Ian and Ash talk about Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot towards the Metaverse and discuss what the industry catch-phrase “You build it, you run it” means in real life.
Show Notes
Links
- Bugs in our Pockets: The risks of client-side scanning
- What A Lot of Things on Amazon Alexa
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- The Metaverse and How We'll Build It Together, at Facebook Connect 2021
- An Interview with Mark Zuckerberg about the Metaverse, by Stratechery
- A $10 Million Investment In SecondLife from IBM is the Latest Push to Build V-Business from November 2006
- IBM CEO Sam Palmisano in Second Life, by Ian in November 2016
- Ready Player One, movie trailer
- The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find It, and Who Will Build It, by Matthew Ball
- Who Runs It, on the different options for production support by Steve Smith
- What is You Build You Run It, from Equal Experts
- Enterprise DevOps: Why You Should Run What You Build, by Stephen Orban of AWS
- (Paid content) Influencing empowered teams to the things that matter to you, by Sarah Wells of Financial Times
Creators & Guests
Host
What is What A Lot Of Things: Tech talk from a human perspective?
Ash and Ian talk about interesting Things from the tech industry that are on their minds.
Is it web 3.0 or is it web 3?
Ian:Well, maybe we should form a digital autonomous organization and determine an answer to that, and then we can have a blockchain signed resolution from the 2 of us, on whether it's 3.0 or just 3.
Ash:It all sounds like a lot of hard work, doesn't it?
Ian:Yes. Particularly for all of the CPUs that have to run it.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably the thing that that kind of grinds my gears the the most, I think, is the obvious destruction, that drives this this movement.
Ian:Yeah. Well, there was another, another crypto thing that instead of requiring a lot of CPU, requires a lot of disk space. And and, and then the price of SSDs starts going up worldwide as people are buying them all up in order to store proof of disk space or whatever it is. Proof of stake and proof of work and proof of disk space.
Ash:I like the proof of disk space. Yeah. So in order to get the proof of stake, you need to be able to prove you have enough disk space.
Ian:I formed a DAO to to prove my disk space.
Ash:But I guess this is the kind of madness that forms around these things, isn't it?
Ian:It is. And what's amusing is that if we post this and have a transcript or or something like we did last time, then people will find it on Google, and we'll get, like, millions of listeners who hate us.
Ash:That sounds amazing.
Ian:It does, doesn't it? Yeah. Even if they hate us. I mean, I I already have the Germans
Ash:True.
Ian:Who tweet all kinds of bizarre stuff to me, so I hardly feel it anymore.
Ash:Yeah. I think the the standard patterns are you have the people who understand it but are incredibly condescending to everyone who has a question about it and the people who think that all of it is is worthless. So I think the only thing that it really proves, is that we enjoy taking extreme positions on things.
Ian:Who? You and I?
Ash:Well, humanity.
Ian:Well, yes. Yes, we do. Thanks, Mark.
Ash:And then whenever you say I don't understand this, and could someone help me to understand it? Because I don't count myself as a as a stupid man.
Ian:And nor do I, Ash. I don't count you as a stupid man either.
Ash:But if I watch or read something about web 3 or 3 point o, I don't I think it is just web 3, isn't it?
Ian:Yeah. I think it is.
Ash:Then I I often come away non the wiser about what's going on. Either I'm not as smart as I think I am, which is very possible, or there's just some disconnect between how I see the world and how web 3.0 without the point o sees the world.
Ian:Yeah. Well, you know, they do say that, well over 50% of people think that they're more intelligent than average. So there's something going going on in that, Yeah.
Ash:Yeah. This is kind of a good range, isn't there, from Yeah. My individual delusions to up all the way up to how we delude ourselves as a society.
Ian:Yeah. So 78% of drivers believe that they are above average drivers.
Ash:Yeah. I really don't believe that.
Ian:No?
Ash:No.
Ian:But if drivers saw themselves how I see them, then, anyway, I'd better not go there. This we're already gonna have the digital web 3 people coming to kill us. If I add drivers to that, that will just be a bit overwhelming, I think.
Ash:You're offending some of the touchiest people on the planet.
Ian:Yes. I am.
Ash:Yes. Who can accept no feedback whatsoever without saying, I'm right. You just don't understand.
Ian:Yes. Nobody understands me.
Ash:Nobody nobody does understand me. It's true either.
Ian:So
Ash:that was a warm up. That was a good warm up.
Ian:Hello, Ash.
Ash:Hello, Ian. How are you?
Ian:I'm very well. Thank you. Good. Merry Christmas.
Ash:See, that sounds like an estimate to me.
Ian:An estimate? Are you saying that, even though we are recording this before Christmas, that we might not get it out until later?
Ash:Maybe. But I think if we name a time period such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, whatever it is, then I don't I feel some internal pressure now. Now we've called it the Christmas special, because in my mind Christmas specials must come out before Christmas.
Ian:Well, I agree with you that in general, Christmas specials come out before Christmas, but, you know, there must be a way around that. Yeah. I mean, maybe it will come out before Christmas, and all this will be irrelevant. Not impossible, isn't it?
Ash:So now I'm fighting the urge to drop all my other plans for Christmas and just edit the episode and and get it out there. Maybe we could release it the same time as the queen's speech.
Ian:Yeah. Or the queen's birthday.
Ash:Which birthday? She's got 2.
Ian:Yeah. But not neither of them is before Christmas.
Ash:Welcome to our Easter special, everyone.
Ian:Yes. Yes. Happy Easter.
Ash:Happy Easter 2024. No pressure. I don't feel any pressure now now that I've named it the Easter special 2024.
Ian:Yes. I think we are safe for that. Good o. So I have some follow-up from the last episode. Do do you remember the last episode?
Ash:I do. I do. We talked about Apple's child safety measures.
Ian:And other development team roles.
Ash:Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
Ian:But this follow-up is about Apple's child safety measures. So I just really wanted to highlight a couple of things. So when we recorded the last episode, the child safety measure had been announced but not implemented. And then there was an enormous outcry, which we alluded to in our episode. And then Apple have subsequently announced that they were going to hold back on implementing them.
Ian:And then a lot of luminaries of the crypto industry. Okay. We can't call it that anymore. We're going back to, Bitcoin again.
Ash:It's just because you don't understand it, Ian. That's all.
Ian:I know. I know. To me, crypto refers to cryptography, not cryptocurrency. But I realized that the world has overtaken me. And while I've been consistently using crypto to refer to cryptography for many years because people are now using it to refer to cryptocurrency.
Ian:That's obviously the new right.
Ash:Yes.
Ian:But if I say that, I might mean cryptography.
Ash:Okay.
Ian:So anyway, a lot of experts in cryptography or crypto as I like to call it, got together and published a paper about Apple's proposals.
Ash:Okay.
Ian:And the name of the paper is Bugs in Our Pockets.
Ash:Oh, nice stuffy title there. I like that.
Ian:Bugs in Our Pockets maybe gives you a flavor of the position that they've adopted in their paper.
Ash:Yeah. There is some bias worked in there, isn't there?
Ian:But I would say that the paper is a very good and coherent collection of all the arguments about this. So I think it's well worth a read if you were interested in that topic last time.
Ash:Yep. Agreed.
Ian:So one more bit of news. In 2019, you remember then
Ash:I do.
Ian:When we recorded our first five episodes, in fact?
Ash:Good year.
Ian:Good year.
Ash:Pre COVID?
Ian:Yes. We we were we were mere innocent that we didn't know what was coming to us. No. And I decided to produce an Alexa skill to allow people to listen to this podcast easily.
Ash:Excellent.
Ian:Then I timed this really well. So I timed it I finished it just after episode 5, which was about this time in 2019, and then forgot to tell you all about it in episode 6, which was about some number of months ago. So I believe that you ought to be able to say to Alexa stuff about what a lot of things, and it will be able to do it. I'm just gonna test it out, actually Oh. To see if it still works.
Ian:I'm gonna have to cut this bit out. Alexa, open What A Lot of Things.
Speaker 3:Welcome to What A Lot of Thing from Ian Smith and Ash Winter. There are 7 episodes. Which one would you like me to play for you?
Ian:Episode 2.
Speaker 3:This is What A Lot of Thing, episode 2, getting into machine learning and team topologies. You're already recording.
Ian:Hello, Matt. How are you? You're here again. Alexa, stop. I think we could say that works.
Ash:Yes.
Ian:So if you love listening to us that much that you want to listen to us using your Alexa thing, he said using a technical term, then by all means, you can talk to the what a lot of things Alexa Skill. I would be more excited about this if it was still 2019 and I'd just done it. But as it's 2 years later, I'm now testing it to see if it still works rather than be excited about it. Yeah.
Ash:Good software lasts. Simple software lasts.
Ian:Yes. That was a I'm gonna go with simple more than good. But yeah.
Ash:Simple is good. Right?
Ian:It's in Python. I'm not sure people normally do Alexa skills in Python except for me.
Ash:Did you choose a technology counter to the, accepted norms for that platform?
Ian:Maybe.
Ash:That's also a very common decision I find in the world of technology too.
Ian:Yeah. Yeah. I I figure I should have learned JavaScript or something, but I just you know, it wasn't gonna happen. No. So I did it in Python.
Ian:I'd probably use, Pandas or some library of machine learning to do it because that's just what I know how to do.
Ash:Same library, all jobs.
Ian:Yes. Exactly. All job. So listen to us on Alexa. That's another thing you can now do, which I think, actually, Amazon has overtaken us, and you could probably just listen to us on Alexa anyway.
Ash:Yes. Probably.
Ian:Because I think Amazon has a thing for that now, and we are on Amazon Podcasts
Ash:Oh.
Ian:As as we are on all good podcast hosts. I I feel the inexorable, the inexorable march of time is is frog marching us towards the point where we are going to have to talk about some things.
Ash:Yes. So let's talk about some things.
Ian:Who's going first? Do you want me to go first?
Ash:Yes. Ian's going first.
Ian:Alright. Well, my thing is I would like to say topical, but probably 2 months ago, it would have been topical. Now it's, now it's still topical. I'm I'm gonna say it's topical. And that is the announcement from Facebook where they changed their name to Meta and announced their desire to create the metaverse.
Ian:And there was a lengthy video from Mark Zuckerberg with all these interesting and amazing conceptual things and projects that Facebook is doing and funding and etcetera, etcetera to provide us with a metaverse to use for our day to day life, but I'm mostly interested in how it might be used for our day to day work. So that's where I'm coming from with it.
Ash:Okay. So what is the metaverse?
Ian:Well, Ash, I'm glad you asked me that. It's quite interesting, actually. There's quite a lot of, of possible answers to that. So the word metaverse was coined in one of my favourite books, actually, by a chap called Neal Stephenson back in 1992, I think. And the book is called Snow Crash.
Ash:Yes. Of course. You've talked about this in the past.
Ian:Well, yes. And I I do recommend this book to people. I think it's a really, really good book, and it has it combines a sort of post disaster collapsed into tiny fragments United States with Sumerian tablets and pizza delivery and sword fighting. And, amid all these things, the metaverse and Stephenson's envisionment. That's not a word, is it?
Ash:Yeah. Why not?
Ian:I'm not gonna I can't say in right. Well, I I think we should copyright that if it's gonna be a word. Stephenson's envisionment of the metaverse was a virtual 3 d virtual environment in which you could walk around and go to places. It was constructed in the shape of a ring, and it had a monorail that went all the way around inside it that you could use to travel between the places.
Ash:Sorry.
Ian:An idea later taken up by the Simpsons.
Ash:I just I can't get over it. The monorail the monorail episode, it's always with me.
Ian:What do we want? Monorail.
Ash:So sorry. Go on.
Ian:What what about us lazy slobs?
Ash:Oh, yes. You'll be given
Ian:Cushy jobs. Well, I'm glad we got that off our chest
Ash:Yep.
Ian:If indeed we have, but hopefully. I'm just hoping. It has a some sort of railway with one track that goes all the way around it, and it's divided into a 128 segments, which is 2 to the power of some number. And it has buildings into which you can go and interact with other people. Companies have their have buildings there.
Ian:They have this interesting idea that you can join from low bandwidth environments, and you're like a grainy black and white person in monochrome or if you join from a proper broadband connection as they didn't call it then. It's almost pre Internet
Ash:Yeah.
Ian:1992. But if you join from a high bandwidth location, then you look much more realistic, and it's using lasers to project the 3 d environment onto the back of your eye through special goggles and things like that, so movement tracking, all this kind of stuff. And obviously, very much science fiction at that time. Yeah. But a lot of those kinds of things are probably well, they they are technologically feasible now.
Ian:I think this the the foundations that this all rests on are the imagination of sci fi writers like Neal Stephenson
Ash:Sure.
Ian:Combined with the connectivity that the Internet gives us and then the kind of 3 d technology that gaming has has come up with. So I I find it quite interesting that these things have all all come together.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah.
Ian:But I also find it quite funny. There's a a sort of undertone from I should call them meta really, shouldn't I? Because that's their new name. But you almost feel like they're they're they've invented it, which, of course, they haven't in the same way that everything in technology is building upon decades of other things that people have have made. Yeah.
Ian:But there is this kind of sense from them of this is the next new big thing. And they said, well, it might be the next big thing, but it's not it's not new.
Ash:No. You've had a few attempts in the past, haven't you, like second life and other things like that, which obviously different in nature, but following along similar lines.
Ian:Well, yeah. Absolutely. And and in 2,006 and 2007, while I was still working at IBM, we had quite a big initiative about that. And we got really into second because the thing about Second Life was that it it let you build things. So if you you could create circles and spheres and cylinders and all these kind of primitive shapes and then join them together and group them together.
Ian:But what you could then do is is add code to them that will make them come alive.
Ash:Alright.
Ian:Come alive. Come alive, and the code could interact with stuff outside. Yeah. You could build these really interesting things. So one of my then colleagues built a a model of a data center, but he connected the the real data center's instrumentation to things in the virtual data center.
Ian:Oh, cool. So you could walk around the virtual data centre, and the servers would glow different colours depending on their state of health Right. All that kind of stuff. So so it's really quite an interesting prototype or proof of concept. That sort of thing, that having of this virtual, almost game driven world, but with the ability to interface it with real stuff in the real world and to write code to make it come alive, was really, really interesting.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah.
Ian:And we did all sorts of stuff around that, and we had the CEO of IBM at that time going into a meeting in Second Life with one of his senior vice presidents to talk about something, and it was the first Fortune 500 CEO to to go in a virtual world, possibly not the last. That was all 15 years ago in 2006. Yeah. So, yeah, it's really not new.
Ash:No. So you said you were interested in the metaverse from a point of view of using it in the the working world. So how did you mean?
Ian:One thing is that I think we have to eliminate business travel, At least eliminate it to the point where it's like 1 or 2% of what it is at the moment Yeah. Or what it was pre COVID anyway. Yeah.
Ash:I mean, personally, I've done a lot of pointless business travel Yeah. Where I've gone a long way for, well, what could have been an email to kind of phrase. Yes. To be brutally honest, I think that's quite common. I think it's probably more common than, we would like to admit.
Ian:Well, yeah. It is. And, you know, we've we've tried various things along the way, haven't we? So you remember when we used to have just telephone conference calls? Yes.
Ian:That was the worst way to communicate between a group of people that's ever been invented. It was like torture, and people would have these repertoires of noises that they would make to indicate they wanted to hell. And then when messaging came along, people would be on the conference call messaging things to each other about about the the things that the people were saying who were monopolizing the airwaves as we like to say on this podcast. Yeah. And then, Zoom came along and all of their sort of competitors like Teams and Webex and all these kind of Yeah.
Ian:Things that that let us see the other participants in the meeting much as we can see each other now as we're recording. And that obviously has been a lot better, and COVID has come along and really forced it to be adopted. Yeah. And people are quite used to that and quite comfortable with it. But it's clearly got a lot of drawbacks as well.
Ian:And you see, there's this whole movement for pressurized people to have their cameras on, for example. And, it it is much more powerful to have a Zoom call with cameras on. But, you know, not everybody lives in an environment where that's an appropriate or suitable thing for them to be able to do.
Ash:Yeah. Sure.
Ian:People need to be able to be comfortable as well as, you know, having that kind of bandwidth communication and all the rest of it. So we're kind of been banging up against some of the limitations of things like Zoom.
Ash:Yeah. Sometimes it feels to me we try and do the the same things we would do if we're all in the same place physically, but over a video conference.
Ian:Mhmm.
Ash:So rather than thinking about what we want to do and then sort of changing the the method of communication to be a bit more appropriate. But, yeah, I I agree with all the, like, the, the privacy concerns and, you know, say, if the screen is being recorded, some people don't wish to be recorded and all those types of things. Mhmm. So, yeah, there is a lot of Yeah. There's a lot of nuance in there.
Ash:The camera thing is interesting because a previous contract to the last one, no one ever had their cameras on. Mhmm. It was always you just saw the you just saw the initials.
Ian:So that was telephone conference call.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. Basically. But with the ability to share your screen, I guess.
Ian:Yeah. And actually, to see who's speaking
Ash:Yeah.
Ian:Because the lights flash, don't they, around the faces. Yeah. I went to a face to face meeting a few weeks ago, you know, between the waves. And I was joking that it would be better if we could have black frames that we could hold up around our faces that would have our names in in the corner so so that we could recognize each other because we'd only ever met before in Zoom calls.
Ash:Put, like, a little light around each one, and then you press it when you start talking.
Ian:Yeah. Yeah. I think we could make that quite realistic. But maybe that could be the next big thing, you know, just to reintroduce people gradually to face to face meetings whenever we get to do that. But I feel like there's a spectrum of interaction or business work related interaction, which goes from asynchronous offline email.
Ian:You can just do it really simply Yeah. And then pass this through the need to have a verbal conversation and then to be able to see the other person. And then and then you've got things that you can really only do in person. And so the question is, what things are in that final category if you must do it in person? And how do how can we shrink that?
Ian:And I think that the metaverse idea I mean, we'll see Yeah. Because the execution is is lagging. But that idea could be something that could really close that gap, and that's why I'm excited about it. At the same time, it's being horrified that it's Facebook that's doing it.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. I think yeah. I think I think there's a good chance that between, like, the idealism of the of the initial sort of vision and once we get into the actual implementation, then, yeah, I think that's a well trotted path for many large tech companies where they have a vision to assist the world, let's say, but then it doesn't turn out like that.
Ian:Yeah. A sufficient to assist the world and then monetize.
Ash:Yeah. Absolutely. So meetings in the metaverse, how do I feel? Throughout everything, whether it be a meeting in the office, a meeting over Zoom, a telephone conference call, or in the metaverse, whatever that looks like, we're obviously a lot of meetings are pretty terrible, are they?
Ian:Yes.
Ash:Yeah. So there's kind of that underpinning we could probably be better at what we actually meet about.
Ian:Yes. Yes. We could.
Ash:And then once you've got that sort of good pattern in there, then you can use the technology to enhance that. Mhmm. So I think I've been on some great meetings with on, video calls using, you know, whiteboarding tools and things like that, which have been really engaging and really fun.
Ian:Mhmm.
Ash:So it's all possible to do. Could you then take that, like, the next level and say, well, in the metaverse you'd have like whiteboarding tools as well which then enable you to take that information away similarly if you've collaborated over a diagram or a model or something like that and take that away and feel like you're more in the space. So I think there's potential there for it to use the the best parts of the physical meeting and the the virtual meeting if the execution is right.
Ian:Yeah. It's interesting actually because you're kind of mentioning tools there like, white virtual whiteboards and stuff like that. But I think that the when when this starts to get amazing will be when it allows you to have personal interaction that's better. So for example, if I'm meeting with you for a coffee, say, we both live in the same town, that has happened in the past, then if I'm looking at you and making eye contact with you, you know that because you can see my face moving. You can see if I'm looking engaged or bored or if I'm looking into but, you know, whatever I might be doing.
Ian:That's something that we don't have with the likes of a Zoom call at the moment because all we can see is is this person looking at the camera. And if they're looking at the camera, they look like they're making eye contact, but they're not then looking at you.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah.
Ian:I think that if you start being able to, in a metaverse kind of 3 d virtual office space or workspace or whatever, if you start being able to get your facial expressions and your eye contact and stuff like that, then I think that is actually will be the superpower. And I think any tools could be built around that like virtual whiteboards, sticky notes, sword fights, whatever whatever it may be. That would be a dramatic gesture when you disapprove of a meeting, wouldn't it?
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I have felt like it at times though.
Ian:Yes. Yes. We're all happy that we don't actually have swords in real life generally. But I think that that ability to connect between people will be really will be a superpower. But again, I I kinda come back to the the sort of dark side of that, which is once you've got a device that you're using to enter your virtual workspace that that can read your facial expressions and transmit them onto your avatar and and see where your eyes are looking and be able to replicate that, then you start thinking, well, what a lot of interesting data that provides for people who want to surveil us, whether that's advertisers who want to analyse what your facial expression does when you see one of their adverts.
Ian:In fact, there'll probably be this, some ability where if you can glare fiercely enough for every advert that appears, they stop appearing because they realise they realise they're really irritating you. I don't know. But but, you know, governments are already talking about, you know, people developing technology to use micro expressions to find out what people are really thinking and feeling even when they're saying the right things. And it kind of falls into that same slightly scary area.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. You can see the direction that that things would go already. It seems like a, like a long, like telegraphed, obvious path for for where this would go. It's like, oh, Ash is, you know, frowning at the television again.
Ash:It's like, he's not enjoying this show or whatever it is. Let's advertise him something else, which just seems yeah. Yeah. I think anyone with a privacy concern will obviously have concerns about whatever form the metaverse Facebook's metaverse takes because the because you talk you're talking about sort of brand new form of data as well, aren't you? Where you're looking at how you physically react to things.
Ash:You know, what's next? In a work meeting, could you have like a pulseometer for everyone just to show how, you know
Ian:How saddened they are.
Ash:How their hearts are racing or not?
Ian:Yes. I I could see that you're about to have have a a cardio event. I think I think you should disconnect now. The only way that this can be acceptable is if built into the hardware built in a very low level of the of the whole thing is the privacy controls to allow you to to specify that advertisers don't get that data or people don't get that data. Or if they get it, then you're at least it's through your own control, not not Yeah.
Ian:Not as the default. And that's kind of why it's I I know that Mark Zuckerberg, if you watch his video, he's saying a lot of the right things. They want to decouple it from being connected to the Facebook social network, for example. And they don't want to force people to sign in with Facebook. They're not looking to build 1 big metaverse that they own and everybody else can rent space in it.
Ian:They're not thinking about it in a lot of the ways that they that would make it obviously evil, but they are them. You know? The the the the history of being able to collect data and then use it for monetary gain is is you know, they've got a big track record of that.
Ash:Yeah. I think that's the challenge, isn't it? Why would you build it unless you were going to make money off it? You wouldn't. And, also, again, it's like you have an ideal from someone at the top of an organization.
Ash:But the implementation and maintenance will happen not at that level. It will happen at lower levels where there's all kinds of weird incentives going on. Mhmm. So I think that we will get to a point where the ideal doesn't match what actually happens, and, you know, we'll end up with a with a heads up display in the metaverse, which is like, you know, 95% adverts with a tiny little letter box in the middle so you could see what's going on.
Ian:But have have you watched the film Ready Player 1?
Ash:Yeah. That's the that's the argument from that, isn't it?
Ian:The baddies in that were basically people who wanted to make their metaverse 80% visual field is adverts. That was what the baddies wanted to do.
Ash:So, you know, I think it's like, you know, it's it's it's obviously parody, but parody often becomes life. Right?
Ian:Well, I think the the big weak point of their metaverse was that one company owned the whole thing. I think that's definitely a situation we can't allow ourselves to get into. We have to there have to be you can't have one company owning the whole thing. And you got all these different areas of, like, things like identity. So, you know, we we know that these big tech companies that we all love so much in the sense that we use their products all the time.
Ian:But those big tech companies, have they they all have their own identity database. So, you know, sign in with Google, sign in with Facebook, sign in with Twitter. You know, you get all these options. Sign in with Apple, but they're not allowing you to sign in with those things to each other. Yeah.
Ian:Yeah. So immediately, there's going to have to. If you want to be a person in a metaverse that always looks the same wherever you go, you know, how's that gonna work?
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Because you essentially, you'd have a bunch of big players in that in the metaverse who dominate, but they always would they always want you to be in their corner of the metaverse, And by its nature, they would make it difficult for you to take whatever you'd whatever you've created in their corner into another corner owned by someone else.
Ian:Yeah. And actually, another thing that's interesting about this is all of the, web 3 stuff that we spent a long time mocking. But that idea of being able to own have ownership of unique digital items might be quite an interesting tie in because a lot of people complain it doesn't relate to the real world. But actually, Mark Zuckerberg in in an interview I read with Stratechery, which is a, a tech strategy newsletter, And that's a free you can listen to that for free. Yeah.
Ian:We'll include a link. But he talks about that he doesn't believe in this idea of the real world. He thinks that he doesn't think that the digital world is not part of the real world. And he's so we live in a physical world, and we have a virtual world that we inhabit already through the Internet Yeah. And that there's no strong difference in reality between those those things.
Ian:So I don't know where I'm going with that except that I started talking about the real world and then caught myself.
Ash:Yeah. I think I know what you mean. I think I can see it from from that point of view as well. Because it's like, once something becomes sufficiently integrated with your your reality, if you like, then is it really all that separate? So is my is are my activities on the Internet really that separate from my activities on, you know, in the physical in the physical sense.
Ash:And I I don't think they are, not to a a significant degree anyway. No. So once something's sufficiently integrated, then it just becomes part of, of, like, you know, your reality.
Ian:I agree with that, and I think we have to start thinking like that because it makes the digital stuff more important than it already is. And it deserves to be, you know, things like digital rights and all that kind of stuff. It's important because that stuff is real. Yeah.
Ash:Yeah. But, again, you know, the implementation of it and how much energy it takes and how easily, how easily fabricated these things are is, you know, there's there's there's it's like any approaches in it. There's lots of flaws to it, but, essentially, there is a there's a problem that needs solving in there, isn't it? Mhmm. And whether or not, like, NFTs are really a good answer to that remains to be seen.
Ian:Well, yes. It it really does. And since it's just a bitmap, it's not very hard to rip off anyway. No. So it's, it's an interesting one.
Ian:We shall see.
Ash:I think it does show it shows, like, the limitations of the digital world. Yeah. Yeah? Oh, maybe maybe it just shows that it has the same limitations in a lot of ways as the physical world. You know.
Ash:But you could get a a computer to perfectly replicate a, painting by one of the old masters, But it would still be a copy, but it would be absolutely perfect.
Ian:Yeah. So is there any one more thing I think I'd like to share in terms of the metaverse stuff? The knot is the, a VC called Matthew Ball wrote a blog post, back in 2020, in which he tried to write down what was meant by the metaverse, which I thought was quite an interesting thing to do. And he came up with some general principles, which I think are quite useful to think about. I would just suggest that if people want to really get into this, they listen to Zuckerberg's thing, if they can stand an hour and a half of Facebook's founder.
Ian:But it is interesting, and it's got a lot of proofs of concepts and stuff like that. And then if they read this Strataquerie interview that's in with him, that's in the, in the in the notes, all this will be in the notes, That thing by by Matthew Ball. And if you're really excited about this and you want to, get into it and you've got an Oculus Quest, then you can come and have a meeting with me in my Horizon work room, which, sadly, I sit in on my own.
Ash:Oh, that's a sad tale.
Ian:It is, but it lets you put an agent on your computer, so your computer can appear in this environment. And it scans where the keyboard is on your desk. So you see the keyboard and can type on it. It's it's got some very clever stuff going on, but there's demos of that in, in in in Zuckerberg's video. So, you know, have have a look at it.
Ian:I I I think it could be a really good way to bring people together for work if we can sort the privacy out.
Ash:Yes. Yes. Agreed.
Ian:That's my thing. It seemed to go on for rather a long time. Sorry about that.
Ash:Well, to be fair, there's a lot to talk about in there, I think. Even if you try and narrow it to a, you know, particular use usage, the the wider implications the they don't, well, they don't just go away, do they? You don't know. They'll need to be addressed no matter what the use case is, if you like.
Ian:No. Indeed. I couldn't couldn't agree more.
Ash:Because it's it's still people at the center, isn't it? You know? And their needs and their privacy and who they are. Yep.
Ian:Yes. For sure. Well, that's definitely my thing and a half.
Ash:Thing and a half.
Ian:What's your thing, Ash?
Ash:So my thing is called you build it, you run it. Oh. So I quite like things which are, they're like oh, it's like like, snappy phrases from the world of software development. Yes. I quite I quite like them because they get released into the world, and then they become like something else.
Ash:And they're, you know, they've obviously purposefully kept short to communicate the concept. But then once you actually get to trying to implement them, then, strange things happen.
Ian:Well, there's always the stories attached to them, isn't there? Yeah. Like, we did this, and everything's been perfect since then.
Ash:Yeah. So, I mean, the essence of you build it, you run it is that you take a development team, they are building a a system. And in the past, previously, what would happen is you would have we would have had a development team and an operations team, and you would build the thing. You would throw it over the wall to the operations team to run it, to administer it, and to, you know, tell you about any problems and manage any incidents or or whatever it is. And then you as a development team would go barely on your way building the next thing, which would then be subsequently thrown over the wall to the ops team, and you would carry on like that.
Ash:You know, in relative ignorance of, the pain. You know how your, Yeah. The pain or the joy or whatever it is that's happened when you've released your thing into the world. Whereas you build it, you run it. It's what was kind of as it as it sounds.
Ash:If you're responsible for creating it, then perhaps you should be responsible for running it as well. This, I I guess, it's kind of like a blend of, activities you might do if you like like being on call or managing incidents or or whatever it is. You would do that within your team, which sounds very noble.
Ian:And, of course, it kind of links it gives you an incentive to make sure that it works before you release it. Yeah. Not just on your computer.
Ash:Yeah. Absolutely. So you you would hope that it would encourage things like, like, good testing and good deployment practices and good relationships with, you know, your customers and your support teams or, you know, whoever it is that surround you, more ownership of the different parts of your application. So rather than having like a a team of DBAs who look after your data, it's more part of what you do as a team.
Ian:Absolutely. Yeah. And presumably, there have to be some things in place to make that fair or feasible even.
Ash:Yeah. So one of the interesting things is, like I said, about it going into the world and then spawning a bunch of weird patterns which tend to happen. So things like I remember a job a few years ago. There was immense pressure to build this thing because it was very time sensitive. Someone made an estimate and it was absolutely terrible, the thing that had been built, but the developers were supposed to support it.
Ash:But and they were calling it, you build it, you run it. But I was like, it's not. Is it it's like you force the devs to build it and then force them to run it, which is not. That's not kind of what we're after, is it here? That's not the the vision for that statement.
Ian:Well, if they haven't got the if the devs don't have the power to build it in a in a good way, then that that's not gonna magically make it work when they try and run it. They must have at least enough autonomy to to do the testing that's required and to have good release processes and all of that kind of stuff.
Ash:I think it was obviously used as a we can we can build rushed crap and then give the impression that we're following good practice by getting the developers to support it. So there was an interesting talk that I went to. 1 of the principal engineers at the Financial Times. So she used to, I'll I'll find the name and put it in the notes. So she used to push back and say, fine.
Ash:You can have that when you want it, but we won't support it. Which I thought was a really interesting way of approaching it. So it's like, you're not saying no. You're just saying, yes. You can have what you want, but it won't wake up any of my, you know, the engineers on the team when it goes wrong because we have purposefully taken some of the safeties off to deliver it.
Ian:It's reasonability. There's a reasonability test, isn't there? I find myself saying reasonability test. I'm thinking that I'm coining a new new phrase. I'd but I feel like that should be something that definitely exists.
Ian:Yeah. I mean, it's like the whole Netflix thing where they what do they call it? Chaos engineering, where they have things in their infrastructure that just go around randomly killing things. And when you're building your stuff, you know that you have to build it so that it can survive being randomly killed and without loss of service. And that has made their infrastructure extremely resilient.
Ian:But not even the craziest executive would say, right, we're gonna start this practice. We we we're gonna just switch this on and things are gonna be randomly killed. And now we want you to run around and find ways to recode them so that they can recover from that. You don't do it that way around.
Ash:Turn it on, and then you have to maintain normal service, but you you're not allowed to make any fixes. See, I I think that that, like, a lot of these phrases, that kind of willful abuse of it starts to happen or just, willful misunderstanding of what it actually all means. I I guess the other part of it as well is once you you were talking about well, what do you need in place? Well, you need to pay people to support systems. You can't just have it for nothing.
Ash:Again, I've been at multiple places where the argument has been it's, you know, it's part of your salary. So what? I'm glad I'm a contractor then, and I can just turn these things down, like, flatly because Yes. You know, there's a there's a there's a decent amount of coercion which happens to say, well, you know, you should be supporting this, but not for any, like, extra money. It's like, no, no, no.
Ash:There should be an addendum to your contract, which which covers all this. And I think that's really, like, really important to you can't ask for people to take on more responsibility, and then have no change to how they're rewarded.
Ian:And, again, you'd expect that the ops people who used to throw things across the over the wall to will be part of the team then. They'll they, I'm I'm trying not to say DevOps.
Ash:You could say it. It's fine.
Ian:There is a skill set associated with that that developers don't necessarily straightaway have. What you're making me think is that you can do this, but there's a lot that has to be in place.
Ash:Yeah. If you talk about continuous delivery, for example, it's like there's there's no magic there. You need to have a set of good robust practices, and you need to work towards them before you can get to the point where that's a, you know, a sensible practice to adopt. Mhmm. And then most of the, if there is any magic, it's in the it's in the journey of adopting those practices, which gives you a a more operable system with better quality rather than, you know, making the statement using the word continuous delivery, t m.
Ash:You build it, you run it, t m. Then I'll build quality in, register trademark, rather than just saying these things. I think they've just probably got a bit too easy to say without the the the set of both technical and people focused practice in there as well.
Ian:But people think they know what things mean, don't they? It's like, saying the magic word again, but DevOps, you know, when you go to an organization and and there's the DevOps team over there, that are neither that are neither thing, really. They're just like the the they used to be the ops team. Yeah. And now we've just renamed them, and now we're doing dev ops.
Ian:It's it's And
Ash:we're doing ops ops.
Ian:Ops ops. Yes. Oops. Ops ops.
Ash:They are like that.
Ian:I'll have to remember that one. But yeah. TM. No. I I so what what do you think has to be true for it to be a reasonable thing to inflict, or to offer to development team?
Ash:I think offer is the word as well because Yeah. I think it has to be a, like, a negotiation if you like, rather than a a mandated mandated policy. Especially as because the world is really, really quite complex. And say if you're a new development team who's picking up a previous team's system Mhmm. Which may have a lot of he talked about being able to reason around it as well, which is what kind of one of the interesting parts, isn't it?
Ash:So if you're picking up a previous team's system and then you're asked to support it without knowing it knowing anything about it and being able to reason around it, then you're kinda setting yourself up for, a lot of painful nights with no sleep there, aren't you? I do think that, it does need to be an offer. I think there's plenty of systems I've worked on in the past, which I wouldn't deem to be sufficient quality to be able to offer 247 you know support around them
Ian:no I would accept that offer
Ash:because essentially you'd be like dooming yourself I think you have to before you even get to that point before you even talk about being able to do that you need to then, have a commitment to gradually, improve the reliability of the system and start to have like a sensible policy of say some number of, like, the 70 30 policy of saying 30% of our time will be spent on improving the system, you know, without and rather than a 100% of our time will be spent on building new features, then we'll just put everybody on call, to fix it when it fails.
Ian:Improving the way we work Yeah. And improving the the way it works.
Ash:Yeah. Absolutely. I think and then you have to come up with a like a clear, like, remuneration policy for people who are gonna be on call. And then also, you have to have, like, a nonjudgmental if someone says they're not going on call because, you know, they've got,
Ian:their life.
Ash:Yeah. You know, they've got commitments outside of work that they can't they care for someone or or whatever it is that they can't move, then you should be able to make allowance for that as well. And then if you still can't get to the level of support that you want with your system, then there's still something wrong with the system and the way that you've designed it. So you build it, you run it. As soon as you start to unpack, like everything that's underneath there's so much going on there so I think there's there's loads of foundational practice if you like that you need in order to get there
Ian:Yeah. And I'm still harping in my mind on bringing the ops the the former ops, the people who who run it today into the team because that's a different set of skills. I'm just having this horror story scenario of you build it, you run it, and we'll fire the ops team.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. I think there is, that yeah. That's that's like another potential, like, outcome as well, isn't it? Where you're like, oh, well, you know, we could just get rid of the the ops team or outsource most of it or whatever it is.
Ash:So, again, it seems to me like it's something that's a good to aim at in terms of you build it, you run it, but the world is a bit more complex than that. So I think a good blog series is Steve Smith's you build it like x runs it, and he goes through a few of the different combinations of the model. Mhmm. So he's taken it from the sound bite and then looked at all the different ways. So this kind of you build it, ops runs it.
Ash:There's like, you build it, you and ops run it. Then there's lots of different combinations of who could do that
Ian:Yeah.
Ash:Which is really interesting. And it kinda like I say, it takes it from the sound bite and puts it into, like, the context of how the world works. I recommend that that blog series. I think that's excellent.
Ian:Yeah. I think that that sounds really interesting. And there will be interim states, I guess, that will be covered in some of that. Yeah. You know, as you move from you build it, ops runs it to you build it, you run it.
Ian:Yeah. You might pass through more than 1. It's interesting, because it comes from Amazon, doesn't it, originally? Yeah.
Ash:It was, yeah. So that's where the the initials Verda Vogels was the was the chap who said it first, apparently.
Ian:And AWS is made up of this set of discrete services, isn't it? And there are dependencies between them, but you can see that the team somebody has an idea. They go through a process, don't they, where they write the press release first, and then they sort of assemble teams, and then they they build whatever it is, and they get some people using it. But that service is always a self contained thing that is both built and run by that team. And I think that, you know, that that is almost the most purely perfect environment, if you like, in which to have that philosophy.
Ash:Philosophy came from a place where obviously, they've had to work hard to get there. I would never obviously sort of take that away. No. But the philosophy comes from a place where you've got a lot of those tools already. And the I think the the challenge comes when you try and apply that philosophy to a place where none of those tools exist.
Ian:Yes.
Ash:And that's when it gets like really really challenging and gnarly and people start to get upset because also there's a lot of can I call it organizational capital in running things? And I have worked in places where the stuff that's been thrown over the wall then becomes part of a bit of an empire. Yeah. And obviously different teams running your code. Well, I get it.
Ash:And that enables you to to build up in a state of of things. Does it it to look after? And you need all kinds of different roles if they're less of that is gonna be on the team.
Ian:And processes.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And as we know process persists for a long time. You can get rid of the people, but the process often stays.
Ash:Yeah. And I think that all of these challenges are there if you try and apply this philosophy in existing environment. And I think you just need to be really careful of how you how you do that.
Ian:Maybe the first step is just saying from for the next 6 months, spend 30% of your time, as you suggest, on improving how the system runs and improving how the team works. Because at that point, we're gonna start looking
Ash:Yeah.
Ian:At you build it, you run it.
Ash:Yeah. I think that's probably that sounds like a really, like, sensible way. Because even if you get to the end of that 6 months and you build it, you run it, if if if, you know, if the cake is not quite ready to come out of the oven yet, it's like, well, you're still gonna have a better system. Yeah. So you're still gonna have made improvements and you're still gonna have made a bit of a statement of intent to people as well that you're committed to making like their lives better, in from a development point of view anyway.
Ash:And then even if you build it, you run it, you try and adopt that a bit further in the future, you've you've built up a bit of goodwill as well through that commitment to to improvement because, there's there's very little more sapping than working for a company which, whether it be just outright sort of blocks your desire to improve the system or always comes up with a, with with a reason to say, yeah, we want to improve that, but we just need to deliver this feature first.
Ian:Yeah. Yeah.
Ash:Which is not always true. And it all sounds very reasonable, but then that pattern just gets repeated over and over again until Yeah. You realize that you're even deeper in the hole and that you need 6 months of no features in order to turn your system around and, and build it well.
Ian:Well, it's technical debt. It's the whole thing of technical debt. And the longer it you leave it, the worse it gets.
Ash:Yeah. Yeah.
Ian:And if you if you're in a hole, the aphorism stop digging.
Ash:Wow.
Ian:Springs to mind, doesn't it? And everyone's heard that that saying. But in IT, it's like if you're in a hole, you better keep digging until, you know, these features are delivered. It's pretty hard to get out now. Note to the type, E was looking up as if out of a hole.
Ash:I think one of the other interesting things about you build it, you run it as well. And it kinda speaks to the right in the press release first as well. It's that it's not just about the product, as in the the the technical system that you build. It's about many other things as well. So I remember a few years ago, I was working for a company which needed the system to be up on a Saturday afternoon, let's say.
Ash:And if the system wasn't up on a Saturday afternoon, they lost an awful lot of money. Yes. And then whenever it was down or there was the intermittent outage or or whatever had happened, the attitude was all was always very much the technical teams are gonna have a good long hard look at themselves and make things better next time, which I always felt compelled to step in and say look every decision marketing product, whatever it is, is all led us to this point. So Yep. It's the whole team that's running it and there's many different pressures on that on that running.
Ash:So let's all take responsibility for it. Whereas I think sometimes the danger whether you build it, you run it. It tries to have a focus of responsibility on the development team, but there's an awful lot of things in running a system which are not necessarily under their control because they're not necessarily either technology or system related.
Ian:You you have these kind of idealized teams in in mind sometimes, but and where, you know, you've got these multidisciplinary teams. I mean, last time we were talking about teams that had a lot of designers and all those kind of people in it, and with a smaller ratio of developers and testers. I think that that's kind of you have to I think what you've said there in that scenario is really good because it's kind of recognizing that it's actually there's one team that is delivering to customers. And it doesn't matter almost where the failing is. You have to fix you have to find and sort it out.
Ian:But there's no point saying it's just in this big and then not, you know, not even considering any of the other parts of it. Anyway, yeah, I think that's really good. Is that your thing, Ash?
Ash:That was my thing. That was my thing. So 2 fantastic things there. Really enjoyed that.
Ian:Okay. So what do we normally do at the end?
Ash:We normally say, thank you, everyone.
Ian:Thank you, everyone. That sounded sarcastic. We're we're back in that world again. So, well, thank you, Ash, for that very interesting thing.
Ash:Thanks, Ian. And then I guess I could say something like happy whatever fest
Ian:Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe.
Ash:Like and subscribe. Happy whatever festival has occurred after you've listened to this podcast. It is that that festival's special.
Ian:Indeed. So In in whatever year.
Ash:In whatever year, then whatever's next, it's that festival special.
Ian:Yes, indeed. And happy Christmas to you too, Ash. No.