Hey there Bizarro Community.

Is it really May already? My oh my, the time is flying by. In this edition of your favorite quirky tech newsletter, we’ve got the following headline stories for you:

• 🧑‍🚀🚀 Humanity Has Entered the 3rd Space Age

• 🕵️‍♂️🦹‍♂️ Professional Fraud Fighter Goes Undercover at a “Yahoo Boys School”

• 🤖🎶 The AI Music App That Actually Makes Good Music

Plus, we’ve got a cool new tool for WordPress users, a great (free) beginner’s course for aspiring front-end web developers, another code conundrum, and more.

Let’s get into it!

📰 From the Newsroom

🧑‍🚀🚀 Humanity Has Entered the 3rd Space Age

Last year, there were a record-breaking 211 successful space launches. The previous record was set the year before that, and the previous one to that one, the year before that. This upward trend is largely due to a shift that’s taken place in the 21st century. While in the 20th century space exploration was dominated by government funding - initially only by two nations, the U.S. and the Soviet Union - nowadays private companies have overtaken governments as the main drivers of innovation.

• Technological advancements, particularly in reusable rocket technology, have significantly reduced the cost of space travel, paving the way for unprecedented exploration beyond Earth's orbit.

• In the past few years, some space-related businesses have even started to generate a profit. Most of it has come from sending up communication satellites, especially broadband internet.

• Many estimates suggest the global space industry could generate revenues of more than one trillion USD within the next two decades. If that ends up being true and even a portion of it is spent on research and development (which I’m sure it will be), then we may all bear witness to some interesting developments.

Much like with all of the other technological advancements that are simultaneously happening, it’s going to be fascinating to see what will result from all this space exploration. I imagine it’s possible that children being born now may witness the first human colony outside of Earth being established somewhere. It might seem farfetched, but no more farfetched than video calls on mobile devices being a part of daily life when I was born.

🕵️‍♂️🦹‍♂️ Professional Fraud Fighter Goes Undercover at a “Yahoo Boys School”

Frank McKenna is a career fraud analyst and investigator with over 30 years of experience. He recently decided to do a little research into what goes on at “Yahoo Boy Universities.” These are essentially informal education camps, largely based in Nigeria, that teach “students” how to run scams using modern communication tools and social media. During the course of his research, he learned ten fascinating things about how they operate. Here are three that stood out:

• The ringleaders or “professors” of these groups target young people - often students - to join their ranks. They even offer small cash incentives to simply reach out to them to ask for more information about their training programs.

• The primary tool of choice that the Yahoo Boys have been relying on lately is deepfake video. After building up a rapport with target victims - who they refer to as “clients” - they shift their communication to video calls to solidify their victims trust. Except that the video calls are manipulated using face-swapping apps and similar tools to create the illusion that the victim is talking to the fabricated persona. This was also recently reported on in a separate article on WIRED.

• Besides their primary source of income of scamming people, Yahoo Boys also sell complete packages of stolen images, and deepfake audio and video that can be used to fool victims. It’s like a form of multi-level marketing within the online fraud world.

In the past, I’ve personally found these types of scamming attempts to be so poorly executed that I never understood how someone could fall for them. However, with all of the advancements in AI tech, they are becoming harder to detect. Poor grammar and spelling mistakes have been solved by ChatGPT and similar tools, and now even video calls and voice calls are being manipulated. Stay safe out there folks.

🤖🎶 The AI Music App That Actually Makes Good Music

I’ve tried a few different AI music generators over the last few months. While some were able to produce some decent-to-good instrumentals, I had yet to come across one that made genuinely good complete music, including vocals - until now. After trying Suno and being absolutely blown away at how good it is, I went and dug up the backstory behind it so I could feature it here.

• The app takes a token-based approach similar to language models like ChatGPT. However, audio data not only requires processing more data points per second compared to text, but also deals with the complexity of these data points being a continuous signal, rather than discrete tokens (as in text). In simple terms, the reason why it’s been so much harder to make an impressive AI music generator is that it’s way more complex than dealing with text.

• Luckily, the folks behind the project have a professional pedigree that’s up for the task. The team who created it is a blend of musicians and AI experts based in Cambridge, MA and its founding members previously worked at Meta, TikTok and Kensho.

• On the legal front, the company remains secretive about the specific data fueling their model, which notably includes human speech to enhance the realism of generated vocals.

As I mentioned, I tried using Suno, and just as the writer of the RollingStones article I linked to above found himself saying that the song he generated was “the most powerful and unsettling AI creation [he’s] encountered in any medium,” I too was blown away. Below is one of the songs I generated with Suno, using this simple prompt:

90's hip-hop with jazzy instrumental. The subject matter should be about front-end web development.

Listen now · 1:14

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• Last Thursday marked the 60th anniversary of BASIC, a programming language that started at Dartmouth College. BASIC played a pivotal role in democratizing computing and shaping the landscape of modern programming languages.

• You’ve likely heard of large language models (LLMs) - they’re the backbone of AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, but Microsoft has been quietly working on a series of small language models (SLMs) with some interesting applications. At the end of last month they released one of them: Phi-3-mini.

• Festo, a German company specializing in developing bionic flying objects, has unveiled an ultra-light, delicately designed fleet of robotic bees. Named BionicBee, they are part of the automation company’s Bionic Learning Network (BLN), which is known for developing products inspired by nature.

• Last month, more than half a million fast-food workers in California got a raise, with minimum wage bumped up to $20 per hour. That same week, the self-proclaimed “world’s first fully autonomous restaurant” opened its doors for business in Pasadena. This has turned California into ground zero for the battle between fast-food worker labor rights versus robotic automation.

• Scientists in the Netherlands launched a “Martian farm" to simulate growing conditions on the red planet. They then implemented a unique agricultural technique to boost yields of certain crops. In the future they hope to create a 100% self-sustainable system, using resources only available on Mars.

• Last year, Amazon launched a beta tool that let self-published authors generate AI "virtual voice" narrations of their ebooks. Since the launch, over 40,000 AI-narrated titles have flooded onto Audible, Amazon's audiobook platform.

• A biological event that last occurred in 1803 is about to happen again. It will only last a few weeks, but the ripple effects from it will be felt in America’s forests for years to come.

• 📽️🎞️ Is it possible to build a functioning WordPress plugin using ChatGPT? Matt Cromwell of StellarWP did just that. He breaks down his process in this video. He also shared a blog post that provides additional insight about his experience.

• If you use JavaScript in your work and you want to enhance your web applications, then you need to check out these ten best practices.

• AI has changed the internet in a lot of ways. Some good. Some bad. Here is an interesting roundup of 12 web developers sharing how they’ve integrated AI tools into their workflows. Check it out and drop a comment to share how you’re using AI.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"This is, I believe, the Oppenheimer moment of our generation."

– Alexander Schallenberg, Austria’s foreign minister (said at the start of the Vienna conference entitled 'Humanity at the Crossroads: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Challenge of Regulation')

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 49.6% of all internet traffic last year originated from bots. That’s up 2% in comparison with the previous year, and is the highest number ever seen since this data started being tracked in 2013.

• 3,900 years ago is approximately when the first recorded instance of encryption was discovered in Menet Khufu, Egypt. Researchers uncovered “password” inscriptions inside the tomb of Khnumhotep II. The inscriptions used a hieroglyphic substitution method to conceal hidden messages.

• 20% of Australian workers who were surveyed would be willing to sacrifice between 16% and 33% of their salaries for the right to work from home. Middle and high-income earners in white-collar “knowledge economy” jobs were the most likely to value working from home. They were willing to forgo $12,000 to $24,000 AUD of their annual salary to have the ability to do it some of the time.

• 96% of transactions in India were conducted using cash in 2016. Contrast that to today, where the Indian government claims that more digital transactions are completed in India than in any other country in the world. To put a number on it, last year India recorded more than 100 billion digital transactions.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

The winner of last issue’s JavaScript challenge was Bill Hall. Bill’s side project is Rose Ministries. In terms of the solution, there was actually more than one, depending on how you chose to handle the variable declarations and operations. The main problem was the dot in between total and Sum. The code had total.Sum when it should’ve just read as totalSum in all instances.

The next challenge is below - this is a Ruby on Rails one:

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Hyve: If your website runs on WordPress and you’ve got a library of information spread out across multiple pages and posts then Hyve is your new best friend. It’s an AI-powered chatbot plugin that you can load up with approximately 100 posts that have an average of 1500 words per post. Think of it as your private chatbot’s “training data.” If one of your site visitors has a question about any of the information found within this training data, Hyve can access it and provide the information to the person in a natural, conversational way.

https://themeisle.com/plugins/hyve/

Front-End Development Bootcamp: Want to start a career in front-end development or perhaps refresh yourself on its fundamental concepts? Do you have 21 hours and 6 minutes to spare? If you answered yes to both questions, then this bootcamp is for you. It covers what you’d expect it to cover: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’ll also learn about GitHub pages and complete several projects to test your skills. Did I mention that it’s 100% free?

https://frontendmasters.com/bootcamp/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Wanna make a lot of money?

Then do what the founders of Jolie did - figure out a way to take a normal, inexpensive thing, and make it a bougie, exclusive thing.

Jolie sells showerheads for a whopping $165 (or $148 if you join their subscription service).

The company has sold more than 200,000 units to date and in 2023 they brought in $28 million in revenue with no venture funding.

💬 What’s the Word?

"Fernweh" is a German term that translates to a far-reaching ache for distant places, reflecting a deep-seated yearning to travel or explore unfamiliar territories. Unlike simple wanderlust, which implies a general desire to travel, fernweh suggests a profound, almost painful longing for places one has never seen, stirring a powerful emotional response.

In terms of tech, while not directly related to the nature of tech work itself, it does apply to the growing digital nomad community - of which tech workers are a major part. One could argue that digital nomads all suffer from a case of fernweh.

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– Martin