Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 11/09 - Amazon and Apple Cut a Deal

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

The great winter of tech worker discontent is definitely here, Disney’s streaming service has a name, Vine might be coming back, Github hits a major milestone and, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Links: Amazon is finally selling new iPhones after a long and complicated 'turf war' with Apple (BusinessInsider) A note to our employees (Google) #GoogleWalkout update: Collective action works, and we need to keep working. True equity depends on it. (Google Walkout For Real Change) Amazon Execs Addressed Concerns About Amazon Rekognition And ICE At An All-Hands Meeting (BuzzFeed) Vine co-founder plans to launch successor Byte in Spring 2019 (TechCrunch) GitHub passes 100 million repositories (Venture Beat) The Betterment Weekend Longreads: Why Technology Favors Tyranny (The Atlantic) Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer (NYTimes) HQ Trivia was a blockbuster hit — but internal turmoil and a shrinking audience have pushed its company to the brink (ReCode) ‘It’s Giant and Has Like Five Million Buttons.’ The Office Desk Phone Won’t Die (WSJ) Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (The New Yorker) Here Comes ‘Smart Dust,’ the Tiny Computers That Pull Power from the Air (WSJ) ASTRONOMERS SEE MATERIAL ORBITING A BLACK HOLE *RIGHT* AT THE EDGE OF FOREVER (SyFy Wire) 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, November 9th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the great winter of tech workers' discontent is definitely here.

Disney's streaming service has a name. Vine might be coming back. GitHub hits a major milestone. And, of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. I'm not sure how many people were aware of this, but while you can currently buy a lot of Apple products and a slew of Apple products, and a slew of Apple product accessories on Amazon,

until now you couldn't buy the most recent iPhone on Amazon. Refurbished, used iPhones, sure, but not the iPhone 10R. Well, that's all changing because Amazon has signed a deal with Apple to start selling Apple's latest and greatest devices on Amazon's website. iPhone 10, whatever's, iPad pros, Apple Watch Series 4s, Apple TVs, the latest Macs, whole shebang. The whole shebang except, notably, Apple's HomePod smart speaker. Quote, Amazon is constantly working to enhance the customer experience, and one of the ways we do this is by increasing selection of the products we know customers want. We look forward

to expanding our assortment of Apple and beats products globally, an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider. When asked about what was up with the HomePod omission, the spokesperson responded, we make assortment decisions all the time based on terms and a large number of other factors, end quote. Yeah, I can think of one rather obvious factor in this case, of course. This actually broke yesterday, but I'm actually glad I waited till today to get full context on it. Google announced yesterday that it will make arbitration optional for individual sexual harassment claims brought by employees, a key demand of those 20,000-odd Google employees who staged walkouts recently. Google also says it will provide more information about harassment investigations and several other measures. In a blog post, Google's CEO

Sundar Pichai wrote, quote, at Google, we try hard to build a workplace that supports our employees and empowers them to do their best work. As CEO, I take this responsibility very seriously, and I'm committed to making the changes we need to improve. Over the past few weeks, Google's leaders and I have heard your feedback and have been moved by the stories you've shared, end quote. In a response post on Medium, the employees who organize the walkouts, who call themselves Google Walkout for Real Change,

applauded the, quote, progress promised in Google's policy update. Quote, the company followed Uber and Microsoft by eliminating forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment. It also committed to more transparency in sexual harassment reporting and will allow workers to bring representatives to meetings with a job. We commend this progress and the rapid action which brought it about. However, the response ignored several of the core demands, like elevating the diversity officer and employee representation on the board,

and troublingly erased those focused on racism, discrimination, and the structural inequality built into the modern-day Jim Crow class system that separates, quote, full-time employees from contract workers. Contract workers make up more than half of Google's workforce, and perform essential roles across the company but receive few of the benefits associated with tech company employment. They are also largely people of color, immigrants, and people from working class backgrounds.

Organizer Stephanie Parker said of the response, We demand a truly equitable culture and Google leadership can achieve this by putting employee representation on the board and giving full rights and protections to contract workers, are most vulnerable workers, many of whom are black and brown women, end quote. The response post from Google Walkout for Real Change concluded by saying, quote, we look forward to meeting with Google leadership

and working to meet all of our demands, end quote. So employee discontent, as we've seen with the tech companies that they work for, and those companies' overall corporate policies continues to be something roiling Silicon Valley lately. I'm not sure how much I've mentioned the employee opposition at Amazon to its so-called recognition software, which is facial recognition technology. BuzzFeed, though, has been reporting

on an all-hands staff meeting at Amazon yesterday where management addressed employee concerns about recognition specifically. Andy Jassy, the CEO of the company's cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, deflected employee criticisms over how Amazon has aggressively marketed its Amazon recognition product to law enforcement agencies across the country and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. I think we're going to have people who have opinions that are very wide-ranging,

which is great, but we feel really great and really strongly about the value that Amazon recognition is providing our customers of all sizes and all types of industries in law enforcement and out of law enforcement, Jesse said. He added that he thought it was the government's responsibility to help specify regulations around the technology, end quote. BuzzFeed actually transcribed the Q&A, So click through on the link in the show notes if you want more.

But I'll leave you with just one more section. Again, this is quoting from Andy Jassy speaking. There's a lot of value being enjoyed from Amazon Recognition. Now, now, of course, with any kind of technology, you have to make sure that it's being used responsibly, and that's true with new and existing technology. Just think about all the evil that could be done with computers or servers and has been done.

And you think about what a different place our world would be if we didn't allow people to have computers. So you don't want to get rid of that technology. You want to make sure that people use the technology responsibly and we have a set of terms and services in AWS. And with all our services, including recognition, where if people violate those terms of services and don't use them responsibly, they won't be able to use our services any longer. In fact, if we find the people are violating folks' constitutional rights, they won't be able to use the services, end quote. We now officially know the name of Disney's upcoming streaming Netflix rival and sort of know when it's coming. In the Disney earnings call yesterday, CEO Bob Iger said

the new service would be called Disney Plus, and it will launch in the U.S. sometime in late 2019. Disney Plus matches the branding of ESPN Plus, the ESPN Streaming Service. I was listening to the most recent episode of The Watch podcast this morning where Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald always discuss TV news. And the pair were discussing how it's looking like this new service will essentially have five subcategories.

Maybe we could call them channels. One for Disney content, one for Pixar content, one for Marvel, one for Star Wars, and oddly, one for National Geographic content. Vine was a service that baffled a lot of people. Not that the service itself was baffling, it was super-puffling. popular, got up to 200 million users, got acquired by Twitter, and then Twitter shut it down. That's what's always baffled people. Why shut down something that was so successful, beloved even? But then Twitter is a baffling company. Well, Vine co-creator Dom Hoffman is among the many people who think that six-second videos can still be a thing.

And he's been making noises for years now about launching a spiritual successor to Vine, so-called V2, never launched after issues with funding arose. So when Hoffman tweeted yesterday that Bight, a new looping video service would debut this spring, people were hopeful. So far, Bight is only a logo, a web domain, and some social media handles. When TechCrunches, Josh Constine tweeted that he'd hold his breath until he heard that there was actually funding, a team, a product, and partners in place before getting excited, Hoffman responded on Twitter that Bight had the first three, meaning partners are, I guess, not yet in place. As TechCrunch itself put it, quote,

the massive outpouring of grief when Vine One shut down is evidence that if Bight can even offer a facsimile of its community vibe, the youth might flock back to Dom. In an age when social media increasingly is blamed for generating envy and inauthenticity, Vine was about pure entertainment. It's worth watching if it can be revived under a different name, end quote. Quick bit of milestone news, GitHub says it now hosts over 100 million repositories and supports 31 million developers who collectively have created over 1.1 billion contributions. Apparently nearly one in three repositories now on the site were made in just the past year. Quoting from Venture Beat, according to the recently released October's report meant to spell out the nature of the developer ecosystem,

the fastest growing open source projects on GitHub are Microsoft. Microsoft's Azure Docs, Facebook's Pi Torch, and the Godot game engine from MIT. While the United States makes the most repositories, Algeria is the fastest growing country by repository creation, and Egypt leads the way in the highest number of open source repositories, according to the report. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in June for $7.5 billion, a deal that officially closed late last month, end quote. Time now for the weekend long reads suggestions.

this week again, brought to you by Betterment. Betterment is designed to break the law of averages with tax-efficient technology and personalized advice from a true financial partner who's constantly working for you. Are you fine with average, or do you want more? First up, since Monday, I've been saving this piece from the Atlantic by Yuval Noah Harari,

the famous author of the book's Sapiens and Homo Deus and the new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. I read the first two. I'm looking forward to the third. Harari is someone a lot of people listen to, and this piece in the Atlantic, why technology favors tyranny, is sobering. Harari essentially argues that artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. Oh, and it will also further concentrate power among a small elite who will someday function in society almost as gods.

So it's a provocative piece, an important piece. First link in the show notes. But as a shot and then chaser sort of thing, pair that with the second link from today in the New York Times titled Tech CEOs are in love with their principal doomsayer. Nellie Bowles essentially profiles Harari as he brings this message to an oddly super receptive Silicon Valley. When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet's secretive research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book. Fascinating and such a stimulating writer, he said, in the New York Times.

I'm interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are. It's insane. He's so popular. They're all inviting him to campus. Yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising and engagement-based model of their products, said, Tristan Harris, Google's former in-house design ethicist, and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, end quote. Taken together, these two pieces are an interesting and eye-opening look at how Silicon Valley the future factory itself might increasingly be thinking of the future broadly. Recode has a check-in with HQ trivia, as that company struggles to retain a shrinking audience

and evolved beyond its first blockbuster breakout hit. We've spoken before about that Wheel of Fortune-style game that is coming out shortly, but also about the personal drama inside the company, including the forcing out of a CEO and a formal HR complaint about the new CEO. And then there's the fundamental reality that HQ co-founder and recently replaced CEO Russ Yusupov

recently voiced on Twitter. Quote, games are hits business and don't grow exponentially forever. tweeted in August. Yes, just asked ABC, a television network that 20 years ago was basically the Who Wants to be a Millionaire Channel, full stop. The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful piece asking why in this age of ubiquitous smartphones, the office telephone sitting on your desk is something that just won't die. The piece is chock full of great vignettes like this one. In Blytheville, Arkansas, 26-year-old Brooke Siegler took to Twitter to ask for advice on how to turn

up her desk phone's ringer. Ms. Siegler, an advisor at a social services agency, had been trying to find relief from a startlingly loud ring when she inadvertently lowered the volume to the point where she can't hear the ringer. If there is an up button for the volume, she can't find it. I think you have to go into the settings, she said. To be honest, I think I threw out the manual, end quote. The New Yorker has a typical deep dive into why, try as it might, technology can't make headway in health care. In a piece titled Why Doctors Hate Their Computers, the situation actually sounds pretty dire. Quote, a 2016 study found that physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face-to-face with a patient, whatever the brand of medical software.

In the examination room, physicians devoted half of their patient time facing the screen to do electronic tasks, and these tasks were spilling over after hours. The University of Wisconsin found that the average workday for its family physicians had grown to 11 and a half hours. The result has been epidemic levels of burnout among clinicians. 40% screen positive for depression and 7% report suicidal thinking, almost double the rate of the general working population, end quote. In the Wall Street Journal, Chris Mims introduces us to the future. Computers so tiny and so energy efficient that we could soon cover the world in sensors

that don't ever need batteries. Essentially, they would run forever an actual perpetual motion machine. These energy harvesting machines can already be as small as a stack of three quarters and there's no law of physics that says they couldn't someday shrink enough to hide anywhere. Imagine tiny sensors for sound, vibration,

chemicals, light, motion that don't require power lines or battery changes. Eventually, researchers believe these tiny always-on devices could enable us to do things that aren't realistic today, such as sticking small security cameras wherever we like, instrumenting every square meter of a farm, or filling our cars and homes with sensors that increase both our safety and the usefulness of our most expensive assets. They've coined a term to describe the potential ubiquity of such sensors, smart dust, end quote.

Finally, if you read just the opening paragraph of the sci-fi wire piece that is the final link in the show notes, you're going to want to read the whole thing. It's about a paper from a team of astronomers who say, quote, that they have observed a blob of dust sitting just outside the point of no return of a supermassive black hole, where the gravity is so intense that this material is moving at 30% the speed of light. And this wasn't inferred, deduced, or shown indirectly. No, they measured this motion by literally seeing the blobs move in their observations, end quote. emphasis mine and from the piece.

It's absolutely fascinating. That's all for the long reads brought to you, as always, by Betterment. Investment involves risk, but tech meme ride home listeners can get up to one year of their investment money managed for free. Just go to betterment.com slash ride. That's Betterment.com slash ride. Betterment. Outsmart average. So thanks to all of you, especially you Australian listeners who got in touch over the last 24 hours.

and let me know it's pronounced Telstra. The Australian Telecom Company, I tried to reference yesterday, is called Telstra. Not Telester or whatever it was, I said. My apologies, I told you guys on day two of this podcast. If there's one thing, I'm guaranteed to do, it is mispronounce people's names, or just names in general, I guess. I don't even want to know how bad I am with Chinese words and names. Please forgive me on that, but I'm.

I don't know that there's any way I'm going to get better. But as I've also said many times, I genuinely welcome feedback and corrections to this show. So I genuinely thank all of you that tweeted at me, which brings up an interesting point. Several times over the last few months, listeners have gotten in touch about setting up a Slack channel or a subreddit just for this podcast. Every time I've gotten this inquiry, I've said, if you want to do it, go ahead, knock yourself out. I'm game, but I don't want to run it. I don't know if anyone has put either of those two together yet, at least I'm not aware of it,

but I am putting it out there. If one of you wanted to set up a Slack or a subreddit, let me know when you've done it, and I'll join. I actually think a subreddit might be the best way to go because if we had a subreddit, you guys could tip me to stories on there, and as I'm working throughout the day, I could post the stories that I'm thinking of going with for the show,

and you guys could comment on them or debate and vote them up and down. You know we like to include tweets around the stories we cover, of course, so if you guys had some witty takes on the stories of the day, I could quote you on the show. Why should Casey Newton and Shirovite get all the glory? Plus, I just had a lengthy Twitter exchange with a listener about this very thing this morning. If I saw you guys voting stories up and down somewhere,

it would help me take the temperature of what you all were interested in hearing about. Anyway, if there's no interest, no bother, but if someone does do this, let me know, and I'll let you guys know that it's up. Talk to you guys on Monday.