Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/18 – Game Emulators On iOS And The Atlas Robot Lives!

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Google has fired 28 employees for political protests yesterday. A well-known coding school has been fined by the CFPB. Game emulators come to the iPhone. TikTok’s Instagram clone is rolling out. Has Sony perfecting Mini LED TVs? And the Atlas robot has been reborn in a new body! Links: Google fires 28 employees after sit-in protest over Israel cloud contract (The Verge) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fines BloomTech for false claims (TechCrunch) Third-party iPhone app store AltStore PAL is now live in Europe (The Verge) TikTok Notes starts rolling out as a new rival to Instagram (The Verge) US Air Force confirms first successful AI dogfight (The Verge) Sony might have perfected Mini LED TVs with its new 2024 lineup (The Verge) Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot goes electric (TechCrunch) 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 TechMeme right home for Thursday, April 18th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google has fired 28 employees for political protests yesterday. A well-known coding school has been fined by the CFPB.

Game emulators come to the iPhone. Tick-Tock's Instagram clone is rolling out, has Sony perfected mini-LED TVs, and the Atlas robot has been reborn in a new body. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google has fired 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour series. sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel yesterday. Quoting the verge, the fired employees were involved in protesting Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli government cloud contract that also includes Amazon. Some of them occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Curian until they were forcibly

removed by law enforcement. Last month, Google fired another employee for protesting the contract during a company presentation in Israel. In a memo sent to all employees on Wednesday, Chris Rakow, Google's head of global security, said that, quote, behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. He also warned that the company would take more action if needed, quote, the overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you're one of the few who are tempted to think we're going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. The company takes this extremely seriously, and we will continue to apply our longstanding policies to take action against disruptive behavior up to and including termination, end quote.

In a response statement, the no-tech for apartheid group behind the protests called Google's firings a, quote, flagrant act of retaliation. In the three years that we have been organizing against Project Nimbus, we have yet to hear from a single executive about our concerns, the group wrote in a post on medium. Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor. These firings were clearly retaliatory, end quote. The USCF P.B. has fined BloomTech, formerly known as Lambda School and CEO Austin Allred, $164,000, and banned BloomTech from lending for 10 years over what they called deceptive student loans. Quoting TechCrunch, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB, said in an order on Tuesday that BloomTech, the for-profit

coding boot camp, previously known as the Lambda School, deceived students about the cost of loans, made false claims about graduates' hiring rates and engaged in illegal lending masks as, quote, income-sharing agreements with high fees. The order marks the end of the CFPB's investigation into BloomTax practices and the start of the agency's penalties on the organization. The CFPB is permanently banning Blumtech from consumer lending activities and its CEO, Austin Allred, from student lending for a period of 10 years. In addition, the agency is ordering Blumtech and Allred to cease collecting payments on loans for graduates who didn't have a qualifying job and allow students. to withdraw their funds without penalty, as well as eliminate finance changes for, quote,

certain agreements. Quotech and its CEO sought to drive students toward income share loans that were marketed as risk-free, but in fact carried significant finance charges and many of the same risks as other credit products, CFPB Director Rojit Chopra said in a statement, today's action underscores are increased focused on investigating individual executives and, when appropriate, charging them with breaking the law, end quote. BloomTech and Allred must also pay the CFPB over $164,000 in civil penalties to be deposited in the agency's Victims Relief Fund, with Bloom Tech contributing around $64,000 and Allred forking over the remaining $100,000. Allred founded Bloom Tech, which rebranded from the Lambda School in 2022 after cutting half its staff in 2017.

Based in San Francisco, the vocational organization is owned primarily by Allred, but is backed by various VC funds and investors, including Gigafund, Tandum Fund, White Combinator, GV, GGV, and Stripe. At one time, it was valued at over $150 million. Critics almost immediately attacked the firm's then pioneering business model, the Income Share Agreement, or ISA, as predatory. BloomTech originated at least 100,000 income share loans to fund students' tuition for the short term, typically six-to-nine-nine-month certification programs and fields spanning web development, data science, and back-end engineering, according to the CFPB. These loans required that recipients who earn more than $50,000 in a related industry pay Blumtech's 17% of their pre-tax income each month until reaching the $24 payment or $30,000 total repayment threshold. BloomTech didn't market the loans as loans really, saying that they didn't create debt and were, quote,

risk-free and advertised a 71 to 86% job placement rate, but the CFPB found these marketing claims and others to be patently false. Bloomtech's loans, in fact, carried an annual percentage rate and an average finance charge of $4,000, neither of which students were made aware of, and a single misspayment triggered a default. The school's job placement rates were closer to 50 percent and sank to as low as 30 percent. And unbeknown to many students, Bloomtech was selling a portion of its loans to investors while depriving recipients of rights they should have had under federal protection known as the holder rule. Prior to the CFPB order, BloomTech, which briefly landed in hot water with California's oversight board several years ago for operating without approval, had faced other lawsuits claiming the school misrepresented how likely graduates were to get a job and how much they were likely to earn.

Last year, leaked documents obtained by Business Insider raised questions about the company, inflating its efficacy and hyping up a curriculum that didn't upskill students to the level they expected, end quote. iOS App Store Alt Store PAL has launched in the EU for one euro 50 cents per year with two apps, Game Emulator Delta, which is also live on the regular App Store, more on that in a second, and a clipboard manager quoting the verge. Installing AltStore PAL requires clicking through a lot of Apple's clumsily implemented scare sheets that double and triple check your desire to install apps from outside Apple's App Store, but with persistence and enough clicks it eventually installs. The new app marketplace is arriving with two apps developed by Riley Testit.

Delta, an emulator capable of playing N-E-S-N-E-S-N-E-S, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS games, and Clip, a clipboard manager that's forbidden by Apple. The store is the work of Testit and his business partner, Shane Gill, end quote. More on Delta itself, because again, basically anyone can get it even outside of that alt app store, quoting a different verge piece. The Delta emulator is officially available on the Apple App Store for free. You should be able to find it in Apple's official store in many countries outside of the European Union. The app marks the first significant and officially sanctioned game emulator for the iPhone since Apple began allowing them with wide-ranging console emulation from the original Nintendo Entertainment System to the Nintendo 64 and even the Sega Genesis for when you want to play those games that Nintendo don't.

Data developer Riley Testit told The Verge via email that the app is identical to the version debut. with AltStore Pal. The app features on-screen buttons that change their layout and appearance to match whatever system you're emulating. It supports Bluetooth controllers like Xbox One Series S or PS5 controllers too, and the app lets you customize their layout or set extra buttons for things like quick save states, essentially letting you pause a game whenever you want and load it up from that point later, or fast forward through an old-school game's all too often unskippable cutscenes or endless stream of startup logos. Delta even works with some of the quirkier Nintendo input methods like the gyroscope in Wario Ware Twisted or the microphone controls in Nintendo DS games like

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. Delta has other touches too, such as automatically grabbing the box art for your games and the ability to customize that art using its built-in database or your own custom images, and users can import controller skins or make their own. It also supports multiplayer for the S-N-E-S-N-S and N-64, up to four players, as well as AirPlay streaming. A small number of other emulators beat Delta to the punch, including one called IGBA that directly ripped off test its GBA for iOS code, and NES emulator called BIMI. Both were short-lived, though, with Apple taking down IGBA over spam and copyright app store rule violations, and Bimmy's developer getting cold feet in light of Nintendo's recent crackdown on emulators, end quote. If this thing lets me play Golden Eye with my friends, please somebody let me know. TikTok has begun rolling out TikTok notes. It's Instagram rival for sharing photo and text content for limited testing in Australia and Canada on Android and iOS, quoting the verge.

A tweet announcing the launch, as well as the App Store and Google Play listings, showed off some official images of the app that offer insights about how it works for those of us who don't have access yet. In them, we see that you can write up headlines for images above your captions, which is a feature Instagram doesn't natively offer. The homepage also seems to be divided into two sections with a separate page where you can view posts from people you follow and another for you page. It's organized a bit like Pinterest's homepage, but with a smaller two-column grid. It's not clear whose posts are highlighted here, but it's likely accounts similar to the ones you follow or that TikTok thinks you might like. Besides these small tweaks, though, the app is

very similar to Instagram, which is a change from the usual. For years, Meta's been the one copying other social media platforms like TikTok with Reels and Snapchat with stories. With TikTok notes, though, TikTok looks like it's copying back. TikTok announced the new photo sharing app earlier this month via a notification sent to users. At the time, it didn't provide many details about the app beyond calling it TikTok notes and suggested TikTok would populate it with users existing and future public TikTok photo posts unless they opt out. It's uncertain when TikTok will roll the app out to the U.S. and elsewhere, end quote. Darpa has revealed that an AI-controlled X-62A jet successfully faced a human pilot for the first time in an F-16 during an in-air dogfight

test carried out in 2023. Quoting the verge, Darpa began experimenting with AI applications in December 2022 as part of its Air Combat Evolution or ACE program. It worked to develop an AI system capable of autonomously flying a fighter jet while also adhering to the Air Force's safety protocols. After carrying out dogfighting simulations using the AI pilot, DARPA put its work to the test, by installing the AI system inside its experimental X62A aircraft. That allowed it to get the AI-controlled craft into the air at the Edwards Air Force Base in California, where it says it carried out its first successful dogfight test against a human in September 2023. Human pilots were on board the X62A with controls to disable the AI system,

but DARPA says the pilots didn't need to use the safety switch, quote, at any point. The X62A went against an F-16 controlled solely by a human pilot, where both aircraft demonstrated high aspect nose-to-nose engagements and got as close as 2,000 feet at 1,200 miles per hour. DARPA doesn't say which aircraft won the dogfight, however. Dogfighting was the problem to solve so we could start testing autonomous artificial intelligence systems in the air. Bill Gray, the chief test pilot at the Air Force's test pilot school, said in a statement, every lesson we're learning applies to every task you could give to an autonomous system, end quote. The agency has conducted a total of 21 test flights so far and says the test will continue through

2024, end quote. Lots of people on socials this morning were excited about Sony unveiling their Bravia 9 lineup today. The verge goes so far as to say they might have perfected mini-LED technology, quoting the verge. To get some numbers out of the way, the Brabia 9 contains 325% more dimming zones than 2023's X-95L, which already delivered phenomenal black levels with barely a trace of any perceptible blooming. The X-95L also got tremendous. bright, but the Bravia 9 can crank 50% brighter at peak luminates, Sony says. It does so while using 20% less energy than its predecessor. Cinema is Coming Home is the tagline for this year's TVs, and Sony wants to reestablish

Bravia as the brand capable of an unmatched living room viewing experience. The company has always sweated the details when it comes to creator intent. On top of Dolby Vision across the lineup, all new TVs except for the entry-level Bravia 3 support Netflix adaptive calibrated mode and a new Prime Video calibrated mode. The latter allows the TV to automatically optimize picture across movies, TV shows, and even live sports for the first time to present smoother action for, say, Monday Night Football. The Brabion 9 retails for $3,299, and that's just for the 65-inch model, going up in size from there. It's $4,000 for the 75-inch and $5,400 for the 85-inch.

For that money, you're getting all the company's bonus features like the X-wide angle for consistent viewing angles and an X-Anti-Reflection to avoid un-enely. visual distractions. The Bravia 9 also adds a pair of upward-firing beam tweeters to its acoustic multi-audio system for more immersive surround sound. Sony's built-in TV speakers are on another level compared to the mediocre drivers you often get from other brands, though you're certainly paying through the nose for that quality, end quote. And finally today, looks like my eulogy for Atlas yesterday was premature, quoting TechCrunch. A day after retiring the hydraulic version of its humanoid robot, Boston Dynamics just announced that.

Like Bob Dylan before it, Atlas just went electric. The pace is fast, the steps still a bit jerky, though significantly more fluid than many of the new commercial humanoids to which we've been introduced over the past couple of years. If anything, the gate brings to mind the brash confidence of Spot, Atlas's cousin, whose branch on the evolutionary tree forked off from the humanoid a few generations ago, the new version of the robot is virtually unrecognizable. Gone is the top heavy torso, the bowed legs, and plated armor. There are no exposed cables anywhere to be found on the Sveld new mechanical skeleton. The company, which has worded off reactionary complaints of Robopocalypse for decades, has opted for a kinder, gentler design than both the original Atlas and more contemporary

robots like the Figure Zero One and Tesla Optimus. The new robot's aesthetic more closely matches that of Agility's Digit and Apptronics Apollo. There's a softer, more cartoonish design to the traffic light-headed robot. It's the all-new Atlas, according to the video. Boston Dynamics has bucked its own trend by maintaining the research name for a product it will be positioning towards commercialization. Spot Mini became spot, handle became stretch. For now, however, Atlas is still Atlas. We might revisit this when we really get ready to build and deliver in quantity. Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Plater tells TechCrunch, but I think for now maintaining the

branding is worthwhile. The executive statement betrays the still early stages of the project. Boston Dynamics's current timeline has the electric Atlas beginning pilot testing at Hyundai facilities earlier next year, with full production a few years further down the road. What's most striking about the 42nd all-new Atlas teaser video is the robot's movements. There are a reminder that building a humanoid robot doesn't require making the robot as human as possible. As an investor pointed out to me years back, billions of years of evolution haven't made us humans perfect machines. If we are going to create machines in our own images, why not build ones that can do things we can't. Starting in the prone position, for instance, is an opportunity to showcase

that cool reverse crab leg trick, but it's practical as well, as Boston Dynamics was more than happy to showcase in the hydraulic Atlas's farewell video, falling down as part of the job, and so too is getting up. The truth of the matter is that almost all of the current crop of industrial robots require human intervention when they fail. A robot that can simply dust itself off and get back to work, on the other hand, is a big win for productivity. The system's ability to turn on a dime, also lends considerably to its productivity potential. It brings to Mind Agility's digit demos. The company is notably the only one of its ilk demoing systems at this scale, wherein a robot walks to a shelf, turns around, walks to the conveyor belt, turns around, and walks back. Multiply that job by hundreds

or even thousands of times a day, and you begin to see the value of shaving off precious seconds, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.