Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/07 – What Is It With These Dang Bridges?

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, October 7th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. There's another huge crypto hack, and I'll give you two guesses as to what folks think the culprit is.

Starting point is 00:00:45 The Twitter-Elon trial is officially paused. Meta can't get its own developers to use their Metaverse products. Maybe my dream of Death Star-style Ankle bots is over, and of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. What the heck is it with Bridges? Example number, whatever. Binance says two million BNB coin worth around $570 million were stolen from its BNB chain in an exploit. The, quote, majority of BNB are in the hacker's wallet. Around $100 million worth were, quote,

Starting point is 00:01:25 unrecovered. Earlier, the word was that Binance smart chain had suspended transactions due to a bridge exploit. Quoting the latest from Reuters, Binance CEO Chang Peng Zhao. said in a tweet that tokens were stolen from a blockchain bridge used in the BNB chain, which was known as Binance Smart Chain until February. Blockchain bridges are tools used to transfer cryptocurrencies between different applications. Zhao said the hackers stole around $100 million worth of crypto. BNB chain later said in a blog post that a total of two million of the cryptocurrency BNB worth around $570 million was withdrawn by the hacker.

Starting point is 00:02:03 BNB chain supports the BNB cryptocurrency, formerly known as BNB, Binance Coin, which is the world's fifth largest token with a market value of some $46 billion according to Coin Gecko data. Some $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency has been sold in 13 different bridge hacks mostly this year, crypto analytics firm Chainalysis said in August. BNB Chain suspended its blockchain for several hours before resuming at around 0630 GMT, it said in a tweet. It said in its blog post that BNB Chain was, quote, able to stop the incident from spreading by contacting the blockchain's validators, entities or individuals who verify blockchain transactions. BNB chain said there are 44 validators across several different time zones without giving further details.

Starting point is 00:02:47 BNB chain said it would introduce a new governance mechanism to counter future hacks, as well as to expand the number of validators, end quote. Real quick, because I'm kind of as tired of this as you are, Judge Kathleen McCormick, officially granted Elon Musk's request to halt the Twitter trial and says that if a deal isn't struck between the two parties by 5 p.m. on October 28th, the trial will begin in November, quoting the verge. The stay was granted over the protests of Twitter's lawyers who implored the judge not to take Musk's words seriously. Twitter's lawyer Kevin Shannon wrote in a letter to McCormick saying, quote, now on the eve of trial, defendants declare they intend to close after all.

Starting point is 00:03:35 Trust us, they say, we mean it this time. And so they asked to be relieved from a reckoning on the merits. quote. Musk's lawyers insisted that the problem is actually with Twitter, as Edward B. McAletty argued, quote, Twitter will not take yes for an answer. Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk, and gambling with their stockholders' interests, end quote. Sources say Musk Twitter talks are stuck on a question of debt financing, but Musk also apparently wants to reserve the right to sue Twitter for allegedly misleading him. about bot accounts. The Verge has seen an internal memo, wherein Meta's VP of Metaverse, says that Horizon Worlds, which is Meta's flagship Metaverse app at the moment,

Starting point is 00:04:29 is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building the app isn't using it very much. Quote, in one of the memos to employees dated September 15th, Meta's VP of Metaverse Vishal Shah, said the team would remain in a quality lockdown for the rest of the year to, quote, ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users. Since launching late last year, we have seen that the core thesis of Horizon Worlds, a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds, is strong, Shah wrote in a memo last month. But current feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of paper cuts,

Starting point is 00:05:08 stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon. Simply put, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well-crafted, end quote. A key issue with Horizon's development to date, according to Shah's internal memos, is that the people building it inside meta appear not to be using it that much. Quote, for many of us, we don't spend that much time in Horizon, and our dog-fooding dashboards show this pretty clearly. He wrote to employees on September 15th, Why is that? Why don't we love the product we've built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don't love it, how can we expect our users to love it, end quote.

Starting point is 00:05:50 In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, Shaw said that employees still weren't using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to, quote, hold managers accountable for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can't do that without using it. in there. Organized times to do it with your colleagues or friends in both internal builds, but also the public builds so you can interact with our community, end quote. Ah yes, a product that you have to make it your mission to fall in love with. That's clearly a product that say my mom would naturally just want to use of her own accord, but hey, you know, product market fit is hard.

Starting point is 00:06:38 Meanwhile, Amazon has reportedly stopped working on Scout, its autonomous, cooler-sized home delivery robot that it's been testing since 2019. This was one of the first of the so-called ankle bots that I got excited about. A source says around 400 people were working on the project globally at Amazon. And look, y'all, if ankle bots end up being a bust two, I'm just going to be very sad, quoting Bloomberg. Amazon spokesperson Elisa Carroll said the scout team was being disbanded and would be offered new jobs in the organization. About 400 people were working on the project globally, according to the person who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. A skeleton crew will continue to consider the idea of an autonomous robot, but the current iteration

Starting point is 00:07:21 isn't working. During our Scout limited field test, we worked to create a unique delivery experience, but learned through feedback that there were aspects of the program that weren't meeting customers' needs, Carol said. As a result, we are ending our field tests and reorienting the program. We are working with employees during this transition, matching them to open roles that best fit their experience and skills. quote. Only a few months ago, Amazon was still holding meet and greets in communities where it was

Starting point is 00:07:47 testing the devices. Sean Scott, the vice president who oversaw the robots development, left the company last year, according to his LinkedIn profile, end quote. But hey, let's try to wrap this week on a hopeful note. Faster memory chips are coming. Samsung has detailed GDDR7, already in production, which boasts speeds up to 36 GbPS, doubling GDBS, doubling GD, D-R-6's 18 G-BPS, and they plan to release new V-NAND chips with a 230-layer design, quoting Tom's hardware. In the DRAM field, the company announced that its latest fifth-generation 10-nometer class manufacturing will start pushing out volume chips by 2023. Exploratory research is being done in sub-10-nometer DRAM manufacturing, employing new patterning materials and architecture

Starting point is 00:08:43 designs that include high K-Gates. Samsung is least. eags ahead of most of its rivals, which generally manufactured DRAM ships on 14 nanometer class nodes. Samsung's next generation GDDR7 memory, which is short to grace future graphics accelerators, is already in production. It offers speeds up to 36 GbPS, a doubling over GDDR6's 18 GPPPS. At those data rates, a 384-bit memory bus would be able to deliver around 1.728 terabytes per second bandwidth, a large increase from the upcoming RTX 4090s 1 terabytes per second bandwidth. This will ensure GPU manufacturers have an adequate reservoir of bandwidth left without having to increase bus widths, as that would lead to more expensive PCBs

Starting point is 00:09:32 and potentially even worse impacting on pricing. As for NAND, where Samsung stands as the undisputed king of the hill, the company is now designing and prototyping its ninth and 10th generation V NAND, with appropriate increases in layer density compared to the technology of today. Samsung is now shipping its seventh generation 176 layer VND, with plans to release VN chips based on its eighth generation 230 layer design by the end of the year. The latter will offer a 42% density increase with 512 gigabyte chips. But Samsung is eyeing even more significant jumps in density

Starting point is 00:10:07 and expects to achieve a thousand layer VN design by 2030. Samsung also continues to work on QLLG. C quad-level cell tech, hoping to boost performance while also increasing storage bit density, end quote. Time for the weekend long-read suggestions. It's kind of been bummer news all today. If the ankle bots aren't coming, maybe self-driving isn't either. Bloomberg has a long piece this week talking to Anthony Lewandowski, among others,

Starting point is 00:10:42 a bunch of folks in the self-driving space who are increasingly bearish about it, saying, you know, we have spent around $100 billion on self-million dollars. self-driving tech, and we're still kind of nowhere? Quote, six years after companies started offering rides in what they've called autonomous cars and almost 20 years after the first self-driving demos, there are vanishingly few such vehicles on the road, and they tend to be confined to a handful of places in the sunbelt because they still can't handle weather patterns trickier than partly cloudy. State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls unprotected left turns, which most

Starting point is 00:11:19 of us would call left turns. While the industry's biggest names continue to project optimism, the emerging consensus is that the world of robotaxies isn't just around the next unprotected left, that we might have to wait decades longer or an eternity. Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy, says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner, but we're going to be old, end quote. Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate. Chief among them is Anthony Lewandowski, the engineer who more or less created the model for self-driving research and was for more than a decade the field's biggest star. Now he's running a startup that is developing

Starting point is 00:12:02 autonomous trucks for industrial sites, and he says that for the foreseeable future, that's about as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle. You'd be hard-pressed to find another industry that's invested so many dollars in R&D, and that has delivered so little. Lavendoski says in an interview, forget about profits. What's the combined revenue of all the Robo Taxi, Robo truck, Robo whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe. I think it's more like zero, end quote. Okay, I keep trying to bounce back to optimism today. So look at all the excitement in AI, all of a sudden as a counter to that doom and gloom about self-driving cars. I really can't quote from this piece because it's more of a graphical thing, but Jay Alamar posted a step-by-step

Starting point is 00:12:48 illustrated explainer of how stable diffusion actually works. Check the links for that. Then back to Bloomberg for a profile of a fintech company that says it's still going strong. A college dropout from Switzerland has amassed a $14 billion fortune to become one of the country's richest people by creating a rising star in electronic payments. Guillermo Puzatz is the founder and chief executive officer of checkout.com, which this year raised funding at evaluation of $40 billion, making it worth more than British telecom's giant Vodafone. But in its formative years, his company also got business from clientele Pozatz doesn't like to talk about. Porn and gambling websites. His path to create one of Europe's

Starting point is 00:13:30 most valuable startups circles the globe from the U.S. where he pursued a passion for surfing and got his first taste of the payments industry to Singapore, where he founded Checkout's predecessor while still in his 20s, end quote. But back to cars, the non-self-driving variety. The Wall Street Journal asked the question, as more and more carmakers turn over the brains and interface for their vehicles to Google and Apple, are we facing a new duopoly? We're already used to Android people versus iOS people,

Starting point is 00:13:58 but in the future, forget Ford versus Chevy. Will we be locked into the cars we drive based on what tech ecosystem we're in? Quote, now that car. Cars, especially electric ones, are becoming something like smartphones on wheels. Some of the dynamics that played out in the early days of the mobile industry are playing out in the auto industry. Competition between the two kingpins of the smartphone industry has in the past couple of years gained new momentum with Google racking up automaker partnerships for the automobile-based

Starting point is 00:14:27 version of its Android operating system and Apple teasing plans to expand its software capabilities in the car. For the car companies involved, which faced the nearly impossible challenge of producing software on par with what tech companies offer, working with Silicon Valley can address consumer desires while also staving off competition from companies like Tesla. And yet, there is an inherent tension in these partnerships over who controls the user experience and the valuable data produced. Taken together, these forces mean that every carmaker is having to navigate a delicate balance between doing things in-house and signing partnerships that cede control and potentially some

Starting point is 00:15:02 sources of revenue. These choices are leading to a vast and confusing new ecosystem in which mobile device refers to the car and not just the phone. Until now, consumers didn't need to care about what software was running in their car, but increasingly they may. For the average driver, this could mean cars that operate with much more familiar and functional software, but it may also extend the limited choice that now exist in the duopoly of smartphone operating systems with implications for later selling a vehicle or switching to a different smartphone ecosystem. Imagine car listings that say 60,000 miles runs great, supports up to Apple CarOS version 3.1. Sorry Android users get an iPhone already, end quote.

Starting point is 00:15:45 And finally today, a weekend project. Download all of Wikipedia and put it on a flash drive. Why? I don't know. So you can have all of Humanities' collective knowledge available anywhere, even offline. I don't know why projects like this always appeal to me. Am I becoming a modern digital hoarder? I told you I got an 8 terabyte hard drive for my Mac studio despite also heavily using iCloud and OneDrive now basically that eight terabytes is only about 1.8 terabytes full. Am I becoming a modern digital prepper is my impulse to want to have all of Wikipedia on hand similar to the fact that I bought a Jackery battery and solar panel so that all summer all my phone and laptop usage was powered by free rays from the sun even though.

Starting point is 00:16:35 though it probably only saved me less than $10 in electric bills. Or is this related to, I don't know, my age, my generation. I'm of the original iPod generation where the urge to have all of your music at your fingertips meant getting the biggest possible iPod and uploading your whole music library and then meticulously organizing it as some form of therapy or something. I actually remember in the early days of the App Store, there was an app that let you download all of Wikipedia onto your phone. I took up most of the storage on my first iPhone with that. I remember reading Wikipedia on planes once or twice, which now, you know, even planes have decent Wi-Fi.

Starting point is 00:17:12 Anyway, if you want to do something similar with a flash drive that can fit on your keychain, say, the last link in the show notes is the step-by-step instructions for how to download all of Wikipedia. You'll need a minimum of a 128 gigabyte drive, but, you know, those are less than 15 bucks or so these days on Amazon, so why not? Let's all save Wikipedia on our thumb drives all around the world, and maybe one of us will be responsible for keeping the light of civilization burning. Canacal for Leibowitz style. Okay, no bonus episode this weekend, and also no show on Monday. I'm going to take Monday off.

Starting point is 00:17:55 Monday is Indigenous People's Day slash Columbus Day. And if you're a long enough listener, you'll recall, I usually make fun of this as a holiday to begin with, but as my parents are in town and the kids are now old enough to travel comfortably, I can't pass up this opportunity to spend a long weekend with all of them. Gonna go check out Providence and Newport, Rhode Island this week, maybe even Cape Cod. Anyway, talk to you on Tuesday. Be good in my absence.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/07 – What Is It With These Dang Bridges?

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