Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/03 – Time To Get Your Driverless Ride On?

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

It’s increasingly looking like we might be approaching a tipping point in terms of driverless ride hailing becoming a reality. Twitter will let you set alerts for your name, among other things. Did Elon Musk order everyone back to the office to encourage some people to quit? What to expect from Monday’s WWDC kickoff. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Links: Cruise can finally charge for driverless robotaxi rides in San Francisco (TechCrunch) Twitter is building a tool for keyword alerts, in case you need more Twitter notifications (The Verge) Elon Musk asks Tesla execs to ‘pause all hiring,’ cut 10% of staff, amid ‘super bad feeling about economy’ (Electrek) Apple Plans to Make the iPad More Like a Laptop and Less Like a Phone (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok. (The Honest Broker) Columbus, Ohio is quickly becoming the Midwest’s tech hub (TechCrunch) The Internet Encyclopedia of Memes (Every.to) Looking Glass might have just invented the GIF’s 3D successor (The Verge) Does a Comedian Really Need an Audience? (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. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, June 3rd, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. It's increasingly looking like we might be approaching a tipping point in terms of driverless

ride hailing becoming a reality. Twitter will let you set alerts for your name, among other things. Did Elon Musk order everyone back to the office just to encourage some people to quit, what to expect from Monday's WWDC kickoff, and of course, the weekend long-read suggestions? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. GM's Cruise has secured a permit to charge fares for its driverless robotaxy service in San Francisco, which will operate from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. on select streets, quoting TechCrunch. The California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, voted Thursday to award Cruz with a driverless deployment permit,

the final hurdle the company needed to jump to begin operating its autonomous ride-hale service commercially. Cruise will be operating its passenger service at a maximum speed of 30 miles per hour between the hours of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. on select streets in San Francisco, adding another one and a half hours to its current service. The company will need additional state regulatory approval to charge members of the public for driverless rides. In the rest of the city, according to a cruise spokesperson, these preconditions come as part of Cruise's passenger safety plan that limits the service to overnight hours and doesn't include the city's dense urban Corps, according to the CPUC's draft resolution.

Cruz has been offering free driverless rides to San Franciscoans in its autonomous Chevrolet bolts between the hours of 1030 p.m. to 5 a.m. since February. The company began testing its autonomous vehicles without a driver in the front seat in the city in 2020 and started giving passengers free test rides in June 2021. In October last year, Cruz received a driverless deployment permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which meant it could begin charging for autonomous vehicles. services like delivery. Crucially, the limits of the DMVs permit stop at charging for Robotaxy rides. With this CPUC permit, Cruz is the only AV company in the city that can

operate a commercial driverless ride hailing service. Waymo, Cruz's biggest competitor and the self-driving arm of Alphabet, also recently received a permit from the CPUC to charge for robo taxis, but only if a human safety operator is present during rides. Waymo has been offering a fully autonomous commercial ride hailing service in Chandler, a city southeast of Phoenix since 2020, and recently expanded its driverless program in the city, end quote. I'm mentioning this because, remember how in early 2021, I got an Oculus because I had a feeling that AR and VR were about to become a big deal in the tech space, and I wanted to get a sense of the current possible. Well, that turned out to be very true. AR and VR is big right now, and I'm getting the sense that

this year into next, we might start to see these autonomous ride hailing programs get very real. So I'm raising my interest level in this space accordingly. Actually, I'm talking to Argo AI about maybe getting a personalized, personal autonomous ride in their Miami test market when I'm down there later this summer. I'd record it for the show, obviously. Fingers crossed, more on that soon. From the you couldn't already do this file, Twitter is apparently working on a feature that allows you to subscribe to and get notifications from search results, quoting the verge. Twitter appears to be working on a feature called Search Subscribe, which will let users opt to receive notifications for new tweets matching a search query. The feature was first spotted by

developer Dylan Russell and appears to put Twitter's bell notification icon next to the search box in its app. Tap the bell, and you'll get notifications for new results. Search Subscribe is only showing up in the Twitter Alpha app for now, so you should shouldn't take this as a sign that it's imminent or even definitely coming. But it's an interesting idea and yet another attempt from Twitter to make it easier for users to find the stuff they're actually looking for. Right now, you can get notifications for individual users or selectively mute or block things by keyword, but you can't opt into specific tweets rather than specific tweeters.

As 9 to 5, Google points out, the closest analog to this is probably tweet deck, which lets you create a column for a search result and get notifications every time it updates. and given tweet decks looming demise as a native app, it's good to see any of its features migrating to the lone remaining Twitter clients. In one sense, signing up for what amounts to Twitter's version of Google Alerts, sounds like a hellscape nightmare of push notifications. Hit that bell on Depp Hurd or NBA Finals and watch your phone explode with useless notifications. But Twitter's search allows for a lot of advanced filtering such that you could use it to get notifications from a single person, but only their best tweets or the ones you care about the most. Or with some effort,

you could search for just the tweets that mention the NBA or the Celtics or the Warriors or basketball in general from your six favorite basketball writers and only the ones that get more than 50 likes. You can already create and save complex searches like these, but you'll always have to go run the search every time you want to see what's new. Search subscribe could, and I emphasize could, because it could also be a huge mess, be a useful way to get exactly the notifications you're looking for. Or you could just do what everyone else does with Google alerts and set one up for your name. In that case, given Twitter's propensity for chaos and rage, the fewer notifications, the better, end quote. Sort of an everything, everywhere, all at once, omnibus segment for you.

Sources say online insurance marketplace policy genius laid off around 170 employees or around 25% of its staff, less than three months after raising a $125 million Series E. According to a filing, Microsoft has cut its Q4 sales guidance from $52.4 billion to $53.2 billion. That was the range to a new range of $51.94 billion to $52.74 billion, citing a stronger U.S. dollar. Microsoft's stock, by the way, is down 18 percent so far this year. According to a leaked memo, Elon Musk has asked Tesla execs to pause all hiring and cut 10 percent of Tesla's total workforce. Quoting Electric. Earlier this week, we reported on Elon Musk asking all Tesla employees to come back to the office or quit. Many people suspected that this was a wave of layoffs in disguise, since Musk had to know a certain percentage of remote workers wouldn't want to come back to the office. Now he apparently confirmed it in an email to Tesla executives obtained by Reuters. Tesla's CEO Elon Musk has a, quote, super bad feeling about the economy and wants to cut about 10%

of jobs at the electric carmaker, he said in an email to executives seen by Reuters. This would be a significant move for Tesla, a company with more than 100,000 employees, which would mean letting go of about 10,000 of them. The email was also reportedly titled, Pause All Hiring Worldwide. Tesla pausing hiring would slow down its growth as the company had about 5,000 open positions around the world at the time. Musk sent the email. The CEO had recently made comments about how he believes the U.S. is going to be in a recession for the next 18 months. Musk also said that he believes that, quote, it is a good thing,

and that, quote, some bankruptcies need to happen, end quote. And finally, Coinbase has extended its hiring freeze, quote, for as long as this macro environment requires, and will, quote, rescind a number of accepted offers, updating new hires by email, end quote. We'll talk about this more at the end of the show, but WWDC kicks off on Monday. What can we expect? Well, first and foremost, iOS and iPadOS 16. The rumor is that it's iPadOS that might be the most interesting with a redesigned multitasking interface, which will let users resize app windows and offer new ways to handle multiple apps at once. In other words, they're trying to take the shackles off iPad users so they can use iPads more like laptops, quoting Mark German.

The iPad accounts for nearly 9% of Apple's annual sales, and that percentage has inched up in recent years. But professional users of the device have clamored for an interface that feels more like a laptop experience. The iPad's hardware, which now includes the same M1 chip as some of Apple's laptops, has grown increasingly powerful, and in some ways the software hasn't kept up, end quote. What else? MacOS 13, rumored to be called Mammoth. WatchOS 9 and T.B. OS 16. The watch, by the way, might be getting an improved low power mode.

But what about hardware? If we get any hardware, it sounds like it would be a new MacBook Air, maybe with a new M2 chip. But the big question mark is, will we get at least a teaser of the new AR thingy from Apple? Here's what TechCrunch says on this front, quote. If Apple really wants to make a splash, it will offer a glimpse at its long-rumored headset. A trademark application for Reality OS seems to suggest that the combo ARVR, wearable could be announced sooner rather than later. The company has also been rumored to be showing the system off to shareholders. All signs point to a 2023 release, however, which would mean,

best case scenario, nothing more than a One More Thing style glimpse at what's to come, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up from a substack that is a new one to me. Maybe you heard about how music artists are complaining about how much record labels are pushing them to do promo on TikTok. Well, the honest broker substack argues that by doing this, record labels are digging their own graves. Quote, the labels think they have found their savior. Artists will get famous on TikTok, and label execs can just sit back and watch the cash pour into their bank accounts. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it won't turn out that way.

In fact, labels will end up, like so many addicts, destroyed by the very thing they crave. I'll spell it out as simply as possible. Record labels have lost their ability to launch new careers, like Bartleby, the Scribner, they really prefer not to deal with this whole issue because career development is such a hassle. So they demand that musicians build their own audience via TikTok and other social media platforms. But the moment musicians become capable of doing this, they don't need record labels anymore. I think this is what Joseph Heller called a catch-22, end quote. Next, I love to highlight things like this so that folks know maybe where to go to join a hot tech scene,

even get in on the ground floor of one. TechCrunch argues that Columbus Ohio is rapidly becoming the Midwest's tech hub. Quote, venture capitalists injected over three billion into the city over the past 20 years, particularly in health care and insurance startups, according to crunch-based data. Investment into the city startups started picking up around 2017 and really peaked in 2021. Columbus has also caught the eye of enterprises, including Facebook, Amazon, and now Intel, which announced earlier this year that it will build two chip factories outside of the city that will provide 3,000 company jobs and many more thousands of indirect jobs. Meanwhile, Therapeutics company Amgen announced last November that it is building a new

biomanufacturing facility in New Albany, one of Columbus's suburbs, providing 400 jobs for assembling and packaging medicines. All of this activity, plus a low cost of living, availability of a young, talented, skilled pool, and public-private partnerships eager to support entrepreneurs, research, and innovation is why TechCrunch has chosen to spotlight Columbus's growing startup scene with a special episode of TechCrunch Live, end quote. Then our friends at every have an interview with Don Caldwell, the editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, the sort of encyclopedia of internet memes, quote, for the past 15 years, know-your-meam has documented internet culture from across the web, from 4chan and Reddit to Twitter and TikTok. For nearly 12 of those years,

or what he describes as an eternity in internet years, Don Caldwell has been at the forefront of know-your-meme, most recently as the editor-in-chief. He's made nearly 100,000 contributions to the site slowed only by moving into a managerial role at the company. He leads efforts for the site's encyclopedia database, for which they're best known, but also their insights operation, Know Your Meme News, and editorial section, as well as their video operations on YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, and TikTok. His advice and expertise is often called on in the media to the sect the latest meme or internet culture craze from memeers taking over TikTok to the viral classic meme to NFT Gold Rush. I got to chat with the anthropology major turned internet

documentarian behind the world's greatest meme collection. Don's internet culture knowledge is as encyclopedic, as the database he's helped shape and his insights on the evolution of memes was a delight to dive into, end quote. Now, of course, a lot of memes are gifs, gifs. So from The Verge, a look at the coming that maybe has invented a new GIF, holograms that are effortlessly portable, quote. That's why his holographic display company is introducing the looking glass block, a new image format that lets you peek inside a 3D scene even if you're viewing it on a normal flat screen. It's built on web standards so you can view them in any modern web browser, much like a GIF or JPEG.

With blocks, you simply swipe or mouse over the image to get a parallax 3D effect, letting you see 3D depth. You can even open up a web browser in a VR headset, then tap and enter VR button to be transported to a virtual room where you can inspect it in full stereoscopic 3D. It's like you're in a mini art gallery. Look closely as you very slowly drag a mouse or finger across the image. See how it pauses with each step. That's because every block is made from as many as 100 slices of a 3D scene. Each slice a picture shot from a different perspective. That also means your device has to load all of these images by the time you scroll, so it's not exactly bandwidth cheap. Frane says a block might be two megabytes or as much as 50 megabytes if it's designed for 8K viewing.

Frane says blocks are built atop hundreds of open web standards, most prominently WebXR. The company plans to contribute improvements to WebXR, but hasn't done so yet. What potentially makes blocks special, though, is that they live in a container that can scale to any device of any resolution anywhere and be shared just as easily. Just text someone a link or embed an code block in your website, and they can experience it to, end quote. By the way, click through to the piece to see examples of these blocks in action. And finally today, not tech, but with the release of Bo Burnham's inside outtakes this week, and a new Netflix special from the late great Norm MacDonald, do comedians really need audiences anymore? Norm's special is apparently

something that he recorded in his home by himself, without any audience present, just like Bo Burnham did, quoting the New York Times. McDonald is perhaps uniquely positioned to serve as an example of the shortcomings of the audience. His standards could be higher than the crowds. There are stories of him deciding to do jokes on Saturday Night Live that he knew were funny, even if they died in rehearsal. This final special, a raw and moving production, is a gift to fans. It's a pleasure to hear one last time his faux-folksy locutions.

It doesn't make no sense. And the way his jokes could twist. I have opinions that everyone holds like, I don't know, yellow is the best color, or move full steam ahead. After years of therapy, he says, he discovered why he has a fear of flying. It's the crashing and the dying, he says, his eyes wide and twinkling. Judge by aesthetic slickness and tight jokes, this hour isn't nearly as successful as his last one from 2017, titled Hitler's dog, gossip, and trickery, but it's mesmerizing in different ways. There's something uncanny about letting the jokes stand on their own, the quiet awkwardness, and messrs. see intrusions. A dog barks, a cell phone goes off, offering a reminder that something bigger

than showbiz is happening here, a glimpse of a man facing the end, giving his last jokes everything he's got, end quote. So number one, there will be no bonus episode at all this week, but we will for sure have one next week because we're going to want to talk about Monday's WWDC keynote. As such, a reminder that the show on Monday will be a few hours late for that reason, as ever, I have to watch the keynote happen before I can report on the keynote happening. And that's it. Talk to you on Monday.