Spontaneous Sales and the Ghost Engineer Debate

A survey found that nearly 10% of developers are ghosts doing nothing - our thoughts on that, AI Big Brother as a service comes to the workplace, OpenAI's NYT standoff, and Google's growing problem.

Sponsored By:

• Mission Control: UK-based Mission Control can build Flutter and React Apps for companies big and small, including Fortune 500 companies or startups getting their first project off the ground. Reach out and tell them Coder sent you! Promo Code: Tell them Coder Radio Sent You!
• Coder QA: 30% off the lifetime of your membership! Promo Code: blackfriday

Support Coder Radio

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
• 🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
• Jupiter.Party Network Membership Black Friday Link — Support all the shows and get all the special features annually. Get one month for free, and stack the Black Friday deal on top of that.
• Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025 — Newly expanded financial aid will cover tuition costs for admitted students from 80 percent of U.S. families.
• 9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers — We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies.
• DOJ wraps up ad tech trial: Google is “three times” a monopolist — "Google is once, twice, three times a monopolist," Teitelbaum said, while reinforcing that "these are the markets that make the free and open Internet possible."
• DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly — The filing includes a broad range of requirements the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google — from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to more broadly breaking the company up. The DOJ’s latest proposal doubles down on its request to spin out Google’s Chrome browser, which the government views as a key access point for searching the web.
• DOJ’s staggering proposal would hurt consumers and America’s global technological leadership — As just one example, DOJ’s proposal would literally require us to install not one but two separate choice screens before you could access Google Search on a Pixel phone you bought. And the design of those choice screens would have to be approved by the Technical Committee. And that’s just a small part of it. We wish we were making this up.
• Niantic quietly using Pokemon Go player data to train AI map models — The model uses geolocation information from scans players submit of real-world locations while playing Pokémon Go.
• Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence – Niantic Labs — This scanning feature is completely optional – people have to visit a specific publicly-accessible location and click to scan. This allows Niantic to deliver new types of AR experiences for people to enjoy. Merely walking around playing our games does not train an AI model.
• Employee monitoring software has gone off the deep end with AI — Had the pleasure of sitting through a sales pitch for a pretty big "productivity monitoring" software suite this morning.
• OpenAI accidentally erases potential evidence in training data lawsuit — While OpenAI’s lawyers characterized the data erasure as a “glitch,” The New York Times’ attorneys noted they had “no reason to believe” it was intentional.
• Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival — The new funding brings the tech giant’s total investment to $8 billion, though Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor.
• AI’s Future and Nvidia’s Fortunes Ride on the Race to Pack More Chips Into One Place — Musk’s xAI and Meta are among firms building clusters of advanced chips
• Cold reading an ADHD affliction — You don't need a diagnosis to be a flawed human. It goes for all of us. So if you want to supercharge your morning's productivity routine by popping a pill or two of amphetamines, own it!
• Mike Launched a blog for Alice!