Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/09 – Zuck’s Not Worried About Apple’s Headset (Corrected)

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

Lots of juicy nuggets from a recent all hands over at Meta. Binance.US looks like it’s on the road to shutting down. The first trials of AI tutors for kids are happening. The self-driving revolution I’ve been waiting for seems to be happening. And the Weekend Longreads are happening. As always. Links: Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro (The Verge) This is what Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor looks like (The Verge) Meta plans to put AI everywhere on its platforms (Axios) Binance.US Set to Be Cut Off From Banking System After SEC Lawsuit (Bloomberg) Spotify says it’s testing an ‘offline mix’ for when your connection’s patchy (The Verge) New A.I. Chatbot Tutors Could Upend Student Learning (NYTimes) Netflix Subscriptions Jump as U.S. Password-Sharing Crackdown Begins (WSJ) Mercedes first to sell vehicles in California with hands-free, eyes-off automated driving (TechCrunch) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The Binge Purge TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show. (Vulture) The Simpsons Is Good Again After 34 seasons, 750 episodes, and a decades-long funk, the show innovated its way back to popularity and relevance. (Vulture) First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS (Daring Fireball) 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 9th. Nice. 2023, I'm Brian McCullough today. Lots of juicy nuggets from a recent all-hands over at Meta. Binance.us looks like it's on the road to shutting down.

The first trials of AI tutors for kids are happening. The self-driving revolution I've been waiting for seems to be happening, at least in California. And the weekend long-read suggestions are happening, as always. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. There was apparently a recent all-hands over at Meta, and a bunch of stuff was discussed, but first up, what did Zuck think of the Apple headset reveal? He renamed his company Meta, of course, so you would figure he was glued to his screen seeing what Apple was doing for its version of the Metaverse, quoting the Verge, quoting Zuck himself.

From what I've seen initially, I'd say the good news is that there's no kind of magical solutions that they, he means Apple, have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven't already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off, and it might make sense for the cases that they're going for, but look, I think that their announcement really showcases the differences in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure

that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do, and we have sold tens of millions of quests. More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It's about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want. There's a real philosophical difference in terms of how we're approaching this, and seeing what they put out there and how they're going to compete, just made me even more

excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we're doing matters and is going to succeed, but it's going to be a fun journey, end quote. At this same event, Chris Cox apparently also demoed Meta's forthcoming Twitter clone, quoting the verge again. The new standalone app will be based on Instagram and integrate with Activity Pub, the decentralized social media protocol that will theoretically allow users of the new app to take their accounts and followers with them to other apps that support Activity Pub, including Mastodon. The forthcoming app, which in the meeting today, MetaChief Product Officer Chris Cox, called Our Response to Twitter, will use Instagram's account system to automatically populate a user's

information. The internal code name for the app is Project 92, and its public name could be threads based on internal documents seen by the verge, end quote. Finally, Zuckerberg shared meta's plans to add generative AI text, image, and video tools to its products such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, quoting Axios. At an all-hands meeting with workers on Thursday, Zuckerberg announced a range of technologies at various stages of development, with some for internal use, but many designed directly for consumers.

One, for example, will allow customers to use a text prompt to modify their own photos and share them in Instagram stories. Another will bring AI agents with different personalities and capabilities to help or entertain. That's focused initially for use in Messenger and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg is pitching this as an expansion of its Metaverse efforts rather than a replacement for meta's focus there, end quote. So paint Zuck as bullish as ever on the Metaverse, I guess. Binance.us has suspended U.S. dollar deposits and notified customers that their banking partners are preparing to pause Fiat withdrawal channels as early as June 13th, quoting Bloomberg.

Cryptoexchange, Binance.us, is being thrown deeper into disarray as banking partners prepare to rescind support. Liquidity dries up and traders withdraw tokens from the platform while U.S. regulators clamp down on the company and its owner. In an email to customers late Thursday, Binance.U.S. told users its payment and banking partners had signaled an intent to pause support for the exchange's dollar channels as early is June 13th. That means Binance.us won't be able to process deposits or withdrawals in dollars forcing the platform to change tack and go all in on cryptocurrencies. Binance.us's customer

assets total over $2.2 billion, according to a memorandum from the Securities and Exchange Commission, while Binance.com is meant to be the only way Americans can trade with the company, its relative size means any changes will barely impact the larger Binances hold over the broader crypto market, where it processes roughly 54% of the sector's monthly trading volume. Binance. U.S. recorded about $6 billion in monthly volume in May, according to CCData compared to Binance.com's $212 billion. Binance.U.S.'s reserves of ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market value, are nearing zero, as traders withdrew or sold around $44.5 million in tokens from the

platform since June 4th per cryptoquant. The lack of liquidity on Binance.coms will soon cause problems for traders, seeking accurate pricing compared to other exchanges with Bitcoin bid and ask depth falling dramatically in recent days, according to researcher Kako, end quote. Spotify is testing a new feature called Your Offline Mix, which will automatically save a mix of users recently played songs for offline listening, quoting the verge. The audio streaming app already lets users download playlists or albums for offline listening, a useful feature for saving data when you're not on Wi-Fi or when you're away from an internet connection entirely while doing anything from traveling on a plane or riding the metro.

But it can be an annoyingly manual process to pick what music to download, especially if you're someone that likes to hop between lots of different music. YouTube music has had a similar feature called offline mixtape for years, and Spotify appears to have been working on its offline mix feature since at least mid-2020, if evidence discovered at the time by app researcher Jane Manchin Wong is anything to go by. Why exactly it's taken the service this long to rollout is unclear. But if I had to guess, I'd assume it became less of a priority when the COVID pandemic severely curtailed the amount of time a lot of people spent outside away from Wi-Fi, end quote. When people talk about being bullish on the new things AI might enable, tutoring and teaching

are always brought up. An AI tutor with infinite patience. Well, this might be that. The Con Lab School is trialing con mingo, an AI chatbot developed by Khan Academy to simulate one-on-one tutoring, one of the first such experiments in the U.S., quoting the verge. A dozen students huddled at communal classroom tables one morning this spring, their gazes fixed on math lessons on their laptops. They used a text box alongside their lessons to request help from Conmingo, an experimental chatbot tutor for schools that uses artificial intelligence. The tutoring bot quickly responded to one student, Zaya by asking her to identify specific data points in a chart. Then Con Mingo coaxed her to use the data points to solve her math question. It's very good at walking you through the process

step by step, Zaya said. Then it congratulates you every time it helps you solve a problem. Khan Lab school students are among the first school children in the United States to try out experimental conversational chatbots that aim to simulate one-on-one human tutoring. The tools can respond to students in clear, smooth sentences, and they have been specifically designed for school use. Based on AI models underlying chatpots like ChatGPT, these automated study aids could usher in a profound shift in classroom teaching and learning. Simulated tutors could make it easier for many self-directed students to hone their skills, delve deeper into topics that interest them, or tackle new subjects at their own pace. Hundreds of public schools already use Khan Academy's

online lessons for math and other subjects. Now the nonprofit, which introduced ConMingo this year, is pilot testing the tutoring bot with districts, including Newark Public Schools in New Jersey. Khan Academy developed the bot with guardrails for schools, Mr. Khan said. These include a monitoring system that is designed to alert teachers if students using Con Mingo seem fixated on issues like self-harm. Mr. Kahn said his group was studying Conmingo's effectiveness and planned to make it widely available to districts this fall, end quote. Antena says that Netflix got more new U.S. subscriptions May 25th to May 28th, after its password sharing crackdown began, more than in any four-day period since at least

2019. Quoting the journal, the influx of new users is a sign that Netflix's decision to put an end to password sharing is bearing fruit. The company said more than 100 million people around the world watch Netflix using borrowed passwords. The company's recent move forced users who share an account outside the same home to pay an additional $7.99 a month to watch and limited the number of extra members customers could add to their account depending on the tier of service they pay for. The monthly cost of sharing with an extra person is $2 less a month than a basic subscription and $1 more than the ad-supported plan, which Netflix introduced late last year in another effort to boost revenue and appeal to price-conscious customers. Shares of Netflix have risen about 13% since

the password sharing crackdown went into effect on May 23rd, end quote. California's Department of Motor Vehicles has issued the first permit to publicly sell or lease vehicles with an automated driving system issued to Mercedes-Benz for its level three drive pilot system, quoting TechCrunch. The hands-off, eyes-off system can be used on designated California highways, including Interstate 15 under certain conditions without the active control of a human driver. This means drivers can watch videos, text, or talk to a passenger, or even mess around with any number of third-party apps coming to new Mercedes models without watching the road ahead or having their hands on the wheel. Mercedes-Benz is the fourth company to receive an autonomous

vehicle deployment permit in California and the first authorized to sell or lease vehicles with an automated driving system to the public, according to the DMV, which regulates autonomous vehicles in the state. The deployment permit allows drive pilot to be used on highways in the Bay Area, Central Valley, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego. Drive pilot is not the same as the fully autonomous systems developed by Waymo, Cruise, Motional, and Zooks, although some of the same principles apply. The drive pilot system uses a combination of sensors such as LiDAR, radar, and cameras coupled with software to handle driving tasks in certain conditions without the active control of a human driver. Mercedes system is only available at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour during daylight hours

on certain highways. The system will not engage on city or county roads in construction zones during heavy rain or heavy fog on flooded roads and during weather conditions that are determined to impact performance of the system, according to the DMV. The DMV, the DMV, has placed other conditions on Mercedes, including that vehicle owners must watch a mandatory video explaining the capabilities of the system and how to engage and disengage the technology before they can access it. Mercedes has also had to meet a number of safety insurance and vehicle registration requirements, end quote. Again, this is what I want. You can have your self-driving everywhere. It's great if it ever gets here. But in the meantime, just let me watch a movie while I'm trying to make

my way down I-95. Time for the weekend long-rate suggestions, just a few this week. First, one of the reasons that the writer's strike is happening right now is actually because the party is over. Over in Vulture, Hollywood Insiders discussed the end of the peak TV era, a time period started by Netflix dropping House of Cards's first season in 2013, as streaming services now are cutting back and consolidating. Quote, if you're wondering who to blame for TV's predicament, that's easy. It was Netflix. Netflix completely revolutionized a 100-year-old industry, says Mike Scher, who created the good place. Everything's changed, and everything changed the way they changed it. In 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of House of Cards on the same day, overthrowing the time-honored orderliness of weekly schedules and giving viewers a brand-new way to spend 13 consecutive hours. Then the company embarked on what was probably the biggest spending spree in entertainment history.

Wall Street treated Netflix not like the next HBO, but more like the next Tesla, ignoring the profit factor to focus on growth, end quote. Then further in the piece, here's sure again, quote, The development surge was also great for established writers, at least at first, as the new economics of streaming made it easier than ever to cash in fast. Under the old TV model, if a show was a success, its creator stood to get rich on the back-end profits. With all of linear TV's revenue streams combined, ads plus syndication plus overseas rights,

a studio might bring in $3 for every $1 in costs on a hit. The problem for writers was that most shows flopped, so there was no back-end to get a piece of. Streamers offered something different. Their model called Cost Plus might pay $1.30 to $1.50 up front, making every show a winner, just not a very big one. To make up for the lost back-end, streamers floated performance-based incentives. Sure describes a scenario in which a platform might promise a showrunner a $100,000 bonus for season one, $250,000 for season two, $500,000 for season three, and $1.7 million for season four.

So you're like, holy S, that's great, he says. There was a catch, though. Many seemingly successful series began to vanish after just a couple of seasons. What no one saw coming was that they'd just kill the show before they ever had to pay that money out, sure says. They kind of tricked everybody. Now, if you get to 20 episodes, it's a miracle, end quote. Yeah, have you noticed that a lot of shows suddenly get cut off after two seasons? seasons lately? I guess we know now why. Also from Vulture, I think we've shared something similar

before, but I've not been watching, so I can't confirm myself. But this is another article making the case that The Simpsons is suddenly good again. Quote, the staff have also found a way to look at its main characters with a fresh eye. Homer and Marge, perpetually in their late 30s, are now living in the year 2023, meaning they are millennial parents facing millennial issues. There was a touching episode in 2021 about the psychological ramifications of Marge offhandedly calling Lisa Chunky. In an episode called Bartless from 2023, Homer and Marge fantasized about what their lives would be like if they weren't Bart's parents, which ends with them appreciating him for what makes him special as opposed to wishing he'd meet some good kid standard. Beyond exhibiting a different perspective on parenting a problem child, the show was reexamining its own relationship to Bart,

who was never treated with the same empathy as the other main characters. You feel less like you are watching season 34, then a reboot of season one. Sleman sees the show as a Groundhog Day-type reality where at the beginning of every episode, they've forgotten everything that's happened before. That frees the writers from the burden of story continuity, allowing them to push the boundaries of what The Simpsons can do. No recent episode defines the current spirit like Lisa the Boy Scout, a mind-bending postmodern intervention into the series. In it, hackers interrupt the episode to play supposed deleted scenes that would ruin the audience's conception of the Simpsons universe. There's a clip in which Carl learns that his best friend Lenny was actually a figment of his imagination,

and another in which it is revealed that Martin, Bart's nerdiest classmate, is actually a grizzled 36-year-old father of three with an aging disorder that leaves him looking 10. It's one of the wildest, all-out funniest episodes in the history of the show, which Carolyn Omni, a seasoned writer credited to a new process in which everyone pitches bad ideas. end quote. And finally, I'm not going to quote from it, but if you wanted John Gruber's hands-on impressions with Apple's Vision Pro, that's the last link in the show notes today. I mean, it is Gruber. You think Gruber's going to have something bad to say about an Apple product, but still, he has an interesting take. And quite frankly, I have to say, I've been surprised

by the reaction from the tech punditry world to this week's debut. Like, nobody seems to be willing to buy it. It's too expensive. But everybody seems willing to say that this is something they could see themselves wanting eventually. It's not been an iPhone moment in the sense that everybody's like, okay, this is the new paradigm now. We're living in it. But it is a sort of iPhone moment in the sense that everybody has been like, okay, I can see where this industry is going to go now. Apple, I think, has succeeded in showing us a plausible endpoint to this technology, a roadmap that everyone can see all the sudden. One bonus episode for you this weekend, an interview I did a few years ago with Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer. It's a great sort of,

this was your life sort of interview with Kevin. But since we go deep into AI and AR and VR at the end, I thought it would be interesting from a framing perspective to see if the things he plotted out in this episode came to pass and to what degree. So enjoy that to talk to you on Monday.