July 19, 2022 • 18 mins
Twitter wants to bring its case against Elon Musk's refusal to go through with his acquisition of the company, and it wants that case to happen in September. Musk argues that the case should be pushed to February of next year. Plus we learn about another Russia fining Google, Apple being sued for being anticompetitive (again) and more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Pay there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you? It is time for
the tech news for Tuesday, July two. And first are
(00:25):
quick obligatory update on the Elon Musk Twitter situation. Twitter
wants to take Musk to court as early as September
uh in order to force him to acquire the company
that he agreed to acquire. Musk has argued that more
time is needed to prove that Twitter is infested with
bots to a point that would justify backing out of
(00:47):
the agreement to purchase the company, so he wants to
push the trial to February of next year. Late February,
i might add, and today a judge will hear Twitter's
motion for a September trial make a decision on that.
So it's possible that later this week we'll actually know
when this is going to head to the courts. The
(01:07):
general sense that I'm picking up reading various analysts takes
about this case is that Musk's argument is exceedingly weak.
A lot of folks feel that it's pretty much all
but guaranteed that the courts will force him to either
go through the deal or he'll have to pay a
hefty settlement to get out of it. But don't take
(01:28):
anything for granted. When it comes to Elon Musk. Sometimes
the absurd is normal. So while that seems to be
the general sense at the moment, doesn't necessarily mean that's
where things are going to head. Albania's government has been
digitizing its agencies over the recent past, and it launched
(01:49):
an online portal for most government agencies and departments earlier
this year. Now, the government has had to take those
websites offline because of a cyber attack. The government said
the attack was synchronized and sophisticated, and that it originated
outside of Albania. The government is currently working with Microsoft
as well as a cybersecurity company to get systems back
(02:11):
online and safe from further attacks. No word as of
the time of this recording on who was responsible for
carrying out those attacks or what their goal was beyond disruption.
Russia has hit Google with a twenty one point one
billion rouble fine that amounts to about three seventy four
million dollars, and you might wonder Okay, well, what's the deal. Well,
(02:34):
the Russian government says that Google has failed to remove
prohibited information, namely information regarding Russia's invasion and war in Ukraine.
Google has also blocked state backed Russian media from posting
on platforms like YouTube. So that is a double whammy
against the Russian government, which has been leaning really hard
(02:55):
on its propaganda machine to fight back against Russian citizens
opposition to the war in Ukraine. The Affinity Credit Union,
which is based in the United States state of Iowa,
has filed a lawsuit against Apple. At the heart of
this complaint is yet another charge of Apple engaging in
anti competitive practices, something we've heard a lot of in
(03:18):
the recent past. This time it's regarding its mobile wallet
and contactless payment system. So essentially, this lawsuit argues that
Apple requires all payment card issuers that is, credit cards
and debit cards to use Apple's mobile wallet if they
want their customers to be able to use contactless payment.
(03:39):
Apple only allows its own digital wallet to use that feature,
so while you could download a different digital wallet on
an iOS device, that wallet would not be able to
take advantage of contactless payment. Further, to get access to
Apple's mobile wallet, payment card issuers have to pay a
fee on all credit or debit transactions. Now, if you
(04:02):
contrast that with Android, you can actually on an Android
device have all sorts of different mobile wallets downloaded to
the device, and all of them can use contactless payment,
and they don't levy fees on payment card issuers. And
so you can see where there's some fuel for a
lawsuit here. Apple has been the target of numerous lawsuits
like this one fairly recently, as more companies and governments
(04:26):
scrutinized the company's practices, and over the last few years,
Apple has really leaned more heavily on being a company
that offers and facilitates services more than being a company
known for focusing on new innovative hardware. Of course, Apple
still does make hardware, still releases hardware. We still get
(04:46):
new iPhones and and Max and all that kind of stuff,
But it's been a few years since Apple has really
been touted as an innovative hardware company, and Tim Cook
has really put a lot of enthusiasm behind developing Apple
as a services company, because, of course, you can only
(05:08):
sell a piece of hardware to a person once, right,
If I sell you an iPhone. I can't sell that
same iPhone a second time. But if I get you
on a service that has a recurring subscription fee, I
can have a paying customer for you know, an indeterminate
amount of time. It's not just a one time thing.
(05:29):
So Tim Cook has really pushed the company into that
kind of revenue model. However, the structures that Apple has
built in order to give itself a dominant position on
its own platform has brought it under scrutiny, and it
may turn out that this focus on services is going
to cause a lot more headaches as Apple tries to
avoid accusations of restricting competition on its own platforms. Well,
(05:52):
I don't know if you happen to know this, but
we are still in the middle of a pandemic. Anyway.
That pandemic has forced some rapid and dramatic changes across
our lives, which is again staying the obvious and then
includes how we work. And that leads us to our
next story, which is that Meta, the company that owns
you know, Facebook and Instagram, has discovered that when hiring
(06:14):
folks who wanted to work remotely, they actually saw an
unexpected side benefit that the new hires were more diverse
than what the company typically saw when it would hire
new employees who were coming into work at the office.
So there were more women and there were more people
of color in the hires that they were bringing on.
(06:36):
The Washington Post ran an article about this, showing that
the hiring saw people from underrepresentative groups joining the company
in larger numbers than before. Now, I've always been a
big proponent of purposefully making moves like that, you know,
actively and consciously working to diversify our workforce because more
perspectives and different ways of coming up with ideas have
(07:00):
an enormous benefit on the company's operations, and it can
also help a company avoid making decisions that would in
hindsight be viewed as being what I like to call
bone headed, or misogynistic or racist. It's good to have
voices that can say, hey, that's not such a good
idea on occasion. Anyway. This report suggests that these underrepresented
(07:23):
groups are more comfortable working remotely, and it further indicates
that Silicon Valley offices aren't really known for their diversity,
so not surprisingly, the region isn't really favored by underrepresented
groups who might feel pressured or they might encounter microaggressions
(07:44):
as they go to the office every day, and of
course by working from home, they sidestep a lot of
that and it ends up causing less stress on their
lives as they try and do their jobs. So when
I read these articles, I realized that, you know, listening
really is important and that folks like me need to
do a lot more listening. Anyway, it was interesting consequence
(08:07):
that that followed the move to remote work, you know,
to see this increase in diversity, and hopefully we'll see
increase diversity in Meta and other tech companies moving forward,
because honestly, we all benefit from that. One issue that
has plagued Amazon, apart from its workers having the temerity
to want to unionize the radicals, is the issue of
(08:31):
fake reviews. UH. Fake reviews skew results in Amazon's searches,
and they guide people to purchasing products that don't justify
the glowing five star ratings that have been posted by
fake accounts or people who are paid or otherwise compensated
in order to generate positive reviews. And Amazon has made
another big move to push back against this trend of
(08:52):
fake reviews by taking legal action against more than ten
thousand Facebook group administrators. So those groups, according to Amazon,
coordinate and facilitate fake reviews for Amazon products or products
that are listed on Amazon, not just Amazon products, and
they promised free stuff to folks who will post fake
reviews for a selection of products. Amazon has been waging
(09:15):
war against fake reviews for a while now, going so
far as to ban certain merchants from the platform, even
really big notable ones. But this is interesting to see
them going after the groups that are meant to to
recruit people to post these fake reviews. Okay, we're gonna
take a quick break and when we come back, we'll
have a few more news items. Okay, we're back. Next
(09:45):
news item up. Clear Trip a flight booking website that's
popular in India. Though lots of places actually use clear Trip,
it's just mostly used in India. Uh. It's also accompanied
by the way that Walmart has a majority ownership in
has recently had a data breach that was serious enough
to prompt the company to alert customers about it. The
(10:06):
company says that someone gained illegal and unauthorized access to
quote a part of clear trips internal systems end quote.
They also said the intrusion only essentially scraped surface level
data like a customer's profile information, but not like their
sensitive info like passwords and payment methods and such, although
(10:27):
they did say, hey, if it makes you feel better,
you can reset your password. The newspaper The Register contacted
clear Trip to get more information about this. They asked
what data did the intruders specifically gain access to, how
much were they able to access, how did they gain
access into the system in the first place, did they
extract any information? Is that detectable? And when the heck
(10:50):
did this happen? And when did clear Trip actually alert customers?
Now when it happened is a big deal because India
has a law that states any company that detects a
data breach has the responsibility to report the breach to
authorities within six hours. Anyway, as of this recording, clear
Trip had not clarified the matter. Samsung tweeted out a
(11:10):
series of messages that created a puzzle for the curious.
The puzzle included a message saying when will something greater arrive?
And then this was followed by six circles, and each
circle had had slightly different shades different colors of circles,
and another message had a grid of letters symbols and
numbers arranged. And then a third message had a a
(11:35):
grid similar grid, same with same height, but instead of
numbers and symbols and such, it had circles with different
colors in them. Now collectively that puzzle would reveal a date.
And see what would happen is you would have to
look at those six circles in the first picture, and
then you would find identical shaded circles that were in
(11:57):
the third picture of the circles that were in the grid.
So you'd find the ones that matched the shade, so
circle number one had matched a specific circle within the grid.
Then you would look for the corresponding symbol that was
in the same same position of the grid on picture
number two. I know it sounds confusing, but ultimately, if
(12:18):
you did all this matching, you would discover that the
an original message was spelling out the date zero eight
one zero to two, which if we're reading dates the
way we Americans do, which is the right way, that
would be August two. Of course, could be that we're
supposed to read the date the wrong way, in which
(12:40):
case it's the eighth of October. But you know that
would just be silly, right it's gotta be August right
either way, most folks expect Samsung will be announcing a
few new products, including a Galaxy Fold four, a Galaxy
Flip four, and a Galaxy Watch five. Hopefully the announcement
itself will be more exciting than the puzzle was. Earlier
(13:00):
in this episode, I talked about how Elon Musk is
leaning hard on the bots issue on Twitter to justify
backing out of the acquisition deal. Well, other folks apparently
leaned on bots hard to elevate the call for Warner
Brothers to release the so called Snyder cut of the
Justice League movie. Rolling Stone reports that fake accounts and
bots amplified the message and that it was above the
(13:23):
normal threshold. You know, bots usually make up three to
five percent of all accounts that are involved in conversations
on trending topics, but when it came to the Snyder cut,
it was more like thirteen. Now, granted, that still means
around seven of all the accounts that we're calling for
a Snyder cut were legitimate. They were from real users,
(13:45):
So it's not like this was a holy manufactured online crusade,
but it is an interesting outlier. Like why why this
topic why were more bots calling for this than anything else.
Warner Media actually investigated the issue after receiving numerous complaints
that the call for the Snyder cut wasn't all it
appeared to be, which makes you wonder why, Like, why
(14:07):
was this such a big deal? Why were people so
upset one way or the other? I mean, I get why,
like fans wanted to see what the original intended movie was,
but I don't. I don't know why there was controversy
on either side apart from like some other issues with Snyder,
But I don't know. This one really confuses me. And
(14:28):
why bring bots into it? Then? I need to know,
So I'm hoping that we learned more about this. The
M I T Technology Review has a fun article titled
Sony's Racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice
and fast. So we're talking about car racing here, and
we're actually talking about video game or simulated car racing.
(14:50):
Using Grand Tarismo as the game engine, so to speak,
Sony developed an AI that could operate within the rules
of the game. So by that, I mean this AI
was operating like an actual driver. It was not able
to bend physics and cheat. I know, Anyone who's played
racing games knows that sometimes these games will fudge the
(15:12):
physics a bit, like there's always cases with things like
rubber banding. Rubber Banding is when um the the You know,
if if you get too far ahead of all the
AI controlled cars, they suddenly magically catch up to you,
as if they were attached to you by an invisible
rubber band. That was not going on here, at least
according to Sony that was not the case. Like this
(15:32):
was all legit where the AI had to operate by
the same rules as any human driver would, and it
quickly showed that on a blank racetrack it could. It
could actually race faster than humans could. It didn't do
so well in full races, like when the racetrack had
a whole group of human drivers in it. The AI
(15:55):
wasn't as competitive until Sony went and tweaked the AI
brought it back, and then it did really well and
was able to beat human drivers again. The AI, which
is called Gt. Sophie, interacts with the game ten times
a second. It collects information about the AI vehicle's position
relative to the track as well as relative to the
(16:16):
other racers, and it also tracks the physical forces that
are all acting upon the vehicle, which means that quote
unquote knows when to do things like apply the brakes
or begin a turn without pushing the car past its limitations.
The article goes into a bit more detail as to
the process that Sony used to train the AI, and
it's really interesting stuff. So if you're interested in this topic,
(16:37):
I recommend you check that article out again. It is
titled Sony's Racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being
nice and fast, and it's in the M I T
Technology Review. Finally, and in similar news, Microsoft recently announced
Project air Sim, which quote uses the power of Azure
to generate massive amounts of data for training AIM models
(17:00):
on exactly which actions to take at each phase of
flight from takeoff to cruising to landing end quote. According
to Jake's Siegel of Microsoft, the idea is that Project
air Sim will create realistic simulations of various flight conditions
while training AI on how to pilot an aircraft in
those situations, all with the goal to accelerate autonomous aircraft development.
(17:23):
And when I say aircraft, you could really substitute the
word drone in there pretty reliably. So Microsoft has built
a platform that will allow drone manufacturers to refine their
autonomous flying systems. This product replaces an earlier one that
was just called air sim, but that one required customers
to have a deeper knowledge and experience with machine learning systems.
(17:44):
Project air sim simplifies matters. It kind of keeps all
that pesky coding stuff behind a user interface that's more
intuitive for customers to use. And that's it for the
news for Tuesday, July two thousand twenty two. If you
have any suggestions for future topics on tech Stuff, please
reach out to me. One way to do that is
to download the i Heart Radio app, navigate to tech Stuff,
(18:07):
use that little microphone icon, record a voice message up
to thirty seconds in length and let me know. Or
you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the
show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Ye. Tex Stuff is an
(18:28):
I Heart 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 I Heart Radio.
Pay there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you? It is time for
the tech news for Tuesday, July two. And first are
(00:25):
quick obligatory update on the Elon Musk Twitter situation. Twitter
wants to take Musk to court as early as September
uh in order to force him to acquire the company
that he agreed to acquire. Musk has argued that more
time is needed to prove that Twitter is infested with
bots to a point that would justify backing out of
(00:47):
the agreement to purchase the company, so he wants to
push the trial to February of next year. Late February,
i might add, and today a judge will hear Twitter's
motion for a September trial make a decision on that.
So it's possible that later this week we'll actually know
when this is going to head to the courts. The
(01:07):
general sense that I'm picking up reading various analysts takes
about this case is that Musk's argument is exceedingly weak.
A lot of folks feel that it's pretty much all
but guaranteed that the courts will force him to either
go through the deal or he'll have to pay a
hefty settlement to get out of it. But don't take
(01:28):
anything for granted. When it comes to Elon Musk. Sometimes
the absurd is normal. So while that seems to be
the general sense at the moment, doesn't necessarily mean that's
where things are going to head. Albania's government has been
digitizing its agencies over the recent past, and it launched
(01:49):
an online portal for most government agencies and departments earlier
this year. Now, the government has had to take those
websites offline because of a cyber attack. The government said
the attack was synchronized and sophisticated, and that it originated
outside of Albania. The government is currently working with Microsoft
as well as a cybersecurity company to get systems back
(02:11):
online and safe from further attacks. No word as of
the time of this recording on who was responsible for
carrying out those attacks or what their goal was beyond disruption.
Russia has hit Google with a twenty one point one
billion rouble fine that amounts to about three seventy four
million dollars, and you might wonder Okay, well, what's the deal. Well,
(02:34):
the Russian government says that Google has failed to remove
prohibited information, namely information regarding Russia's invasion and war in Ukraine.
Google has also blocked state backed Russian media from posting
on platforms like YouTube. So that is a double whammy
against the Russian government, which has been leaning really hard
(02:55):
on its propaganda machine to fight back against Russian citizens
opposition to the war in Ukraine. The Affinity Credit Union,
which is based in the United States state of Iowa,
has filed a lawsuit against Apple. At the heart of
this complaint is yet another charge of Apple engaging in
anti competitive practices, something we've heard a lot of in
(03:18):
the recent past. This time it's regarding its mobile wallet
and contactless payment system. So essentially, this lawsuit argues that
Apple requires all payment card issuers that is, credit cards
and debit cards to use Apple's mobile wallet if they
want their customers to be able to use contactless payment.
(03:39):
Apple only allows its own digital wallet to use that feature,
so while you could download a different digital wallet on
an iOS device, that wallet would not be able to
take advantage of contactless payment. Further, to get access to
Apple's mobile wallet, payment card issuers have to pay a
fee on all credit or debit transactions. Now, if you
(04:02):
contrast that with Android, you can actually on an Android
device have all sorts of different mobile wallets downloaded to
the device, and all of them can use contactless payment,
and they don't levy fees on payment card issuers. And
so you can see where there's some fuel for a
lawsuit here. Apple has been the target of numerous lawsuits
like this one fairly recently, as more companies and governments
(04:26):
scrutinized the company's practices, and over the last few years,
Apple has really leaned more heavily on being a company
that offers and facilitates services more than being a company
known for focusing on new innovative hardware. Of course, Apple
still does make hardware, still releases hardware. We still get
(04:46):
new iPhones and and Max and all that kind of stuff,
But it's been a few years since Apple has really
been touted as an innovative hardware company, and Tim Cook
has really put a lot of enthusiasm behind developing Apple
as a services company, because, of course, you can only
(05:08):
sell a piece of hardware to a person once, right,
If I sell you an iPhone. I can't sell that
same iPhone a second time. But if I get you
on a service that has a recurring subscription fee, I
can have a paying customer for you know, an indeterminate
amount of time. It's not just a one time thing.
(05:29):
So Tim Cook has really pushed the company into that
kind of revenue model. However, the structures that Apple has
built in order to give itself a dominant position on
its own platform has brought it under scrutiny, and it
may turn out that this focus on services is going
to cause a lot more headaches as Apple tries to
avoid accusations of restricting competition on its own platforms. Well,
(05:52):
I don't know if you happen to know this, but
we are still in the middle of a pandemic. Anyway.
That pandemic has forced some rapid and dramatic changes across
our lives, which is again staying the obvious and then
includes how we work. And that leads us to our
next story, which is that Meta, the company that owns
you know, Facebook and Instagram, has discovered that when hiring
(06:14):
folks who wanted to work remotely, they actually saw an
unexpected side benefit that the new hires were more diverse
than what the company typically saw when it would hire
new employees who were coming into work at the office.
So there were more women and there were more people
of color in the hires that they were bringing on.
(06:36):
The Washington Post ran an article about this, showing that
the hiring saw people from underrepresentative groups joining the company
in larger numbers than before. Now, I've always been a
big proponent of purposefully making moves like that, you know,
actively and consciously working to diversify our workforce because more
perspectives and different ways of coming up with ideas have
(07:00):
an enormous benefit on the company's operations, and it can
also help a company avoid making decisions that would in
hindsight be viewed as being what I like to call
bone headed, or misogynistic or racist. It's good to have
voices that can say, hey, that's not such a good
idea on occasion. Anyway. This report suggests that these underrepresented
(07:23):
groups are more comfortable working remotely, and it further indicates
that Silicon Valley offices aren't really known for their diversity,
so not surprisingly, the region isn't really favored by underrepresented
groups who might feel pressured or they might encounter microaggressions
(07:44):
as they go to the office every day, and of
course by working from home, they sidestep a lot of
that and it ends up causing less stress on their
lives as they try and do their jobs. So when
I read these articles, I realized that, you know, listening
really is important and that folks like me need to
do a lot more listening. Anyway, it was interesting consequence
(08:07):
that that followed the move to remote work, you know,
to see this increase in diversity, and hopefully we'll see
increase diversity in Meta and other tech companies moving forward,
because honestly, we all benefit from that. One issue that
has plagued Amazon, apart from its workers having the temerity
to want to unionize the radicals, is the issue of
(08:31):
fake reviews. UH. Fake reviews skew results in Amazon's searches,
and they guide people to purchasing products that don't justify
the glowing five star ratings that have been posted by
fake accounts or people who are paid or otherwise compensated
in order to generate positive reviews. And Amazon has made
another big move to push back against this trend of
(08:52):
fake reviews by taking legal action against more than ten
thousand Facebook group administrators. So those groups, according to Amazon,
coordinate and facilitate fake reviews for Amazon products or products
that are listed on Amazon, not just Amazon products, and
they promised free stuff to folks who will post fake
reviews for a selection of products. Amazon has been waging
(09:15):
war against fake reviews for a while now, going so
far as to ban certain merchants from the platform, even
really big notable ones. But this is interesting to see
them going after the groups that are meant to to
recruit people to post these fake reviews. Okay, we're gonna
take a quick break and when we come back, we'll
have a few more news items. Okay, we're back. Next
(09:45):
news item up. Clear Trip a flight booking website that's
popular in India. Though lots of places actually use clear Trip,
it's just mostly used in India. Uh. It's also accompanied
by the way that Walmart has a majority ownership in
has recently had a data breach that was serious enough
to prompt the company to alert customers about it. The
(10:06):
company says that someone gained illegal and unauthorized access to
quote a part of clear trips internal systems end quote.
They also said the intrusion only essentially scraped surface level
data like a customer's profile information, but not like their
sensitive info like passwords and payment methods and such, although
(10:27):
they did say, hey, if it makes you feel better,
you can reset your password. The newspaper The Register contacted
clear Trip to get more information about this. They asked
what data did the intruders specifically gain access to, how
much were they able to access, how did they gain
access into the system in the first place, did they
extract any information? Is that detectable? And when the heck
(10:50):
did this happen? And when did clear Trip actually alert customers?
Now when it happened is a big deal because India
has a law that states any company that detects a
data breach has the responsibility to report the breach to
authorities within six hours. Anyway, as of this recording, clear
Trip had not clarified the matter. Samsung tweeted out a
(11:10):
series of messages that created a puzzle for the curious.
The puzzle included a message saying when will something greater arrive?
And then this was followed by six circles, and each
circle had had slightly different shades different colors of circles,
and another message had a grid of letters symbols and
numbers arranged. And then a third message had a a
(11:35):
grid similar grid, same with same height, but instead of
numbers and symbols and such, it had circles with different
colors in them. Now collectively that puzzle would reveal a date.
And see what would happen is you would have to
look at those six circles in the first picture, and
then you would find identical shaded circles that were in
(11:57):
the third picture of the circles that were in the grid.
So you'd find the ones that matched the shade, so
circle number one had matched a specific circle within the grid.
Then you would look for the corresponding symbol that was
in the same same position of the grid on picture
number two. I know it sounds confusing, but ultimately, if
(12:18):
you did all this matching, you would discover that the
an original message was spelling out the date zero eight
one zero to two, which if we're reading dates the
way we Americans do, which is the right way, that
would be August two. Of course, could be that we're
supposed to read the date the wrong way, in which
(12:40):
case it's the eighth of October. But you know that
would just be silly, right it's gotta be August right
either way, most folks expect Samsung will be announcing a
few new products, including a Galaxy Fold four, a Galaxy
Flip four, and a Galaxy Watch five. Hopefully the announcement
itself will be more exciting than the puzzle was. Earlier
(13:00):
in this episode, I talked about how Elon Musk is
leaning hard on the bots issue on Twitter to justify
backing out of the acquisition deal. Well, other folks apparently
leaned on bots hard to elevate the call for Warner
Brothers to release the so called Snyder cut of the
Justice League movie. Rolling Stone reports that fake accounts and
bots amplified the message and that it was above the
(13:23):
normal threshold. You know, bots usually make up three to
five percent of all accounts that are involved in conversations
on trending topics, but when it came to the Snyder cut,
it was more like thirteen. Now, granted, that still means
around seven of all the accounts that we're calling for
a Snyder cut were legitimate. They were from real users,
(13:45):
So it's not like this was a holy manufactured online crusade,
but it is an interesting outlier. Like why why this
topic why were more bots calling for this than anything else.
Warner Media actually investigated the issue after receiving numerous complaints
that the call for the Snyder cut wasn't all it
appeared to be, which makes you wonder why, Like, why
(14:07):
was this such a big deal? Why were people so
upset one way or the other? I mean, I get why,
like fans wanted to see what the original intended movie was,
but I don't. I don't know why there was controversy
on either side apart from like some other issues with Snyder,
But I don't know. This one really confuses me. And
(14:28):
why bring bots into it? Then? I need to know,
So I'm hoping that we learned more about this. The
M I T Technology Review has a fun article titled
Sony's Racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being nice
and fast. So we're talking about car racing here, and
we're actually talking about video game or simulated car racing.
(14:50):
Using Grand Tarismo as the game engine, so to speak,
Sony developed an AI that could operate within the rules
of the game. So by that, I mean this AI
was operating like an actual driver. It was not able
to bend physics and cheat. I know, Anyone who's played
racing games knows that sometimes these games will fudge the
(15:12):
physics a bit, like there's always cases with things like
rubber banding. Rubber Banding is when um the the You know,
if if you get too far ahead of all the
AI controlled cars, they suddenly magically catch up to you,
as if they were attached to you by an invisible
rubber band. That was not going on here, at least
according to Sony that was not the case. Like this
(15:32):
was all legit where the AI had to operate by
the same rules as any human driver would, and it
quickly showed that on a blank racetrack it could. It
could actually race faster than humans could. It didn't do
so well in full races, like when the racetrack had
a whole group of human drivers in it. The AI
(15:55):
wasn't as competitive until Sony went and tweaked the AI
brought it back, and then it did really well and
was able to beat human drivers again. The AI, which
is called Gt. Sophie, interacts with the game ten times
a second. It collects information about the AI vehicle's position
relative to the track as well as relative to the
(16:16):
other racers, and it also tracks the physical forces that
are all acting upon the vehicle, which means that quote
unquote knows when to do things like apply the brakes
or begin a turn without pushing the car past its limitations.
The article goes into a bit more detail as to
the process that Sony used to train the AI, and
it's really interesting stuff. So if you're interested in this topic,
(16:37):
I recommend you check that article out again. It is
titled Sony's Racing AI destroyed its human competitors by being
nice and fast, and it's in the M I T
Technology Review. Finally, and in similar news, Microsoft recently announced
Project air Sim, which quote uses the power of Azure
to generate massive amounts of data for training AIM models
(17:00):
on exactly which actions to take at each phase of
flight from takeoff to cruising to landing end quote. According
to Jake's Siegel of Microsoft, the idea is that Project
air Sim will create realistic simulations of various flight conditions
while training AI on how to pilot an aircraft in
those situations, all with the goal to accelerate autonomous aircraft development.
(17:23):
And when I say aircraft, you could really substitute the
word drone in there pretty reliably. So Microsoft has built
a platform that will allow drone manufacturers to refine their
autonomous flying systems. This product replaces an earlier one that
was just called air sim, but that one required customers
to have a deeper knowledge and experience with machine learning systems.
(17:44):
Project air sim simplifies matters. It kind of keeps all
that pesky coding stuff behind a user interface that's more
intuitive for customers to use. And that's it for the
news for Tuesday, July two thousand twenty two. If you
have any suggestions for future topics on tech Stuff, please
reach out to me. One way to do that is
to download the i Heart Radio app, navigate to tech Stuff,
(18:07):
use that little microphone icon, record a voice message up
to thirty seconds in length and let me know. Or
you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the
show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Ye. Tex Stuff is an
(18:28):
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
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you listen to your favorite shows.
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