Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/23 – The Playstation Portal

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, August 23rd, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Sony announces the PlayStation Portal handheld device. IBM announces an AI model to translate code from one type of code to another. Open AI lets anyone fine tune. Is LinkedIn the big winner in social media right now? And what happens when your 3D printer comes alive like a zombie in the middle of the night? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Sony this morning unveiled the expected PlayStation Portal. an 8-inch handheld console that will stream PS5 games over Wi-Fi in 1080P at 60 frames per second, available later this year for $200.

Starting point is 00:01:17 Quoting the Verge. The PlayStation Portal features prominent controllers on each side that look very much like Sony's PS5 Dual Sense controllers. They support adaptive triggers and haptic feedback, so PS5 games will feel similar to using a dedicated dual-sense controller. The PlayStation Portal will also be capable of playing media, as the home screen has a dedicated section for it, as it's mirroring your PS5. You won't be able to run anything locally, though, so if you don't have Wi-Fi, then you're out of luck. Strangely, the $199.99.00.000 handheld won't work with Sony's upcoming cloud streaming for PS5 games. Games that must be streamed on PS5 using a PS Plus Premium membership are not compatible,

Starting point is 00:01:59 says Sony. So the PlayStation Portal is really a way to stream PS5 games you already have installed on your own PS5 onto a handheld for remote play. You'll need an internet connection capable of at least 5 mbPS, and Sony is recommending 15 mbPS for the best experience. IGN got to test the PlayStation portal early, and in a video hands-on tech editor, Beaumor said he couldn't notice any latency using the handheld. That will be a key part of the experience, as streaming games over Wi-Fi networks still isn't a perfect experience for many, end quote. Actually, let's quote from that hands-on, quote. Its design essentially takes a standard dual sense controller, chops it in half, and slaps those two controller grips on the side of an 8-inch 1080p LCD display. It's definitely

Starting point is 00:02:46 a little weird when you're used to the more singular-looking design of current handhelds like the Nintendo Switch and Valve's Steam Deck, but it's also lighter than either of those while still giving you both a large screen and full-size controls. The Dual Sense grips feel exactly like a regular dual sense controller and all of their best features are available here. Trying it out with Astro's Playroom, I could feel the haptics showcase just as well as when I experienced it on a dual sense. And the portal's adaptive triggers simulate the pool of alloy's bow in Horizon Forbidden West in exactly the same way. Even the dual sense's touchpad is available, though instead of the single center panel, two touch areas pop up in the bottom

Starting point is 00:03:24 left and right of the display when you touch it. The only dual sense feature missing technically is the light bar, but that's for giving. as an omission considering how non-essential it is to most games. Beyond all the regular dual-sense inputs, there's a USBC port for charging, a 3.5 millimeter jack for wired headphones, and a small pair of speaker grills if you don't want to use headphones. Connectivity-wise, it supports Wi-Fi and PlayStation Link. More on that in a minute, but no Bluetooth. On the visual quality front, the PlayStation Portal delivers the 8-inch 60-hertz LCD display succeeds at translating PS5 quality visuals into a handheld format. Colors looked bright and vibrant, although Sony hasn't given

Starting point is 00:04:04 me any brightness, color gamut, or HDR specs beyond that it's an LCD panel. And the 1080P resolution offers a nice pixel density for the screen size. Does it look as good as playing on a 65-inch OLED TV? Of course not. But as far as handheld go, the 8-inch screen feels expansive, end quote. IBM has debuted Watson X code assistant for IBM Z, which uses a code generating AI model to translate Cobol code into Java, set for general availability in Q4 of 2023, quoting TechCrunch. Cobol, or common business-oriented language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use dating back to around 1959. It's had surprising staying power. According to a 2022 survey, there's over 800 billion lines of cobal in use on production systems up from an

Starting point is 00:04:55 estimated 220 billion in 2017. But Cobol has a reputation for being a tough to navigate inefficient language. Why not migrate to a newer one? For large organizations, it tends to be a complex and costly proposition given the small number of cobal experts in the world. When the Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced its core cobal platform in 2012, it took five years and cost over $700 million. Looking to present a new solution to the problem of modernizing cobal apps, IBM today unveiled code assistant for IBMZ, which uses a code generating AI model to translate Cobol Code into Java. Set to become generally available in Q4, 20203. Code Assistant for IBM Z will enter preview during IBM's Tech Exchange conference in Las Vegas early this September. Code Assistant for

Starting point is 00:05:40 IBMZ is designed to assist businesses in refactoring their mainframe apps, ideally while preserving performance and security, according to IBM Research Chief Scientist Ruchir-Purie, running locally in an on-premises configuration or in the cloud as a managed service code assistant is powered by a code generating model, Codenet, that can understand not only Coball and Java, but around 80 different programming languages. IBM built a new state-of-the-art generative AI code model to transform legacy cobal programs to enterprise Java with a high degree of naturalness in the generated code. Puri told TechCrunch in an email interview. In addition to code transformation, code assistance supports the complete application modernization lifecycle and

Starting point is 00:06:19 helps developers understand, refactor, transform, and validate the translated code in a modern architecture, end quote. Puri says that Codnet, which was trained with 1.5 trillion tokens and has 20 billion parameters, was engineered with a large context window, 32,000 tokens to capture the broader context for more efficient cobal to Java transformation. Parameters are the parts of a model learned from historical training data and essentially define the skill of the model on a problem, such as generating text, while tokens represent the raw text. As for context windows, They refer to the text the model considers before generating additional text, end quote. OpenAI has added fine-tuning to GPT3.5 turbo, letting developers customize models with their own data to make them perform better for their use cases for a fee.

Starting point is 00:07:11 Quoting TechCrunch, OpenAI claims that fine-tuned versions of GPT3.5 can match or even outperform the base capabilities of GPT4, the company's flagship model, on certain narrow tasks. With fine-tuning, companies using GPT3.5 Turbo through OpenAI's API can make the model better follow instructions, such as having it always respond in a given language, or they can improve the model's ability to consistently format responses, e.g. for completing snippets of code, as well as hone the feel of the model's output like its tone so that it better fits a brand or voice. In addition, fine-tuning enables OpenAI customers to shorten their text prompts to speed up API calls and cut costs. Early testers, have reduced prompt size by up to 90% by fine-tuning instructions into the model itself. OpenAI claims in the blog post, fine-tuning currently requires prepping data, uploading the necessary files and creating a fine-tuning job through OpenAI's API. All fine-tuning data must pass through a moderation API and a GBT-4-powered moderation system to see if it's in conflict with OpenAI's safety standard, says the company. But OpenAI plans to launch a fine-tuning UI in the future with a dashboard for checking the status of ongoing

Starting point is 00:08:23 fide tuning workloads, end quote. Who might be the biggest winner of the recent chaos and turmoil times in the social media space? What this article from Bloomberg proposes is that what if it's LinkedIn, which has seen a jump in sharing as LinkedIn is leveraging its position as a place where old school self-promotion still works. Quote, LinkedIn, which Microsoft bought for 26.2.2.2.2.2.1.1.2.2.2.2.2.2. $2 billion in 2016 doesn't report its number of daily or monthly average users, a common metric for usage on social media sites, but the company says that in the spring of this year, users shared 41% more content on the network than they did in the same time period of 2021.

Starting point is 00:09:12 That kind of growth is unusual for a 20-year-old operation and speaks to the turbulence at other major social media services. Other social media platforms were changing their algorithms or operating rules, says Selina Rezvani, influencer with 100,000 LinkedIn subscribers who offers tips on how to be more confident. X, Elon Musk's new name for Twitter is becoming a site that rewards those who either post memes or pay the billionaire $8 a month. Meta's, Instagram and Facebook, worried that TikTok is eating their lunch, have become all about reels, short-form videos from people users aren't friends with, touting kitchen renovations and fitness hacks. For social media users looking to engage

Starting point is 00:09:50 in some old-fashioned self-promotional posting, LinkedIn is the only place left. On Instagram or TikTok, there's more frustration because what worked more than a year ago or even six months ago that got success and got tons of eyeballs doesn't today, says Rezvani. There's more of a steadiness with LinkedIn. The shift is prompting cries of, do I have to? Lost social media users are now congregating in the weirdest places, Kate Lindsay and internet culture commentator wrote in her newsletter embedded. When people started abandoning X, she wrote, they couldn't agree on whether to huddle around blue sky, mastodon threads, or any of the numerous apps aiming to reinvent social media, dooming them to socialize in the same place where they

Starting point is 00:10:28 endorse someone for leadership. If you see me posting this on LinkedIn, mind your business, Lindsay added. The ties to work do make LinkedIn more of a mainstay. Students and new grads have an incentive to try to use the site to get a job, even as they may have little reason to use X, which they associate with anger and political chaos. Those who are still using X, note how strange it is to see vacation pictures and emotional stories on LinkedIn, captioned with a half-hearted mention of something work-related, a supportive employer, a work-from-anywhere policy in case the boss sees it. LinkedIn's product team is fueling the new vibe. In recent years, it's added tools for newslettering, podcasting, and creating video and audio for its ambitious

Starting point is 00:11:09 careerists, building on the influencer program that started in 2011 by training corporate leaders to post. Unlike Instagram and Facebook, LinkedIn doesn't dramatically tweak its algorithm when new products go live. We're totally agnostic about what media form people share. says Dan Roth, the site's editor-in-chief. And while Meta and X distanced themselves from the news industry downplaying article links, LinkedIn is beefing up its curation efforts and partnerships with content creators and publishers. The company says users like seeing knowledge-based content, and as a result are more satisfied. In June, the site saw an 80% reduction from a year earlier in the number of people who said they wished they were seeing different posts, end quote.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Interesting raises AI edition. Sources are telling the information that hugging raised more than $200 million at a greater than $4 billion valuation, led by Salesforce ventures more than doubling its private valuation. Quote, Salesforce is paying a high price for a piece of Hugging Face, which runs a service that helps companies store and use AI software, similar to the way GitHub lets developer store software code. The new funding valued the startup at more than 100 times its annualized revenue, a measure of how much revenue the company would generate over the next 12 months at its current rate, one of the people said.

Starting point is 00:12:27 HuggingFace, for its part, is on pace to generate more than $30 million in revenue annually, one of the people said, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft IBM, and others, pay HuggingFace for steering its users to their respective cloud computing services. Founded in 2016, HuggingFace also charges developers for an enterprise version of its repository for machine learning models. The startup, which has more than 200 employees, says more than 10,000 companies use its free or paid repositories. It hosts at least several hundred thousand. and AI models, including popular open-source large-language models, such as meta-platforms Lama 2. Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, and Co2 management last valued the company at around $2 billion in a financing round last year.

Starting point is 00:13:09 The funding by Salesforce suggests it may view Hugging Face as a potential future acquisition. While Salesforce is best known for software used by sales professionals and for the Slack chat app, it also sells an array of services for software developers, end quote. And this is not a raise exactly, but it is valuation deep. detail. The information is also reporting that Tiger Global is nearing a deal to sell its 2.1% stake in AI startup cohere for around $63 million at a $3 billion valuation, which would be up 40% from, well, June. Tiger will still retain around a 5% stake even if they make this sale. Tiger, facing a liquidity crunch as many of its public stock holdings have been pummeled,

Starting point is 00:13:52 is in the process of selling shares in many of its portfolio companies, according to people familiar with the matter. The firm has also tried to sell stakes in the small venture capital funds it backed during the peak of the bull market. The information previously reported, the Cohere sale would mark a small win for Tiger during an otherwise turbulent period for the firm. Cohere develops proprietary artificial intelligence models that can automate business tasks like generating emails, summarizing documents, or searching for information. It competes with startups like Anthropic and Open AI, as well as larger cloud providers in selling businesses access to its technology. Earlier this year, Coheer raised $270 million.

Starting point is 00:14:26 from investors including Oracle, Nvidia, and Salesforce ventures at a valuation of $2.2.2 billion. The company's founding team includes former Google researchers, including CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored an influential paper that paved the way for the latest wave of image and text-generating AI technologies, end quote. And finally, today, this would be disturbing, quoting Ars Technica. Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of your 3D printer printing away. You know you didn't request a print. In fact, you're sure of it because your previous project is still on the

Starting point is 00:15:01 the printer. It sounds like an eerie technology haunting, or as if the machines have finally become self-aware. Thankfully, the problem stands from something less creepy, but perhaps just as scary. A cloud outage. As reported by the Verge on August 15th, numerous owners of bamboo lab 3D printers reported that their device started printing without their consent. It didn't matter if said printing resulted in bent or broken nozzles or other components or if it involved printing a project on top of another. It didn't matter if it was at an ungodly time, like four in the morning. The printers, which cost anywhere from $599 to $1,500, were printing. The company announced a cloud printing failure on its system status page and wrote on August 16th, saying it would look into the

Starting point is 00:15:41 problem. Also contributing to the problem, apparently was a large number of API access requests performed simultaneously preventing a timely response. The confusion concerning chaos created by a 3D printer activating in the middle of the night is a reminder of the risk inherent in consumer tech products that rely on the cloud. The concerns are especially notable when considering that these 3D printers are remotely controllable devices with heating elements. Further, 3D printers owners often leave their printers either to print without overseeing the project or powered while unattended. Bamboo was quick to apologize to owners and some users online reported that the company told them it would send replacement parts promptly, end quote. Not exactly the same thing,

Starting point is 00:16:30 but I woke up this morning to my Mac studio being unable to boot up. It took over an hour to figure out what was going on. But it turns out the issue was with my Western Digital External Hard Drive that I have hooked up for time machine backups. I'm not lying, y'all, when I say I'm a backup fanatic, as I've told you, I've paid for crash plan for years. I pay for ICloud to back up my desktop and various files in the cloud. So my computer is the same, whether it's laptop or desktop. And I have a local NAS system for media, and I do local time machine backups. Anyway, The computer apparently can't connect to the time machine drive, maybe because it's encrypted or something. I don't know. Maybe the drive is just dead. But it reminds me of the second oldest maxim in computer troubleshooting.

Starting point is 00:17:17 The first maxim, as you all know, is just unplug it. Turn it off and then turn it on again. But the second maxim is unplug all peripherals. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/23 – The Playstation Portal

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