Transcript

[00:00:00] Ned: Do you know what I mean?

[00:00:03] Chris: No, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think they did that years ago. The narrative is shut up and buy them.

[00:00:11] Ned: You’re not wrong. I wouldn’t argue with that. As I develop courses for pluralsight, I am forced to dig into the morrass that is Microsoft’s product portfolio and the fact that they have renamed things so many times over the last three or four years that it’s almost impossible to figure out what the hell a product does and where you go to manage it.

[00:00:45] Chris: Right? Yeah, I don’t have anything. That’s basically the story.

[00:00:53] Ned: Yeah, I mean, the sprawl isn’t new, right? But it’s gotten worse with all the cloud products that they’ve released over time because they had like a CASB portal for a while and then like a CSAM portal for a while but then that got rolled into like a Cloud Defender Portal. But that’s different than their Microsoft Defender for Cloud which is a portal but that’s different than their Microsoft Defender for Endpoint which is managed through yet another portal that roles that’s called the Microsoft 365 Defender Portal.

[00:01:31] Chris: And then towards the end of last year, all of that changed and now Defender is an umbrella term that includes.

[00:01:39] Ned: Both Microsoft Defender and Windows Defender products.

[00:01:42] Chris: Right.

[00:01:43] Ned: And when they decide to call something microsoft Defender versus Windows Defender is just like completely arbitrary. Flip a coin.

[00:01:54] Chris: What are we doing here?

[00:01:56] Ned: What are we doing here? It’s so frustrating. And I understand that they’re a giant corporation with different people who are arguing with each other constantly, but I just want could we just make it coherent and stop renaming things? This is our predictions episode. So my prediction is Microsoft is going to rename some shit that’s like low hanging fruit. Microsoft is going to rename something and Ned is going to get frustrated. Just put that on the spreadsheet, it’s a guaranteed winner.

[00:02:35] Chris: Google will cancel a product without warning.

[00:02:38] Ned: Also ringer. All right. And AWS will release a new service with a vague name that you cannot possibly link back to what the service does.

[00:02:50] Chris: And it’s already duplicated at least twelve times on the AWS platform.

[00:02:55] Ned: At least the 13th way to, I don’t know, spin up a database as a service. They’re probably well over 13 at this point.

[00:03:05] Chris: I was trying to think about that.

[00:03:06] Ned: Yeah, well, I mean, I know that the running joke is the number of different ways that you can run a container on AWS is something like 19 different ways.

[00:03:15] Chris: Last time oh, I thought they broke 20.

[00:03:17] Ned: Maybe they did. I, I might be out of date on that, but to spin up a database, there’s got to be, you know, 26 different ways to do that as well. So let’s add another service as a.

[00:03:30] Chris: Service, not database as a service. Spinning up a database as a service. S-U-A-D-A-S SaaS.

[00:03:42] Ned: Sued ass. Real emphasis on the AWS there.

[00:03:46] Chris: Yeah, I I got I got the joke.

[00:03:48] Ned: Yeah, it wasn’t a good one. Hey, welcome to 2023. Huh? The same jokes, different year. Oh, let’s get this thing started. Hello, alleged human. Welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I’m definitely not a robot. I don’t have time crystals flowing through my synthetic blood. I definitely cannot see into the future. Using AI and ML to extrapolate exactly what will happen over the course of the next year. That’s silly and ridiculous, and I will not be making predictions throughout this episode. With me is Chris, who’s also here.

[00:04:28] Chris: Time is a flat circle.

[00:04:30] Ned: If that’s true, we can just see what’s coming across the horizon by traveling further out the circle. Is that how it works?

[00:04:37] Chris: Yeah, I think it is.

[00:04:40] Ned: Is it like a hyper circle? Like a hyper cube?

[00:04:44] Chris: It’s certainly not a hyperloop because this is real.

[00:04:48] Ned: Boom. Got them. Can that be the last time we mentioned musk?

[00:04:55] Chris: No.

[00:04:56] Ned: No. Well, we could get our hopes up, right?

[00:05:01] Chris: Yeah.

[00:05:02] Ned: How is your new Year so far? I know we’re we’re three days into it. How’s it going?

[00:05:08] Chris: I mean, today is the first, like, quote, real work day that I’ve had in 2023.

[00:05:14] Ned: Okay. All right.

[00:05:15] Chris: So just because of the way the calendar shook out and other people’s vacations and whatnot and so yeah, back to the grind.

[00:05:21] Ned: AWS.

[00:05:21] Chris: It were. And I have to say I resent it.

[00:05:23] Ned: As do I. Yesterday was my first real day back. I did a little bit of work over the holiday, but tried to minimize that. And for the most part, I did. I wrapped up things the week before Christmas, for the most part, and then just kind of coasted. And that’s my plan for all of 2023. I’m just going to coast.

[00:05:41] Chris: That’s fair.

[00:05:42] Ned: I think that’s what the economy is going to do.

[00:05:44] Chris: Am I right?

[00:05:46] Ned: Maybe. Wait, what is that? I don’t know if that’s I can’t help. You’re kidding.

[00:05:50] Chris: Coast into a ditch? I don’t know. I’m working on it.

[00:05:52] Ned: Drift into a ditch slowly. Like when you see someone who’s clearly got dyed blue hair slowly just edging into the shoulder on a two lane road, and you’re like, I’m going to honk my horn all I want. But they probably don’t have their hearing aid turned on. They’ll figure it out eventually.

[00:06:14] Chris: That’s when you just bump them. That’s what the bumper is for.

[00:06:17] Ned: It’s called a bumper for a reason.

[00:06:20] Chris: Exactly. That’s definitely not illegal.

[00:06:24] Ned: Not the way I do it. Oh, dear. So, like, I alluded to in the beginning of the episode, or at some point when we were rambling incoherently, this is going to be the predictions episode, which we were going to record last week, but I think both of us agreed that working last week was not in the cards.

[00:06:43] Chris: No, I mean, what’s important is we thought about it.

[00:06:46] Ned: I thought about it like, I won’t say real hard, but thought about it.

[00:06:49] Chris: We immediately discarded it, but we thought about it.

[00:06:52] Ned: Yes. Thought happened. Intention was there. So instead we’re going to do it now, which I think makes sense because we have a whole additional week of perspective. We’re already in the new year, so we can make some really bold and outstanding predictions. Or at least I will. I know yours is going to be garbage.

[00:07:12] Chris: No, I’ve just been throwing darts at the wall, seeing what sticks.

[00:07:16] Ned: Your landlord is not going to be happy about that.

[00:07:18] Chris: Neither is the neighbor’s cat.

[00:07:22] Ned: Wow. Actually, it’s all right, though.

[00:07:25] Chris: I mean, it’s a cat, so it.

[00:07:28] Ned: Fought back with darts of its own, as it were. They’re attached to a larger, furry construction.

[00:07:35] Chris: It’s more one flying dart of gray and black fury.

[00:07:41] Ned: Interesting. I’ve never heard of did you know.

[00:07:43] Chris: That when cats are angry, they can in fact levitate?

[00:07:48] Ned: It might seem so, but that’s actually just their hair pooping out. It makes it look like they’re levitating. I thought that we had given up on David Blaine as a concept and as a human being, and I was fine to leave it at that, but apparently there’s a new set of specials on Netflix that is another street magician basically doing the David Blaine thing, including the Levitation.

[00:08:13] Chris: Oh, good.

[00:08:15] Ned: And that’s why I will add that.

[00:08:16] Chris: To my list of things that I’m never, ever going to watch.

[00:08:19] Ned: The children found it, Chris. They found many things. They also found the Matilda musical, which I was unaware of as a thing until now.

[00:08:28] Chris: Yeah, same.

[00:08:30] Ned: Don’t, if you enjoy life, should we talk about our predictions?

[00:08:39] Chris: We might want to.

[00:08:40] Ned: Yeah, right. Fine. I got a real good thing going. Grumble in the Voice that’s probably because I’ve had a cold for the last week.

[00:08:49] Chris: Yeah, that’s like the rules of December. January is you’re just going to get sick. You’re not going to know why. You’re not really going to know when it’s over.

[00:08:59] Ned: Today is the first day that I feel like I’m past it. I’m through it.

[00:09:04] Chris: Oh, well, good for you.

[00:09:06] Ned: Yeah.

[00:09:07] Chris: Humble brag.

[00:09:08] Ned: I’m sure by the weekend I will have contracted something else because the kids went back to school, you little disease ridden heliums. Okay, so, predictions. You want to do one for me? One from you, kind of situation? I feel like your first one leads directly off.

[00:09:35] Chris: There’s a couple of them that are connected. Okay, I think that makes sense.

[00:09:38] Ned: Let’s start with my clearly right and superior predictions outages. I think we’re going to see more outages in 2023 than we saw in 2022, but people will make less of a stink about it. When you think about it, when one company has an outage, mostly just the employees and the customers have any idea that that outage occurred. So when you’re the flower shop down the street, it’s not really a big deal. Right? Maybe people can’t buy flowers for like an hour or you just write them up on, like, a ticket somehow. You know, old school. One of those credit card swipey johns.

[00:10:22] Chris: Oh, right. Yeah, you can do that still.

[00:10:25] Ned: It depends on the credit card because some of them don’t actually have raised numbers anymore.

[00:10:29] Chris: You can still write them down by hand.

[00:10:31] Ned: I suppose that’s secure PCI will have a fuel day, but when your customers are thousands of other companies relying on your service, it’s slightly more important and impactful. Nevertheless, we saw major outages from all the big cloud providers this year, and I don’t remember any level of hysteria above. Well, that sucks. I guess they’ll go take a nap till they fix it.

[00:10:56] Chris: Sure.

[00:10:57] Ned: So I guess what I’m saying is that if you don’t care, don’t expect the cloud providers to care either. So I’m expecting a major outage from AWS this year in US East One, probably involving some esoteric service that underpins everything. DNS. It’s always DNS.

[00:11:18] Chris: But Ned in AWS, DNS is a global service, and that’s not pinned to any specific region. Oh, I can’t even finish saying that.

[00:11:25] Ned: Oh, you tried. You tried real hard. You know that there’s some underlying thing in US East one that makes the rest of Route 53 work.

[00:11:34] Chris: Right? Yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right in terms of we’ve seen an increase in outages pretty much every year for two reasons. One, the amount of servers and services that are available continue to go up, and the amount of customers that are using said servers and services are going up. So it stands to reason that incidents are going to go up.

[00:11:55] Ned: Yeah.

[00:11:56] Chris: And really what happens there is fatigue. People can only fly into a tizzy 16 to 17 times before they start losing interest.

[00:12:07] Ned: I think we we’ve seen that play out on the political scale where just the level of outrage has, for most people subsided, even though the number of terrible things happening hasn’t. Because we’re tired. Right.

[00:12:24] Chris: It’s late. Can we just I mean, this is a good time for a nap.

[00:12:28] Ned: It really is. And if I can’t do my work, if slack is down for a little while, which happened last year, oh, no, I can’t get my work done. Guess I’ll go take a nap on the couch. And since a lot of us are still working from home, that is a very realistic thing to occur and almost.

[00:12:49] Chris: Always a more comfortable couch.

[00:12:51] Ned: Yes, indeed. So you have something that tied into this pretty nicely.

[00:12:56] Chris: Yeah. And a couple of the things that I have in my list are tied to the meta concept that the economy is going to suck this year. Okay. So bear that in mind with basically everything that I say, because I think it’s not just going to be service outages that increase, it is going to be security incidents that increase. And what did we see at the very beginning of the year, as in either yesterday or the day before, 235,000,000 accounts from Twitter being compromised, leading to the spread on not just the Dark Web, but the regular Internet of people’s usernames matched to their email addresses.

[00:13:38] Ned: Right. That actually happened a couple of days, some point last week, I think was.

[00:13:44] Chris: When this is the first time I saw a real breakdown of what happened.

[00:13:47] Ned: Yeah, I saw hints of it, I want to say, last week. And I thought it was more than that. I thought it was 400 million accounts. It was a lot. It was a lot of accounts. And someone was basically saying, I’ll either sell them on the Dark Web or hey, Twitter, if you’d like to buy them from me with exclusive rights holding them for ransom, basically, then I’ll do that. And I don’t think Twitter paid the ransom because they don’t have a team that could actually spring into action and help.

[00:14:17] Chris: Right. And Twitter is an extreme example because it’s run by a belligerent narcissist who doesn’t know what the f he’s doing, who I won’t name, but it could be anyone. But I think a lot of companies are going to see inflation and decreasing customer spending as inevitable and therefore a threat to the bottom line. Therefore, they will do the only logical thing, cut their It budget, especially security.

[00:14:46] Ned: Yeah.

[00:14:47] Chris: So what does that mean? That means less new projects rolled out. It means less new hires to manage and monitor. It means less full time staff to keep track of those types of things. It means a lot of nothing is going to happen for a lot of companies. Even basic things like rolling out new versions of Windows, rolling out a major patch upgrade, which means by the end of the year, security is going to become more of a problem.

[00:15:18] Ned: I absolutely agree. And security has been kind of in a difficult spot for a while now because there’s been that major movement to roll security into the developer sphere. So the whole dev SEC vROps movement, which has been wrongly interpreted as let’s fire our security team and just have the developers do it.

[00:15:44] Chris: Right.

[00:15:45] Ned: Which the developers don’t like and the security team doesn’t like, but the people in finance, they fucking love it.

[00:15:53] Chris: That sounds like a 50% staff reduction to me, Alan.

[00:15:57] Ned: Sure it does. And so I think we’ll see a continuation of that trend, even though it’s been identified as a bad trend, much like the open office concept. It’s going to continue happening for a while before we get back to, oh, and that’s why this was a terrible idea. Usually it’s going to be some inciting event, like a giant security breach at your company that forces you to reinstate those teams.

[00:16:22] Chris: Right? And as we all know, when you have teams that leave and then you try to reinstate them, all you’re doing is snapping your fingers and immediately becoming 100% secure like that. Second, that’s totally how it works.

[00:16:34] Ned: I will hear nothing else. My next prediction is that we will see CXL in the public cloud.

[00:16:46] Chris: Wow, you’re really going for it with that.

[00:16:48] Ned: No going hard. This is kind of a softball and I might be stealing it from you. I’m not sure if this was already in your list of things it was too bad. Maybe you have something to add. So AMD’s Genoa and Intel’s. Sapphire Lake. The intel event, did that happen? I think that was supposed to happen this week, but I think you’re right.

[00:17:11] Chris: I have not been keeping up with any of the conferences or announcements over the past couple.

[00:17:16] Ned: All right, so Sapphire Lake is their next generation of server CPUs, and it’s an open secret that it’s going to carry support for CXL. One one most likely. And if it’s anything like AMD’s platform, it’s going to be one one plus some extras. So this was kind of the last piece in the puzzle because without the CPUs and the system boards supporting CXL, it doesn’t matter that we had cards that could do it, right? Right now that we’re going to have these two new platforms rolling out, major cloud providers are going to start adding these hardware components to their fleet of infrastructure. Now, they’re not going to roll that capability out to the end user right away. First of all, they got to battle test these things and make sure they’re actually production ready. And then at least as far as Microsoft goes, typically what they do is they will start using this newer hardware in the background for their platform as a service offerings. So you won’t directly see that CXL is now being used by their AI or ML service, but it will be used by that service in some capacity. And then once they’ve proven it in that regard, they’ll start rolling out new virtual machine families or types that use this hardware.

[00:18:41] Ned: So my guess is the first half of 2023, we’ll see the cloud Hyperscalers buying the CXL technology and rolling it into their internal services. And then I would expect announcements at Reinvent Ignite and whatever the hell Google Cloud event is, ReDev Ignite of Element, something like that.

[00:19:05] Chris: GCP, we’re here too.

[00:19:09] Ned: I would expect at all of these events announcements around new virtual machine or compute instances that have CXL exposed to the end users. If you really want hands on the hardware because those VMs are not necessarily going to give you direct hardware access. Keep an eye on Equinix metal. They have bare metal SKUs available today, and I’m imagining they’re going to roll out CXL probably sometime in late 2023 or early 2024.

[00:19:42] Chris: Yeah, I’m honestly wondering if they ever need to release an official CXL SKU for Is, because in the way that the virtual environment works, if you’re doing that for fast swapping, for performance and capacity reasons, that could effectively stay invisible to the user forever.

[00:20:04] Ned: Exactly. I think the only time you would actually expose it is if you azure renting out a bare metal bare metal instance. Because honestly, most of the advantages are going to be taken by the hypervisor, not the virtual machines that underpin it. And that’s definitely true for VMware, because VMware so far has been pretty quiet on the CXL front and their level of how they’re going to support it in their hypervisor.

[00:20:34] Chris: So, yeah, it’s going to be interesting because as we’ve talked about a couple of times, VMware, even though it’s sort of stagnated over the past year and will probably continue to not do much, is still pretty well plugged in and people have deep investments in ESXi. So if they can make this work and something like the Equinix that extends CXL into the data center in a way that is what we think are the game changers that CXL will bring, that will really help. Not that we would call this a new product from VMware, but it would really help expand their lifespan in the data center.

[00:21:11] Ned: I think they have no choice but to support it when that support comes is an open question. I’d imagine you’ll see some skunkwork stuff at the next VMware Explorer, but nothing concrete until 2024 because honestly, this thing ain’t going to roll out in the enterprise until at least 2024 anyway, right?

[00:21:31] Chris: Yeah, I think I mean, the potential is incredibly exciting, but you’re absolutely right. The biggest thing that these manufacturers and resellers are going to want to do is make sure that this is in fact production ready.

[00:21:42] Ned: Right. And it will be battle tested by the cloud hyperscalers first and anybody who runs like a high performance compute cluster like research institutions. And whatnot would you like to lead off with your next prediction?

[00:21:57] Chris: No, you go first and then I’ll put my second one in at the back because once again, it’s kind of exactly what I was going to say. But I have an extension, which is a slightly more crazy gamble.

[00:22:08] Ned: I like it. All right, we are going to have to mention the Musker, and that’s because my prediction is that Elon will be the CEO of less Companies in 2023. Yay, that’s good news. We’re happy about that. My best guess is that he steps down from Twitter gracefully, however gracefully, he can do anything. And then we will see a rapid succession of CEOs churn through Twitter. I’m going with maybe four new CEOs of Twitter by the end of the year. I think Musk is going to appoint a CEO. Not like what they do, fire them, rinse and repeat. And I think let’s jump over to yours because you have a prediction over who that CEO could potentially be.

[00:22:59] Chris: I think you’re right. I think Elon wants to be in control still because it is his company and whatnot whomever he puts in as CEO or what was the way he put it, somebody that dares to take this job or some stupid arrogant thing yeah, that’s the one will be on some kind of a short leash. And like, Elon wants to be the puppet master in the background, even though everyone else just wants him to go yes. Anywhere else, literally. But I also know that if and when he does this, I think he’s going to want to do it in the most splashy way possible. That generates the most headlines with what people would call a superstar CEO.

[00:23:46] Ned: Okay.

[00:23:47] Chris: And the one that I think makes the most sense, based on Elon’s very unique specifications, is Sheryl Sandberg.

[00:23:56] Ned: Interesting.

[00:23:56] Chris: Now, she spent, what, a decade as second in command, effectively co CEO at Facebook. So she has definitely got the bona fides when it comes to running a social media company. A big one. People might have heard of it. And the last time that I checked, she was still unemployed after stepping down in August. All right, so that’s a splashy name. That is somebody in the industry. Even though there are arguments that Facebook and Twitter are two different things, elon Musk we’re talking about. So let’s realize he might not notice that either.

[00:24:33] Ned: Fair enough. Okay. We’ll put that on your prediction sheet. Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Twitter. Sure, why not?

[00:24:41] Chris: And I think it would be an interesting thing for her because, like I said, she was COO and effectively co CEO. This would be her opportunity to take over completely.

[00:24:54] Ned: Right. But still have the same level of control, because Elon is not going to give her a whole lot of, as you refer to, leash, to go off and do what she wants to do.

[00:25:05] Chris: And that’s one of the biggest reasons that I’m calling this kind of a wild prediction, is if she does not get that, I don’t see why she would want to even bother. She’s a billionaire in her own right. She’s got other things going on in her life. She doesn’t need this shit.

[00:25:23] Ned: I wouldn’t take it. But not everybody does everything for money. At a certain point, it’s about ego and just your own personal pride, so right. The other company that I think Musk will no longer be CEO of is Tesla. Yes. I believe he will be forced out, which will be, in my opinion, too little, too late for the reputation. While Tesla does have the current lion’s share of electric vehicles on the road, that is about to be dwarfed by all the other car makers out there, including Chinese EV maker. I don’t know how to say it, but it’s spelled by so bid, bid, bid. Honestly, this was Tesla’s game to lose. They got way out in front of this. But I think in 2023, they will drop below the 50% market share line and never recover from that.

[00:26:22] Chris: Right. I would agree with that, and especially since in no short reason, Elon’s behavior, we have seen Tesla’s shares go down by 65% this year. Forget about market share. That’s company value. That is the sort of thing that shows that a CEO is literally not doing their job, which is to maximize returns to the shareholders.

[00:26:45] Ned: Right. And I think there’s been a certain level of reputational damage to Tesla. Typically, if you think about who would be in the market for an EV, it’s an eco conscious person who also likes the flare of driving a Tesla, and they tend to be on the left leaning side of the political spectrum. Elon’s, ridiculousness, has not gained many friends on that side of the spectrum, and I expect a lot of them are looking elsewhere for their EV needs in the next year.

[00:27:20] Chris: Yeah, Tesla saw a record number of reservation cancellations this year. They have also seen quality control go into the toilet. Indeed, as Elon insists on basically abusing his workers to force out more and more cars at increasingly declining levels of quality. And I don’t think any of us is ever going to forget when he tried to pretend that he built a robot and it really was just a guy in a skin suit.

[00:27:50] Ned: Really? That should have been the moment. You’re fired. I think he still had a controlling stake in Tesla at that time, but he has since sold off enough shares that he does not.

[00:28:01] Chris: Right, we’ll see.

[00:28:04] Ned: You want to do one of yours?

[00:28:06] Chris: No, you can go.

[00:28:07] Ned: Okay. Closely related to the twitter. Fraucus. fracus. fracus raucus. Yeah. Fraucus I think Mastodon adoption will level off and then stagnate people flocked to Mastodon as Twitter burned. And we did a whole show about Mastodon, but I think the majority of those people also kept an account in Twitter just to see how things would go. That’s what I did. And since then, personally, I check Twitter a hell of a lot more than I check Mastodon, and I don’t see that changing. Oddly enough, actually, I’ve been using LinkedIn more due to the business focus of my accounts. That’s how I get leads and generate more revenue. So it’s kind of important to me. I’m not sure how I would approach things differently if I was a regular user of Twitter. So I think what’s basically going to happen is the spike in Mastodon usage is over. You’re going to see a slow trickle of people leaving the platform, and I don’t think it’s going to spike again. Even if something crazy happens at Twitter, I think it had it shot and something I don’t think anything is going to replace Twitter directly. I think it’s going to be a slow diaspora of people to other platforms.

[00:29:42] Chris: Yeah, I think two things. One, I think even as easy as Mastodon is, it’s still too complicated and there is not an easy option for people that just want to log on. You have to understand servers. You have to understand decentralization and moving your account and all this other stuff where a Twitter account was just username password, you’re in that alone is a barrier. So I think that that’s a problem. I think the network effects of having billions of people on Twitter and I don’t actually think that’s an exaggeration versus people migrating to Macedodon was always going to make that a tough ask.

[00:30:25] Ned: Right.

[00:30:27] Chris: I don’t think that mastodon is going to go anywhere. I have a feeling it has gotten a toehold with a certain group of deeply committed people that will continue to advocate for it and work on it and try to figure out ways to make it matter. But I don’t think it’s going to be an overnight success in any way, shape or form. To your point, even if Twitter goes offline.

[00:30:52] Ned: Usenet still exists.

[00:30:54] Chris: That’s true.

[00:30:57] Ned: Nothing dies in tech. It just feeds out slowly.

[00:31:03] Chris: I do wonder if, when it comes to that type of thing, people continue to use Twitter out of habit. So if Twitter was to disappear, that habit would disappear. Would they immediately feel compelled to replace it with something as close to the same service? Or would it just be, well, that was fun while it lasted. Turns out everyone’s awful. I’m going to go play with a ball outside.

[00:31:31] Ned: I think the latter more than the former. At least that’s my hope.

[00:31:36] Chris: Yeah, here’s a fun one. I think that this is going to be the year of the Linux desk. No, wait, this is going to be the year of zero trust and password list gaining a lot more traction at the enterprise level.

[00:31:55] Ned: Okay.

[00:31:56] Chris: Now, it’s not like these two things are unknown concepts. We’ve been talking around and about zero trust and password list for a while, and I think we actually even know what it means. Now. Mostly I believe that things like the frankly catastrophic LastPass hack is really going to help organizations look at at least proof of concepts around modernizing their identity management programs, particularly passwordless. Now, users on an individual and a desktop level are starting to get exposure to password list via things like Windows Hello and learning that it just kind of works and is not really that big of a deal or an adjustment. How many people do you know that would say something like, oh, I don’t use password list and then use their Face to unlock their phone?

[00:32:52] Ned: I’d say if you have an Apple device, you’ve probably been doing this for quite some time now. And the newer versions of Android also have a face unlock feature.

[00:33:03] Chris: Right. And you can tie it to other applications within your phone.

[00:33:06] Ned: Absolutely.

[00:33:07] Chris: You’re done. Congratulations. You’re passwordless now.

[00:33:11] Ned: That’s the thing that’s been somewhat missing, at least in the Android ecosystem. I can’t speak to the Apple ecosystem. It’s that I have a way to authenticate to my phone, but that doesn’t go beyond the system itself. I want that same authentication to extend out to other. Programs and apps and be able to use that same biometric authentication with those apps. Some apps are supporting it, but a lot of them still don’t.

[00:33:43] Chris: Right. So that’s on the user side, right. With Lastpassing completely losing all of their users, 33 million vaults, all of which can be cracked via brute force eventually, because of course they can. Here’s the question how many of those 33 million vaults have work passwords in them?

[00:34:09] Ned: 32.

[00:34:11] Chris: 32.998. Now, there is absolutely an argument to be made that you shouldn’t be using the same vault for your work passwords as you do with your home and individual user passwords. But let’s be honest, everybody does, of course. So my guess is that as this gets more socialized and people understand just how risky it could possibly be, there will be institutional pushes that help with the wider adoption of passwordless in particular, and probably also zero trust.

[00:34:49] Ned: I suspect you are correct. And there’s a lot of vendors out there that are hoping you’re right. And if any of those vendors want to sponsor us, just let us know.

[00:35:01] Chris: I imagine everybody at Biota is just shivering uncontrollably right now.

[00:35:07] Ned: Oh, I can’t believe the last Pass thing. That was wild. Yeah. So that ties back to the security breaches thing, too. How about that?

[00:35:15] Chris: Yeah.

[00:35:16] Ned: All right, here’s another one that related to the economy. Public cloud growth will slow by 30%. So take whatever the growth numbers are for AWS, Azure, and GCP in 2022 and cut them by 30%. I’m not saying cloud isn’t going to continue to grow. It is absolutely going to continue to grow. But I think we’re hitting a down cycle here and a pushback on the cloud first narrative that has been oh so popular. And the result of that is that growth will slow by 30%.

[00:35:58] Chris: I don’t even think it’s just that. I mean, you’re right, and we talked about the economy a couple of times, and people are starting to recognize that the cloud, while great, is not necessary in every single use case. So that’s important. But the other thing is the amount of potential customers for the cloud is not unlimited.

[00:36:17] Ned: Exactly.

[00:36:17] Chris: The cloud has seen insane growth for the past couple of years, primarily because everybody was rushing to get there. Well, at some point, everybody’s going to get there.

[00:36:28] Ned: I don’t think we’re at that point yet. If you look at overall enterprise spending in It, there’s still a good chunk of it that could move to cloud, but there’s less of It than there was before.

[00:36:41] Chris: Fair.

[00:36:44] Ned: Yeah.

[00:36:44] Chris: And the people that are left who are still in the process of moving are certainly the people that are the more cautious, probably the more pennywise. So even if they do move to the cloud, it’s not going to be in the same way. Whole hog, millions of dollars per month after spending zero the year before.

[00:37:04] Ned: Right. Incremental increases as opposed to these bonanzas correct. Okay.

[00:37:16] Chris: So something else that’s going to be fun, that’s going to affect it, but really it’s going to be more around the tools that are being created and or used to take advantage of people. And I think you know what I’m talking about. The two buzziest terms I can think of from 2022, AI and crypto. Even with as much chat as we’ve had about them, they’re still more or less brand new and they have a lot of people talking these days. They can be used for evil and they are completely unregulated. For now, GPT Four is coming out and it is going to be trained on a stack of data that is in order of magnitude larger than GPT-3, and that’s just for text. Other writing creative AIS, including images and videos are coming out and there is going to be an increasingly vicious argument about copyrights use cases, what should be legal, et cetera. So that’s a challenge on the crypto side, the failure of FTX and the likely 25 to 40 year prison sentence for SBF. We are going to see the government take on these Ponzi schemes in a way that is actually serious.

[00:38:36] Ned: I hope so.

[00:38:37] Chris: I think what’s going to happen is that crypto is going to be treated like an investment vehicle because that’s allegedly what it is. Not like gambling, which it actually is.

[00:38:48] Ned: Yeah. And when you do that then that means that some of the worst actors out there are now legally culpable for what they do.

[00:39:01] Chris: Correct. Just like I can’t remember the guy’s first name. Let’s go with Samuel Ponzi. He actually was a real person, Charlie. He was in the newspaper for being a crazy successful businessman for years and years, right up until he wasn’t and then he went to jail.

[00:39:18] Ned: The thing about the Ponzi scheme is there was still money to be distributed to the people who had been had. The problem with crypto is the money’s gone, you can’t get it back, which makes it worse than a Ponzi scheme.

[00:39:39] Chris: Yeah. I think this is the year that crypto grows up in that way. I don’t think with the negative press that’s been going on, I really don’t think Sam Bankman Freed is going to escape prison and a lot of prison.

[00:39:51] Ned: What’s wild to me is he entered a plea of not guilty.

[00:39:56] Chris: Yeah, he can always change his plea though, remember? So this is probably just standard lawyering.

[00:40:03] Ned: True. But I think he would be in a much better situation to plead down to something reasonable if he’d started with just pleading guilty.

[00:40:12] Chris: Oh, so he strikes you as the kind of person that would ever be reasonable?

[00:40:15] Ned: Oh no, I was hoping his lawyers could convince him though. I think the discovery process of going in with a not guilty plea is going to be fascinating considering all the stuff we’ve already learned and wasn’t it?

[00:40:31] Chris: Two of his senior vice presidents of finance have already pled guilty and will be definitely cooperating.

[00:40:39] Ned: Definitely, yes. He is not in a good position. And you’re right, it probably is some sort of lawyer strategy going on to plead not guilty or he’s just being himself, which is a complete ass. One interesting thing, and maybe we can dig into this in the coming year, is that argument you mentioned around copyright and attribution for these AI models. Someone brought up an interesting point, which was that for years there have been these online services that teachers can utilize to see if the submissions from their students are plagiarized. Yeah, but that data was also being used to train these models.

[00:41:34] Chris: Interesting.

[00:41:35] Ned: So you were paying for a service to see if something that was going to be plagiarized, which then fed back into whether it was plagiarized or not. So this was also net new content going into these machines, training the model to get better at writing to help those next generation of students avoid the plagiarism detection from those self same services. So they were kind of getting the money from the researchers, getting the money from the professors, but also getting money from the companies that wanted access to these big pools of data that they had.

[00:42:18] Chris: I am really curious. I have thought about doing something along those lines. I actually thought about doing something like that last year, but we did like four AI things in a row. I was like, maybe, maybe take a breath.

[00:42:30] Ned: I agree. So speaking of things that should take a breath and maybe never be mentioned again, my next one is that Super Cloud will die in unceremonious death in 2023. I’m going to say this is more hope than anything else, but I sincerely think that aside from the folks at Silicon Angle, we won’t see anyone in the industry continue to use this pointless term. For those who enjoy a bit more drama in their lives, I’m going to include a link to a Twitter thread between Dave Valente from Silicon Angle and Charles Fitzgerald, who is, let’s say, like the main instigator against SuperCloud as a term. He’s really taken umbrage and it is wildly entertaining.

[00:43:24] Chris: Stop trying to make super cloud happen, Dave. It’s not going to happen.

[00:43:29] Ned: Oh, yeah, I mean, that’s simple prediction, but I just thought I would throw it out there. I got one more and then you can do your weird nostradamus thing.

[00:43:40] Chris: Dude. Spoilers.

[00:43:42] Ned: They’re already listening to the episode. Made it this far. Congratulations. DevOps is dead. Long live DevOps. Platform Engineering. In this past year, Platform Engineering became the new hotness. And is that time for everyone to get a job title change and arise? Sure, maybe I am now the head of platform development and pay me 20% more even though I’m doing the same exact thing I was last week. This is probably going to end up being its own episode at some point. Like everything in The Elves in Tech nothing is ever dead and the long tail is forever. So I think we’re going to see a lot of people rallying around DevOps being dead and then a whole other camp saying it’s not. But the actual practical implication on the ground is there’s still going to be DevOps teams and there’s still going to be platform engineering teams and that is not going to change. There’s an excellent video on YouTube that gets into some of this and I will include that link in the show notes as well.

[00:44:53] Chris: Okay. And to close us out, I figured we would have spend a little bit of time with everybody’s favorite seer from history. What did Nostradamus have to say about 2023? He’s of course been dead for a few years now. I don’t know if everybody knew that, but pour one out, he left us predictions going well into the future, at least until 2050. All right, so for 2023, he predicts three things and they are not great. The first one, and I quote, like the sun, the head shall sear, the shining sea, the black sea’s, living fish shall all but boil. Wow, my man hates him some fish apparently.

[00:45:47] Ned: Okay.

[00:45:49] Chris: The second one is that he is predicting a, quote, celestial fire on the royal edifice. So since the only royal edifice we have left is Buckingham Palace, I’m assuming he thinks that a meteor is going to kill the royal family.

[00:46:05] Ned: Not outside the realm of possibility, though. It’s certainly not the only palace out there.

[00:46:12] Chris: No, it is. And then finally he predicts a world war with a side of antichrist.

[00:46:21] Ned: Woo.

[00:46:23] Chris: Seven months, great war. People dead through evil. The Antichrist very soon annihilates the 327 years his war will last. The Unbelievers are dead, captive, exiled with blood human bodies, water and red hail covering the earth. Okay, so no fish, exploding royals, and World War fucking three. And you all thought implementing password list was going to be hard?

[00:46:59] Ned: That is some grim shit. Good for him. So no lightning round this time around? We don’t do that with the predictions.

[00:47:11] Chris: No, I think we proved our point.

[00:47:13] Ned: But I do want to mention that we are launching a newsletter. A chaos lever newsletter. And if you happen to go to our website, chaoslever.com, there is now a handy dandy button you can click that says newsletter. And then you can punch in your email address and then we will send you tirades of spam and also a newsletter.

[00:47:37] Chris: It’s going to be a lot.

[00:47:41] Ned: Oh, I hope you like Nigerian princes. So hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you friend. You accomplished something today. Now go lie down on the couch and set an alarm for 2024. 2023 is going to be a hot train wreck according to Mr. Thomas. You can find me or Chris on Twitter at ned 1313 and at Heiner 80, respectively. Or follow the show at Chaos underscore Lever if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Show notes are available@chaoslever.com if you like reading things, which you shouldn’t. Podcasts continue to be better in every conceivable way. We’ll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Tata for now.

[00:48:28] Chris: Yeah. I don’t know how much seriously we should take the Nostradamus thing because his historical hit record is, like, 1.4%.

[00:48:39] Ned: It’s better than your chances of making money off of Bitcoin.

[00:48:42] Chris: Nice.

[00:48:45] Ned: Yeah. Burnham.