Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/25 – JK, JK, JK! OnlyFans Reverses Course On Porn Ban

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

OnlyFans says it loves porn. Doesn’t want to ban porn from its platform after all. Says it wants to be an inclusive platform for all creators. Even the naked ones. The new Fitbit Charge 5. New Messenger features on the occasion of its 10th birthday. Is T-Mobile winning the 5G war? And I guess bigger really is better for neural networks. Sponsors: OurCrowd.com/ride KiwiCo.com promocode Ride for 50% off your first month Links: OnlyFans no longer plans to ban porn, saying in abrupt U-turn that it wants to be a 'home for all creators' (Insider) FITBIT’S NEW CHARGE 5 HAS A ROUNDED DESIGN AND A COLOR SCREEN (The Verge) Messenger celebrates its 10th anniversary with new features and a plan to become the ‘connective tissue’ for real-time experiences (TechCrunch) Microsoft to launch cloud gaming service on Xbox consoles (CNBC) Fastest Mobile Networks 2021 (PCMag) A New Chip Cluster Will Make Massive AI Models Possible (Wired) 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, August 25th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Only fans says it loves porn.

Doesn't want to ban porn from its platform after all. It says it wants to be an inclusive platform for all creators, even the naked ones. The new Fitbit Charge 5 arrives, new messenger features arrive on the occasion of that app's 10th birthday, is T-Mobile winning the 5G war. And I guess bigger really is better when it comes to neural networks. here's what you missed today in the world of tech. In an abrupt reversal, OnlyFans has suspended its October 1st policy change, which would have banned porn on the platform after securing what it calls assurances and aims to provide a home for all creators, its words. So, JK, I guess, or as the Dr. Parake

Patel Twitter account snarked, OnlyFans has decided not to ban porn after realizing. the company would be bankrupt without it, end quote. Or as Austin Reef tweeted, this could have been the marketing stunt of the year, quoting Business Insider. Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard. OnlyFans said in a statement Wednesday, we have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1st policy change. OnlyFans stands for inclusion, and we will continue to provide a home for all creators, it added. The company had planned to ban the content starting October 1st. And only fans' representatives said the change was planned to, quote, comply with the requests of our banking partners and payment providers, end quote.

Sex workers had told Business Insider that they were, quote, angry and confused by the change. They're giving us less than two months notice to find a new platform to move all our fans to in an attempt to just survive and keep paying rent, a sex worker named Nat Cole told insider. CEO Tim Stokely had told the Financial Times that the bank, B.N. Mellon, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Metro Bank created what he called unfair obstacles to pay creators because of OnlyFans' association with sex work. Stokely said in an interview Tuesday that J.P. Morgan Chase was, quote, particularly aggressive in closing accounts of sex workers, or, quote, any business that supports sex workers, end quote.

OnlyFans, which was said to have had trouble wooing investors because of the platforms association with sex work, stopped fundraising after an announced plans to ban porn. sources close to the company told Insider, Stokely, however, denied the company's decision to ban porn stemmed from trouble-finding investors. He told the financial times that sexually explicit conduct would be allowed on only fans if banks changed their practices. Quote, this decision was made to safeguard their funds and subscriptions from increasingly unfair actions by banks and media companies, Stokely said. We obviously do not want to lose our most loyal creators, end quote. There are so many stories recently where I

feel like what's really going on behind the scenes is probably way more interesting than what we're being publicly told. Like I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. And this is one of those stories. Fitbit has announced the Charge 5, a fitness tracker with a rounded design, a larger and brighter color Amelad display, GPS, and more, arriving in the fall for $179.95, quoting Jay Peters in the verge. The Charge 5's screen is 10% larger than the charge 4's and can get up to 450 knits bright up from the charge 4's 200 nits. That all means that the screen should be easier to see when you're outside. And you can also opt to have the display on at all times, which means you won't have to wait

for the screen to light up just to see the time. Fans of the previous monochrome screen might bulk at the change, and I say that as someone who really likes the monochrome on the charge 4. It's nice not having yet another colorful screen to distract me, but I could see how a color screen could make it easier to differentiate between stats and information, which could make the charge five that much more glanceable. And while the always on display could also be quite useful, it comes with a significant cost of battery. While Fitbit advertises up to seven-day battery life with the charge five, that's with the always-on display turned off. Turning it on, cuts that down to just two, much closer to what you might be used to with a more traditional smartwatch than the charge five resembles. I'm a big fan of the charge five's more rounded look. Gone are many of the hard angles, edges, and geometric shapes of the previous charge five trackers. Everything on the charge five looks

smoother than it did before. Though I do wish the charge five's band kept the crisscross lines that stand out on the band for the charge two, three, and four. The charge five is 10% thinner than the charge four, meaning it shouldn't jut out quite as much from your wrist. And I really like the way the sensors on the back of the charge five look to blend in more seamlessly than they do on the charge four, end quote. Facebook today added features to Messenger on the occasion of Messenger's 10-year anniversary. The changes include word effects, contact sharing, and birthday gifting via Facebook pay, quoting TechCrunch. Although earlier in Facebook history, the Messenger app had operated as a standalone experience,

Facebook tells us that it's now starting to see Messenger less as a separate entity, more of an underlying technology that can help to power many of the new experiences Facebook is now developing. We've been focused more on real-time experiences, watch together, rooms, live audio rooms, and we've started to think of Messenger as a connective tissue regardless of the surface, a Facebook spokesperson told us. This is a test, but the bigger vision is for us to unlock content and communities that may not be accessible in Messenger and that the Facebook app is going to become more about shared real-time experiences, they added.

As for today's crop of new features, including polls, word effects, contact sharing, and others, the goal is to celebrate Messenger's ability to keep people in touch with their family and friends. To play the new poll games, users can tap polls in their group chat and select the most likely to tab. Then they can choose from questions like, most likely to miss their flight, or most likely to give gifts on their own birthday, select names of chat participants to be included as potential answers and send the poll. Contact sharing will make it easier to share others' Facebook contacts through Messenger. While birthday gifting lets users send birthday-themed payments on Messenger via Facebook pay.

There will also be other birthday expression tools, including a birthday song Sound Moji. Messenger is 10, sticker pack, and a new balloon background, a message effect and AR effect to celebrate Messenger's double-digit milestone. Meanwhile, word effects let users manually input a phrase, and any time they send a message with that phrase in accompanying emoji will float across the screen. In an example, Messenger showed the phrase, happy birthday, accompanied with a word effect of confetti emojis flooding the screen. That one's pretty tame, but this could be a remarkable application of the poop emoji. The company only shared a sneak peek of this feature, and it's not rolling out immediately. In total, Facebook is announcing a total of 10 features, most of which will begin rolling out today, end quote. Microsoft said yesterday that Xbox Cloud Gaming will expand beyond PC and mobile to its Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One consoles this holiday season.

quoting CNBC. Though Microsoft is still investing heavily in Xbox hardware, it's also putting a great deal of focus into Xbox GamePass, a subscription service that gives players access to a library of over 100 titles for about $15 a month. Cloud Gaming, where games are hosted on remote servers and stream to users over the Internet, is a big part of Microsoft strategy.

The aim is to attract gamers to the Microsoft ecosystem through a range of different devices. Currently, Xbox Cloud Gaming is only, available on mobile devices and PCs, but now Microsoft plans to bring it to consoles. It also has a plan to launch cloud gaming on TVs through partnerships with manufacturers and its own dedicated streaming dongles. Microsoft unveiled the release window for cloud gaming on consoles at the GamesCon video game trade fair. The event normally takes place in Cologne, Germany, but has gone online only this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Japanese rival Sony is also betting on services

through its PlayStation Plus subscription offering, which gives gamers access to online multiplayer and select free games every month. But the company is mainly touting its blockbuster exclusive games in a bid to lure consumers. Hit franchises like The Last of Us, and God of War, for example, can only be found on PlayStation platforms, end quote.

Testing of carriers across the U.S. has revealed T-Mobile, holding a commanding lead in 5G coverage, according to PCMag, winning speed tests in 24 cities and rural regions compared to AT&T winning eight cities and Verizon winning two, quoting PCMag. T-Mobile's winning secret isn't much of a secret. It's mid-band spectrum, which T-Mobile calls ultra-capacity 5G. Now covering more than 165 million people in cities large and small, these airwaves, bought with the Sprint acquisition, let T-Mobile's network give consistent results between 150 mbps and 500 mbps of download speed. That's far better than AT&T and Verizon's 5G can do in most areas, and it's secured T-Mobiles win. Faster download speed signal more capacity

on a network. T-Mobile's widespread added capacity has also let it launch Magena Max, the nation's first truly unlimited no-deprioritization 5G plan, and its $60 a month unlimited home broadband service. If you're a T-Mobile customer and not, seeing results like these, it's probably for one of two reasons. First, to get on T-Mobile's new wild ride, you need a 5G phone. T-Mobile 4G still falls short of the competition. Looking at 4G-only results, AT&T dominated nationwide, as surely as T-Mobile did overall. If you're using a 4G phone, your T-Mobile service will likely be unremarkable. And if you're out in the countryside and don't often head to the city, T-Mobile might not be the best carrier for you. The

Carrier is doing great in the nation's biggest metro areas, but when we look at small cities and areas away from interstate highways, especially in the western U.S., it's clear that T-Mobile has to do more work to get better coverage. In those regions, once again, AT&T dominated, end quote. Finally today, Cerebrus Systems, which I think I did a story on recently about how they made the biggest chip ever. I don't remember if we actually did that, but I do remember reading about this. Anyway, Cerebra Systems claims its hardware can now run a neural network with 120 trillion parameters targeting a nascent market for massive NLP AI algorithms, and it's using its massive chips to do so. Quoting Wired.

When it comes to the neural networks that power today's artificial intelligence, sometimes the bigger they are, the smarter they are too. Recent leaps in machine understanding of language, for example, have hinged on building some of the most enormous AI models ever and stuffing them with huge gobs of text. A new cluster of computer chips could now help those networks grow to almost unimaginable size and show whether going even larger may unlock further AI advances not only in language understanding, but perhaps also in areas like robotics and computer vision. Cerebrus Systems, a startup that has already built the world's largest computer chip, has now developed technology that lets a cluster of those chips run AI models

that are more than a hundred times bigger than the most gargantuan ones are. round today. Cerebraus says it can now run a neural network with 120 trillion connections, mathematical simulations of the interplay between biological neurons and synapses. The largest AI models in existence today have about a trillion connections, and they cost many millions of dollars to build and train, but Cerebra says its hardware will run calculations in about a 50th of the time of existing hardware. Its chip cluster, along with power and cooling requirements, probably still won't come cheap, but Cerebrus at least claims its tech will be substantially more efficient. Today, most AI programs are trained using GPUs, a type of chip

originally designed for generating computer graphics, but also well-suited for the parallel processing that neural networks require. Large AI models are essentially divided up across dozens or hundreds of GPUs connected using high-speed wiring. GPUs still make sense for AI, but as models get larger and companies look for an edge, more specialized designs may find their niches. Recent advances and commercial interest have sparked a Cambrian explosion in new chip designs specialized for AI. The Cerebrus chip is an intriguing part of that evolution. While normal semiconductor designers split a wafer into pieces to make individual chips, Cerebris packs in much more computational power by using the entire thing,

having its many computational units or cores talk to each other more efficiently. A GPU typically has a few hundred cores, but Cerebris' latest chip called the Waifer Scale Engine 2, has 850,000 of them. The design can run a big neural network more efficiently than banks of GPUs wired together, but manufacturing and running the chip is a challenge, requiring new methods for etching silicon features, a design that includes redundancies to account for manufacturing flaws, and a novel water system to keep the giant chip chilled.

To build a cluster of these chips capable of running AI models of record size, Cerebrus had to solve another engineering challenge, how to get data in and out of the chip efficiently. Regular chips have their own memory on board, but Cerebrus developed an off-chip memory box called Memory X. The company also created software that allows a neural network to be partially stored in that off-chip memory, with only the computations shuttled over to the silicon. And it built a hardware and software system called SwarmX that wires everything together. They can improve the scalability of training to huge dimensions beyond what anybody is doing today, says Mike Demler, a senior analyst with the Linley

group, and a senior editor of the microprocessor report. Demler says it isn't yet clear how much of a market there will be for the cluster, especially since some potential customers are already designing their own more specialized chips in-house. He adds that the real performance of the chip, in terms of speed, efficiency, and costs are as yet unclear. Cerebras hasn't published any benchmark results so far, end quote. Tonight, 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, a Twitter space. Christmasina and I will be talking to the folks at Otter AI, who will hopefully break some news with us. We'll also toss around some topics from the last two weeks in the world of tech. And this will be the show that will mark our 1,000th episode when I release it this weekend. So we will talk about, well, doing this for a thousand episodes, I guess. Come join us as I expect. We'll throw the floor open. to everybody. So if you ever wanted to know how this particular sausage gets made, come ask me. See you then. Talk to you tomorrow.