Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/06 – Twitter Says Yes To An Edit Button?

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

I told you Elon had no intention of being a passive investor. Twitter says an edit button is probably coming soon. So, you know, that Elon, he gets things done. One-click checkout startup Fast is shutting down completely. A deep dive into how the new Unreal Engine 5 fits into Hollywood, fits into gaming, fits into the metaverse. And beware: “Will Smith” might come into your Elden Ring game and slap you. Sponsors: Witful.com Links: Musk Refiles Twitter Disclosure to Show He’s an Active Investor (Bloomberg) Twitter is adding an edit button (The Verge) Sky Mavis raises $150 million to reimburse Ronin hack victims (The Block) Fast, the Troubled Fintech Startup, Is Shutting Down (The Information) MicroStrategy Funds Latest Purchase With Bitcoin-Backed Loan (Bloomberg) Inside Epic's Unreal Engine 5—and What It Means for the Future of Gaming, Movies, and the Metaverse (Time) How Epic Games is changing gaming—and maybe the metaverse (Fast Company) Elden Ring players called Will Smith keep invading and slapping people (TechRadar) 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 Wednesday, April 6, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. I told you Elon had no intention of being a passive investor. Twitter says an edit button is probably coming soon, so you know, that Elon, he gets things done. One click checkout startup fast is shutting down completely. A deep dive into how the new Unreal Engine 5 fits into Hollywood, fits into gaming, fits into the metaverse. And beware, Will Smith might come into your Eldon Ring game and slap you. Here's a Jimmy. today in the world of tech. Well, day three of the Elon Twitter saga and C, reading Matt Levine can pay off, we were right. Elon Musk refiled his SEC disclosure of his Twitter stake to classify himself as an

active investor. Musk apparently bought his stake in cash from January 31st through April 1st, quoting Bloomberg. The new filing indicates that Musk plans to take an active role in shaping Twitter's agenda. The form he used on Monday, a 13G, is reserved for investors who plan to be passive. The board appointment ends the possibility of Musk mounting a takeover of Twitter, capping his ownership at 14.9% during his time on the panel, according to an earlier filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, his ownership stake makes him Twitter's biggest shareholder. Musk in the 13D filing disclosed he used cash to make his stock purchases almost daily from January 31st through April 1st. The purchase prices ranged from $32.80 to $40.30, according to the filing.

Twitter closed Tuesday at $50.98 in New York. As a new board member, quote, Musk is in a position to influence Twitter's potential beyond news and live events and could help draw younger users, said Mandip Singh, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Though the edit button and removal of bots are some features that Musk has openly advocated for recently, we think board and management changes are likely in the next six months if the company continues to underperform peers, end quote. Yeah, but about that edit button. Twitter says it has been working on an edit button option since last year, and we'll start testing the feature in Twitter Blue Labs in the coming months, quoting the verge. It's a feature that

Twitter users have been requesting for so long that it's become a meme, but now the mythical edit button is actually becoming a reality. Twitter has announced that it is working to allow users to edit their tweets after posting them. The idea is that you'll be able to fix any typos or errors in a tweet without sacrificing any replies, retweets, or likes. It's already accrued. Twitter plans to begin testing the feature with Twitter blue subscribers in the coming months. The company said Tuesday. Jay Sullivan, the company's VP of Consumer Product, said that editing has been, quote, the most requested Twitter feature for many years in a thread on Tuesday. The company has been looking into how to build the feature, quote, in a safe manner since last year.

Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation, he said. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work, end quote. People have been asking for an edit button for so long that it's become something of an ongoing joke. Tweets, but editable, has become the standard response to discovering a typo in a popular tweet. But Twitter's former CEO, Jack Dorsey, was reluctant to add such a feature in the past.

During a talk in 2018, Dorsey expressed concern that an edit button could let users change a tweet's meaning after it gets widely shared. And in 2020, he said Twitter would, quote, probably never add the feature, end quote. A couple of updates now. First up, Sky Mavis, which runs Axi Infinity, has raised $150 million in fresh capital led by Binance with participation from Anamoka, A6,000. Z and others to reimburse users after that Ronan exploit, quoting the block. Combining its own funds, along with the latest raise, will help Sky Mavis deliver on its promise of paying back everyone who was affected by the exploit, the firm said.

Sky Mavis added it was in the, quote, process of implementing rigorous internal security measures. To bolster the game's security, Sky Mavis has replaced its Ronan side chain validator nodes that got compromised in the hack. Meanwhile, the Ronan bridge that lets users transfer assets into the game from Ethereum remains shut and will only open after multiple security audits have been completed. That may take several weeks, according to Sky Mavis, end quote. And sources are telling the information that one click checkout startup fast is shutting down entirely. Fast raised $120 million from backers including Stripe, Index Ventures, and Edition. And yet, as we've reported previously, was only able to generate around $600,000.

in revenue. Quote, after failing to generate more than a sliver of revenue and spending wildly on hiring hundreds of employees, the company was in desperate need of a new investor or buyer. The company had hired Morgan Stanley to run an auction and explore options. Meanwhile, it had just weeks worth of cash left to spend. Some fast engineers will be offered an opportunity to work at a firm whose software lets people buy goods and pay for them in installments, according to two other people familiar with the matter. Fast CEO and co-founder Dom Holland tweeted a statement, quote, after making great strides in our mission of making buying and selling frictionless for everyone, we have made the difficult decision to close our doors, end quote. There's doubling down on a bet,

and then there's doubling down on a bet with debt. Micro Strategy, apparently, is doing the latter, by taking out a loan against its Bitcoin holdings to buy a hundred and a half, million dollars more Bitcoin. A first for the company. Micro Strategy now owns 129,218 BTC worth around $6 billion. Quoting Bloomberg. Last week, the firm announced that it had taken out a $205 million three-year term loan from a unit of Silvergate Bank. The loan is backed by collateral roughly equal to four times its size or $820 million. We view Bitcoin as pristine collateral for the digital age and believe this transaction allows us to continue pursuing our Bitcoin acquisition strategy in a manner accretive to our shareholders. A spokesperson said in response to an email on Tuesday,

Micro Strategy's aggregate purchase price for its holdings is about $3.97 billion, and the average purchase price was around $30,700 per Bitcoin. The filing shows. The company started acquiring Bitcoin for its balance sheet in August 2020, with the CEO citing the Federal Reserve's relaxing of its inflation policy for helping to convince him to get out of cash. Micro Strategy has already sold two sets of convertible bonds and issued corporate debt to buy the Bitcoin, end quote. So I actually have some big news on the Metaverse. The closest thing we have to the Metaverse is actually going live right now.

Epic is launching Unreal Engine 5 with its Nanite graphic rendering tech, and yes, they say this will be a foundational way to get us to. to the Metaverse. Quoting from Time Magazine. The company promises that the new updates to Unreal Engine 5 will make it the bedrock for the next generation of Web 3 developments, from Metaverse experiences to movies and, of course, video games. Unreal Engine is the second most widely used video game engine, trailing only Unity, and is

known for its depth of features and visual quality. Unreal Engine 5 augments these strengths, giving its users hyper-intricate 3D detail, facial realism, and large-scale world building. Its release opens the door for Disney to create a live Mandalorian video game that looks nearly as real as the show does, for example, says Kim Librarie, the CTO at Epic Games. But top developers at Epic Games and outside of the organization argue that UE5's biggest impact is not on the biggest studios, but rather smaller independent developers who can now make high-quality games for much lower costs. Starting today, UE5 is free to download and use with Epic taking a 5% cut on products created with it only after they earn over $1 million in gross revenue. In December, Epic teased the release of UE5 with a demo featuring Keanu Reeves and Kerri-An Moss of the Matrix franchise. The video showed Reeves and Moss transforming back into their bodies from 23 years ago when the original Matrix came out and then being transported into a virtual city to fight off a slew of bad guys.

The graphics of the city are startlingly lifelike, the way the sun glints off the top of a car or a wet highway, for instance, or the depth and texture of intricately carved art deco reliefs and rusty chain link fences. These visual details are boosted by two new technologies in UE5, Lumen, which emulates natural light, and nanite, which allows for incredibly precise 3D detail. In the past, as you got closer to surfaces, the realism would break down. You could see that it's a flat surface with a lot of texture, as opposed to 3D geometry, says Nick Penwarden, vice president of engineering at Epic, now the artist can keep chiseling down and put in as much detail as they possibly can, end quote. There's a real-world link between the Matrix and UE5. Librarie, now Epic's CTO, served as a visual effects supervisor of the Matrix franchise, presiding over the bullet time technology in the original film.

A lot of us at Epic share the philosophy that the real world and the virtual world can look the same, he says. our whole tagline was, what is real? What is a movie? What is a game? End quote. To show off the depth of the new UE5, Epic is releasing the entire city from the Matrix demo so that developers can build games and experiences on top of it. The world will be populated by 20,000 metahumans driving cars and walking around city streets, with each block rendered in vivid detail down to each leaf and brick. Epic hopes this release shows the possibility of Unreal Engine's metaverse capabilities, in which high definition, large World can be easily built. Another new update World Partition breaks down enormous maps into parcels that are manageable for a regular gamer to play without an expensive rig. We're also releasing tutorials to show developers that if you're starting from scratch and want to make your own fantasy city, this is how we did it, Liberi says. With the templates for virtual worlds ready to go, it's up to companies and developers to fill them with things and events. Liberi anticipates that UE5 will also enable a robust environment of digital twins, in which

real-life physical objects and environments are replicated in the virtual world. Many industries have begun using UE5 to create prototypes, from car companies like Porsche to architecture firms to manufacturing plants. The fact that these designs are already in UE5 makes it nearly seamless for Porsche, say, to make a virtual 9-11 that drives inside the Matrix City. Hybrid live virtual events are also on the way. Liberi is excited, for instance, about the possibility of concerts that take place in real life with the performer wearing a motion capture suit that are then streamed to viewers at home in real time.

He also mentions live virtual game shows and gamified musical concerts. I think that the next evolution of social connectivity is going to happen through these live events, he says. But just because incredibly lifelike world events can be built in UE5 doesn't mean every game or metaverse environment will suddenly be intricately lifelike. Developers still need to account for the fact that many devices, including many smartphones, don't have the capability to, run highly sophisticated graphics. The more you push fidelity, the fewer devices you can support, says Jacob Navak, the CEO of GenVid Technologies, which develops tech tools for streaming. Navak is also a co-writer of Matthew Ball's influential essay on the Metaverse. Fortnite and Minecraft have proven that visual fidelity is not necessarily the thing that

gets people excited to spend billions of hours inside of virtual worlds, he said, end quote. I've actually downloaded that Matrix demo, and it's insane. Like, until you get up close to things, really, really, really up close, if you're just looking at the cityscape, say, it's like 98% the same as watching any sort of competently made modern movie. You might not be able to even tell the difference at all. It's like your video game is a movie that you can play. And based on this interview with CEO Tim Sweeney in Fast Company, that's the point. Quote, convergence is happening because you're able to use the same sort of high-fidelity graphics on a movie set and in a video game, Sweeney says.

And in architectural visualization and automotive design, you can actually build all of these 3D objects, both a virtual twin to every object in the world, or every object in your company or in your movie. It's all aimed at making game development much more accessible and making high-quality and photo-realistic gaming and creation more accessible to far more developers, Sweeney says. I'd like to make it possible for a 10-person team to build a photorealistic game that's incredibly high quality, he says. Whereas right now, if you you're building everything by hand, it might be a 100-person team, end quote. The centerpiece of UE5 is a graphics rendering technology epic calls Nanite, which intelligently

adds more or less detail to objects depending on their importance to the scene and their proximity to the point of view of the audience. Pedwarden told me the digital humans seen in the demo were created using another epic tool called MetaHuman Creator, which integrates with Unreal Engine 5. The tool lets designers create digital humans by selecting from a large library of sample humans, then going to work filling out the details, selecting from among endless variations of facial features, skin, complexions, hair, eyes, body type, and on and on. The demo's 1990s version of Neo and Trinity were created in MetaHumans, but the producers informed those characters' movements by analyzing video of Reeves and Moss's real-life expressions and body language. Building the various features

of the Metaverse will likely require lots of different tools, but tools like Unreal Engine that are already used to create immersive gaming environments will likely play key roles. Some of the new features in Unreal Engine 5 seem to suggest this. After seeing the Matrix Awakens demo Games Beats Dean Takahashi reflected, quote, it's a pretty good sign that Epic Games is serious about building its own Metaverse or enabling the customers of its game engine to build their version of the Metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player 1, end quote.

Such an open universe. Single developers wouldn't so much build a Metaverse as they would build for the Metaverse. A social network might build its own virtual island. A gaming company might hold scheduled gaming events at pre-announced places in the world. A retailer might build a large digital storefront with an interior for shopping. Sweeney believes such an open world would require in-world companies and other organizations to use a set of open standards in order to allow people's avatars to move between worlds. I think we can build this open version of the Metaverse over the next decade on the foundation of open systems, open standards, and companies being willing to work together on the basis of respecting their mutual customer relationships, he says. You can come in with an

account from one ecosystem and play in another, and everybody just respects those relationships. And there's a healthy competition for every facet of the ecosystem, end quote. Which you would say, if your company was building the platform that was set to be the key structural foundation of that entire ecosystem. But seriously, check out both pieces for some really insane pictures. Finally today, from the Metaverse, but it's already here, file, Eldon Ring players, calling themselves Will Smith, keep invading the game, Eldon Ring, slapping people, and then running away, quoting Tech Radar.

Several Eldon Ring players named Will Smith keep invading other people's games, slowly walking up to their opponents and slapping them across the face, before sauntering away. Afterwards, they disconnect from the game, leaving their opponent to nurse their wounds in a slight state of shock, much as Chris Rock did. Over on the Eldon Ring subreddit, users have reported running into similar Will Smith-looking slap-ready players. There's probably not a high chance you'll see them in your game, but there's at least a possibility. You could join in on the fun, too. Eldon-ring characters' names aren't unique, meaning any number of players

can take the Will Smith moniker. You can change your character's name and appearance later in the game upon reaching the roundtable hold if you're desperate to start slapping with your current character. and Will Smith isn't the only notable figure who's been recreated in the game. Another Eldon Ring player struck up a conversation build that all but turned them into Darth Sidious, complete with a glowing red blade, force lightning, and black robes, end quote. You know, I gave Eldon Ring a try, but it's so hard and it's so dark and like grimy and depressing. I'm not afraid of difficult games, but as a parent with limited gaming time in my schedule, kind of like my games to be escapist and not anxiety-inducing and depressing. When I mentioned this

on Twitter, lots of other people seem to agree with me, too. It was just too dark for them, not to their taste. So I've been mostly sticking to Forbidden West lately. Crunching the hell out of robot dinosaurs in a simulated Wild West can be more satisfying, I think. Also, if you have kids and have a system that can actually download that Matrix demo we talked about, the one with the Unreal engine. I recommend doing so because basically your kids can drive around this Grand Theft Auto-style huge, gorgeous open-world city, crash their car, run over things, but not with all of the hookers and guns and stuff. It's like Grand Theft Auto for Kindergarteners. It's currently Max's favorite game. Talk to you tomorrow.