Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/17 - Y Combinator Gets Picky

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

Microsoft has some AI tech that can catch bugs 99% of the time, Y Combinator is going to be more picky about who it invests in, macOS is getting a smarter battery management system for your laptop, and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: DoubleUp.agency CognitoHQ.com Links: AI spots critical Microsoft security bugs 97% of the time (VentureBeat) Changing policy, Y Combinator cuts its pro rate stake and makes investments case-by-case (TechCrunch) Google's fast-growing Meet video tool getting Zoom-like layout, Gmail link (Reuters) Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health (Six Colors) Apple CEO Talks Covid-19 Crisis, Return to Work Plan at Company-Wide Meeting (Bloomberg) 'Needle in a haystack': Reborn tech offices may need distance and mass testing (Protocol) The coronavirus pandemic turned Folding@Home into an exaFLOP supercomputer (Ars Technica) Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era? (NYTimes) LIDAR: Peek Into The Future With iPad Pro (Halide) The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder (Wired) In Half-Life’s improv scene, anyone can speak for Gordon Freeman (Ars Technica) 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. Welcome to the tech meme right home for Friday, April 17th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Microsoft has some AI tech that can catch bugs 99% of the time, it says. Y Combinator is going to be more picky about who it invests in.

MacOS is getting a smarter battery management system for your laptop, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Microsoft claims it can now use AI to distinguish between security and and non-security bugs 99% of the time, and it can identify high-priority security bugs 97% of the time. It plans to open up the methodology behind all of this to make it possible for you to maybe do the same in coming months,

quoting Venture Beat. The work suggests that such a system, which was trained on a dataset of 13 million work items and bugs from 47,000 developers at Microsoft stored across Azure DevOps and GitHub repositories could be used to support human experts. CoreLogics estimates that developers create 70 bugs per thousand lines of code, and that fixing a bug takes 30 times longer than writing a line of code. In the U.S., $113 billion is spent annually on identifying and fixing product defects.

Microsoft's model leverages two techniques to make its bug predictions. The first is a term frequency inverse document frequency algorithm, a TFIDF. an information retrieval approach that assigns importance to a word based on the number of times it appears in a document and checks how relevant the word is throughout a collection of titles. Microsoft says that its bug titles are generally very short containing around 10 words. The second technique, a logistic regression model, uses a logistic function to model the probability of a certain class or event existing. Microsoft says that the model is deployed in production internally and that it is continually

retrained with data approved by security experts who monitor the number of bugs generated in software development, end quote. Something something. Microsoft is really working hard to own the entire stack for an entire generation of developers, right? Y Combinator is reducing its pro rata investment stake in Y Combinator companies from 7% to 4% and is now only investing on a case-by-case basis instead of the blanket investments that have been made over the past few years. Since 2015, Wye Combinator has invested in every seed and series A round of its portfolio companies, more than 300 companies in nearly 500 rounds. Well, no longer, quoting TechCrunch. The reason for the change is that the number of companies in its

portfolio has gotten too large for it to invest, and some of the limited partners who back the accelerator's operations are balking at making commitments to the pro rata investment program. We have significantly exceeded the funds we raise for pro Radas, and the investors who support YC do not have the appetite to fund the pro rata program at the same level, the accelerator wrote in a post-seen by TechCrunch. In addition, processing hundreds of follow-on rounds per year has created significant operational complexities for Y Combinator that we did not anticipate. Said simply, investing in every round for every YC company requires more capital than we want

to raise and manage. We always tell startups to stay small and manage their budgets carefully. in this instance, we failed to follow our own advice, end quote. For entrepreneurs who take investments from the accelerator, the change is pretty significant. On the accelerator's internal messaging board, they worried about the potential optics of having the accelerator not make a follow-on commitment. YC addressed these concerns by saying it would not make an investment decision until a company had already received an initial term sheet from a lead investor.

The change will take effect on May 8th, 2020, the investor said, end quote. Thank you. Google has announced that Gmail business and education users can now directly take video calls on Meet, which now features a new Zoom-like layout, noise filtering, and more bells and whistles that are coming soon, quoting Reuters. Other functionalities will be added later this month. Meet will offer a layout displaying up to 16 call participants at once, resembling a popular option on rival Zoom, that its users have compared to a grid in the opening sequence of American TV show Brady Bunch. In addition, Meat will be able to.

improve video quality in dim lighting and filtering of background noise such as keyboard clicks and slamming doors. Google Vice President Javier Sautero declined to specify Meets' user growth rate but said a recent peak was 60% more users compared to a day earlier. Google announced last Thursday that Meet, which is available on a desktop browser or through mobile apps, was adding 2 million new users per day and had more than 100 million education users across 150 countries, end quote. Apple's macOS 10.15.5 will include a new battery management tool for Macbooks that have Thunderbolt 3, which will manage battery life by analyzing the battery's temperature.

The idea here is extending your battery life over time by topping it up more intelligently, spotted by six colors, quote, the new feature, which will only be available on Mac notebooks with Thunderbolt 3 ports, enables a new default approach to charging and discharging MacBook batteries. According to Apple, the feature is meant to reduce the rate of chemical aging of the MacBook's battery, thereby extending its long-term lifespan, but without compromising on day-to-day battery life. The feature works by analyzing the temperature of the battery over time, as well as the charging pattern the laptop has experienced. In other words, does the laptop frequently get drained most of the way and then fully recharged, or is it mostly kept full and plugged in?

In the latter case, battery health management is more likely to stop a bit short of full capacity in order to extend the battery's long-term lifespan. All charging data is kept private on the MacBook unless the Mac has been opted in to share anonymous analytics data with Apple. Charging a modern laptop battery to 100% and leaving it there for extended periods of time, especially at warm temperatures, can dramatically reduce the battery's usable life. is hardly limited to laptops. I own an electric car and the manufacturer makes it very clear that it should be routinely charged to only 80% to extend its battery lifespan. You can revert battery settings to their old defaults by turning off the feature. Essentially, Apple has decided it

needs to adjust the default MacBook battery charging behavior to be less aggressive at fully charging batteries in certain circumstances in order to extend battery life. Rather than just silently roll that feature into MacOS and wait for users to discover it's been down that path before, by the way, with the iPhone. It's making the change clear, but make no mistake by setting this as the default, Apple is sending a strong message that this is how MacBook batteries should charge, end quote. Mark German says that at a virtual Apple All-Hands meeting yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook, did not guarantee there wouldn't be any layoffs or hiring freezes at Apple, but did point to Apple's financials as may be allowing for a bit of a cushion there.

Quote, he said that Apple isn't immune to worldwide economic trends, but that it entered the coronavirus pandemic with a robust balance sheet and stressed that the company will keep investing in a, quote, really significant way in research and development and future products, according to Apple employees who attended the meeting. A company spokesman declined to comment, quote, if we stay focused on doing what we do best, if we keep investing, if we manage the business wisely and make decisions collaboratively, if we take care of our teams, if our teams take care of their work, I don't see any reason to be anything but optimistic,

Cook told staff. When asked about potential job cuts, the Apple CEO reiterated Apple's strong financial position and pointed out that it has been paying retail employees even while stores are closed. Quote, I won't tell you Apple won't be impacted, Cook said, while stressing that his focus is on running the company for the long-term rather than making short-term adjustments, end quote. Time as ever for the weekend long reads suggestions. So Silicon Valley companies and startups are gearing up, hopefully putting the systems in place to allow them to welcome employees back to their

workplaces. But there are going to be a few kinks to be worked out first, not the least of which is the fact that the open floor plan office is basically no good for social distancing anymore. but also testing programs need to be in place so that people can have confidence they're not going to return to work only to face infection. And given the fact that we can't seem to rely on the government here in the U.S. to help us out very much, once again, this looks like it's going to be a case of tech doing things for itself. Quote, a lot of the risk exposure of this disease and of transmission

is going to happen in the workforce, color chief commercial officer Caroline Savello said. I think what you're going to need to see is just general testing moving outside. of the traditional health care system, end quote. In that rush, firms and their employees may turn to retail health care providers like Walgreens and CVS, along with providers of so-called non-medical use tests. In that case, an employee who tests positive for COVID-19 using a workplace test wouldn't be added to official government tallies unless they were retested with a sanctioned test at a traditional health care provider. Companies must apply with the FDA for approval to sell these tests privately, but the review process includes little scrutiny. Among the

players in the space is Dexterity, a 30-person Southern California biotech firm that specializes in autoimmune disease testing. Actually, reading that now, it's probably DXterity, dexterity, I don't know how they pronounce it. Anyway, the company's focus in the past month has been on developing a COVID-19 test that employees can administer themselves. The test, now being offered for free to a handful of companies as beta testers, is done using an employee's saliva, and, if the employer requests it, can also include a nasal swab. Employees turn their samples into a coordinator at their company who in turn passes them to dexterity for processing.

Each sample is given a barcode to protect users' privacy. Only the coordinator knows which employee is associated with a given test, essentially leaving any privacy concerns up to the employer to address. Dexterity promises results in 48 hours, end quote. Ars Technica looks at how the pandemic has revived the distributed computing project Folding at Home. In fact, due to COVID, folding at home has actually recently broken the Exaflop supercomputer barrier, roughly two years before Intel, AMD, or IBM are expected to do something similar. Quote, one thing every distributed computing project has in common is

that they are very processor intensive. So participating PCs run very hot. Your PC will go from 3% utilization to 100% very quickly. And if you're using stock cooling, the machine might over heat. So projects like Folding at Home are best suited for a high-performance fan or water-cooled tower PC, not a laptop where cooling is often minimal. That's why the Mac is such a minor presence on this client list. Macbooks and IMAX are not suited to run at 100% CPU and GPU utilization. Then in February, everything changed. Folding at Home suddenly went from 30,000 volunteers running the software in February to 400,000 in March. Another 300,000 users came on board after that. There were so many users that the database ran out of potential simulations for them to crunch,

and data coming in was so great that the servers were overloaded, said Bowman. Despite these glitches, folding at home, zoomed to a peak performance of one and a half exoflops, making it more than seven times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, summit at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, end quote. The New York Times asked whether or not comic books, as an industry, can survive the pandemic, Turns out that comic book stores, old-style retail, is so vital to the comics industry that even with the proliferation of digital distribution these last few years, this is still very much an in-person and analog industry. And thank God, right? But also, quote, these stores were dealt a further blow when Diamond Comic Distributors, the company that supplies them with the comic books and graphic novels of most major publishers, announced that it would stop shipping new comics to stores, beginning April 1st. Diamond has also been making deferred payments to publishers and other vendors

from which it buys the merchandise that is sold to stores. Calls to Diamond's offices in Maryland were not returned, but in a statement on the company's website, Steve Geppey, its founder, wrote that Diamond's, quote, publishing partners are also faced with numerous issues in their supply chain, working with creators, printers, and increasing uncertainty when it comes to the production and delivery of products, end quote, adding that its own freight networks and distribution centers were under significant strain. In his statement, Gepi encouraged retailers to, quote, let loose your own creativity as they try to sell merchandise already in stock, end quote. Halid has a deep dive into the new LiDar sensors on the new iPad pros. This is the first time

a new hardware feature like this, especially one this important, has come to the iPad first. And Halid looks at why and what it could mean, quote, regular camera sensors are good at focused images in color. The LiDAR sensor doesn't do anything like this. It emits small points of light and as they bounce off your surroundings, it times how long it took the light to come back. This sounds crazy, but it's timing something moving at the speed of light. It's a window of time that amounts to hundreds of picoseconds. Yes, Pico. That's an order of magnitude smaller than nanoseconds. A PICO second is 0.000, well, 11 zeros and 1. Count all the zeros, end quote. Wired has the unfortunate story of the devastating decline of Lee Holloway, the brilliant coder who was one of the founders of Cloudflare.

And then, well, you're going to have to read it, quote, some years before the IPO, his behavior began to change. He lost interest in his projects and coworkers. He stopped paying attention in meetings. His colleagues noticed he was growing increasingly rigid and belligerent, resisting others' ideas and ignoring their feedback. Lee's rudeness perplexed his old friends. He had built his life around Cloudflare, once vowing not to cut his hair until the startup's web traffic surpass that of Yahoo. It took a few short months or about four inches of hair. He had always been easygoing, happy to mentor his colleagues or hang out over lunch, end quote. and then seemingly overnight all of that changed. It's an age-old question of what makes you, you really. What is your personality or even your personhood

beyond chemicals and structures in your brain? When you think to yourself, who or what is the echo that is thinking back at you? And then, as this sad case illustrates, what is lost if that whole structure in your head is altered? And finally, Ars Technica takes a look at the comedy improv video game phenomenon that I've just now been turned on to called Wayne Radio TV. Quote, with the arrival of charismatic Twitch streamers who sometimes create full in-character personas for themselves, the convergence of performer and digital performance has come full circle.

Perhaps the culmination of this trend is Wayne Radio TV's exceptionally hilarious program, Half-Life VR, but the AI is self-aware. Wayne takes on the mantle of the lovable but silent anti-hero, Gordon Freeman, imbuing him with the now common neurotic panicked narcissist persona made popular by Freeman's mind. He's joined by a mysterious cast of supposedly self-aware NPCs, played with uncannily accurate impressions of the original voice talent. Wayne's version of Freeman trumps through the halls of Black Mesa with his cavalcade of fools, turning the entire self-serious narrative of half-life on its head, once regarded as an apex horror experience with few peers. Valve's shooter masterpiece

has now become a vehicle for the wackiest of memes and sublime comic timing. Who knew Half-Life's setting and characters could serve as the basis for a new type of sitcom, end quote. As I said, I just learned about this last night and watched about an hour of it, and it's hilarious. Read the story link in the show notes, but also search YouTube for Wayne Radio TV, and the program is called Half-Life VR, but the AI is self-aware. So I'm pretty sure that I'm recording a weekend bonus episode about an hour from now. But you never know about these things, especially these days. If the recording goes ahead as planned, we'll have it for you tomorrow.

And if it's delayed, we'll certainly have a weekend bonus episode next week. Hope you're all good this weekend. Well, safe. Time to begin my weekly 24-hour period where I don't pay attention to any news at all if I can avoid it. Talk to y'all on Monday.