Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/02 – Coinbase Going Public With A Confident Swagger

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

Coinbase is going public and sharing its numbers ahead of time, which is rare and probably a sign of confidence. The App Store has started rejecting apps ahead of that big new privacy change. Has Tencent’s gaming studio become the biggest in the world? Another Clubhouse clone, this time from Discord. And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: MasterWorks.io promocode ride GivingMultiplier.org/techmeme Links: Coinbase To Go Public on April 14, Announce Q1 Earnings Beforehand (Decrypt) Apple Rejecting Apps With Fingerprinting Enabled As iOS 14 Privacy Enforcement Starts (Forbes) Apple knew it was selling defective MacBook displays, judge concludes (The Verge) Discord’s new Clubhouse-like feature, Stage Channels, is available now (The Verge) Exclusive: Tencent's Timi gaming studio generated $10 billion in 2020, sources say (Reuters) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: People's Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why (Motherboard) 5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next? (Wired) How a Chip Shortage Snarled Everything From Phones to Cars (Bloomberg) Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter (New Yorker) Graphene and Beyond: The Wonder Materials That Could Replace Silicon in Future Tech (WSJ) Turing Award Goes to Creators of Computer Programming Building Blocks (NYTimes) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. more quick pitch to get you to check out our sister podcast, the Kotki Ride Home. Today, Jack is looking at how it turns out we got lucky with that whole Suez Canal thing. It could have been way worse. NASA's Insightlander has observed two strong earthquakes on Mars recently, but how can you have

earthquakes on a planet without tectonic plates? Jack explains. And let me throw in a shout out to two of yesterday's segments that ask if humans could evolve to be venomous. And the Hamilton space jam mashup you never knew you needed. The Kotki Ride Home. It's like a daily Today I Learned podcast. All the cool stuff you miss today. Search for it right now in your podcast app. Kotki, K-O-T-T-K-E, Ride Home. Welcome to the TechMeme Ride Home for Friday, April 2nd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Coinbase is going public and sharing its numbers ahead of time, which is rare and probably a sign of confidence. The App Store has started rejecting apps ahead of that big new privacy change from Apple, has Tencent's gaming

studio become the biggest in the world, another clubhouse clone this time from Discord, and of course the weekend long-reach suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It's official. Coinbase is going public on April 14th, and it will release its Q1 results ahead of that on April 6, which definitely suggests they think they're going to be able to share some impressive numbers, quoting decrypt. The plan is unusual and significant because the results will arrive just days before the company offers its shares to the public and will thus add new guidance for investors looking to determine how much Coinbase shares should be worth. The announcement comes weeks after Coinbase published its 2020 financial results as part of a mandatory

S-1 regulatory filing ahead of going public. Those results showed the company earned a profit of $322 million in 2020 on revenues of more than $1.2 billion, a major jump over 2019 when Coinbase lost $30 million on revenues of just $522 million. The impending earnings announcement will mark the first time Coinbase has publicly disclosed results for a particular quarter. Given the massive crypto bull run that has been underway since December, it's likely the company's Q1 will be the best quarter to date for the company, which earns the vast majority of its revenue from trading commissions, end quote. Ahead of those upcoming privacy changes in iOS 14,

developers are reporting that the App Store has already begun rejecting updates for apps that use third-party SDKs that collect data, which can be used for device fingerprinting. Quoting Forbes. According to mobile marketing analyst Eric Sufert, a software development kit from Adjust, a mobile measurement company,

is causing the problem. If so, it could impact thousands of apps. Adjust says that, it is trusted by over 50,000 apps on its website, and according to app figures, 18% of the apps on the app store and 11% of the apps on Google Play that use attribution providers use adjust. Full disclosure, I do some consulting for Singular, another mobile measurement partner. Device fingerprinting, sometimes called probabilistic attribution, uses a large amount of data about a device to identify it. A measurement company might, for instance, collect data on

software version, time since last system update, time since last restart, location, time zone, and more, even things like battery status, charging level, and amount of disk space. Put it all together and you have something fairly unique. Estimates on degree of uniqueness vary that you can use to track who clicked on an ad, who installed an app, and potentially more. You could also use this data to potentially build a device graph, which includes insights and history on every device your software interacts with. All of that is explicitly forbidden by Apple and iOS 14, where if you want to track people and devices, you need to explicitly ask for and get permission, not unlike GDPR in some ways. Before iOS 14, Apple's IDFA

identifier for advertisers was freely available without consent and became the basis for measuring marketing and, frankly, tracking both devices and people, end quote. Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that a class action lawsuit against Apple for selling MacBook. with defective display cables can proceed, quoting the verge. When Apple introduced its controversial MacBook Pro redesign in 2016, the company probably didn't know it was setting itself up to get sued, but not only is a class action lawsuit now underway for their infamous butterfly keyboards, it's looking likely there will be a second one for their notoriously fragile display cables too.

Judge Edward DeVilla has decided to let the Flexgate lawsuit go forward. ruling that Apple should have known that they would fail and yet kept selling them anyhow. Quote, the court finds that the allegations of pre-release testing in combination with the allegations of substantial customer complaints are sufficient to show that Apple had exclusive knowledge of the alleged defect, the judge wrote. You can read the full order at the bottom of this post, end quote. And actually, also, if you check the post that I've linked to, you can see examples of the so-called stage light problem that maybe you weren't aware of because it didn't get as much publicity as the keyboard issue. Quoting from the Verge again, part of the Flexgate controversy

is around how Apple addressed the issue when it first got publicity in late 2018, first by silently swapping a new, slightly longer cable into newer MacBooks, and only opening up one of its typical free repair programs months after 15,000 users signed a petition, and it was called out in the press. The company's been a lot more responsive with issues ever since, such as with a free battery replacement program for a small number of those 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro laptops that won't charge anymore, end quote. Again, man, that generation of MacBooks basically, at this point, the worst most star-crossed, foolishly designed gadgets Apple has ever released. From the audio rooms are table stakes for everyone now filed. Discord has debuted stage channels,

a clubhouse-like way of broadcasting audio into a Discord room. It's available on all platforms, but only community servers can start them, quoting the verge. If you've used Discord before, you might know that the app already offers voice channels, which typically allow everyone in them to talk freely. A stage channel, on the other hand, is designed to only let certain people talk at once to a group of listeners, which could make them useful for more structured events like community town halls or AMAs. However, only community servers, which have some more powerful community members, management tools than a server you might share with a few of your buddies can make the new stage

channels, end quote. And real quick, from the Metaverse Watch, I wanted to mention that Reuters is reporting that sources have told it that Tencent's gaming studio, T-My Studios, T-My studios, T-Me studios, T-I-M-I, which makes Honor of Kings and Call of Duty Mobile generated $10 billion of revenue in 2020. And I thought that was a notable number. because Nintendo, which had a banner year last year, generated revenues of $12 billion, quoting Reuters. The $10 billion number would make T-Me the world's largest developer, the sources say, which many industry watchers had suspected to be the case. It also provides a hefty basis for its ambitions to move beyond mobile games and compete directly with global heavyweights developing expensive

so-called triple A titles on platforms such as desktop computers, Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft's Xbox. In a recruitment notice last month, a T-Me engineer wrote that the company aims to create a new AAA game that resembles the virtual community from the movie Ready Player One and will compete head-to-head against big powers from Japan, Korea, Europe, and the U.S. Tencent is building studios overseas, including one for Timi and one for light speed and quantum, in Los Angeles with the goal of creating content with original intellectual property that has global appeal, end quote.

I'm for the weekend long read suggestions, and once again, here's a whole bunch of stories to fill out exactly specific things we've been talking about this week. For instance, Vice has a piece up explaining why people's expensive NFTs have an unfortunate tendency to disappear. There was no history of me ever purchasing it or ever owning it, said one confused NFT buyer. Now there's nothing. My money's gone. Quote, When you buy an NFT for potentially as much as an actual house, in most cases, you're not purchasing an artwork or even an image file. Instead, you are buying a little bit of code that references a piece of media located somewhere else on the internet. This is where the problems

begin. Ed Clements is a community manager for OpenC who fields these kinds of problems daily. In an interview, he explains that digital artworks themselves are not immutably registered on the blockchain when a purchase is made. When you buy an artwork, rather, you're minting a new cryptographic signature that when decoded points to an image hosted elsewhere. This could be a regular website, or it might be the interplanetary file system, a large peer-to-peer file storage system. Clements distinguish between the NFT artwork, the image, and the NFT itself, which is the little cryptographic signature that actually gets logged. I use the analogy of OpenC and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging, he said.

The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists, and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window, end quote. And this is almost tailor-made for our needs. Wired has a story up marking the five-year anniversary of the Oculus Rift. Where do AR and VR go from here? The piece asks, quote, And then there's the Big Kahuna, the mythical augmented reality glasses that represent Facebook's endgame. Let's just forget about brain implants, shall we? It's a vision. Abrush has spooled out at developer conferences for years and one that the company has grown increasingly comfortable talking about. Imagine a piece of eyewear that can overlay virtual content on top of the real world. That could mean simple things like games or a keyboard, or it could mean the photorealistic avatars that the company has been working on. in its Pittsburgh Research Lab.

You know, that's seen in Kingsman, the Secret Service, where they have a meeting with a bunch of people who aren't even there, that. Even better, imagine that the Glass's computer vision capabilities, which will by then be generations past those used for the Quest's Inside Out tracking or the portal's auto-framing technology, can see the world the way you do and utilize an unobtrusive but powerful assistant that can do things like reduce background noise in your earbuds,

or translate signs in other languages. That's something that doesn't just get you off your phone. It replaces all your digital devices. Why have a TV when the glasses can display whatever you want, wherever you'd like? Abrasch asked me, rhetorically in an email, end quote. And then you want an explainer on the whole semiconductor chip shortage that we've been talking about from a micro and macro level.

Bloomberg has got us covered, quote. Carmakers got hit first in part because of poor inventory. planning. The industry underestimated vehicle consumption and thus the amount of chips they needed when the pandemic hit. They are now expected to miss out on $61 billion of sales this year alone. But TSMC executives said on their two most recent earnings calls that customers across many sectors have been accumulating more inventory than normal to hedge against the unknown. The problem gets further magnified by the fact that the cost of chipmaking and keeping pace with technology advancements has increased exponentially this decade.

decade, making the business of manufacturing semiconductors a rarefied field for the deepest of pockets. As an illustration, TSM raised its envisioned capital expenditure for 2021 by as much as 63% to $28 billion, while Samsung is earmarking about $116 billion on a decade-long project to catch its Taiwanese arch rival, end quote. Clearly, this piece was written before TSM's announcement that it would boost CAPX to $100 billion. If you read the piece, though, you'll understand that the silicon industry is facing black swan events and secular macro trends at the exact same time. So a perfect storm. One assumes market forces will soon step in and do their things to solve this pinch point. But as the piece sort of suggests, what would it mean for the

entire tech industry ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles if they can't, or at least if they can't quickly enough. The great sci-fi writer Ted Shang has a piece in The New Yorker that is provocative. We fear and yearn for the so-called coming of the singularity. But Chang proposes what happens if it never comes, quote, could AI programs take the place of those humans so that an explosion occurs in the digital realm faster than it does in ours? Possibly, but let's think about what it would require. The strategy most likely to succeed would be essentially to duplicate all of human civilization in software with 8 billion human equivalent AIs going about their business.

That's probably cost prohibitive, so the task then becomes identifying the smallest subset of human civilization that can generate most of the innovation you're looking for. One way to think about this is to ask, how many people do you need to put together a Manhattan project? Note that this is different from asking how many scientists actually worked on the Manhattan Project. The relevant question is, how large of a population do you need to draw from in order to recruit enough scientists to staff an effort? In the same way that only one person in several thousand can get a PhD in physics, you might have to generate several thousand human equivalent AIs in order to get one Ph.D. in physics equivalent AI. It took the combined populations of the U.S. and Europe in 1942 to put together the Manhattan Project. Nowadays, research labs don't restrict themselves to two continents when recruiting,

because building the best team possible requires drawing from the biggest pool of talent available. If the goal is to generate as much innovation as the entire human race, you might not be able to dramatically reduce that initial figure of $8 billion after all. We're a long way off from being able to create a single human equivalent AI, let alone billions of them. For the foreseeable future, the ongoing technological explosion will be driven by humans using previously invented tools to invent new ones. There won't be a last invention that man ever need make. In one respect, this is reassuring because, contrary to goods claim, human intelligence will never be left far behind. But in the same way that we needn't worry about

a superhumanly intelligent AI destroying civilization, we shouldn't look forward to a superhumanly intelligent AI, saving us in spite of ourselves. For better or worse, the fate of our species will depend on human decision-making, end quote. If you're not familiar with Chang's writing, it was his short story that was the basis for the movie Arrival. And he was interviewed in a recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast that I would highly recommend. As a counterweight to that, maybe, but also to the piece about the Silicon Shortage, our friend Chris Mims in the Wall Street journal looks at graphene and other wonder materials that could hopefully soon replace silicon in the future and allow Moore's law to outlive its current inevitable event horizon.

Researchers on the bleeding edge of physics, chemistry, and engineering are experimenting with exotic sounding substances to be used in microchips. They include graphene, black phosphorus, transition metal, dukele-cocococon, dikyl cogenides and boron nitrate nanosheets. Collectively, they're known as 2D materials, since they are flat sheets, only an atom or two thick. Largely unknown until just 20 years ago, they are now regularly fabricated in labs

using methods as mundane as a blender and as tricky as high-temper vapor deposition, end quote. And finally, just for the heck of it, check out the New York Times profile of this year's recipients of the Turing Award. Mezzar's Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho, recognizing them for their pioneering work in developing compilers. Tonight, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, Chris Messina and I will be jumping on Twitter spaces

to do a live chat. So anyone that is a member of Twitter, come join us. Of course, we're going to try to record it and throw the audio up as a bonus episode tomorrow. So either join us to chew the fat of the news of the week yourself, live, raising your hand, having your say, or catch up with the whole Convo this weekend. Also, that experiment with shuffle for yesterday's episode was pretty cool. Lots of conversations around the episode happened right in that room, quote unquote. Like, an actual debate broke out around the whole remote work thing, which is sort of exactly what I was hoping for. Like, I love a space where you all could commiserate without me having. to be there to moderate or prompt or anything like that.

Mutant podcast army members doing it for themselves. So yeah, this is going to happen from now on automatically. If you download the Shuffle Podcast app on iOS, every time you listen to an episode on there, it generates a room where you can make comments that sync up in line with the actual timeline of the show. So you can clap back, comment, or discuss individual segments or just post gifts and stuff.

If you've got a hot take ever on something I say, leave it in the shuffle room, and I'll see it and maybe use it on the show. Talk to you on Monday.