talked five minutes on it at our Thursday afternoon lightning talks.

36:02His co-workers said it would immediately hit Goodhart's law. Once a metric becomes a measure, it no longer is a good metric. and they say they saw it as a way for management to easily calculate who you can fire. So, you know, all good tools can be used for good and evil. But long story short, went out, used this truck factor paper, which is a way, actually describes a way you can go about calculating this, at least, you know, fuzzily, to find out the key contributors to projects, and ran against the Linux kernel. Don't run against the foundation. Run against the Linux kernel. Found a way using the linguist plugin to filter out documentation and third-party libraries just to make sure it's actually the people who are working on the Linux kernel and found that.

36:53Not only is it small, even on something as large as Linux kernel, it's going down. currently Shea found a truck factor of 12 12 people on the Linux kernel down from in the 40s when it was run originally so from 2015 till now from the 40s down to 12 and his collaborator M. Claire who did some visualizations and stuff also installed the plugin on her system she got a factor of 8 I'm not sure why there's a discrepancy between the two you know this is a developer's blog post that I'm that I'm mining for this information but yeah so we have now this tool I assume you can go take it and run it against other repositories I would think depending on the repository it may or may not be accurate because like if you have probably the smaller the project the harder it is to know that number for sure but maybe you can know that number just by looking at the list of contributors in that case but for large projects with thousands of contributors you can actually understand how many of these are key in order to keep that sucker running.

38:01And it turns out over time, it appears the Linux kernel in particular has been going down, down, down. What are your thoughts on this, Adam? I'm looking at different angles. I also went to M. Claire's blog. She has a parallel to use a pun. I'll bring up a second. Not relevant in the moment, but it will be relevant here in just a second. I promise. Stay tuned. Stay tuned for the pun landing. she wrote a parallel blog post to this post that has a bit more detail okay different detail i'd say and the pun will land now there's one more built-in command to mac os that is kind of cool parallel oh i think it's built in because i've used it before i can't recall if i had to install you know the command or a package to make it work i think it works and so she mentioned when cloning the repos that it was very resource intensive despite passing a job count of eight to parallel and so you she used the the uh the command parallel dash j eight get clone and the rest of the command to pull down tons of repos in this repo list that uh that was in this dot text file kind of cool so that's the pun there here is the closing of that loop this is a third party library called Parallel.

39:21Hosted at savannah.ganu.org so it seems like it's an old GNU project. Yeah. Appears to be written in Perl. So an old thing that you can definitely use on macOS but probably an apt-get install or a brew install kind of a thing. I've used it before. That's why I thought maybe it is built in because I've used it before then I wasn't sure if I installed something to make it work. Fair enough. Yeah, no problem. I think this is cool. Honestly, I think it's cool insofar as that I do agree with Goodhart's Law that it will become this thing that you can measure against and use it in the incorrect way, so to speak.

40:05But I like the idea of being able to, as someone who's trying to make choices to guide the ship, to have a bus factor, a truck factor number, it does resolve people to numbers literally yeah which is not cool but you know data they say you know make data driven decisions hello that's data right i think it's cool but i think at the same time it could let some folks go it's like hey i'm management and uh jared is useful and adam is not right let's let adam go which would not be cool no that would not be cool but if it was if it was deserved maybe yeah maybe it is cool you know not cool for me circumstantially but totally cool in terms of project or product or yeah direction efficiency and appropriate all right somebody's not bringing value what i wish i had more time to do though was dig through this paper yeah the title is a novel approach for estimating truck factors it's it's pretty deep that's cool that That is the coolest part for me.

41:08It reminds me of Aminota's subsection of our show with him. Right. Where he talked about measuring developer productivity. And I mentioned how hard it is to actually compare it with technical debt because you have quantitative measures with money and it's just easy. And I kind of get fatalistic, I guess, with certain things that are hard to measure. I'm just like, ah, we can't measure that. Let's move on. I think it's cool that people take the time and the effort and do the research and the novel ideas in figuring out how to actually measure something which seems, it seems immeasurable, but really that just means it's not easy to measure.

41:46And so that doesn't mean it's actually immeasurable, but most of the time you have to measure something that's proximate to it in order to find this measure. So I think it's just cool. I thought I didn't think about ever being able to quantify bus factor in terms of it being proven out like this project has a bus factor of X. And we know that's true ish because we've done this novel approach. I think what it does let you do though, in terms, like let's forget the list of people you can fire aspect of this and think of it more in terms of how in trouble is your project? How many open source projects out there could leverage this to its better advantage, its greater advantage?

42:31because in the intro of the paper, it says a systems truck factor, TF, is defined, as you said before, Jared, as the number of people on your team that have to be hit by a truck or quit before the project is in serious trouble. And that is not a good thing for the project, obviously. So if you have people who quit because of just natural attrition, maybe you've got the WordPress thing happening and people are just considering being let go or offered to leave for money or literally just quitting, you have this opportunity to say, well, this is how in trouble my project could be if things went sideways, if these things did happen.

43:11And what you could do in the opposite of that is to insulate from that, is to say, okay, let's reduce that number. Or I guess, what is the opposite here? Well, you want to raise it. So yeah, raise it. So you got a TF of, what was it like, 40 something for at first? and then now it's down to like eight-ish yeah but what's strange about this is that it seems like shay got one measure and then right claire got slightly less so i'm not sure why they would change he said running on her machine and got an eight and these are i don't understand that so maybe there's more information to be figured out there but yeah call it single digits well now you have at least some measure to say well we've got a a declining bus factor yeah i wonder who came up with truck factor and then who came up with bus factor because somebody must have thought it'd be a good idea to consider how many people on our project are going to get hit by a truck like that's just a very morbid thing to think and then someone else is like nah let's just call it a bus like maybe that's slightly less no it's just there's probably more to it but i think i would imagine that it's more common to be hit by a bus i would think so right city streets buses are more frequent than trucks that's why it's called bus factor because it's it's it's the norm not the anomaly and why wouldn't you just call it like leave the team factor right like i just feel like why do we have to bring death into this i do i do think the reason there's a reason for that and i think it's a fair reason i think the reason is because a bus or a truck factor brings to mind the very real possibility that somebody could suddenly without planning leave the team right like that's what you think of is like everything was great until Fred got hit by a bus and so now all of a sudden we don't have time to like do any sort of preparation for this you know Fred was going to be at BDFL there was no plans of quitting and so I think that's why death gets brought in is because it has to you have to think about it in a way of it could be a surprise anyways that's just my trying to read the tea leaves on the etymology of the term because otherwise it's kind of a morbid term.

45:26It is a very morbid term. I do agree with it. Suddenness, maybe that's why, as you said, is pinned back to sudden and unexpected. I mean, it even went as far in this paper. I might as well read the whole paper to everybody at this point. In section two, it says, truck factor, an example from the early days of Python. In quotes, what if you saw this posted tomorrow? Guido's unexpected death has come as a shock to us all. It's a shock disgruntled members of the TCL mob are suspected, but no smoking gun has been found. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. The TCL mob, so that's a competing language, right, TCL?

46:05So they're making up this hypothetical in which people from the TCL language community, the mob, somehow came and killed Guido Van Rossum. That's kind of funny, but also even more and more. But they're surmising there'd be some sort of inner language rivalry so harsh that they would execute a man. Wow. Who wrote this paper? If you've seen Glass Onion, I believe, what was the first one? You know what I'm talking about. Oh, you're talking about the... The pair of movies that are similar, but not the same. They're not sequels. Yeah, where they're in the house. It's Murder Mysteries. Yeah, Murder Mystery.

46:42I love those movies. I mean, those are so good. I mean, we need more of those. It's like, that's the kind of thing. This reminds me of this, you know. It's killing me right now. What's that movie called? Everybody who's listening has seen it and they're like, you idiots. Knives out, glass onion. Thank you. Knives out. I was Googling that. The easiest way to Google something when you want to find something is glass onion versus. And it's going to come up with knives out. It's going to come up with the opposite. I was just typing glass onion movie. Yeah. Ryan Johnson. There we go. I would have got there.

47:12Now, if we want to talk about that quickly. The problem was I got auto-completed. Let's bring that in as a topic because I think that's a good non-sequitur. But it's a good one. Glass onion versus knives out. Oh. knives out hands down have you seen glass onion yeah oh or you must be the opposite you haven't thought about it before yeah i really haven't actually i know i'm thinking there was a lot that i liked about glass i actually haven't thought much about it obviously i compared them after i saw glass onion i compared it to the original in my head but i haven't had anybody asked me that so that was my guttural reaction was hands down the original yeah but i don't know if you ask me like for reasoning i'd just be like uh it's just better i don't know why i liked them both first of all so i'm not saying anything against the second one wasn't the second one was very much like this hypothetical elon musk kind of character who was like was it elon musk that it was was it based after him it was based off of some eccentric billionaire right i don't know we're getting into areas where i flaunt how little i paid attention to movies they're they all go to an island i don't think it's epstein island you know that's who I was thinking about actually was Epstein.

48:19Maybe it's comparative to Epstein. Although it doesn't I don't think it parallels one more pun very well to it but I think it's similar in the fact that it's an island. Maybe that's what it is. It was a very yeah we're in the weeds here on this but my thoughts on it I suppose both very good and I really can't say which one I like better. Honestly. I think they were like equally good in their own right. I think they're The Glass Onion movie had a really cool premise, whereas Knives Out also had a really cool premise. And I think you couldn't see either of them coming. You really couldn't. Oh, they were both well written.

49:01They were both well executed. Yes. Great stories. I think Knives Out is a more classic whodunit, which nobody was making. I mean, Hollywood hasn't taken a chance like that in a long time. It's all like reboots and sequels and like the seventh version of this movie. and like here comes a classic whodunit with a brand new character, brand new storyline. So I really appreciated it for that. Great cast. Great cast. Another thing about it, Knives Out, they both had great casts though, but I think Knives Out had a more classically good cast. Like it had a lot of, you know, actors that are not in their 20s or 30s, like 40s, 50s, 60s kind of actors and actresses.

49:41Yeah. So to close the loop on Elon Musk, I was right that everybody compared it to Elon Musk, especially because it came out right around the time that he bought Twitter. And there are dozens of articles comparing it, calling it a veiled dig at Elon Musk because of the eccentric billionaire who is a major part of the story. However, Rian Johnson says that that comparison was accidental and merely coincident. He was not thinking about Elon Musk when he wrote it. but you be the judge, I suppose. Well, social media was involved, right? And putting someone on, well, I guess it was YouTube or a version of YouTube.

50:23I can't recall if it was like literally YouTube or not, but social media for sure. Let's move on before we have to use our spoiler horn. Oh my gosh. Yes, that's true. All right. Next up, ARK is a dead browser walking. ARK, the ARK browser. Yes. I was actually going to go there, so I'm glad you did. Who's Sons of Guns killed it, man? They killed it. Is this news? Did it die? Well, okay, I'm being dramatic. No, it's not dead. But the CEO and head person has moved on to a new browser. Oh, okay. It's been put into maintenance mode. What an absolute shame for the people who use it, really. I just like, wow, what a shame to like begin to adopt something, begin to be excited about something, and then it just not work out.

51:06Okay, so this website is why I turned on my TailScale, not sponsored by the way do love tailscale and then i enabled my exit node because i don't have my pie hole here at the studio i have it at home uh and so i don't this website is just full of ads i can't even enjoy the content or find the content because there's just so many ads yes this is the howtogeek.com website it's just the it's i'm sorry y 'all have to do this to sustain your business it's an absolute shame the web shouldn't be like this this is not the web i'm fighting for right i'm fighting for your freedom to publish of course but not your freedom to put all these ads everywhere it's just like come on so i actually didn't notice that because i've got you know built-in ad blockers and stuff and next dns otherwise i don't that sound like a brag i didn't mean to sound like a brag but the reason i was saying it is because i linked to this in news and we tend to not link to sites that are yucky like we don't like that yeah this is and so i'm kind of apologizing to a certain extent because i didn't notice how bad it was yeah on how to geek.com so i agree with you 100 i should probably should have linked over to the verge which generally has a much classier website yes and does a better job of coverage as well but i just found this one first this is the the article i linked to in change dog news when i wrote about this a couple weeks ago but just i don't know i feel validated because last time we talked about browsers i was like i don't just trust a vc funded browser that doesn't have a clear business model i just feel like it's going to go away.

52:38And I didn't expect to be correct so quickly. That's what shocks me. And I get it. You got to move fast if you're a startup. So why keep working on something? Even though we were impressed by their adoption, lots of loyal fans of the Arc browser. Yeah. But not fast enough. Yeah, they changed the, I wonder what really happened here. So I'm going to read a little bit because it says this is, we haven't closed the loop fully on what exactly happened here because we've been meandering a bit. Maybe my fault in terms of the ads and stuff. But it says the browser company, best known for the Arc browser, is developing a new, completely new browser.

53:15The company has been working for years on a browser unrelated to Arc. Arc won't be abandoned, but the new focus will primarily be on stability updates and bug fixes. That's kind of like, it's not abandonment, but there's no... That's maintenance mode. It's done. Yeah, it might as well be abandoned. There's nothing new here in a new thing. So what's the point of the new? Yes. So that's the story. And the reason was because they did not think they could take ARC to mass adoption to the masses. And their goal is to make a browser for the masses. You know, I'm somewhat reminded of Ryan Dahl with Dino because I had Ryan Dahl on the show, I don't know, a couple of months ago around the Dino 2 launch.

53:59and we talked about how he's very much had to be pragmatic with his choices with Dino whereas when he started it as the big rewrite right the second effort after having made all these regrets with Node.js he was going to do things differently and better and he took a very pure approach at first to Dino in order to eschew backwards compat and like all to leave Node.js behind but he said he wasn't happy building a runtime for a small group of people he wanted to build something for the masses and he realizes that he will not get mass adoption unless he goes back on some of those ideals and compromises point in case is the eventual adoption of the npm ecosystem and all the work they had to do inside dino in order to make npm support happen And Ryan was very torn about that.

54:57He did not want to do it. But he just had to, he felt like, in order to get people, to meet people where they are and to build software for everybody. And that's kind of what ARK is trying to do, right? They're trying to create a browser for everybody. And they just feel like the current one they built was too power user focused. It was too esoteric and too many knobs and switches and things you had to relearn. I was somewhat turned off because of how different it was for me. And they're like, it's never going to get there. Now, Ryan's taking Dino and changing it, and he thinks he can get there, and time will tell.

55:33But with Arc, they're just like, no, this browser's never going to get there. We're going to start with a new one, which is totally cool. They can go ahead and do that. I'm just not going to try it. I'm out. There's enough browsers out there. I don't need to use one by somebody who's going to rug pull me again. I do think the premise they have for this new version has some legs, so to speak. Well, they got some stuff out there about it. Same article, just more hints at what the future could be. It says the goal for the new browser is to turn the browser into an app platform that is proactive, powerful, and AI-centric.

56:09What is not AI-centric these days? The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless to attract a larger audience to explore its capabilities. And then it says the company's, I'm just passing by some of those details. Oh, I should read this part. The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless and to attract a larger audience, which I just said, to its capabilities, with an interface that more people are used to with horizontal tabs. The company's vision for the new browser involves using AI and machine learning to automate tasks like data transfer between enterprise applications or retrieving order numbers for customer support.

56:42That seems kind of niche, but I like the idea, I suppose, of more smarts in the browser. Let other people deal with web standards. That's what Chrome is doing, right? Safari is doing. Put a layer on top of that that is familiar to the person, not crazily different like Arc was. I love the adventure, though. I applaud their courage to do something so different than a typical browser. because maybe that's actually what got them a lot of the, you know, like the shiny object kind of thing. You know, like, oh, what's this? This is the purple cow aspect that Seth Godin talked about, right? Is that here you have this factor of a brand new browser that isn't just simply trying to be fast or better, et cetera.

57:27It's like just literally different in terms of user experience and starkly different compared to horizontal tabs. Right. I could never get past the, like, and I'm a power user. I think I am at least, or I aim to be, or I try to be. You aspire to be a power user. I'm an aspiring power user. You know, and I really tried ARK in earnest several times. And I was just like, I just can't get used to this experience. I liked other aspects about it. But to my point though, and to their point is, I like the idea of something that builds on top of, where the browser is more of a platform. in terms of on top of the web.

58:10I like the idea of like automating some things, but how does that actually translate? I don't know. We'll see. So Josh Miller is the CEO of the browser company. And I've DMed, I believe, on Twitter slash X. And I'm sure that we emailed trying to coordinate. So Josh, if you're listening to this or somebody who knows you, let this be an open invite to dig in. Let's talk about it. Let's go deep on what happened with ARK. What lessons did you learn? How are you reformulating your idea and plan? Because it is a 2025 plan. It's early 2025. So this is not Lady Bird's 2026 beta. You know, this is, it says the new browser is expected to launch at the beginning of next year, but it's not set in stone and maybe push further into 2025.

59:00But their plan is soon and they've been working on this other thing in parallel. So come on here, Josh. Let's talk. Yeah, 100%. What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. He released this recently. Tell me more. So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at Assembly to even train large scale speech AI models.

59:45It was trained on about 12 and a half million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's a super robust model. We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a$50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI.

1:00:28Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI.

1:00:35Are you on officially Blue Sky? I am not. Do you have an account? I don't think so. I know. I don't think so. I don't think I do either. I could have sworn I created an account. I know that changelog.com is on there and I've coded against their API. And our platform posts our new stuff there. Right. And so if you want to follow Changelog on Blue Sky, by all means, please do. But I'm not personally on there. And I know that they're getting massive adoption all of a sudden, at least in terms of brand new social networks go. They're getting a huge uptick. And people are raving. I would love to see a comparison of Blue Sky because the reason why I ask this is there's a headline that you covered, I believe, in news.

1:01:22Blue Sky crosses the 15 million user mark, which is, it's a lot of people. It's not billions. No, it's nowhere near threads. I mean, yeah, exactly. So cross, you know, cross examine that against obviously X slash Twitter threads and then Blue Sky. Is it truly worth, I think the thing I think about is less like, is X for me or is threads for me? And more like, is Blue Sky worth giving any attention to? It's almost synonymous with ARK in the fact that they're trying to do something different, but kind of the same. Blue Sky is not much different. How much different could you make a social media application, though, or a platform?

1:02:03It's not drastically different. Even True Social, I think Trump did that, didn't he? I've never been on there. I have no idea. But every time I saw it in the news, it was like a copy and paste of Twitter slash X posts. It's like there's not much you can revolutionize there. That's what Blue Sky is for the most part. There's a few things that set it apart, technicalities. But for most people, it's going to be like Twitter minus Elon Musk and crew for the most part. And that's what it looks like at least. And I think that it's not very big because 15 million, while they've had 700 ,000 coming on a week is what I read on the verge.

1:02:44or in the last couple of weeks, probably not a week, but recent weeks. It's not how many people are there, it's who's there to a certain extent. And I think that a lot of developers are going there, which makes it interesting and creatives. But Threads has something like 275 million people on there. And so 15 million in that light is a barnacle, you know? Very much a barnacle. A large barnacle, grant you, but a barnacle. lots of people are talking it up you know twitter used to be a nice place in the early days and it feels probably like that i don't think there's anything inherent in there that makes it not become what twitter became eventually anyways and so i think resistance is futile to a certain extent and i'm at this point in my life and maybe this is foolish as a podcaster but like i'm just ready to opt out of the next thing like let's put changelog on there but do I want to be on Blue Sky personally?

1:03:42I just really don't care anymore. I'm kind of over it all. I'm kind of over it all. Social media, I'm talking about. Right. New short form text platforms. Right. Like how much value do they bring to our lives in reality? Well, the value is distribution of ideas. Obviously, you know this. I'm not speaking to the choir. Or I am speaking to the choir. Please keep speaking. Right. So, I mean, to state the obvious, the value is distribution of ideas. And so I think so long as you would like to distribute your ideas, then they do hold a use, whether it's personally or corporately. And, you know, we do the job of spreading and distributing the ideas as a corporation or corporately.

1:04:31We're not literally a corporation. I guess we kind of are. I feel you on that you know I've I've sort of opted out in a way to a lot of these things I think uh to the betterment of my mental health I didn't do it because I was like oh I'm mentally taxed let me get off of Instagram but I can tell you that if you had like a cat scan on my brain whenever I scan Instagram comparative to life without Instagram as an example this is the one I for sure opted out of. It's just all vanity. Vanity is everywhere out there and it just drives me crazy. It's all comparative, all vanity. And I just, I'm like you, like I just opted out.

1:05:10And I almost feel like X is the same. Like I don't have much to share there aside from the things we can share. And anything more than that is just like, I'd rather just share it in like Zulip or Slack or something that's just a bit more focused and a bit more personal. And so I haven't really been in the zone of my life or I want to speak to the masses ad nauseum. I'm just like, yeah, here's the ideas. Take them right. Take them right. And there's lots of people who remember fondly the early days of Twitter, and I am one of them. Me too. I remember that very well. I loved it. And I definitely made a lot of friends that way.

1:05:46I mean, if you look at our lives, paths, crossing, Twitter played a role in that. Blogs played a role in that. So I got involved in the changelog because when Netherland read my blog and I read his blog and so we were blog buddies and we were Twitter friends. And Wynn, of course, Adam, you know, I'm not telling you this, I'm telling everybody else, Wynn was one of the original creators of the changelog and was on the show for a couple of years before moving on, getting a job at GitHub, moving on, in which time I stepped in slowly and became your co-host. But that all happened because of Twitter plus blogging and that's radically changed the course of my life.

1:06:28And so I don't want to discount that. And so maybe that's what I'm doing is I'm discounting those kinds of things because tons of friends and colleagues and interesting people have been met that way. I just don't know if I'm ready to do it all over again. Like I was in my twenties then, you know, and didn't know a lot of people. And like now I've met a lot of people and I don't know. I'm ready to maybe let that be a different person's game. but change logs should still be there which means I have to be there to a certain extent which also means maybe I have to read stuff and then I get sucked in and I'm just back at some point like I'm back, blue sky is amazing I think there's a different version of being back there's a back where you consume slash lurk and there's a back where you do that as well as create and I would say that's different yeah, for sure I could go Justin Searle's mode so Justin automates everything to all the social networks and he reads none of them.

1:07:25So it's very... That's the way to do it, man. It's broadcast only. Gosh. And I feel like there's something lame about that. I've told Justin this to his face, so I'm not calling him out here on the show. He knows I know this. It's kind of lame because you're just like, here, my thoughts are interesting, but yours aren't. It's like, here, read my stuff. But I'm not going to read yours. It's antisocial. But it's also probably... I mean, for him, because he's obsessive and compulsive, he's an absolute necessity because he gets obsessed with these things and he can't check them all the time. And so because he's unable to regulate that, he has to just turn it all off.

1:08:01And that makes 100 % sense for him. So, but it's definitely a technique. But if we're all just broadcasting our voices into the void, then what are we doing here? Which brings us to, maybe we close with this, dead internet theory. I wanted to actually say two things on that. Okay. I do want to say dead internet theory, but I also want to say you should go to conferences so I think a somewhat segue could be well if you don't want to lurk slash non-participate in social media participate in IRL and the best way to do that is the hallway track and then my other thought was yes the dead internet theory and are we creators of this dead internet like you just admitted to having bots out there essentially automated posting to X literally X and other X's in terms of variable Right.

1:08:50So many puns today. Wow. Sorry about that. Yeah, we're part of the bots. This dead internet theory. What is the dead internet theory, Jared? So to outline the dead internet theory for folks, if you've been listening to Changelog News, I brought it up probably three or four times in the last year because I guess I'm a conspiracy theorist in that way because this is a conspiracy theory. Aren't we all conspiracy theorists in our own special way, by the way? Here's something I've noticed. Aside. Everybody, left, right, and center, up, down, whatever place you are, we all do this. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but, and then we launch into our newest conspiracy.

1:09:27Well, as humans, we are also very prone to believing and listening to conspiracies. Well, we're trying to figure stuff out. It's a mystery. We're trying to figure out the world. Yeah, it's a mystery. It's totally natural. But I just like how everybody has to preface their new theory with this disclaimer first. Like, listen - I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but - I don't normally dabble in conspiracies. I don't want to be labeled as a crazy person, but let me tell you about this theory I have. I just think it's funny. We all do it. I've certainly done it. And so here's one theory. The dead internet, it asserts that due to a coordinated, maybe that's where the conspiracy really comes in, an intentional effort, the internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.

1:10:14Now, having read the paragraph again, I don't 100 % believe that. I don't think it's coordinated and intentional. I think some of it's probably intentional. I don't think it's coordinated. I just think it's incentives working themselves through the human race. I do think it's happening though. I do think that more and more and more and more, and even more so, we are out there, the few, the proud, on the internet, talking to robots who are talking to other robots and to humans to a point where we're just like completely disconnected from actual humans. And how would we ever know? We used to escape by going onto the internet.

1:10:50Yeah. Now we escape by leaving the internet. Going back to the real world. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. A different version I have, this is from the LMIS, that's DLDR for me. And so it says different versions of it, but it says. Sure. Mine was Wikipedia. Yeah. And that's probably just fine. What's the good part to read here? Proponents of the theory believe that government agencies and large corporations are responsible for creating fake content and interactions to manipulate the public opinion, control information, and inflate engagement metrics. I mean, there's a lot of fake content out there.

1:11:28I wouldn't be surprised. There's a lot of, I mean, especially on TikTok. I mean, I've kind of ejected from TikTok. I was listening to that episode we reposted a little while back. It was a really good episode. Let me go and find what that one was again. 10 ,000 Hours? Yeah. Yeah, that's, you know, lessons learned from 10 ,000 hours of programming. Now, I'd actually scanned that episode because it did not have chapters. That's how far back it was. And you should go listen to it, by the way, listeners, episode 613, 613, changedall.fm slash 613. And I said on there, I think this is the early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley on this podcast.

1:12:06Because you mentioned TikTok a bunch and I was getting sick of hearing about TikTok. And you, yeah, this, there's actually, okay, here it is, it's even better. I earmarked it. There is a chapter for this. Oh, nice. I will tell you what it says. It says, and you're going to laugh, Jared, if you didn't pay attention to this yet. Chapter 15, Jared provokes Adam. I like this. Yeah. So what did I say? You basically said you have to mention TikTok every show or something like that. You might as well, I'm paraphrasing. It was something like a dig because it was definitely early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley.

1:12:36I remember your TikTok phase. I feel like there's just so much information there. Maybe that's why I believe this theory that, or this conspiracy theory at least, of this dead internet, because I think there's a lot of content on there that's just like somebody is employing somebody just to generate this content so that it can go viral and so that it can affect a mass amount of people to believe a new thing. like chickens for example i've asked this question a few times my idea or my awareness of this conspiracy theory that if you begin to cultivate i don't know what's what's it called when you farm you farm chickens you don't farm chickens you raise chickens yes right those you that's the term for it yeah what's what's weird with a spider is it's husbandry if you caretake a spider yeah male or female doesn't matter the the process is called husbandry anyways i think husbandry speaks to the production process maybe anyways so you're raising some chickens next thing you know you're questioning all life because you realize that the the eggs you're getting from these chickens is nowhere near the eggs you're getting from the chickens at the store unless you're buying the really expensive ones that are cage-free and like even then you got all these marketing terms that sort of like curtail the the idea of what an egg is anyways you start oh yeah You start doing all the stuff.

1:13:57Now you're living on the land. Yeah, you go deep. Once you take the pill, then you question everything. The chickens are the pill. Yeah, the chickens is the gateway. I think that's fair. I mean, my brother and sister-in-law raise chickens, and we eat their eggs. And they're epically different than what you buy at the store. And they're like, they probably have opinions, right? They're like, oh, my gosh. Don't ever eat the – if you had an egg in your hand from the store, they're like slapping it out of your hand. Yeah, slap that egg. Slap that egg. It's the right place to slap an egg. Yeah, no, I get it.

1:14:28I think that, is this your theory? Did somebody give you this one? This chicken theory? No, it was given via TikTok. That's the point. Oh, they gave you that theory. Yeah, I became aware of this theory on TikTok. So it could be have - Oh, they planted it. This idea was planted so that we now look at things differently. I mean, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but parts of this dead internet theory ring true to me. Yes, I agree. Definitely parts of it, you know, shades of gray on how much of it's true. But it definitely feels like if not the intentionality, but the effect is 100 % true. Like there's just way more, there's way more noise than there ever has been on the internet.

1:15:14and I think a lot of that noise is manufactured because it's so easy to manufacture noise and easier than ever to manufacture noise that looks like a human. Well, I think it could be where they literally are using real humans. It doesn't have to be generated. It could be... Well, they use people as vessels. For instance, whoever wanted to get this chicken theory out there, they got Adam Sokoviak and look what you're doing with it, dude. You're spreading it far and wide. So many places. You are a pawn. and I think that we should close right there. I believe so. Go to conferences. Shout out to the author of that post, sophiekunen at localghost.dev.

1:15:51Great domain, great website. Shout out to Sophie for writing that one and that's it. We'll throw the other links that we didn't talk about in the show into the show notes in case you want to do some more reading. I think there's two or three that we passed on but why not share them as well just in case you want to dive a little deeper. I have one for our plus plus audience can we do that? alright let's say goodbye to our friends and we'll see you all next week goodbye friends

1:16:22that one more thing Adam kept back for our changelog plus plus supporters the latest on the WordPress drama we gotta talk about that right? stay tuned after this outro plus plus people and if you want to join the cool kids club by directly supporting our work Well, you can do that at changelog.com slash plus plus. As a thank you, we make the ads disappear, send some stickers to your door, extend many of our episodes like this one and more. Changelog plus plus. It's better. Thanks once again to our sponsors of this episode. Shout out to Sentry, Fly, AteSleep and Assembly AI. Please check out what they're up to.

1:17:03Cool stuff indeed. And of course, a thank you to the one, the only, the Beat Freak. break master cylinder next week on the changelog news on monday helena zhang and toby freed from phosphor icons and the rad new departure mono font on wednesday and our local first apps truly the future johannes shickling and james long join us to discuss and debate that question right here on changelog and friends on friday have yourself a great weekend get some merch while supplies last and let's talk again real soon.