Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/20 – The Apple Headset Has Been Demoed!

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

A new high end Snapdragon chip. The Apple AR/VR headset has been demoed, but only 9 people got to see it in action. A YC backed startup is facing lawsuits related to the whole UST blowup. The feds will no longer go after good faith, white hat hackers. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Composer.trade/ride AthleticGreens.com/ride Links: Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, for when flagship isn’t flagship enough (The Verge) Apple Shows AR/VR Headset to Board in Sign of Progress on Key Project (Bloomberg) Stablegains Faces Lawsuit After Losing $44M on UST (CryptoBriefing) Coinbase Slashes Costs, Freezes Hiring Amid Crypto Crash (The Information) A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence. (Insider) Elon Musk’s Twitter Deal Is Proceeding, Not ‘On Hold,’ Executives Tell Staff (Bloomberg) DOJ Announces It Won’t Prosecute White Hat Security Researchers (Motherboard) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Cyber Insurers Raise Rates Amid a Surge in Costly Hacks (WSJ) The Decade of Cheap Rides Is Over (Slate) The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans (NYTimes Magazine) Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From? (Quanta) Star Wars: The Rebellion Will Be Televised (Vanity Fair) 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, May 20th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. A new high-end Snapdragon chip.

The Apple AR VR headset has been demoed, but only nine people got to see it in action. A Y-combinator-backed startup is facing lawsuits related to the whole U.S.T blowup. The feds will no longer go after good-faith white hat hackers. And, of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon 8. plus Gen 1, saying it will offer 10% faster CPU performance, 10% faster GPU clocks, and have up to 30% better power efficiency for your smartphone. Quoting the Verge.

CallCom's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 set the stage for the biggest Android smartphones of 2022, including Samsung's flagship Galaxy, but it's about to be surpassed by a better plus version that'll no doubt appear in Buy It for the Bragging Rights, Gaming Phones, and Luxury Handsets. It's called the Snapdragon 8 plus Gen 1, which just rolls off the tongue, and Qualcomm says it'll offer 10% faster CPU performance, 10% faster GPU clocks, and get this, use 15% less power for nearly one hour of extra gameplay or, say, 50 minutes of social media browsing. Technically, Qualcomm says it's achieved, quote, up to 30% better power efficiency from both the CPU and GPU, and 20% better AI performance per watt, but that doesn't necessarily

all transfer into more battery life. Some of it is about performance, too. Qualcomm is particularly touting better sustained performance from the new chip, too, theoretically maintaining its clock speed for longer as it heats up while gaming or tapping into 5G. Of course, that all depends on how phone manufacturers decide to cool the chip. The company's not breaking down where the extra performance and efficiencies are coming from, but you can see from some of the chip's other features in the slide above, even though many of them, like Wi-Fi Bluetooth, 10 GPs of theoretical 5G and 8K HDR video capture, haven't changed from the original Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Qualcomm says it'll live alongside that older chip so you can probably

expect a price premium, end quote. Mark Gurman says Apple executives previewed their upcoming mixed reality headset to the company's board last week. Apple also has apparently ramped up reality OS development in recent weeks. quote, Apple executives previewed its upcoming mixed reality headset to the company's board last week, indicating that development of the device has reached an advanced stage, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The company's board made up of eight independent directors and Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook convenes at least four times a year. A version of the device was demonstrated to the directors during the latest gathering, said the people who asked not to be identified because the meeting was private. In recent weeks, Apple has also ramped up development of ROS, short for reality,

operating system, the software that will run on the headset, according to other people familiar with the work. That progress, coupled with the board presentation, suggests that the product's debut could potentially come within the next several months. The headset, which combines elements of virtual and augmented reality, is Apple's next big bet. It represents the company's first major new product category since the Apple Watch in 2015, and would vault the tech giant into a still-nacent industry, one currently dominated by Facebook owner meta-platforms. Apple is seeking new ways to expand its devices business, which makes up about 80% of annual sales. Apple has aimed to unveil the headset as early as the end of this year or sometime next year with a consumer release plan for 2023.

It targeted an introduction at the Worldwide Developers Conference this June, but challenges related to content and overheating have led to potential delays, Bloomberg has reported, end quote. Y Combinator-backed Defi Startup Stable Gains is facing a lawsuit after losing $44 million worth of user funds by investing them in U.S.T after earlier claiming it was investing in USDC, quoting crypto briefing. Stable Gains, a yield generation app that promised users 15% APY on USD is being threatened with legal action after losing over 44 million of its depositors' funds. Class action law firm Erickson Kramer Osborne sent a letter to Stable Gaines on May 14th demanding records of customers' accounts, the firm's marketing and advertising materials and

communications records regarding the U.S.T. StableGains was part of Y Combinator's Winter 22 batch and had received over $3 million in funding from several venture capital firms, including Snow Ventures, Moonfire, and Goldwater Capital. The Stable Gains founders had graduated from top London universities and previously worked at reputable companies in executive positions. Despite its esteemed backing, there were also signs that Stable Gaines wasn't all it was cracked up to be. The company marketed itself as a, quote, simple and safe way for its users to benefit from, quote, advances in financial technology, end quote. Documentation on the Stable Gains website assured users that the value of their deposited assets would remain stable, quote, regardless

if the crypto markets are soaring or crashing, end quote. In reality, stable gains took customers U.S. dollar deposits, converted them to U.S.T, and deposited them into Anchor Protocol. Anchor, a terra-based lending and borrowing DFI platform, guaranteed 18% APY on U.S.T deposits, before the algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg and crashed the, Tera ecosystem. Stable Gains skimmed 30% off of Anchor's yields for its trouble while returning the remaining 15% to customers, end quote. Since deleted documentation on the Stable Gains website also painted a misleading picture to customers about how the company was using customers' funds to generate yield, an article covering the risks of crypto-stable coins and how Stable Gains

mitigates them claimed that the firm mainly used USDC to generate yields with smaller allocations to UST and DAI to diversify its holdings. However, in an update on the UST-DPEG situation posted to the Stable Gains website on May 17th, the firm admitted to holding all of its users' funds in UST, end quote. Today in the tech slowdown, sources are telling the information that Coinbase is pausing new projects, freezing hiring, cutting costs, and giving staff more stock grants after its stock fell more than 75% over the last six months. Quote, Coinbase, which went public via a direct listing in 2021, had been generating hefty profits before the latest slump in crypto prices.

It also had been growing its workforce rapidly from roughly 1,250 people to 3,730 people in 2021, and originally had been looking to triple headcount this year to focus on Web 3 and non-fundible token projects, as well as international expansion. It hired at least 1,200 more employees so far this year, According to its website, the hiring spree significantly boosted operating costs, and the company said it is trying to limit losses in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization to around $500 million for the year. That type of metric usually leaves out costs such as stock compensation. A Coinbase spokesperson declined to comment, end quote. And today in Elon, Insider, nay, Business Insider, is reporting that SpaceX paid $250,000, $250,000. to settle a flight attendants' allegation that Elon Musk exposed himself and offered a horse

in exchange for an erotic massage back in 2016. The incident which took place in 2016 is alleged in a declaration signed by a friend of the attendant and prepared in support of her claim. The details in this story are drawn from the declaration as well as other documents, including email correspondence and other records shared with insider by the friend. According to the declaration, the attendant confided to the friend that after taking the flight attendant job, she was encouraged to get licensed as a masseuse so that she could give Musk massages. It was during one such massage in a private cabin on Musk's Gulf Stream G650ER,

she told the friend that Musk propositioned her. After insider contacted Musk for comment, he emailed to ask for more time to respond and said there is, quote, a lot more to this story. If I were inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely to be the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light, he wrote, calling the story a, quote, politically motivated hit piece, end quote. Indeed, you might have seen that around noon on Wednesday, May 18th, Elon tweeted cryptically, quote, political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months, end quote. John Cook, Investigation's editor at Insider later, tweeted that, quote, for those interested, we reached out to principals for comment regarding this story at around

9 a.m. Eastern yesterday, Wednesday, May 18th, end quote. Anywho, sources say that at an all-hands meeting, Twitter's top lawyer, Vijaya Gaddi, said there is, quote, no such thing as a deal being on hold, and execs said that Musk's deal is moving forward. Quote, executives addressed a number of questions about the transaction, including whether Twitter would try and legally force Musk to buy the company based on his agreement. Gatti assured employees that Musk must, quote, do everything he can, end quote, to make sure he gets his financing in order, and that it's possible Twitter could try, end quote, enforce the terms of the deal, quote, if we ever needed to do that in a court,

end quote. She added that getting to that step would be, quote, pretty rare, end quote. In a welcome policy shift, the U.S. Department of Justice says it plans to stop prosecuting good faith security research that would have in the past violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, quoting Motherboard. The move is significant in that the CFAA has often posed a threat to security researchers who may probe or hack systems in an effort to identify vulnerabilities so they can be fixed. The revision of the policy means that such research should not face charges. For decades, experts have criticized the broad nature of the CFAA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an activist organization, previously said that, quote, security research is important to keep all computer users safe. If we do not know about security vulnerabilities, we cannot fix them and we cannot make better computer systems.

in the future. The CFAA should protect White Hat hackers and give them incentives to continue their important work, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up from the Of course they are file. The Wall Street Journal looks at how cyber insurance rates have surged after a year of huge hacks. Quote, direct written premiums collected by the largest U.S. insurance carriers in 2021 swelled by over 92% year over year, according to information submitted to the National Association Association of Insurance Commissioners in industry watchdog and compiled by ratings firms. Analysts say that the increase primarily reflects higher rates rather than insurers significantly expanding the amount of money they are willing to cover. The amount of rate that is being

generated in this market is quite astonishing just in terms of the percentages that are out there, said Tim Zawaki, principal research analysts at S&P Global Market Intelligence Business, and quote. Slate has an interesting think piece up. It points out that as Uber and lift, pair back in order to attempt to reach profitability, the decade or so of cheap on-demand ride hailing with fares subsidized by mountains of VC cash is likely over. But considering Uber alone has burned more than $30 billion in its short life, another way to look at this, is that a huge experiment on the urban space on public transit has been run over the last 15 years that is now coming to an end. How has it changed our cities? And what would things look like if none of this had

happened? Quote, think of it as a city transportation parallel to what economists are calling the end of the era of free money as interest rates finally rise. It's the end of a decade in which we changed our systems, our habits, even our architecture around the assumption that we could be driven around for cheap. The cynical assumption was always that Uber was burning all that investor cash in order to corner the market. Once it killed off car service, taxi cartels, and its ride hail rivals, The company would stop charging riders less than it was paying drivers and prices would have to go up. On Monday morning, an Uber from Manhattan to JFK Airport was $100, nearly double the fixed yellow cab rate. But good luck finding a yellow cab.

The Uber Taxi Cab Showdown is how most people conceive of Uber's market-swallowing impact, but the decade of cheap rides had more profound effects on how we live and get around. The failure of car-sharing companies like Maven and Car to Go is one example of how all that subsidy, distorted the market, quashed business models that might otherwise have thrived, and changed habits that might have otherwise endured. It did this for the good, reducing the size of parking lots, suppressing drunken driving, and for the bad, increasing car ownership and traffic congestion. One well-known consequence of the rider subsidy is the decline in public transit. One study estimates the arrival of Uber and Lyft in a city decreases rail ridership by 1.29% and bus ridership

by 1.7% each year. In San Francisco, where Uber was founded, the authors estimate Uber has decreased bus ridership by 12.7%. A second study concluded a 5.4% decline in bus ridership in mid-sized cities. A third study clocked the decline at 8.9%. A related Uber phenomenon has been a sizable increase in downtown traffic congestion, end quote. The New York Times has a look at the so-called pimps of only fans, quote, Two years later, Rosero has the Onlyfans operation more or less routinized. When he starts managing a new client, he asks for a bank of nude photos and videos. Rosero's ghostwriters, known in the industry as chatters, will act as the model in private messages with the customers who pay to talk to her.

Those chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos. They tell particular subscribers that a video was recorded just for them. In fact, the same clip might be sold to dozens of people. The chatters earn a small percentage on most sales, and the rest is split between the agency and the model. The subscribers presumably think they're talking directly to the woman in the videos, and it is the job of the chatter to convincingly manifest that illusion. Their clientele, typically horny, lonely men, make it pretty easy, quote, Our best customers come to us not so much to buy content as they come to us

just to feel a connection, reads a post on Think Expans website. This desire? The post explains is a pimp's bread and butter, e or otherwise. Hustling simps has been in art since the beginning of time, end quote. Next, I've got a recommendation for a podcast episode from Quantum magazine, but it's also transcribed in the link in the show notes if you want to read the whole thing. It asks the question, where do space, time, and gravity actually come from, quote, General relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most successful conceptual breakthroughs of modern physics, but Einstein's description of gravity as a curvature in space time doesn't easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wave functions. Recent work that tries to bring those theories together is revealing

some mind-bending truths. In this episode, the physicist and author Sean Carroll talks with host Steven Strogetz about how space and time might be emergent properties of quantum reality, not fundamental parts of it, end quote. And finally, from Vanity Fair, it's not tech, though I could argue that it's about the streaming wars. The cover story from Vanity Fair this month is about where Disney is right now with its whole Star Wars project. TLDR, Star Wars is leaning into TV.

In fact, if I'm reading this correctly, there are currently no new Star Wars movies currently in production or even pre-production. quote, George Lucas himself had attempted and abandoned, a live-action Star Wars series called Underworld before he sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company in 2012. Scripts were written and test footage shot, but the level of quality he was looking for proved to be far too expensive for a TV budget. Then in 2017, Lucasfilm was tasked with trying again, this time, making not one series but a whole fleet to bolster its parent company's streaming ambitions.

Disney Plus would need the firepower of many Star Wars shows to compete in. against rivals Titans like Netflix and Amazon. The Mandalorian, we know now, became a global phenomenon which only raised expectations. This winter, the Book of Boba Fett, delivered a redemption story nearly four decades after the title character's apparent demise in Return of the Jedi. Now, with 130 million subscribers waiting, Disney has upped its demand to three separate Star Wars shows within a year. For this story, Lucasfilm has lifted the secrecy surrounding its TV universe and how it

formed, as universes do, under immense pressure. and quote. So I'm assuming I got this out to you at or around the time of our space with Chris Dixon at noon. Assuming that all went to plan, expect to hear that episode tomorrow. Talk to you on Monday.