November 8, 2022 • 41 mins
The dumpster fire that is Twitter continues this week as we learn about Twitter reps scrambling to re-hire some of the employees let go in last week's layoffs. Elon Musk toys with putting Twitter behind a paywall. Meta may be holding layoffs of its own this week. And the creator of the Oculus makes a VR headset that kills you for real if you die in a game.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from My Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland, Diamond executive producer with My Heart Radio and
how the tech are you. We're going to cover the
tech news today on Tuesday, November eight, two thousand twenty two.
(00:25):
But before we get going, I do want to let
y'all know that tomorrow we're going to share with you
an episode of The Restless Ones here in the Tech
Stuff feed. The Restless Ones is a show I host
where I interview leaders in tech positions across different industries
to talk about things like technical challenges and innovations and
(00:47):
leadership strategies and things along those lines. I think you'll
dig it all right, But onto the news, and we're
gonna start with Twitter. Of course, there's a lot of
Twitter news because a lot has been going on over there.
So last week was kind of a dumpster fire over
at Twitter, and this week has already proven to be
chaotic and we're barely into it. Last week I talked
(01:08):
about how the word was that Musk was going to
lay off approximately half of Twitter's staff, and that did happen,
and Musk tweeted out quote regarding Twitter's reduction in force. Unfortunately,
there is no choice when the company is losing over
four million dollars a day end quote. But the move
to layoff staff was so rushed that well, there were
(01:32):
there were regrets. Apparently at least some of the folks
fired at Twitter, we're not supposed to be fired at all.
They got lumped in by accident. Their accounts were discontinued,
they were suspended, and they were effectively laid off without
meaning to be laid off. That's pretty gush darn awful.
That speaks to a certain level of incompetence on the
(01:53):
part of management. But on the other hand, there really
was a very short timeline to announce that kind of layoff.
I mean, that was such an extensive move that and
you had so little time. Mistakes were bound to happen.
It's just when those mistakes are wrapped up in people's
lives and their careers that's it's just really hard to
(02:15):
get past. Right. Then, there were leaders who found out
that some of the folks that they had laid off
were whoopsie daisy, folks who are knowledgeable about specific projects
and who are responsible for a lot of work and
Without those folks, Twitter would be set way back on
those projects. And since Musk has been setting aggressive, in
(02:36):
fact unrealistically aggressive deadlines to get certain features built into
Twitter or overhauled at Twitter, they still need some of
those now former employees. And so, in a move that
I think you can only describe as embarrassing, various Twitter
folks began to reach out on some various platforms to
(02:57):
try and entice recently laid off employee is to come back,
asking could you please return to work? Now, keep in
mind these employees had already been locked out of company systems,
So if they had a company computer in their position,
they got locked out of that. They were locked out
of Twitter's slack channel, they were locked out of their
(03:17):
employee email. So yeah, not a good look. Some affected
former employees are worried that if they refused to come
back after being laid off, then they will get fired.
Now you might think, if you've been laid off, how
could you be fired? Well, if you've been laid off
and then the company says, wait, that we didn't mean
to do that, come back to work, and you refuse
(03:39):
to come back to work, then the company can say
we never really laid you off. We're firing you now.
And by being fired rather than laid off, the employees
could potentially lose the sixty days of severance pay that
otherwise they would have received if you know, the layoffs
had stuck in the first place, which you might imagine
creates really nasty ral issues, and you'd be right in fact,
(04:02):
I honestly, I can't even begin to think of how
I would feel if this were happening to me. Meanwhile,
for the folks who are still at Twitter who didn't
get laid off, you have employees who are unsure of
what team they fit in, or or who they report
to because the company has been gutted, and reportedly some
employees and a lot of employees are left wondering about
(04:24):
health benefits because Twitter's open enrollment period was to begin
this week, but management has been pretty quiet on that front,
with no real word on what health benefits are going
to be. Now that Twitter is a private company, it's
no longer the same company that it was, you know,
a couple of weeks ago. So that's really concerning too.
(04:47):
I mean, in this country, healthcare is at a point
where if you don't have insurance, you're really really in
trouble and insurance changes all the time, So having open
enrollment is important. And I don't know if that's been
resolved yet. It might have been, but the news as
I'm reporting it now did not have any indication of that.
(05:08):
My hope is that Twitter sorted that out, because that's
incredibly important to employees. Twitter also rolled out the eight
dollar a month Twitter Blue subscription over the weekend. This
is the version of the subscription that's going to come
with it a new verified check mark, so you don't
have to go through the old verification process. You can
(05:29):
subscribe to Twitter Blue for eight bucks a month and
get that checkmark on your your account. However, the company
has subsequently decided to hold off on actually instituting the
check mark changes until the midterm elections are over here
in the United States. Those elections happened today, so we
should see the rollout happened later this week. But there
was concerned that people could rush to get verified accounts
(05:52):
and then use that check mark to lend credibility to
misinformation campaigns. Right if you're sending out lies about the election,
but you have that little blue check mark next to
your name, people might think oh, this person's legit. So
for that reason, Twitter held back on actually implementing this
change so far. On a similar note, we learned that
(06:12):
free speech absolutist Elon Musk actually does have limits to
free speech. For example, if you make an account and
you claim to be Elon Musk and you're not clearly
stating in your bio that it's a parody account, Ellen
will ban you permanently one strike, and you're not just
out of the game, you are out of the league,
which is interesting. Musk said that now that the company
(06:35):
is rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning
if someone chooses to impersonate someone else without clearly labeling
the account as a parody account. Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin,
both comedians, changed their verified names to Elon Musk, which
illustrated how having a verification system that doesn't, you know,
actually verify that someone is who they claim to be
(06:58):
is just downright broken. Sort of like how full self
driving on Tesla vehicles isn't really full self driving. I'm
sensing a little theme along Elon Musk companies here. Another
issue is that Musk has said Twitter Blue accounts will
receive half the ad load of a regular Twitter user,
and analysts say if that happens, Twitter will miss out
(07:18):
on about six dollars of ad revenue per Twitter Blue
subscriber in the United States, and once Google and Apple
have taken a cut of the subscription transaction of eight
dollars per month to be in Twitter Blue, it's actually
possible that subscribing to Twitter Blue will cost Twitter money
so as people pay Twitter to use it. If in fact,
(07:42):
this all stays the way it is, then Twitter will
lose money because it will not be showing as many
ads to those people and won't be able to monetize
their activity. So yeah, there's some questions about that long
term strategy, as it does not appear to be helping
the problem of losing more than four million dollars per day.
The Verge reports that at least some verified users are
(08:05):
now finding it impossible to change their names in Twitter,
leading some to wonder if perhaps the company is trying
to head off a mass musk ing, or just to
avoid Twitter turning into that free for all hell escape
the Musk was saying definitely would not happen. Elizabeth Lopato
of The Verge reported that she and her verified coworkers
all encountered an error message while they were trying to
(08:27):
change their names, but that her unverified coworker was able
to change his name on the platform without a problem,
which does sound curious. Also, Musk warned that verified users
who changed their names would quote cause temporary loss of
verified check mark end quote. Elizabeth pointed out that if
she changed her Twitter name to Liz, which is a
(08:50):
name that some of her friends and colleagues use for her,
that would technically mean she would be unverified, at least temporarily,
even though she was just aaging one form of her
name to a different form of her name, not changing
her name to something else entirely, and still twittering over here.
News outlet The State not to be confused with the
(09:12):
old MTV comedy Sketch group with folks like Thomas Lennon
and Joe Latrulia in it reports that quote Twitter's rules
under new CEO Elon Musk, published Monday do not include
policies about misinformation end quote. That's a big old yikes
that is concerning now there are rules in place. They
(09:32):
did publish rules for content moderation, So for example, it's
against the rules to engage in targeted harassment. You cannot
call for violence or glorify violence. You can't promote terrorism
that kind of thing. Also, they had rules against dox sing.
You cannot reveal personal information about someone else on Twitter.
(09:53):
That's against the rules. So there are content rules in place,
but when it comes of things like misinformation, none of
that is included in the rules. The State reached out
to Twitter asking if the company would allow clear misinformation
campaigns to to proliferate across the platform without moderation, and
(10:16):
seem to get the indication that Twitter will still look
for that kind of stuff, but it's not codified in
the rules. So who knows. Platformer, a tech newsletter written
by journalist Casey Newton, whose work is really good. By
the way, you're not familiar with Casey, you should check
out his work, revealed that Musk is allegedly considering putting
all of Twitter behind a paywall. Now, it sounds as
(10:39):
though this plan is to allow for a certain amount
of browsing on Twitter each month for free, but once
you hit a limit, let's say, like it's like I
don't know, five hours or something, then you would have
to pay to continue using Twitter for the rest of
that calendar month, or you'd have to wait for the
next month before you could use Twitter again, which sounds
a lot like some mobile games I've played, where the
(11:03):
game is designed to hook you into activity and then
has a cool down period, but you can skip the
cool down if you pay cash. As of this recording,
there is no word on how seriously Musk and his
team are considering this option. I would be really interested
to see if this got implemented. I mean, I'm already
kind of off Twitter myself, but yeah, I could definitely
(11:26):
see that brands would want to pay in order to
continue using Twitter. But if your average user isn't, obviously,
that would not be a very sustainable model. I guess
they're they're really banking on people being addicted to using Twitter.
Will be back with some more news, including stuff that
doesn't involve Twitter at all. After these messages. One thing
(11:58):
that some Twitter users have been doing is dumping Twitter
entirely and migrating over to Mastodon. Uh. Then a bunch
of people go to Mastodon and their left saying, what
the heck is this? How does this work? So? Mastodon
allows you to post messages, it allows you to engage
(12:18):
with posted messages, so you can comment on someone else's message,
you could repost other people's messages, that kind of stuff.
So it has a lot of features that are similar
to what you can do on Twitter, but Mastodon is
organized in a totally different way from Twitter. Twitter is
a centralized service hosted on Twitter servers. Mastodon is decentralized.
(12:44):
It is hosted on multiple servers that are owned and
operated by different people and organizations all around the world.
So when you start using Mastodon, the first thing you
have to do is choose a server to join. Servers
tend to have focus to them. That focus could be
topic based, It could be regionally based, could be like
(13:05):
this is a server for you know, Southeast UK, that
kind of thing. It can be demographically based. There are
a lot of lgbt Q friendly servers, and the server
you choose ends up becoming part of your handle slash address.
Folks who are on the same server that you're on
can just look you up by your handle, right, It's
(13:27):
like you're both in the same room in a house.
They can just look across the room and see you there.
But they can do that just by using your handle.
If they're on a different server. They have to know
what server you belong to in order to look you up,
so they use your handle plus whatever server you belong to,
and then they can send you messages and things of
that nature. All that being said, anyone on any server
(13:51):
can technically communicate with anyone else on any other server,
but discovery is pretty challenging. Uh, it's a little more
umbersome that what you would find on Twitter. Also, if
whatever entity or organization runs your server stops supporting it,
you effectively lose your account. You would have to start
(14:12):
over by establishing a new account on another server. So
that is an issue with Mastodon. Uh. There are people
who are working to create kind of a buffer so
that if an organization plans to shut down a Mastodon server,
people will have time to migrate their stuff over to
a different server. But as I understand it right now,
(14:33):
that's not the case. It's just kind of taking on
faith that the server you've joined, we're will still be
around tomorrow. Anyway, Mastodon has reported an influx of users
that's really pushed Mastodon to the limit on some servers.
You know, a certain servers got way more popular then
that increase in traffic has really strained the server load,
(14:57):
and it's you know, been a pretty quiet utility for
the last several years, except within certain communities. If you
are thinking about joining Mastodon and checking it out, I
feel that I should add Mastodon tends to lean left politically,
not exclusively, but it is a tendency. Now. I'm personally
(15:18):
a left leaning kind of guy, which I'm sure everyone
out there realizes based upon my my uh commentary in episodes,
but I realized not everyone is, and likely a lot
of listeners will disagree with me politically, so I thought
it's only fair I mentioned that there is a somewhat
liberal leaning environment at Mastodon. As for whether I will
(15:40):
set up a tech stuff space over on Macedon, I'm
still thinking about it, and I will let y'all know.
Several news outlets are reporting that Meta maybe gearing up
for its own round of layoffs. This week, The Wall
Street Journal reported we may hear about thousands of layoffs
beginning tomorrow, which would be Wednesday, the ninth of November
to thousand, twenty two for those of y'all listening to
(16:02):
old news episodes in the future. If these layoffs happen,
they will mark the first broad scale downsizing across Meta
in the company's history. It's not exactly shocking because CEO
Mark Zuckerberg has indicated several times this year that he
suspects Meta has more employees than there is work to do,
(16:24):
and that some folks aren't necessarily putting in significant effort
in their jobs, and that there are employees who may
not need to be there. And this is all talk
that indicates that there's a leader in place who feels
it's time to clear out some office space. Plus, Zuckerberg
continues to focus on his Metaverse project, which is costing
(16:45):
Meta billions of dollars each year. If you're going to
keep up with that kind of cash drain, you may
eventually have to look at making cuts elsewhere, like with
your head count on projects that are not directly connected
to your Metaverse vision. We've already heard reports that there
are folks in Meta who say they are on MMH projects,
(17:05):
which stands for make Mark Happy. That one way to
stay in good graces with management is to tackle whatever
pet project Zuckerberg has in mind at the time. But
that this gets tricky because Zuckerberg also is known to
change his mind about stuff, often due to the public
reception of his ideas, which then necessitates pivoting those projects
(17:30):
and being able to respond to new criteria. Now, I'm
no expert in any of this kind of stuff, but
to me, it sounds like Meta isn't a bit of
a vicious cycle right now. Investors are generally unhappy that
the company isn't performing nearly as well as it used
to who which is putting it lightly, And they're really
not happy that Meta is spending billions of dollars on
(17:53):
a project that will not see fruition for years if
it succeeds at all. And there's still plenty of skeptics,
myself included, who think that the vision of the metaverse,
particularly as something that necessitates VR and a R headgear,
is not likely to have broad acceptance. You're gonna have
(18:16):
probably a narrow band of extremely enthusiastic fans of it,
but I just don't see it extending beyond that without
like a lot of growing pains. Now that being said,
shares of Meta rose a bit after news broke that
layoffs are coming, because that's cheerful, And as of this recording,
(18:37):
shares of Meta are trading and around ninety six dollars
per share. Now, this is up from its low of
eighty eight dollars per share, which was what it was
posting it just a few days ago. But ninety six
dollars a share is way way down from the company's
high this year of around three forty dollars a year
(18:58):
back in January. So yeah, it was trading at three
dollars at the beginning of the year. Now it's less
than a hundred dollars per share. You know, towards the
end of the year. Uh, it did have a little
bit of a recovery compared to its low, but yeah,
that is not in a great place. Whendows eleven users
might notice some new ads popping up as they go
(19:19):
to shut down their computers. Bleeping Computer reports that users
have noticed flyout ads popping up as they go to
shut down their machines. So they go into the start
menu and they pull up the little menu that comes
up when you hover over the power selection, and the
ads are really simple. It's just an option that if
(19:39):
you were to click on the option would take you
to a product page. So for example, like when you
would hover over that power button, you would get a
little menu that give you options like change account settings,
lock to lock your computer, or sign out. But now
if you do it, you would also get a little
advertise service at the top. It would just be listed
(20:01):
as another option among these that are already there. So
you might see an option that says back up your files,
and if you click on it, it actually takes you
to Microsoft's one drive product page, or you might see
one that says sign up for Microsoft account. So, in
other words, the first option in the menu is trying
to sell you something specifically some sort of Microsoft service. Interesting.
(20:25):
People are already upset about it, which I get like
there they don't want to be confronted with sales messages
when they're just trying to access basic functions of a
computer like turning it off. So yeah, interesting little report there.
And you know, we already talked earlier about how Microsoft
(20:46):
is apparently considering going down a strategy where they offer
PCs that are subsidized by advertising so that you could
purchase it for very little money relatively speaking. And the
tradeoff would be every time you're using your computer, you're
getting ads served to you, and that offsets the purchase
(21:07):
price of the computer. Uh, we've heard about that last week.
Still no word on whether or not they're moving forward
with that, but we are starting to see Microsoft incorporate
Microsoft specific advertising in basic functions of Windows eleven, so
maybe that is where they're going over on the Activision
Blizzard side of things, which just as a reminder, Microsoft
(21:29):
is still attempting to acquire Activision Blizzard, but the deal
is facing some scrutiny in different parts of the world,
So no guarantee that that's going to happen or what
timeline it might happen on. But let's talk about Call
of Duty Modern Warfare two and the upcoming free to
play companion title Call of Duty war Zone two point oh.
(21:52):
Engadget reports that Activision is launching some content moderation tools
meant to deal with toxicity in communications within the games.
And I'm sure that if any of y'all have ever
played any sort of competitive online game that features voice
chat or text chat, you have run into situations where
someone is being incredibly offensive and vulgar and are harassing
(22:16):
other players that you can hear like some of the
worst stuff imaginable in these games. And for folks who
make say they're living streaming, people who live stream games,
this can be a real problem because that kind of
language can get the streamer and hot water with whatever
platform they're using, like if it's YouTube or Twitch, even
(22:38):
if the streamer is not necessarily engaging with the toxic player,
like if there's proximity chat on and another player is
in the same general space as the streamer and then
just starts letting loose with ethnic slurs, that affects the
streamer too, right, So not to mention just normal players
who don't necessarily want to encounter that kind of abuse online. Well,
(23:03):
Call of Duty is going to have active moderation teams who,
once they verify that a player has engaged in toxic
voice chat or text messages within the game, they will
mute that player in all communication channels. That person will
no longer be heard or be able to text. They'll
still be able to play unless they have violated some
(23:24):
other rules, in which case they could get you know,
booted and banned, but they won't be heard by anybody,
which I think is a blessing. Uh. In order for
this to work, however, is being a reactive system. Players
will still need to flag offensive gamers to alert the
moderation team to look into them. So if you're playing,
and you encounter someone who is just being the worst,
(23:45):
you can flag them. Then, at least hypothetically, the content
moderation team will take a closer look and listen in
on chat and start looking at the text messages, and
if they see that, in fact, there are instances of
a use, they will then mute the player. Still, considering
all the types of stuff that can get shouted about
in these games, I think that's a good choice. It's
(24:07):
not the best. There are more proactive approaches to this
kind of thing, but at least it's a way of
addressing it. And that's going to be important because war
Zone being a free to play game is bound to
attract a ton of players, and not everyone's going to
be a hateful jerk, but some of them definitely will be.
(24:29):
As for me, I'm not good at these kind of
first person shooter multiplayer games. I can't play at a
competitive level. I would just be a bullet sponge. So
you won't find me playing these online. I just I can't.
My reactions are not good, my aim is not good.
Even with aim assist, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
compete at a decent level, So I just go through
(24:52):
single player first person shooters and then I yell at
computer controlled enemies because I know I can't hurt their feelings. Um.
But yeah, I'm glad to hear this news because I
do watch some streamers and I never want them to
have their their career impacted by things that are outside
their control. The Verge reports that AMC theaters here in
(25:14):
the US and Zoom are partnering to bring interactive meeting
calls to some AMC theaters, allowing the theater to become
kind of a giant meeting space, capable of holding more
than a hundred people as they participate in like a
remote meeting. And I can see that as being an
attractive option for say a large company that has offices
(25:36):
or stores that are all over the place, like if
it's a nationwide company, for example, employees can get together
in a physical space and watch an all hands meeting
on a big old screen. The other thing that this
does is that can reinforce that feeling that your boss
literally towers over you and that the power dynamic is
(25:57):
incredibly unbalanced, and that helps you visual is that enormous
gap between your position and that of your boss. Maybe
I'm getting a bit too cynical about this, But honestly,
that's the first thing that popped into my head is like, gosh,
what would make me feel like I had really been
put in my place? Oh? I know what if my
boss were five stories tall and looking down at me
while telling me about the company. AMC says it's planning
(26:21):
on installing the service in seventeen major US markets next year,
so it's not coming to every AMC everywhere, but it
should be rolling out throughout If I'm being serious, I
can see the value of this, Like I getting people
together does have a certain value to it, and uh,
for a distributed company, one that has locations across lots
(26:44):
of different regions, it could be a practical solution as
opposed to having every single person individually logging into a
meeting from their own computer. But yeah, it's hard to
get around that fact of you're looking at an enormous
movie screen and by necessity everything has to be enlarged
so that the folks sitting in the back can have
(27:04):
a view of what's going on. To also the thought
of my boss's voice coming over a surround sound system
with like Dolby Base to it also terrifying. Maybe I'm
thinking about this too much. You know what, We're gonna
take another quick break and I'm gonna calm down, and
then we'll cover the rest of the tech news. Some
(27:33):
engineers and researchers at m I T, the University of Minnesota,
and Samsung have developed a new kind of Terra Hurts
camera that can operate at room temperature and room pressure,
which opens up the possibility for this tech to be
used in many different areas, including stuff like airport security.
So the cameras capable of generating and detecting waves and
(27:55):
the terror Hurts range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This puts
this kind of radiation between microwaves and visible light. It
inhabits that space, and these waves can penetrate lots of
different kinds of materials, non metallic materials, not all of them,
but a lot of them, and that's one reason why
it could be useful in security operations. They can also
(28:18):
detect signatures of certain molecules, so in an industrial setting,
you could use this kind of technology to analyze materials
for certain types of molecules, but you can do it
in a non invasive, nondestructive way that could be really
valuable to the camera works by sending out light. It
stimulates these little particles called quantum dots, which I've talked
(28:39):
about in tech stuff episodes from a long time ago.
I probably need to do a new one. But it
stimulates quantum dots by using a terror hurts wave. So
it generates a terror hurts wave, sends that to affect
these quantum dots, which then emit light, and that light
can then be recorded by a sensor similar to the
kind we use in digital cameras. The team created a
(29:00):
device that produces images that not just show what was imaged,
but can show the polarization state of terror Hurts waves,
which can give you ideas as to the nature of
whatever was image. And I think of this tech as
being similar to kind of like thermal imaging sensors. Thermal
imaging goggles, for example, detect infrared radiation and they send
(29:23):
that data to a system that converts the information into
something we can see. So when you put on thermal
goggles and you see like that heat signature, you know,
like predator vision, that that's thanks to a system that
is taking the thermal information and then matching that two
colors that we can see in order to indicate levels
of heat. Otherwise it would just be invisible to us,
(29:45):
So it has to be converted into the visible range
for us to be able to see it, right, That
makes sense, Same sort of thing here. The researchers have
made big strides towards solving some massive engineering challenges when
using terror hurts cameras. You know, being able to operate
a room to sure and at room pressure is huge,
But there are other obstacles that we have to overcome
before this tech could go into widespread use, namely, generating
(30:08):
terror hurts waves in the first place is a complicated process,
and the current tech that we have to rely upon
uses really expensive large laser systems, so it's not something
that would be practical right now. We would need to
make greater strides in being able to create terror hurts
waves without the reliance of things like laser systems, which
(30:28):
people are working on, but we have ways to go. Recently,
representatives at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Observatory in Chile,
which houses large important radio antenna that are used in
astronomical observations, revealed that the facility had to shut down
starting in late October due to a cyber attack. The
(30:49):
rep said the attackers did not affect scientific data, so
they weren't able to compromise information from recent observations. Nor
were they able to get actual access to the antennas themselves,
so they weren't able to damage the array of radio antennas.
But other network systems were affected, you know, things like
administrative systems, email systems, that kind of stuff, so they
(31:11):
had to shut it down to contain it. The statement
indicated that the attack has been contained, but an investigation
is ongoing and as of now they are unsure when
the observatory will be able to go back to normal operations.
I've done episodes about AI powered machines competing against humans
in various games, as well as the related topic of
(31:32):
solvable versus unsolvable games. So a solvable game is one that,
if you assume both players are playing perfectly, you can
predict the outcome from any position even before a single
move is made. You know, you have to have complete
information about the game in order for this to work,
but it is possible. So for example, in Connect four,
(31:54):
assuming that both players are playing perfectly, player one will
all days win just from the beginning Anyway, there are
other games that have lots of different potential outcomes, and
some of those are games that humans were for a
very long time able to dominate. So you've likely heard
about the various chess programs like Deep Blue that played
(32:15):
at superhuman levels and were able to beat chess champions.
But another board game that computers for a long time
we're good at, but not not better than humans. But
then eventually overtook us is Go. So back in two
thousand and sixteen, Alpha Go and AI emerged as a
formidable computer opponent, defeating the best human Go players, and
(32:40):
so for the first time in history, a computer was
able to play Go at a level better than expert humans.
But recently, some researchers found that they could beat a
go playing AI called Cateago, which is also capable of
beating human champions. But they could beat Catego using a
(33:01):
very quirky strategy. So the researchers took a much weaker
go playing AI program. So they got like a computer
program that can play Go, but it plays it at
a level where even amateur players human players can defeat
this AI without much trouble. And then they took this
(33:23):
week Ai Go game playing system and put it up
against Catego, which has beaten human champions, and they found
that if they trained the weak AI to go after
some blind spots and Catego strategy, they could actually have
this inferior AI defeat a much stronger one, which sounds
(33:45):
really weird, right. I mean, we humans can get pantsed
by Cateago, but we can beat this weaker AI system. However,
the weaker AI system can beat Catego. It's kind of
like paper rock scissors in that way, and you might think, well,
how is this even possible? Bowl Well, during the training
process for Catego, Catego would refine its approach by playing
(34:07):
millions of games against itself. But this refining process meant
that over time, Catego would naturally concentrate on particular moves
and sequences within the game and migrate away from more rare,
outlying possibilities. And that meant that some legal moves were
largely ignored because they were just not likely to occur.
(34:29):
But this weaker AI, by focusing on those unlikely moves,
was able to make moves that Catego wasn't able to anticipate.
And that's interesting because it meant that this system that
could potentially just beat the best go players could be
defeated by something far inferior, and that should also raise
(34:50):
red flags to us not not for go necessarily. This
is an entertaining version of a larger issue that we
should really pay attention to. When I hear a story
like this, I think about other uses of AI, especially
AI that has been trained through machine learning in processes
similar to kindago and AI can sometimes, on the surface
(35:15):
appear to be really capable, but knowing that it can
be thrown for a loop if it encounters something that's
outside its training parameters should make us wary. Take, for example,
self driving cars. While we can train autonomous driving systems
in countless scenarios, and we can take information from real
world experiences and use that to continue to to augment
(35:39):
as self driving systems capabilities, the fact is the real
world could throw some really strange stuff at us occasionally.
And while humans might be able to make a split
second decision and avoid an accident even if they encounter
something they have never seen before, and AI system can
lack that capability and make a bad choice, which is
(36:02):
one of the biggest challenges when we come to truly
refining AI for specific use that we need to remember
that with these these machine learning processes, we can create
blind spots, and those blind spots. If it's a possibility
that those blind spots could occur in the real world,
they will occur, and when they do, it's going to
(36:24):
throw these AI systems for a loop. Whether that AI
system is used to detect things like you know, financial uh,
misappropriation of funds, or it's designed to control a car
as it goes down the highway or whatever. If there
are blind spots that are possible, then they will happen
(36:45):
at some point or another, and we need to be
on the lookout for that kind of thing. It's fun
with go not so much fun if you're in a
car that's being controlled by a robot and there's no
human controls available to you. That would be scary. Finally,
talking about scary, Palmer Lucky, who's the guy who created
(37:06):
the oculus and then subsequently went on to reveal that
he can be a pretty awful person, has created a
VR headset that can kill you. He posted about this
on his blog over the weekend. Because November six, two
twenty two is an important date in the fictional series
Sword Art Online. So in that series, a deranged tech
(37:30):
genius creates a really immersive game and a VR headset
used to access that game, and it's supposed to be
the most incredible experience ever. But what people don't know
is that he also built into this headset, which is
called the Nerve Gear, a system of powerful microwaves that
(37:50):
are designed to kill the user if they die in
the game. So if you die in the game, you
die in real life. It's an old sci fi trope.
Similar Literally, you cannot remove the nerve Gear without activating
the kill switch, which makes me think of movies like
Battle Royale where you've got characters wearing explosive collars. That
(38:11):
the Hunger games is the same way the explosive colors,
where they can activate the collar and kill someone if
they are breaking the rules of the game or they're
in the wrong region at the wrong time. Well, Palmer
thought this was such a cool idea he built something similar.
He didn't use microwaves because he can't really mantorize that
technology to a point where you could fit it into
(38:32):
a headset. So instead of using microwaves, he has used explosives.
He has positioned three small explosive devices on the headset,
and they are wired, so that should the headset indicate
that the player has died in the game by flashing
a red screen up at a certain frequency, the explosives
(38:53):
will trigger and the player's head would get blowed up
in real life. So you die in the game, this
headset kill you. Palmer then goes on to say he
has yet to build in a system that would make
the headset explode if you tried to take it off,
so it's not like it's tamper proof, so shucks, and
that he also is not sure that the explosives couldn't
be triggered by accident, So in other words, you might
(39:16):
be playing the game not die, but the explosives get
triggered and you get blown up. Anyway, he calls it
more of an office art piece. So yeah, this is
one of those cases where I feel that fandom has
gone a little too far, because sometimes people take away
the wrong lessons from fiction, Like I can just imagine
that Palm are lucky reading or watching Hunger Games or
(39:38):
Battle Royal for that matter, and thinking oh that's a
good idea. That means you you learned the wrong lesson Palmer.
That's not what that's not what they're trying to teach whatever. Anyway,
you know, I I don't assume that anyone's ever going
to actually be putting these things on unless we truly
(39:59):
enter a dystopian sure, in which case I'll be roving
the deserts looking for gas. Because I've already decided the
mad Max approach is my way. I kind of dig
the punk aesthetic, so that's that's kind of my I'm
not gonna be worried about the virtual reality stuff so much.
It will be going after petrol. I guess that's it
for this news episode of tech Stuff. We will be
(40:21):
back on Thursday with another news episode. As a reminder, tomorrow,
we are publishing an episode of The Restless Ones in
the tech Stuff feed, and I encourage you to listen
to it. It's a good show and you might discover
that you want to dive into the entire series because
I talked to a lot of interesting people this past year.
Um and yeah, check it out. If you have suggestions
(40:44):
for future topics I should cover in tech Stuff, please
reach out to me. A couple different ways to do that.
You can download the I Heart Radio app, which is
free to downloads free to use. You can navigate over
to tech Stuff by putting tech Stuff in the search
field you'll see on the tech Stuff page there's the
little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can
leave a voice message up to thirty seconds long let
(41:05):
me know what you would like to hear in future episodes,
or if you prefer, you can get in touch with
me over on Twitter. The handle for the show is
tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you
again really soon Y. Tech Stuff is an i Heart
(41:25):
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from My Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland, Diamond executive producer with My Heart Radio and
how the tech are you. We're going to cover the
tech news today on Tuesday, November eight, two thousand twenty two.
(00:25):
But before we get going, I do want to let
y'all know that tomorrow we're going to share with you
an episode of The Restless Ones here in the Tech
Stuff feed. The Restless Ones is a show I host
where I interview leaders in tech positions across different industries
to talk about things like technical challenges and innovations and
(00:47):
leadership strategies and things along those lines. I think you'll
dig it all right, But onto the news, and we're
gonna start with Twitter. Of course, there's a lot of
Twitter news because a lot has been going on over there.
So last week was kind of a dumpster fire over
at Twitter, and this week has already proven to be
chaotic and we're barely into it. Last week I talked
(01:08):
about how the word was that Musk was going to
lay off approximately half of Twitter's staff, and that did happen,
and Musk tweeted out quote regarding Twitter's reduction in force. Unfortunately,
there is no choice when the company is losing over
four million dollars a day end quote. But the move
to layoff staff was so rushed that well, there were
(01:32):
there were regrets. Apparently at least some of the folks
fired at Twitter, we're not supposed to be fired at all.
They got lumped in by accident. Their accounts were discontinued,
they were suspended, and they were effectively laid off without
meaning to be laid off. That's pretty gush darn awful.
That speaks to a certain level of incompetence on the
(01:53):
part of management. But on the other hand, there really
was a very short timeline to announce that kind of layoff.
I mean, that was such an extensive move that and
you had so little time. Mistakes were bound to happen.
It's just when those mistakes are wrapped up in people's
lives and their careers that's it's just really hard to
(02:15):
get past. Right. Then, there were leaders who found out
that some of the folks that they had laid off
were whoopsie daisy, folks who are knowledgeable about specific projects
and who are responsible for a lot of work and
Without those folks, Twitter would be set way back on
those projects. And since Musk has been setting aggressive, in
(02:36):
fact unrealistically aggressive deadlines to get certain features built into
Twitter or overhauled at Twitter, they still need some of
those now former employees. And so, in a move that
I think you can only describe as embarrassing, various Twitter
folks began to reach out on some various platforms to
(02:57):
try and entice recently laid off employee is to come back,
asking could you please return to work? Now, keep in
mind these employees had already been locked out of company systems,
So if they had a company computer in their position,
they got locked out of that. They were locked out
of Twitter's slack channel, they were locked out of their
(03:17):
employee email. So yeah, not a good look. Some affected
former employees are worried that if they refused to come
back after being laid off, then they will get fired.
Now you might think, if you've been laid off, how
could you be fired? Well, if you've been laid off
and then the company says, wait, that we didn't mean
to do that, come back to work, and you refuse
(03:39):
to come back to work, then the company can say
we never really laid you off. We're firing you now.
And by being fired rather than laid off, the employees
could potentially lose the sixty days of severance pay that
otherwise they would have received if you know, the layoffs
had stuck in the first place, which you might imagine
creates really nasty ral issues, and you'd be right in fact,
(04:02):
I honestly, I can't even begin to think of how
I would feel if this were happening to me. Meanwhile,
for the folks who are still at Twitter who didn't
get laid off, you have employees who are unsure of
what team they fit in, or or who they report
to because the company has been gutted, and reportedly some
employees and a lot of employees are left wondering about
(04:24):
health benefits because Twitter's open enrollment period was to begin
this week, but management has been pretty quiet on that front,
with no real word on what health benefits are going
to be. Now that Twitter is a private company, it's
no longer the same company that it was, you know,
a couple of weeks ago. So that's really concerning too.
(04:47):
I mean, in this country, healthcare is at a point
where if you don't have insurance, you're really really in
trouble and insurance changes all the time, So having open
enrollment is important. And I don't know if that's been
resolved yet. It might have been, but the news as
I'm reporting it now did not have any indication of that.
(05:08):
My hope is that Twitter sorted that out, because that's
incredibly important to employees. Twitter also rolled out the eight
dollar a month Twitter Blue subscription over the weekend. This
is the version of the subscription that's going to come
with it a new verified check mark, so you don't
have to go through the old verification process. You can
(05:29):
subscribe to Twitter Blue for eight bucks a month and
get that checkmark on your your account. However, the company
has subsequently decided to hold off on actually instituting the
check mark changes until the midterm elections are over here
in the United States. Those elections happened today, so we
should see the rollout happened later this week. But there
was concerned that people could rush to get verified accounts
(05:52):
and then use that check mark to lend credibility to
misinformation campaigns. Right if you're sending out lies about the election,
but you have that little blue check mark next to
your name, people might think oh, this person's legit. So
for that reason, Twitter held back on actually implementing this
change so far. On a similar note, we learned that
(06:12):
free speech absolutist Elon Musk actually does have limits to
free speech. For example, if you make an account and
you claim to be Elon Musk and you're not clearly
stating in your bio that it's a parody account, Ellen
will ban you permanently one strike, and you're not just
out of the game, you are out of the league,
which is interesting. Musk said that now that the company
(06:35):
is rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning
if someone chooses to impersonate someone else without clearly labeling
the account as a parody account. Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin,
both comedians, changed their verified names to Elon Musk, which
illustrated how having a verification system that doesn't, you know,
actually verify that someone is who they claim to be
(06:58):
is just downright broken. Sort of like how full self
driving on Tesla vehicles isn't really full self driving. I'm
sensing a little theme along Elon Musk companies here. Another
issue is that Musk has said Twitter Blue accounts will
receive half the ad load of a regular Twitter user,
and analysts say if that happens, Twitter will miss out
(07:18):
on about six dollars of ad revenue per Twitter Blue
subscriber in the United States, and once Google and Apple
have taken a cut of the subscription transaction of eight
dollars per month to be in Twitter Blue, it's actually
possible that subscribing to Twitter Blue will cost Twitter money
so as people pay Twitter to use it. If in fact,
(07:42):
this all stays the way it is, then Twitter will
lose money because it will not be showing as many
ads to those people and won't be able to monetize
their activity. So yeah, there's some questions about that long
term strategy, as it does not appear to be helping
the problem of losing more than four million dollars per day.
The Verge reports that at least some verified users are
(08:05):
now finding it impossible to change their names in Twitter,
leading some to wonder if perhaps the company is trying
to head off a mass musk ing, or just to
avoid Twitter turning into that free for all hell escape
the Musk was saying definitely would not happen. Elizabeth Lopato
of The Verge reported that she and her verified coworkers
all encountered an error message while they were trying to
(08:27):
change their names, but that her unverified coworker was able
to change his name on the platform without a problem,
which does sound curious. Also, Musk warned that verified users
who changed their names would quote cause temporary loss of
verified check mark end quote. Elizabeth pointed out that if
she changed her Twitter name to Liz, which is a
(08:50):
name that some of her friends and colleagues use for her,
that would technically mean she would be unverified, at least temporarily,
even though she was just aaging one form of her
name to a different form of her name, not changing
her name to something else entirely, and still twittering over here.
News outlet The State not to be confused with the
(09:12):
old MTV comedy Sketch group with folks like Thomas Lennon
and Joe Latrulia in it reports that quote Twitter's rules
under new CEO Elon Musk, published Monday do not include
policies about misinformation end quote. That's a big old yikes
that is concerning now there are rules in place. They
(09:32):
did publish rules for content moderation, So for example, it's
against the rules to engage in targeted harassment. You cannot
call for violence or glorify violence. You can't promote terrorism
that kind of thing. Also, they had rules against dox sing.
You cannot reveal personal information about someone else on Twitter.
(09:53):
That's against the rules. So there are content rules in place,
but when it comes of things like misinformation, none of
that is included in the rules. The State reached out
to Twitter asking if the company would allow clear misinformation
campaigns to to proliferate across the platform without moderation, and
(10:16):
seem to get the indication that Twitter will still look
for that kind of stuff, but it's not codified in
the rules. So who knows. Platformer, a tech newsletter written
by journalist Casey Newton, whose work is really good. By
the way, you're not familiar with Casey, you should check
out his work, revealed that Musk is allegedly considering putting
all of Twitter behind a paywall. Now, it sounds as
(10:39):
though this plan is to allow for a certain amount
of browsing on Twitter each month for free, but once
you hit a limit, let's say, like it's like I
don't know, five hours or something, then you would have
to pay to continue using Twitter for the rest of
that calendar month, or you'd have to wait for the
next month before you could use Twitter again, which sounds
a lot like some mobile games I've played, where the
(11:03):
game is designed to hook you into activity and then
has a cool down period, but you can skip the
cool down if you pay cash. As of this recording,
there is no word on how seriously Musk and his
team are considering this option. I would be really interested
to see if this got implemented. I mean, I'm already
kind of off Twitter myself, but yeah, I could definitely
(11:26):
see that brands would want to pay in order to
continue using Twitter. But if your average user isn't, obviously,
that would not be a very sustainable model. I guess
they're they're really banking on people being addicted to using Twitter.
Will be back with some more news, including stuff that
doesn't involve Twitter at all. After these messages. One thing
(11:58):
that some Twitter users have been doing is dumping Twitter
entirely and migrating over to Mastodon. Uh. Then a bunch
of people go to Mastodon and their left saying, what
the heck is this? How does this work? So? Mastodon
allows you to post messages, it allows you to engage
(12:18):
with posted messages, so you can comment on someone else's message,
you could repost other people's messages, that kind of stuff.
So it has a lot of features that are similar
to what you can do on Twitter, but Mastodon is
organized in a totally different way from Twitter. Twitter is
a centralized service hosted on Twitter servers. Mastodon is decentralized.
(12:44):
It is hosted on multiple servers that are owned and
operated by different people and organizations all around the world.
So when you start using Mastodon, the first thing you
have to do is choose a server to join. Servers
tend to have focus to them. That focus could be
topic based, It could be regionally based, could be like
(13:05):
this is a server for you know, Southeast UK, that
kind of thing. It can be demographically based. There are
a lot of lgbt Q friendly servers, and the server
you choose ends up becoming part of your handle slash address.
Folks who are on the same server that you're on
can just look you up by your handle, right, It's
(13:27):
like you're both in the same room in a house.
They can just look across the room and see you there.
But they can do that just by using your handle.
If they're on a different server. They have to know
what server you belong to in order to look you up,
so they use your handle plus whatever server you belong to,
and then they can send you messages and things of
that nature. All that being said, anyone on any server
(13:51):
can technically communicate with anyone else on any other server,
but discovery is pretty challenging. Uh, it's a little more
umbersome that what you would find on Twitter. Also, if
whatever entity or organization runs your server stops supporting it,
you effectively lose your account. You would have to start
(14:12):
over by establishing a new account on another server. So
that is an issue with Mastodon. Uh. There are people
who are working to create kind of a buffer so
that if an organization plans to shut down a Mastodon server,
people will have time to migrate their stuff over to
a different server. But as I understand it right now,
(14:33):
that's not the case. It's just kind of taking on
faith that the server you've joined, we're will still be
around tomorrow. Anyway, Mastodon has reported an influx of users
that's really pushed Mastodon to the limit on some servers.
You know, a certain servers got way more popular then
that increase in traffic has really strained the server load,
(14:57):
and it's you know, been a pretty quiet utility for
the last several years, except within certain communities. If you
are thinking about joining Mastodon and checking it out, I
feel that I should add Mastodon tends to lean left politically,
not exclusively, but it is a tendency. Now. I'm personally
(15:18):
a left leaning kind of guy, which I'm sure everyone
out there realizes based upon my my uh commentary in episodes,
but I realized not everyone is, and likely a lot
of listeners will disagree with me politically, so I thought
it's only fair I mentioned that there is a somewhat
liberal leaning environment at Mastodon. As for whether I will
(15:40):
set up a tech stuff space over on Macedon, I'm
still thinking about it, and I will let y'all know.
Several news outlets are reporting that Meta maybe gearing up
for its own round of layoffs. This week, The Wall
Street Journal reported we may hear about thousands of layoffs
beginning tomorrow, which would be Wednesday, the ninth of November
to thousand, twenty two for those of y'all listening to
(16:02):
old news episodes in the future. If these layoffs happen,
they will mark the first broad scale downsizing across Meta
in the company's history. It's not exactly shocking because CEO
Mark Zuckerberg has indicated several times this year that he
suspects Meta has more employees than there is work to do,
(16:24):
and that some folks aren't necessarily putting in significant effort
in their jobs, and that there are employees who may
not need to be there. And this is all talk
that indicates that there's a leader in place who feels
it's time to clear out some office space. Plus, Zuckerberg
continues to focus on his Metaverse project, which is costing
(16:45):
Meta billions of dollars each year. If you're going to
keep up with that kind of cash drain, you may
eventually have to look at making cuts elsewhere, like with
your head count on projects that are not directly connected
to your Metaverse vision. We've already heard reports that there
are folks in Meta who say they are on MMH projects,
(17:05):
which stands for make Mark Happy. That one way to
stay in good graces with management is to tackle whatever
pet project Zuckerberg has in mind at the time. But
that this gets tricky because Zuckerberg also is known to
change his mind about stuff, often due to the public
reception of his ideas, which then necessitates pivoting those projects
(17:30):
and being able to respond to new criteria. Now, I'm
no expert in any of this kind of stuff, but
to me, it sounds like Meta isn't a bit of
a vicious cycle right now. Investors are generally unhappy that
the company isn't performing nearly as well as it used
to who which is putting it lightly, And they're really
not happy that Meta is spending billions of dollars on
(17:53):
a project that will not see fruition for years if
it succeeds at all. And there's still plenty of skeptics,
myself included, who think that the vision of the metaverse,
particularly as something that necessitates VR and a R headgear,
is not likely to have broad acceptance. You're gonna have
(18:16):
probably a narrow band of extremely enthusiastic fans of it,
but I just don't see it extending beyond that without
like a lot of growing pains. Now that being said,
shares of Meta rose a bit after news broke that
layoffs are coming, because that's cheerful, And as of this recording,
(18:37):
shares of Meta are trading and around ninety six dollars
per share. Now, this is up from its low of
eighty eight dollars per share, which was what it was
posting it just a few days ago. But ninety six
dollars a share is way way down from the company's
high this year of around three forty dollars a year
(18:58):
back in January. So yeah, it was trading at three
dollars at the beginning of the year. Now it's less
than a hundred dollars per share. You know, towards the
end of the year. Uh, it did have a little
bit of a recovery compared to its low, but yeah,
that is not in a great place. Whendows eleven users
might notice some new ads popping up as they go
(19:19):
to shut down their computers. Bleeping Computer reports that users
have noticed flyout ads popping up as they go to
shut down their machines. So they go into the start
menu and they pull up the little menu that comes
up when you hover over the power selection, and the
ads are really simple. It's just an option that if
(19:39):
you were to click on the option would take you
to a product page. So for example, like when you
would hover over that power button, you would get a
little menu that give you options like change account settings,
lock to lock your computer, or sign out. But now
if you do it, you would also get a little
advertise service at the top. It would just be listed
(20:01):
as another option among these that are already there. So
you might see an option that says back up your files,
and if you click on it, it actually takes you
to Microsoft's one drive product page, or you might see
one that says sign up for Microsoft account. So, in
other words, the first option in the menu is trying
to sell you something specifically some sort of Microsoft service. Interesting.
(20:25):
People are already upset about it, which I get like
there they don't want to be confronted with sales messages
when they're just trying to access basic functions of a
computer like turning it off. So yeah, interesting little report there.
And you know, we already talked earlier about how Microsoft
(20:46):
is apparently considering going down a strategy where they offer
PCs that are subsidized by advertising so that you could
purchase it for very little money relatively speaking. And the
tradeoff would be every time you're using your computer, you're
getting ads served to you, and that offsets the purchase
(21:07):
price of the computer. Uh, we've heard about that last week.
Still no word on whether or not they're moving forward
with that, but we are starting to see Microsoft incorporate
Microsoft specific advertising in basic functions of Windows eleven, so
maybe that is where they're going over on the Activision
Blizzard side of things, which just as a reminder, Microsoft
(21:29):
is still attempting to acquire Activision Blizzard, but the deal
is facing some scrutiny in different parts of the world,
So no guarantee that that's going to happen or what
timeline it might happen on. But let's talk about Call
of Duty Modern Warfare two and the upcoming free to
play companion title Call of Duty war Zone two point oh.
(21:52):
Engadget reports that Activision is launching some content moderation tools
meant to deal with toxicity in communications within the games.
And I'm sure that if any of y'all have ever
played any sort of competitive online game that features voice
chat or text chat, you have run into situations where
someone is being incredibly offensive and vulgar and are harassing
(22:16):
other players that you can hear like some of the
worst stuff imaginable in these games. And for folks who
make say they're living streaming, people who live stream games,
this can be a real problem because that kind of
language can get the streamer and hot water with whatever
platform they're using, like if it's YouTube or Twitch, even
(22:38):
if the streamer is not necessarily engaging with the toxic player,
like if there's proximity chat on and another player is
in the same general space as the streamer and then
just starts letting loose with ethnic slurs, that affects the
streamer too, right, So not to mention just normal players
who don't necessarily want to encounter that kind of abuse online. Well,
(23:03):
Call of Duty is going to have active moderation teams who,
once they verify that a player has engaged in toxic
voice chat or text messages within the game, they will
mute that player in all communication channels. That person will
no longer be heard or be able to text. They'll
still be able to play unless they have violated some
(23:24):
other rules, in which case they could get you know,
booted and banned, but they won't be heard by anybody,
which I think is a blessing. Uh. In order for
this to work, however, is being a reactive system. Players
will still need to flag offensive gamers to alert the
moderation team to look into them. So if you're playing,
and you encounter someone who is just being the worst,
(23:45):
you can flag them. Then, at least hypothetically, the content
moderation team will take a closer look and listen in
on chat and start looking at the text messages, and
if they see that, in fact, there are instances of
a use, they will then mute the player. Still, considering
all the types of stuff that can get shouted about
in these games, I think that's a good choice. It's
(24:07):
not the best. There are more proactive approaches to this
kind of thing, but at least it's a way of
addressing it. And that's going to be important because war
Zone being a free to play game is bound to
attract a ton of players, and not everyone's going to
be a hateful jerk, but some of them definitely will be.
(24:29):
As for me, I'm not good at these kind of
first person shooter multiplayer games. I can't play at a
competitive level. I would just be a bullet sponge. So
you won't find me playing these online. I just I can't.
My reactions are not good, my aim is not good.
Even with aim assist, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
compete at a decent level, So I just go through
(24:52):
single player first person shooters and then I yell at
computer controlled enemies because I know I can't hurt their feelings. Um.
But yeah, I'm glad to hear this news because I
do watch some streamers and I never want them to
have their their career impacted by things that are outside
their control. The Verge reports that AMC theaters here in
(25:14):
the US and Zoom are partnering to bring interactive meeting
calls to some AMC theaters, allowing the theater to become
kind of a giant meeting space, capable of holding more
than a hundred people as they participate in like a
remote meeting. And I can see that as being an
attractive option for say a large company that has offices
(25:36):
or stores that are all over the place, like if
it's a nationwide company, for example, employees can get together
in a physical space and watch an all hands meeting
on a big old screen. The other thing that this
does is that can reinforce that feeling that your boss
literally towers over you and that the power dynamic is
(25:57):
incredibly unbalanced, and that helps you visual is that enormous
gap between your position and that of your boss. Maybe
I'm getting a bit too cynical about this, But honestly,
that's the first thing that popped into my head is like, gosh,
what would make me feel like I had really been
put in my place? Oh? I know what if my
boss were five stories tall and looking down at me
while telling me about the company. AMC says it's planning
(26:21):
on installing the service in seventeen major US markets next year,
so it's not coming to every AMC everywhere, but it
should be rolling out throughout If I'm being serious, I
can see the value of this, Like I getting people
together does have a certain value to it, and uh,
for a distributed company, one that has locations across lots
(26:44):
of different regions, it could be a practical solution as
opposed to having every single person individually logging into a
meeting from their own computer. But yeah, it's hard to
get around that fact of you're looking at an enormous
movie screen and by necessity everything has to be enlarged
so that the folks sitting in the back can have
(27:04):
a view of what's going on. To also the thought
of my boss's voice coming over a surround sound system
with like Dolby Base to it also terrifying. Maybe I'm
thinking about this too much. You know what, We're gonna
take another quick break and I'm gonna calm down, and
then we'll cover the rest of the tech news. Some
(27:33):
engineers and researchers at m I T, the University of Minnesota,
and Samsung have developed a new kind of Terra Hurts
camera that can operate at room temperature and room pressure,
which opens up the possibility for this tech to be
used in many different areas, including stuff like airport security.
So the cameras capable of generating and detecting waves and
(27:55):
the terror Hurts range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This puts
this kind of radiation between microwaves and visible light. It
inhabits that space, and these waves can penetrate lots of
different kinds of materials, non metallic materials, not all of them,
but a lot of them, and that's one reason why
it could be useful in security operations. They can also
(28:18):
detect signatures of certain molecules, so in an industrial setting,
you could use this kind of technology to analyze materials
for certain types of molecules, but you can do it
in a non invasive, nondestructive way that could be really
valuable to the camera works by sending out light. It
stimulates these little particles called quantum dots, which I've talked
(28:39):
about in tech stuff episodes from a long time ago.
I probably need to do a new one. But it
stimulates quantum dots by using a terror hurts wave. So
it generates a terror hurts wave, sends that to affect
these quantum dots, which then emit light, and that light
can then be recorded by a sensor similar to the
kind we use in digital cameras. The team created a
(29:00):
device that produces images that not just show what was imaged,
but can show the polarization state of terror Hurts waves,
which can give you ideas as to the nature of
whatever was image. And I think of this tech as
being similar to kind of like thermal imaging sensors. Thermal
imaging goggles, for example, detect infrared radiation and they send
(29:23):
that data to a system that converts the information into
something we can see. So when you put on thermal
goggles and you see like that heat signature, you know,
like predator vision, that that's thanks to a system that
is taking the thermal information and then matching that two
colors that we can see in order to indicate levels
of heat. Otherwise it would just be invisible to us,
(29:45):
So it has to be converted into the visible range
for us to be able to see it, right, That
makes sense, Same sort of thing here. The researchers have
made big strides towards solving some massive engineering challenges when
using terror hurts cameras. You know, being able to operate
a room to sure and at room pressure is huge,
But there are other obstacles that we have to overcome
before this tech could go into widespread use, namely, generating
(30:08):
terror hurts waves in the first place is a complicated process,
and the current tech that we have to rely upon
uses really expensive large laser systems, so it's not something
that would be practical right now. We would need to
make greater strides in being able to create terror hurts
waves without the reliance of things like laser systems, which
(30:28):
people are working on, but we have ways to go. Recently,
representatives at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Observatory in Chile,
which houses large important radio antenna that are used in
astronomical observations, revealed that the facility had to shut down
starting in late October due to a cyber attack. The
(30:49):
rep said the attackers did not affect scientific data, so
they weren't able to compromise information from recent observations. Nor
were they able to get actual access to the antennas themselves,
so they weren't able to damage the array of radio antennas.
But other network systems were affected, you know, things like
administrative systems, email systems, that kind of stuff, so they
(31:11):
had to shut it down to contain it. The statement
indicated that the attack has been contained, but an investigation
is ongoing and as of now they are unsure when
the observatory will be able to go back to normal operations.
I've done episodes about AI powered machines competing against humans
in various games, as well as the related topic of
(31:32):
solvable versus unsolvable games. So a solvable game is one that,
if you assume both players are playing perfectly, you can
predict the outcome from any position even before a single
move is made. You know, you have to have complete
information about the game in order for this to work,
but it is possible. So for example, in Connect four,
(31:54):
assuming that both players are playing perfectly, player one will
all days win just from the beginning Anyway, there are
other games that have lots of different potential outcomes, and
some of those are games that humans were for a
very long time able to dominate. So you've likely heard
about the various chess programs like Deep Blue that played
(32:15):
at superhuman levels and were able to beat chess champions.
But another board game that computers for a long time
we're good at, but not not better than humans. But
then eventually overtook us is Go. So back in two
thousand and sixteen, Alpha Go and AI emerged as a
formidable computer opponent, defeating the best human Go players, and
(32:40):
so for the first time in history, a computer was
able to play Go at a level better than expert humans.
But recently, some researchers found that they could beat a
go playing AI called Cateago, which is also capable of
beating human champions. But they could beat Catego using a
(33:01):
very quirky strategy. So the researchers took a much weaker
go playing AI program. So they got like a computer
program that can play Go, but it plays it at
a level where even amateur players human players can defeat
this AI without much trouble. And then they took this
(33:23):
week Ai Go game playing system and put it up
against Catego, which has beaten human champions, and they found
that if they trained the weak AI to go after
some blind spots and Catego strategy, they could actually have
this inferior AI defeat a much stronger one, which sounds
(33:45):
really weird, right. I mean, we humans can get pantsed
by Cateago, but we can beat this weaker AI system. However,
the weaker AI system can beat Catego. It's kind of
like paper rock scissors in that way, and you might think, well,
how is this even possible? Bowl Well, during the training
process for Catego, Catego would refine its approach by playing
(34:07):
millions of games against itself. But this refining process meant
that over time, Catego would naturally concentrate on particular moves
and sequences within the game and migrate away from more rare,
outlying possibilities. And that meant that some legal moves were
largely ignored because they were just not likely to occur.
(34:29):
But this weaker AI, by focusing on those unlikely moves,
was able to make moves that Catego wasn't able to anticipate.
And that's interesting because it meant that this system that
could potentially just beat the best go players could be
defeated by something far inferior, and that should also raise
(34:50):
red flags to us not not for go necessarily. This
is an entertaining version of a larger issue that we
should really pay attention to. When I hear a story
like this, I think about other uses of AI, especially
AI that has been trained through machine learning in processes
similar to kindago and AI can sometimes, on the surface
(35:15):
appear to be really capable, but knowing that it can
be thrown for a loop if it encounters something that's
outside its training parameters should make us wary. Take, for example,
self driving cars. While we can train autonomous driving systems
in countless scenarios, and we can take information from real
world experiences and use that to continue to to augment
(35:39):
as self driving systems capabilities, the fact is the real
world could throw some really strange stuff at us occasionally.
And while humans might be able to make a split
second decision and avoid an accident even if they encounter
something they have never seen before, and AI system can
lack that capability and make a bad choice, which is
(36:02):
one of the biggest challenges when we come to truly
refining AI for specific use that we need to remember
that with these these machine learning processes, we can create
blind spots, and those blind spots. If it's a possibility
that those blind spots could occur in the real world,
they will occur, and when they do, it's going to
(36:24):
throw these AI systems for a loop. Whether that AI
system is used to detect things like you know, financial uh,
misappropriation of funds, or it's designed to control a car
as it goes down the highway or whatever. If there
are blind spots that are possible, then they will happen
(36:45):
at some point or another, and we need to be
on the lookout for that kind of thing. It's fun
with go not so much fun if you're in a
car that's being controlled by a robot and there's no
human controls available to you. That would be scary. Finally,
talking about scary, Palmer Lucky, who's the guy who created
(37:06):
the oculus and then subsequently went on to reveal that
he can be a pretty awful person, has created a
VR headset that can kill you. He posted about this
on his blog over the weekend. Because November six, two
twenty two is an important date in the fictional series
Sword Art Online. So in that series, a deranged tech
(37:30):
genius creates a really immersive game and a VR headset
used to access that game, and it's supposed to be
the most incredible experience ever. But what people don't know
is that he also built into this headset, which is
called the Nerve Gear, a system of powerful microwaves that
(37:50):
are designed to kill the user if they die in
the game. So if you die in the game, you
die in real life. It's an old sci fi trope.
Similar Literally, you cannot remove the nerve Gear without activating
the kill switch, which makes me think of movies like
Battle Royale where you've got characters wearing explosive collars. That
(38:11):
the Hunger games is the same way the explosive colors,
where they can activate the collar and kill someone if
they are breaking the rules of the game or they're
in the wrong region at the wrong time. Well, Palmer
thought this was such a cool idea he built something similar.
He didn't use microwaves because he can't really mantorize that
technology to a point where you could fit it into
(38:32):
a headset. So instead of using microwaves, he has used explosives.
He has positioned three small explosive devices on the headset,
and they are wired, so that should the headset indicate
that the player has died in the game by flashing
a red screen up at a certain frequency, the explosives
(38:53):
will trigger and the player's head would get blowed up
in real life. So you die in the game, this
headset kill you. Palmer then goes on to say he
has yet to build in a system that would make
the headset explode if you tried to take it off,
so it's not like it's tamper proof, so shucks, and
that he also is not sure that the explosives couldn't
be triggered by accident, So in other words, you might
(39:16):
be playing the game not die, but the explosives get
triggered and you get blown up. Anyway, he calls it
more of an office art piece. So yeah, this is
one of those cases where I feel that fandom has
gone a little too far, because sometimes people take away
the wrong lessons from fiction, Like I can just imagine
that Palm are lucky reading or watching Hunger Games or
(39:38):
Battle Royal for that matter, and thinking oh that's a
good idea. That means you you learned the wrong lesson Palmer.
That's not what that's not what they're trying to teach whatever. Anyway,
you know, I I don't assume that anyone's ever going
to actually be putting these things on unless we truly
(39:59):
enter a dystopian sure, in which case I'll be roving
the deserts looking for gas. Because I've already decided the
mad Max approach is my way. I kind of dig
the punk aesthetic, so that's that's kind of my I'm
not gonna be worried about the virtual reality stuff so much.
It will be going after petrol. I guess that's it
for this news episode of tech Stuff. We will be
(40:21):
back on Thursday with another news episode. As a reminder, tomorrow,
we are publishing an episode of The Restless Ones in
the tech Stuff feed, and I encourage you to listen
to it. It's a good show and you might discover
that you want to dive into the entire series because
I talked to a lot of interesting people this past year.
Um and yeah, check it out. If you have suggestions
(40:44):
for future topics I should cover in tech Stuff, please
reach out to me. A couple different ways to do that.
You can download the I Heart Radio app, which is
free to downloads free to use. You can navigate over
to tech Stuff by putting tech Stuff in the search
field you'll see on the tech Stuff page there's the
little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can
leave a voice message up to thirty seconds long let
(41:05):
me know what you would like to hear in future episodes,
or if you prefer, you can get in touch with
me over on Twitter. The handle for the show is
tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you
again really soon Y. Tech Stuff is an i Heart
(41:25):
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
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TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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