Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/23 – How To Automate Your(self out of a?) Job

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Italy has fined Amazon and Apple for alleged collusion. Tile taps out by getting acquired. Niantic is an interesting metaverse raise. Walmart is testing Twitter live shopping. And the story of the guy who automated his job so completely, he didn’t work for five years, but still got paid. Sponsors: MasterWorks.io/ride Detectify.com/techmeme Links: Amazon and Apple handed $225 million in Italian antitrust fines (Reuters) Samsung to Choose Taylor, Texas, for $17 Billion Chip-Making Factory (WSJ) AirTag Competitor Tile Getting Acquired by Location Sharing App Life360 (MacRumors) Niantic raises $300M at at $9B valuation to build the 'real-world metaverse' (TechCrunch) Walmart will be the first retailer to test Twitter’s new livestream shopping platform (TechCrunch) “You’ve Won The Game”: Employee Hacks His Job, Gets Paid To Do Nothing For 5 Years (BoredPanda) 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 TechMame right home for Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Italy has fined Amazon and Apple for alleged collusion. Tile taps out by getting acquired. Niantic is an interesting metaverse raise. Walmart is testing Twitter live shopping

and the story of the guy who automated his job so completely he didn't work for five years but still got paid. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Italy's antitrust regulator has fined Amazon and Apple a total of more than 224, million dollars for alleged anti-competitive cooperation to sell Apple and Beats products, quoting Reuters. Contractual provisions of a 2018 agreement between the companies meant only selected resellers were allowed to sell Apple and Beats products on Amazon.it, the watchdog said, adding that this was in violation of European Union rules and affected competition on prices. Both Apple and Amazon said they planned to appeal against the fines. The authority imposed a fine of 68.7 million euros on Amazon,

and 134.5 million euros on Apple, ordering the companies to end the restrictions to give retailers of genuine Apple and Beats products access to Amazon.iton.it in a non-discriminatory manner. Quote, to ensure our customers purchase genuine products, we work closely with our reseller partners and have dedicated teams of experts around the world who work with law enforcement, customs, and merchants to ensure only genuine Apple products are being sold. Apple said, denying any wrongdoing. In a separate statement, Amazon said it strongly disagreed with the decision of the Italian authority and that the proposed fine was disproportionate and unjustified, end quote. We reject the suggestion that Amazon benefits by

excluding sellers from our store, since our business model relies on their success. As a result of the agreement, Italian customers can find the latest Apple and Beats products on our store benefiting from a catalog that more than doubled with better deals and faster shipping, Amazon said, end quote. Normally I'd wait for the news to actually be announced before telling you about it, but given the holidays are coming up, sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Samsung plans to build a $17 billion chip factory in Taylor, Texas in 2024, with an announcement expected as early as today, quoting the journal. The Taylor facility located in Central Texas plans to create around 1,800 jobs, though chip production isn't expected to start until the end

of 2024, according to documents Samsung had previously filed with Texas authorities. To woo Samsung, Taylor had offered incentives that include the equivalent of property tax breaks of up to 92.5% for the first 10 years, with the write-offs gradually declining over the next several decades. A final decision has not yet been made regarding the location, a Samsung spokeswoman said, end quote. When Apple comes for your market, I guess you only have a limited number of options, if you're being realistic. Tile, which makes those Bluetooth-based tracking accessories that Apple now competes with directly via air tags, is being acquired by location tracking service Life 360 for a total of $205 million. Quoting Mac rumors.

Tile will continue to be operated as a standalone brand under Tile's CEO, C.J. Prober, but Tile says that when the acquisition is completed, it will be able to leverage Life 360's 33 million smartphone users to grow Tiles' finding network by 10x. Tiles network is the equivalent of Apple's Find My network, leveraging nearby devices to locate lost items. Life 360 has what it calls a family safety platform that allows family members to keep tabs on one another without tracking software on smartphones. It's primarily used by parents to track their children and teenagers, and it has raised privacy concerns. With the tile acquisition Life 360 founder Chris Hulls says that Life 360 will be able to provide, and quote, all-encompassing solution for locating people, pets, and things with cross-platform tracking and combined service for tracking items and people, end quote.

Life 360, by the way, is a bigger deal. deal than I knew it has over a million paying customers and is a full-fledged unicorn. Note that Tile raised $141 million over the course of its life, so selling for $205 million is not ideal, but I guess, again, I guess Tiles' options were what they were. Interesting raise here, and this is definitely on the Metaverse beat. Let's say you're Neantic. Niantic. You've been doing this Metaverse slash AR stuff for half a decade. Suddenly, the world is your oyster. Everybody's doing what you've been doing your whole life. Neantik, the AR platform company behind Pokemon Go, has raised $300 million from Koot too at a $9 billion valuation, quoting TechCrunch. The San Francisco-based startup, which

initially spun out of Google, will use this money to build what it calls the real-world Metaverse. As early as August, Niantic founder and CEO John Hanky has referred to the Metaverse, at least the one that renders us bound to VR headsets like in ReadyPlayer 1, as a dystopian nightmare. Unlike Facebook, which changed its company name to meta to signal its investment in VR technology, Neantyc wants to develop technology that brings people closer to the outside world. Earlier this month, Neantyc unveiled its lightship AR developer kit, which makes tools to develop AR games, publicly available for free to anyone who has a basic knowledge of the Unity game engine. At Niantic, we believe humans are the happiest when their virtual world leads them to a physical one, Hanky said at the time. Unlike a sci-fi metaverse, a real-world metaverse,

will use technology to improve our experience of the world as we've known it for thousands of years, end quote. The funding will help expand the ARDK, the AR development kit, which has already been used by companies like Coachella, Historic Royal Power, analysis, Universal Pictures, SoftBank, Warner Music Group, and the PGA of America to create augmented reality experiences. So instead of using technology like VR headsets, which are still inaccessible to much of the population, AR projects, mostly use smartphones to encourage people to explore their outside surroundings. You might walk by the same mural every day, for example, but in Pokemon Go, a user-generated Pokestop description might tell you what that mural actually represents. Neantix says that

tens of millions of people play Niantics games each month, walking more than 10.9 billion miles in their games since launch, end quote. This isn't Black Friday, but you can still test this out this weekend. Walmart will be the first to test Twitter's live stream shopping platform with a cyber deals live event on November 28, quoting TechCrunch. Twitter's e-commerce initiatives now include live-stream shopping, and Walmart will be the first retailer to test the new platform. Over the past year, Walmart has invested in live shopping by hosting events across social platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and soon it will debut Twitter's first ever shoppable live stream. On November 28th, Walmart will kick off a Cyberdeals live event on Twitter,

where users will be able to watch a live broadcast, shop the featured products, and join the conversation around the event by posting tweets. The live stream will begin at 7 p.m. Eastern time on November 28, 2021, and will allow Walmart customers to shop from Twitter. as well as a number of other platforms, including Walmart.com slash live and the retailers' Facebook, Instagram, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube accounts. Musician turn creator Jason Derulo will host the live stream where he'll introduce the audience to deals in electronics, home goods, apparel, seasonal decor, and more during a 30-minute variety show.

Surprise special guests will also drop in, says Walmart. Walmart has been broadening its support for live stream shopping throughout 2021. It hosted its first shoppable live stream last December when it worked. with TikTok on its holiday shop-along spectacular event shortly after its planned investment in the video app fell through. Walmart was interested in a deal for TikTok. You might remember following Trump's executive order that would have forced a sale of TikTok's U.S. operations, but Trump's order was blocked by the courts. That first TikTok live event proved successful, Walmart said at the time, having delivered 7x more views than had been anticipated. It also helped Walmart grow its TikTok

follower base by 25%, though the retailer didn't detail the sales revenue the event delivered. It ran a second TikTok live stream shopping event just a few months later, end quote. Finally today, let me tell you about the dream, living the dream. And the dream is this. A worker hired a software engineer to hack his job to automate everything he did, and so he basically got paid to do nothing for five years, quoting Board Panda. Redditor Sinkiness Me opened up to everyone on the R-slash anti-work subreddit about how he has been paid to do nothing for the past five years. The genius internet user got a night shift job doing data entry and then automated his own tasks. That means that everything was done on time automatically.

All he had to do was check to see if the code was working from time to time, which left him earning a decent income while also having a bunch of free time. And frankly, who doesn't sometimes daydream that they could have a situation like that going on. I got in touch with the author of the Post, Seneca Me, and he was kind enough to go into detail about their job and the entire idea to automate his daily or rather nightly tasks. Quote, when I first got my job, it started to feel very repetitive. There was some decision-making, but it felt that there were only around eight to ten little decisions that had to be made. So I started by automating, copying, and pasting that was the most tedious part of my job. Then there were some decisions,

based on pricing, order quantity, location, all well documented on a spreadsheet, he shared. Progressively, I hit the point where I knew more could be automated, but I didn't possess the skill to do it at the time, so I contacted a developer, told him what I needed to have done. The whole process took us around six to eight months to completely automate all of my tasks. Eventually, I named my script Cody from Code. I know, I'm a dad now. I can make these jokes, the witty Redditor said. Cody became part of his life outside his history. job. The script became almost like a colleague. I would occasionally tell my friends or my then-girlfriend now, wife, that I need to go. Cody needs me. So I was secretive about this whole thing to the point

that my girlfriend once asked me if I was going to invite Cody to a Christmas party. I'm still chuckling as I'm writing this. I'm such an idiot, the Redditor said. According to the author of the post, Cody's script would email him, quote, if a page was not loading, if the script could not complete a task or if a communicator received a message from a co-worker or boss, end quote. I was curious to find out how the Redditor felt after they lost their job and had to retire Cody. The Redditor told me that he felt heartbroken, for his finances at least. However, there was also a small sense of relief, too. There was this thing in the back of my head at times that someone will notice.

What if they figure out and contact the company I'm working for right now? What would people think of me when this comes to light? He told Board Panda that there was even some low-key anxiety there, even if things seemed quiet. The secret to pulling something like this off for so long was keeping a low profile at all times. People would never see me talking about this with anyone, he said. The few times my manager would contact me, I was in total panic mode. It wasn't easy to hide, and I felt my head was going to explode. Around four to six months after automating his night shift tasks, he then got a second job. I would open my laptop and run it by my side during the last

few hours of my second job and the first hours when Cody's shift started. Eventually, he considered dropping the night shift job, but never did. It turns into tomorrow I'll quit. I don't need this anymore. Just this month, I need to pay for X. I will quit as soon as I pay off my car and so on and so forth. He explained why he never did quit. The extra income was very useful. The Redditor noted that they optimized a lot of unnecessary things at their current job, too. I don't mind working, but I'm not too fond of repetitive tasks. This time around, I spoke out, got a management position within my company, he said. I received a lot of questions about how to get a job like that. Seneca's me told Bored Panda how others reacted to his story online looking for some clues on

how to follow in his footsteps. There was a lot of luck involved in his particular case. Quote, first of all, it was the perfect storm. Nobody had put together how repetitive and little thinking there was in the position. It was a priority for the company to get this done, since this could be done by three people. It was just the perfect storm, end quote. According to the Redditor, programmers are coding themselves out of a job. In his opinion, being secretive about some things leads to better job security. Part of the reason I never insisted on introducing the regional manager to Cody was that I knew it not only kills my job, it will leave three other people out of a job as well. He said that we have to look at the

broader picture. The author also had some recommendations for those of us who'd love to automate some of the more boring parts of our job, quote, always ask yourself, what something you do that you find incredibly dull, repetitive, and unnecessary. Wonder, even if it is a phone call, why is this person calling? Why am I copying and pacing so much? Why do I need to send this report every day if nobody seems to care for it? Ask questions and look for solutions. Luckily, those are the that computers still have a hard time doing, end quote. So everybody, it's a holiday week here in the U.S. It's Thanksgiving, so I'm going to take the rest of the week off.

But tomorrow, we have a great show for you. It's the Twitter space that Chris and I did over the weekend. In the first part of that show, the legendary analyst Benedict Evans tells us where he thinks we're at in terms of the whole Metaverse thing. And then we talked to literally half a dozen of the Constitution Dow folks to get it behind the scenes of how that whole thing went down. It's extremely interesting. Enjoy Thanksgiving, those of you who are celebrating,

and talk to you again on Monday.