So, as some of you know, I recently had my first child, which means 21st century rite of passage, where in the middle of the night, when you really should be sleeping, instead you're wandering alone through the wilds of online shopping. And you, as a new parent, are buying things online that you never imagined you would buy online, like paper towels and bizarre sleep contraptions and crayons for birthday parties. And all the while you imagine you're alone, but in fact, as Professor Stuckey is going to tell us today, companies are collecting data on you and running experiments. And so what he's actually here to tell us is why on earth Amazon thought that I was willing to pay $10 for like a tiny box of crayolas. I suspect it had to do with my zip code, and maybe what I was willing to pay for one of those bizarre sleep contraptions. Professor Stuckey is a professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Law. He's also a co-founder of the Data Competition Institute, and together with a co-author, he has written this terrific new book, Virtual Competition. And he is here today to talk to us about how algorithms are changing online shopping, and how competition law may or may not be up to the job of regulating them. We are thrilled to have him here to talk about these important issues, so please join me in welcoming Maurice Stuckey. Thank you so much to each of the fellows, and we were noticing about how much now you're seeing this shift from brick-and-mortar stores to online. And we also noticed that with that shift, there's an increase in the use of these pricing algorithms. And we asked, well, what would happen to these pricing algorithms could somehow collude with one another? And that started then the whole process, the whole inquiry that led to our book. So the first thing, and my co-author, Ariel, always says, this is sort of the warning, is that we recognize at the beginning that a data-driven economy can really provide us a lot of benefits. And if you look at it, we've got Einer here as well, that all of these factors would suggest that the economy would become more competitive, because by increasing the amount of data and the algorithms, you can have dynamic pricing that can promote allocated efficiency. You can lower entry barriers. You can lower the search costs in order to identify products in your life. And you can have significant efficiencies, and we don't dispute that. The second thing is that we're not anti-technology. We believe that big data and big analytics can be good, they could be bad, or they could be neutral. It depends on several factors on how companies employ these technologies, whether or not their incentives are aligned with our incentives, and certain market characteristics. So that's our disclaimer. But the one thing that we came upon is that we started hearing that, well, with these online markets, because they're so dynamic, that they rarely, if ever, will be anti-competitive. And we were wondering, is that necessarily true? And that led us then to say, well, what would be some of the anti-competitive scenarios that might result? The key thing here is that competition in the online world may appear to you competitive. There may be the facade of competition, but you're not necessarily going to benefit to the extent that you would think you would in a competitive market. So these are the three scenarios that we're going to address today. And the first one involves algorithmic collusion. And when we looked at this, we came up with the following four scenarios. In the first scenario, the messenger scenario is the easiest. Here you have competitors that are agreeing to collude, and they're using the algorithms to help perfect their cartel. And in the antitrust world, that's considered a no brainer, because the illegality inheres with the agreement itself. So when we were writing this, the DOJ prosecuted its first case involving algorithms, it's the Hopkins case, and there the co-conspirators were agreeing among themselves to fix the price of posters that were on the Amazon marketplace. And because the illegality inheres with the agreements, the humans agree, they go to jail. The second scenario is a little bit more complex. Here you have an agreement, but it's a series of vertical agreements. Basically, you're allowing one entity to use its algorithm to set the price of multiple market participants. And we use Uber as the example. So with Uber, the drivers could conceivably compete with one another overpriced. But they don't. Uber sets the price. They also determine whether or not there's going to be a surcharge, where the surcharge will be, the extent of the surcharge, and how long the surcharge lasts. And that in and of itself is not anti-competitive. Because let's say Uber enters into a new market and it has its first driver, not necessarily an anti-competitive effect. But what happens as Uber's market power increases? And so now it's no longer necessarily responding to market forces. It could start setting the price. In fact, it is determining what the market price is. And here, now, each driver that is added to the platform, they understand that no one else is going to necessarily undercut them on price. So to what extent does that resemble, then, the hub of spoke and spirits? The third scenario, we call it a tacit conclusion on steroids. This is even tricky. Here, each firm unilaterally decides to adopt a pricing algorithm. But by doing so, they understand that with the speed in which these algorithms can respond to one another, and the increase in market transparency, you can have an anti-competitive outcome, namely tacit collusion. And tacit collusion in the United States is not illegal. But the outcome can be as bad as express collusion. It's the interdependence you had a classic case here in Martha's Vineyard where the First Circuit had to address this claim of price fixing. And what the court said, no, no, no, the gas stations in Martha's Vineyard could all agree, could all elevate price above competitive levels without agreeing with one another. They just see what the others are doing, and then they respond in time. And that by itself is not illegal under the competition law. So with our third scenario, we don't have an anti-competitive agreement among competitors to fix price, but we have evidence of anti-competitive intent. And the question here is, is that enough? Is that by itself enough? And is there a tool that the agency can use to go after that? And there might be section five of the FTC Act, but that could be popular. And then the last scenario is the most problematic. Here, we don't have evidence of any agreement among two different factors. Each company decides to adopt the app. And we don't have any evidence of anti-competitive intent, which you have the confluence of two factors. We call one God view and the other artificial intelligence. God view is a term that we borrow from Uber because Uber has the ability to see on a screen where all of the drivers are and where all the passengers are. And it gives them a view then to see the commercial icon. So one thing we ask is, what happens now with the increase of the internet of things and the like, the increase in data? Can you have such an increased transparency in the marketplace that rivals will now know not only where their customers are, but also what their rivals are doing? And they could respond then well before price. They could see a rival seeking to enter into a particular market by building warehouses and the like, and they can respond to the problem. And the second component would be artificial intelligence. And here, from machine learning, the computers learn how to arrive at the optimal strategy. And one of the things that fascinated us is that Carnegie Mellon recently came out with this program that defeated some of the world's best poker players, Texas Holder. And the remarkable thing about it was is that they didn't teach the computer how to play poker itself. I mean, they gave it the basic rules, but they didn't tell them these are the optimal strategies. What they basically gave the computer was basic game theory. And the computer from trial and error playing multiple, multiple, multiple hands was able then to define the optimal strategy. And the human players wouldn't always know why the computer acted that way. They sometimes thought, oh, the computer made a mistake. And later they discovered that no, it was actually that they had made a mistake. And the second thing was once the players, they started ganging together, let's find the weaknesses of the computer and we'll try to exploit it. Overnight, the computer would identify itself, its own weaknesses, and then correct them. So when they tried to then exploit it, they lost as well. So this last scenario is causing the most heartburn for competition authorities. It's not there yet, but now the executives themselves might not necessarily know why the algorithms are behaving in such a manner, but it may be some strategy in order to maximize profits and they may be tasked with colluding in ways that the executives don't even know. So that's our first set of anti-competitive scenarios, algorithmic collusion. Then we shift into the other world, which is very different. In algorithmic collusion, it's likely involved homogenous goods, you're gonna have high entry barriers, and the like. Here, this would be the example that you mentioned going on to Amazon, whereby companies are devoting a lot of resources to tracking you to collect data about you, to identify what your likely reservation price is, how much you're willing to pay. And also to induce you to buy things that you ordinarily may not want to have purchased before. And so we love this quote on the internet. It's to get you to buy things that you don't need with money you don't have to impress people you don't like. And this is how behavioral discrimination differs from price discrimination that we all, anyone here who's taking college tuition is a victim of price discrimination, but we don't complain about it. But this type of price discrimination is different. First off, it moves closer to first degree discrimination. And secondly, it's shifting the demand curve to the right and getting you to buy things ordinarily you might not have purchased. And that could be good if that product is under-demanded like dental services. But it can also be bad if you're exploiting these various biases. So when we presented earlier, like a draft of this, the one the competition authorities, one of their chief economists said, there are over 100 biases that the behavioral economics literature has identified. So it wouldn't be that hard for the company to identify one to exploit consumers. And the thing here is that you may not necessarily be aware of it.  But what is presented to you is carefully orchestrated based on all the data that's collected about you, about how much money you're making, where you're living, what you're reading, what are you watching and the like. And the price that you're charged is gonna differ than the price that someone else is gonna be charged. And the products that you're offered can differ from other products as well. And we also explored the welfare effects of that. That the economists, when we were presenting this, the economists were equivocal about price discrimination. Lawyers and judges seem to be more concerned about price discrimination generally. When we talked about behavioral discrimination, there was a greater concern among all the parties about that because the welfare effects are less clear and they can't be potentially troubling for us. And this take us then to the third scenario which we call frenemies. So we wanted to have a unifying theme. How do we connect the collusion scenarios and the behavioral discrimination scenarios? And we came to say, well, where does the power lie now in this new economic system? And what we found is that the power lies with the super platforms. The Europeans call it GABA, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and one Wall Street analyst said it nicely that apps are worth millions but platforms are worth billions. And what we find is that the super platforms can have what's called a frenemy relationship with the websites and the apps of the life. And the way to analogize this would be as if a dental clients were coordinating among themselves to track the gazelle as they go across the savannah. And so there they're friends because they want to better track you, they want to better identify you. But once the gazelle is killed, then there's competition over who gets the choice cut with gazelle. And the power we find here lies with the super platforms. And one of the things that we bring about is the tail of two apps in order to see what the incentives are in this ecosystem. So I've got this one app that's offered for free on your phone, you turn it on, it converts your phone into a flashlight. But unbeknownst to you, that app is also tracking your geolocation data and is selling that surreptitiously to advertisers in order to target you with ads. This company then is fined by the FTC because they've engaged in deceptive practices. The other app is Disconnect. And Disconnect's purpose is actually one of the co-founders was one who worked for one of the super platforms. And they said, we're going to allow you to better able prevent yourself from being tracked if you don't want to. And to control who can track you within this ecosystem. So we asked, which of the two gets kicked off of the Google Play Store? The one that engaged in deceptive behavior or the one that enables consumers to better protect themselves? This one is still on. And we want to understand why that is. And it was really interesting when we presented this. One person from the industry said, well, this is like inviting an arsonist to our house because their incentives are counter to our incentives. We want to encourage the tracking of consumers. So the key point here is that these gatekeepers can have a lot of power in controlling the ecosystem and affecting the incentives within that ecosystem. And this is not really the end of the story. What we're now going to emerge to is the digital personal assistant. So when you have a new baby, one of the things you can now, I believe me tell this actually, is a digital butter that will sing to that baby. We'll talk to the baby. We'll learn from the baby, right? We'll communicate with the baby. And you will now conceivably have a digital personal assistant that could be with that baby before they were born all the way until they die. And what are the implications then of digital butter? And these can be profound because now when you still have the ability to go onto Google and search, you can search other sites and the like. The more you rely on these digital personal assistants, the less likely you're going to search outside of them. And now they can become the key gatekeeper of your ecosystem. And their power can increase significantly. And, oh yeah. So the effects here of the digital assistant isn't just economic. It's not likely going to be just the ability to price discriminate better. But the digital personal assistants can also affect the news that you watch, the entertainment you receive, the suggestions and the like. They can really start controlling your worldview. And there was this one interesting study you may have heard about that Facebook conducted where they altered the newsfeed of the readers. And they wanted to see like emotional contagion. If I have more positive stories, what impact does that have on your postings? Or if there are more negative stories, what impact does that have? And what they found was a statistically significant effect on the postings. More negative postings you receive, more likely you're going to respond to it. More positive, more positive postings. And just think that's just one manipulation. How much more manipulation can be the more that you rely on these digital buttons. Now, you're going to hear next week on the problem. And the pro author have come up with a paper about a pure as butter. And I think this is really exciting. And one of the things is will the market provide an alternative? So let's say if you were exploited, if the digital butter is not necessarily aligned with your interest, can you easily switch to another digital assistant? Yes, we hope so. But we can't necessarily assume that market forces will deliver a pure as butter. One of the reasons that we identify these data-driven network effects. And network effects aren't necessarily bad. Think of the telephone. More people that have a telephone, the more utility you have from the telephone. With these data-driven markets, we find other types of network effects. The more people that use, for example, a search engine, the better the quality of the search engine itself. It tapers off at some point. But nonetheless, there are these enormous network effects that can then allow big firms to become bigger, collect even more data, which helps improve the quality of the phone and helps separate the gap. So one potential entry barrier are these data-driven network effects. The other is the leverage of the super platform. That you're going to interconnect with one of these digital butlers. You want something that might be able to coordinate well with your calendar, with your mapping technology, with your driverless car, with all of the products, the smart technology you have in your home. And the super platforms already can offer many of these services that put them at a competitive advantage to drivers. So the key takeaway here is that the effects aren't just going to be economic. They can then be potentially affecting our democratic ideals and they can affect our well-being. So, is the future bleak? No, not necessarily, sorry, just want to keep reminding that it's not necessarily deep. We can, through a combination of competition policy, consumer protection and privacy, still get the benefits of a data-driven economy that ultimately improves our well-being. But we can't assume necessarily that this will invariably happen under the current antitrust policies. And one of the things is, there's an interesting conference going on at the University of Chicago today, tomorrow, and yesterday. And they're looking at, is there a concentration problem in America? And this is sort of ironic, because the University of Chicago helped bring about a change in antitrust policy in the 1980s.  Believe that markets normally sell correct, we shouldn't really be as concerned about vertical restraints, nor should we really be concerned about monopolies as much in the life. And what we've seen just in the past year is a lot of economic literature coming out from the Council of Economic Advisers, from the Obama White House, that there are warning signs, there are red flags that our competitive market isn't working necessarily the way it should be. What we're seeing is that there's increasing concentration levels. And profits are accruing to a handful of firms. So there are fewer firms, greater profits, less mobility among workers, fewer startups, and the like. And the other concern is as we shift from the brick and mortar to go to the data-driven economy, our current antitrust tools won't necessarily solve the problem. That there are various problems with our current tools, that they're very much price-centric and many of these markets are multi-sided, the products and services are offered for free. They defy the antitrust paradigm, not always, but in several different ways. So we can't ignore the issue. So what are we gonna do with that? And we love this quote, it's by Barry Nielber. He's a game theorist at Yale. And he says, when the masses get mad enough, perhaps they'll elect the new trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt for the digital era. And this was before the elections. He was reviewing our book for Science Magazine. He was like, yeah, this would be great. And now we have Trump. And the question is, what's the Trump administration going to do? And here I do have some good news. One of the goals of our book was to alert competition authorities that there may be competitive problems, that there may be this facade of competition down the surface, looks really promising, but underlining their real problems. And then just the past few months, you've had, particularly in Europe, senior policy makers that are now engaged in the subject. They really are interested in this. We presented this book to both the US and EU competition authorities. Terrell McSweeney of the FTC is very much engaged in this issue. So that's really promising. But it's going to take more. And I think one of the things that's going to be on you is to hold the politicians as well as the antitrust officials accountable. What exactly are you doing to address these potential risks? So I leave you then with the following prune for thought. To what extent does the invisible hand still hold sway? We've got now a digitized hand. You look at Hoover's algorithm, it can determine the market clearing price. Now, does that open the possibility for smart regulation? I mean, that's one possible. And to what extent is there going to be any more a competitive price? So when you go onto Amazon, you say, this doesn't seem right. What is going to be your framework in comparing that price to what might be the competitive benchmark price? All of you are going to have your own unique price. You can have your unique experience and then the behavioral discrimination. And then this goes to the digital assistants if we have these super platforms and if these network effects lead to one or two personal digital assistants, what are the impacts going to be on our privacy? It was an interesting case in Arkansas where the police tried to subpoena the information of Amazon's digital assistant. So what does that mean for surveillance by the government? What does that also mean about private surveillance of your behavior? And to what extent does that impact our democratic ideals and our well-being? So I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts. You are the future. So let me go at it. I'm going to turn it open out for a question and answer at this point. Bill's ready to talk and a naughty set of problems. So I was wondering what sort of concrete changes to antitrust policy would you recommend given this? What should we, you know, assuming you could persuade the FTC to do what you wanted to do, what would that be?  So there it's going to be very hard to say that the agencies are going to, you know, analyze the firms just because they're acting interdependent. So one of the things that we're thinking about is what are, rather than doing ex-post enforcement, are there necessary conditions that could help promote privacy competition? So the UK's consumer markets authority, they're looking at privacy competition as the canary and the coal mark. And to the extent that you're not getting necessarily the privacy benefits, that might be some sort of market failure. And then it might not be an antitrust solution, but it might be greater coordination with the privacy, consumer protection, and the antitrust officials to put mechanisms in the marketplace in order to increase that data for the company. So that would be one aspect. Second would be, for the super platforms, would be to be tougher on section two enforcement. We were talking about that beforehand. The DOJ brought one case in the last 16 years under section two. Just to give you an idea, they brought more cases under the Bird Migratory Act in one year than they have under the last, I believe we have the statistics, it was like 20 years under section two. So the Europeans have been basically leading on this one. I think the US authorities need to step up on that as well. And then for behavioral discrimination, I think it's greater control over your data and your ability to be tracked and your ability to opt out for being tracked in life. And we have that in terms of COPPA for our children, that there are much greater privacy protections that are for children than there are for adults. We don't necessarily need to extend all of that, but there might be some measures that we can do so we can avoid being tracked. Yes. You said earlier that digital assistance would influence people in a way that we may not want to. But how does that differ from more traditional ways? Like a local newspaper, if there's only one newspaper and you have to read that one or the radio, for example, if you always tune into the same station, how is that, how is the digital assistant different? When I was at DOJ, that was one of the things that we looked at was at press monopolies. And that would be a concern, right? That in a less robust marketplace of ideas, you could have censorship. And the problem is that you may not necessarily identify it because you don't know about the stories that the newspaper could have reported, which I was not to. Here, that's only going to be one parameter of that because the newspaper has to have some sort of guess of their readers. Here, you're going to have a highly personalized environment where you're going to be given articles that the super platform thinks you might enjoy. And so here, your worldview can really change significantly, at least like in the New York Times, if you have a broad readership base, the newspaper has to find stories that somehow won't alienate one set of readers versus another. But under this scenario, they can be highly targeted and they can create sort of a worldview. So they know that you're susceptible, let's say, to fake news and of a particular story, right? Then they can provide you that stream of news. So the effects can be much more pernicious. Just a little question for you. So we're almost in, just to be clear, a student here coming from a tech company. But our worldview right now is shaped by the construct of this being an anomalous situation, what's going on with like an Amazon Alexa kind of scenario.  This is the fourth industrial revolution brings us to a very different kind of place. And when we're just looking at antitrust policy in a way that views the construct are in our worldview today versus what it will be in 10, 15 years or in the heart of that. I guess the heart of my question might be how do we influence policy associated, I mean, this is a major change that's coming. I mean, Deming's research out of the education program. It's an overwhelming change to how we work, how we interact with society. How do we change our worldview? How do we change DOJ viewpoints as to, the major change that is coming, the role of data, the role of just the, that intuition liberates us, like the Carnegie Mellon experiment. It's imperfect information. I mean, that's gonna permeate into negotiation. It's gonna permeate into all aspects of society. How do we change our worldview based on that? That's what we would hear. And invariably, these were researchers that were supported by Google. And they were very superficial arguments that because data is free, consumers necessarily, because the service is free, consumers necessarily better. Data is like sunshine. It can't form an entry barrier. So the first level is to really analyze the myths and say deconstruct the myths and say, are the myths real? And there might be some element of truth in them for some markets, but they're not universal truths. So that's one way to explain to policymakers is that the issue is far more complex than these 10 simple myths. The second then would say, okay, going forward, what are some of the potential risks? And to start identifying the risks and the like and then to start looking at economic literature that helps support this risk. So already you start seeing some economic studies. There's two studies, whereby they created these gasoline apps. And the belief was that by having the gasoline apps, it'll be easier for you to find where gas is cheaper. That should mean lower prices for you. But consistent with our algorithmic collusion scenario, that actually had the opposite. That actually raised price because now the algorithms can see exactly what each rival is charging that can quickly undercut it and the like. So a second component then is to do more economic testing. And I think for you, this is a really exciting area where you can combine competition policy, you can combine game theory and you can start creating these pricing algorithms and start testing them yourselves and say under what conditions, for example, in coordination, if we want to create, let's say, a algorithmic collusion incubator, what conditions can help create that collusion? And what conditions can help destabilize that collusion? So you can start creating these programs yourselves and start testing them or using some of the pricing algorithms in the market and start testing them to see when is it likely to be pro or anti-competitive? So that's the second component. And then the third is to keep an eye on the big picture. The big picture right now is what are the macroeconomic trends? Is our competition policy working for us? And to start using your resources to start questioning, how are we benefiting from this competition policy? We've got growing wealth inequality. We've got higher concentration. We have greater profits accruing the fuel funds. And I think what you'll find is you're gonna have greater interest in both the right and the left on those issues. Hi. So I guess my question is you keep on referring to a thing. What exactly or who exactly are you referring to? Are you referring to algorithms? Are you referring to the data companies? And then specifically, what kind of legal mechanisms after we do say this incubator kind of experiment, would we be able to implement to adequately control or not control competition? All right, the second question is it's going to, some of the, we'll see what it would be helpful to see what type of information flow helps facilitate this passive pollution. And if it's the sharing of information that consumers may not particularly value, but could be very helpful in sustaining the algorithm and collusion, then competition makers, then competition officials can target that. We can limit the sharing of that information. If there are other factors that help foster this algorithmic collusion, such as the transparency of price and customers rely on that as well as competitors, then you don't have a ready solution for the competition official. So you might then think of other policies maybe outside the competition authorities to help destabilize passive pollution. This might be ways to foster entry by mavericks for the life. So I think there you have to have a broader framework of what creates the conditions for this algorithmic collusion and what are some factors that can help destabilize that collusion. Now, when I was referring to the thing, I was probably in marvel because there were many things throughout my presentation. So one important thing are the competition officials. They're there to protect you and one of the, there's this great article, whatever happened to the antitrust movement, they said antitrust originally was a movement without any cases. And then Richard Hofstetter said by the 1960s, you had cases but no antitrust movement. Now we don't have antitrust cases except for cartels. Move few merger challenges and we don't really have any antitrust movement. But this is remarkable because the first, this is the first time in a long time that you have populists like Elizabeth Warren that are speaking out about increased antitrust enforcement. You had it part of the Democratic platform, increased antitrust enforcement. And you have a populist Trump who has mentioned antitrust. So now the question is to start saying, have what we've been doing worked? Where has it been working? And start putting pressure on the competition officials. And then the second route would be on super platforms. And to understand, why is it that it's taking me so long to have an ad blocking measure on my phone when that technology has existed for so long? And what are my alternatives? And to start, it's gonna be hard to circumvent but maybe find ways to, first of all, accept the risks. If you take one of these digital personal systems, what are the likelihood risks? And then are there other ways that you can do it without minimizing the price of the system or consumers? This question is about timeframe. So specifically the things you're discussing seem like they're in the present and the immediate future. And I'm wondering how far out your work is projecting or considering and whether it's relevant to think in the longer term future about social or economic or cultural effects of these systems. Yeah, so let me just go. So right now, for the collusion scenarios, we already are in the messenger scenario. And Hopkins case is one, the European Commission is investigating another. The hub and spoke, they're starting out to look at that. And it's not, and one of the things is that as companies start outsourcing their pricing to companies like boomerang. And so you have multiple competitors that are using the same pricing algorithm. This is likely gonna become an issue. Uber is already now in federal court and there's this sort of hub and spoke conspiracy, they survive the motions of dismissal. This is likely to become more difficult as companies migrate online and start outsourcing their pricing to algorithm. This we're starting to see as well in the gasoline industry as companies migrate to pricing algorithm, I say in the next three to four years, this is gonna become a greater issue. This is longer term. This would be once we start getting the internet of things and really start the data is being collected. And you can have that a better image. And the artificial intelligence as it improves. I would say five to 10 years, this is gonna likely be on the horizon. For behavioral discrimination, you already have behavioral discrimination, you already have dynamic pricing. Now the question is that why isn't there more of it? It's because there's an unfairness. Customers are upset. But to the extent that we start accepting dynamic pricing, we're told that the price is different because the supply and demand changes minute by minute. Then it's gonna be easier to also price discriminate because there's no longer a fixed price. And you don't know is it a dynamic price or is it discriminatory price? So I would expect this is already happening. I expect this to grow in the next five years. The digital personal assistant, I mean already right now with the super platforms, the European commission is investigating Google for various offenses. There have been one statement of, I think there's been one statement of objections. There hasn't been any final adjudication, so the jury is still out. But this is likely to become an issue. Digital platform, digital bugger, I think it's just taking off. We just recently upgraded the paper that we're doing for the OECD. And it's just amazing how many apps are being added now for these digital assistants. You just looking at the ads now you've seen on TV, you go to your home improvement centers. So I would say in the next five or six years, they'll be interesting to see if one of the four super platforms is gonna become our primary butler. And one impact that that will likely have. I mean you're already starting to have that with the fake news, is that a antitrust problem? I guess what I'm wondering, maybe suggesting is whether there's any utility to thinking out even farther in the future, like 50 years with speculative design fictions about what may emerge so that we can start, because things are moving so quickly so that we can start putting in place sort of laws or policies now in anticipation of that future and whether that something at work covers. Yeah, I'm just such a person with cat dependencies that I just wonder that there can be so many different routes. I think one thing is, I can't project what's gonna happen in 50 years, but I think one thing is, you wanna keep the competitive portals open so you can allow innovations that can promote your interests. And doing so, that's the best insurance policy for like 10, 15 years. All right, I'll go. This is maybe not to the core of the presentation and thanks so much, it's really interesting. But in your work with the two of these books, have you worked at all together or talked a lot with the industry, so the major platforms and what have they been saying about your work? And second, just kind of anecdotal, after doing all of this, have you changed your own personal behavior in any way in terms of how you, what you purchase on Amazon and whatnot? We're the worst with Amazon because we're both, Arla and I are both prime users. I was with my mother, she needed to get a battery for her garage. And I could have looked, in any of the stores in the neighborhood, if I said, let me just go on Amazon. I found exactly the battery, had it sent to her and the like. And we're Amazon prime members as well. I think the one thing is that, yes, I've been much more sensitive to my privacy. Like one of the things that really earth me is when Uber changed its privacy notifications so that they can continue to track you even when they don't use your, you're not using the app. And I thought that was just Uber's. Why do they need to track me when I'm not using it? So I turned that off. So that's always problematic because I don't want to use it or have to go turn on my location. The response from the industry, it's interesting. It's mixed. You have some, particularly when we go to the frenemy scenario, is that here people like Uber are starting to get concerned because when I spoke with the folks at Uber, they were concerned about the taxing conditions, right? They said, those are the problem. They're keeping us out of the market. And I said, well, what about Google? And they said, no, Google is an investor in our company.  But now you can see is like Google controlling the super platform, controlling the phone. It has the mapping technology on which Uber is provided. And it's also now going into driverless cars. So you can then see how a frenemy relationship might arise. And I think now what you've seen out over in the last year or two years is they've hired a lot of professors from Carnegie Mellon to step up their driverless cars. They're also investing in mapping technology. So one of the things that we're hearing, our concerns, are the ones that are reliant on this platform. And they're coming to us and saying, these are weird dependent. They control our oxygen supply. Google, it's an evolving debate. We go to conferences and we present our book. I think now they're starting to, they're starting to move the game post. They're no longer necessarily wedded to the 10 myths. Now they're raising questions about, well, what are, one of the things as well, privacy can be a non-priced component of competition, but that's going to be rare in the life. So, I mean, but the other thing is that we're not anti-Google as well. Google does a lot of wonderful things in terms of internet connection with its fiber, the technologies that they provide. But the issue is that, you know, I remember I asked, this was way back when I asked Hal Varian, he's their chief economist. And antitrust used to be a mechanism that would protect both the strong and the weak. And the strong realized that if things ever changed, they would have the protection from the antitrust laws as well. And so there was this belief that these were the rules rolled bound by these rules in the life. And I asked, I said, it doesn't matter if I was Google, I mean, because now if you're going into other markets there might be anti-competitive factors weighing against you. And I don't know. I mean, I'm hoping that like Microsoft sort of changed its tune after the DOJ. That possibility might happen with them as well. Because there's no reason that, you know, we, they're not really the villain here because they are producing great technologies. But it's not necessarily always our interests that are in their primary. Thank you very much for this wonderful talk. I wanted to ask a question about the normative premise informing your reasoning, which is we should protect competition. I guess my question is, why do you think we should do that? Because setting the democratic question aside, I think there are two reasons we would go for that. It's either efficiency and well-being, at least the more efficient economy and more benefit for big ones and small ones, for consumers and companies. Or it's the ontological reasoning in which things like freedom, choice, autonomy are intrinsically valuable. And so the second half of 20th century, the Soviet America competition has shown that good competition, proper functioning market, somehow reaches both goals. But if you think more into the future, like this happened last 10 years and you already mentioned cyberbattler, which is in for like automatizing our consumer choices. But we can also think one, two, three decades ahead where also what we do, our professional life will be automatized. With all this data, when we know who is good at doing what, who is where, what are the societal needs, we can imagine that we are getting to a world in which central planning will be possible. And so it is possible that at some point we'll face a choice between more efficient economy where we have no freedom or a world in which we still have choice and autonomy, but this will lead to a less efficient outcome. I'm wondering what you think about that. No, it's a great question. And so we went back to Hayek on this one, right? And we actually have a chapter on this because we were thinking about this. Uber doesn't own the cars, doesn't employ as it claims the drivers, right? And yet it can determine the market clearing price for its services. And one of the problems at Hayek says is the dissemination of information, that the market serves the function of accruing that information in the price and that leads then to efficiency, right? That there's no central planner because the central planner will never be able to identify all the relevant information in the marketplace and effectively determine what the right price will be for the right price. And one of the things that we're thinking about is, well, if Uber can set the price for cars, well, why can't the government do those through smart regulation? Can we develop algorithms that can take all the market data and determine the market clearing price? Now, there are problems with that because you have capture issues, capture and move up. But one of the things that you're starting to see is that municipalities are now doing that as well, that we're metering in San Francisco. They have sensors. They can see where the cars are being parked, where they're not being parked and they can price differently when there's no excess supply, they can lower than the price as a result. So I think one component is that there may be an opening for smart regulation. The other component is, what does it mean, what does competition mean in this future market? And I don't think necessarily it's going to mean efficiency because I think in any democracy, you have a certain amount of inefficiency. So there are these trade-offs and the economists may not necessarily know how we're going to then make these trade-offs. So one trade-off here is that by engaging in this behavior, they can lower the search costs for advertisers to contact you. That could lower the cost of advertisers, that could yield efficiencies. But on the other hand, you have the privacy concerns of consumers being tracked. And how do you then, and I think those are going to be invariably policy issues. That it's not going to be one that we can necessarily measure what are the costs and what are the benefits. But ultimately, what do we want and how do we decentralize economic power to prevent some of these issues? We have time for one more question. All right. Thanks so much for your talk. I have a question about price discrimination. You mentioned that, over here. Hi. That it can be either good or bad. And I was wondering if you could tell a bit more about that assessment because I imagine that. So on the whole, it produces, it increases total output, but it does lead to the seller capturing more of like the consumer surplus. But on the other hand, there's also perhaps a kind of a redistributive element to it to the extent that most likely the people with the most money are going to be paying the most, right? And then how does that also tie in, as you mentioned, to like the public perception of these practices? Because you say that people think it's unfair, you know, should we? And when does that change? How do we assess that? Right. I mean, so I'm a parent. I have a daughter now who's a freshman in college. And I'm a victim of perfect price discrimination because they know exactly how much we're willing to pay, right? And I'm okay with it. And I think the reason is that most of us are okay with it is because it yields a greater goal. First off, in that setting, price discrimination creates opportunities for people who otherwise could not purchase the product. And then secondly, even for the people that pay more, they benefit because the educational environment is enriched, right? It would be very different to be here at Harvard where you only have people that can afford to pay the full price or even above the full price. So you're benefiting as a result of this educational or enrichment societies benefiting as well. Now, if we take that, so there are these greater social goals that come from and the quality of the product itself is enhanced by the price discrimination. But with the behavioral discrimination that we identify, first, the quality of the product may not be improved. Second, it's inducing you to buy things that ordinarily you might not have purchased. And so that can be in some ways wasteful, finding ways to get you to smoke, right? And then the third thing is that not necessarily the rich are gonna be soaked and the poor are gonna pay less. It could have the opposite. And what we found from some of the online behavioral discrimination is that the poor who don't have an outside option are charged actually a higher price, like the office depot of the stables and the like. When you live in a poorer neighborhood, you pay a higher price than if you live in a wealthier near home. And then the other thing to take into account is what are the costs in order to implement the price discrimination?  And once you factor into those costs, you can have great ways of doing so. So we're not necessarily condemning price discrimination overall, but we are showing that with behavioral discrimination, it could be distinguishable from online discrimination. Thank you so much, Professor Secki. It was a great work. Thank you.


Today we're going to be talking about responsive content. It's a conversation of any time, just interrupt and ask a question. I'm a front-end developer. I've been thinking a lot about staying away from that speaker while I have a microphone in my hand, and thinking about responsive design from the front-end. But there's some really big implications for the back-end as well. I know the theme system really well. At DrupalCon, San Francisco, I gave a conversation, a core conversation about the render API and how complex it is. And what are we really doing here? And it was a bit hand-wavy, because I didn't actually know what was problem was. But today we're going to be talking about mobile. It's going to tie into WhissyWig, render API, design pattern, semantic, I think maybe I've listed everything that actually Drupal does. But that's a fantastic slide. Oh, right, okay. So what are some awesome things that you love? Chocolate and peanut butter, peanut butter cups. I love them together. They're fantastic. Ponies and unicorns, pony corns. Who doesn't love pony corns? The same thing is true about responsive layouts and responsive content, right? They really go together quite well. And Drupal's layout system makes it really easy to do responsive layouts, right? So you've got different regions on your TPL. All you need to do is apply some CSS basically, right? And you can have your regions sort of rearrange themselves. I think a lot of you are actually back-end developers. Is there anybody who's not familiar with this front-end concept of responsive web design? Because I could show another slide that shows what responsive web design means. Or did everybody- I don't know the term. You don't know responsive web design, okay. Right, so let me actually show you a slide that I gave at 1045 and make it really obvious what's going on, what I mean by responsive design. So this is a responsive website, Hicks Design. And as the size of your browser changes and like different devices, obviously have their own intrinsic width, you can see that the layout changes depending on what the width of your devices or what the width of your window is on your desktop. And this is a single source. There's no JavaScript. It's just HTML, CSS3 media queries, and some extra sort of CSS stuff. And here we're going to zoom out again. You see this is a mobile design, which is just a single column. And then as things are wider in your device, different things rearrange. So they fit into the context of your device. This is what responsive design is all about. And Drupal is great about this. You can do this right now without any problems, without any changes to the back-end of Drupal, which is fantastic. That's what I talked about at 1045. And let's go back to the other slides now. So I have pony corn. It's okay. There we go. Oh, that's too far. That's too much back. Yeah, okay. So another thing that's possible, and front-end developers are figuring this out, and again, we don't need back-end changes for this, because we don't have a node that has a whole bunch of fields on it. For example, you can create responsive panel layouts. So basically, you have a single source HTML inside panels. And you can add fields into this pane, and the other fields into this pane, and have the actual content be responsive in the same way that block regions in your page TPL can be responsive. So this is something that we actually just did at Palantir.net. Last week, and we haven't quite launched a site, it's probably going to be launched this week. And it's using responsive panel layouts to do content. And this works great with fielded nodes. Really, really great. The problem is, and I'm sorry I'm whispering. I totally killed my voice in my first session. But the problem is that there's a lot of sites that use the basic page content type. And the reason why they do this is because they have pages that they're not repeatable. It's not like you have another page which has the exact same structure. So you can't use fields, because if you created a content type just for that page, you would never use it. You'd have like one node, and you could do that. Some people do that for a home page. Adding fields to a single node or a single entity. Right. Sure, yeah. That might be a good solution. I don't know. But right now, basically the basic page content type is a single, it's a single big text field, right? That's the body field. And we always stick WYSIWYG editors on there and maybe you have insert module or media module or whatever so you're just dumping stuff in there and it ends up being hard-coded HTML inside your content, right? And so how do you... You can basically add some hard-coded HTML to do very specific responsive designs if you want to, but it feels like Drupal should have a way to make it easier rather than hard-coding HTML. What happens when you redesign the site, right? So we have to redesign all of these pages. Kind of stinks, right? So one idea that I had was... How many slides have we got here? I totally skipped a slide here. How did I do that? Let's bring it back to render API. So I really... I'm both frustrated by render API and I love it, right? Because Drupal 7 is super powerful. I can do crazy things because I'm probably one of the few people who knows that the whole system inside it out, right? Which is great for me. Not so great for everybody else, but... But render API is kind of like moonwalking in that it's very cool, you know, it helps you get dates and it's a really powerful dance move. But I can never tell whether or not render API itself is it propelling Drupal in the right direction? Are we actually going in the right direction? We're just sort of tweaked the wrong way so we're not actually looking where we're going. Or are we facing where we should be going and headed the opposite direction, right? So at San Francisco, I sort of just talked about the complexity of the system and the difficulty in making it work. And the thing is that the reason why we have render API in Drupal 7 is because we are lazy programmers, which is a virtue, right? We're lazy programmers. We needed a way to add more power to the Drupal 7 theme system.  So why not reuse that code and sort of expand it and make it render API? And that's how we got Drupal 7, really. But that's because we were being lazy and just re-using code. But we didn't actually have any design goals of what are we trying to do with the system. And I think the end result really shows those lack of design goals. And when I started talking about responsive design, to bring this all back, I started to realize what my actual issues were with render API, which is that there's no design goals. What I sort of imagined is, wouldn't it be great if we had a wissy wig editor for this text area for our basic page, and you got to select design patterns. I need this images and then a description next to it. I need that pattern where it has three of those images and text and then maybe the image and the text sort of rotating back and forth. So you select that design pattern, stick it into the spot there, and then fill out the content. The design pattern itself is responsive. So that as you're going to different devices, it knows you can respond in an usual way. But the thing is that, that still gets us towards hard-coded HTML. And the thing is that we should be able to get the data out of that design pattern without necessarily forcing all of that HTML down of that design pattern for mobile apps that just need the data. Do we have to throw the entire HTML stuff down at the mobile apps in order just for them to sort of glean this information like the DrupalCon app just gets data? So how do we get this information? And the DrupalCon apps are great because they're working on field of nodes. There are no basic pages from the DrupalCon site that are in the mobile app, or maybe just a couple. But those have been sort of added very specifically. So if we could have some way for... How do I make the actual DrupalCon the content responsive? Let the theme system convert the semantic content. Understand the underlying idea of what is the content that I'm sticking into this basic page and convert it into a render marker for whatever I happen to need. If I need it for a website, it's fine. If I need it for a mobile app, it's fine. Any kind of device that we need... I know that Greg Dunlop who's not here right now, or at least he wasn't here, is working on this problem of Drupal needing to output all these different kinds of content and not just HTML. And our content from the basic page should be able to do that too. I'm just throwing out ideas here. I want to have a conversation and have people throw this stuff around. Is HTML5 to have enough semanticness inside it that it could be used as a sort of a general container and converter of understanding the semantic nature of our page to be able to convert it into these different formats? Do we need to have microdata, microformats, RDFA, whatever? I don't know. But Drupal needs to understand the semantics of what's inside what is essentially the giant text field that we ignore right now. JSON is a loose semantic structure. I don't know. This was something that was recently thrown out for the formatting of the... Yeah, the one with XML instead of JSON. But again, I'm just throwing out ideas right here. Please God, not at XSLT. This... I mean, that's what XSLT is basically for, but I just feel like this... It's never worked very well before. Maybe we can figure out how to make it work again, but anyway, that's my comment. And then Element Info API. Right now, in Drupal 7, there's an Element Info API that talks about different things, right? So in the render API, you specify that this is a list, right? And there's a whole API that specifies when you see that this is a list, you render it this way, right? And the thing is that right now, the Element Info API is very hard-coded to... I mean, it's flexible, but it's hard-coded to HTML output, right? And it's not thinking about things in a semantic way at all. It's just like, we've got lists, and I don't know what this means. We have an HTML tag Element Info right now. I understand the need for it, but it's not semantic at all, right? That's the end of my slideshow, apparently. I have no more slides. So this is when I wanted to get started talking about it, and I don't have good answers. I just have a whole bunch of questions. So have I, like, blown your mind or are you bored? So the thing is that if Drupal doesn't understand... Oh, yeah, sorry. So the question is he didn't understand what responsive... Right. He didn't understand how responsive tied in with semantic, exactly. And the thing is that responsive design is basically just a layout technique, right? There's nothing in it that's inherently about semantics. You're right. But the thing is that if we understand the semantics of our actual content in ways that we don't right now, except, like I said, for field of nodes, we're in good shape. We can add some sort of thin semantic layer on top of that and be racking and rolling. Basic page, we don't know anything about it. It's just a big blob that we ignore. We understood the semantics of it. We could transform it in responsive ways, not at CSS ways, but at the code level, back-end level, so we can transform it into these different things that we can't do right now. Right now it's just a big blob of HTML. Right. Let's see if I have... So you basically didn't understand how a content could be responsive or... How necessary is it to have the actual content be responsive? Basically, the more complex the content type is, the more necessary it is for it to be responsive, right? And then it's because you just... A lot of times when you have these complex content types, you're already doing fun things in the node TPL or whatever and moving different fields around and stuff into different wrappers, right? So you're starting the process of making nodes sort of responsive and that's only possible by hard coding the HTML for basic page content types. We can do it with the fields and things, but so it really is... Palantir.net, we were working on our own site to make it responsive and it's almost all content that's being made responsive rather than just like blocks and regions, right? So designers are absolutely going to need this and the thing is that I think that we'll need this same idea for outputting to different things besides HTML. Sorry? Context, yeah. Definitely. Drupal 8, so we're working on adding a context system into Drupal 8. That's absolutely required for this, right? Yes. Mark, Larry. I'm going to repeat the question for the video. So the idea is there's usability issue with when we were abstracting sort of the wissy wick basically, right? So instead of just like making things bold or italics or shifting off to the left or right, we have to think about, you know, semanticness about this. And the thing is that inside these, you know, responsive design patterns you can have semantics embedded in them and say that you need to, you know, or have a configuration maybe for... So you can say that these are the semantics of the content that you're going to be putting into this design pattern. And yes, there's going to be usability problems because you're going to make it more complex, but you're also going to make it easier if you have a good enough design pattern library, you're going to make it easier for them to actually create pages because they're not having to do all of it by hand, right? Because like basically when you have like complex HTML that you want to stick into the basic page, you turn off the wissy wick editor and you start typing your HTML, right? So how's it... Only in that I think that we should store the semantic knowledge of the content alongside any HTML that we're adding, right? So that we can understand at the same time, this is the semantics of it and this is the HTML that's sort of on top maybe. And when you're editing, you're editing sort of both layers at the same time, right? But it's seamless from the user. They're not editing sort of both layers, but Drupal understands both the semantic understanding and the actual HTML. Actually, it doesn't understand the HTML very much, but it would understand the semantics a lot better in the front there. What time is that session? Oh, okay. So there's another session right after this. You're watching the video. Watch the one that comes after. What's the name of the session? Did it help? Dita. Okay. So look for the video on Dita because it has some related information. Excellent. So the suggestion is that you use the documentation Dita semantics and sort of leverage that inside the responsive context. Lynn. So Lynn Clark was seconding what Larry said about adding complexity and there's an actual example of a media, semantic media wiki where they're actually doing something very similar to this and it adds just enough of burden that people don't adopt it. And the thing is that wissy wigs in general have that same burden though, right? Because as soon as you want to do anything reasonably complex, you turn off the wissy wick and then you write it by hand. So I... We do, but not everybody does. Well, yeah, okay. Right, right. Oh, yeah. And it's not an easy problem. But I don't think we should build like a system our own. I'm definitely, you know, investigate stuff and figure out what problems and avoid the problems or maybe improve or want to make them better. I don't know. I just want to start the conversation. So, yeah. Yeah. So the question was does it tie into this other idea of making fields so that you could like maybe just apply some fields to some nodes as an alternative to what we can currently do. Yeah, so the thing is that the basic page is not that it's... We're treating it as unstructured data because we're ignoring it basically. It's just a big blob, right? But it actually has structure, right? And I want us to be able to understand its structure. So, yeah. It absolutely ties into that, I think. If we could have like, you know, if we're adding fields into this blob, right? We should be able to track that, that it is this type of field, right? We don't want to just lose it as rendered HTML because the insert module I quite like, but that's basically the way it works right now is you insert an image field into the body type and as soon as you do that, it's lost. I mean, it's just rendered HTML and it never knows that it's a field again. Yeah, so there are two things here when you understand the semantics, right? So it allows a lot of different backend things that are not possible. And then, of course, the theme, the presentation layer, right, has to understand that as well. And the thing is that it's going to get some... From the backend, it's going to get some rendered HTML. Maybe it'll get different HTML depending on what kind of mobile device it is or whatever, but it still has to understand that. But it understands it in a normal way that it's always understood it. It's HTML, I'm adding some CSS. You know, we've got field wrappers right now. This is very similar to things right now, right? I talked about that, so the problem with responsive design that I absolutely agree with is that when you have these flexible columns, and the flexible images, what you're actually doing is actually downloading a big image and then rescaling it to be small. This is not particularly performant to put it nicely. Well, right, but some browsers do a much better job of resizing surprise, i.e., you know, older versions of IE don't... Actually, no, wait, it's not even old versions of IE. It's tied to older versions of Windows do crap jobs of resizing images.  Right, and we're trying to figure out on the front end with some, you know, contrib modules, how do we do this so we're not hitting this double whammy of downloading an image that's too big and then also causing the mobile device to have to resize it. That's two hits against performance. We would like to avoid that, but we're trying to figure that out. That's related, but not really the same thing. Yeah. It's an issue of your problem. Actually, we're going to have a bof that will talk about this, I'm sure, because it's a big issue. At like 3.45, I think, that's going to be talking about responsive design in general. It's... I would love to talk for another like hour and a half, but it's 1.30, so I got to let end this. Thank you very much. I would love to talk more about this as anybody wants to talk more about just find me and we'll talk and... Yeah, thank you.


So if you want to hang out you're gonna be live you need to leave Seriously by who Who invited you to this event We're happy to talk with you tomorrow under the terms we're tech we're gonna send you Until then you need to leave Yeah I'm gonna send them to you in writing. So we have an email and text Okay It's okay We're trying to be professional keep everything really cool. All right. This is George Bruno chatting with Nelly bulls from the New York Times George Bruno is the Sultan of silver. He is a professional beard and hair trimmer He's also a professional pipe smoker George Bruno to save the day exactly So long story short rich you want to tell the story or do we not need to be shouting? Yeah, we're still live right still live 205 got 47 live viewers. This is Anthony dream Johnson and the squad check it in George Bruno, man with a pipe. I'll show you how to smoke Closer I need to ditch my gear. Oh What about our people can you keep us off camera?


Hi, everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with another five box break of 2022 Bowman Draft baseball sapphire edition This is random team three Halfcase from a fresh case all teams are in all card ship and there's an early bird special if you're one of the first 16 spots purchased We're gonna take your names. We're gonna give away an extra spot So let's see who the early bird is gonna be let's roll it randomize it five into six eleven times I guess you're all early birds who's gonna catch the worm Top name after eleven two three four Five six seven eight nine ten And eleven in final time Congrats to Justin Weber After eleven you are the early bird That catches the worm So little buy one get one for you now Let's assign you a team Let's get all the names in here. Let's get a team list going So second dice roll let's roll it randomize it snake eyes two times one and two Mark down to daniel snake eyes for the teams one And two easy White socks down to the red socks All right mark with the white socks tristan diamondbacks raise mark with the twins daniel guardians mariners Justin with your early bird spot astros and your regular spot blue jays tristan angels and orials daniel royals and dodgers Tristan with the reds jesse with the rangers tristan with the tigers Mark with the giants daniel with the nationals jesse with the a's jessen with the marlins alex with the uh Alex the pirates tristan metz cubs devon yankees carlos padres daniel rockies jessen cardinals daniel braves brian with the fillies mark with the brewers and daniel has the boston red socks All right, we're going to pause the video for a little trade window I'm going to go run and grab the case when we come back We'll see if there's any trades and then we'll have the break stick around. We'll see you on the other side All right. Welcome back No deals were done. So Let's get this five box break going. He's a smart alex. There you go ricks kind of smart alex Second half in the store right now jaskies case breaks.com. This is going to sell out fast So I would get your early bird teams now or your early bird spots now before someone else does And you know someone else is going to So this this bowman draft sapphire went fast So I appreciate everybody getting into I think personal breaks multiple cases Are gone already even before jason went on went live So this has been hot. I'm not sure if we're going to be able to get any more But just keep an eye on the website to see if it pops back up again All right, we'll go one two three for the back five and then four five six for this five right over here Two We'll do that five and this side we will put Next to me over here And we'll save those for next time because I'm sure that's going to sell out very quickly And that's it those five boxes, that's it until we got hope we get more Obviously sapphire editions Parallel hunting that's the big hunt here Is this exclusive set they don't print too many of these it's an online exclusive so This gets to be very very popular. Oh, is that some red down there? What is that? Reds out of five maybe here's matt mclean for the reds Tristan That's to 50 the kumar rockers for jessie and the rangers Ah travis kelsey is hosting us now. Has he ever done it? All right sitting behind jason demingas Is a two out of five henry davis nice former number one overall pick Henry davis pirates alex donnelly got randomized the pirates Yep, 2021 first overall Two out of five. That's really strong alex All aboard the big hit express Very nice another box I do not listen to the kelsey podcast What what give me some highlights? What was their insight? What was some insight in their post super bowl show? Anthony Gutierrez and zack nito 52 out of 99. Yeah, believe it or not snl still on air brian Tristan with the angels and orange alexa sarnandez 24 out of 25 Tristan with the cubbies Probably too soon. I wonder If they would have had one of the eagles hosted if they had one, I would think so it sounds like that was planned Probably jason kelsey probably they're they're uh their entertainment agent just working overtime booking booking the kelsies for snl And uh, give some more exposure to that podcast of theirs get that sweet sweet podcast money Surprised they didn't get kelson on my homes. Yeah, I mean, I don't know maybe they offered it to my homes and he didn't he declined but I feel like I feel like the kelsies are more Are better at that sort of stuff. Anyway, there's zack vene 11 out of 50 That's for the rock. He's gonna go to dilo daniel Yeah, there is that persistent rumor that uh, lauren michaels Here's jacob miss iriski Miss sorry oski Butchered that 11 out of 99 for the brewers. Yeah, who will take her for lauren michaels? Maybe they should just stop the show And a nice alexa green Going to daniel and the gnats Ah, they complained about it. Yeah, jason jaspy was talking about the field too. There's a lot of people slipping around both sides Yeah, I don't think as players or it wasn't I don't know. I feel like fans will make more more a bigger bigger deal about that, right? Can you still get fined if if on your own podcast A non nfl sponsored podcast. Could you criticize the refs and? Knock it fine I think both tina fey conan o' brian's horizon is show correct tina fey in fact was a head writer on that show She was there for a long time um I don't think I mean, I don't know anything right. I don't know these people, but I have a feeling tina fey probably won't do it mostly because I feel like she has other creative things she wants to do and not be Locked into the grind of saturday and live week to week conan o' brian I don't think he wants to do it either. He doesn't have an hbo or showtime show coming up. I think he's gonna be focusing on that I don't know who steve higgins is And uh kenan thompson. I think I feel like kenan thompson's other things he wants to do than be I mean basically it's You know basically like it's an executive role like Those guys are like creatives, right? All right. Hey, see you Michael. How's it going? Thank you. Um, yeah, I'll uh, do I have your number? I'll get your number from someone and then Yeah, there you go. Thank you All right behind the yasin moro bell Is yerland confidants 47 out of 99 Skeafings is currently the sidekick of the jimmy fount of jimmy fount on the tight show What are his qualifications to to run snl? Yeah, it's like I feel like people want a creative to do that job But you're asking a creative to to be an administrator and I feel like that's I don't think that really works. It'll probably be someone that We don't even know There's dylan ray And there's drew gilbert four out of 20 Justin with the astros Like it'll probably be like a a senior writer that probably You know Has never even been in front of the camera I feel like it would be someone like that. I'd be surprised if like a big name took that Although I could see I could see them doing like a Almost like a guest producer Right if they want to get creative with it you know, so like you could have You could have tina fe do one season you know as a as the executive producer and then she'll curate the season of the show and cast the season of the show in the way that You know and book guests for the season in the way that she sees Fit right and then you have seth myers do it for a season then you have you know This conan's working on other stuff, but Have the steve higgins guy do it for a season They could rotate have keen and do it for a season Do something like that So they're kind of like the they're editing the entire season You know, so look green like the sketches. They'll Get specific guests on I think that could be interesting And in that way that's where I could see You know, some of the more creative like sort of on Front of the camera personalities want to do that for just like a limited period of time There's mason win And jason morbell 45 out of 99 rangers jesse with the rangers Right. Yeah, I have like john mulaney do it for a season But like I can't see him being like, oh, i'm going to do this executive role for a long period of time But if you tell him, hey, it's just a short period of time. That might be interesting There's uh, mikey romero 30 out of 50 for the red sox dilo All right, jason kill. Oh just says That's what I figure. I feel like it's something that fans like to complain about more than players I think ref calls and uh, tamar johnson Coloss and firman at the end tamar johnson going to alex and the pirates there you go ladies and gentlemen Random team three in the books ram team four in the store right now jesse's case rakes.com I'm joe. I'll see you next time for the next sapphire break. Bye. Bye


Hello everyone, I am Aasthavish and I am a computer science undergraduate student from Deradunetia. For the past six months, I have been working on building a declarative specification for workloads under the Hyperlogic Caliper project. Attila has been the mentor during the past six months for this project and he has been an amazing guide. Coming to the more detailed parts, so a bit of an introduction about Hyperlogic Caliper. It is a framework for benchmarking blockchain systems. When Hyperlogic Caliper is run over a blockchain system, the system is subjected to a large number of transactions and towards the end, a report is generated with all the relevant benchmarking parameters. Now for these transactions, each of them is created or say initialized by a workload module. This project focuses on simplifying the implementation of those workload modules for the people who are using Caliper. So currently, the workload modules have to be written in JavaScript and there are a lot of things to take care of during that. So this project focuses on building out a more declarative specification for workload modules and trying to convert it into more of a low code solution. Coming to how a declarative specification differs from one written encode. So this is how a part of the workload module looks when it is written in JavaScript. All the relevant parameters here are initialized. Then there's a contract function that's also declared and all of these, all of this information is sent through to the system under test. And this is only a small fraction of what the workload module looks like. There are also other parameters like Caliper's own internal parameters and then there are also things that the user defines that have to be either modified or passed into the transaction. So this can get a little bit more detailed. So in order to make it simpler, a declarative specification was our idea of implementing the solution. Here there are on the lower level parameters that go into a transaction. There are also functions associated with those parameters and contracts that maybe present in the system that is being tested under Caliper. So this cuts down the implementation to just specifying what is required rather than handling everything else as well. Coming to project objectives. So the first objective was to build the YAML schema that has to be implemented. And this was done just to give an idea of how things would flow inside the project. Based on that, a modular implementation for how parameters would go was created. The third objective is to integrating and testing how the values defined using YAML schema and implemented using the modular classes would work out in Caliper's environment. The fourth objective is to migrating existing workloads or say existing tests that are proven to work within Caliper's environment to this new schema. And the fifth is to provide user documentation and developer-level documentation for people who intend to use Caliper's declarative schema. Coming to project deliverables, they are more of a breakdown of the already state objectives. So first was again building out the schema, then building out the value providers. So these are associated with the likely parameters or the kind of parameters that might be sent through to a transaction. The third deliverable was testing out these value providers thoroughly because there might be a lot of edge cases in declarative schema like, for example, the minimum range of random number provided might be greater than the maximum range provided. The fourth deliverable is integrating the schema through higher-level classes. So since these are just the value providers and the parameters that might be used, there are also functions and contracts to look after. The fifth deliverable is migrating existing workload to the schema. Again, the tests that have been proven to work with Caliper have to be written in terms of the schema. And the sixth is creating documentation coming to project execution. So it started out the project by looking into other tools that were doing similar things. So these consisted of blockchain benchmarking tools and also load testing frameworks. So most of them were either using scripts to declare the parameters which are similar to port or they were just using very minimalistic configurations like passing in a CSV file, the user defined parameters that might be there. So it was mostly code-based configurations in that area. So what we were trying to do here kind of ended up being different form what was already done. The second was creating a YAML schema. The third was building out classes and testing how values are linked within that YAML schema and how the edge cases were being handled. The fourth deliverable is something I'm still working on and it's integrating the schema through function and contract classes. I also intend to work on system six deliverables which is testing it through something that has already worked out and writing user and developer documentation. I expect to complete these by the end of November. Coming to recommendations for future works there can be more complex value providers under Caliper like weighted Boolean values or randomly generated string. The value providers right now are relatively simpler. I hope there can be more complex ones so that it's easier to define values. Coming to the second point the current schema is more platform oriented. So started out with taking the difference of a fabric integration test in order to build out the initial schema and it doesn't take into account how say the same system might work for Ethereum. So this is something that is worth looking into and the third point is scheduling of contracts and functions like round robin instead of just randomly picking them out. So these are the recommendations. Coming to the outputs these are all links associated with the project. The initial project proposal the project plan that was written after I got accepted into the mentorship. This is the declarative workflow directory that consists of the results of value providers that were written and the final is the bullet points that were put in during the mentorship program. Coming to insights I learned a lot during this project and one of them was one of those things was that the solution could not come out to be perfect on the first try and things have to be improved iteratively. Also I learned a lot about good coding practices in code documentation, a little bit of GitHub magic and considering a lot of edge cases while writing your board and testing it out again and figuring out where things can go wrong and it's a lot of thinking outside the box. So and if I had to give an advice for other mentees or someone new to open source it would be to communicate a lot and also plan out things a lot and that was all from my side I am now open to any questions. Thank you. I do see your mentor Athila, clinic on Zoom. Do you have any comments? Yes I would just like to add that Asta performed a lot of complex tasks and a lot of challenges during this mentorship. I mean she performed surveys of other tools and essentially designed domain-specific language for workloads and from that she created modular sub-framework inside of CaliPer. So I think it was really challenging and it was a lot of work for her but she did it admirably and I would just like to say congratulations. Great. Thank you. I'm glad to see that Asta persisted and even though the project was fairly challenging and big scopes and it sounded like she learned a lot and there's still one or two items to be worked on during the remaining months and I hope that Asta you will stay involved in the hyperledger community. We'll hope to see your contributions again in the near future. Yes I plan to stay involved. Thank you so much. I may not like to echo that. Asta is fantastic to see this work and we look forward to further contributions from you and thank you Athila for mentoring Asta as well. This is fantastic work.