Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/20 - Instagram Copies The Last Snapchat Feature Left

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, March 20th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Yelp is showing how the restaurant industry is in deep trouble. Instagram makes ready to clone the last Snapchat feature it hadn't copped yet.

Starting point is 00:00:47 The very interesting lessons behind a self-driving startup closing its doors, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. We spoke about this yesterday, but it is actually come to pass. Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video all say they will reduce the resolution quality of their streaming video in the EU to reduce traffic load on the networks. AWS is committing $20 million to launch a diagnostics development unit with 35 partner organizations in order to accelerate research to find a faster, more affordable test for COVID-19, quoting CNBC. One area where we have heard an urgent need is in the research and development of diagnostics, which consist of rapid, accurate detection, and testing of COVID-19, Amazon said. Better diagnostics will help accelerate treatment and containment and in time shorten the course

Starting point is 00:01:45 of this epidemic, end quote. Amazon specifies that the program called the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative is open to accredited research institutions and private entities that are AWS customers. At launch, the program includes 35 global research institutions, startups, and businesses. It will also be supported by an outside tech. technical advisory group made up of, quote, leading scientists, global health policy experts and thought leaders who specialize in infectious disease diagnostics. It hopes to focus these resources specifically on AWS customers that are working on point of care diagnostics or testing that can be done at

Starting point is 00:02:21 home or at a clinic with same-day results. Quote, given the need, the emphasis will be initially on COVID-19, but we will also consider other infectious disease diagnostic projects, Amazon said, end quote. And rounding up this segment of the Corona News of the Hour, Yelp is committing $25 million to local restaurants in the form of waived fees and free services. Yelp reports that its data indicates that U.S. consumer interest in restaurants overall fell 54% over the past week. Instagram is internally testing a Snapchat-like ephemeral feature that will clear chat messages after all members have viewed a thread and closed it. So I guess this means that the

Starting point is 00:03:12 final Snapchat feature that Instagram will clone will be the very same feature that differentiated Snapchat in the first place, quoting TechCrunch. Instagram already has disappearing photo and video messaging, which it launched in February 2018, to let users choose if chat partners can view once, allow replay multiple times for a limited period, or keep in chat permanently. technically you could use the create mode for overlaying words on a colored background to send an ephemeral text, but otherwise you have to use the unsend feature which notifies other people in the thread. But today, reverse engineering specialist and TechCrunch favorite tipster Jane Manchin Wong unearthed something new. Buried in the code of the Android app is the new

Starting point is 00:03:54 monkey mode labeled in the code with the speak no evil monkey emoji. When users enter this mode by swiping up from Instagram direct message threads. They're brought to a dark mode messaging window that starts an empty message thread. When users close this window, any messages from them or their chat partners disappear. The feature works similarly to Snapchat, which clears a chat after all members of a thread have viewed it and closed the chat window, end quote. Microsoft has taken the wrapping off of DirectX12 Ultimate, which it thinks will better unify the features and capabilities of PC gaming by marrying them.

Starting point is 00:04:37 all in a development sense to the Xbox platform. It will be available later this year, but it should also support the Xbox Series X at launch, quoting the verge. DX12 Ultimate isn't a giant leap over standard DX12, the graphics API first released back in 2014, that this Ultimate version is building off of, but it does bring together a number of software advances, most prominently ray tracing 1.1, which will no longer require the GPU pinging the CPU. will make optimizing games for the upcoming Xbox Series X and the latest Nvidia and AMD graphics cards much easier. At the same time, the API is also keeping support for older Xbox and PC hardware intact. For regular consumers, none of

Starting point is 00:05:21 this will mean a whole lot is changing, and it's not going to translate into any immediate and noticeable changes in the graphical quality of existing games. But what it will do is give developers the right tools to ensure everything from next-gen console ray tracing to variable rate shading on PCs using Nvidia RTX cards will be supported on a single platform, end quote. According to a court filing, Anthony Lewandowski, the ex-head of Uber's self-driving car operations, is pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets from Google in exchange for 32 other charges being dropped. The guilty plea could still lead to a prison sentence of 24 to 30 months for

Starting point is 00:06:08 Levindosky, quoting the Washington Post. LeVendosky admitted to take a single spreadsheet called Schaffer-TL Weekly Updates, Q4 2015. According to court documents, the file contained quarterly goals and weekly metrics and the objectives and key results for Levindoski's team. It also included a summary of technical challenges, the team faced, and some that had been overcome. Levendoski admitted downloading the file to his personal laptop in January 2016. He last accessed the file on February 24, 2016, about a month after leaving Google.

Starting point is 00:06:40 The file was valued at between $550,000 and $1.5 million for the purposes of sentencing guidelines, end quote. Self-driving truck startup Starsky Robotics is shutting down after its CEO cited the unmet promise of AI. This is quoting from a blog post by the founder of Starsky Robotics, Stefan Seltz Axmacher. Quote, timing more than anything else is what I think is to blame for our unfortunate fate. Our approach, I still believe, was the right one, but the space was too overwhelmed with the unmet promise of AI to focus on a practical solution. As those breakthroughs failed to appear, the downpour of investor interest became a drizzle. It also didn't help that last year's tech IPOs took a lot of energy out of the tech industry and that trucking has been in a recession

Starting point is 00:07:33 for 18 or so months. There are too many problems with the AV industry to detail here, the professorial pace at which most teams work, the lack of tangible deployment might, milestones, the open secret that there isn't a robotaxy business model, etc. The biggest, however, is that supervised machine learning doesn't live up to the hype. It isn't actual artificial intelligence akin to C3PO. It's a sophisticated pattern matching tool. Back in 2015, everyone thought their kids wouldn't need to learn how to drive. Supervised machine learning under the auspices of being AI was advancing so quickly in just a few years it had gone from mostly recognizing cats to more or less driving. It seemed that AI was following a Moore's Law curve.

Starting point is 00:08:20 Five years later, and AV professionals are no longer promising artificial general intelligence after the next code commit, instead, the consensus has become that we're at least 10 years away from self-driving cars, end quote. There's also this quote from later in the piece. It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1 billion business with 90% margins than a $5 billion business with 50% margins, even if capital requirements and growth were the same, end quote. I highly recommend reading the whole post for a deeper discussion about the supposed failures in AI and self-driving right now, also about S-curves, and how, as Seltz-Axmacher puts it, no one really wants safety. What they really want are features. There are some key insights

Starting point is 00:09:11 here if you're working in the self-driving space especially, but also if you're doing any kind of startup, really. I'm sharing this post as part of my self-driving cars by 2020 watch, of course, but also because, look, expect that I'll be doing a lot of stories in the coming months about startups closing their doors. I obviously take no joy in that, quite the opposite actually, but get ready for it nonetheless. This is the reality I think we're living in. As one VC adjacent person said recently, first, it'll be the startups that couldn't get traction because coronavirus and a coming wicked recession will give everybody a convenient excuse that will save people's reputations both on the founder and VC side of the table. But after that,

Starting point is 00:09:57 we'll begin to see the companies that are running out of cash. If you don't already have a runway, this person said, it's too late to look for a soft landing now. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. They are a little corona heavy this week, but what are you going to do? They are all tech-related corona stories, though. NBC News looks at how the subreddit R-slash coronavirus has grown to more than 1.2 million members, a million of whom signed up in just the last two weeks. Quote, the coronavirus community is now the third most active subreddit, according to Reddit list, a website that tracks Reddit and one of the fastest growing subreddits ever.

Starting point is 00:10:40 Every day, Boggs and the other moderators work through a Q. of thousands of comments and posts that have been flagged for a review. They coordinate via the message platform Discord to ensure that they aren't duplicating work or to settle any disagreements. Some spend time developing tools to automate or improve their workflow, inviting high-profile scientists and doctors to participate in Ask Me Anything Q&A sessions, and recruiting more moderators. NBC News's medical correspondent Dr. John Torres recently participated in one, end quote. both of my kids, when they were babies, we used these smart thermometers from Kinsa on them. Kinsa thermometers are digital, they're connected to the internet, and they have an accompanying app so you can keep track of readings over time, for example.

Starting point is 00:11:27 In the past, Kinsa thermometers have been able to track the flu better than the CDC can, and now they are a potential tool for turning up cases of COVID-19. Quote, Kinsa's latest map of fever spikes shows areas that are known to have many cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. But the data also point to spots in Florida, Michigan, Arizona, and Eastern Texas, where not as many cases have been reported. Just last Saturday, Kinsa's data indicated an unusual spike in fevers in South Florida, even though it was not known to be a COVID-19 epicenter. Within days, testing showed that South Florida had indeed become an epicenter.

Starting point is 00:12:08 Quote, we can't save it. for sure that these anomalous fever spikes are COVID-19, but we believe this is the earliest signal of where it's occurring, one of the founders said, end quote. Next, Fred Wilson takes a stab at answering my question from earlier as to why crypto has been crashing along with the rest of the markets. He mentions an episode of a podcast with friend of the show, Howard Linson, who was, I believe, the first ever weekend bonus episode guest. Howard's guests on that show said, quote, in panics, all assets are correlated. In other words, everybody wants to be liquid all at the same time. Everybody wants to have cash. Although I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be better cash, but, you know, I digress.

Starting point is 00:12:53 Fred acknowledges all of this, quote, Bitcoin crashed harder than anything in the first few days of the market sell-off. It was down 60% over five days from March 7th to March 12th. But since then, it has recovered nicely and is now down only about 30%. Howard's guest was right. In panics, all assets are correlated because the market needs to de-leverage. Margin loans get called. Leverage bets go bad. Weak hands fold. And in crypto, that happened faster and more furiously than any other asset class, end quote. But Fred comes back to the idea that crypto still remains hard money. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. So he still thinks that crypto is attractive as a hedge against risk, and he thinks that smart money will be heading crypto's way soon. We shall see, I guess. Fred concludes by writing, quote, I'm not going to

Starting point is 00:13:47 write an entire crypto thesis here, but my point is that crypto won't be correlated with the overall market for long. It doesn't even appear to be so, even a week in, end quote. Next, forgive me for phrasing it like this, and please understand the spirit of the words I'm using here, because I'm not trying to be flippant. But the big winners this week in tech have been those who have enabled remote work. Microsoft Teams, as discussed, but also Zoom, the video conferencing startup that went public to great success not so long ago. Protocol says Zoom has conquered video chat, and now it has even bigger plans. Quote, inside the company, Zoom's ambitions match the moment. Its executives believe they can do more than just make great video conferencing. They think Zoom can

Starting point is 00:14:33 change and own the way businesses communicate going forward. They're launching new communication tools to replace desk phones and instant messenger, new AI features designed to make meetings more efficient, and working on ways to use bleeding edge tech to make distributed workforces feel closer together. Think of it this way. We work wanted to reimagine the office as a different kind of place. Zoom wants to reimagine the office as no place at all, end quote. Fast Company says that the tech industry's quest to help us get better sleep is just getting started also. Have you checked out the aura sleep ring yet? Quote, aura is part of a growing industry worth an estimated $70 billion devoted to helping us sleep better. It includes weighted blankets, health optimization sites like Huffington's

Starting point is 00:15:21 Thrive Global, and sleep tracking tech. Big tech companies have already shown interest in the market. Apple acquired sleep tracker, Bet It in 2017. And a year later, Google's life sciences, company Verily, partnered with a medical device company, ResMed, to develop technology for detecting sleep apnea, end quote. And finally today, another TikTok trend story, this time about how TikTok is spawning new genres of music. Quote, before TikTok, this music sometimes called no melody rap, or no mel's, was niche. It found modest popularity on SoundCloud and in local scenes like South Florida and Texas. The lone star state is where Splurge, Quinn NFN, 10K Cash, Gun 40, Tisha Korean, and a legion of other no-melody rappers hail from. Spotify statistics point to Dallas,

Starting point is 00:16:15 in particular as the genre's epicenter. Somewhere along the way, though, TikTok users embraced this sound. It began in 2018 with bass-busted fan remixes of tracks like designers Panda, Rich the kids' plug walk and Comphazines Walk, which has since taken over the app. There are other reasons why bass-driven songs are so popular. Meme culture's love of distortion, dance psychology, and TikTok's structure itself, end quote. Click through to the story for a sampling of what no melody rap actually sounds like. One weekend bonus episode coming at you tomorrow, and then I guess I guess, We all just have to hunker down.

Starting point is 00:17:05 This is shaping up to be a tough weekend, everybody. So be well. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/20 - Instagram Copies The Last Snapchat Feature Left

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