Ben and Ryan talk about the work that earned the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics and how it might make computers way faster. Plus: California’s efforts to transform how math is taught, Unity’s new fee structure, and the trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
California is trying to transform how math is taught. How’s that going?
Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that allows scientists to see how electrons move by mapping their positions in an atom. Learn more here and here.
As Ben says, speaking of things that are difficult to observe and don’t make a lot of sense, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for a historically huge amount of fraud. Follow the live trial blog from Wired or check out their explainer.
Starting next year, Unity is charging developer fees. We explore the back and forth as they try to find a solution that works for the company and the community.
Shoutout to user vasco, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How to test abstract class in Java with JUnit?.
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Ben Popper Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a home team edition. Yours truly, Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow, and my partner in crime, the Editor of our blog and maestro of our newsletter, Ryan Thor Donovan. Ryan?
Ryan Donovan All right, thank you, sir.
BP How’re you doing?
RD Good, good. Dropped that middle name on them.
BP Nice. You’ve got to drop the middle name, show strength. The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists for producing the shortest burst of light ever, so small.
RD So small, tiny. It was one attosecond.
BP An attosecond, like an atomic second. It's one quintillionth of a second. An attosecond and a quintillionth are both just made up. Those are made up numbers.
RD Yeah, they're all just made up for sure.
BP So if you can see the electrons you can study the birth of the universe, you can learn some things, and electrons rule everything around us. Computers too, okay. Software, deep down it's all just electrons, ones and twos.
RD Well, that was so they could look at electrons going 43 miles per second.
BP Yeah. They're moving so fast that you need to be even faster to take a quick snapshot of them. It's like a strobe light. Take a picture.
RD It's like a strobe light. So I wonder what the use cases of this will be. Obviously we're at the pure science part of the program here, but I don't know if being able to measure them more precisely will make computers faster. Somebody will come up with something.
BP Ah, here we go, okay. “What could the future hold? Technology taking advantage of attoseconds is largely yet to enter the mainstream, but the future looks bright, experts say. So far we're only using this stuff to observe electrons, but what is basically untouched yet, or is really just beginning, is to control the electrons, to manipulate their motion, which could lead to far faster electronics, as well as potentially spark a revolution in chemistry. We would not be limited to what molecules naturally do. Now that we can see the electrons, then we can poke them, move them around, make them go this way and that. That's coming next.”
RD Like one of those machines that knocks the rotten apples out of the way, just knock some electrons.
BP Exactly. I'm glad we brought this back to hardware. This is all better performance for your next gaming PC.
RD Yeah, ultimately you're going to get Nobel Prizes just to make your Call of Duty run better framerates. That's it, that's all it is.
BP That much smoother, exactly.
RD Side note– there was a petition going around a while back to make ‘hella’ an official metric prefix, so it'd be one hellameter to the next star or something ridiculous. A hellagram would be hella big.
BP Nice, I like that. Also another excellent Norse god. We're getting a lot of Norse god references on this one. Speaking of things that are difficult to observe and don't make a lot of sense, the SBF trial begins today. It alleges that Sam Bankman-Fried is behind what may be one of the biggest financial frauds in history, $8 billion or something like that, and it really feels like sort of a capstone at the end of what was a crypto era where crypto dominated the conversation, blockchain technology was the thing that was the hottest, and has completely taken a backseat now to AI as well as still fail to find its foothold, its great utility in the world, from what I can tell. There may be use cases out there and I would like to be proven wrong. We've had some folks on talking about cross-border transactions. If you live in an autocratic state, I'm sure it's a great way to protect your assets. From a cryptography secure messaging perspective, there might be some utility, but it certainly doesn't feel like it's disrupting everyday life and the sort of movement of industry the way that generative AI has done in its first 6-12 months.
RD I think I have heard a couple use cases that seem good. I think I heard that the California DMV is using it to record some sort of licenses or registrations. There's some other ones that are actually using it for something that is genuine, but it always has felt like anybody talking about crypto is trying to hustle you. And I know you were sort of on the more positive side of crypto. Are you shifting because of this? Are you throwing up your hands in the air?
BP I guess the unfortunate thing is that crypto became a speculative bubble in the way that tulips once did.
RD Or comics in the ‘90s.
BP Or junk bonds, or tech stock. There was a point in time where people who had nothing to do with crypto, your local car mechanic and dentist were saying, “Ah, I'm in a chat group online and we know what the next big shitcoin is going to be and we're going to get ahead of this and triple our money overnight.” And when people start talking like that, the underlying technology is irrelevant. And SBF allegedly sort of stood atop the pinnacle of that kind of behavior. Banking the unbanked was always one of the great things they talked about and how many people were able to secure a savings account that they can access when they need and is immune to the inflation that's rocking their country because of blockchain, I don't know. I remember writing about what a huge impact companies like M-PESA were having in Africa by allowing people to save money digitally and load up their phones and become people who are participating in the financial system despite living in really rural areas where there wasn't a lot of technological infrastructure. And so I guess it doesn't feel to me like blockchain or Bitcoin really fulfilled that promise, unfortunately.
RD Yeah, I think the solution to that is just better banking. There's talk of check cashing at the post office or something like that, or just giving everybody a direct line to the federal reserve, just to have some amount of money there. I think with crypto it always seemed like its basic use case was speculation.
BP Yeah. I think some of the things you're talking about seem obvious on their face, and the reason we don't have them sometimes is because of regulatory capture. Why not make things easier? The answer, unfortunately, often is that the people who are currently profiting from other systems don't want you to get into that. But from the beginning, crypto captured people's imagination and technologists' imagination because it said that we're going to get off the old financial rails, we're going to build a whole new world on our own, and that world is wrapped up in ideas around cryptography and math and shared compute, and that was exciting. Software developers and technologists want to be involved in the next big wave, and so we had done the internet, we had done mobile, we had done social, and we were waiting for something big and a lot of people banked on this one and it feels bad, man, to see it not flourish and also to see it hurt a lot of other people to see that be the outcome.
RD I think there was a lot of hope around the decentralization part of it. I definitely liked hearing about DAOs and the sort of decentralized applications, but that just speaks to the frustration of the power of platforms. Everybody wants a little bit more control in their world, but somebody is going to control it eventually.
BP Yeah, I think you're right. I think another piece of it was a reaction to locked-in social graphs and other walled gardens and the idea that we could create these shared spaces that Mastodon has done to a degree and some people have found great community there and are running their own servers and stuff like that. But the ease of use for the average user and the ability to get to that mega scale and to have that network effect still requires, at least until now, centralization has been the answer. I mean, not in open source software. Linux rules the world, and maybe there's a benevolent dictator for life, but it's open to all to improve and fork and change. So in open source software, maybe you have seen the success of that idea.
RD Yeah. Talking about Linux, there’s so many flavors of Linux and Unix which is the sort of underlying. Just people contributing and forking and building their own, I think that's really powerful, but like you said about the network effect, having a big platform is actually kind of great. I haven't used Mastodon much and I was mostly a lurker on Twitter, but I still lurk on Twitter because it's still where people are posting things and where you find everybody.
BP You're lurking on Twitter, and we will never stop calling it Twitter.
RD I will never stop calling it Twitter.
BP Never. And the other funny thing about the Sam Bankman-Fried one is that he just couldn't stop himself from continuing to talk. There's a great piece in Wired that we can link in the show notes: “Sam Bankman-Fried is the Worst Client Ever.” He really did himself no favors in the lead up to this trial speaking with journalists and appearing on podcasts. And I guess the defense is, “I was just doing my best and I was clueless. I wasn't defrauding anybody, I'm just not that bright.” We'll see how that one plays out.
RD They had a chat channel called ‘Wire Fraud’ where they were talking about defrauding people, so...
BP Yes. Also important to remember that three of the four major people who were indicted have pled guilty and are cooperating, so he's in a pretty bad position as the one person trying to buck that trend.
RD Yeah.
BP All right. Well, we'll see how that goes. Trial starts today and it's supposed to take six to eight weeks, so we'll check back on that one in a little bit. Next up in our news hits– California's math misadventure is about to go national. Ryan, tell me what this one's about.
RD So there were some proposed changes to the middle school math curriculum where they're talking about getting rid of algebra, pushing it later, and the article I read was written by a math professor, he studies undergraduate math curriculums. I think he's a child of a math high school teacher too. And he read this entire thousand-page proposal and was like, “It’s not based on research. The things you're trying to cut are key to the things you're trying to promote, like data science and computer science.” And the proposed “data science course” is sort of a data understanding course, which is valuable, but it's not going to replace the sort of logical manipulation of algebra. And I think it's very valuable. When I went to college, there was a course called ‘discrete math’ which you had to take if you were taking computer science classes, and it turns math into this big logical problem where it's like, “What's 15 + 27? Well, it's 10 + 20 + 5 + 7,” and it teaches you how to break down things into smaller parts and understand how you can manipulate and move the numbers in a way that a computer can.
BP Right. My kids are in fourth and fifth grade. They're very defiantly into reading their Calvin and Hobbes and saying “school sucks” phase. Luckily, they manage to bring home good grades. And it is interesting to see them rebel against math, but apply those things in real life. Like you said, they are using those concepts to divide up time or to make progress in a video game, they just can't stand to be told they need to eat their broccoli. When somebody tells you you have to do the multiplication tables, then that's when you feel like they're total nonsense. And I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way about algebra, but to your point, maybe making it, as you said, something that you can understand how you would apply it in life, always enlivens the education.
RD Yeah. And I think there's a part of new math where they sort of teach you addition by getting to 10, where it's like, “7 + 8 is 7 + 3 + 5.” You get to 10 first and I was like, “Oh, that's great. That's sort of how I did things in my head instead of just the memorization.” But I think that sort of manipulation of numbers is not intuitive to people, so I think algebra is the first step to that.
BP Yeah. All right, we have one more. It might be a little too spicy to survive in the end, but we're going to go there anyway. We'll see how a pricing change led to a revolt by Unity's video game developers. “In an industry where customers are slow to trust and quick to criticize, a new fee from Unity infuriated studios that use the platform.” Unity is a big name, it's been around forever, it's basically professional tools to build 3D games. Instead of an annual fee, it charged developers every time someone installed a copy of their games, meaning they would pay more as their titles grew in popularity. Don't punish success. It's so un-American, don't you know that? Flat tax.
RD Also there's a lot of Unity developers. Unity was this kind of professional toolkit used by very punk rock. Anybody could pick it up and do stuff, so there's a lot of free stuff out there. A lot of free games made with it, a lot of game jams where it's like, “Oh, now you have to pay for every time somebody installed your free software.” That's not going to work.
BP Right, that's no good. They should have thought about that. Some portion of the money that's coming in makes sense, but paying per download if you're charging for free means that there can be no more of that open community stuff. That's no good.
RD Yeah. And I know at least one person who is a Unity developer professionally, who, when they saw that were like, “What, do I got to learn a new language now? I've been doing this for 10-15 years or something and built a career on it.” And now he's like, “This is not workable.”
BP Right. You’ve got to message these things earlier. You’ve got to work with the community to come to a reasonable compromise before you announce, because the article also points out that the about-face would make a significant difference for Unity which has never turned a profit. So the people inside who are maybe working to sustain this or want to grow it in certain ways are saying, “We’ve got to figure out some business model for the long term,” but you don't want to just drop something on your community which has invested so much without them expecting it or understanding how they can work with it. For example, can you apply for an academic or not-for-profit version if you're not going to charge and how would that work?
RD Right, or change when the licensing starts. So if you've already been paying on this other licensing scheme, you're not going to suddenly owe thousands of dollars because your game was a success five years ago.
BP Developers said they felt betrayed. Many spent years learning and coding in a particular programming language used by Unity called C#.
RD To be fair, C# is a language that can be used elsewhere. I think we use C# on Stack Overflow because it's a Microsoft technology.
BP Yeah, we're a Microsoft shop.
RD Don't sweat .NET.
BP Well, it's interesting. Among other changes, it raised the revenue threshold for games. Okay, so larger developers will primarily be charged and smaller ones not. The company still plans to go ahead with the new fee model. Okay, so they did respond to this and made some changes, maybe more will come to sort out this brouhaha. But that's a great first start that you should have had with the community first. Under 100,000 copies, we're not going to charge you. That way you can have your game jam, you can have your indie creative thing.
RD Yeah. I think there is a negotiating technique where you say something crazy to start something that is unacceptable to everybody and use that as the baseline negotiating position.
BP Right, you get that stalking horse out there. I like it.
RD That's right. And then you say, “Well, okay, we'll do this other one.” And then you're like, “Oh, that's fine.”
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BP All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. As always, if you have thoughts about any of this, how to properly teach math, what the best way for Unity and its developers to come together is, the fate of SBF, whatever, jump on the blog, leave us a comment, hit us up at the podcast. We want to hear from y'all and get you involved in the show. As we do always at this time, we're going to shout out the winner of a badge– somebody who came on Stack Overflow and helped to spread a little knowledge or asked a great question. Great Question Badge today, awarded 50 minutes ago to Vasco. “How to test abstract classes in Java with JUnit.” If you've ever wondered, there is a question for you. Helped 135,000 people, so we appreciate you for asking a great question and congrats on your badge. I am Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on X @BenPopper. Email us questions or suggestions, podcast@stackoverflow.com. And leave us a rating and a review if you like the show, because it really helps.
RD I'm Ryan Donovan. I edit the blog here at Stack Overflow; you can find it at stackoverflow.blog. And you can reach out to me on X @RThorDonovan.
BP All right, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you soon.
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