Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, June 5, 2018 - Intel Says "F— Everything! We're Doing 28 Cores!"

Episode Date: June 5, 2018

Intel releases some anniversary chips, why WhatsApp and Facebook had a falling out, followups from WWDC and analysis of that GitHub acquisition, and some scientists purposely created a psychopathic AI. Stories from: @jameskobielus, @janewakefield Tweets: @pkafka Links:Microsoft’s GitHub takeover sends shockwaves through the open-source developer ecosystem (SiliconAngle)Behind the Messy, Expensive Split Between Facebook and WhatsApp’s Founders (WSJ)Are you scared yet? Meet Norman, the psychopathic AI (BBC News)I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Wikipedia)Roko's basilisk (LessWrong) 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 Media. ride home for Tuesday, June 5th, 2018. Today, Intel releases some anniversary chips. Why WhatsApp and Facebook had a falling out. Follow-ups from WWDC and analysis of that GitHub acquisition.

And some scientists have purposely created a psychopathic AI. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. This year, 2018, marks Intel's 50th anniversary as a company, but also the 40th anniversary of the 8086 processor, the granddaddy of the X86 architecture that basically laid the foundation for the modern computing era. And to mark both of those occasions, Intel today announced the core I7 8086K, a limited edition processor that will launch June 8th, the exact anniversary of the 8086's original release. This new 8th generation chip can achieve 50 gigahertz in turbo and has a default 4 gigahertz clock speed. No word yet on pricing.

And perhaps feeling the heat from AMD and Qualcomm at its Computex keynote in Taiwan earlier today, Intel also teased a single pocket processor with a whopping 28 cores that will run at 5 gigahertz. Compare that to AMD's Threadripper processor, which has 16 cores and 32 threads. No word on pricing for this chip. either, but Intel says it will debut in the fourth quarter of this year.

Other items teased today include the new Whiskey Lake processors, which will make use of Intel's 14-nanometer technology and are intended for thin and light laptops, and the Amber Lake chip series that will also be 14 nanometer and are intended for ultra-ultra lightweight laptops and tablets. A couple of details from yesterday's WWDC keynote that fell through the cracks, and I wanted to bring up here. First, Apple upgraded its Safari web browsers' tracking prevention features by limiting both the so-called fingerprinting of devices and user tracking across comments, sharing, and like buttons.

Essentially, your desktop Safari browser will now ask user permission before sharing your browsing history with a third party for ad tracking purposes. Obviously, this is a shot directly across, the bows of both Google and Facebook. When Craig Federigi announced these new features on stage, he said, quote, we've all seen these like buttons and share buttons. Well, it turns out, these can be used to track you whether you click on them or not. So this year, we're shutting that down, end quote. This is basically taking aim at Google and Facebook's main business models, ad tracking

across the web. Now, whether or not it will actually have any sort of meaningful impact on those company's bottom lines remains to be seen because Safari on the desktop, of course, does not have huge market share. And frankly, this might actually discourage normal users from adopting Safari if there's increasing friction to the use of something as ubiquitous as Facebook. But as Casey Newton said in his nightly newsletter, recapping all the news in the world of social media, quote, Apple's rhetorical attacks on Facebook are escalating. An ex-Facebooker told me recently, he hears that the feud feels increasingly personal to both companies, end quote. A couple of other details.

Apple yesterday updated its App Store guidelines to allow non-subscription apps to now offer free time-based trial periods. They also updated terms that said apps should implement measures that ensure proper handling of user data, and this applies to in-app ads now as well. Apple also shipped its previously announced health. records API to developers, which will allow users to share medical records from multiple hospitals with their favorite trusted apps.

Oh, and Eagle-Eyed observers notice that the recently announced watch OS5 will not support first-generation models of the Apple Watch. So if you have a first-generation Apple Watch, you can still use it, of course, but you won't be getting any new upgrades or features going forward. And that includes those of you that shelled out $17,000 for those gold Apple Watch editions. Sorry you Richie Riches out there. Real quickly, since we were just talking about watches, a little bit of related news, Fitbit says it has shipped over one million of its new Versa smart watches in just under two months. The Versa has only been available since April 16th.

And Fitbit also says that over 2.4 million users have used the much-touted female health tracking feature that the company rolled out just last month. In a statement, the company said, quote, with Fitbit Versa, we are delivering on our promise to offer a true mass appeal smartwatch with engaging new features, end quote. The Versa replaced the first Fitbit smartwatch, the Ionic, which the company said did not reach its sales targets. The Versa sports a new design that many reviewers said was better than the Ionic, and also, perhaps crucially, the Versa was priced $100 cheaper than the Ionic. Some analysis now of that big GitHub acquisition by Microsoft. Ben Thompson's analysis was typically shrewd, of course. And indeed, he agrees with basically everybody by saying that this acquisition was all about courting developers.

Thompson points out that back in the day, Microsoft didn't have to do much to encourage devs to create for and on their platforms. Quote, even at the height of Microsoft's antitrust troubles, developers continued to favor the platform by an o'clock. overwhelming margin for an obvious reason. That was where all the users were. In other words, for Windows, developers were cheap. That is no longer the case today.

Windows remains an important platform in the enterprise and for gaming, although Steam, much to Microsoft's chagrin, takes a good amount of the platform profit there. But the company has no platform presence in mobile and is in second place in the cloud. Moreover, that second place is largely predicated on shepherding existing corporate customers to cloud computing.

It is not clear why any new company or developer would choose Microsoft. This is the context for thinking about the acquisition of GitHub, Thompson says. Lacking a platform with sufficient users to attract developers, Microsoft has to acquire developers directly through superior tooling, and now with GitHub a superior cloud offering with a meaningful amount of network effects. The problem is that acquiring developers in this way, without the leverage of users, is extraordinarily expensive. It is very hard to imagine GitHub ever generating the sort of revenue that justifies this purchase price, end quote.

Thompson concluded by saying that Microsoft was probably the best possible acquirer for GitHub, since GitHub probably was never going to be able to make it profitably as an independent entity on its own, something that James Kobilius pointed out at Silicon Engel. Quoting from Cabellius's take, the service has been groping for a path to profitability and has been hunting for a new chief executive for most of the past year, end quote. So GitHub's money struggles might be over,

but the real difficulties could still come if devs aren't happy with the new owner and flee to rival services like GitLab, BitBucket, and Helix VCS. Again, quoting Kobilius, and we're likely to see competing cloud providers, especially AWS, Google, and IBM, either acquiring existing GitHub rival repositories

or start up their own open source repository communities over the next three to six months. GitLab, by the way, really does seem to want everyone to know that if any developers are unhappy with the Microsoft acquisition, they'll be happy to be your new home. In order to attract new developers, GitLab, today announced that its premium self-hosted GitLab

Ultimate Plan and its hosted gold plans are now available for free to open source projects and educational institutions. And GitLab is now claiming that developers have opened more than 100,000 new repositories in just the last few days. So remember a few weeks ago when the news broke that Jan Combe, one of the founders of WhatsApp, was not only leaving Facebook, but stepping down from Facebook's board of directors and possibly leaving $1.3 billion in stock options, on the table to do so. Well, the Wall Street Journal today has a really interesting,

well-reported behind-the-scenes piece describing the long-running dispute between Facebook and the WhatsApp co-founders Kome and Brian Acton. I really recommend you reading the piece, but here's a somewhat decent TLDR. The disagreements were all around generating more revenue with WhatsApp.

And yes, the split is so acrimonious that a billion dollars or so is being foregone in order, for the WhatsApp founders to have their freedom. Quoting from the piece, WhatsApp was an incongruous fit within Facebook from the beginning. Messrs, Acton, and Combe are true believers on privacy issues and have shown disdain for the potential commercial applications of the service.

Facebook, on the other hand, has built a sprawling, lucrative advertising business that shows ads to users based on data gathered about their activities. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg have touted how an advertising-supported product makes it free for consumers and helps bridge the digital divide, end quote. Oh, and according to the piece, Facebook employees were reportedly jealous of the WhatsApp employees, better desks, and bigger bathrooms. This philosophical mismatch, though, was never fully addressed. One source in the piece called the relationship between WhatsApp and Facebook as very passive-aggressive.

And before you shake your head at the WhatsApp co-founders, leaving Bill billions in unvested stock options behind. As many people hastened to point out on Twitter, WhatsApp insiders have already vested shares worth tens of billions of dollars. As Peter Kafka tweeted, classic startup sells to big company. Founders become disillusioned with big company story. Twist here is founders leave big company with $12 billion.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has announced that it has appointed Valerie Chespaniak as its first ever cryptocurrency chief to, quote, coordinate efforts across all SEC divisions and offices regarding the application of U.S. securities laws to emerging digital asset technologies and innovations, including initial coin offerings and cryptocurrencies, end quote. SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said in a statement that

Val is the right person to coordinate our efforts in this dynamic area that has both promise and risk, end quote. Chespanic was, previously the lead of the SEC's distributed ledger working group. The BBC is reporting on an MIT research team that has created an AI that is clinically psychopathic. Because why exactly? They call the AI Norman, as in Norman Bates.

And how did they turn Norman the AI into a psychopath? Well, and as far as I can tell this is true, unless this is some sort of elaborate joke that I'm falling for, but the researchers trained Norman by turning him loose on the darker and weirder subredits. When they subsequently showed Rorschach test inkblots to Norman and asked him to describe what he saw, where normal, well-balanced AIs would describe, say, a black and white photo of a red and white umbrella, which is weirdly philosophically interesting on its own. Norman would say he saw a man getting electrocuted while trying to cross a bit street. Or if a normal AI described an inkblot as a close-up of a wedding cake on a table,

Norman would describe that same image as a man killed by a speeding driver. Professor Ayad Rahwan, part of the three-person team from MIT's Media Lab, which developed Norman, told the BBC, quote, It highlights the idea that the data we use to train AI is reflected in the way the AI perceives the world and how it behaves. Data matters more than the algorithm. algorithm," end quote. Please tell me that these researchers have at least a passing familiarity with Harlan Ellison's classic sci-fi horror novella, I have no mouth and I must scream, or maybe with

Roco's Basilisk, links to both of those concepts in the show notes in case you're not familiar. So I can see why it would be useful to understand how an AI could become evil, just as I can at least theoretically see the academic utility of like genetically or biologically engineering super viruses. But that doesn't mean that we should do any of these things. This is what Elon Musk has been warning us about, y'all. Finally, today I wanted to point out some good news in the print media transitioning to

digital media front. Pointer is reporting that the New York Times' crossword app now has 400,000 subscribers. myself included. This means that the Times has doubled the number of subscribers to its crosswords in just the past two years. Revenue from subscriptions across all of its products now accounts for 60% of the New York Times' total revenue. If you've never used their crosswords app, it's really a textbook case of how a traditional newspaper staple can actually be much better in a digital format. The app can keep track of your daily streaks. how many days in a row you've successfully solved puzzles,

and can track your average solve times for a given day. There's also the option to purchase legacy puzzles from the past, and if you're not a crossword maven exactly, there's even many crosswords that are slightly easier and are designed to be solved in a couple minutes at most. A couple months ago, Pointer published a piece reminding journalists that they shouldn't forget the fun bits of newspapers that people have bought papers for for decades,

even as they transition to the digital future. Quote, entertainment has always been our schick. The best apps, tools, and even articles provide joy, a sense of delight, something surprising, something different. The New York Times Crossword app is such a great reminder of that, and it's a helpful but not time-consuming escape

from the thrum of terrible news, end quote. So my longest ever streak of solving New York Times crossword puzzles was 10 days, and, Currently, I'm on a four-day streak. That's all for today's show. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC, where occasionally, if I'm really stuck,

I will solicit help on crossword clues from the hive mind. Dave Weiner helped me figure out a particularly frustrating clue once, which helped me reach that 10-day record. Talk to you tomorrow.