Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 11/04 – The Twitter Layoffs

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

The layoffs have begun at Twitter. And while Twitter might shutter its Substack competitor, Substack has moved into Twitter’s turf by launching a sort of discussion platform. DALL-E API’s are now available for you to use. What it’s like to use Netflix’s new ad-supported tier. And, of course, The Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: hiddenheroes.netguru.com Links: Elon Musk’s Twitter layoffs are starting (The Verge) Substack targets Twitter with launch of discussions feature, Substack Chat (TechCrunch) Amazon pauses hiring for corporate workforce (CNBC) DALL-E API released by OpenAI in public beta, potential boon for app builders (VentureBeat) With Netflix’s ads tier, you never know what you’re going to get (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Bored Ape Yacht Club tell all: The untold story of the $4 billion crypto startup (FastCompany) The ‘Viral’ Secure Programming Language That’s Taking Over Tech (Wired) The Race to Be Figma for Devs: CodeSandbox vs. StackBlitz (TheNewStack) The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet (Wired) Inside the weirdly competitive industry of robots writing letters in human handwriting (FastCompany) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, November 4th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The layoffs have begun at Twitter. And while Twitter might be shutting down, its substack competitor, Substack, has moved into Twitter's turf by launching a sort of discussion platform. Dolly APIs are now available for you to use, what it's like to use Netflix's new ad-supported tier, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Twitter layoffs are happening right now. Unfortunately, they began overnight, quoting the verge. Employees will receive an email by 9 a.m. PST on November 4th, confirming whether they have been laid off or not, according to the internal memo, which also states

that employee badge access to Twitter's offices will be shut off temporarily. We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through whether or not you are impacted. The memo reads, thank you for continuing to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential company information on social media with the press or elsewhere, end quote. After employees received the memo confirming layoffs would begin, many began quickly trying to unlink their Twitter accounts from their work email addresses, a company mandated policy that also requires physical keys for two-factor authentication. In Twitter's Slack and group chats, employees complained about the lack of internal communication from Musk and Twitter's other leaders over the past week. I truly wish

you all well, for your sake, for the sake of your teams, and for the sake of the many people and communities. This product serves, one data scientist wrote in a Slack message addressed to leadership that was seen by the verge. But I also hope the failure of this past week hangs heavy on you to remind you to do better, end quote. It's funny how different companies having different cultures is actually reflected in real life by the people who work there. Twitter employees that I've known over the years have always been a very specific type, dedicated, often more idealistic than a lot of people in tech. Also extremely generous and interesting people. I'm going to let friend of and listener to this show, Keith Hernandez,

speak for me when he tweeted, quote, sorry it's going down this way, Twitter peeps. You were always great partners and collaborators trying to make the app better each day while other forces were trying to destroy it. Be proud of your work and know the next place you go will respect you, end quote. Some Twitter workers. have filed a class action lawsuit against the company in San Francisco for executing mass layoffs without at least 60 days notice per the Warren Act. Sources are also telling the New York Times that Elon Musk is weighing, adding paid DMs to let users privately message, quote, very important tweeters, which just sounds to me like a way

to chase celebrities off the platform. Casey Newton is reporting that Twitter plans to shut down their newsletter platform review, which was acquired only back in January 2021, shutting it down by the end of this year. It's also paused work, according to Casey, on its new notes product and crypto wallet. Meanwhile, Reuters says Elon has told Twitter teams to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings, including reduced spending on cloud services and server space. And word from the Wall Street Journal that General Mills and Audi have paused their Twitter ads, and sources say Pfizer and Mondalese have as well as concern over content moderation grows. Well, as opposed to review shutting down, newsletter leader Substack has announced chat

and opt-in feature letting writers host discussions with their subscribers, available in the Substack iOS app now and coming soon to Android, quoting TechCrunch. Another company hoping to capitalize on Twitter's upheaval in the wake of Elon Musk's takeover is the newsletter platform Substack. The company has openly targeted Twitter's user base over the past few days and has now thrown its hat into the ring as a more direct competitor with the launch of Substack chat. The new feature allows Substack writers to communicate directly with their most avid and loyal readers right in the Substack mobile app. With chat, Substack is not only taking on Twitter, where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord. Discord, Slack, and Telegram. The company says the new chat feature will eliminate the need for its writers to Frankenstein together different software tools and cross-reference subscriber lists. It explains in its announcement, chat is not a Twitter clone by any means, though there is overlap with how writers have used Twitter in the past. For starters, the chat feature will be

opt-in, meaning not every newsletter may have chats enabled at this time. Publications will have to first enable the feature on their settings page, or by simply starting a new thread in the Substack app. Already, Substack says writers including sports journalist Joe Posnatsky, pop culture writer Hunter Harris, and comics writers Three Worlds, Three Moons, have launched chats on the service. In some cases, these chats have been used to discuss live events, like Game 3 of the World Series, or they've been used in place of email or other ways writers may have chosen to interact with their readers in the past. Readers can react to post using emojis and add their own comments in the chat threads, end quote.

Back to the jobs situation in the tech industry, unfortunately. Amazon has reportedly paused hiring for roles in its corporate workforce after announcing in October plans to freeze hiring for corporate roles in its retail business. Quoting CNBC, Amazon's HR chief Beth Galletti wrote in the memo that the company moved to further restrict new hiring amid a worsening economic outlook and after it hired rapidly in recent years. We anticipate keeping this pause in place for the next few months and will continue to continue to. monitor what we're seeing in the economy and the business to adjust as we think makes sense, Goletti said. Amazon will backfill roles to replace employees who leave for new opportunities, and it will continue to, quote, hire people incrementally in some targeted places, she added, end quote. Meanwhile, Mark German is reporting that Apple paused hiring in October for many of its jobs outside of research and development, including some corporate functions and standard hardware and software engineering roles. OpenAI has released a Dolly API into public beta, letting developers integrate Dolly into their apps and products.

The API is priced per image output based on size, quoting Venture Beat. Get ready, developers, today OpenAI released the hotly anticipated Dolly API in public beta, which means developers can now integrate Dolly directly into their apps and products. With the announcement, Dolly, a transformer language model that allows users to use natural language prompts to create and edit original images, joins GPT3 embeddings and codecs in OpenAI's API platform. Companies such as Kala, a fashion design platform, and mixed tiles, which prints online photos on lightweight decorative tiles, have already implemented and tested the API for their specific use cases. The API will be available for anybody to use on the OpenAI platform, Luke Miller product

manager at OpenAI told Venture Beat, the Dolly API is priced per image output based on size. 1024 by 1024 costs two cents an image, while there are very slight discounts for 512 by 512 at 0.018 per image and 256 by 256 at 016 per image. The API has three capabilities. Miller explained, users can generate an image, edit a part of the image, and also generate multiple variations of the image. You can think of it as not unlike the creative process coming up with ideas, picking something and narrowing in, and then continuing to iterate and find something that suits your need and the given context, he said, end quote. And a review, but a different kind of review. Over at the verge, tech meme editor alum, Jay Peters got hands on time, or I guess,

eyes on time with Netflix's new Basic with Ads tier. He says, while most shows have pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads are more unpredictable, and many popular shows are locked to higher tiers anyway. As for the ads themselves, they're pretty standard online video ads. With my brand new account, I was served ads for things like cars, hotels, cruises, jewelry, and fragrances. Netflix says ads are 15 or 30 seconds long, which matched my experience. You can pause them, but you can't skip them, though Netflix hopefully counts down how long the ad break is in the top right corner of the screen. One major drawback to the ads tier is that some things just aren't available to watch.

Those shows and movies will be marked by a little red padlock in the top right-hand corner. If you see that, you can't watch the show. Netflix Basic with Ads is exactly what I expected. It's Netflix with ads. If that's something you can live with and you're okay with other tradeoffs like 720P video quality and no offline downloads, then saving a couple bucks with the cheaper tier might be worth it. Personally, I'll be sticking with the no ads option since I see enough ads on the Internet already. Time for the Week on Long Read Suggestions.

first up from Fast Company, the whole history of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, told through the lens of the history of its parent company, Yuga Labs, quote, since forming in February 2021, Yuga Labs racked up $100 million in profit in its first year, according to a leaked presentation, and raised $450 million in seed funding in March, valuing the company at $4 billion. It has attracted celebrities and companies from Gwyneth Paltrow to Adidas to associate their brands with board. Bored Apes and debuted a preview of its Metaverse game Other Side in July. If anyone you know outside of the Crypto Universe has heard of an NFT project, it's the BordApe Yacht Club. But even as Bored Apes have achieved a measure of cultural ubiquity, Yuga's story has remained largely a mystery. No one knows its future ambitions, nor that the company's success and direction are primarily the product of just four people. The two idea guys, the operator, and the Hollywood legend.

Co-founders Wiley Aronow and Greg Solano, strategic advisor-turned CEO Nicole Munoz, and talent manager and producer Guy Osseri have each had a profound effect on Yuga Labs and its trajectory from art project to controller of the most valuable NFT brands with the intention of taking them mainstream. We're all involved, we're all invested, we all love each other, says Munoz of the moment in the fall of 2021, that she and Osiri joined the founders as partners in Yuga. Let's just do this thing, end quote. From Wired, a look at the Rust programming language after 12 years, how it's evolved from a side project to a robust ecosystem, as developers praise its security, ease of use, performance, quote, because Rust produces more secure code and crucially doesn't worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherence and is now at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust.

Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust's support. Rust is what's known as a memory-safe language because it's designed to make it impossible for a program to pull unintended data from a computer's memory accidentally. When programmers use stalwart languages that don't have this property, including C and C++, they have to carefully check the parameters of what data their program is going to be requesting and how a task that even the most skilled and experienced developers will occasionally botch.

By writing new software and rust instead, even amateur programmers can be confident that they haven't introduced any memory safety bugs into their code, end quote. Then online venue, the new stack, asked the question, who is going to be the Figma for developers? Who's going to be a cloud IDE for programmers? It takes a look at two contenders, code sandbox and stackblitz, quote, Ever since the $20 billion figma acquisition in September, there has been increasing interest in the cloud IDE market. The thinking is, if even design tools can become web-native, then surely it is high time for developers to move to fully web-based tooling. After all, even Photoshop, once thought to be incapable of shifting to the web, has a browser version now.

But strangely, developer tools are seemingly the last category of builder products to move to the web. Developers are sticking loyally to their local host, end quote. Back to Wired, if you had to guess the one single point of vulnerability, the one place where the risk of bottleneck was the greatest in terms of the actual physical global footprint of the internet, would it surprise you if I told you that place was Egypt? Quote, the global network of underwater cables forms a large part of the internet's backbone, carrying the majority of data around the world, and eventually linking up to the networks that power cell towers and Wi-Fi connections. subsea cables connect New York to London and Australia to Los Angeles. Sixteen of these submarine cables, which are often no thicker than a hosepipe and are vulnerable to damage from ships' anchors and earthquakes, pass 1,200 miles through the Red Sea before they hop over land in Egypt and get to the Mediterranean Sea connecting Europe to Asia. The last two decades have seen the route emerge as one of the world's largest internet choke points and arguably the internet's most vulnerable place on Earth.

The region, which also includes the Suez Canal, is also a global choke point for shipping and the movement of goods. Chaos ensued when the container ship ever given got wedged in the canal in 2021, end quote. And finally today, with all of this recent talk of AI and robots, back to Fast Company for a look into the weirdly competitive industry of robots writing letters in script. That is to say, attempting to mimic human handwriting. quote, imagine an army of robots holding real pens, writing real letters that look eerily realistic to a human's handwriting. That's the idea behind handwritten, an Arizona-based company that was one of the first to popularize robot scribes. Since it was founded in 2014, the company's robots

have produced more than 6 million notes and amassed more than 100,000 customers, including Netflix, which fittingly used the robots to promote a movie called The Last Letter to Your Love. after a slow start and a COVID-19-related slump, handwritten closed 2020 with $3 million in revenue, and it's projecting to triple that by the end of 2022. The premise is simple and preposterous all at once. Individuals and companies alike can choose among 30 handwriting styles, a single card starts at $3.75.

Monthly packages range from $99 to $14,250 based on the number of cards you need, or replicate their own for up to $1,250. And if you really mean business, you can integrate the services into your sales and marketing strategy and have your system automatically send a handwritten thank you card when, say, a customer purchases a car from your dealership. But handwritten's robots are not the only ones toiling away approximating a human touch. In fact, it's just one of half a dozen companies relying on the dexterity of robots to perform an intrinsically personal activity. Addressable mail focuses entirely on real estate listings, while Ignite Post is more geared towards e-commerce, fundraising, insurance, and sales.

There's handwritten with a Y and handwritten with an I, according to Jared Moore, who founded the latter. Handwritten's main clientele is insurance companies. And then there's simply noted, which caters to a wide range of sectors from medical sales to B2B companies, or, as its founder, Rick Elmore says, anybody who has a client, end quote. No bonus episodes for you this weekend. be well, have a peaceful time. Talk to you on Monday.