Amazon Twitch: Losing Social Traction of the Bezos Bulldozer
February 5, 2025
Twitch is an online streaming platform primarily used by gamers to stream their play seasons and interact with their fanbase. There hasn’t been much news about Twitch in recent months and it could be die to declining viewership. Tube Filter dives into the details with “Is Twitch Viewership At Its Lowest Point In Four Years?”
The article explains that Twitch had a total of 1.58 billion watch time hours in December 2024. This was its lowest month in four years according to Stream Charts. Twitch, however, did have a small increase in new streamers joining the platform and the amount of channels live at one time. Stream Charts did mention that December is a slow month due to the holiday season. Twitch is dealing with dire financial straits and made users upset when it used AI to make emotes.
Here are some numbers:
“In both October and November 2024, around 89,000 channels on average would be live on Twitch at any one time. In December, that figure pushed up to 92,392. Twitch also saw a bump in the overall number of active channels from 4,490,725 in November to 4,777,395 in December—a 6% increase. Streams Charts notes that all these streamers broadcasted a more diverse range of content of content than usual. “[I]t’s important to note that other key metrics for both viewer and streamer activity remain strong,” it wrote in a report about December’s viewership. “A positive takeaway from December was the variety of content on offer. Streamers broadcasted in 43,200 different categories, the highest figure of the year, second only to March.”
Twitch is also courting TikTok creators in case the US federal government bans the short video streaming platform. The platform has offerings that streamers want, but it needs to do more to attract more viewers. Changes have caused some viewers to pine for the days of Amouranth in her inflated kiddie pool, the extremely sensitive Kira, and the good old days of iBabyRainbow. Some even miss the live streaming gambling at home events.
Now what Amazon? Longer pre-roll advertisements? More opaque content guidelines? A restriction on fashion shows?
Whitney Grace, February 5, 2025
eGames Were Supposed to Spin Cash Forever
February 5, 2025
Videogames are still a young medium, but they’re over fifty years old. The gaming industry has seen ups and downs with the first (and still legendary) being the 1983 crash. Arcade games were all the rage back then, but these days consoles and computers have the action. At least, they should.
Wired writes that “2024 Was The Year The Bottom Fell Out Of The Games Industry” due to multiple reasons. There was massive layoffs in 2023 with over 10,000 game developers losing their jobs. Some of this was attributed to AI slowly replacing developers. The gaming industry’s job loss in 2024 was forty percent higher than the prior year. Yikes!
DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) combined with woke mantra was also blamed for the failure of many games, including Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The phrase “go woke, go broke” echoed throughout the industry as it is in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and other fields.
“According to Matthew Ball, an adviser and producer in the games and TV space…says that the blame for all of this can’t be pinned to a single thing, like capitalism, mismanagement, Covid-19, or even interest rates. It also involves development costs, how studios are staffed, consumers’ spending habits, and game pricing. “This storm is so brutal,” he says, ‘because it is all of these things at once, and none have really alleviated since the layoffs began.’”
Many indie studios were shuttered and large tech leaders such as Microsoft and Sony shut down parts of their gaming division. Also a chain of events influenced by the hatred of DEI and its associated mindsets that is being called a second GamerGate.
The gaming industry will continue through the beginnings of 2025 with business as usual. The industry will bounce back, but it will be different than the past.
Whitney Grace, February 5, 2025
Google and Job Security? What a Hoot
February 4, 2025
We have smart software, but the dinobaby continues to do what 80 year olds do: Write the old-fashioned human way. We did give up clay tablets for a quill pen. Works okay.
Yesterday (January 30, 2025), one of the group mentioned that Google employees were circulating a YAP. I was not familiar with the word “yap”, so I asked, “What’s a yap?” The answer: It is yet another petition.
Here’s what I learned and then verified by a source no less pristine than NBC news. About a 1,000 employees want Google to assure the workers that they have “job security.” Yo, Googlers, when lawyers at the Department of Justice and other Federal workers lose their jobs between sips of their really lousy DoJ coffee, there is not much job security. Imagine professionals with sinecures now forced to offer some version of reality on LinkedIn. Get real.
The “real” news outfit reported:
Google employees have begun a petition for “job security” as they expect more layoffs by the company. The petition calls on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to offer buyouts before conducting layoffs and to guarantee severance to employees that do get laid off. The petition comes after new CFO Anat Ashkenazi said one of her top priorities would be to drive more cost cutting as Google expands its spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2025.
I remember when Googlers talked about the rigorous screening process required to get a job. This was the unicorn like Google Labs Aptitude Test or GLAT. At one point, years ago, someone in the know gave me before a meeting the “test.” Here’s the first page of the document. (I think I received this from a Googler in 2004 or 2005 five:
If you can’t read this, here’s question 6:
One your first day at Google, you discover that your cubicle mate wrote the textbook you used as a primary resource in your first year of graduate school. Do you:
a) Fawn obsequiously and ask if you can have an aut0ograph
b) Sit perfectly still and use only soft keystrokes to avoid disturbing her concentration
c) Leave her daily offerings of granola and English toffee from the food bins
d) Quote your favorite formula from the text book and explain how it’s now your mantra
e) Show her how example 17b could have been solved with 34 fewer lines of code?
I have the full GLAT if you want to see it. Just write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com and we will find a way to provide the allegedly real document to you.
The good old days of Googley fun and self confidence are, it seems, gone. As a proxy for the old Google one has employees we have words like this:
“We, the undersigned Google workers from offices across the US and Canada, are concerned about instability at Google that impacts our ability to do high quality, impactful work,” the petition says. “Ongoing rounds of layoffs make us feel insecure about our jobs. The company is clearly in a strong financial position, making the loss of so many valuable colleagues without explanation hurt even more.”
I would suggest that the petition won’t change Google’s RIF. The company faces several challenges. One of the major ones is the near impossibility of paying for [a] indexing and updating the wonderful Google index, [b] spending money in order to beat the pants off the outfits which used Google’s transformer tricks, and [c] buy, hire, or coerce the really big time AI wizards to join the online advertising company instead of starting an outfit to create a wrapper for Deepseek and getting money from whoever will offer it.
Sorry, petitions are unlikely to move a former McKinsey big time blue chip consultant. Get real, Googler. By the way, you will soon be a proud Xoogler. Enjoy that distinction.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2025
Google AI Product Names: Worse Than the Cheese Fixation
February 4, 2025
This blog post is the work of a real-live dinobaby. No smart software involved.
If you are Googley, you intuitively and instantly know what these products are:
Gemini Advanced 2.0 Flash
Gemini Advanced 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental
2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with apps
2.0 Pro Experimental
1.5 Pro
1.5 Flash
If you don’t get it, you write articles like this one: “You Only Need to See This Screenshot Once to Realize Why Gemini Needs to Follow ChatGPT in Making Its AI Products Less Confusing.” Follow ChatGPT, from the outfit OpenAI which is an open source and a non profit with a Chief Wizard who was fired and rehired more quickly than I can locate hallucinations in ChatGPT whatever. (With Google hallucinations, particularly in the cheese department, I know it is just a Sundar & Prabhakar joke.) With OpenAI, I am not quite sure of anything other than a successful (so far) end run around the masterful leader of X.com.
The write up says:
What we want is AI that just works, with simple naming conventions. If you look at the way Apple brands its products, it normally has up to three versions of a product with a simple name indicating the differences. It has two versions of its MacBook – the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro – and its latest iPhone – iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro – that’s nice and simple.
Yeah, sure, Apple is the touchstone with indistinguishable iPhones, the M1, M2, M3, and M4 which are exactly understood as different by what percentage of the black turtleneck crowd?
Here’s a tip: These outfits are into marketing. Whether it is Apple designers influencing engineers or Google engineers influencing art history majors, neither company wants to do what courses in branding suggest; for example, consistency in naming and messaging and community engagement. I suppose confusion in social media and bafflement when trying to figure out what each black box large language model delivers other than acceptable high school essays and made up information is no big deal.
Word prediction is okay. Just a tip: Use the free services and read authoritative sources. Do some critical thinking. You may not be Googley, but you will be recognized as an individual who makes an honest effort to formulate useful outputs. Oh, you can label them experimental and flash to add some mystery to your old fashioned work, not “flash” work which is inconsistent, confusing, and sort of dumb in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 4, 2025
The Thought Process May Be a Problem: Microsoft and Copilot Fees
February 4, 2025
Yep, a dinobaby wrote this blog post. Replace me with a subscription service or a contract worker from Fiverr. See if I care.
Here’s a connection to consider. On one hand, we have the remarkable attack surface of Microsoft software. Think SolarWinds. Think note from the US government to fix security. Think about the flood of bug fixes to make Microsoft software secure. Think about the happy bad actors gleefully taking advantage of what is the equivalent of a piece of chocolate cake left on a picnic table in Iowa in July.
Now think about the marketing blast that kicked off the “smart software” revolution. Google flashed its weird yellow and red warning lights. Sam AI-Man began thinking in terms of trillions of dollars. Venture firms wrote checks like it was 1999 again. Even grade school students are using smart software to learn about George Washington crossing the Delaware.
And where are we? ZDNet published an interesting article which may have the immediate effect of getting some Microsoft negative vibes. But to ZDNet’s credit the write up “The Microsoft 365 Copilot Launch Was a Total Disaster.” I want to share some comments from the write up before I return to the broader notion that the “thought process” is THE Microsoft problem.
I noted this passage:
Shortly after the New Year, someone in Redmond pushed a button that raised the price of its popular (84 million paid subscribers worldwide!) Microsoft 365 product. You know, the one that used to be called Microsoft Office? Yeah, well, now the app is called Microsoft 365 Copilot, and you’re going to be paying at least 30% more for that subscription starting with your next bill.
How about this statement:
No one wants to pay for AI
Some people do, but these individuals do not seem to be the majority of computing device users. Furthermore there are some brave souls suggesting that today’s approach to AI is not improving as the costs of delivering AI continue to rise. Remember those Sam AI-Man trillions?
Microsoft is not too good with numbers either. The article walks through the pricing and cancellation functions. Here’s the key statement after explaining the failure to get the information consistent across the Microsoft empire:
It could be worse, I suppose. Just ask the French and Spanish subscribers who got a similar pop-up message telling them their price had gone from €10 a month to €13,000. (Those pesky decimals.)
Yep, details. Let’s go back to the attack surface idea. Microsoft’s corporate thought process creates problems. I think the security and Copilot examples make clear that something is amiss at Microsoft. The engineering of software and the details of that engineering are not a priority.
That is the problem. And, to me, it sure seems as though Microsoft’s worse characteristics are becoming the dominant features of the company. Furthermore, I believe that the organization cannot remediate itself. That is very concerning. Not only have users lost control, but the firm is unconsciously creating a greater set of problems for many people and organizations.
Not good. In fact, really bad.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2025
Microsoft and Bob Think for Bing
February 4, 2025
Bing is not Google, but Microsoft wants its search engine to dominate queries. Microsoft Bing has a small percentage of Internet searches and in a bid to gain more traction it has copied Google’s user interface (UI). Windows Latest spills the tea over the UI copying: “Microsoft Bing Is Trying To Spoof Google UI When People Search Google.com."
Google’s UI is very distinctive with its minimalist approach. The only item on the Google UI is the query box and menus along the top and bottom of the page. Microsoft Edge is Google’s Web browser and it is programed to use Bing. In a sneaky (and genius) move, when Edge users type Google into the Bing search box they are taken to UI that is strangely Google-esque. Microsoft is trying this new UI to lower the Bing bounce rate, users who leave.
Is it an effective tactic?
“But you might wonder how effective this idea would be. Well, if you’re a tech-savvy person, you’ll probably realize what’s going on, then scroll and open Google from the link. However, this move could keep people on Bing if they just want to use a search engine. Google is the number one search engine, and there’s a large number of users who are just looking for a search engine, but they think the search engine is Google. In their mind, the two are the same. That’s because Google has become a synonym for search engines, just like Chrome is for browsers. A lot of users don’t really care what search engine they’re using, so Microsoft’s new practice, which might appear stupid to some of you, is likely very effective.”
For unobservant users and/or those who don’t care, it will work. Microsoft is also tugging on heartstrings with another tactic:
“On top of it, there’s also an interesting message underneath the Google-like search box that says “every search brings you closer to a free donation. Choose from over 2 million nonprofits. This might also convince some people to keep using Bing.”
What a generous and genius tactic! We’re not sure this is the interface everyone sees, but we love the me too approach from monopolies and alleged monopolies.
Whitney Grace, February 4, 2025
Another Bad Apple? Is It This Shipment or a Degraded Orchard?
February 3, 2025
Yep, a dinobaby wrote this blog post. Replace me with a subscription service or a contract worker from Fiverr. See if I care.
I read “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber.” Now Siri someone told me had some tenuous connection to the Stanford Research Institute. Then the name and possibly some technology DNA wafted to Cupertino. The juicy apple sauce company produced smart software. Someone demonstrated it to me by asking Siri to call a person named “Yankelovich” by saying the name. That just did not work.
The write up explains that my experience was “dumb” and the new Apple smart software is dumber. That is remarkable. A big company and a number of mostly useful products like the estimable science fiction headset and a system demanding that I log into Facetime, iMessage, and iCloud every time I use the computer even though I don’t use these features is mostly perceived as one of the greatest companies on earth.
The write up says:
It’s just incredible how stupid Siri is about a subject matter of such popularity.
Stupid about a popular subject? Even the even more estimable Google figured out a long time ago that one could type just about any spelling of Britney Spears into the search box and the Google would spit out a nifty but superficial report about this famous person and role model for young people.
But Apple? The write up says from a really, truly objective observer of Apple:
New Siri — powered by Apple Intelligence™ with ChatGPT integration enabled — gets the answer completely but plausibly wrong, which is the worst way to get it wrong. It’s also inconsistently wrong — I tried the same question four times, and got a different answer, all of them wrong, each time. It’s a complete failure.
The write up points out:
It’s like Siri is a special-ed student permitted to take an exam with the help of a tutor who knows the correct answers, and still flunks.
Hmmm. Consistently wrong with variations of incorrectness — Do you want to log in to iCloud?
But the killer statement in the write up in my opinion is this one:
Misery loves company they say, so perhaps Apple should, as they’ve hinted since WWDC last June, partner with Google to add Gemini as another “world knowledge” partner to power — or is it weaken? — Apple Intelligence.
Several observations are warranted even though I don’t use Apple mobile devices, but I do like the ruggedness of the Mac Air laptops. (No, I don’t want to log into Apple Media Services or Facetime, thanks.) Here we go with my perceptions:
- Skip the Sam AI-Man stuff, the really macho Zuck stuff, and the Sundar & Prabhakar stuff. Go with Deepseek. (Someone in Beijing will think positively about the iPhone. Maybe?)
- Face up to the fact that Apple does reasonably good marketing. Those M1, M2, M3 chips in more flavors than the once-yummy Baskin-Robbins offered are easy for consumers to gobble up.
- Innovation is not just marketing. The company has to make what its marketers describe in words. That leap is not working in my opinion.
So where does that leave the write up, the Siri thing, and me? Free to select another vendor and consider shorting Apple stock. The orchard is dropping fruit not fit for human consumption but a few can be converted to apple sauce. That’s a potential business. AI slop, not so much.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2025
A Failure Retrospective
February 3, 2025
Every year has tech failures, some of them will join the zeitgeist as cultural phenomenons like Windows Vista, Windows Me, Apple’s Pippin game console, chatbots, etc. PC Mag runs down the flops in: “Yikes: Breaking Down the 10 Biggest Tech Fails of 2024.” The list starts with Intel’s horrible year with its booted CEO, poor chip performance. It follows up with the Salt Typhoon hack that proved (not that we didn’t already know it with TikTok) China is spying on every US citizen with a focus on bigwigs.
National Public Data lost 272 million social security numbers to a hacker. That was a great day in summer for hacker, but the summer travel season became a nightmare when a CrowdStrike faulty kernel update grounded over 2700 flights and practically locked down the US borders. Microsoft’s Recall, an AI search tool that took snapshots of user activity that could be recalled later was a concern. What if passwords and other sensitive information were recorded?
The fabulous Internet Archive was hacked and taken down by a bad actor to protest the Israel-Gaza conflict. It makes us worry about preserving Internet and other important media history. Rabbit and Humane released AI-powered hardware that was supposed to be a hands free way to use a digital assistant, but they failed. JuiceBox ended software support on its EV car chargers, while Scarlett Johansson’s voice was stolen by OpenAI for its Voice Mode feature. She sued.
The worst of the worst is this:
“Days after he announced plans to acquire Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk argued that the platform needed to be “politically neutral” in order for it to “deserve public trust.” This approach, he said, “effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” In March 2024, he also pledged to not donate to either US presidential candidate, but by July, he’d changed his tune dramatically, swapping neutrality for MAGA hats. “If we want to preserve freedom and a meritocracy in America, then Trump must win,” Musk tweeted in September. He seized the @America X handle to promote Trump, donated millions to his campaign, shared doctored and misleading clips of VP Kamala Harris, and is now working closely with the president-elect on an effort to cut government spending, which is most certainly a conflict of interest given his government contracts. Some have even suggested that he become Speaker of the House since you don’t have to be a member of Congress to hold that position. The shift sent many X users to alternatives like BlueSky, Threads, and Mastodon in the days after the US election.”
It doesn’t matter what Musk’s political beliefs are. He has no right to participate in politics.
Whitney Grace, February 3, 2025
AI Smart, Humans Dumb When It Comes to Circuits
February 3, 2025
Anyone who knows much about machine learning knows we don’t really understand how AI comes to its conclusions. Nevertheless, computer scientists find algorithms do some things quite nicely. For example, ZME Science reports, "AI Designs Computer Chips We Can’t Understand—But They Work Really Well." A team from Princeton University and IIT Madras decided to flip the process of chip design. Traditionally, human engineers modify existing patterns to achieve desired results. The task is difficult and time-consuming. Instead, these researchers fed their AI the end requirements and told it to take it from there. They call this an "inverse design" method. The team says the resulting chips work great! They just don’t really know how or why. Writer Mihai Andrei explains:
"Whereas the previous method was bottom-up, the new approach is top-down. You start by thinking about what kind of properties you want and then figure out how you can do it. The researchers trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — a type of AI model — to understand the complex relationship between a circuit’s geometry and its electromagnetic behavior. These models can predict how a proposed design will perform, often operating on a completely different type of design than what we’re used to. … Perhaps the most exciting part is the new types of designs it came up with."
Yes, exciting. That is one word for it. Lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta notes:
"’We are coming up with structures that are complex and look randomly shaped, and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance,’ says Sengupta. The designs were unintuitive and very different than those made by the human mind. Yet, they frequently offered significant improvements."
But at what cost? We may never know. It is bad enough that health care systems already use opaque algorithms, with all their flaws, to render life-and-death decisions. Just wait until these chips we cannot understand underpin those calculations. New world, new trade-offs for a world with dumb humans.
Cynthia Murrell, February 3, 2025
Dumb Smart Software? This Is News?
January 31, 2025
A blog post written by a real and still-alive dinobaby. If there is art, there is AI in my workflow.
The prescient “real” journalists at the Guardian have a new insight: When algorithms are involved, humans get the old shaftola. I assume that Weapons of Math Destruction was not on some folks’ reading list. (O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown, 2016). That book did a reasonably good job of explaining how smart software’s math can create some excitement for mere humans. Anecdotes about Amazon’s management of its team of hard-working delivery professionals shifting into survival tricks revealed by the wily Dane creating Survival Russia videos for YouTube.
(Yep, he took his kids to search for graves near a gulag.) “It’s a Nightmare: Couriers Mystified by the Algorithms That Control Their Jobs” explains that smart software raises some questions. The “real” journalist explains:
This week gig workers, trade unions and human rights groups launched a campaign for greater openness from Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo about the logic underpinning opaque algorithms that determine what work they do and what they are paid. The couriers wonder why someone who has only just logged on gets a gig while others waiting longer are overlooked. Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
Confusing? To some but to the senior managers of the organizations shifting to smart software, the cost savings are a big deal. Imagine. In Britain, a senior manager can spend a week or two in Nice, maybe Monaco? The write up reports:
The app companies say they do have rider support staffed by people and some information about the algorithms is available on their websites and when drivers are initially “onboarded”.
Of course the “app companies” say positive things. The issue is that management embraces smart software. A third-party firm is retained to advise the lawyers and accountants and possibly one presentable information technology person to a briefing. The options are considered and another third-party firm is retained to integrate the smart software. That third-party retains a probably unpresentable IT person who can lash up some smart software to the bailing-wire-and-spit enterprise software system. Bingo! The algorithms perform their magic. Oh, whom does one blame for a flawed solution? I don’t know. Just call in the lawyers.
The article explains the impact on a worker who delivers for people who cannot walk to a restaurant or the grocery:
“Every worker should understand the basis on which they are paid,” Farrar [a delivery professional] said. “But you’re being gamed into deciding whether to accept a job or not. Will I get a better offer? It’s like gambling and it’s very distressing and stressful for people. You are completely in a vacuum about how best to do the job and because people often don’t understand how decisions are being made about their work, it encourages conspiracies.”
To whom should Mr. Farrar and others shafted by math complain? Perhaps the Guardian newspaper, which is slightly less popular than TikTok or X.com, Facebook or Red Book, or BlueSky or YouTube. My suggestion would be for the Guardian to use these channels and beg for pounds or dollars like other valiant social media professionals. The person doing deliveries might want to explore working for Amazon deliveries and avail himself of Survival Russia videos when on his generous Amazon breaks. And what about the people who call a restaurant and specify at home delivery? I would recommend getting out of that comfy lounge chair and walking to the restaurant in person. While you wait for your lovingly-crafted meal at the Indian takeaway, you can read Weapons of Math Destruction.
Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2025
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
