Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/01 – The Facebook Walkout

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 ride home for Monday, June 1st, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. What I believe is the first ever walkout in Facebook history. The biggest acquisition in Zinga history, Samsung Access is an interesting ARR play to get ahead of a supposed Apple Prime subscription. And an Android event this week was canceled, but a PlayStation 1 will go on. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. in what is thought to be a first in the entire history of the company. Facebook employees are staging a virtual walkout today,

Starting point is 00:01:10 protesting CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to allow President Trump's inflammatory posts on Facebook to stand. Quoting Sheriff Frankel and Mike Isaac, who broke the story in The New York Times, the employees who took the day off by logging into Facebook systems and requesting time off to support protesters across the country, also added an automated message to their emails saying that they were out of the office in a show of protest. The group is one of many clusters of employees attempting to push back on executives. As of Monday morning, many employees continued to discuss a list of demands for management. The movement, a virtual walkout of sorts, since most Facebook employees are working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic, comes as staff members have circulated petitions and threatened to resign.

Starting point is 00:01:58 More than a dozen current and former employees have described the unrest as the most serious challenge to Mr. Zuckerberg's leadership since the company was founded 15 years ago, end quote. Well, time for a little context. You might have heard that some stuff went down over the weekend. In fact, some stuff went down like literally eight blocks away from where I'm talking to you right now, since the Barclays Center is just a quarter mile or so over yonder here in Brooklyn. And, well, lots of tech folks had lots of stuff to say about all of this. So let's start with a quick sort of roundup of some of the responses from the tech world. Amazon's official account tweeted, quote,

Starting point is 00:02:45 The inequitable and brutal treatment of black people in our country must stop. Together we stand in solidarity with the black community, our employees, customers, and partners in the fight against systemic racism and injustice, end quote. to which the ACLU's official Twitter account responded, quote, cool tweet. Will you commit to stop selling face recognition surveillance technology that supercharges police abuse, end quote. Microsoft posted the remarks of CEO Sacha Nadella, quote, We need to recognize that we are better, smarter, and stronger when we consider the voices, the actions of all communities. And you have my assurance that Microsoft will continue to advocate to have all those voices heard and respected.

Starting point is 00:03:27 Nadella said, adding that employees should, quote, have empathy for those who are scared and uncertain and join me and everyone on the senior leadership team in advocating for change in our company, in our communities, and in society at large, end quote. Tim Cook in a memo to Apple staff addressing racism in the U.S. said Apple will give to nonprofits like the Equal Justice Initiative matching staff donations to that nonprofit two to one throughout the month of June. Quote, we have to re-examine our own views and actions in light of a pain that is deeply felt but too often ignored, Cook said. George Floyd's death is shocking and tragic proof that we must aim far higher than a normal future and build one that lives up to the highest ideals of equality and justice, end quote. YouTube joined Apple by saying it will donate $1 million to the Center for Policing Equity, a nonprofit think tank that works with police departments to change discriminatory practices. the Google and YouTube homepages, both have notices of support for racial equality on them today. And then quoting Reuters. In an internal company memo criticizing racism, Snapchat chief executive officer Evan Spiegel appealed for comprehensive tax reforms in the country

Starting point is 00:04:45 with corporations paying a higher tax rate. Quote, we cannot end systemic racism without simultaneously creating opportunity for all people, regardless of their background, he said. In short, people like me will pay a lot more in taxes. and I believe it will be worth it to create a society that benefits all of us, he said, end quote. But this is quoting TP Insights. Of the 30 tech companies, we were able to confirm made public statements by Saturday night, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was missing in action. The billionaire CEO had yet to make a statement and people took notice.

Starting point is 00:05:18 As of the publishing of this story, Facebook had not made a public statement. One employee tweeted, I don't know what to do, but I know doing nothing is not acceptable. I'm a Facebook employee that completely disagrees with Mark's decision to do nothing about Trump's recent posts which clearly incite violence. I'm not alone inside of Facebook. There isn't a neutral position on racism, end quote. So there you have the context for the walkout. President Trump published similar statements to the ones that Twitter flagged late last week, statements that critics say incited violence around the recent protesting. Zuckerberg released statements Friday and

Starting point is 00:05:59 Saturday with the usual platitudes around how he did not believe Facebook should be an arbiter around things like speech. And then late Sunday night, Zuckerberg posted this, quote, We stand with the black community and all those working towards justice in honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery, and far too many others whose names will not be forgotten. end quote, and then pledged to donate $10 million to groups working for racial justice. But this came as far too late for apparently far too many Facebook employees, and note that Facebook has not changed its stance in regards to the president's statements on its platform. And indeed, Facebook continues to position itself in direct opposition to some of the editorial decisions made recently by Twitter in particular.

Starting point is 00:06:51 So that is the background over the weekend that has led to the walkouts today. I'm going to quote at length from this piece from CNBC because, again, I think it's worth giving you the cadence of the unrest that is happening internally at Facebook at the moment. Quote, Jason Toff, director of product management at Facebook, said he wasn't proud of how the company was showing up, adding that most of his coworkers feel the same. Brendan Dale, a front-end engineer at Facebook, said, quote, Trump's glorification of violence on Facebook is disgusting and it should absolutely be flagged or removed, end quote. David Gillis, director of product design at Facebook, said Trump's message, quote, encourages extrajudicial violence and Stokes racism, and quote. He added, quote, respect to Twitter's integrity team for making the enforcement call, end quote. Josiah Golden, a product designer at Facebook retweeted Gillis and said he agreed, quote,

Starting point is 00:07:46 I'm gravely concerned that if we're only willing to enforce our standards based on presumed intended meaning and never on apparent meaning, we're always giving bad actors room to play the I didn't mean it that way card, he said, quote, a very slippery slope, end quote. Diego Mendez, a product design manager at Facebook said, quote, Facebook's leadership is wrong, and that he has voiced his concerns internally, end quote. Dan Premack just tweeted, quote, from a company culture perspective, hard to overstate the significance of a Facebook employee walkout, end quote. But hey, sources have also been telling Axios that Mark Zuckerberg and President Trump shared a phone call on Friday that both

Starting point is 00:08:29 described as productive. So maybe they've worked things out. Zinga is doing its biggest acquisition ever paying $1.8 billion, half in cash, half in stock, for Turkish mobile game developer, Peek, quoting Bloomberg. The Peek deal will bring Zinga a popular lineup of puzzle games called Tune Blast and Toy Blast. The company is making the acquisition at a time when video game companies are thriving along with purveyors of video and adult streaming as the pandemic drives a search for diversions. Peak is an amazing founder's success story, made in Istanbul and the first Turkish unicorn exit, said Roland Mangor, co-founder and partner of Early Bird Venture Capital, one of Peek's backers. The acquisition is expected to boost the number of average users playing Zingas games

Starting point is 00:09:22 daily by more than 60% by expanding its international audience, Gibbo said. Zinga's acquisitions have been critical to its revenue growth and its successful turnaround under Gibbo, who took over as CEO in 2016. The idea is to create a mini empire of successful game studios that can make franchises that remain popular for years, end quote. I gotta say, this is pretty cool and pretty smart. If you were worrying about competing with a supposedly upcoming Apple Prime subscription or whatever they're going to end up calling it, Samsung has officially launched what it's calling Access, a new service for U.S. users, which for one monthly fee will get you an S-20 handset, Samsung Premium Care, a Microsoft 365 subscription, one-terabyte of One Drive storage, and other

Starting point is 00:10:16 bells and whistles. Quoting 9 to 5 Google. It will only be available for those buying a new Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20 Plus, or Galaxy S20 Ultra. We're not sure if you will get the opportunity to join access with older devices or not as yet. That entire package is quite enticing, given that Microsoft 365 can cost as much as $99 alone, while one terabyte of One Drive storage is $9.99 per month separately. The Samsung Access Program is priced at $37 per month for the Galaxy S20, $42 per month. month for the Galaxy S20 plus or $48 per month for the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Luckily, you can cancel your membership at any time, which will remove all of your benefits.

Starting point is 00:11:00 The only catch is that you have to commit to a minimum three-month membership, or you will be charged a one-time $100 fee to leave early, end quote. Researchers are reporting that new algorithms aimed at making neural networks more efficient actually end up performing no better than old algorithms. thereby suggesting that the state of the art in this particular corner of AI has seen little in the way of meaningful progress in the last 10 years. This is from the journal Science. Artificial intelligence just seems to get smarter and smarter.

Starting point is 00:11:39 Each iPhone, for example, learns your face, voice, and habits better than the last, and the threats AI poses to privacy and jobs continue to grow. The surge reflects faster chips, more data, and better algorithms, but some of the improvement comes from tweaks rather than the core innovations their inventor's claim. And some of the gains may not exist at all, says David Blaylock, a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Blaylock and his colleagues compared dozens of approaches to improving neural networks, software architectures that loosely mimic the brain. Fifty papers in, he says, it became clear that it wasn't obvious what the state of the art even was, end quote. The researchers evaluated 81

Starting point is 00:12:23 pruning algorithms, programs that make neural networks more efficient by trimming unneeded connections. All claim superiority in slightly different ways, but they were rarely compared properly, and when the researchers tried to evaluate them side by side, there was no clear evidence of performance improvements over a 10-year period. The result presented in March at the Machine Learning and Systems Conference, surprised Blaylock's PhD advisor, MIT computer scientist John Gutag, who says the uneven comparisons themselves may explain the stagnation. It's the old saw, right? Guttag said,

Starting point is 00:12:58 if you can't measure something, it's hard to make it better, end quote. Researchers are waking up to the signs of shaky progress across many subfields of AI. A 2019 meta-analysis of information retrieval algorithms used in search engines concluded the high watermark was actually set in 2009. Another study in 2019 reproduced seven neural network recommendation systems of the kind used by media streaming services. it found that six failed to outperform much simpler non-neuro algorithms developed years before when the earlier techniques were fine-tuned, revealing phantom progress in the field. In another paper posted in March, Kevin Musgrave, a computer scientist at Cornell University,

Starting point is 00:13:39 took a look at loss functions, the part of an algorithm that mathematically specifies its objective. Musgrave compared a dozen of them on equal footing in a task involving image retrieval and found that contrary to their developer's claims, accuracy had not improved since 2006. There's always been these waves of hype, Musgrave says, end quote. I missed this late last week, but I wanted to make sure to pick it up for you in case you hadn't heard about it. Google says it will be delaying the Android 11 beta release, as well as the virtual launch event that was scheduled for that for two days from now, June 3rd. However, Google wants you to know that the final release for the next year. next Android is still on track for Q3, quoting 9 to 5 Google. The first Android 11 beta was originally

Starting point is 00:14:29 expected this month, but that was delayed as Google decided to add a bit of extra time to the release schedule from February. The Android team at the start of the month said that it's collaborating remotely and prioritizing the well-being of our family's friends and colleagues. As a result, it pushed back Beta 1 and all subsequent milestones by about a month and released developer preview 4 instead. The company on Twitter said that, quote, now is not the time to celebrate in light of ongoing societal protests across the U.S., including in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we will reschedule at a future date, end quote. In lieu of a physical I.O. conference, the Android 11, the beta launch show, was meant to showcase

Starting point is 00:15:08 what's new in the operating system this year. It would have started with an hour-long keynote at 8 a.m. PT on Wednesday, June 3rd. Afterwards, senior members of the Android team were supposed to host a live Q&A session. Earlier this week, the company posted the list of Android 11 talks that would also be released that day. They were originally scheduled for I.O. 2020 and include the annual What's New in Android, all things privacy in Android 11, and what's new in Android development tools, end quote. And finally today, sticking to things that were or are on this week's schedule, Sony says that it is on track to launch PlayStation 5 this year and has begun manufacturing the console already,

Starting point is 00:15:53 and guess what? There will be a games-focused event that it will hold on June 4th, Thursday. Quoting the PlayStation blog. This digital showcase will run for a bit more than an hour, and for the first time, we will all be together virtually experiencing the excitement together.

Starting point is 00:16:09 A lack of physical events has given us an amazing opportunity to think differently and bring you on this journey with us, and hopefully closer than ever before. This is part of our series of PS5 updates, and rest assured, after next week's showcase, we will still have much to share with you. Please join us on Twitch or YouTube

Starting point is 00:16:26 on June 4th at 1 p.m. PDT, end quote. Hey, some of you might have noticed that I've been experimenting with different release times for the show lately. I think I even hit publish on an episode last week at noon. Well, I just wanted to say that that's not going to be a normal thing, because stuff still happens in a day, so it's still useful to release in the afternoons, even if we don't any of us have commutes anymore. For instance, had I published at noon today, I would have missed

Starting point is 00:17:02 the Facebook walkout news. And tomorrow, I wouldn't expect the show to be released a minute before 5 p.m., but for personal reasons. In fact, it could be even later than 5 p.m. tomorrow. As I said last week, the McCullough family is going to buy a car for the first time, and a deal just came through this morning that I'll have to attend to tomorrow, thereby not giving me enough time to line up a guest host for tomorrow, but don't worry, it shouldn't take me long. How long can it take to buy a famous last words, and I'll wake up at five or so to begin writing and recording as much as I can, just allowing me time to do the rest whenever I get back in the afternoon. So anyway, show might be five o'clock or later tomorrow, just letting you know. Talk to you then.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/01 – The Facebook Walkout

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