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Your Operations Solved

Your Operations Solved

Written by: Channing Norton
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 We cover tech news and tell you how it affects your small business, cover specific challenges your organization may face in terms of efficiency and expansion, and talk about how we can overcome those challenges and continuously improve your bottom line. We release our 10-15 minute episodes Wednesday, and Friday, at 9:30 AM Eastern Time, and our 30 minute monthly bonus shows at 2:30 PM Eastern Time on the second Saturday of the month.PC Solutions Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • AI Ethics, and common sources of technical debt

    AI Ethics, and common sources of technical debt
    Jun 2 2021
    Hello and welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the 24th episode of our show,Listen to us Wednesday and Friday mornings at 9:30 Eastern, or on our bonus shows released on the 2nd Saturday of each month, at 2:30 PM. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also enjoy it.If you have a problem in your business you want solved, email us at Solutions@youroperationssolved.com, we may just feature your business on our bonus show as we tackle it to help you and others.With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headlinesFirst, an update to an existing story.We've talked several times about Google's new targeted advertising technology FLoC, on this show, and the associated controversies in its potential to target ads in a predatory manner. In response to the backlash, Google has added a new setting to opt out of FLoC in the latest build of google chrome... if you're willing to dig for it in the obscure Chrome://flags page. Alternatively, one could use another browser, as both microsoft edge and Mozilla firefox block FLoC by default. Floc is currently in early stage trials affecting about .5% of browsers in selected regions.With that out of the way, let's talk about our main story, turkish killbots.Being that this is a technology show, I try to stay as FAR away from politics as possible. I, like anyone else, have my own political leanings, but, outside of specifically discussing policy affecting the tech space, I try to keep things out of the show. Even when politics does come up, I try to constrain my commentary in scope to how a change or event will affect my listeners in the small and medium business space. That being said, when I saw this story, it's egregiousness, and its potential to serve as a vector to talk about a topic that is often overlooked in the business space, I decided that this was a conversation I wanted to have with my listeners, even if it is a bit more controversial than I like to put in.The UN has confirmed, as of a recently released report, that, back in march of 2020, Turkey deployed a fully autonomous weapons system in Libya. When I say, fully autonomous weapons system, I mean an Unmanned drone, that, armed with artificial intelligence, made decisions entirely without human input or confirmation as to if a target should be fired upon. If a person should live or die. This is a literal autonomous killbot. This is thought to be the first time such a weapons system has seen combat in a fully autonomous mode. Certainly its the first recorded case. As someone who dabbles in AI in their spare time, and interacts with software made by much smarter programmers than I at all stages of the software lifecycle, this terrifies me. Fully automated AI systems shouldn't be trusted with a number of far less impactful or permanent decisions than to end or not end a human life; I wouldn't trust an AI judge to handle a case of a traffic ticket without human oversight, let alone the decision of if someone should be killed. This isn't just my opinion, talk to anyone in the AI or software engineering spaces what their thoughts are on trusting software to run highly critical applications, like voting, or indeed war, and the near universal consensus is that these systems are not ready for prime time. Via how they operate on a technical level, their decisions are near impossible to audit, even for the engineers who designed them, they, like any software, have bugs that no amount of testing will ever uncover, and that's in an ideal case where we assume the code is secure, everyone involved in developing it is highly capable, that management doesn't rush project delivery or force any decisions upon the engineering team that negatively affected the quality of code delivered, that the physical constraints of sensors and cameras, processing power, or other hardware didn't result in tradeoffs being made, and that all the hardware works perfectly all the time. Needless to say, I doubt a single engineering product in the history of software development has been free of a single one of these concerns, let alone all of them. It's no wonder that the UN tried to ban systems like this back in 2018, though both Russia and the US exercised their Security Council veto power, leaving such systems as fair game in war. Yikes.So, let's take the time we have left in our news segment to talk a little bit about AI ethics, why they are important for businesses, what biases in AI might look like, and how these systems make decisions. We will follow up on our friday episode with a larger conversation about AI, and the value it can bring to businesses.Modern AIs are constructed with software patterns designed to mimic the structure of neurons in the human brain. However, the scale at which they do so is much, MUCH smaller than that of the brain. ...
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    18 mins
  • Square's upcoming business banking, and technical debt's ugly head

    Square's upcoming business banking, and technical debt's ugly head
    May 26 2021
    Hello and welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Wednesday, May 26th, 2021I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the 23rd episode of our show,Listen to us Wednesday and Friday mornings at 9:30 Eastern, or on our bonus shows released on the 2nd Saturday of each month, at 2:30 PM. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also enjoy it.If you have a problem in your business you want solved, email us at Solutions@youroperationssolved.com, we may just feature your business on our bonus show as we tackle it to help you and others.With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headlinesFirst, an update to a prior story. We have discussed the increase in regulatory activity surrounding the tech industry worldwide on several occasions on our show. Such activity continues as, on Tuesday, the DC attorney general filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, complaining that Amazon's requirement that third party sellers not offer their products at a better price or better terms on any platform than what they offer on amazon's marketplace platform is anticompetitive and stifling. This case could have large implications both for amazon's Ecommerce dominance, and for other eccomerce players that are able to find major leverage in other niches, like game developer Valve's stranglehold on the online videogame market, which places similar constraints on developers wishing to be released on their platform "Steam." If successful, the case seeks to force amazon to change their policy and extract damages. This case could serve as important precedent to limit such pricing agreements from being standard cost of admission on many ecommerce platforms. I remember the days when you could always seemingly find a better source offering a slightly cheaper price on a product. A promo code here, a bundle deal there. The deal hunting and digital couponing world has simply collapsed over the past decade, and i'm sure many price savvy consumers, myself included, would like to see its' return. This move is also good for those businesses selling consumer goods over the internet, as it potentially threatens amazon's hold on that market. These days, businesses have to operate exclusively on amazon, or nearly so, eat amazon's fees as a cost of doing business, and be very careful not to do anything that could draw the Yellow Giant's wrath, at threat of losing their customer base. By being permitted to offer their products at better prices elsewhere, it gives small sellers the opportunity to build themselves a customer base independent of Amazon, allowing for more robust businesses, and potentially the opportunity for more innovation in products. This is good news for everyone. Except Amazon, of course.Now, onto our main story today, Payment processing giant Square appears to be preparing to launch a full fledged banking system for small and medium businesses reliant on the platform. While no official announcement has yet been made as of time of writing, data mining of their PoS terminal app shows that a recent update added references to this platform in the code. Adding code underpinning new features before they are released is extremely common in software development, and that appears to be what's going on here. According to what we can find, as best we can tell, these accounts will hook in with the existing Square debit card, and offer no fees for overdrafts or minimum account balances. This would appear to be a potentially VERY good option for retailers already relying on square's platform. We await an official announcement, and will of course keep you updated on whatever goings on happen with this developing story.With that done, let's talk about our business issues today, technical debt.Technical debt is a problem that plagues many businesses, and one that every business needs to be aware of. As any business leader knows, if you dedicate less time and resources to your technology, your business can still work. So, since technology is a cost, what's stopping us from operating on no budget, and just fixing critical problems when they come up? Well the answer here is technical debt. Much like issues anywhere else in business, it gets more expensive to fix problems the longer you let them go on. Imagine a car with a slight alignment problem. Getting your alignment adjusted at a car shop costs 300 dollars max. But if you let it go on for a thousand miles or so, all of a sudden, you're out a tire or two. Let it go on for 5 thousand, and all of a sudden you have some serious suspension issues, Let that go on, and all of a sudden, your suspension issues result in an accident you never would have had if your car handled more true. A 300 dollar fix just became a 3000 dollar fix with injuries. In the model of fixing things as they break rather than looking at matters proactively in your business IT, you run into the same issues. It ...
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    16 mins
  • Customer feedback - Learning from the fast food industry

    Customer feedback - Learning from the fast food industry
    May 21 2021
    Script 22Hello and welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Friday, May 21st , 2021I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the 22nd episode of our show,Listen to us Wednesday and Friday mornings at 9:30 Eastern, or on our bonus shows released on the 2nd Saturday of each month, at 2:30 PM. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also enjoy it.If you have a problem in your business you want solved, email us at Solutions@youroperationssolved.com, we may just feature your business on our bonus show as we tackle it to help you and others.With that out of the way, let's get started on today's headlinesFirst, an update to an existing story. We've talked a lot about the ongoing global semiconductor shortage on this show. Recent press releases by Cisco have given indication that, once again, the shortage is exceeding expectations, and not in a good way. Cisco confirms that, while they have successfully locked in their own supply and pricing, that capacity of their component manufacturers proves extremely limited. Cisco also cites an increase in demand as a factor worsening their existing issues. Cisco is seen as an important indicator in the computing market, as their hardware typically gets bought in advance of large business rollouts. As such Gartner has updated their predictions on the chip shortage, and now anticipate it stretching to the second quarter of 2022. Quite a few businesses are trying to buy early to get ahead of the anticipated further squeeze in prices. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the industry, AMD has announced a new line of computer processors that, uniquely, rather than focusing improvements on speed or power efficiency like any new release line in normal times, instead focuses on intercompatibility and ease of manufacture. They are betting that the higher yield rate that these chips may be able to offer them will be enough to get consumers to buy them for sake of being available. In short, AMD is betting that the shortage will last long enough for them to fully bring manufacturing of several new products on multi year cycles up to speed for manufacturing, with enough time left over to still make a profit over R&D costs. Regardless of how you look at it, the shortage is going to be going on for a bit.Now, onto our main story, GDPR Fines. This one is a bit more relevant for our European listeners, but any listeners in america or other regions that do any business or have any presence in an EU country are subject as well. For those not familiar, GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is a broad regulation covering how companies handle personally identifying information for consumers. Among other things, it requires that EU citizens be able to opt out of data collection activities, be notified of them, things like that. The law is too comprehensive to cover in detail here, though if there's interest, I can certainly break down the implications. One snag of GDPR compliance is that it applies to EU citizen data, even when they are not physically located in the EU, so, functionally, if your company does business in the EU, or serves EU customers, even simply via selling products on the internet and shipping them into the EU or delivering them digitally, you have to be GDPR compliant. In practice, of course, if you aren't subject to EU jurisdiction, then, well, there's not a whole lot they can do to you. Next Tuesday marks the third year anniversary of GDPR being enforceable, and we see that, unlike data protection laws in the US, it's far from a slap in the wrist for violators. Collectively, all 28 EU countries, plus the UK have handed out well over 330 Million Euros, or 415 Million US Dollars in fines that we are aware of (not all fines are listed in public databases), with the largest going to google, at 50 Million euro for failures to observe GDPR principles in the design of the Android Mobile operating system, and the smallest fine amusingly ALSO going to google, at $28 for failing to fulfill an individual's request for an inventory of google's collected personal information on themselves in an acceptable timeframe.Regulators have been unafraid to go after entities as small as individual people, and as large as Google in their enforcement efforts, So, what does this mean for your business? Well, if you're subject to GDPR and EU jurisdiction, compliance is key, as the fines for noncompliance are getting more and more frequent (incidentally, if you want to check out the fine listings, Privacyaffairs.com keeps a record of every GDPR fine ever issued that's listed publically), so it's a matter of when, not if, noncompliant companies get fined. Nor is it simply one regulatory body you have to keep track of; GDPR is enforced individually by every individual country subject to it. So, how do we get in compliance? Well, the only way to know that you are in compliance is a thorough ...
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    17 mins
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