Stargate Project’s $500B AI Dream & TikTok’s Creepy Accuracy | Tech News of the Week

[00:00:00.00]
Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, Slartibartfast Jr. and the friendly Fjords.

[00:00:07.05]
Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast where Chris and I go through four interesting stories that we came across in the past week. I rambled on about LDAP and X500 for entirely too long. So Chris, why don't you take a crack at the first story this week?

[00:00:25.08]
Chris: Once again, you didn't do that yet.

[00:00:28.01]
Ned: But I did. Time is a flat circle.

[00:00:32.29]
Chris: Anyway, do you want to take a look at TikTok's recommendation algorithm?

[00:00:40.02]
Ned: Maybe.

[00:00:40.23]
Chris: Well, you can't. That shit is locked up tighter than a whalebone corset, as all the kids are saying these days. But if you want, you can read a research paper that goes down the road of what's in the TikTok algorithm, how it's intended to work, and most importantly, how do they define success? Unsurprisingly, TikTok is looking to keep people on the platform. But then again, same with Twitter, same with Facebook, same with YouTube. Basically, every social media website in existence. Basically, every website in existence. Who are we kidding? Tiktok, though, seems to have been able to take that next step. The algorithm constantly updates itself for the evolving changes of user references based on their activities. As a great philosopher once said, Kids today have attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds.

[00:01:40.29]
Ned: I'm sorry, what?

[00:01:41.16]
Chris: It makes sense that whatever the last thing a TikTok user watched would be more important to the decision of what's next than something they looked at several months ago. The paper goes through the how of the algorithm on the technical side as well, which includes tools like collisionless hash tables, Kafka, which I've heard of, and Apache Flink. Which, what are we doing here? Flink? Is that a real name? All of this adds up to an algorithm that delivers, personalized content at lightning speed. And most importantly, it's personalized content that users actually want. Here's the kicker. Probably one of the main reasons TikTok has so many devoted followers Of course, to quote researcher Zengweizhou, the more frequently someone uses TikTok, the more accurate the algorithm will be.

[00:02:40.15]
Ned: I have heard some spooky things about how accurate that algorithm can get.

[00:02:45.28]
Chris: It was listed when this report came out, and this was actually a breakdown of a report that came out about two years ago. We didn't talk about it then because the actual report is literally impenetrable. But they basically said this technology is two years ahead of anything else on the Internet.

[00:03:04.03]
Ned: And probably should be illegal.

[00:03:06.23]
Chris: And will be, and then won't be, and then will be again, and then won't be.

[00:03:10.08]
Ned: We should do a whole show just about the weird names of Apache projects?

[00:03:18.03]
Chris: I'm still not over it, and I'm upset that you brought it up again.

[00:03:22.22]
Ned: Stargate project has neither stars nor gates. Openai, SoftBank, and Oracle have announced a joint venture to build a series of AI-focused data centers in Texas called the Stargate Project. The initial spending commitment is 100 billion, with up to 500 billion to be spent in the next four years. The first site to see construction will likely be in Abilene, Texas, where Oracle and OpenAI were already negotiating for a data center lease agreement. Each data center is purportedly going to be 10 buildings, each with 500 1,000 square feet, consuming an estimated gigawatt of power. With a plan to construct up to 20 of these data centers, local residents are rightly concerned about where the power and the water are going to come from to feed these AI bit barn behemoths. One might also wonder what's happening with OpenAI and Microsoft these days, as Redmond has already committed to spending $80 billion on new AI data centers in 2025 to benefit OpenAI and others. Sam Altman seems to believe that no amount of money spent on AI will ever be enough. With the OpenAI CEO, reportedly trying to build an AI investment supergroup with $7 trillion of investment capital.

[00:04:49.14]
Ned: That may have seemed like a pipe dream when it was reported last March, but with half a trillion already on the table from SoftBank, it is looking less like a fantasy and more like an AI-fueled hellscape. Or maybe AGI finally emerges and solves all the world's problems. I'm going to be honest, I've given up trying to predict anything.

[00:05:12.13]
Chris: Openvox has arrived as a fork of configuration management Trailblazer puppet. All the way back when computers began... Okay, that's a little hyperbolic, but I'm not going to lie, it was a while ago. It was 2005 when a project called Puppet proudly popped up. It purport, I cannot keep this up, probably. Puppet was and is a configuration management tool that was super popular for a period of time because one, it was free and open source, and two, it supported a massive number of operating systems. Also, it was written in Ruby, which was the style of the time. Fast forward to the end of last year, though, Puppet's current owner, Perforce, has decided to close access and continue life as a proprietary product. This is really upsetting me. Pinheads. Puppet's open source proponents decided to fork the project, and it is now available as Openvox. No relation to the guitar amp. It is built to be completely compatible with Puppet, meaning that all existing extensions should work just fine in Openvox for now. The maintainers expect Open Vox to go its own way and not just copy what Puppet's doing. And while they didn't explicitly say it out loud, I suspect that they hope the effectively stolen Puppet Project just goes ahead and dies on the vine.

[00:06:47.10]
Chris: This story, as you might recall, closely resembles the open sourcing of HashiCorp's Terraform project as Open Tofu, with a name that's just as weird. Open Puppet Project seems to have been in the running, which, if true, Openvox is better. Other names up for consideration appear to have been Phoenix, which was rejected because too many things are already called that. Maniken, but spelled the stupid way. P-i-n-p, as in P-I-N-P is not puppet, get it? It's a little good new humor there. And Muppet, which is actually clever because it's just a straight, simple letter replacement. But the prevailing fear was that that was still too close and Perforce would sue. I myself only ever used puppet for a short while, as in my early career, I had to work side by side with a massive proponent of Puppet, who talked far too loudly, wore pajama pants at work and walked around the office without any shoes on. This might be judgmental of me, but as an impressionable youth, I just went ahead and learned Ansible. I don't have any regrets, Dan. I don't have any regrets. In any event, though, if you like Puppet, but you don't like Perforce, this might just be the good news you've been waiting for.

[00:08:17.21]
Ned: You said P-I-N-P, and all I could think of is the song by Fitty Cent, P-I-N-P, and they really missed an opportunity there.

[00:08:27.27]
Chris: Cobranding, baby. Think about it.

[00:08:30.05]
Ned: It's next big venture after vitamin water. Bamboo Labs takes a page from HP. 3d printer and filament seller Bamboo Labs is worried about the security of their printers, so much so that they want to lock their printers down to prevent any unauthorized software from talking to them. If you're not a 3D printing enthusiast, well, first, I congratulate you on having a life. Good job. Second, you might not be super familiar with the extremely frustrating nature of the hobby. There's a very strong hacker and tinkerer vibe to the 3D printing community, which means that a lot of the printers out there have a steep learning curve and break almost constantly. For a certain type of person in their 20s, this is fun. Yay. For the rest of us, it sucks donkey balls.

[00:09:22.22]
Chris: I'm not expecting that.

[00:09:26.22]
Ned: Bamboo bucked the trend by developing plug gameplay printers that seldom need maintenance and just print the damn thing already. They even have a cloud service that you can print from so you don't have to futs around with third-party printing software. But that cloud service had the potential for exploitation, so with a recent hardware update, they are locking things down to prevent unauthorized software from using that API endpoint, including third-party tools. Officionados and redditors immediately called foul, and the company had to backtrack and clarify that while the default experience would prevent unauthorized software, there would be a land-only developer mode that allowed for an unhindered experience. As someone who simply uses Bamboo software, This is a total non-issue for me. Redditers see nefarious plans to lock customers into the Bamboo ecosystem, but I see a reasonable effort being made to keep my printing process simple and straightforward and secure. Still, it was a proprietary printer code that sparked the open-source revolution, and it seems like some folks are still pretty touchy about that thing. At least that's how the story goes with Stalman and the printer from Xerox, I believe.

[00:10:46.18]
Chris: That's a whole different episode.

[00:10:48.04]
Ned: It really is. We have to stop making new episodes. We have enough already. That's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye..