Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/13 - The AI That Can Predict When You'll Die

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

The new 16-inch MacBook pro might actually have a keyboard that works! Google wants you to bank with them. The Brave browser comes out of beta. And there’s an AI that can predict if you’ll die in the next year… but doctors don’t know how it does it. Sponsors: PixelUnion.net Capterra.com/ride Links: APPLE’S 16-INCH MACBOOK PRO IS HERE AND IT HAS A GOOD KEYBOARD (The Verge) 16-Inch MacBook Pro First Impressions: Great Keyboard, Outstanding Speakers (Daring Fireball) Next in Google’s Quest for Consumer Dominance: Banking (WSJ) Brave 1.0 launches, bringing the privacy-first browser out of beta (The Verge) DoorDash Picks Up Another $100 Million at Nearly $13 Billion Valuation (Bloomberg) Border officials can’t have ‘boundless’ access to search devices, court rules (The Verge) AI can predict if you'll die soon - but we've no idea how it works (New Scientist) 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 TechMeme ride home for Wednesday, November 13th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The new 16-inch MacBook Pro might actually have a keyboard that works. Google wants you to bank with them. The Brave browser comes out of beta. And there's an AI that can predict if you'll die in the next year, but doctors don't know how it works. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The much-rumored new 16-inch MacBook Pro is finally here. You can pre-order today.

It will be in stores later this week. The starting price is $2,399, which was the same starting price as the old 15-inch MacBook Pro, which this new model replaces. The old 15-inch MacBook Pro is gone. There are new processors, apparently significantly better speakers, and obviously a larger screen on this new pro. This machine is 0.7 millimeters thicker, and part of that is that the entire thermal system has apparently been redesigned. The previous 15-inch pro had some thermal throttling issues, quoting the verge. Apple is offering two base configs with Intel 9th-gen processors. There's a 6-core, core I-7, and an 8-core, core I-9. But the processors aren't actually the

most important specs. That would be the RAM and storage. The base for each is fairly normal, 16 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes or 1 terabyte of SSD storage, depending on the model. Where it gets interesting is the maximum available for RAM and storage is much higher than before. You can spec this machine up to 64 gigabytes of RAM and 8 terabytes, not a typo, of storage on the SSD. That's just a massive amount of storage. And it will cost $6,000. $6,099 to get a fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro. The other important spec is the battery. It's 100 watt hours.

Apple says that it noted, the FAA's regulation that lithium-ion rechargeable batteries are limited to a rating of 100-watt hours per battery, and just made its battery the maximum available size. Since it has to power a larger screen and processors that can now run hotter, not all of the increased size goes to longevity. Apple rates it for 11 hours of wireless web, which is just one hour longer than last year's model, end quote. But that's not what everyone cares about, right? What everyone wants to know is, does the keyboard, you know, actually work?

Well, I've got great news, everybody. The butterfly is no more. We're back to Cizzer Switches. Deeter's review in The Verge is actually titled, Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro is here, and it has a good keyboard. Let me actually, though, quote liberally from John Gruber's review, quote, We Got It All, a return of scissor key mechanisms in lieu of butterfly switches, a return of the inverted T-Arow key arrangement, and a hardware escape key.

Apple stated explicitly that their inspiration for this keyboard is the magic keyboard that ships with IMAX. At a glance, it looks very similar to the butterfly switch keyboards on the previous 15-inch MacBook pros, but don't let that fool you. It feels completely different. There's a full 1 millimeter of key travel. The butterfly keyboards only have half a millimeter. This is a very good compromise on key travel,

balancing the superior feel and accuracy of more travel, with the goal of keeping the overall device thin. The new 16-inch MacBook Pro is, in fact, a little thicker than the previous 15-inch models overall. Calling it the magic keyboard threads the impossible marketing needle they needed to thread. It concedes everything while confessing nothing. Apple has always had a great keyboard that could fit in a MacBook. It just hasn't been in a MacBook these last three years.

There's also more space between the keys, about half a millimeter more. This difference is much more noticeable by feel than by sight. Making it easier to feel the gaps between keys really does make a difference. Like the 15-inch MacBook Pro, all 16-inch models come with the touchbar. But even there, there's a slight improvement. It's been nudged further above the top row of keys to help avoid. accidental touches. No haptic feedback or any other functional changes to the touchbar, though. It's hard not to speculate that all of these changes are, to some degree, a D-Johnny Ivafication of

the keyboard. For all we on the outside note, this exact same keyboard might have shipped today, even if Johnny Ive were still at Apple. I'm not sure I know anyone, though, who would disagree that over the last five to six years, Apple's balance of how things work versus how things look has veered problematically towards making things look better, hardware and software, at the expense of how they function, end quote. A couple of other things to note as well. There are four Thunderbolt 3 ports on this machine, no USBA ports, no SD card slot, but yes, it still has a headphone jack. Gruber concludes by saying this, quote, we shouldn't be celebrating the return of longstanding features we never should have lost in the first place, but Apple's willingness to revisit these decisions, their explicit acknowledgement that, yes, keyboards are meant to be typed on, not gazed upon is, if not cause for a party, at the very least, cause for

a jubilant toast, end quote. Speaking of Dieter Bone, this morning, he tweeted, quote, why does every company need to do every single thing? It's okay to not enter a business. Sigh, end quote. Yeah, well, I'm afraid, Deeter, this is just just the way the world seems to be going. He was reacting to the report in the Wall Street Journal that Google is planning to offer checking accounts to users as early as next year in partnership with banks and credit unions. That, of course, comes hot on the heels of yesterday's news of Google who bring up medical records, quoting the journal.

The project codenamed Cash is expected to launch next year with accounts run through Citigroup and a credit union at Stanford University, a tiny lender in Google. 's backyard. Big tech companies see financial services as a way to get closer to users and glean valuable data. Apple introduced a credit card this summer. Amazon has talked to banks about offering checking accounts as well. Facebook is working on a digital currency, it hopes will upend global payments. Their ambitions could challenge incumbent financial services firms, which fear losing their primacy and customers. They are also likely to stoke a reaction in Washington where regulators are already investigating whether large technology companies have too much clout, end

quote. What was it I said yesterday about how a certain story was tech all over at the moment? Actually, it was that Google story. Yeah, why not become a platform for everything in our lives? Why not get into every business imaginable? The big tech platforms can't seem to help themselves. Do they want to do this for traditional reasons? like, you know, creating an ecosystem of services or creating traditional brand lock-in?

No, that's too pedestrian for them these days. One more quote from the journal piece. Google is setting its sites fairly low. Checking accounts are a commoditized product and people don't switch very often, but they contain a treasure trove of information, including how much money people make, where they shop, and what bills they pay, end quote. Yeah, look, I don't love my bank at all. by any stretch of the imagination. And I'm sure you could find a million examples of my bank

probably strip mining, my spending patterns, and selling that data to people I don't want them to sell it to. But look, this is just a personal stance I'm going to have going forward. When I do my banking, I'm going to do it with a bank. Thank you very much. I haven't officially done my browser switch yet. Thanks, by the way, to those of you who gave me a advice in this matter on the show subreddit and on Twitter. I'm probably going to go with Firefox because I like the idea of having a diverse browser ecosystem. And so I like the idea of not using a chromium-based browser. But a lot of you put your votes in for Brave. And except for Brave being, you know, chromium-based, I definitely would give it a try and

maybe more so after reading this. Because actually, right now might be a good day to try Brave out because the Brave browser has officially come out of beta. Brave officially launched version 1.0 today available on all major platforms. The beta version has already racked up 8 million monthly users drawn to Brave's priority on blocking third-party ads, trackers, and autoplay videos, but I did not know this aspect of what Brave does, quoting the verge. Ad blockers can deal a serious hit to publishers and creators who rely on ad views for revenue, But what sets Brave apart from other browsers is that it offers a possible solution in Brave ads, a form of ads that pays you to view them, doesn't access your data, and appears as push notifications rather than web page banners. Brave says that its ads will be targeted to the user, but none of the user's information will leave the browser.

You can also adjust the number of ads you're shown each hour. Brave Rewards gives users blockchain tokens when they opt into Brave ads. If you read an article you really like or want to support your favorite creator, you can give those tokens to sites and creators. Alternatively, you can cash them yourself via Brave's partner, uphold, or eventually exchange those tokens for gift cards and restaurant vouchers, end quote. So I don't know. That sounds pretty good to me. Maybe I've not made my decision just quite yet. We spoke of DoorDash's success just recently.

and speaking of a hot streak, sources are telling Bloomberg that DoorDash is raising $100 million at around a $13 billion valuation. The new money is coming from T-Roe Price Group, among others, though not SoftBank this time, quoting Bloomberg. In addition to the new funding, Doordash this week discussed the results of its new pay model in a blog post. Earlier this year, the company had come under fire for its handling of customers' tips, prompting Chief Executive officer Tony Zhu to promise to change its policy. Before the updates, the company paid workers a certain amount per job inclusive of tips. That meant if a customer tipped generously, DoorDash might put in less of its own money to cover the base payout. That policy, which was also used by some other

delivery companies, drew ire from those who felt that tips should amount to additional pay for a delivery worker on top of their paychecks from the company. On Tuesday, DoorDash said, consulting firm Beacon Economics had found that the company's payments to its drivers or dashers had increased by about 12.5% on average after the changes. Overall, Dasher earnings, including tips, increased by $1.30 on average to $18.54 per hour, end quote. A district court has ruled that the U.S. government's suspicionless searches of international travelers' phones and laptops at airports and the border violates the Fourth Amendment, quoting the verge. The plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic

Frontier Foundation argued that the searches were unconstitutionally invasive. Those searches have been widespread under the Trump administration with border officials searching devices 15,000 times in the first half of 2017 alone. The court said in its ruling today that government interests are paramount at the border, but that even border searches are not boundless, end quote. Electronic searches of gadgets still must meet the reasonable suspicion standard, otherwise they violate the privacy interests of travelers. The plaintiffs had asked for the court to find that a warrant was required. The ACLU held the decision as a major win for privacy protections, end quote. We've spoken recently about black box algorithms when AI programs

can achieve results that even the researchers involved are not sure how they arrived debt. Here's one such example that is kind of troubling, I guess. There's an AI that can predict if you'll die soon, but the problem is the doctors and researchers have no idea how it works. Researchers in Pennsylvania trained in AI to look at 1.77 million electrocardiogram or ECG tests from nearly 400,000 people in order to predict a person's chances of dying within a year. There were two separate versions, actually. One where the algorithm was given raw ECG data, which measures voltage over time, and the second got ECG data along with the patient's age and sex. This is from new scientists, quote, they measured the AI's performance using a metric known as

AUC, which measures how well a model distinguishes between two groups of people. In this case, patients who died within a year and those who survived. The AI consistently scored. The AI consistently scored above 0.85, where a perfect score is 1, and a score of 0.5 indicates no distinction between the groups. For comparison, the researchers also created an algorithm based on ECG features that doctors currently measure, such as certain patterns from the recordings. Quote, no matter what, the voltage-based model was always better than any model you could build out of things that we already measure from an ECG, says one of the researchers. The AI accurately predicted risk of death, even in people deemed by cardiologists, to have a normal ECG.

Three cardiologists who separately reviewed normal-looking ECGs weren't able to pick up the risk patterns that the AI detected. Quote, that finding suggests that the model is seeing things that humans probably can't see, or at least that we just ignore and think are normal, said a researcher. quote, AI can potentially teach us things that we've maybe been misinterpreting for decades, he said. It's still unclear what patterns the AI is picking up, which makes some physicians reluctant to use such algorithms, end quote. So, glasses half full, glasses half empty situation, AI is better at detecting health problems that can lead to death, even in patients that look normal and healthy to human doctors. Problem is, stupid algorithms won't tell us what they're seeing that we can't. Finally, today Disney announced that Disney Plus has already seen 10 million signups since launching, checks the calendar, yesterday.

Now, caveat, caveat, Verizon, wireless users, of course, get Disney Plus free for a year, and everybody gets a seven-day free trial. so, you know, not every one of those 10 million signups will stick around, logically. But as Steve Kovetch pointed out on Twitter this morning, Hulu has been around for 12 years, and it's only managed 28 million subscribers in that time. Netflix has 60 million subscribers in the U.S., so 10 million in a day is pretty impressive by any measure. I really, really want to talk about the Mandalorian, but, you know, spoilers, so I probably shouldn't, I guess.

One question, though, are we really never going to see Pedro Pascal's face? Never, ever, ever? That's just kind of weird. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow.