Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/14 – Paging Jonah Hill For The SBF Movie

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Twitter still lives, at least at the time of this writing. But thousands more contractors have been laid off. CZ wants to start a fund to save crypto projects. Paging Jonah Hill to play SBF in the movie that Michael Lewis is shopping around Hollywood. Meta is exiting the Portal business. And a big review of the Meta Quest Pro is just downright befuddling. Sponsors: LadderLife.com/ride Storyblok.com/ridehome Links: Twitter reportedly cut thousands of contractors without warning (The Verge) SpaceX just bought a big ad campaign on Twitter for Starlink (CNBC) Binance Starts Recovery Fund for Crypto Projects Facing Liquidity Crisis (CoinDesk) Exclusive: Jeff Bezos says he will give most of his money to charity (CNN Business) Nearly half of Meta job cuts were in tech, reorg underway - execs say (Reuters) Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here (The Verge) 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 TechName Right Home for Monday, November 14th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter still lives, at least at the time of this writing, but thousands more contractors have been laid off. Z wants to start a fun to save crypto projects, paging Jonah Hill to play SBF in the movie that Michael

Lewis is shopping around Hollywood. Meta is exiting the portal business, and a big review of the Meta Quest Pro is just downright befuddling. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So Twitter survived the weekend, which at this point, I mean that's kind of where we're at. That doesn't mean there wasn't chaos, though. Twitter apparently cut around 4,400 of its 5,500 contract staff back on November 12th, which is expected to significantly impact content moderation and core infrastructure, quoting the verge. The job cuts follow layoffs that called about half of Twitter's workforce and slash 15% of its trust and safety team. Platformer first reported about the mass firings on Saturday night, which spanned both U.S.-based and global employees working in content moderation, real estate, marketing, engineering, and other departments.

Twitter reportedly failed to notify managers of these job cuts as well, who didn't realize their colleagues had been terminated until after seeing that their accounts have been deactivated in Twitter system. According to an internal email sent to contractors and obtained by Insider, which Insider says contractors didn't receive until after they'd learned they'd been locked out of their accounts, Twitter explains that the job cuts are part of its, quote, reprioritization and savings exercise, end quote. It also informs employees their last day is Monday, November 14th, but that they won't be expected to do anything, end quote. Also, over the weekend, Omnicom, one of the world's biggest ad firms, which represents clients like Apple, Pepsi, and others told their clients to, quote, pause activity on Twitter, citing brand safety risk.

So more brands leaving the Twitter platform for now. But hey, looks like Elon has a plan for that. According to various sources and documents, SpaceX has ordered a large Twitter ad package promoting Starlink in a takeover in Spain and Australia that can cost more than $250,000 a day, quoting CNBC. The ad campaign SpaceX is buying to promote Starlink is called a Twitter takeover. When a company buys one of these packages, they typically spend upwards of $250,000 to put their brand on top of the main Twitter timeline for a full day, according to one current and one former Twitter employee who asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Users should see Starlink brand messaging for the first three times that they open the Twitter app on the day or days of the planned takeover campaign in Australia and Spain. The campaign, which was purchased in the last week, was slated to run in coming days first in Australia, then in Spain. SpaceX has not typically purchased large advertising packages from Twitter in the past, the current and former employees said, end quote.

As for the other big story of the moment, Binance and Halby have blocked deposits of FTX's native token FTT. After more than 192 million FTT tokens worth around $400 million were suddenly released, out of schedule and without warning from FTX. So is SBF trying to free up some funds again? Binance also announced a recovery fund to help otherwise strong crypto projects facing a liquidity crisis right now. Justin's son says Tron, Howby, and Polinex will support Binance, quoting CoinDesk. CZ said that more details will be announced in the coming days and said that the fund is open to industry co-investors. Tron founder Justin Sun said that Tron, Hobie Global and Pollinax will support Binance in its initiative.

Hobie Global also confirmed this in a tweet. This announcement comes a month after Binance Pool said it was committing $500 million in the form of a lending facility for struggling Bitcoin miners. Binance's BNB token is up 3% on the news. Bitcoin and Ether also both gained 4% after the announcement was made. It remarks made Monday at the B20 Summit in Indonesia. CZ said he wants the industry as well as regulators to take responsibility for cleaning up its act. quote, we will try to collect the other industry players together to form an industry association globally

and try to deal with some of the common standards in business, CZ said, citing recent crypto market events as a reason for the initiative to happen very soon, end quote. I hope you read that long read about CZ that I suggested in the long reads on Friday, because when it comes to crypto, to quote that Tom Hanks movie, he's the captain now, it seems. Over the weekend, lots of speculation as to whether or not Sam Bankman-Fried and Associates were either being arrested in the Bahamas or had fled the Bahamas in a private jet, as far as I can tell. Neither of those stories proved to be true. I think I should also make something clear. That whole CZ did he cause FTX to blow up narrative that I latched on to last week, it seems to be

immaterial to what actually happened. An FTX balance sheet that got revealed over the weekend showed $9 billion in liabilities and a mere $900 million in liquid assets. So this seems to be a case of SBF straight up taking the money that investors put into FDX, that users sent to him via FTX, and then spending it, allegedly. So maybe he was pushed by CZ, but all that push probably did was reveal widespread, straight-up theft that already existed, allegedly. According to crypto-quant, users have removed $3.7 billion in Bitcoin, $2.5 billion in ether, and more than $2 billion in stable coins from various exchanges between November 6th and November 13th.

As FTX collapsed, the good news is, at least at the time of this writing, no other exchanges or crypto platforms have blown up today due to the spreading contagion yet. And one more thing. Michael Lewis has reportedly been shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried for the last six months in order to eventually write a book about the whole crypto space. You know Michael Lewis, he's the guy that wrote the books The Big Short, Flash Boys and Liars Poker. Apparently, the Hollywood Talent Agency CAA is pitching Lewis's yet to be written book on FTX's collapse to Hollywood buyers as we speak. And look, all that really means is that there is only one person who can play Sam

Bankman Freed in the inevitable movie, Jonah Hill. Time to let your hair grow out again, Jonah. Jeff Bezos says he plans to give away the majority of his $124 billion net worth, but has offered few specifics on how he plans to do so. Bezos had been criticized for not signing up with the giving pledge, that whole thing that were in Buffett, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all signed up for to give away their fortunes while they were still alive, quoting CNN business. Though Bezos' vow was light on specifics, this marks the first time he has announced that he plans to give away most of his money. In a sit-down interview with CNN's Chloe Melas on Saturday at his Washington, D.C. home, Bezos speaking alongside his partner, the journalist-turned philanthropist Lauren Sanchez, said the couple is,

quote, building the capacity to be able to give away this money, end quote. Asked directly by CNN whether he intends to donate the majority of his wealth within his lifetime, Bezos said, yeah, I do. Bezos said he and Sanchez agreed to their first interview together since they began dating in 2019 to help shine a spotlight on the Bezos Courage and Civility Award granted this year to musician Dolly Parton, end quote. Meta has told staff that the company plans to exit its portal business, also plans to wind down various smartwatch projects, and says 46% of its 11,000 job cuts announced recently were in tech departments versus 54% in business departments. Quoting Reuters. Meta had decided earlier this year to stop marketing

portal devices known for their video calling capabilities to consumers and focus instead on business sales, Bosworth said. As the economy declined, executives decided more recently to make bigger changes, he said. It was just going to take so long and take so much investment to get into the enterprise segment. It felt like the wrong way to invest your time and money, said Bosworth. Portal had not been a major revenue generator and drew privacy concerns from potential users. Meta had yet to unveil any smartwatches. Bosworth said the smartwatch unit would focus instead on augmented reality glasses. More than half of the total investment in reality labs was going to augmented reality, he added. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Friday reiterated his apology from Wednesday

about having to cut 13% of the workforce telling employees he had failed to forecast meta's first drop-off in revenue. Revenue trends are just a lot lower than what I predicted. again, I got this wrong. It was a big mistake in planning for the company. I take responsibility for it, Zuckerberg said. Going forward, he added, he was not planning to massively grow headcount of the reality labs unit, end quote. Finally today, from the Verges Addy Robertson, a review of the meta-quest pro, and it just ain't good. I'm going to actually jump around with quotes from different parts of the piece to show you the various ways that it sounds. not good, but the bottom line to me is this thing just really sounds confusing, like a product

without any sense of what its market is. It kind of sounds just like a big bust. Quote, so the Quest Pro, Meta's new virtual reality headset, is facing a lot of pressure. It has to start delivering on a huge set of promises about the future of work. It's meant to host meetings, replace big monitors, and create a more lasting sense of connection to other people in VR. Meta has seen modest success with its Quest 2 game console, but the Quest Pro is the start of a new generation of computers, a $1,49 product designed to run Microsoft software and sold by Accenture. The problem is the Quest Pro isn't very good. It's a device seemingly launched without a plan or purpose, highlighting VR's persistent drawbacks without making good use of its strengths, and topped off with

some irredeemably bad software. We might be seeing a roadmap for where meta is going, but right now it's not a particularly fun place to be, and if meta lingers there much longer, its metaverse is in trouble. Since its first demo, using the Quest Pro has become uniquely torturous. Its ring puts practically all its substantial weight on my upper forehead, sometimes leaving a numb and tingling strip along my hairline. It feels a little better if I keep the fit loose, but that makes the headset less stable during games and other high-intensity activities. It's a worse experience than the Quest, too, with its optional elite strap, which includes... and over the head strap for balance and still leaves the Quest 2 about 100 grams lighter than the Quest

Pro. Meta has made some other hardware tradeoffs. The headset's face mask is shallower than the Quest 2's, for instance, so it gives you a peripheral view of the real world outside your headset. If you want to block out more light, you can snap on a pair of included magnetic silicone wings that act like blinders or a separate $49 mask that shuts out practically all light. That's a nice bit of flexibility, except that the headset in its default state made me constantly nauseated, likely thanks to the constant visual clash of real and virtual worlds. My colleague and boss, Eli Patel, a frequent Quest 2 user, experienced the same problems. I had no trouble once I put the blinders on, but I'm guessing some people won't reach that point.

They'll simply feel motion sick and conclude VR isn't for them. The Quest Pro's battery also doesn't last as long as the Quest 2's, with metapromising one to two hours instead of the Quest 2's 2 to 3. The battery lasted longer than I expected in practice. I could get a little more than two hours out of it in a session, but it was usually a moot point because I had trouble wearing the headset for that long without taking a break. The Quest Pro's resolution is 1800 by 1920 pixels per eye, roughly the same as the Quest 2's 1832 by 1920 pixels. In theory, it provides better contrast and a very slightly higher pixel density per eye,

But comparing both devices head-to-head, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference. It's still grainy enough that images look all right, but small text is fuzzy. The field of view sits at 106 degrees horizontal and 96 degrees vertical, similar to the Quest 2, and offers an experience that's perfectly usable, but a little goggly. For the average VR user, I can't recommend the Quest Pro over Meta's old headset, particularly given the massive price difference. There's a Quest 3 debuting in 2023, and it will likely include some of the... internal upgrades almost certainly at a lower cost than the pro. So right now, it's the face-tracking

and color pass-through video that set the Quest Pro apart from the Quest 2. And unfortunately, while I see both features potential, meta hasn't quite figured out what they're good for. Pass-through video is a midpoint between conventional VR and HoloLenstile AR glasses displaying a live video feed of the real world through a headset. It offers real advantages over AR glasses right now, including typically a wider field of view, and virtual objects that look completely solid rather than remaining a little bit transparent. That enables things like virtual big screen monitors that sit in front of your face in an otherwise visible office. But meta's color pass-through doesn't look remotely like the real world.

Video footage is fuzzy in the Quest Pro's grainy display. The feed is murky in low light, washed out or flickery in bright light, and sometimes luridly saturated in between. Reading real-world phone or computer screens through it is virtually impossible. It's a fine system for dipping into the physical world while you have a conversation or get a cup of coffee, but it's not vastly more useful or pleasant than the Quest 2's black and white pass through. Eye tracking, meanwhile, enables foviated rendering, which lets apps display virtual objects in more detail by only sharply rendering the pixels in front of your eyes. It's a promising feature, especially for gaming, since the Quest is still running on a mobile chip set with limited power. But again, the current use is limited.

Meta has one confirmed app that uses foviated rendering, the game Red Matter 2, which renders at a high resolution in the Quest Pro, but is still held back by that fundamental graininess. Face tracking is primarily useful in Horizon, the meta-social platform that includes a Roblox-like recreational Metaverse called Worlds, and a personal office dubbed Workrooms. Worlds and Workrooms are available for the Quest 2 and Quest Pro alike, but Workrooms is particularly aimed at Pro users, and there's just no nice way to put it, it's one of the first. the worst apps I've ever used. Workroom's personal office component is a little better, mostly because it's simpler. As mentioned above, the feature lets you install remote desktop software

on your Mac or PC, and then project your real computer inside the headset on up to three virtual big screens. But the Quest Pro hardware isn't ready for full-time office work. It's too heavy to be comfortable, and its screen makes website and app text maddeningly fuzzy. I swore I would use the headset as a full-time computing device during this review, but I managed about a day before scaling back to short sessions. It was just too painful for my eyes and head. And workrooms is supposed to be a core part of the MetaQuest Pro strategy. VR big screens are one of the only things I've heard even VR skeptics discuss buying a headset for. Consumer VR is still a work in progress, and meta has always made compromises with its headsets,

but it's typically offered something that transcends them. The original Oculus Rift had no motion controllers and an elaborate tracking setup, but it launched with games that highlighted the sheer wonder of looking around in a VR space. The first Quest had limited graphical power, but it offered a catalog of experiences that worked great with wireless VR and motion controllers. These headsets offered options that nothing else on the market could match. The Quest Pro doesn't have any of that careful management. Meta is promoting it for uses that its hardware still can't make enjoyable, offering technically innovative features without doing a good job of showcasing them.

Even at their worst, earlier Meta had to be able to do. sets felt a little bit like magic. Using the Quest Pro just feels like work, end quote. So as promised, my report on the overnight Amtrak train trip that Penny and I took was nice and comfortable to be sure. Food was on the high end of airplane food level, I would say. You can easily work comfortably if you have a bedroom to yourself, if you're one person in one of these rooms. Even two adults could make it at least during the day. Wi-Fi was good, the seating was comfortable. Even the shower was useful, the water was warm, etc.

The problem for me came when I tried to sleep. Turns out, trains are herky-jurkey. And since one of the sleeping berths is something that you have to pull down from the ceiling, bunk bed style, I slept on that one, and I found myself constantly jerked awake by the sensation I was about to fall off,

that top bunk. Yeah. It had a sort of seatbelt-like net that would have caught me if I fell, and the bed was spacious. I'm six feet exactly, and I could stretch out completely, but I couldn't get my lizard brain to stop panicking every time the train lurched, convinced I was going to fall down. Now, Penny slept down below me. The couch pulls out to a full-size mattress, and if I had slept down there closer to the ground, maybe the sensation of falling would have gone away. Penny slept fine, slept all night. I only slept about three hours. I feel like if I had another night on the train, I maybe would have gotten more used to the

bumps and bustle of the train moving, but it didn't help that around Buffalo. The train conductor seemed to go to ludicrous speed. Some of those turns were legit harrowing, and every time we went over a bridge or something, you could really feel it. So bottom line, I don't think we'll do the family train trip. Sure, we could get the bigger family bedroom that sleeps for or get two conjoining rooms. but if it takes us two nights to get all the way out to Arizona, which is where I wanted to go, and my wife and I don't get any sleep over those two days by the time we got out to the Grand Canyon,

we'd be too tired to enjoy it. I still think I might try the experiment of doing a Papa mental health trip. Sometime in the spring, though, maybe out to Seattle or San Francisco, do the show from the train for a day or three. But yeah, experiment mostly failed, unless you're a deeper sleeper than I am. Which is a shame because the whole working and just chilling and reading and watching movies while watching the world go by thing was perfect. I felt snug as a bug and a rug. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow.