Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/09 – White House Comes Out Against Proof-Of-Work?

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 Tech meme right home for Friday, September 9th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is the U.S. government about to legally curtail proof-of-work crypto projects. Intel's big new GPU specs. Uber Eats signs a deal to get into the sort of ankle bots business. What I believe is the oldest startup ever to be acquired by a tech giant. And of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. A White House report is proposing outright restrictions on proof-of-work mechanisms if U.S. crypto mining companies fail to reduce the industry's environmental impact.

Starting point is 00:01:13 This comes as sources are also saying that the U.S. Treasury will warn the White House that cryptocurrencies pose significant financial risks that outweigh the benefits and need major regulations. Quoting the block. A report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy proposed that U.S. lawmakers and policymakers consider legal. limitations or outright restrictions to reduce crypto mining's environmental impact if other strategies fail to catch on. The report, which was mandated by executive order earlier this year, called for efforts to minimize the environmental impacts from crypto assets. Government institutions

Starting point is 00:01:48 like the Environmental Protection Agency, quote, should provide technical assistance and initiate a collaborative process with states, communities, the crypto asset industry, and others to develop effective evidence-based environmental performance standards for the responsible design development and use of environmentally responsible crypto asset technologies, end quote. Those proposed standards focus on the use of clean energy, low water, and low energy intensities, among others, the report said, quote, should these measures prove ineffective at reducing impacts, the administration should explore executive actions and Congress might consider legislation to limit or eliminate the use of high-energy intensity consensus mechanisms for

Starting point is 00:02:29 crypto asset mining, according to the report, which mentioned proof-of-work consensus, currently used by Bitcoin and other digital assets to create the next block of transactions on the network. The miner that creates a block is rewarded with both a subsidy, currently 6.25 Bitcoin, as well as transaction fees, but the process is highly energy-intensive, end quote. Well, I guess Ethereum is ahead of the game by moving to proof of stake. Intel has revealed its ARC alchemist desktop GPU specifications for demanding budget and even casual gamers. The top model will have 32XE cores and 16 gigabytes of GDDR 6 RAM, quoting Tom's hardware. Intel's ARC A series family for desktops will consist of ARC A770, ARC A750, ARC A580, and the already well known ARC A3

Starting point is 00:03:32 80. For now, Intel releases specifications of actual graphics processing units and recommended memory configurations, but graphics cards from the company's partners may have higher clocks and higher performance. The ARC A770 will be Intel's top of the range model based on the ACMG10 graphics processor with 32XE cores equivalent to 4,096 stream processors operating at 2100 megahertz and equipped with 8 gigabytes or 16 gigabytes of GDDR6. memory featuring a peak bandwidth of 560 GbPS. The ARC-750 will sit slightly below the flagship and feature a cut-down ACMG10 GPU with 28 XE cores equivalent to 3,584 shading units working at 2050 megahertz and connected to 8 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory with a peak bandwidth of 512 GbPS.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Both cards might find themselves among the best graphics cards provided they work flawlessly, offered decent performance, and their price is right. Intel's ARC-A-580 will sit below the A-750 and target gamers on a budget who still want to get a taste of Intel's top-end discrete GPU. This board will feature 24 XE cores or 3,072 shading units running at 1,700 megahertz so that it will be more than 30% slower than the top of the range, Arc A770. In addition, graphics cards based on the Arc A580 will carry 8 gigabytes of, GDDR6 memory with up to 512 GPPS bandwidth.

Starting point is 00:05:07 Intel's entry-level offering is the ARC-A-380 based on the ACMG11 GPU with 8XE cores, 1,024 shading units, operating at 2,000 megahertz and connected to 6 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory. This board is already available from New Egg for $140, end quote. Uber and Nuro have signed a 10-year deal and planned to deploy autonomous vehicles for Uber Eats, deliveries in Mountain View, California, and Houston, Texas as soon as this fall. Quoting the Verge. Today's announcement is the culmination of over four years of start and stop negotiations between the two companies.

Starting point is 00:05:49 Uber wanted to use Nero's vehicles to make deliveries in Houston back in 2019, but those plans never panned out. Now the two companies have struck a decade-long deal to expand robot deliveries to more customers than ever. Neuro's second-generation R2 vehicle is not your typical delivery robot designed only for sidewalk travel. It's much larger, about half as wide as a compact sedan, but shorter than most cars. And there's no room inside for human passengers or drivers, making it fully driverless in the truest sense. It has a top speed of 45 miles per hour, making it ideal for residential travel, but not allowing it to go on

Starting point is 00:06:24 highways. It can carry a total of 500 pounds with space for about 24 grocery bags in its compartments. Nero, which is valued at $8.6 billion, was founded in 2016 by Dave Ferguson and Jiajuang two veterans of the Google self-driving car project that would go on to become Waymo. It is one of the few companies to be operating fully driverless vehicles, that is, vehicles without safety drivers behind the wheel on public roads today. It was the first company to receive a special exemption from certain federal safety requirements and was also the first to charge money for its driverless deliveries in California. The permit issued by the California DMV only allows the company to operate its delivery service in parts of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which would mean most of the Silicon Valley and its tech workers would be within its domain, but not San Francisco or Oakland.

Starting point is 00:07:14 That means the company will need to obtain additional permission from the DMV before expanding its service area, end quote. Amazon has acquired Klustermans, a Belgian company specializing in tech to move and stack, heavy pallets, and robotics used to package products for customer orders. Quoting TechCrunch. Clusterman's is a specialist in mechatronics. It's been building technology to move and stack heavy pallets and totes, and robotics used to package products together for customer orders. Amazon has been using those products as a customer of Clusterman since 2019 for e-commerce operations.

Starting point is 00:07:56 It's making the acquisition to ramp up its R&D and deployment in that area. The bigger picture for Amazon is that it will likely be doing a lot more in warehouse robotics in the years ahead to meet the demands of its ever-expanding e-commerce operation. An internal report at the company leaked earlier this year to Vox projected that Amazon is facing a major shortage of workers in its warehouses, not necessarily because of the labor disputes it's been facing in various markets, but because it's running out of people to hire. The report suggested that alongside higher wages, further automation could be one way to offset that crisis. Deals like this one to acquire Klucermans and ramp up its usage of robotics,

Starting point is 00:08:33 in those warehouses would fit into that strategy. Notably, Klusterman's is no startup, nor is it a typical M&A target for a tech leviathan. It was founded in 1884 and has been privately held for the last six generations, end quote. Which is kind of why I'm sharing this story. It's not every day that you see a tech giant gobbling up, a company, and you find out that that company was founded before Queen Victoria had even celebrated her golden Jubilee. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up from Ars Technica, more on stable diffusion. Quote, stable diffusion is the brainchild of Imad Mostaki, a London-based former hedge fund manager whose aim is to bring novel applications of deep learning to the masses through his company's

Starting point is 00:09:26 stability AI. But the roots of modern image synthesis date back to 2014, and stable diffusion wasn't the first image synthesis model, ISM, to make waves this year. On August 22nd, Stability AI released its open source image generation model that arguably matches Dolly 2 in quality. It also launched its own commercial website called Dream Studio that sells access to compute time for generating images with stable diffusion. Unlike Dolly 2, anyone can use it, and since the stable diffusion code is open source, projects can build off it with few restrictions. In the past week alone, dozens of projects that take stable diffusion in radical new directions have sprung up, and people have achieved unexpected results using a technique called image-to-image that has upgrades.

Starting point is 00:10:08 M.S. Dos Game Art, converted Minecraft graphics into realistic ones, transformed a scene from Aladdin into 3D, translated childlike scribbles into rich illustrations, and much more. Image synthesis may bring the capacity to richly visualize ideas to a mass audience, lowering barriers to entry while also accelerating the capabilities of artists that embrace the technology, much like Adobe Photoshop did in the 1990s, end quote. more dystopian gaming reports from the team that strung together a Minecraft project on the blockchain. It kind of turned out the way you would expect, quoting rest of world. After interest in Axi Infinity collapsed following a plummeting in-game economy and a $620 million hack,

Starting point is 00:10:50 many players moved to other play-to-earn games, including Critters. Critters hoped to address one of the primary criticisms Axi Infinity faced that players were motivated much more by profit than by a desire to play the game itself. as the game alone simply wasn't compelling enough. We just had an idea, what if you can make an existing game play to earn? Emerson Shea, a co-founder of Critters, told Rest of World, Minecraft is an established game that we know people want to play, end quote. For a while, it worked.

Starting point is 00:11:17 Some Critters players told Rest of World that at one point they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned. But as with Axi Infinity, once the game became more powerful, popular, the value of its crypto token began to drop. Worth 85 cents at its peak in January, it had decreased to around three cents by May. But the depreciation was gradual and many players continued playing and building. Then on July 20th, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell. Minecraft would not support integrations with

Starting point is 00:11:53 NFTs, end quote. If stories like that make your blood boil, maybe check out the coverage of the no-coiner conference that was held recently in London. I believe it's the first conference of people that are, let's say, skeptical of the blockchain, quote. It was the final evening of the two-day crypto policy symposium in London, and a group of crypto-sceptics had gathered in a club in Marleybourne to drink free Prosecco and conspicuously not sell each other crypto-tokens. I was surrounded by guys who were the exact inverse of your usual crypto-bro conference goer. They wore corduroy trousers, worked in IT, and looked like your dad. They were called Martin, and they came armed with evidence-based research, sober policy proposals, and empirical, entirely uncontroversial perspectives on market

Starting point is 00:12:42 structure. We're getting more organized and more powerful, and this conference is a testament to that, said deal, a virulent online critic of crypto and chief organizer of the conference. Coincidentally, he is also peddling a new free, self-published book he co-authored, called Popping the Crypto Bubble, end quote. Well, you know, who says grifters can only be operating on one side of this debate. Then from the Atlantic, a look at YouTube's Cool Hunters, who were tasked with finding and promoting talented YouTubers in the company's earliest years before the algorithms took over. Quote, the cool hunters each had their own way of finding hits. Every morning, Harper scoured a list sheet assembled of blogs and internet Arcana,

Starting point is 00:13:26 searching for interesting videos. When she found ones worth putting on the homepage, she would add them to, YouTube's featured videos banner, which stacked small frames of videos on a column of 10. Her team swapped those slots every four hours, giving YouTubers behind the videos. They selected a guaranteed cascade of views. Before Donald Glover was a celebrity, Harper promoted a comedy sketch in which he mocks an old hip-hop pose, the B-boy stance. Some picks showed up in wider pop culture. Harper discovered a music video with a catchy whistling hook from a band called Peter Bjorn and John. A week later, Drew Barrymore wore the band's t-shirt on Saturday Night Live, end quote. Not many people know this, but early on in

Starting point is 00:14:05 its life, Yahoo literally had hundreds, maybe even as many as a thousand employees, whose sole job was adding new websites to the Yahoo directory. But that was kind of the thing. Yahoo was for a long time a curated directory, not an automated index. And you wonder why culturally Google was able to beat Yahoo. Then this got a lot of play last week. weekend, so in case you missed it, from the Guardian, a profile of the super-rich preppers, largely from the tech industry who are planning to save themselves, not all of us, but themselves, from the apocalypse. The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed

Starting point is 00:14:48 me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to. me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves five super wealthy guys, yes, all men, from the upper echelon of the tech investing in hedge fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions. They started out innocuously and predictably enough Bitcoin or Ethereum, virtual reality or augmented reality, who will get

Starting point is 00:15:24 quantum computing first, China or Google. Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern. New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat? Global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, how do I maintain authority over my security force after the event. The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear

Starting point is 00:16:04 explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hacks that would take down everything. This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy SEALs to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? what would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader, end quote. And finally, from Apple Insider, just a fun look at the Apple feature graveyard. As Apple Insider themselves put it, the once heavily marketed, once touted as major breakthroughs

Starting point is 00:16:46 that showed Apple was the best, often touted from the stage at Apple events, but now gone. 3D touch is in there, aperture is in there, I-Web, heck, as we discussed recently, even the use of the eye before products as a naming convention. I believe not a single eye product has been released in the Tim Cook era. Anyway, enjoy these blasts from the past. Okay, one more. The very last link in the Long Reads is to a post from 2018 that took a look at the so-called deaditors of Wikipedia,

Starting point is 00:17:24 those editors who update a famous person's Wikipedia page. Almost the second news of their death is announced. Not trying to be cute. and find a tech-angled to the big news of the day. I just thought it was interesting. No bonus episodes this weekend. Truly going to enjoy probably the last weekend of summer here in Brooklyn. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/09 – White House Comes Out Against Proof-Of-Work?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.