Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you. It's time for the tech news for
the week ending on Friday, October eighteenth, twenty twenty four,
(00:27):
and over at X the platform formerly known as Twitter,
I think I'll always call it that, maybe just offspite anyway,
there was another change in how the platform works, and
it appears to have prompted yet another exodus among a
subset of users. So this time it all has to
do with the block feature. Now, in ye olden days,
(00:50):
if you chose to block someone on Twitter, not only
would they no longer be able to comment on, or
quote or repost any of your tweets, I wouldn't be
able to see any of those tweets in the first place.
So to the blocked person, you would seem to have
disappeared off the platform. But earlier this week, for reasons
I don't fully understand, X revealed that it was going
(01:12):
to change the block feature. And the block feature will
still block someone from commenting on or retweeting your posts,
but they will be able to read everything that you
have tweeted. So now, if I were still on X
Slash Twitter and you were irritating me and I blocked you,
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you would still be able to see everything I posted,
you just couldn't comment or retweet it. Now a lot
of people have balked at this since it has been revealed,
and they pointed out that this can create really dangerous
situations for some users. Let's say that someone's getting stalked
and blocking accounts was one way to limit their visibility
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to the stalker. Well, now the stalker could continue to
read updates and potentially escalate matters, make things worse because
the other person's now not aware of what's going on.
They're just posting, but they don't realize that the person
that they thought was blocked from seeing them can actually
read everything. As Matt Binder of Mashable noted, it appears
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that some folks on X have felt the need to
stretch their metaphorical legs and seek greener pastures or perhaps
bluer skies because X competitor blue Sky announced that in
the twenty four hours following X's announced changes to the
block feature, blue Sky saw half a million users join
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the service now. Blue Sky is behind both X and
metas threads, platforms and users, and all of those platforms
are similar. They're kind of like that microblogging sort of thing.
There's also Mastodon out there. I wouldn't be surprised if
Mastadon also saw a surge of new folks signing on
these days. I'm only kinda sorta on Threads. Even that
(02:57):
is a bit much for me. There are issues with Threads.
I have that the same as my issues with like
Facebook and really Meta in general. So I don't feel
great about posting there, but I have done it a
couple of times. It does help scratch the itch that
Twitter used to satisfy for me back in the day.
But it's not great. Maybe I should switch just a
Blue skyer Maston, or just accept the fact that that
(03:19):
part of my life is over anyway. I don't understand
why X made this choice to change the block feature.
But I should also mention that Meta's Threads announced a
change to its service that's being rolled out gradually, which
is that users will be able to turn on a
feature called activity Status. Now I say turn on, it
may be that the status is turned on by default
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and you have to go in to opt out of it.
But activity status tells you which users are currently online.
So if this is on, if it's active for you,
and it's on, it's not active for me yet I
checked before I recorded today. But if it's on, then
for other people that it's on, you'll see a little
green dot on their profile icon that indicates that they're
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online at that moment. And if the green dot's not there,
it either means that they aren't online or they have
turned off the activity status feature. To me, it sounds
like this is a bad idea too, Like I don't
know anyone who is begging for this. Maybe it's just
that I use threads in a different way. I always
viewed threads just as I viewed Twitter as kind of
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an asynchronous communications tool where you post, but you're not
expecting an immediate response, right, They'll respond when they get
a chance to respond, that's it, and then you respond
when you have a chance. It's not happening in real time.
But Meta appears to be kind of trying to move
threads into that space a little bit. And I don't know,
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maybe that is something that a lot of people have
been asking for. But if you're like me, and you
aren't keen on everybody being aware of when you're on
the service, You'll probably want to turn the activity status
to off if you are in fact using once it
is rolled out. That is, so I'll be curious to
see how this rollout happens. Like I said, I don't
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have it yet, so I don't know if this is
opt out or opt in. I would much prefer it
to be opt in and have it off by default,
but I suspect that will not be how it turns out.
We'll have to see. Sarah Perez of tech Crunch has
an article this week titled Elon Musk's X is changing
its privacy policy to allow third parties to train AI
(05:27):
on your posts. So maybe some of those folks headed
to Blue Sky are more concerned about their posts being
used to fuel our future robotic overlords and less concerned
about the block feature. I don't know. Perez notes that
X changed its privacy policy and it now includes the
option for third party collaborators to slurp up all that
tasted tasting data that you have generated over the years,
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so that the next generation of trollbot or whatever can
lean on the collective wisdom of X, and I do
use all of those terms sarcastically. Users will apparently be
able to opt out of this feature. The new section
of the policy states, quote, depending on your settings or
if you decide to share your data, we may share
or disclose your information with third parties if you do
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not opt out. In some instances, the recipients of the
information may use it for their own independent purposes in
addition to those stated in excess privacy policy, including for example,
to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise
end quote. Perez notes that as of the writing of
this article, there was no clear setting that would relate
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to this policy, so if you went into your settings,
you wouldn't see something that was clearly marked as allowing
you to opt out of this third party collaborator stuff.
But the policy itself won't go into effect until November fifteenth,
so it is possible that that setting will arrive before
or when that happens. Getting back to Meta, the company
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has apparently been making some staff cuts, and they sound
like they're not quite as sweeping as earlier rounds of
layoffs with the company, where like more than ten thousand
people were like go at a time. Alex Heath and
Jay Peters of the Verge report that the layoffs have
affected multiple divisions within Meta, including Instagram, Wattsapp, and the
company's all Things Metaverse department Reality Labs. As Maxwell Zeph
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of tech Crunch has put it, the layoffs meant are
meant to quote reallocate resources within the company end quote.
So that's your standard reorganization slash restructuring language you hear
from corporate entities. Sometimes these moves reflect an organization realizing
that it has overstaffed certain departments and so operations have
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become inefficient and wasteful, so the layoffs are an effort
to realign that. In other cases, it's more like company
leaders have decided they want to try and accomplish more
with less and say like, let's try and do the
same thing we're doing now, but with fewer people, so
are not spending as much money. It's hard to say
what this particular instance really qualifies. As Zeph at tech
(07:58):
Crunch also mentioned that the company declined to answer questions
regarding how many employees in total were let go, but
the layoffs definitely included some prominent folks who have taken
the social media to make it known that they are
currently in the job market. So I'm sure the cuts
are deeply felt within the departments where they happened. It's
just unclear as to how extensive those cuts actually have been.
(08:21):
Instagram has instituted some features to help protect users, particularly teens,
from sextortion attempts, as reported by Ayisha Malik of tech Crunch. Now, previously,
it was possible for someone to use screen capture tools
to copy images that were sent through direct messages. While
the sender would receive a notification that the image they
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had sent had been saved, they couldn't really do anything
about it. And if the recipient of the message chose
to blackmail the sender, you know, threatening to share the
images that were sent to them unless the sender followed
you know, instructions, well that's where the sextortion stuff comes in,
which is pretty damn horrifying. Manipulating someone in order to
(09:03):
give them to send compromising images and then threatening them
by saying you're going to share those potentially with like
friends and family or whatever unless they do whatever it
is you tell them to do. It's disgusting anyway. Now
Instagram prevents screen captures of those kinds of images that
are sent as a view once or allow replay messages.
If it's sent through dms like that, you can no
(09:25):
longer take screen captures. Plus they'll only display on the
mobile version of the app. You cannot access these through
a desktop version of Instagram. They will not display the
images at all in an effort to prevent abuse. This
new process complements Instagram's recent rollout of teen accounts, which
includes a suite of features meant to give younger users
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more protection while they're on the program. Meta has a
lot of ground to make up in this area because
the company has long been criticized for failing to ensure
the safety of younger users while simultaneously trying to court
them over to use the platform. That was a big
part of the whistleblower bruhaha from a couple of years
ago was that the revelation was one Meta at the
(10:10):
time it was Facebook. Facebook was well aware of the
potential harm it could cause, and two, while it did
very little to address that harm, it was actively trying
to get more young people to join the platform. So yeah,
this is an important step, but clearly it's just one
(10:31):
small step on a longer journey. Okay, we've got more
journey ahead of us too, but before we get to that,
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back.
Meda's Oversight Board, which I'll remind you, is an organization
(10:53):
that's independent of Meta. It advises Meta on content moderation decisions.
It is now seeking public comments regard immigration related content
that potentially could be harmful to immigrants. The board has
expressed concern that Meta's current policy only shields vulnerable populations
like immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers from the most harmful
(11:14):
forms of hate speech, but it leaves those people open
to perhaps less overt, but no less dangerous attacks. And
they have shown two examples of posts containing hate speech
or things that are bordering on hate speech that Meta
did not remove even after human review of those items
were brought to the company's attention. So One of them
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happened in Poland and contained a derogatory term for black people.
The other one happened in Germany and featured a picture
of a white, blonde haired, blue eyed woman holding up
her hand, and there was a message saying outsiders should
stop coming into Germany. It got more explicit and hateful
from there, but I don't want to even repeat it
because it's gross. Anyway, Metta left both of those messages
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up even after human review, and it seems pretty clear
to me that the messages included speech that was meant
to incite people and to be expressed at the harm
of vulnerable populations, and that therefore it probably should have
been taken down. And the board suggested that Meta reverse
its decision and take those messages down, but Meta declined.
(12:19):
And this is a good time to remind you that
this oversight board, while it can make content moderation guidelines
for Meta, Meta is in no way obligated to actually
follow those guidelines. It's non binding. But now the board
is looking for public comment about these issues, potentially in
order to pressure Meta to make these changes. Because it's
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one thing for Meta to kind of ignore its oversight board.
It's another thing if there's a big public campaign pressuring
Meta to take more action. That's bad for optics, and
I think Meta is far more sensitive to that than
it is to the guidelines of its own oversight board.
But that's my own personal opinion and we're not done
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yet with Meta. So Reuter's reports that Facebook and Blumhouse
Productions have created a project in which some filmmakers, including
Casey Affleck, the Spurlock Sisters, and Aniche Chiganti. Aniche's piece
is already up. I watched it, and Aniche showed how
he used the tool to change the background or elements
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of videos he shot when he was a child, and
it was kind of interesting, Like there was one where
it shows someone walking down their street in California that
was supposed to be set in Manhattan, so he had
the AI tool changed the background to look like Manhattan.
It did not look like Manhattan. It did look like
a big city, but it looked a little weird. I mean,
it's like AI generative stuff. But his whole point was
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that this was a way to augment the filmmaking experience,
and that he stresses in it, I still needed to
make the movie. I still needed to write everything, that
this wasn't a tool that replaced all that it was
a tool that augmented it. I remain somewhat unconvinced, not
that it could be a tool used to augment I
(14:07):
think it could be. I think generative AI could be
used in ways to augment work that is not necessarily
harmful to creatives. The problem I see is that a
lot of the companies, the production companies that are ultimately
in charge of paying for creatives, that they would just
go and use generative AI as a shortcut and skip
(14:31):
the whole artistic process because we've seen that. We have frankly,
we have seen companies fire creative departments and rely on
generative AI to varying degrees of failure. Really it's not
really success. They're pretty awful at this stage. But anyway,
that's what's going on. It's the movie gen tool or project.
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It'll be curious. I'll be curious to see what Casey
Affleck and the Spurlock sisters create. I haven't seen their
output yet, seen a Niche Chaganti's, but it is interesting
and I'm sure it will propel the conversation forward. I
remain somewhat skeptical, largely because I mean, any project that
is heavily supported by Meta, there's obviously a narrative that's
(15:15):
trying to be promoted there. Caid Mets, Mike Isaac, and
Aaron Griffith have a piece in The New York Times
with the headline Microsoft and Open AI's close partnership shows
signs of fraying. It's well worth reading if you can
get hold of it. The article explains that there are
some interesting clauses in the agreement between the two companies
that suggests the relationship isn't as cozy as was previously thought.
(15:36):
Considering Microsoft has dedicated more than ten billion with a
B dollars of investment into open ai so far, I
mean that's a huge amount of money. So the article
details how open ai has grown kind of frustrated over
stuff like access to money and access to compute power, because,
as I've mentioned before, ai is incredibly expensive, both from
a purely financial standpoint and energy requirements in order to
(16:00):
power all that compute that you need. And you have
companies like open ai that are trying to scale up
and ramp up ever more ambitious project that's kind of
require even more computational power, and yeah, that's incredibly expensive.
One of the things that blew my mind in this
article is that there are estimates that by twenty twenty nine,
the annual computational bill for open ai is going to
(16:24):
be somewhere like thirty seven and a half billion dollars
per year. Like, think how much money you have to make.
If your expenses are thirty seven point five billion dollars,
open ai isn't making enough money to cover its expenses
now they're look they were looking at spending around more
than five billion dollars for compute power this year. So
(16:44):
no wonder. There are a lot of analysts out there
predicting that open ai was going to go bankrupt before
the end of the year, except that they then got
a big influx of cash from another investment round. Yeah,
it's pretty crazy. Also, open ai apparently has a clause
that says if Microsoft gets to artificial General Intelligence or AGI,
then it severs the partnership between the two. And meanwhile,
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Microsoft is apparently worried that it's depending too heavily upon
open ai and so wants to diversify its approach to
artificial intelligence beyond open Ai. It's a really complicated thing,
so I recommend reading that article. It's very informative. Okay.
Couple of space stories. NASA's Artemis project to return to
the Moon continues to hit some snags. A lot of outlets,
(17:27):
including Ours Technica, have plenty of articles listing numerous reasons
why we're not likely to see the Artemis two mission
happen next year, as it was scheduled to happen, but
work continues to prepare for our return to the lunar surface,
and one such element is the development of new spacesuits.
And this week Axiom Space and Prada, as in the
(17:48):
luxury fashion company, unveiled a new spacesuit design. Now it's
not exactly chic, but then aesthetics aren't really as important
as you know, not dying, and as I've mentioned many
times on this and other space is trying to kill you.
So the suits have thermal protection built in that the
companies say will keep astronauts safe from the dangers of
(18:08):
extreme cold temperatures even at the South Lunar Pole in
shadowed regions, for up to two hours at a time. Now,
I'm not sure when this design is going to get
fitted to an actual astronaut for use in space, but
it's pretty cool to see the next evolution of spacesuits. Finally,
if you are aware of this news, I'm not surprised
it was spectacular. SpaceX accomplished an incredible achievement when a
(18:33):
super heavy Falcon booster returned to its launch site after
propelling a payload high into the atmosphere, and as it
did so, an enormous mechanical claw on the tower caught
the booster as it returned under precise control. As Elon
Musk wrote on x the tower caught the rocket and yeah,
seeing the video of this is spectacular. It's hard for
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me to fathom how complicated this was from an engineering standpoint.
Having such precise control of a descent and the perfect
timing for the tower to grasp the booster with its claws,
which are called chopsticks, that is just amazing stuff, really
worth watching. And before I leave, one more reading recommendation
for all of y'all. Lilahmcclellan has a piece on Fortune
(19:17):
dot com that's titled twenty three and Me's entire board
resigned on the same day founder and Vodjitski still thinks
the startup is saveable. And it's a really thoughtful and
I think balanced analysis of the troubled company's challenges in
recent years and a complicated portrait of an assertive and
controversial founder. It's well worth a read. It covers a
(19:38):
lot of territory. That's it for this week. I hope
all of you out there are doing well, and I'll
talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an
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