Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein
Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
Speaker 1: an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's time for the tech news for the
Speaker 1: week ending on Friday, September thirteenth, twenty twenty four. Happy
Speaker 1: Friday the thirteenth, everybody. I'm wishing all of you the
Speaker 1: best of luck and hopefully a notable absence of a hulking, undead,
Speaker 1: hockey mask wearing psychopath. We start off this episode with
Speaker 1: some stories about AI, as is our wont to do so.
Speaker 1: First up, Kylie Robinson of The Verge Robison, perhaps my apologies, Kylie.
Speaker 1: Kylie of the Verge has an article titled open AI
Speaker 1: releases OH one, its first model with reasoning abilities, which
Speaker 1: sounds pretty significant, and Kylie explains that one is the
Speaker 1: first of several planned sophisticated AI models that should be
Speaker 1: capable of answering complex queries. While in development, this was
Speaker 1: known to the AI crowd as the Strawberry Model. That's
Speaker 1: actually the first I've heard of that code name. But
Speaker 1: then again, I'm not exactly brought in to hear about
Speaker 1: all things AI. The model is said to be able
Speaker 1: to tackle multi step problems, which is something that earlier
Speaker 1: AI models have had troubled doing, and doing this comes
Speaker 1: at a couple of costs. There's the cost of time,
Speaker 1: because it does take a little longer for this model
Speaker 1: to create an answer, although it typically is still faster
Speaker 1: than humans would be able to do it. But then
Speaker 1: there's also the financial cost. These models aren't free to use,
Speaker 1: and they come with a fairly hefty fee for access.
Speaker 1: That fee is like three to four times more expensive
Speaker 1: than using the current AI models for other purposes. Now,
Speaker 1: according to open ai representatives, the one model is less
Speaker 1: prone to hallucinations than earlier models are, but it is
Speaker 1: still not immune to them. So the challenge of creating
Speaker 1: an AI model that you know is dependable and accountable
Speaker 1: without having to worry that it's just making stuff up, Well,
Speaker 1: that problem persists. It's also apparently pretty good at coding.
Speaker 1: It can't outperform the best of the best of human coders,
Speaker 1: at least not yet, but I feel like if open
Speaker 1: ai can convince companies that you know, their AI models
Speaker 1: are equivalent to exceptional coders. Maybe not the best, but
Speaker 1: really good coders. That's a pretty big sales bitch. Coders
Speaker 1: who don't have salaries, they don't have healthcare plans, they
Speaker 1: don't have stock options or retirement accounts or anything like that.
Speaker 1: You know. I know that AI ideally is meant to
Speaker 1: augment humans so that they can do their jobs better
Speaker 1: and they can offload the really tedious work to automated processes.
Speaker 1: But I still have concerns that, at least in the
Speaker 1: short term, there are going to be business leaders out
Speaker 1: there who will view AI as kind of a shortcut
Speaker 1: to downsizing staff and outsourcing work to the robots. Marie
Speaker 1: Baran of Newsweek wrote an article this week titled AI
Speaker 1: generated junk science is flooding Google scholar studied claims, and
Speaker 1: assuming that the study is correct, it illustrates one of
Speaker 1: the many concerns I have about generative AI. Essentially, the
Speaker 1: study found that AI generated science papers, fake science papers
Speaker 1: in other words, are showing up in Google scholar right
Speaker 1: next to legitimate, you know, scholarly articles within search results.
Speaker 1: So Google has been indexing pages that are made by
Speaker 1: AI bots, you know, like chat GPT. The Harvard Kennedy
Speaker 1: School Misinformation Review published this study and identified one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty nine papers that are likely generated by AI,
Speaker 1: and more than half of those identified papers focused on
Speaker 1: topics that relate closely to stuff like climate change, health concerns,
Speaker 1: and other policy relevant subject matter. And the danger here
Speaker 1: is obvious. The papers may appear to be from legitimate
Speaker 1: researchers who followed rigorous scientific practices in order to you know,
Speaker 1: draw their conclusions, but in reality, they could just be
Speaker 1: propaganda that's pushing a specific point of view and disguised
Speaker 1: as a legitimate scientific paper and considering a lot of
Speaker 1: people quote unquote research by just looking for passages and
Speaker 1: papers that appear to confirm what the people already believe,
Speaker 1: you know, just cherry picking. In other words, this could
Speaker 1: lead to situations in which folks are citing fraudulent papers
Speaker 1: because those papers support specious arguments. Now y'all already know
Speaker 1: that I call out for critical thinking regular on this show,
Speaker 1: and this trend really drives home how important critical thinking is.
Speaker 1: I am just as guilty as anyone else of grabbing
Speaker 1: onto a source that appears to confirm my biases. I
Speaker 1: actually have to remind myself to take a closer look
Speaker 1: to one make sure that the source is legitimate, and
Speaker 1: then make double sure that what it's actually saying is
Speaker 1: what I think it says, because that's not always the case.
Speaker 1: I have been known to misinterpret stuff like that has happened,
Speaker 1: so I have to be careful about this too, and
Speaker 1: I don't always succeed, but it's good to keep it
Speaker 1: in mind, like this is something to strive for, use
Speaker 1: critical thinking, and it sounds to me like this is
Speaker 1: just going to get more challenging to do as time
Speaker 1: goes on. One thing that could help is if Google
Speaker 1: developed some tools to make Google scholar more reliable. You know,
Speaker 1: knowing that these things are going to exist, how can
Speaker 1: Google scholar better differentiate between legitimate papers and those that
Speaker 1: were generated by AI. That might involve improving transparency regarding
Speaker 1: how Google Scholar indexes and ranks scholarly results in the
Speaker 1: first place, or giving more tools so you can filter
Speaker 1: stuff out, like make sure that the articles you get
Speaker 1: are from legitimate peer reviewed sources. I suppose I should
Speaker 1: also throw in this potential pitfall. If future generations of
Speaker 1: AI models train themselves on fake scientific papers that were
Speaker 1: created by earlier AI models, then the quality of content
Speaker 1: on the Internet will further decline reasoning AI models like
Speaker 1: the aforementioned one would be more likely to create incorrect
Speaker 1: solutions if the training material it used included this sort
Speaker 1: of stuff, these fraudulent scientific papers, because AI can't just
Speaker 1: magically know what information is relevant and dependable and which
Speaker 1: one is just invented in order to push forward a narrative.
Speaker 1: Emma Roth that The Verge has an article that it's
Speaker 1: titled Google is using AI to make fake podcasts from
Speaker 1: your notes, and it kind of makes me think of
Speaker 1: a recent episode I did on tech Stuff. I titled
Speaker 1: it this episode was written by AI sort of, So
Speaker 1: in that episode, I use chat GPT to create a
Speaker 1: tech podcast episode not just not of tech stuff, just
Speaker 1: a tech podcast, and it was supposed to trace the
Speaker 1: history and the technology of airbags. And I read the
Speaker 1: entire generated episode out in that podcast episode of tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I then spent the rest of the episode fact checking
Speaker 1: and critiquing the AI's work. Now, the most disturbing thing
Speaker 1: I encountered with this experiment was that the AI kept
Speaker 1: inventing fake experts to deliver various bits of information. Sometimes
Speaker 1: that information was wrong, and all the experts didn't really
Speaker 1: exist anyway. In Roth's article, it unfolds that Google created
Speaker 1: a feature in its notebook LM app that will take
Speaker 1: notes that you have written down. It will then generate
Speaker 1: this you know, AI created podcast hosted by a couple
Speaker 1: of AI bots posing as the hosts, and the podcast
Speaker 1: has hosts having a discussion about whatever the research topic is,
Speaker 1: and it uses your notes to create a conversation between
Speaker 1: these two bot hosts, and it kind of riffs off
Speaker 1: the information that you have gathered. It sounds like the
Speaker 1: AI is careful to only draw information from your notes,
Speaker 1: so the output you get should reflect the input that
Speaker 1: the bots relied upon. So in other words, if something
Speaker 1: is wrong in the episode, it would be because your
Speaker 1: notes have wrong information in them or incomplete information. The
Speaker 1: AI wouldn't necessarily be hallucinating or confabulating, you know, drawing
Speaker 1: from some source you've never seen either, And that's a
Speaker 1: good thing. It does remind me. In the case of
Speaker 1: the AI episode that I generated, Chad gbts was actually
Speaker 1: unable to share with me what the sources were that
Speaker 1: it was pulling information from. I asked it to, and
Speaker 1: it couldn't. Instead, it gave me a list of sources
Speaker 1: that the information might have come from, but there was
Speaker 1: no guarantee that any of the information used in the
Speaker 1: episode actually came from those sources. Now, in this case,
Speaker 1: with Google, the sources you or at least the notes
Speaker 1: that you've taken. And I think this approach is interesting.
Speaker 1: It doesn't strike me quite as off putting as what
Speaker 1: I experienced with chat GPT for one thing. To me,
Speaker 1: this feels more like a study tool. I mean, we
Speaker 1: all know that people have different learning styles, right, so
Speaker 1: I think this tool could potentially be good for someone
Speaker 1: who does take meticulous notes, but that doesn't really help
Speaker 1: them absorb the information, right they don't really understand they've
Speaker 1: got the notes, but it hasn't kind of sunk in.
Speaker 1: So I think this kind of approach could create a
Speaker 1: way of synthesizing and contect rualizing the information that could
Speaker 1: be more impactful depending upon the subject matter and you know,
Speaker 1: the learning style of the person involved. So as a
Speaker 1: studying tool, I think it's a pretty neat idea. Now,
Speaker 1: I also wonder if this will ultimately lead to people
Speaker 1: using this tool to create podcasts that are hosted by AI,
Speaker 1: which could be a problem. I mean, especially considering that
Speaker 1: it's going to be based on whatever notes were made
Speaker 1: to create the podcast, so you could do it to
Speaker 1: make them say whatever you wanted, or you know, not
Speaker 1: make them say, but they would say things drawn from
Speaker 1: your own perspective in the notes you created. Now, that
Speaker 1: could be funny if you were to create really weird
Speaker 1: notes about obviously fake stuff, not in an effort to
Speaker 1: mislead listeners, but rather as a way to entertain them.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking about shows that are something along the
Speaker 1: lines of existing fictional podcasts out there, stuff like Welcome
Speaker 1: to night Vale or Old Gods of Appalachia or my
Speaker 1: friend Shay's podcast Kadi Womple with the Shadow People. And yes,
Speaker 1: that last one is real. Kadi Womple with the Shadow
Speaker 1: People is a real podcast, and yes I am plugging
Speaker 1: my friends podcast sort of. So if Southern gothic fantasy
Speaker 1: with a healthy dose of feminism is your kick, you
Speaker 1: should check it out. In fact, you should just check
Speaker 1: it out anyway, give an episode a listen, because Shay
Speaker 1: is a great storyteller, and you know, maybe it's your jam,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not, but yeah, I could see this tool
Speaker 1: being used for that kind of thing. That arguably that
Speaker 1: does bring into question the artistry although you would still
Speaker 1: need to put in the work to create the source
Speaker 1: notes that the hosts are drawing from. So it's a
Speaker 1: gray area for me. Like generally, I tend to be
Speaker 1: pretty negative or pretty critical at least about generative AI,
Speaker 1: But if it comes down to something like this, where
Speaker 1: you have done an enormous amount of work to build
Speaker 1: the source material, I'm not quite as adamant the generative
Speaker 1: AI is a bad tool to use in this context.
Speaker 1: But maybe I just need to think on it more.
Speaker 1: Now back to artificial intelligence in general. So on Science Alert,
Speaker 1: David Neil has an article that's titled AI chatbots have
Speaker 1: a political bias that could unknowingly influence society. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't think this should come as a surprise because bias
Speaker 1: has been a big issue in AI for decades. Some
Speaker 1: experts have argued that not all bias is bad, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you might build an AI model that is quote unquote
Speaker 1: biased to pick out instances of say, medical images that
Speaker 1: could indicate a health hazard, like the presence of say
Speaker 1: a tumor, for example. But unintended bias is bad, and
Speaker 1: we've seen lots of examples of that with AI, like
Speaker 1: with facial recognition, technologies and the like. Neiled cites a
Speaker 1: computer scientist named David Rosato from Otago Polytechnic and New
Speaker 1: Zealand who uses various political questionnaires to test different AI
Speaker 1: chat models to see where they fall on the political
Speaker 1: spectrum based upon their responses to these questionnaires, and according
Speaker 1: to his results, the models all fell somewhere left of
Speaker 1: center on political matters, and they tended toward a more
Speaker 1: libertarian point of view rather than an authoritarian point of view.
Speaker 1: None of the models were coming out as like hard
Speaker 1: left evangelists or anything like that, but the bias was
Speaker 1: present and it was significant. Rosatto doesn't believe that the
Speaker 1: bias was intentional, but rather it's sort of an emergent quality.
Speaker 1: And why is it emerging at all? Well, the best
Speaker 1: guess is that the material used to train the AI
Speaker 1: models skews left more than it does right. Not all
Speaker 1: of it, but that overall, when taken as in it,
Speaker 1: you know, a hole, it skews more left. That there
Speaker 1: are more pieces written from a left of center perspective
Speaker 1: than right of center. This in turn imbalances the material,
Speaker 1: so that leads to a bias in the models. And
Speaker 1: it kind of makes me think about how matter and
Speaker 1: antimatter are. So when matter and antimatter come into contact
Speaker 1: with one another, they annihilate each other. So if there
Speaker 1: had been a perfect balance of matter and antimatter at
Speaker 1: the dawn of time, there would be no universe to
Speaker 1: speak up, because it would have all blowed up before
Speaker 1: it could even get started. But for some reason, there
Speaker 1: was a little bit more matter than there was antimatter,
Speaker 1: and we got the universe. So with these AI models,
Speaker 1: the training material had more left of center perspective material
Speaker 1: than otherwise, which y'all you know, I lean left so hard.
Speaker 1: I walk around at a forty five degree angle. But
Speaker 1: I don't think having a biased perspective in the tools
Speaker 1: themselves that are meant to provide and contextualize information is
Speaker 1: a good thing, even though that bias kind of leans
Speaker 1: toward the way that I view the world. I don't
Speaker 1: think a bias is good in that respect. It needs
Speaker 1: to be as objective as it possibly can, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: So if the bias means we can't rely on the
Speaker 1: results provided, that ends up being a big problem, especially
Speaker 1: considering how gung ho everybody is on AI. Now. Despite
Speaker 1: these findings, we have also seen examples of generative AI
Speaker 1: engaged in recreating some really ugly biases as well. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking primarily of image generating models that tend to be
Speaker 1: guilty of perpetuating racial stereotypes. So I guess you could
Speaker 1: see this issue as a wake up call regarding our
Speaker 1: own prejudices and biases on top of the issue we
Speaker 1: have with AI. Okay, we've got a ton more news
Speaker 1: to get through. Let's take a quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors. We're back and we're not done with AI
Speaker 1: just yet. Just Weather Bed of the Verge has a
Speaker 1: beast titled Meta fed its AI on almost everything you've
Speaker 1: posted publicly since two thousand and seven. And yeah, that
Speaker 1: article starts off with a whammy. In fact, I'm just
Speaker 1: going to quote whether Bed at the beginning of the article.
Speaker 1: Who writes quote Meta has acknowledged that all text and
Speaker 1: photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published
Speaker 1: since two thousand and seven have been fed into its
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence models. End quote. Now this is significant for
Speaker 1: many reasons, one of which is that Meta executives had
Speaker 1: previously sort of denied that this was the case when
Speaker 1: asked by Australian legislators if user data was being exploited
Speaker 1: in this way, but ultimately they did cop to the
Speaker 1: practice when lawmakers really cornered them with pretty direct questions
Speaker 1: that they couldn't just deflect. So essentially, unless users had
Speaker 1: set their content to something other than public, you know,
Speaker 1: like friends only or private or whatever, then that content
Speaker 1: was up for grabs and Meta grabbed it for the
Speaker 1: purposes of training AI. Meta didn't go so far as
Speaker 1: to explain if there's a cutoff for when the data
Speaker 1: scraping happened. So, for example, assuming that it does go
Speaker 1: all the way back to two thousand and seven, can
Speaker 1: the bots scrape everything that was ever posted to the platform,
Speaker 1: at least publicly? And could that be the case even
Speaker 1: if the person who posted that stuff was a minor
Speaker 1: at the time, so all of those posts, including images,
Speaker 1: could be up for grabs. Now, Meta has said it
Speaker 1: does not scrape profiles of users who are under the
Speaker 1: age of eighteen. Fine, but what about users who today
Speaker 1: are adults but have been on Facebook long enough so
Speaker 1: that the earliest days of their Facebook use was when
Speaker 1: they were under the age of eighteen? Did the data
Speaker 1: scraping include their data from that time? I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: today they're adults. But when they posted those things back
Speaker 1: in say, two thousand and seven, they well, that question
Speaker 1: is more murky, and to be truthful, the Meta representatives
Speaker 1: didn't really have an answer for it, and that's very concerning. Now.
Speaker 1: Meta does allow users to opt out of this data
Speaker 1: scraping practice if those users happen to live in the
Speaker 1: European Union, where regional laws mandate that Meta create this
Speaker 1: option to opt out. Likewise, laws in Brazil required Meta
Speaker 1: to cut out the data scraping for AI there as well,
Speaker 1: But everywhere else in the world, it's fair game, baby.
Speaker 1: If it ain't expressly against the law, Meta is doing it,
Speaker 1: which might be food for thought for all the other
Speaker 1: countries out there, at least the ones with any interest
Speaker 1: at all regarding protecting citizen data from massive corporations. Metta
Speaker 1: is also in the news here in the United States,
Speaker 1: as Republican Congressman Tim Wahlberg has some pretty harsh words
Speaker 1: for the company after it responded to concerns over how
Speaker 1: it has hosted ads for illegal drugs, which I talked
Speaker 1: about in an earlier Tech Stuff episode, so to kind
Speaker 1: of summarize, Legislators had sent an inquiry to Meta following
Speaker 1: reports from the Tech Transparency Project as well as the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal that detailed how advertisements for illegal drugs
Speaker 1: were appearing on Facebook and Instagram, both prescription drugs and
Speaker 1: recreational drugs, like log on and suddenly there's an ad
Speaker 1: for cocaine on your Facebook feed. And this means that
Speaker 1: Meta was not only providing a platform that these illegal
Speaker 1: ads got to use, but Meta itself was profiting from
Speaker 1: these illegal advertisements. Now, Meta didn't create the ads, They're
Speaker 1: just hosting them, but they are profiting from them because
Speaker 1: the advertisers have to pay Meta to have this space. Right,
Speaker 1: So the lawmakers sent more than a dozen questions to
Speaker 1: Meta to really get down to how big an issue
Speaker 1: this is, how prevalent is this problem, and what the
Speaker 1: heck is Meta doing about it? And Meta essentially responded
Speaker 1: by saying, and to be clear, I am paraphrasing like
Speaker 1: crazy here, but they said essentially like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. We agree that's crazy. But Meta is all
Speaker 1: about doing its part to fight illegal activity. This is
Speaker 1: a big issue beyond any one platform. This is this
Speaker 1: is major. This isn't just us, This is this is
Speaker 1: a big problem. Now, Wahlberg was not buying this and
Speaker 1: called the response unacceptable. I agree with him. He went
Speaker 1: on to say, quote Metta's response not only ignores most
Speaker 1: of the questions posed in our letter, but also refuses
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that these illicit drug ads were approved and
Speaker 1: monetized by Meta and allowed to run on their platforms
Speaker 1: end quote. The director of Tech Transparency Project, Katie Paul,
Speaker 1: also accused Meta of deliberately sidestepping questions of accountability in
Speaker 1: an effort to deflect and to claim that this is
Speaker 1: just a bigger issue, much bigger than Meta and its platforms.
Speaker 1: And CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said on a podcast interview
Speaker 1: that he thinks in the past he has made the
Speaker 1: mistake of accepting responsibility for stuff that subsequently he believes
Speaker 1: his company wasn't actually guilty of doing. Like he said,
Speaker 1: we got to stop saying we're sorry for stuff that
Speaker 1: isn't our fault. Essentially is how it came across to
Speaker 1: me anyway. But this particular subject seems pretty cut and
Speaker 1: dried to me, because either Meta was selling ads to
Speaker 1: clients who ultimately made those ads about illegal drugs, or
Speaker 1: Meta did not do that. So either Meta profited off
Speaker 1: of illegal advertisements or it didn't. There's not grey area here,
Speaker 1: you know. And sure Meta could argue that the scale
Speaker 1: of its business as such that it can't police every
Speaker 1: ad or ensure that an ad that was sold actually
Speaker 1: ends up being for whatever it was sold to be.
Speaker 1: But shouldn't they because advertising is their business, that's what
Speaker 1: Meta does. It's where the vast majority of the company's
Speaker 1: revenue comes from. So it seems to me that the
Speaker 1: company absolutely should prioritize that it ensures that its core
Speaker 1: business is legal. Maybe I'm being unreasonable here. I don't
Speaker 1: think so, but maybe. David Shepherdson of Reuter's has a
Speaker 1: piece titled TikTok faces crucial court hearing that could decide
Speaker 1: fate in the US. So you might remember that lawmakers
Speaker 1: here in the United States decided that TikTok would have
Speaker 1: to divorce itself from its parent company, Byteedance, which is
Speaker 1: headquartered in China, if it is to be allowed to
Speaker 1: continue to operate in the United States, and subsequently, TikTok
Speaker 1: has argued that such a separation is technologically impossible. Now
Speaker 1: that's a claim I personally find hard to believe, though
Speaker 1: I do think any separation would require huge changes to
Speaker 1: how TikTok operates. It also said it's legally impossible and
Speaker 1: financially impossible. Well, next week, the US Court of Appeals
Speaker 1: for the District of Columbia will hear arguments about that
Speaker 1: legal side from TikTok's legal team, and they're saying that
Speaker 1: this law is unconstantitutional that violates the First Amendment, which
Speaker 1: is also known as the freedom of speech. Well, no
Speaker 1: matter what the outcome is of this particular case, I
Speaker 1: think chances are pretty good it's going to get pushed
Speaker 1: upward to the Supreme Court. Both the US Department of
Speaker 1: Justice and TikTok's lawyers have asked the Court of Appeals
Speaker 1: to render a decision by no later than December sixth,
Speaker 1: and that will be just a little over a month
Speaker 1: before the nationwide ban is to go into effect, which
Speaker 1: is on January nineteenth. That's assuming that, you know, there's
Speaker 1: no challenge to this, and it provides very little time
Speaker 1: for the Supreme Court to get involved to make a
Speaker 1: decision as to what might happen once it gets to
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court. That beats me, because I mean Donald
Speaker 1: Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices during his presidency and
Speaker 1: At that time, Trump was actively trying to ban TikTok
Speaker 1: by executive order. That was a big deal. However, since then,
Speaker 1: Trump has flip flopped about TikTok. Whether that has anything
Speaker 1: to do with a billionaire TikTok and who made significant
Speaker 1: campaign donations to the GOP, I can't say. But certainly
Speaker 1: Trump's own explanations of well, you know, kids really like it,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem to be a compelling reason for his
Speaker 1: one to eighty degree turn on TikTok. Anyway, I have
Speaker 1: no clue if the current Supreme Court would side more
Speaker 1: on what past Trump said back when he was president
Speaker 1: or what he says now when he's trying to be
Speaker 1: president again. But that decision will happen after the election,
Speaker 1: so maybe that could have an impact, I have no
Speaker 1: way of knowing. Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration here
Speaker 1: in the United States issued a press release that announced
Speaker 1: that Apple AirPods pro headphones have qualified to be labeled
Speaker 1: as over the counter hearing aids software devices, and that
Speaker 1: is a first. It's the first over the counter hearing
Speaker 1: a device or software device I guess that has ever
Speaker 1: received that designation here in the United States. Previous hearing
Speaker 1: aids have not been over the counter. You had to
Speaker 1: go through a pretty lengthy sequence of visits with various
Speaker 1: doctors before you could get a medical device to age
Speaker 1: your hearing. With Apple, users can customize the performance of
Speaker 1: their AirPods to meet their hearing needs, assuming that they
Speaker 1: have mild to moderate hearing impairment. Beyond that, they would
Speaker 1: still need to go through the medical pathway. But folks
Speaker 1: who have experienced mild to moderate hearing loss can order
Speaker 1: directly through Apple without first going through the whole medical system,
Speaker 1: so they don't have to seek out an examination from
Speaker 1: their doctor and then you get referred to audiologists and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. For people who have insufficient
Speaker 1: time or health coverage, this is a huge deal. The
Speaker 1: FDA's designation lends credibility to this technology. There's no shortage
Speaker 1: of tech out there that claims to be helpful in
Speaker 1: various ways in the medical field, but if the products
Speaker 1: lack the FDA designation, then there's no authority out there saying, yes,
Speaker 1: this stuff works for that intended purpose. Now, I am
Speaker 1: not an Apple user, but I do think this is
Speaker 1: a great day for folks who have mild to moderate
Speaker 1: hearing loss and gives them a lot more options. Maybe
Speaker 1: we'll get an Android compatible candidate that also meets FDA
Speaker 1: requirements to receive this sort of designation. I would find
Speaker 1: that pretty helpful. I mean, I went to way too
Speaker 1: many loud music shows when I was in college, and
Speaker 1: I'm certainly paying for that now. This week, Sony announced
Speaker 1: that starting on November seventh, you can order yourself a
Speaker 1: brand new PS five Pro. This model has more oomph
Speaker 1: than the previous PS five consoles, so earlier gamers had
Speaker 1: to make a choice. They could play games at the
Speaker 1: highest visual settings enabled, but they would do so while
Speaker 1: taking a hit on stuff like frame rate, so the
Speaker 1: performance of the game would take a bit of a hit,
Speaker 1: but it would look gorgeous. Or they could optimize for performance,
Speaker 1: which means the graphics wouldn't look is pretty, but the
Speaker 1: game would run much more smoothly. So this new PS
Speaker 1: five Pro model is meant to eliminate that problem by
Speaker 1: providing enough power to run games at their higher visual
Speaker 1: settings without impacting the performance, and it would only set
Speaker 1: you back seven hundred US dollars, obviously priced differently in
Speaker 1: different regions. On top of that, however, this particular Pro
Speaker 1: model does not have a disk drive. It's digital only,
Speaker 1: so if you wanted a console that could also play discs, well,
Speaker 1: then you would need to buy an external drive for
Speaker 1: the PS five and connect it to the PS five
Speaker 1: Pro to get that capability. I think that's kind of
Speaker 1: rough for folks who depend upon a game console to
Speaker 1: be a multitasker. Now a lot of game publishers have
Speaker 1: ditched physical media in favor of digital downloads, So for
Speaker 1: a lot of games, there is no physical disk to
Speaker 1: buy anyway. The only way to get the game is
Speaker 1: to download it digitally. But there's still a lot of
Speaker 1: us out there who are either still collecting physical media
Speaker 1: like movies and TV shows on disc, or we have
Speaker 1: recently gone back to physical media after we got tired
Speaker 1: of streaming services dropping the films and TV shows we
Speaker 1: love from their respective libraries. I fall in that camp.
Speaker 1: For a while, I was digital only, but eventually I
Speaker 1: did get fed up with constantly having to play leap
Speaker 1: Frog to figure out which service has the movie that
Speaker 1: I wanted to watch on it. Now forget it. I'll
Speaker 1: just buy a copy of the movie so that way
Speaker 1: I always have it if I want to watch it. Well,
Speaker 1: consoles have obviously not served just as game centers, they've
Speaker 1: also served as physical media players, so ditching the drive
Speaker 1: is tough on those of us who want both. Now.
Speaker 1: I've heard that sales of PS five external disk drives
Speaker 1: have spiked in the wake of this announcement, and also
Speaker 1: a lot of analysts have interpreted Sony's move to indicate
Speaker 1: that future consoles will likewise leave off the disk drive,
Speaker 1: it just won't be part of the system. Analysts are
Speaker 1: also cheesed off that the seven hundred dollars price tag
Speaker 1: is pretty hefty, considering you do not get a disk
Speaker 1: drive in that model. Now, you could argue, yes, the
Speaker 1: microchips are more advanced, they're more powerful, but it's still
Speaker 1: hard to feel like you're not paying more for diminishing returns,
Speaker 1: particularly if you're someone who can't really see the difference
Speaker 1: in the various graphic settings to begin with, like me,
Speaker 1: I have trouble seeing much of a difference between the
Speaker 1: highest settings and the ones that allow you to play
Speaker 1: with little impact to gameplay. Now, I don't doubt that
Speaker 1: there is a difference. I'm sure there is, but my
Speaker 1: television isn't large enough and I don't sit close enough
Speaker 1: to it to be able to pick out those differences.
Speaker 1: So I suppose one argument supporting the PS five pro
Speaker 1: is that in the future there will be PS five
Speaker 1: titles that will require that horsepower to run well. But then,
Speaker 1: assuming that there will be future PS generations, we're likely
Speaker 1: at the halfway point for the current console's life cycle,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot to balance out when making a
Speaker 1: decision as to whether you're going to buy one or not. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got a few more news stories to get through.
Speaker 1: Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. So
Speaker 1: Microsoft has held another round of layoffs for its Xbox division. Reportedly,
Speaker 1: some six hundred and fifty employees are going to lose
Speaker 1: their jobs as part of these layoffs. That sucks. Sorry
Speaker 1: for anyone out there affected by that. That stinks. This
Speaker 1: is according to reporting from Matthew Schomer of Game Rant.
Speaker 1: He has an article titled Xbox has reportedly been told
Speaker 1: to go dark today. So by go dark, what Schomer
Speaker 1: means is that allegedly the Xbox division has been directed
Speaker 1: to say nothing on social media, and this is an
Speaker 1: effort to sidestep the reaction to this layoff decision. So,
Speaker 1: according to Microsoft, game being CEO Phil Spencer. The layoffs
Speaker 1: are a continuation of the restructuring that has had to
Speaker 1: happen in the wake of Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard. You
Speaker 1: might recall that particular acquisition was a very lengthy process.
Speaker 1: It took way longer than what was anticipated, and it
Speaker 1: was not guaranteed to work out because there were various
Speaker 1: regulators around the world who are raising concerns that the
Speaker 1: acquisition would lead to a decline in competition in various
Speaker 1: gaming markets, most notably in the cloud gaming market. You
Speaker 1: might also remember that Microsoft has already held rounds of
Speaker 1: layoffs that the company claimed to be connected to this
Speaker 1: restructuring in the wake of the acquisition. When Microsoft did
Speaker 1: this back in May, the company became the target for
Speaker 1: a lot of online criticism. Tom Warren of The Verge
Speaker 1: posted that Microsoft has directed employees to avoid posting social
Speaker 1: media in order to try and prevent a similar online
Speaker 1: backlash situation this week. I'm not sure that's really going
Speaker 1: to work out for them. The gaming industry as a
Speaker 1: whole has been hit with a lot of layoffs in
Speaker 1: the last year and a half, and it concerns me
Speaker 1: as I know there are thousands of talented people who
Speaker 1: are following their passion for video games and you know,
Speaker 1: making a career out of that passion, and they have
Speaker 1: subsequently found themselves out of work, which again stinks. I
Speaker 1: really hope anyone affected by this lands on their feet
Speaker 1: very quickly. Boeing continues to get hit by bad news.
Speaker 1: Union workers who are machinists at Boeing have voted to
Speaker 1: authorize a strike after more than ninety four percent of
Speaker 1: union members rejected a proposed contract agreement, which would have
Speaker 1: seen a twenty five percent pay raise over the course
Speaker 1: of four years. Interestingly, the union leaders who were at
Speaker 1: the negotiating table with Boeing had prompted members to agree
Speaker 1: to this, but the union as a whole disagreed with
Speaker 1: the team that negotiated this agreement and said, no, this
Speaker 1: is not good enough. The strike effectively began this morning,
Speaker 1: one minute after midnight, and thirty three thousand machinists are
Speaker 1: represented in this union, which means all work on things
Speaker 1: like Boeing aircraft has come to a halt. Now, a
Speaker 1: twenty five percent raise ain't nothing right, So you might
Speaker 1: be saying, what are the workers expecting, Well, they had
Speaker 1: been asking for a much more aggressive raise schedule. They
Speaker 1: wanted forty percent increase in raises over the course of
Speaker 1: three years, So they wanted more money, and they wanted
Speaker 1: it on a shorter timeline. They say, it's that the
Speaker 1: twenty five percent is not enough to compensate for how
Speaker 1: employees have been made to make concessions regarding compensation and
Speaker 1: pensions since two thousand and eight. So they say that,
Speaker 1: you know, the previous sixteen years went with no raises
Speaker 1: at all, and that a twenty five percent increase would
Speaker 1: not put them on equal footing of where they would
Speaker 1: be had they been and getting year over year raises
Speaker 1: the way you would typically expect. So what they're saying
Speaker 1: is this isn't good enough. It doesn't bring us to
Speaker 1: where we should be, and it doesn't address the other
Speaker 1: issues that we have. So we're going on strike pretty
Speaker 1: rough situation last up, and then we're going to get
Speaker 1: to some reading recommendations. Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis became
Speaker 1: the first two private citizens to go on an EVA
Speaker 1: or extra vehicular activity in spice or space. This is
Speaker 1: also known as a space walk, and they did this
Speaker 1: as part of Polaris Dawn, which is a SpaceX mission
Speaker 1: that carried the two private citizens up to space along
Speaker 1: with two other crew members, so four in total. The
Speaker 1: pair each spent about eight minutes out there in space
Speaker 1: in their space suits. They were not fully outside the capsule,
Speaker 1: so they weren't like walking around or drifting around the capsule.
Speaker 1: Their legs were still inside the cap so their upper
Speaker 1: half was kind of poking out. They did try different
Speaker 1: experiments to use tools and test their spacesuits maneuverability and
Speaker 1: how useful it would be in the instance of actually
Speaker 1: doing a spacewalk where you're trying to perform some sort
Speaker 1: of engineering task. Everyone obviously had to wear space suits
Speaker 1: because there's no airlock in this SpaceX Dragon capsule. The
Speaker 1: whole cabin had to be depressurized to allow for this exercise.
Speaker 1: But the exercise was a success, and it's a huge
Speaker 1: achievement for all the people at SpaceX who have been
Speaker 1: working for years to get to this point. I know,
Speaker 1: I get really critical of Elon Musk and his various antics,
Speaker 1: as well as the companies he oversees, but there is
Speaker 1: no denying that the folks at SpaceX have hit some
Speaker 1: pretty impressive milestones. They were incredibly ambitious, and they were achieved. Hopefully,
Speaker 1: one day people who aren't billionaires or SpaceX engineers will
Speaker 1: get a chance to have a similar experience. Right now, well,
Speaker 1: it remains well out of range of let's say, typical people.
Speaker 1: I almost said ordinary, but that's making a judgment against
Speaker 1: SpaceX engineers. I don't feel bad judging billionaires. They can
Speaker 1: afford it. I'll judge billionaires all day long and they'll
Speaker 1: be just fine. Okay, now we're at recommended reading time.
Speaker 1: I've actually got four articles I want to mention. There
Speaker 1: were so much going on this week. Well, three of
Speaker 1: the articles I have to mention are all from Here's
Speaker 1: no surprise, Ours Technica. Again, I have no connection to
Speaker 1: Ours Technica. I'm just a fan. So first up, we've
Speaker 1: got Kevin Perdy's Ours Technica article. It's titled Music Industries
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. Hard drives, like all HDDs are dying. So
Speaker 1: this piece details how a data storage company has discovered
Speaker 1: that around twenty percent of the hard disk drives that
Speaker 1: were sent to them by media companies are ultimately unreadable.
Speaker 1: And that really makes it clear that poorting data over
Speaker 1: to other storage methods needs to be a priority for
Speaker 1: anyone who's still relying on legacy hard disk drives from
Speaker 1: decades earlier. As the equipment fails, it becomes harder and
Speaker 1: sometimes impossible to retrieve the data that's been stored on them,
Speaker 1: and so we run the risk of irretrievably losing some
Speaker 1: of the information that could include things like master tracks
Speaker 1: for some of the most popular songs of the past.
Speaker 1: This is actually reminding me that I should probably get
Speaker 1: some cloud storage solutions for some media files I currently
Speaker 1: have stored on an external HDD, but that's a meat problem.
Speaker 1: Next up, there's a piece by Rebecca Valentine of Ign
Speaker 1: about how the entire gaming staff of a video game
Speaker 1: development studio has recently resigned. That studio is on a
Speaker 1: Purna and the reasons behind the mass resignation are pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: So the article is titled Anna Perna's entire gaming team
Speaker 1: has resigned, So go check that out. Eric Berger back
Speaker 1: at Ours Technica has an article titled the future of
Speaker 1: Boeing's Crude as in crwed spaceflight program is muddy after
Speaker 1: Starliner's return, so it follows up on the tale of
Speaker 1: the beleaguered star Liner spacecraft, which obviously it experienced malfunctions
Speaker 1: as it was nearing the International Space Station. It ultimately
Speaker 1: returned back to Earth safely, but without its human crew
Speaker 1: aboord it. They remain on the ISS for the time being,
Speaker 1: so check that out. It's kind of bringing into question
Speaker 1: where does Boeing go from here? How does NASA handle this?
Speaker 1: Will the two organizations be able to move forward or
Speaker 1: is it really in limbo? Now? Finally, there's Jennifer Oulette's
Speaker 1: article in Ours Tetnica. It's titled Meet the Winners of
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four iig Nobel Prizes. Now. I did
Speaker 1: a tech Stuff episode about the ig Nobel Prizes a
Speaker 1: while back. If you're not familiar with the Ignobels, these
Speaker 1: prizes celebrate weird and unexpected achievements in various fields, usually
Speaker 1: in science and technology, but also other areas as well,
Speaker 1: and the general philosophy of the prizes is that they
Speaker 1: go to projects that first make you laugh, then they
Speaker 1: make you think. So check that out as well. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll do a follow up episode to my ig No
Speaker 1: Bells to just talk about some of the stuff that won.
Speaker 1: Often I feel like it's better for me to wait
Speaker 1: and do those in roundups of multiple years because often
Speaker 1: a lot of those projects are only tangentially related to tech,
Speaker 1: and while they are funny and interesting, they don't necessarily
Speaker 1: meet the rubric of tech stuff. I've been listening to
Speaker 1: a lot of the Besties podcast It's again. I have
Speaker 1: no connection to the Besties, but it's a show about
Speaker 1: video games and stuff, and they use the word rubric
Speaker 1: a lot, especially in their Patreon episodes, so it's kind
Speaker 1: of gotten stuck in my vocabulary recently, just from osmosis.
Speaker 1: I guess that's it for today's episode about tech news
Speaker 1: for the week ending scept Member thirteenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Happy Friday the thirteenth. Everybody be safe out there. I
Speaker 1: hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.