Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Now that pretty much all entertainment is available to be streamed at a moment’s notice, it has become increasingly hard to keep track of what we have watched. We also try to only have one streaming service at a time so when we switch to a new one, we’ll sometimes stop in the middle of a season. I started keeping track of this in the Just Watch app but it bothered me that the data was not exportable from their app. Enter trakt.tv.

Trakt.tv is a platform specifically for this purpose. Anyone can make an app on top of their database so you just make one account with them and then pick whichever app you like the best. You’re in full control of your data.

I ended up paying for a year of “VIP” service which, among other things, removes adds and lets me see which services are streaming a specific show. We’ve had it for a few months now and I expect we’ll keep paying for it. (Note that they do have a free option which is very good too.)

Here’s a tip: the next time you’re on the phone with your internet provider and they say “For $10/month, I can offer you X bandwidth”, just say no. You almost certainly don’t need it. Another common way they start this conversation is by asking what you do with your connection or how many devices you have connected. No matter what you say, they’re going to explain why you don’t have enough bandwidth.

I have over 30 devices connected to my network, work from home, do frequent video calls and screen sharing, stream multiple TV shows at the same time, and play online video games, but I’ve lived for a couple of weeks with 10Mbps down and 10Mbps up and it didn’t impact life at all. (My service was busted and it took them a long time to figure out why.) But of course, as soon as I was back to the 240Mbps down, 10Mbps up service that I was paying for, the sales guy insinuated I was dumb for not paying $10/month more to get 400/10 service. They’ve overselling you. Basically the only time you’ll notice that extra speed is if you’re trying to download enormous files like new video games or operating system ISOs. I’d only pay for more than the base package if a slight increase in price would get me higher upload speeds. That’s rarely an option though.

So go for whatever the cheapest package is and I bet that the only difference you’ll notice is that you have a little more money in your account each month. And even if you decide I’m wrong and you need more speed, they’re always going to be happy to bump you up to a higher package with no change fees.

Let me start by saying that I know this is a duplicate post, but unless you’ve been reading since 2008, you probably haven’t seen this one before. Besides, I think it’s worth retelling the story of the programming contest that eventually got me into Microsoft.

In college, I joined a programming club sponsored by Microsoft. I don’t remember exactly what the club did, but I remember them giving out free food which is about all it takes to get a college kid to join a club. They also handed out a thick set of CDs that represented an early beta of Visual Studio .NET. This was the first time the world had seen the .NET languages, and to get us into the tool, the club sponsored a programming contest in 2002 which would have been the end of my senior year. The rules of the contest were to write something that uses as many languages and features of .NET as possible. They wanted us to show off the capabilities of the language.

I had been spending a lot of time working on building a giant library of digital Lego specifications in a tool called POV-Ray and making digital Lego movies, but the slowest part of that process was rendering out the movie frames. It would take about 15 minutes to render a single frame at a measly 320×180 resolution. So my programming contest entry was a system that would orchestrate the rendering of a movie over a bunch of different computers.

The main server had a list of all the frames that needed to be rendered. Clients would connect via a web API and request work. They would be sent the text file representing a single frame, render the file locally in POV-Ray, and then send the image back to the server. To score more points, the client, server, and web API were all written in different .NET languages and all the interaction was tracked in a SQL database that had a web front end for displaying progress and participation points.

It took me FOUR MONTHS of work to get this all going, but with help from a friend, the final presentation really wowed the judges and we captured 85% of the first-place votes. If I remember correctly, the grand prize was an original Xbox and an HP Jornada with a WiFi card.

I did use the software to get rendering help with some Lego movies. The stories are garbage but I’m still proud of the technology that went into them. This stuff is simple now, but 20 years ago, it was unique. You can view an older post about it here: https://studio711.com/the-lego-movie/.

So how did this land me a job at Microsoft? Fast forward four years. I had just finished up my Masters degree and was looking to leave New Jersey. I had been trying to apply to Microsoft but it’s a challenge to make yourself stand out in the veritable flood of applications that they receive. I decided to cold call the head of the Microsoft club from Purdue. We hadn’t talked in four years, and I had to get his contact info through a mutual friend, but it worked! He happened to have a position open on his team and within a couple weeks, I had made it through the interview process and had a job offer.

One of my main recommendations for kids going into high school and college is to do more than the bare minimum. Getting good grades is important, but you need to be an interesting human too. “Passion” is hard to define, but I know it when I see it in a job candidate and that passion goes a long way to opening doors for new opportunities.

These days, companies are using any data they can get their hands on to build profiles of us, market to us, and sell information they’ve derived about us. It’s mostly unavoidable, but it’s nice to exert some control when possible, which is one of the reasons why I use Signal for messaging. This isn’t a sponsored post or anything, but I thought I’d share in case you didn’t know about this but would find it helpful.

Text messages are unencrypted. Anybody in between you and the recipient can read them. I’m not saying telephone companies are mining data out of text messages, but I assume they are regardless of what their privacy policies claim. At the very least they have the ability to do it. Text messages are where I’m the quickest to say something that could easily be taken out of context and even if nobody is reading them now, I’d rather not have them sit around for years.

The three main reasons that I now use the Signal messaging app are:

• The app encrypts your data end to end. Even the Signal employees can’t read your messages.
• Each message thread can be configured to delete messages after a certain amount of time. I usually set mine to 4 weeks
• Pictures and videos are sent at much higher quality. No more being annoyed at low quality images when sharing between iPhone and Android users!

Apps are available for most platforms. I use it on my phone, but I also run the Windows app on my desktop. There’s no cost to use it. The group that runs it is a non-profit that exists on funding from investors and donations from users.

The only downside to using it is that the people you chat with need to be on it for it to be useful. Thankfully, that’s the case for most of the people I chat with, but some chats still happen in an SMS app. It’s not that big of a deal to just tap the notification for whichever app received the message and open it up.

So chat however you want, but if you get a little itchy when you think about how companies are potentially using your data, this is a really easy way to decrease your attack surface.

ChatGPT made a big splash last fall and large language models (LLMs) in general continue to be a hot topic. My current favorite is using Bing AI (https://bing.com/chat) because it combines current search results with the information it already has in its model.

But there’s still a lot of confusion about what is powering these sites. How do they know things? Are they sentient? Stuff You Know Should Know did a great episode called Large Language Models and You and I think it’s worth a listen. I’ve heard LLMs previously described as “word salad”, and this episode gives another good example of explaining that it’s like an iteration on autocomplete in a text box. The algorithm just knows what words are most likely to come next and which words are related to each other. It has no concept of what it is saying. It only knows that those words are most likely to go together when it sees your prompt. So there’s no sentience or actual knowledge happening here, which is probably good but it’s also bad because it means that ridiculous answers can come out and be presented as fact.

The episode covers all of this and then also does a good job of how incredibly fast things are improving. Give it a listen if this topic interests (or scares) you.