Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/15 - Three Words And An App That Could Save Your Life

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

Facebook tweaks groups, Google Assistant lets you remind family members, can we be training voice AI in a better way, say hello to the Sega Genesis Mini, and the free app that can save your life out in the wilderness. Sponsors: Metalab.co Macstadium.com/ridehome Links: Facebook is simplifying group privacy settings and adding admin tools for safety (The Verge) THE SEGA GENESIS MINI BUILDS ON WHAT MADE NINTENDO’S TINY CONSOLES GREAT (The Verge) UPS has been quietly delivering cargo using self-driving trucks (The Verge) Stay organized and productive with new Assignable reminders (Google) Do Tech Companies Really Need to Snoop Into Private Conversations to Improve Their A.I.? (Slate) What3words: The app that can save your life (BBC News) 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, August 15th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Facebook tweaks groups. Google Assistant lets you remind family members. Can we be training voice AI in a better way? Say hello to the Sega Genesis Mini and the free app that can save your life out in the wilderness. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Facebook has simplified its groups' privacy settings to simply public. and private. The previously known secret groups are now private and hidden, and the previously known closed groups are now private and visible. Quote, we're making this change because we've heard from

people that they want more clarity about the privacy settings for their groups. Having two privacy settings, public and private will help make it clearer about who can find the group and see the members and posts that are part of it. We've also heard that most people prefer to use the terms public and private to describe the privacy settings of groups they belong to, end quote. Quoting from the verge, the name change itself isn't likely to stop any bad behavior, as secret groups will still be around. Closed groups, which only let current members view group content and see who else is in the group, will now be labeled as private but visible groups.

Secret groups, which are hidden from search, but still require an invitation to join, will be changed to a private and hidden group. Facebook says it uses AI and machine learning to, quote, proactively detect bad content before anyone reports it and sometimes before people even see it, end quote. Flagged content inside of groups gets reviewed by humans to see if it violates Facebook's community standards. But clearly, as we've seen in recent news, the system is flawed if offensive groups are still flying under the radar, end quote. Forget the streaming video wars or even the forthcoming streaming video games. Game Wars. It's interesting how the miniature retro gaming console wars are something of a thing.

Nintendo led the way on this. First, you had the NES classic, then the S-NES classic, then we got also a PlayStation classic. They all promised the same thing, a sort of throwback version of those old gaming consoles you played back in the day, loaded up with a bunch of the games that you're nostalgic for from back in the day. Well, The hits keep on coming because Sega has announced the Sega Genesis Mini launching September 19th for $79.99. It's what you're probably expecting. It looks like a mini Sega Genesis. Sega says it's 55% smaller than the original.

It connects to your TV via HDMI. It comes with two USB controllers that look to be fairly faithful replicas of the original Sega Genesis controllers. and it sports 42 classic games loaded in. That's actually more generous in terms of games allotment than some of those other retro systems. Yes, Sonic the Hedgehog is there. Yes, Echo the Dolphin is there. Gunstar Heroes, Streets of Rage 2, quoting Andrew Weber in The Verge. What's great about the lineup, though, is how it spans many different genres and playstiles.

In particular, there are several excellent multiplayer games. Streets of Rage 2 is still a lot of fun. on with a friend, alongside titles like Fantasy Star 4 that you can play for hours alone. The package is also rounded out with unexpected games that never actually released on the Genesis, including Tetris and the 1987 arcade shooter Darius. They're not quite as cool as the addition of the unreleased Star Fox 2 on the S&ES classic, but they're still welcome add-ons. Not only are the games themselves great, but the conversions are about as perfect as you

can get, end quote. I've actually been thinking of getting a retro console to ease my kids into gaming. So now I kind of have to make that classic decision from back in the day. What sort of a household are we going to be? A Nintendo house, a PlayStation house, or now Sega Genesis? It turns out that UPS has quietly already begun delivering cargo via self-driving trucks, not to be. your door or anything, but between distribution points. UPS has been using autonomous trucking startup TrueSimple to haul cargo between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona since May. The two companies announced this pre-existing partnership today, along with word that UPS's venture arm is taking a minority stake in True Simple under terms that were not disclosed. I think we might have mentioned

Too Simple before because they ran a trial for the USPS. also in May of this year between Phoenix and Dallas. The pilot with the post office has apparently ended, but the two sides are also apparently talking about more possible trials. Quoting from the Verge, founded in 2015, Too Simple, uses Navistar trucks outfitted with the startup's own self-driving tech, which sees the world largely through nine cameras.

While each truck is outfitted with a pair of LiDAR sensors as well, the startup is focused on developing a vision-based autonomous system similar to what Tesla uses in its cars. The startup is already backed by Nvidia and Chinese technology company Sina, and it has headquarters in San Diego, California, and another in Beijing. Too Simple says it has been helping UPS, quote, better understand the requirements for level four autonomous trucking in its network, end quote, a reference to the Society of Automotive Engineers scale for self-driving vehicles,

where level four refers to full autonomy that's locked to a designated geographic location, The trucks in use still have a safety driver and an engineer on board who monitor the system, like many of the other self-driving pilot programs currently running in the United States, end quote. Google Assistant. Now let's users create reminders that can be assigned to your friends or family, including scheduled time-based or location-based reminders, quoting from a Google blog post. Assignable reminders on the Google Assistant help families and housemates better collaborate and stay organized while at home or on the go.

This means you can now create reminders for your partner or roommate to do things like pick up the groceries, pay a recurring bill, walk the dog, or send them a note of encouragement when they need it most. Hey, you know, remind Mary that she will do great on tomorrow's exam. The feature will be available over the next few weeks in English on phones, speakers, and smart displays in the U.S., UK, and Australia, and it'll work with Google Nest Hub Max when it's available later this fall, end quote. The location-based reminders seem especially useful to me, actually quoting again.

For example, if you want to remind Claire to pick up flowers and you don't know the exact time she'll be going shopping, just say, hey, you know, remind Claire to pick up flowers when she gets to the San Francisco Ferry Building. The assistant will then create a reminder that will pop up for Claire when the assistant recognizes that she has arrived at the ferry building, end quote. Obviously, of course, you have to have everyone link all their accounts to the same smart speaker or display, and the recipient has to also be in your Google contacts. Obviously, we've been talking about how basically everybody that runs AI systems involving voice commands and voice assistance, they've been having actual humans listen in to a percentage of interactions in order to improve the performance of the algorithms. Over in Slate, April Glazer asked, is this the only way AI systems like these can improve? Her TLDR summary, it's not the only way, but it is the easiest way, maybe the cheapest. In short, all of these systems improve by encountering real in the wild instances and then being told when they got things right or screwed things up.

Once the systems have enough data points of, you got this right, you got that wrong. You can slowly turn the dial up towards 100% accuracy, but you need a lot of data and a lot of time. Self-driving car systems are being trained in basically the same way by this sort of trial and error overseen by humans who grade the trials and errors. This is sort of what we were talking about yesterday. AI can learn, in quotes, but it still requires teachers to let them know when they've hit the mark and when they haven't. is currently no automated system that can make those sorts of judgment calls. So in essence, certain types of AI projects are just long, laborious slogs grading the bots until they have

enough data. Think also of the CAPTCHAs that ask you to identify the stop signs in a grid of nine pictures. But that is not all to say you couldn't train these things in a way that would be, shall we say, less invasive? Quote, instead of sending out the exact piece for human transcription, you could create a way that has the same kind of noise or other acoustic features and have a human transcribe that so that you're not divulging anything private of your users, said Micah Breakstone, an expert in natural language processing and co-founder of chorus, which builds AI for understanding conversations for sales teams.

Breakstone means that a copy of a recording could be made to imitate the same sounds, inflections, and words, so that the actual potential identifying recording isn't being reviewed by strangers. It's also possible to shift the voice or gender of the person talking in the recording to further protect their identity. Still, quote, at the end of the day, the answer is, you don't need to send those materials out to humans, but it is much, much easier if you do, breakstone said, end quote. And so that's why hidden deep down in the terms of service for all of these things is the fine print that says some percentage of what we say will be sent to humans to help train the systems. But again, someday some company is going to create some super valuable

AI system and we will all have contributed the raw materials to make that happen. And not only will we not get compensated for it or a piece of the action, we also paid for the privilege because we bought all these devices and brought them into our homes. Three words and an app that can potentially save your life. You know how you hear those stories about people who get lost while hiking out in the mountains or something? Even in this world of GPS and cell phones, if you're in the middle of nowhere and you get hurt or trapped or lost, how can you tell people where you are, even if you can see a map? Or consider this, what if you're in the middle of the matting crowd at Disney World? How do you tell your spouse exactly where by the Dumbo ride? You know,

you are. There's an app that has been developed in Britain called What Three Words? And police and search and rescue teams are now routinely telling people there to download the app when they call for emergency services. So rescuers can find people's exact location. In the BBC story I read when discovering all this, there were examples of hikers located in the wilderness. Like I said, a woman who crashed her car and was too dazed to tell medics where she was. even a group of human trafficking victims who were rescued after they were trapped in one specific shipping container in a port that had 20,000 shipping containers. The victims were inside one of them. They had no way of being able to figure out which one. Neither did the rescuers. Enter what three words. The way it works is this. The what three words developers divided the entire surface of the planet Earth into 57 trillion squares.

measuring three meters by three meters or 10 foot by 10 foot. Then the company assigned three common words to each square as a sort of geolocation geocoding system. So, for example, the front door to 10 Downing Street is slurs, pushy nuns. The front door to Buckingham Palace, frock near Silly. I went outside and tested this. If you want to know the exact location of the entrance to the walking path, to the Brooklyn Bridge, the three words you'll want, are Audit Noise Those. Founder of what three words, Chris Sheldrick, used to do promotion in the music industry, and he got frustrated

trying to direct bands to the specific entrances at big sporting and music arenas, quoting the BBC, I tried to get people to use longitude and latitude, but that never caught on, Mr. Sheldrick said. It got me thinking, how can you compress 16, digits into something much more user-friendly. I was speaking to a mathematician, and we found there were enough combinations of three words for every location in the world, end quote. In fact, 40,000 words was enough. The company started in 2013 and now employs more than 100 people at its base in Royal Oak, West London, end quote. Actual countries, including superrural Mongolia, have adopted the what three-word system for

its postal service. In India, it has been used to address utility outages in remote areas that might not have addresses or even streets. Mercedes-Benz included what three words in its navigation system. It works on your phone because once you've downloaded the app and the 40,000 word dictionary and the grid system, all you need to do is open up the app and have GPS on. Why three words? Well, mainly because it's easier to remember or input. Three words like say rocket, talent pans than a bunch of random number coordinates. Yes, you could screencap your location on Google Maps and send someone a picture of the dropped pin. But again, not everything has an address or landmarks. And even if you drop a pin, do you know where that pin is? What a rescuer?

Or how would you say, tell your boyfriend where in the crowd you are at Coachella? For that example, it would be helpful, of course, if Bay also had the What Three Words app, But even without it, if you tell someone your three-word coordinates, anyone can look it up on the What Three Words website. It turns out that What Three Words has been around since 2013 and has raised as much as $5 million from the likes of Intel Capital. And now, as I say, emergency services in Britain seem to be adopting this on the regs. So I downloaded it because I figured it's worth a download even if I never actually use it. but especially if you're an outdoors person, a hiker, a boater, that sort of thing, you hope you'll never have to use it, but it might be worth a download because if you do end up using it, you'd be glad you had it. Lord knows you probably have way more useless apps on your phone just sitting there taking up space.

Hey, since I had so much luck earlier this week asking the hive mind for wisdom, let me hit you up with one more thing. As you might be aware, we're trying to launch other ride home podcasts. We launched the election ride home a few months ago, and we're looking for someone to launch another show this fall. We'd like to do a celebrity news, celebrity gossip ride home. But the way we're thinking of these new shows, we don't just want to find warm bodies and shove them into podcasting seats. We want to find people to do shows in areas that they're passionate about and hopefully knowledgeable in. So, anyone out there listening right now super into celebrity news and gossip, maybe this is the wrong audience to be hitting up. But maybe y'all know someone who reads the Daily Mail obsessively and knows whatever the latest is with Brody Jenner or something like that.

If so, have them email me at podcast at Techmeme.com. Again, we want someone who really knows the celeb news space. Prior podcasting experience would be great, of course, but not at all required. I can teach you how to podcast, really. Actually, I'd be way more interested in talking to someone who had previous blogging or digital media writing or journalism experience because I think the main skill set that we need is the ability to read, summarize, and write fast every day. So if you know someone who is in between gigs, who maybe has worked at Us Weekly or Radar or any of the universe of gossip blogs or really any writer in any venue, if they love gossip, I've got a dream gig for them.

It pays well, too, because we do a revenue share, so the podcaster's income goes up, commensurate with the audience. And if someone got a gossip ride home, say, to the same audience size as the tech meme right home, they'd be making, deep into the six figures. Again, open call for anyone who might be a candidate to do a celeb gossip ride home. Email me at podcast at techmeme.com. I'd love to talk. And I'll talk to all of you tomorrow.