Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 08/18 – Werner Herzog Is The AI Voice We Deserve

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 TechMeme right home for Friday, August 18th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Starting point is 00:00:39 More drips and drabs, threads feature releases. Meta is readying a Code Lama. Throwback Friday with Uber and Lyft threatening to leave a major municipality. Our first fall hardware event is on the calendar. And of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Data has updated threads with a repost tab on users' profile pages and added reposts to the reverse chronological following feed, quoting J. Peters in TechCrunch. Threads is adding reposts,

Starting point is 00:01:16 a.k.a. retweets to its reverse chronological following feed. Instagram head, Adam Moseri announced in a Threads post on Thursday. It's a small but nice addition to the app that makes the following feed a bit more useful, and while Moseri said Meta added it based on your feedback, the following feed does still have its flaws. That's not the only repost-related update for Meta. It's also rolling out a repost tab on your profile so that you and others can more easily find the threads that you've reposted. I don't appear to have either update on iOS yet, but I do have the repost tab when I view my profile on the web. I think I need to repost more. The new updates probably aren't enough to bring over the many threads users that haven't returned to the platform, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Starting point is 00:02:01 said on August 4th that improved search and a web client will arrive in, quote, the next few weeks, which might convince some lapsed users to come back. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg hinted that the web client might be imminent, replying directly to my desperate plea with two emoji, soon and shh, end quote. Sources are telling the information that meta is also preparing to release Code Lama, a free code generating AI model based on Lama 2, as soon as next week. Quote, Meta Platforms is preparing to launch software to help developers automatically generate programming code, a challenge to proprietary software from OpenAI, Google, and others, according to two people with direct knowledge of the product.

Starting point is 00:02:50 Meta's code generating artificial intelligence model dubbed Code Lama will be open source and could launch as soon as next week, one of the people said. The new coding model rivals OpenAIs Codex model and builds on META's Lama 2 software, a large language model that can understand and generate conversational text. Lama 2, which is open source, upended the AI field by making it easier for companies to make their own AI apps without paying for software from OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft. Code Lama will make it easier for companies to develop AI assistance that automatically suggest code to developers as they type, and it could siphon customers from paid coding

Starting point is 00:03:25 assistance, such as Microsoft's GitHub co-pilot, which is powered by Codex. Generating automated code suggestions has been among the most popular uses of LLMs, as code is based on language. LLMs also power conversational text services like chat GPT. GitHub, a year ago, began charging developers $10 a month for co-pilot, and a slew of other coding assistant companies have raised venture funding in recent months. Companies might gravitate to using an open source coding model to develop their own coding assistant in order to safeguard their source code, said one person who has worked on Code Lama, end quote. This is like a blast from the past story. Lyft and Uber are threatening to leave Minneapolis. If the mayor of that town signs a minimum wage bill on

Starting point is 00:04:14 August 23rd, that mandates at least $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute for driver pay, quoting CNN. In a 7 to 5 vote, the Minneapolis City Council passed an ordinance that includes a number of ride share worker protections, including a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers. Mayor Jacob Frey has the opportunity to veto the ordinance. and has until next Wednesday, August 23rd to do so. The proposed ordinance mandates at least a dollar 40 per mile and 51 cents per minute within Minneapolis be paid to drivers. Minneapolis is debating the minimum wage as gig workers across the country are advocating for fair wages and job benefits. In recent years, states and cities have attempted to pass legislation regarding the growing

Starting point is 00:04:59 gig economy or freelance work through apps like Uber and Grubhub, but have generally met with fierce opposition. On Tuesday, Lyft sent a letter to the council saying, quote, should this proposal become law, Lyft will be forced to cease operations in the city of Minneapolis on its effective date of January 1st, 2024. Lyft, according to a statement sent to CNN Thursday, said the bill would be detrimental to drivers who would ultimately earn less, quote, because prices could double and only the most wealthy could still afford a ride. The company said the bill had been, quote, jammed through the Council and urged Fry to veto the bill and instead allow time for the state's Rideshare Task Force to complete its research. Uber sent an email to its drivers on Monday, urging them to contact the mayor

Starting point is 00:05:41 and city council to ask them to oppose the move. Uber said its drivers sent over 700 emails on Thursday, but did not specify what was in those emails. In its email, Uber said the legislation could, quote, greatly limit its ability to remove unsafe drivers from the platform and increase the cost of rides. If this bill were to pass, we would unfortunately have no choice but to greatly reduce service and possibly shut down operations entirely Uber wrote, end quote. Mark your calendars. Microsoft is planning to hold a special event in New York City on September 21st, likely to announce Surface hardware including the Go4, Laptop Studio 2, and Laptop Go 3. Quoting the Verge. Microsoft has been rumored to be working on a Surface Go4, Surface Laptop Studio 2, and Surface Laptop Go 3 for the fall. Windows Central recently reported that the updated Surface Laptop Studio 2 will ship with Intel's latest processors, a more powerful GPU, and an improved selection of ports. Microsoft also reportedly postponed a Surface Go 4 with an arm processor in favor of an Intel 1 instead.

Starting point is 00:06:48 The Surface Go 3 is rumored to ship with Intel's 12th-gen processors and an improved base-level configuration. Microsoft's special event will be the first it is held since it changed its hardware portfolio amid layoffs earlier this year. Those changes resulted in no more Microsoft-branded mice, keyboards, and webcams, with the company focusing on the Surface brand instead. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft has any new Surface-branded accessories this year, particularly webcams. The event could also include details on the next Big Windows 11 update. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it's planning to release a September update for Windows 11, which will include native support for RAR, which is that RAR, is that the pronunciation,

Starting point is 00:07:29 and seven zip files, a new settings homepage, a better volume mixer, and early access to Windows co-pilot, end quote. Some weird podcasting news here. Did you know how popular white noise podcasts have become on Spotify? So much so, apparently that Spotify was considering shutting them down, quoting Bloomberg. As I wrote last year, these podcasters, who, shows entail playing various noises like crashing waves or bird sounds on repeat, could make at least $18,000 a month through advertisements that Spotify placed in the programming. I posited in that story

Starting point is 00:08:09 that some algorithmic magic seemed to be pushing people to this content. And now over a year later, documentation from Spotify confirms as much. As of January, according to an internal document, Bloomberg viewed, white noise and ambient podcasts accounted for 3 million daily consumption hours on the platform, inadvertently boosted by Spotify's own. own algorithmic push for talk content versus music. Once Spotify realized how much attention was going to White Noise Podcasts, the company considered removing these shows from the talk feed and prohibiting future uploads while redirecting the audience towards comparable programming that was more economical for Spotify. Doing so, according to the document, would boost Spotify's annual gross

Starting point is 00:08:46 profit by $35 million euros or $38 million. The proposal in question did not come to fruition. We continue to have White Noise Podcasts on our platform. A Spotify spokesperson responded email. Still, some odd events have occurred. One Reddit thread documents a time when White Noise Podcasts vanished from their account. Other users joined the thread saying they saw the same issue. One white noise podcaster who asked to remain anonymous because they didn't want to draw attention to their show told me they've seen their episodes go missing on the platform twice this year. The first time, the missing episode problem lasted around three weeks and cost them an average of 50,000 downloads per day. The second time, which lasted around 10 days,

Starting point is 00:09:25 caused them to lose an additional 20,000 downloads per day. They still haven't recovered that lost audience, they said, though the episodes are live again. Spotify's challenge with White Noise Podcasts mirrors a similar conversation happening in the world of music. Universal Music Group's CEO Lucian Grange and Werner Music CEO Robert Kynel have both voiced their displeasure at the fact that songs filled with noise are paid out of the same royalty pool shared by their superstars.

Starting point is 00:09:53 But what they, and likely even Spotify, might not have realized, is how the biggest streaming platforms push into podcasts would not only take listeners' time away from Drake or Ed Shearin, but also drive them into the calming fuzz of things like white noise soundscapes, removing them from the music ecosystem altogether, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, the journal has a rare look at the finances and business of SpaceX. Quote, the privately held company generated $55 million in profit on $1.5 billion in revenue,

Starting point is 00:10:29 during the first quarter of 2023, according to results in documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal. The slim earnings came after two years of significant but narrowing losses at SpaceX, which is pouring money into a rocket that remains unproven and poses difficult technical challenges. Hawthor and California-based SpaceX has grown rapidly since its early days and was valued at roughly $150 billion during a recent employee stock sale, putting it on par with Intel or Disney. Before SpaceX's small quarterly profit at the start of this year, the company reported about $5.2 billion in total expenses for 2022 up from $3.3 billion the year earlier,

Starting point is 00:11:05 the documents show. Revenue doubled to $4.6 billion, helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559 million from $968 million. Next, it's the 25th anniversary of the IMac, which, as the verge in this piece rightly points out, is the device that saved Apple from oblivion. at the table for the company that we know today, but they also make two other important points. Aside from the easy connectivity and cute colors, as the things that made the original IMAX stand out, I think they're right to also highlight, number one, the internet moment was really why the IMAX succeeded in the end, and also, number two, how it bequeathed to us the I moniker, which we may never really be rid of. Quote, after Windows became dominant, the Mac's greatest

Starting point is 00:11:58 liability was simply its incompatibility. One of the reasons to get a computer at home during this era was to run the same programs you ran at school or at work. And while many schools had Macs, few businesses did outside of the design and publishing industries. While Apple had built up a community of customers who felt the product was superior to the competition, most people just opted for the default, and that was Windows. But the rise of online services and the internet in the mid-1990s gave Apple a unique opportunity. On the internet, nobody knew you were using a Mac. Once you connected, you were using AOL or a CompuServe or just your local internet provider and a web browser or email app. While some sites didn't function if you weren't using Internet Explorer for Windows, most worked just fine.

Starting point is 00:12:39 So if you were a family looking to get on the Internet, why wouldn't you buy an IMac? It worked with the Internet, would look great on a desk or table, and was easy to get up and running. And sure, if you wanted to run Microsoft Office, they made that for MacOS 8, too. Upon its release, the IMAQ became so well known that it may have even eclipsed, the Apple brand for a little while. It was at least a strong enough signifier that Apple began using it for other products. The iBook laptop was an obvious choice, but in 2001, the company chose to reuse the branding for its new music player, the iPod. The iPod didn't connect to the internet, but it didn't matter. Apple was declaring that the I stood for another cool Apple

Starting point is 00:13:18 product you'd want to buy, and people bought an awful lot of iPods. Apple began slapping the lowercase eye in front of a lot of its hardware, software, and services culminating in the release of the iPhone and iPad, end quote. This is also history, but a bit off the beaten path. I present for you the scientific history of the humble paper airplane. Quote, Chinese engineers are thought to have invented what could be considered the earliest paper planes around 2,000 years ago. But these ancient gliders usually crafted from bamboo or paper or linen resembled kites more than the dart-shaped flyers that have earned numerous Guinness World Records in recent years. Leonardo da Vinci would say.

Starting point is 00:13:57 take a step closer to the modern paper airplane in the late 14th and early 15th centuries by building paper models of his aircraft designs to assess how they might sustain flight. But Da Vinci's knowledge of aerodynamics was fairly limited. He was more inspired by animal flight, and as a result, his design for craft like the ornithopter, a hang glider-sized set of batwings that use mechanical systems powered by human movement, never left the ground. Paper airplanes helped early engineers and scientists learn about the mechanics of flight. The British engineer and aviator Sir George Cayley reportedly crafted the first folded paper plane to approach modern specifications in the early 1800s as part of his personal experimentation with aerodynamics.

Starting point is 00:14:36 He was one of the early people to link together the idea that the lift from the wings, picking up the aircraft for a stable flight, must be greater or equal to the weight of the aircraft, says Jonathan Ridley, Ph.D., the head of engineering, and a scholar of early aviation at Solent University in the UK, end quote. Actually, it turns out that paper airplanes are still heavily studied and heavily in use for scientific purposes at high-level labs around the world to this day. Read this piece. It's way more detailed than I'm able to quote from here, like scientifically detailed. Turns out also, by the way, the world record time a paper airplane has stayed in the air is 30 seconds. Maybe a weekend project for you to get in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Starting point is 00:15:20 Finally, last week I shared a profile of Paul F. Tompkins, a comedian who does a somewhat famous Werner Herzog impression. Well, here's a piece this weekend about the man himself, the film director Verner Herzog, and there's an AI angle to this to boot. Quoting the times, if artificial intelligence had a voice, what would it sound like? Calm like Hal 9,000, perky like Alexa, polite like C3PO. For the editors of IM code in artificial intelligence speaks, a collection of poems generated by AI, the answer, was obvious. Werner Herzog. The 80-year-old German director, actor, and author is a titan of independent cinema whose films often concern the hubris and folly of humankind. His speaking voice,

Starting point is 00:16:06 known to audiences mostly through the stark literary voiceover narration that accompanies many of his documentaries, carries an existential pathos and Teutonic Gravitas that made it a pop culture trademark. Something like this, anyway, was on the minds of Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau, and Simon Rich, the editors of IAM Code, when they reached out to Mr. Herzog to ask if he would lend his formidable instrument to the audiobook version of their project. They had an understanding that I wasn't the best choice, I was the only choice. Mr. Hertzsock said in a phone interview, when you look at the text, it becomes quite self-evident. He added, end quote. I usually shy away from these, but okay, here's my Werner Herzog impression, because it's simple.

Starting point is 00:16:59 It's only one word. You ready? look at those bears the bears no bonus episodes for you this weekend talk to you on Monday

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 08/18 – Werner Herzog Is The AI Voice We Deserve

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