Is Amazon’s AWS Quietly Getting Better at Contributing to Open Source?

“If I want AWS to ignore me completely all I have to do is open a pull request against one of their repositories,” quipped cloud economist Corey Quinn in April, while also complaining that the real problem is “how they consistently and in my opinion incorrectly try to shape a narrative where they’re contributing to the open source ecosystem at a level that’s on par with their big tech company peers.”

But on Friday tech columnist Matt Asay argued that AWS is quietly getting better at open source. “Agreed,” tweeted tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in response, commending “Good open source people, good open-source work.” (And Vaughan-Nichols later retweeted an AWS principle software engineer’s announcement that “Over at Amazon Linux we are hiring, and also trying to lead and better serve customers by being more involved in upstream communities.”) Mark Atwood, principle engineer for open source at Amazon, also joined Asay’s thread, tweeting “I’m glad that people are noticing. Me and my team have been doing heavy work for years to get to this point. Generally we don’t want to sit at the head of the table, but we are seeing the value of sitting at the table.”

Asay himself was AWS’s head of developer marketing/Open Source strategy for two years, leaving in August of 2021. But Friday Asay’s article noted a recent tweet where AWS engineer Divij Vaidya announced he’d suddenly become one of the top 10 contributors to Apache Kafka after three months as the founding engineer for AWS’s Apache Kafka open source team. (Vaida added “We are hiring for a globally distributed fully remote team to work on open source Apache Kafka! Join us.”)
Asay writes:
Apache Kafka is just the latest example of this…. This is exactly what critics have been saying AWS doesn’t do. And, for years, they were mostly correct.

AWS was, and is, far more concerned with taking care of customers than being popular with open-source audiences. So, the company has focused on being “the best place for customers to build and run open-source software in the cloud.” Historically, that tended to not involve or require contributing to the open-source projects it kept building managed services around. Many felt that was a mistake — that a company so dependent on open source for its business was putting its supply chain at risk by not sustaining the projects upon which it depended…

PostgreSQL contributor (and sometime AWS open-source critic) Paul Ramsey has noticed. As he told me recently, it “[f]eels like a switch flipped at AWS a year or two ago. The strategic value of being a real stakeholder in the software they spin is now recognized as being worth the dollars spent to make it happen….” What seems to be happening at AWS, if quietly and usually behind the scenes, is a shift toward AWS service teams taking greater ownership in the open-source projects they operationalize for customers. This allows them to more effectively deliver results because they can help shape the roadmap for customers, and it ensures AWS customers get the full open-source experience, rather than a forked repo with patches that pile up as technical debt.

Vaidya and the Managed Service for Kafka team is an example along with Madelyn Olson, an engineer with AWS’s ElastiCache team and one of five core maintainers for Redis. And then there are the AWS employees contributing to Kubernetes, etcd and more. No, AWS is still not the primary contributor to most of these. Not yet. Google, Microsoft and Red Hat tend to top many of the charts, to Quinn’s point above. This also isn’t somehow morally wrong, as Quinn also argued: “Amazon (and any company) is there to make money, not be your friend.”
But slowly and surely, AWS product teams are discovering that a key element of obsessing over customers is taking care of the open-source projects upon which those customers depend. In other words, part of the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” that AWS takes on for customers needs to be stewardship for the open-source projects those same customers demand.

UPDATE: Reached for a comment today, Asay clarified his position on Quinn’s original complaints about AWS’s low level of open source contributions. “What I was trying to say was that while Corey’s point had been more-or-less true, it wasn’t really true anymore.”

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‘I’m CEO of a Robotics Company, and I Believe AI’s Failed on Many Fronts’

“Aside from drawing photo-realistic images and holding seemingly sentient conversations, AI has failed on many promises,” writes the cofounder and CEO of Serve Robotics:
The resulting rise in AI skepticism leaves us with a choice: We can become too cynical and watch from the sidelines as winners emerge, or find a way to filter noise and identify commercial breakthroughs early to participate in a historic economic opportunity. There’s a simple framework for differentiating near-term reality from science fiction. We use the single most important measure of maturity in any technology: its ability to manage unforeseen events commonly known as edge cases. As a technology hardens, it becomes more adept at handling increasingly infrequent edge cases and, as a result, gradually unlocking new applications…

Here’s an important insight: Today’s AI can achieve very high performance if it is focused on either precision, or recall. In other words, it optimizes one at the expense of the other (i.e., fewer false positives in exchange for more false negatives, and vice versa). But when it comes to achieving high performance on both of those simultaneously, AI models struggle. Solving this remains the holy grail of AI….

Delivery Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) are the first application of urban autonomy to commercialize, while robo-taxis still await an unattainable hi-fi AI performance. The rate of progress in this industry, as well as our experience over the past five years, has strengthened our view that the best way to commercialize AI is to focus on narrower applications enabled by lo-fi AI, and use human intervention to achieve hi-fi performance when needed. In this model, lo-fi AI leads to early commercialization, and incremental improvements afterwards help drive business KPIs.

By targeting more forgiving use cases, businesses can use lo-fi AI to achieve commercial success early, while maintaining a realistic view of the multi-year timeline for achieving hi-fi capabilities.
After all, sci-fi has no place in business planning.

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What Makes Workers ‘Thrive’? Microsoft Study Suggests Shorter Workweeks and Less Collaboration

Microsoft describes “thriving” at work as being “energized and empowered to do meaningful work.”

So Microsoft’s “people analytics” chief and its “culture measurements” director teamed up for a report in Harvard Business Review exploring “as we enter the hybrid work era… how thriving can be unlocked across different work locations, professions, and ways of working.”

ZDNet columnist Chris Matyszczyk took special note of the researchers’ observation that “Employees who weren’t thriving talked about experiencing siloes, bureaucracy, and a lack of collaboration,” asking playfully, “Does that sound like Microsoft to you?”

Klinghoffer and McCune were undeterred in their search for the secret of happiness. They examined those who spoke most positively about thriving at work and work-life balance. They reached a startling picture of a happy Microsoft employee. They said: “By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size.”

Five fewer collaboration hours? 17 fewer employees in their internal network? Does this suggest that the teamwork mantra isn’t working so well? Does it, in fact, intimate that collaboration may have become a buzzword for a collective that is more a bureaucracy than a truly productive organism?

Klinghoffer and McCune say collaboration isn’t bad in itself. However, they say: “It is important to be mindful of how intense collaboration can impact work-life balance, and leaders and employees alike should guard against that intensity becoming 24/7.”

If you’re a leader, you have a way to stop it. If you’re an employee, not so much.

The Microsoft researchers’ conclusion? “Thriving takes a village” (highlighting the importance of managers), and that “the most common thread among those who were not thriving was a feeling of exclusion — from a lack of collaboration to feeling left out of decisions to struggling with politics and bureaucracy.”

Matyszczyk’s conclusion? “It’s heartening to learn, though, that perhaps the most important element to making an employee happy at work is giving them time to, well, actually work.”

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Japan’s KDDI Mobile Service Criticized After 86-Hour Failure Last Weekend

Earlier this week, long-time Slashdot reader ThinkPad760 wrote:

How is this not news everywhere?

KDDI, Japan’s 2nd largest mobile phone provider and carrier to multiple critical government agencies — including the weather service — failed for 86 hours. After failing to inform users and the government about the problems, questions are starting to be asked.
Japan’s government “will set up an expert panel to compile measures to prevent a recurrence,” reports Japan Today, citing Japan’s Internal Affairs and Communications Minister.
The network failure occurred when a router for voice calls was replaced during regular maintenance, with repair work triggering a concentration of traffic that led the company to reduce user access. During that time, the carrier experienced a cascade of technical problems that further prolonged the connection difficultie

40 million users were affected by the outage, Reuters reports — adding that it’s not the first time for something like this:
Japan’s three big telcos have all had widespread network failures in recent years. NTT Docomo’s [29-hour] outage last October affected 12.9 customers, while disruption to SoftBank Corp’s network in late 2018 cast a shadow over its bumper public listing.

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Mexico’s President Plans to End Daylight Saving Time

What’s Next for Twitter?

Elon Musk no longer wants to buy Twitter, which now will “pursue legal action” simply to “enforce” their planned merger agreement, according to the company’s chairman.

But however that plays out, Twitter is now in a worst-case scenario, one Wall Street analyst argues to NBC News:

Dan Ives, a managing director and senior equity research analyst covering the technology sector at Wedbush Securities, said Twitter’s stock price stands to suffer significant damage…. “The company has been in pure chaos — people have left in droves, and now competitors are going to seize on the ad dollars. With the employee turnover, it’s going to be viewed as damaged goods from another potential buyer….”

Ives believes the damage to Twitter’s value has only just begun. “When you have a cult figure like Musk — one of, if not the, most followed person in world — calling out Twitter, now it has a ripple effect that’s hard to quantify,” Ives said. “From advertisers to employees to the political firestorm that could ensue,” he said. “For Twitter, it’s not about the court battle and the legal ramifications, and how that plays out, that will be debated by lawyers. But it’s a public company that needs to be run, and now it’s hanging in the wind.”

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North Carolina Looks To Remove Public EV Chargers, Probably To the Trash

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Car and Driver, written by Ezra Dyer: Politicians have to run on some kind of platform, and Ben Moss — my incoming state House representative here in North Carolina’s District 52 — decided that his animating principle is Being Mad at Electricity. To prove his animosity toward this invisible menace, he’s sponsoring House Bill 1049, which would allocate $50,000 to destroy free public car chargers. It contains some other enlightened ideas, but that’s the main theme: We’ve simply got to do something about these free public chargers, even if it costs us $50,000! Those things cost tens of cents per hour, when they’re being used.

Of course, there’s a caveat here. Moss isn’t saying that free public Level 2 chargers — of which there are three in my town, with plans in the works to convert to paid kiosks — definitely need to get crushed by a monster truck. That rule only comes into play if a town refuses to build free gas and diesel pumps next to the EV chargers. So anyway, warm up El Toro Loco, we’re smashin’ some car zappers! But what about private businesses? you ask. Don’t worry, Moss hasn’t forgotten that a business might put a charger on its property as an inducement for EV owners to patronize the establishment. And small business is the heart of the local economy. That’s why he’s staying out of the way when it comes to private property. Just kidding! Ben Moss cares about the consumers being harmed by these hypothetical free chargers — namely, any customer who arrived via internal-combustion vehicle, or on foot, or in a sedan chair. Why is someone else gaining some advantage based on a decision they made? That’s not how life works.

Thus, House Bill 1049 decrees that all customer receipts will have to show what share of the bill went toward the charger out in the lot. That way, anyone who showed up for dinner in an F-150 (not the electric one) can get mad that their jalapeno poppers helped pay for a business expense not directly related to them. It’s the same way you demand to know how much Applebee’s spends to keep the lights on in its parking lot overnight, when you’re not there. Sure, this will be an accounting nightmare, but it’ll all be worth it if we can prevent even one person from adding 16 miles of charge to a Nissan Leaf while eating a bloomin’ onion — not that restaurants around here have free chargers, but you can’t be too careful. Now, there is a charger at the neighborhood Ford dealership, which is marking up Broncos by $20,000. Coincidence? I think not. “Critics of this bill might point out that increasing the number of electric cars could actually benefit owners of internal-combustion vehicles, thanks to reduced demand for petroleum products,” adds Dyer. “Electron heads, as I call them, also like to point out that electricity is generated domestically, so your transportation dollars are staying in the U.S. rather than going to, say, Saudi Arabia.”

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Most Government Websites Serve Tracking Cookies Without Consent, Report Finds

A new study published by the IMDEA Networks Institute shows just how common it is for government websites to install third-party cookies in visitors’ web browsers. HotHardware reports: The study makes a distinction between third-party (TP) cookies and third-party tracking (TPT) cookies, because not all third-party cookies are “set by domains that are known to be tracking users for data collection purposes.” The chart [here] shows the percentage of government websites for each country that install at least one third-party cookie, as well as the percentage of said cookies that are associated with domains that are known to be tracking users. Russia tops out the list with over 90% of its government websites installing third-party cookies in visitors’ web browsers. Meanwhile, nearly 60% of US government websites install at least one third-party cookie. Germany sits at the bottom of the list with a little under 30% of government websites serving up third-party cookies.

Most of the third-party cookies installed by government websites are known tracking cookies, except in the case of Germany, where under 10% of third-party cookies are associated with domains that are known to track users. The researchers also found that, depending on the country, 20% to 60% of the third party cookies installed by government websites remain in visitors’ browsers without expiring for a year or more. That’s a long time for a tracker installed without your knowledge or consent to remain active. Beyond specifically tracking cookies, the researchers measured the number of trackers of any kind present on government websites. The Russian gov.ru has the most trackers out of any government website analyzed by the researchers, numbering 31 trackers in total. However, Brazil and Canada aren’t far behind, with 25 trackers present on both investexportbrasil.gov.br and nac-cna.ca. The US government website with the most trackers is hhs.gov, which has 13.

The researchers point out that both third-party tracking cookies are automatically installed in visitors’ web browsers without their consent. However, the researchers guess that web developers and administrators likely include third-party content without intending to add trackers to their websites. A great many websites now rely on third-party resources and include social content that come with trackers built-in.

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Tesla To Expand Its US Supercharger Network To Other EVs In Late 2022

Tesla plans to begin opening its Supercharger network to other electric vehicles by the end of the year, according to a White House memo that shared the automaker’s plans. TechCrunch reports: The U.S. government said in April that it needs to increase its own network of about 1,100 charging stations a hundred-fold to meet coming demand. Tesla’s plans call for expanding capacity at its Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York, where more than 1,600 employees produce Supercharging stations and solar panels, the memo said. “Later this year, Tesla will begin production of new Supercharger equipment that will enable non-Tesla EV drivers in North America to use Tesla Superchargers,” according to the memo.

The expansion — and exposure to customers of other EVs brands — could help Tesla capture more revenue and attention as automakers begin launching new EVs over the next couple of years. The memo did not mention how much money Tesla will invest in adding stations to its fast-charging network, but said that the EV maker is ramping up production of “power electronics components that convert alternating current to direct current, charging cabinets, posts and cables.”

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