On the Duplex demo

Disclaimer: I worked for Google long ago, and I may work there again someday. I had nothing to do with Duplex.

The Google Duplex demo has caused some fairly heated & widespread reactions; to paraphrase, "The person on the other end doesn't know or consent to talking to a robot! This is a deceptive violation of their rights!" I think that I understand, a little, why people react this way, but on balance I find it logically ridiculous. I am also convinced that it will seem both logically and emotionally ridiculous to most people within a generation.

As someone in my 40s, I understand the relationship that 20th century people once had with their phones. I am old enough to remember "reach out and touch someone" being a thing that real people felt was the primary purpose of telephonic communication. However, over the course of my adult life, this use case has been utterly swamped by the rise of automated or semi-automated telephonic processes, constructed by immense and remorseless engines of bureaucratic modernity, that use the telephone as an electronic siphon to suck value out of my time: legally protected political robo-calling, flagrantly illegal commercial robo-calling, telemarketing driven by script-reading call center employees (who, in this role, are functionally biological components of a machine, not autonomous individuals), and a constant nagging flood of scam hangup calls.

Conversely, nearly all outbound phone calls that I make, except to close friends and family, now involve navigation through a robotic phone tree. In other words, I am interacting with a succession of artificial voices for many minutes before a usually-brief chat with a human being.

In other words, for any human being less than about 45 years of age, nearly all telephonic interactions in their adult life have been to a large degree robotic. It is hard to get up in arms because the robots are going to be slightly more fluent in the future. They have been getting more fluent all my life (for example, many phone systems can now recognize numbers that are spoken rather than dialed on a touch-tone pad). I don't care. Deep down, you probably don't either.

Search your feelings; you know it to be true. How many times in your life have you picked up the phone to a telemarketing call and thought to yourself, "Oh thank goodness, I am super glad to have been interrupted in this fashion because it's a human being talking to me rather than a robot? My heart brims over with joy!" None. Zero times. You have never thought this.

On the other hand, suppose you received a call that said: "Hey, just wanted to let you know that a recently deceased distant relative left you a one million dollar inheritance; a check and a letter with details will be arriving in your mailbox today. You don't have to do anything else but cash the check, thanks, take it easy!" You would not care whether the voice was a robot or a human being. You would be skeptical, but when you got the check and the letter, which said, "By the way, a robotic call was placed to your phone number earlier today to inform you that this letter would arrive so you wouldn't miss it," you would not think to yourself, "OMG, I feel so unbelievably violated because that voice was a robot! Fuck this stupid million dollar check and fuck the horse that it rode in on!"

The moral valence of a phone call is determined by the value that the participating parties get out of the call, not by whether one or both parties on the call are mediated by machines that are slightly more adept than the machines which existed in 1992.

Lastly, if the above doesn't convince you, here are two more quick reasons that the future will welcome talking bots:

• People under 30 today ("millennials" or whatever you want to call them) hate making voice calls. They will probably welcome any opportunity to delegate this stupid chore.
• People under 15 today will grow up taking bots for granted; for example, textual chatbots, or other types of bots in online games that they play. They will feel no horror at the idea that spoken-word bots can have warm, engaging voices.

A few problems with Firefox

Disclaimer: I worked at Google for 6.5 years, although not on the Chrome team. I am currently independent. I also worked a little bit with Rob at IBM in 2001.

Rob O'Callahan has a good post explaining why you should use Firefox. I am sympathetic to this argument, but I can't bring myself to switch yet. I try periodically, and every time I end up bouncing off again. Alas, Firefox is currently inferior in specific ways that are cripplingly bad for my needs.

First, as a web developer:

1. The developer tools are really janky.
2. The profiles functionality is buried and has no in-browser UI. I need quick, simple profile management and switching when testing my apps. (Don't refer me to the add-on market; add-ons are a cesspool.)

Second, as someone who recommends tech to my family:

3. Multi-process isolation and sandboxing have still not shipped.
4. Firefox's updates are still not as timely as Chrome's. On my personal machines, I often find that I'm running an older version of Firefox weeks after a new version is released. In fact, just as I was writing this, I found that the machine I'm typing it on was still running 30.0, when 31.0 was released on July 22.

As a result of (c) and (d), Firefox is plausibly the least secure major web browser shipping today. I can't recommend Firefox to my family until these things are fixed. I won't expose them to a high risk of exploitation, here and now, solely to protect them from a theoretical risk that they'll be harmed by the Chrome team's product choices in the future.

In addition to all of the above, I think Rob overstates the extent to which Google is (1) winning and (2) likely to use that position to harm users in the foreseeable future.

Obviously, I am biased w.r.t. (2), so I don't think it's productive for me to try to convince you of my point of view in this post. At any rate, Rob is better-informed than me about browser politics, not to mention much smarter than me, so I am willing to believe that he has good reasons for believing what he does.

However, w.r.t. (1):

• On desktop, Chrome doesn't even have majority market share. It is trending upwards, but it's a long, long climb from its present ~40% position to the 80-90% that Microsoft once had in desktop operating systems. And Google's competitors today are a lot more impressive than Microsoft's were in the 1990s. I don't think it's plausible that a large fraction of the web will build strictly for Chrome, or even Blink-based web browsers, anytime in the foreseeable future, unless all of Google's competitors fumble the ball mightily.
• On mobile, iOs isn't going away any time soon. And I would bet (a small amount of) money that forks of Android, from China and elsewhere, will reach rough market share parity with Google Android in the long run.[0].

Today's giants always look more invulnerable than they really are. Apple looked unstoppable just a few years ago, Microsoft not that long before that. Facebook looked like it would become the identity layer for all human interaction; now it's just a boring and somewhat declassé social media site for middle aged people (plus a server farm for a few flashy acquisitions). Google may seem like a juggernaut, and to be fair I think it is much more competent on average than any of the three companies I just mentioned, but it's vulnerable in ways that aren't even obvious to us today and I'll be very surprised if we look back in 2024 and find that Google is dictating terms to the rest of the technology industry, in the old Microsoft (or new Apple) mold, rather than being merely one influential player among many.

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[0] Incidentally, since Google has let the AOSP web browser languish, and restricted Google Chrome(TM) to its increasingly-tightly-constrained partners, making Firefox run amazingly well on non-Google Android — well enough that non-Google Android users almost universally either get Firefox shipped with their device or install it themselves — might be a more plausible path to getting large mobile market share globally than Firefox OS. (I do think Firefox OS is an important and worthwhile project as well.)

What happens when you let people pay to remove ads

Disclaimer: Obviously I worked at Google for 6.5 years so take this with the appropriate grain of salt.[0]

"I wish Google would just let me pay them money to remove ads from this service. WTF GOOGLE IS SO DUMB AND EVIL WHY WON'T THEY DO THIS."

How many times, in various corners of the Internet, have you read some variation of the preceding sentiment?

Now, it turns out, Google is trying to do this with a subset of music videos on YouTube. But when you do this, you need a contract with the rights holder. This is complicated. The rights holder might not agree to your contract terms. For example, they might want more money. So you end up in negotiations. While those negotiations are ongoing, or if they break down, you can't include that music in your paid service.

The Internet's collective reaction has been: "WTF GOOGLE IS SO DUMB AND EVIL WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS?"

Now, YouTube will still host music videos that are not opted into its monetization program, i.e., if you are a band and want to put music videos on the Internet for free, YouTube will host those videos for you. Let's be clear what this means: if you want to distribute a video to a hundred million strangers on the Internet, YouTube will pay for the software and servers and a petabyte of network bandwidth and a small army of SREs holding pagers who will wake up at 3am if too many people in Kuala Lumpur click on your video and get an HTTP 50x error, and it will do so without you paying YouTube a dime. None of that's changing. But if you opt into YouTube's monetization program, you will have to opt into its full, updated monetization program: ads for non-subscribers, and no ads for subscribers.

Note that there is no sensible way to let users pay to remove ads from music videos while also still showing ads to those same users for some music videos. If YouTube did this, you can bet the Internet would collectively scream, once again, "WTF GOOGLE IS SO DUMB AND EVIL WHY DON'T THEY REMOVE ADS ON MUSIC VIDEOS WHEN I PAID TO HAVE ADS REMOVED? I'm unsubscribing from this bullshit service!" The subscription service would fail and YouTube would have to revert to its old model of monetizing via ads only.

In short, "blocking" — i.e., excluding unlicensed music from the monetization program — is an inevitable consequence of having a paid subscription service.

The press has done an abysmal job covering this. It seems that every year my contempt for (most) journalists finds reasons to grow greater and greater. I'm pretty disappointed that the Financial Times, reputedly pretty reliable, appears to be Ground Zero for this particular blast of misinformation.

p.s. As for claims that YouTube has anything approaching a monopoly on online video sharing, I'm honestly puzzled by the claim. Just to take one example competitor, Vimeo is pretty reliable and seems to have rough feature parity, including embedding in external sites. Vimeo's content is included in Google's video search corpus (example) and therefore shows up as a thumbnail image in Google web search, just like YouTube videos. If you need to make money, Vimeo has a few built-in monetization options; if those are insufficient, there's a lot of innovation occurring in the world of funding, and in my opinion the Patreon/Subbable model seems much more promising for creators with a small-to-medium-sized audience than Spotify-style monetization, which currently amounts to "we'll give you 0.0001 pennies per stream play so that both the company and the artists can lose money hand over fist!" Is it really true that Adele fans will face substantial (or even non-substantial) barriers to watching her music videos if they're on Vimeo? And that's just one competitor. The upshot is that indie labels are probably wrangling with YouTube over licensing terms not because it has anything like a monopoly, but because they think wrangling with YouTube will make them more money than all the other alternatives. Which is perfectly fine — more power to them, negotiating the best deal is essential in business, etc. — but we should not misread the situation.

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[0] On the other hand, one benefit of no longer working there is that I can write stuff like this post, just like I used to before I worked there. Arguably, working at Google made me less predisposed to harshly criticizing misinformed critics of Google.

Assorted tech fails related to Copy.com

Lots of fail to go around today.

A. just tried to share some photos with her mother via Copy.com (disclosure: this is a referral link, because why not, although as you'll see I don't recommend using Copy much in its current state). Her mother's sole computing device in Taipei is an iPad.

Fail no. 1: Although the photo folder was shared with the email address that A.'s mom used to sign up, the folder is not accessible anywhere I can find via the iPad app UI. Blame goes to: Copy's developers, who either failed to implement sharing correctly or hid it behind some undiscoverable UI.

Fail no. 2: The Copy website's image viewer page crashes Safari on iPad. Blame goes to: the Copy developers for failing to test this configuration; the iOs browser developers, for implementing a crashy browser (note that current Chrome desktop doesn't crash, so WebKit/Blink alone is not to blame).

Fail no. 3: Downloading Chrome onto her mom's iPad reveals that the crash occurs again, so the crashing defect is with WebView, not Safari-specific wrapper code. On an even marginally more open OS, Chrome (and Firefox, and every other browser vendor) would be permitted to ship an alternative browser stack, and I'd probably be able to download a browser that wouldn't crash. Blame goes to: Apple's business strategy bosses, for being control freak jackholes.

Fail no. 4: Searching for "Copy.com" safari ipad crash on Google is annoyingly filled with garbage. Blame goes to: Google for failing to recognize that when I write "copy.com" in quotes, I really don't care about web pages that merely contain some subset of the segmented lexemes in that query*; also the leadership at Barracuda networks, who gave Copy a ridiculously search-unfriendly name for branding reasons, thus guaranteeing that tech support queries for their service would be frequently frustrated by the current generation of search engine technology. (Also pity all the future users, of any operating system, who need some help with a copying feature not related to Copy.com.)

Welcome to the "post-PC era", where your storage is in a cloud you can't access because your shit crashes and your ecosystem overlords prevent you from installing workarounds.

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*To be more precise, for this search, Google does prioritize "copy.com" over web pages that contain "copy" and "com" or even "copy com" (with a space or other punctuation between the two words). The absence of useful results for this query is due to the fact that there's just no relevant content on the web. I just wish the result page would make it more obvious that Google doesn't think there's any good match for this query, and it's scraping the bottom of the barrel for some weakly related content, so that I could give up my search sooner.