Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/22 – New (Google) News

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, June 22nd, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. News is new again after Google does a sizable redesign.

Starting point is 00:00:44 Co-Pilot AI is available on GitHub, but is it worth paying for? Amazon unveiled some new warehouse robots, but is this partially because they fear running out of workers? The new Twitter notes feature and why it's increasingly likely that you'll buy your next car online, even if you don't buy it from Tesla. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. New news. News is new. Google has redesigned news, elevating local news and fact checks, and relaunching the service in Spain after eight years, following Spain adopting EU copyright rules, which caused Google to pool news from that market. By the way, we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of Google News, which was famously launched after the attacks of 9-11, making it one of Google's first successful side products, even older than Gmail, quoting 9-5. Google. With shared elements from the Android and iOS apps, Google News now features a row of tabs at the

Starting point is 00:01:41 top of the screen underneath the search field. Replacing the navigation drawer at the left, there's home for you and following. That matches the mobile client, while sections for your country, world, local, business, technology, entertainment, sports, science, and health come after. The Google News desktop redesign starts with a your briefing header that notes the day, date, and current temperature, which can be expanded to get a four-day forecast. Top Stories is the first card, while local news and picks for you are right next to it. Google is making use of pastel colors to differentiate the section titles. The Your Topic section is next with a prominent button to edit the cards.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Other highlights of this Google News desktop redesign include an expanded fact-check section to, quote, see the original claim made along with the fact-checked assessment from independent organizations, end quote. for you and beyond the front page, round out the homepage. This revamp is live today by visiting news.gookle.com and tapping Try it out at the very top. For the moment, you're able to switch back to the old UI by going into settings, which also houses control for the dark theme and temperature unit, end quote. GitHub has officially launched co-pilot AI, which suggests lines of code to developers. It's out of preview for $10 a month or $100 a year, and GitHub says more than 1.2 million people have tried copilot AI in preview in the last 12 months, quoting the verge. GitHub originally teamed up with

Starting point is 00:03:17 Open AI last year to launch a preview of copilot, and it's generally available to all developers today. Priced at $10 per month or $100 a year, GitHub co-pilot is capable of suggesting the next line of code as developers type in an integrated development environment or IDE like Visual studio code, NeoVim, and JetBrains IDEs. CoPilot can suggest complete methods and complex algorithms alongside boilerplate code and assistance with unit testing. More than 1.2 million developers signed up to use the GitHub copilot preview over the past 12 months, and it will remain a free tool for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects. In files where it's enabled, GitHub says nearly 40% of code is now being written by co-pilot. Microsoft's $1 billion

Starting point is 00:04:04 investment into OpenAI, the research firm, now led by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, led to the creation of GitHub Copilot. It's built on OpenAI Codex, a descendant of OpenAI's flagship GPT3 language-generating algorithm. GitHub Copilot has been controversial, though. Just days after its preview launch, there were questions over the legality of co-pilot being trained on publicly available code posted to GitHub. Copyright issues aside, one study also found that around 40% of co-pilot's output contained security vulnerabilities, end quote. I see a lot of people complaining online about the price here. And look, if it doesn't help you write better code faster than I agree, it's really not worth it. But as Kurt Schrader tweeted, quote, honestly, very strange to me

Starting point is 00:04:50 to see people debating whether or not the $10 a month cost of this will be a blocker. At that price, it needs to save an average developer around nine minutes of time a month at a 150k a year salary to break even, end quote. Twitter is testing Twitter notes with select users, which is a new feature designed for creating long-form content with rich text formatting and uploaded media that can be tweeted upon publishing, quoting TechCrunch. In what could be one of Twitter's more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters, the company is preparing to launch a new feature that would

Starting point is 00:05:33 support the direct publishing of long-form content on its platform. If broadly adopted, Twitter notes could potentially change how some people use the social media platform to share their more in-depth thoughts and ideas. Today, it's common for users to create numbered Twitter threads to connect a series of tweets together as a means of storytelling or when explaining any subject that stretches beyond Twitter's supported character count. As a result of this user activity, Twitter officially embraced threads back in 2017 with the launch of a new Twitter composer screen that made multi-tweet posts or tweet storms, as they're known, easier to create and publish. At the time, there were hundreds of thousands of threads posted daily the company had said.

Starting point is 00:06:12 That number has likely grown since. But while Twitter threads encourages engagement as users click to expand the related tweets and replies, they can also be a bit unwieldy to peruse, particularly for longer content. Beyond threads, users have also worked around Twitter's character count restrictions by writing long-form content in the Notes app on their smartphone, then posting a screenshot of their This works to quickly get a message out to a large audience, but it doesn't benefit Twitter, as the text and the screenshot isn't searchable and hashtags aren't clickable the way text posted natively to the platform would be.

Starting point is 00:06:44 Twitter notes could potentially offer an alternative to both problems by allowing users to instead write long-form articles directly on Twitter itself. This lets users share their thoughts, as before, while still being able to tap into the potential for viral distribution that comes with posting to the platform. Like tweets, the notes would have their own link, could be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DMs, liked, and bookmarked. The feature has been spotted in testing earlier this year by app researchers, including Jane Mention Wong, and others.

Starting point is 00:07:12 Initially, notes was being called Twitter article researchers found. In images Wong posted in May, the feature offered formatting tools in a bar at the top of the screen, similar to those you'd find in blogging software, like options to bold text, add italics, or strike-through, insert ordered lists, add links, change the style, insert media, and embedded items, track word count, and more. Users could also add either one GIF, one video, or up to four photos to their article, as well as include embedded tweets either via URLs or their own bookmarks the screenshots showed. Wong noted there was also a focus mode that would expand the article to a full-screen view

Starting point is 00:07:48 and hide Twitter's sidebars. She said the feature looked fairly polished, which suggested it could be nearing launch. In a related series of images shared by app researcher Nima Augee this April, the feature was shown to support saving articles as drafts and an interface for accessing both drafts and published content. When publishing a Twitter notes, Algae found that users could check or uncheck boxes to automatically tweet the article to their feed, their Twitter circle, or their communities, as well as copy the article URL for sharing elsewhere, like on another website or in an email, for instance. In the current version, now called notes, the feature will be

Starting point is 00:08:24 accessible from users' profiles directly to the right of the tweets and replies link and before media, app researchers said, end quote. Amazon has unveiled new robotic tech for its warehouses, including Proteus, its first fully autonomous mobile robot meant to safely move large carts around workers, quoting the verge. Amazon says Proteus robots have, quote, advanced safety, perception, and navigation technology, and a strangely silent video shows the robot shining a green light in front of themselves as they move around. When a human steps into the beam, the robot stops moving, then resumes after the person moves away. The company has also announced several other robotic systems. One called Cardinal is a robotic arm that can lift and move packages weighing up to 50 pounds,

Starting point is 00:09:16 which Amazon hopes to deploy in warehouses next year. The company says that its computer vision systems let it pick out and lift individual packages, even if they're in a pile. Amazon's post also shows off tech that could let employees ditch the hands. hand scanners they use to log barcodes. Instead, workers stand in front of a camera system that recognizes the packages without pausing to scan the label. There isn't a lot of detail on how it works other than some combination of machine learning and a 120 frames per second camera system, but the effect is similar to what we've seen from the companies just walk out tech that lets it build cashierless stores. We've reached out to Amazon to ask exactly what the system is looking at,

Starting point is 00:09:55 and we'll let you know if we hear back, end quote. I think you'll see why I'm pairing this segment with that last one, Vox, has seen a leaked Amazon memo that suggests the company fears it is running out of people to hire. Quote, Amazon is facing a looming crisis. It could run out of people to hire in its U.S. warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021, that recode reviewed. If that happens, the online retailers' service quality and growth plans could be at risk and its e-commerce dominance along with it. Rising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six levers that Amazon could pool to delay this labor crisis by a few years, but only a series of sweeping changes to how the company does business

Starting point is 00:10:45 and manages its employees will significantly alter the timeline, Amazon staff predicted. Quote, if we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the U.S. network by 2024, the research which hasn't been previously reported says. The report warned that Amazon's labor crisis was especially imminent in a few locales, with internal models showing that the company was expected to exhaust its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area by the end of 2021 and in the inland empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles by the end of 2022. Amazon's internal report calculated the available pool of workers based on characteristics like

Starting point is 00:11:24 income levels and a household's proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities. The pool does not include the entire U.S. adult population. Amazon spokesperson Rina Loonak didn't refute the contents of the internal report recode obtained, but declined to comment on it. The leaked internal findings also serve as a cautionary tale for other employers who seek to emulate the Amazon way of management, which emphasizes worker productivity over just about everything else, and churns through the equivalent of its entire frontline workforce year after year. In the Inland Empire region of California, for example, Amazon may cycle through every worker who'd be interested in implying for a warehouse job by the end of 2020.

Starting point is 00:12:00 22, the internal report warned. One of the reasons is that Amazon is increasingly finding itself in a bidding war for workers with rivals in the area, which is a key logistics region because it is within a two-hour drive of 20 million potential customers and two of the largest container ports in the U.S. We are hearing a lot of Amazon workers say, I can just go across the street to Target or Walmart, said Sherrier Kosoji, co-executive director of an inland empire nonprofit called the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. Kosoji added that Walmart is offering some workers with past warehouse experience as much as $25 an hour. And Amazon executive told Reuters in late 2021 that the company was bumping the average starting wage for new hires in the U.S. to more than $18 an hour, attributing the decision to intense competition among employers.

Starting point is 00:12:47 He also said Amazon had increased hiring bonuses to as much as $3,000 in some geographies. To be sure, part of Amazon's turnover issue relates to how some employees view working in a warehouse as a brief pit stop. on the way to better things. But some workers have long complained of stresses unique to Amazon's workplace, from the pace and repetition of the labor to the unrelenting computerized surveillance of workers every move to comparatively high injury rates. In a company survey of 31,000 workers who left Amazon that was referenced in the report, some former Amazon workers say it's worse to work at Amazon than some big-name competitors like FedEx or Walmart. In that survey, those who joined another employer soon after leaving the tech giant, quote, rated Amazon's significantly worse on work

Starting point is 00:13:33 fitting skills or interests, demands of the work, shift length, and shift schedule, end quote. Yeah, look, if you're doing 100% turnover, 100% attrition rate in your workforce every single year, that's challenging for anybody, but especially challenging when you're operating at Amazon's scale. Someone on Twitter this weekend was tweeting about how much thus far Andy Jassie. 's job as Amazon CEO has been about undoing mistakes made by Jeff Bezos in recent years, pulling back from physical retail experiments, pulling back some even from the drone delivery experiments, but especially pulling back from the warehouse and hiring expansion of recent years. Turns out that COVID times had faked even Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

Starting point is 00:14:19 So one wonders if longer term labor retention will be a bigger priority than Bezos ever made it, which probably means making Amazon not just a good place to work, but an enjoyable and humane place to work. Finally, today you might buy your next car online. Why? Well, like almost everything else, seems like the legacy automakers want to copy Tesla. After Tesla shifted entirely to online car sales in 2019, other U.S. automakers are looking to follow suit, seeking lower costs and wider distribution. Quoting the New York Times. Tesla's approach, which has been copied by other young electric carmakers like Rivian and Lucid Motors, could eventually have major ramifications for the auto industry.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Most carmakers and auto dealers are earning rich profits right now, because the shortage of new cars has pushed up prices for both new and used cars. Still, car companies and dealers may have to eventually adopt some of the changes Tesla has introduced to win over buyers who have grown used to buying cars online. People who have traded in conventional cars for electric vehicles made by Tesla and newer companies said they were pleased with the experience and would consider buying future cars in the same way. Easiest big purchase of my life. Crazy easy. Rachel Ryan, who lives near Los Angeles, said about her 2021 purchase of a Tesla Model Y. I bought it while my husband was at work, she added. When he came home,

Starting point is 00:15:42 I told him he wouldn't be driving my minivan anymore, end quote. Buying online is a must for people looking to purchase an electric car made by Tesla Rivian or Lucid, whose customers can only buy online and directly from the manufacturer. But online car shopping appeals to a large proportion of all car buyers, even those buying combustion engine cars through dealerships, said Michelle Krebs, an executive analyst for Cox Automotive. Our data shows consumers want to do more of the process online, but most don't want to eliminate the dealer visit altogether, Ms. Krebs said. They just wanted the dealer experience to be something else, focused on the product, the features of the product, and a test drive, end quote. She said some dealerships had started digitizing some or all of the

Starting point is 00:16:24 buying process in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when showrooms shut down like other retail businesses in Europe. Some carmakers have gone even further. Daimler, Volkswagen, and Volvo are selling cars directly to consumers or have announced plans to do so. U.S. automakers have also signaled they would like to make big changes. The chief executive of Ford, Jim Farley, said at an investor conference this month that the company's distribution and advertising costs per car were about $2,000 higher than Tesla's. Mr. Farley said Ford wanted to sell electric cars only online at non-negotiable prices without keeping a large inventory of cars at dealerships. He added that dealerships would remain important, but would have to

Starting point is 00:17:03 become more, quote, specialized. He likened what is happening in the auto industry to the retail business, where the rise of Amazon forced established retailers to sell more on the internet and use physical stores in new ways. It's kind of like what happened between Amazon and Target, Mr. Farley said. Target could have gone away, but they didn't. They bolted on an e-commerce platform, and then they use their physical store to add groceries and make returns much easier than Amazon, end quote. Establish automakers are unlikely to do away with dealerships entirely for another reason. State laws often require them to sell cars through franchise dealers and can make it hard or impossible for automakers to deal directly with customers, end quote.

Starting point is 00:17:50 We're going to do our Twitter space early in the day again tomorrow at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific. We're still firming up topics. More on that tomorrow. And the last link in today's show notes is to a funding raise announcement. Stackhawk is an investment that the Ride Home Fund made this quarter. We've joined their Series B funding, which is in the announcement. And while they're not ready to come on the show yet,

Starting point is 00:18:17 I figured I'd spread the word about Stackhawk anyway. I've wanted to invest in a security company for a while now. And I fell in love with how Stackhawk is tackling security from a developer-first perspective. stackhawk is about finding security issues before code has even been shipped to production they bake security testing in from the very beginning of product development which can have a massive impact on the quality of the code being shipped into as i said an actual product so congratulations stackhawk on your series b round ride home fund is thrilled to be a part of the round of course hashtag proud investor talk to you tomorrow

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/22 – New (Google) News

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