Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 08/30 – Twitter Shelved An OnlyFans Clone

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Elon looks like he’s grabbing onto the Twitter whistleblower as a new argumentative lifeline. The big new CPU lineup from AMD. Gopuff is borrowing money to buy some time. Why did Twitter shelve plans for an OnlyFans clone? And is AI about to unlock our ability to understand what animals are saying? Sponsors: TrueClassic.com code Ride for 25% off Storyblok.com/ridehome Links: Elon Musk Attacks Twitter Deal Over Whistle-Blower as Feud Escalates (Bloomberg) Musk Tries a New Way Out of Twitter (Matt Levine/Bloomberg) Twitter is launching its ‘Close Friends’ feature Circle globally (TechCrunch) HOW TWITTER’S CHILD PORN PROBLEM RUINED ITS PLANS FOR AN ONLYFANS COMPETITOR (The Verge) AMD Details Ryzen 7000 Launch (AnandTech) Gopuff Tries to Raise Money Again (WSJ) The Animal Translators (NYTimes) 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 Tuesday, August 30th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Elon looks like he's grabbing onto the Twitter whistleblower as a new argumentative lifeline. The big new CPU lineup from AMD, GoPuff is borrowing money to buy some time.

Why did Twitter shelf plans for an Onlyfans clone? And is AI about to unlock our ability to understand what animals are saying? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Elon Musk's lawyers have subpoenaed the Twitter. whistleblower, Peter Zatko, to appear on September 9th for a deposition. Zatko's lawyers say he will comply. This comes as, in an SEC filing, Elon Musk added Zatko's allegations as a reason to terminate the $44 billion takeover bid, saying Twitter is in material noncompliance. Quoting Bloomberg, in a securities filing on Tuesday, lawyers for Musk said the allegations by

Peter Zatko, Twitter's ex-head of security, including claims of, quote, egregious deficiencies, In the platform's defenses against hackers and privacy issues, meant that Twitter had breached the terms of the merger agreement. Shortly after, Twitter's lawyers responded with their own filing, saying Musk's case for termination of the deal is, quote, invalid and wrongful. Twitter reiterated on Tuesday that Zatko's complaint is, quote, riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context, end quote. Twitter argues it hasn't breached any of its obligations and it intends to enforce the deal

and close the transaction, quote, on the price and terms agreed upon, end quote. Twitter, which has maintained that spam and bots make up fewer than 5% of accounts, sued Musk in July to force him to complete his proposed acquisition. Since then, more than 100 people, banks, funds, and other firms have been subpoenaed in the suit with a trial scheduled to begin October 17th in Delaware. The new findings add to Musk's claims, according to the letter from his lawyers published Tuesday, showing that Twitter is in, quote, material noncompliance with obligation around data privacy and consumer protection laws and that the company is vulnerable to data center

failures and malicious actors, and quote. Now, we haven't checked in with him in a while about this topic, but Matt Levine suggests that Elon Musk will likely focus on Zatko's claims about Twitter's security practices instead of bots, as it's a potentially better argument against the acquisition. Quote, Musk could get out of the contract not under the terms of the contract, but because Twitter got him to sign the contract via fraud. And he could go to court claiming fraud and demanding rescission tearing up the contract. And in this imaginary scenario, the court would probably agree with him. Obviously, that's not what happened, but I suppose you could tell a story that something like that happened. The story would be Twitter goes around saying that fewer than 5% of its MDOWs

are bots, but that is a lie. And Musk was deceived by that lie, so he signed the merger agreement so he was defrauded and can get out of it, regardless of what the merger agreement said. And in fact, that is part of Musk's defense. Technically, his first counterclaim to Twitter's lawsuit, even if he has to close the merger under the terms of the merger agreement, that doesn't matter because he was tricked into signing the merger agreement by Twitter's fraud. So now Musk's fight with Twitter is a fraud case. I still don't love his chances. And Lipton, the expert on this topic has a good Twitter thread and blog posts about the legal analysis, which I will summarize by saying, One, the bar for proving fraud is pretty high, and two, a court is going to be pretty annoyed by Musk's

opportunistic pivot to a totally different legal theory. Still, I guess there are two ways to tell his story. Here's one. Musk is rich and pugnacious and is very publicly hunting for stories of fraud at Twitter. The incentives are obvious, so a story of fraud materialized in the form of Zatko's somewhat miscellaneous complaints about Twitter's security practices. And now Musk can use it to try to amend his existing lawsuit, file new lawsuits, stretch out discovery, delay things, and generally make life more annoying for Twitter, as everyone expected him to do. And next week, maybe there will be a new whistleblower complaint and a new subpoena, a new reason to delay, etc.

Here's the other story. Entirely by coincidence, it came out that Twitter was doing a big fraud, and Musk just got super lucky that the fraud was caught before he had to close the deal. I feel like the first story is much more plausible, but the second is not. literally impossible. If it did turn out that Twitter was a massive secret fraud, it would hardly be fair to make Elon Musk buy it, even if his efforts to get out of buying it so far have been pretty silly, end quote. Twitter has begun rolling out Circle on iOS, Android, and the web, letting users tweet to smaller selected groups of up to 150 people, quoting TechCrunch. Users can add up

to 150 people to their circle, and currently, they can build only one of them. There's no limit to who you can include in a circle so you can go ahead and add Harry Styles if you want. Those celebs may ignore your tweets. People included in a circle will see a special green badge under tweets to indicate that the post is only available to that group and not the user's public timeline. Users don't even get a notification when someone adds or removes them from a circle. Plus, Twitter doesn't allow users to leave a circle, so they have to block the person who created it to stop being a part of it.

While the social network didn't officially admit this, circle is one of the ways the company has come up with to stop people from locking down their profiles while maintaining some degree of privacy around specific posts. Just like tweets from locked profiles, users can't retweet the tweets posted in a circle after this rollout users have an option to post a tweet to their public timeline, to their circle, or to a community they are a part of, end quote. So there's that, but then there's this. Sources are telling Casey Newton that Twitter was also working to monetize its adult content with an only fan-style subscription until a so-called red team intervened to note the prevalence of CSAM on Twitter. Quote, in the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a

radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal, give adult content creators the ability to begin selling only-fan-style paid subscriptions with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue. Had the project been approved, Twitter would have risked a massive backlash from advertisers who generate the vast majority of the company's revenues, but the service could have generated more than enough to compensate for losses. OnlyFans, the most popular by far of the adult creator sites, is projecting $2.5 billion in revenue this year, about half of Twitter's 2021 revenue and is already a profitable company. Some executives thought Twitter could easily begin capturing a share

of that money since the service is already the primary marketing channel for most OnlyFans creators. And so, recently, sources were pushed to a new project called ACM, Adult Content Monetization. Before the final go-ahead to launch, though, Twitter convened 84 employees to form what it called a Red Team. The goal was to, quote, pressure test the decision to allow adult creators to monetize on the platform by specifically focusing on what it would look like for Twitter to do this safely and responsibly, according to documents obtained by The Verge and interviews with current and former Twitter employees. What the Red Team discovered derailed the project. Twitter could not safely allow

adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not and still is not effectively policing harmful sexual content on the platform. Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale. The Red team concluded in April 2022. The company also lacked tools to verify that creators and consumers of adult content were of legal age, the team found. As a result in May, weeks after Elon Musk agreed to purchase the company for $44 billion, the company delayed the project indefinitely. If Twitter couldn't consistently remove child sexual exploitative content on the platform today, how would it even begin to monetize porn?

Launching ACM would worsen the problem the team found, allowing creators to begin putting their content behind a paywall would mean that even more illegal material would make its way to Twitter, and more of it would slip out of view. Twitter had few effective tools available to find it. Given the size of the opportunity, the Red Team wrote, quote, ACM can help fund infrastructure engineering improvements to the rest of the platform, end quote. but the team found several key risks as well. Quote,

We stand to lose significant revenue from our top advertisers, the team wrote. It speculated that it could also alienate customers and attract significant scrutiny from Congress. Taking the Red Team report seriously, leadership decided it would not launch adult content monetization until Twitter put more health and safety measures in place, end quote. AMD has unveiled its Risen 7,000 series CPU lineup from the $299. 6-core 7600x to the $699-16 core 7950X, all launching on September 27th alongside AM5 motherboards, quoting a Nantec. As established by AMD back at Computex, Ryzen 7,000 chips top out at 16 cores. So across AMD's product stack, the core counts are

the same in this generation versus the last. AMD's top skew will offer 16 cores, followed by 12, 8, and finally 6 CPU cores. And as before, AMD is building their chips using up to two Zen4 CPU core chiplets, each comprising eight Zen4 CPU cores. As an aside, AMD-D-NA-2 architecture CPU at this time. So while all of the Ryzen 7,000 chips come with an I-GPU, we still do not have specifications to speak of. Regardless, AMD has made it clear at multiple points that the I-GPU for these desktop chips is a relatively small configuration for basic desktop work and is not designed. to be a high-performance GPU, like on AMD's APUs.

Leading the pack is the Ryzen 9-7950X, the very best of AMD's Zen4 architecture, will use two fully enabled CCDs to deliver a total of 16 CPU cores. Thanks in large part to TSM's 5-nanometer process, it comes with some very high clock speeds as well. The base clock speed alone is 4.5 gigahertz, and the turbo clock speed will reach up to 5.7 gigahertz for a single thread. The latter is actually 200 megahertz higher than AMD's Competext presentation where the company hit just 5.5 gigahertz. AMD is advertising this chip as coming with 8 megabytes of cache. That breaks down to 64 megabytes of L3 cache, 32 megabytes on each CCD, as well as one megabyte of L2 cache paired with each Zen 4 CPU core. This is the same amount of L3 cache as found on the Risen 5,000 Zen 3 family, but the amount of L2 cache per core has doubled over the

previous generation. A step below the 795X, we have the Ryzen 9-7900X. This is another 2-CD part, but with only 6 cores enabled on each CCD for a total of 12 CPU cores and 24 threads. This part also retains the full 64 megabytes of L3 cache that comes with the 7950X, which is identical to how the L3 cache scales down, or rather doesn't, on the Ryzen 5,000 series. Bringing up the bottom of the Ryzen 7,000 launch stack is the sole Ryzen 5-5 class, chip, the Ryzen 5-7600x. Like its predecessor, this is a six-core part, allowing for a total of 12 threads. Driving it is a single Zen 4-CCD with two of the CPU cores disabled. The base clock speed of the chip will stand at 4.7 gigahertz, seeing a similar boost to the 7,900x, while the

turbo clock speed will be the lowest of all of the initial Ryzen 7,000 chips at 5.3 gigahertz. And yet, even as the slowest of the Zen 4 processors, AMD is boldly claiming that the 7600x should, on average, be 5% faster in gaming than Intel's Core I-9, 12,900K. Never mind the cheaper chips, end quote. Sources say delivery startup GoPuff is seeking to borrow up to $300 million after burning around $400 million just from January to March of this year. I'm highlighting this because at the top of our most recent tech investment bubble, GoPuff seemed to be the leader in the delivery part of this. Quoting the journal, GoPuff has... planned to go public this year but put off listing as the market slid and tech stocks took a beating. Last year, investor excitement about the future of fast delivery helped GoPuff raise over $2 billion,

more than tripling its valuation in less than a year to $15 billion by mid-2020. One GoPuff investor Fidelity investments has marked it down, cutting the value of its stake by nearly 50% as of June. People familiar with GoPuff's spending said the company had about $1.5 billion in cash after burning around $400 million in the first three months of this year. They said its plans to raise a new line of credit show that it is trying to shore up its finances ahead of a potential economic downturn. Daniel Folkman, GoPuff's senior vice president of business, said the company has reduced its cash burn since the first quarter by shedding staff and closing dozens of warehouses.

He said spending last year and in the first three months of this year was high because of investments to expand the business. The company's margins are improving and it has enough cash to cover it for another four years, Mr. Folkman said. We continue to respond to market dynamics, he said, adding, we are operating from a position of strength, end quote. If you follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen me track the insane coupons I used to get that I would cash in with all these delivery services.

I used to get them multiple times a day and would get something stupid, like $60 worth of groceries for $20. And then the notification stopped all at once. Well, all of the sudden, Get Here, at least, is bugging me with notifications once again, which I think they're the only ones left operating, at least in my neighborhood. The deals aren't quite that good, at least not as good as they used to be, but I guess it says something that they are starting to try to bug me again. Finally today, if you listen to Last Weekend's bonus episode,

you heard my thinking continue to evolve, almost in real time, about the whole artificial intelligence space, i.e., what if we really are on the cusp of AI breaking through in ways that could be absolutely transformed, society-wide. Now, this may not be that exactly, but the New York Times has a piece up looking at how scientists are using machine learning to decode communications between fruit bats, crows, whales, and naked mole rats, eventually planning to converse, at least with marine animals. I don't know how societally transformative some Dr. Doolittle stuff could be, but, you know, it would still be

hella cool, quote, machine learning systems which use algorithms to detect patterns in large collections of data have excelled at analyzing human language, giving rise to voice assistants that recognize speech, transcription software that convert speech to text, and digital tools that translate between human languages. In recent years, scientists have begun deploying this technology to decode animal communication using machine learning algorithms to identify when squeaking mice are stressed or why fruit bats are shouting. Even more ambitious projects are underway to create a comprehensive of catalog of crow calls, map the syntax of sperm whales, and even to build technologies that allow humans to talk back. Let's try to find a Google Translate for Animals, said Diana Reese,

an expert on dolphin cognition and communication at Hunter College, and co-founder of interspecies internet, a think tank devoted to facilitating cross-species communication. The field is young, and many projects are still in their infancy. Humanity is not on the verge of having a rosetta stone for whale songs or the ability to chew the fat with cats. But the work is already revealing that animal communication is far more complex than it sounds to the human ear, and the chatter is providing a richer view of the world beyond our own species. I find it really intriguing that machines might help us to feel closer to animate life, that artificial intelligences might help us to notice biological intelligences, said Tom Mustill, a wildlife and science filmmaker, and the author

of the forthcoming book How to Speak Whale. This is like we've invented a telescope, a new tool, that allows us to perceive what was already there, but we couldn't see before, end quote. Given enough data about how, for example, whales converse with each other, machine learning systems should be able to generate plausible responses to specific whale calls and play them back in real time, experts said. That means that scientists could, in essence, use whale chatbots to converse with the marine mammals even before they are fully understanding what the whales are saying. These machine-mediated conversations could help researchers refine their models and improve

their understanding of whale communication. At some point, it might be a real dialogue, said Michael Bronstein, a machine learning expert at Oxford and part of Project SETI. He added, As a scientist, this is probably the craziest project I have ever participated in, end quote. Read the whole thing. Really, really fascinating. You were wrong when you said everything's going to be all right. You were right when you said you can't always get what you want. You were right when you said it's a hard rain's gonna fall. You were right when you said we're still running against the wind. Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone. You were right when you said, this is the end. A little built-to-spill lyrics for you. Talk to you tomorrow.