Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech area. It's time for the tech
Speaker 1: news for Tuesday, January twenty twenty three, and let's start
Speaker 1: off with cryptocurrency. Now, I'm sure most of y'all know
Speaker 1: I'm pretty skeptical of crypto in general, and they've got
Speaker 1: a lot of bones to pick with cryptocurrency. But I
Speaker 1: also think it's only fair to report on when the
Speaker 1: market gets some momentum in a positive direction. So Reuter's
Speaker 1: reports that Bitcoin is up twenty six percent since the
Speaker 1: beginning of this year and has climbed above the twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars per coin mark for the first time in months.
Speaker 1: Other crypto coins are also performing well, many of them
Speaker 1: kind of you know, following bitcoins footsteps, and some so
Speaker 1: called meme coins, which others would argue our trash coins,
Speaker 1: are going absolutely bonkers. You're seeing like five thousand percent
Speaker 1: increase in value for some of these. Now I should
Speaker 1: add that these meme coins are usually worth like fractions
Speaker 1: of a penny, so even a small amount of growth
Speaker 1: ends up looking huge if you talk about percentage, right,
Speaker 1: If it went from point zero zero zero zero zero
Speaker 1: zero eight to point zero zero zero zero zero one zero,
Speaker 1: that's a huge jump in percentage, but in actual money
Speaker 1: it's not much at all. Right. Also, Reuters rightfully points
Speaker 1: out that these meme coins tend to be even more
Speaker 1: unstable than other types of crypto, and the value can
Speaker 1: drop just as quickly as it can go up. See
Speaker 1: also coin, which was all the rage for about a
Speaker 1: month a couple of years ago before the bottom fell out.
Speaker 1: Reuter's also cautions that this upturn may not sustain itself,
Speaker 1: that the recent gains in cryptocurrency are probably connected to
Speaker 1: an overall positive look at the global economy and people
Speaker 1: making a bet that inflation is at least for the moment,
Speaker 1: kind of done. Obviously, any big change could send values
Speaker 1: down again, and as we all learned with Russia's invasion
Speaker 1: of Ukraine, sometimes it's just an unpredictable global event that
Speaker 1: can really have a huge impact on the economy. So
Speaker 1: nothing is ever certain. The changes are not always predictable.
Speaker 1: So I guess what I'm saying is crypto appears to
Speaker 1: be recovering and I think I said last year that
Speaker 1: I didn't believe that the setbacks we saw in late
Speaker 1: two were the death knell for crypto in general. It
Speaker 1: was just a real reckoning for crypto and blockchain and
Speaker 1: related topics. So I suppose we're gonna have to keep
Speaker 1: an eye on stuff like how governments are going to
Speaker 1: treat the crypto exchange Binance, for example, to see where
Speaker 1: crypto goes in because it's not out of the woods
Speaker 1: right There are plenty of governments around the world that
Speaker 1: are taking a more critical view of cryptocurrency and looking
Speaker 1: at imposing regulations. So while we're seeing some improvement right now,
Speaker 1: that could be just a short term gain. Uh it's
Speaker 1: too early to say, but I don't know. Maybe we'll
Speaker 1: see something kind of akin to what we saw in
Speaker 1: where the value really went up dramatically in the early
Speaker 1: part of the year. Now we've got several stories about AI,
Speaker 1: and when I said I thought AI was going to
Speaker 1: be a big topic in three I didn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: it would dominate headlines in mid January. Uh. I suspect
Speaker 1: we're gonna see AI coverage calmed down a bit later
Speaker 1: this year. Like I think it's always going to be
Speaker 1: a big part of the news in three, but I
Speaker 1: don't think it's going to be quite as dominant once
Speaker 1: things kind of initially calmed down. Right at the moment,
Speaker 1: it's sort of the scary new thing that has media
Speaker 1: outlets jumping to cover, And I don't really think it's
Speaker 1: it's necessarily that scary. It's just that's how it's being treated.
Speaker 1: But first up, getting Images, which maintains a huge library
Speaker 1: of stock photography and artwork that people can license to
Speaker 1: use for their works, is suing the company Stability AI.
Speaker 1: Getting images accuses Stability AI of scraping the library of
Speaker 1: images in getting images, just in an effort to train
Speaker 1: an art tool. An AI art tool called stable diffusion.
Speaker 1: So quick explanation here. One discipline within artificial intelligence is
Speaker 1: machine learn arning, or you might even argue that it's
Speaker 1: adjacent artificial intelligence. The ven diagram has a lot of
Speaker 1: overlap and machine intelligence, just like AI, can take lots
Speaker 1: of different forms. But one common practice in machine learning
Speaker 1: is to teach a computer model how to do whatever
Speaker 1: it is the model that is supposed to do by
Speaker 1: feeding the model lots and lots of information. For example,
Speaker 1: let's say you wanted to teach an AI system to
Speaker 1: recognize images of cats, well, you would want to feed
Speaker 1: the model tens of thousands of pictures of kiddie cats.
Speaker 1: But you would also want to feed lots of pictures
Speaker 1: that have no cats in them at all to the
Speaker 1: model so that it could tell the difference, and you
Speaker 1: would continuously tweak the model so that it would get
Speaker 1: better and better at distinguishing which images actually have cats
Speaker 1: in them. Well, if you want an AI image generation
Speaker 1: program that makes images that are actually, you know, recognizable
Speaker 1: as the of stuff you prompted the a A model
Speaker 1: to create, you have to feed it lots and lots
Speaker 1: of images, right, otherwise you could just get these random
Speaker 1: shapes and colors that don't look like anything, or that
Speaker 1: look like really disturbing versions of whatever it was you
Speaker 1: wanted to create. So Getty Images has a truly enormous
Speaker 1: supply of photographs. They're stretched across decades. Some of them
Speaker 1: are work for higher images, where photographers have set up,
Speaker 1: you know, like scenes in a studio and they just
Speaker 1: shoot tons and tons and tons of photographs and then
Speaker 1: sell those photos to Getty Images. You get some pretty
Speaker 1: wacky versions of that. If you've ever seen pictures of
Speaker 1: a woman wearing a silvery body suit and a metallic
Speaker 1: visor while she's holding an ear of corn. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. And yes, that's a real stock image.
Speaker 1: Most of you, I'm sure have seen it somewhere at
Speaker 1: some point. Other images come from like paparazzi who take
Speaker 1: pictures of clebrities and notable figures and then they license
Speaker 1: or sell their photographs to Getty. And what Getty is
Speaker 1: saying is that Stability AI used software to scrape Getty's
Speaker 1: images and copy them without paying for them, without paying
Speaker 1: a license for it, and using those images then to
Speaker 1: train a I that will ultimately you be used to
Speaker 1: create a competing product, right, a competing service, Like instead
Speaker 1: of going to Getty Images to license a stock photograph
Speaker 1: that represents whatever it is you want, you would go
Speaker 1: to Stable Diffusion and have it generate an image based
Speaker 1: on what you want. But Getty says, well, first of all,
Speaker 1: you're using our images to train your computer to do this,
Speaker 1: then you're going to introduce something that competes against our
Speaker 1: own business. That's an unfair business practice. Now we're starting
Speaker 1: to get into an area where the law is really
Speaker 1: lagging behind. The law is not designed to deal with
Speaker 1: this kind of intellectual property issue, so it does sound
Speaker 1: like this method is creeping in on the violation of
Speaker 1: intellectual property laws, or at least tiptoeing around them. But
Speaker 1: without actual law or court precedents. With AI, it's a
Speaker 1: gray area at best. But my guess is this year
Speaker 1: is going to be one where we start to see
Speaker 1: that gray turn into more black and white sooner rather
Speaker 1: than later, because it is becoming oppressing and uh and
Speaker 1: relevant issue. On a similar note, a group of artists
Speaker 1: have joined to file a class action lawsuit against three companies,
Speaker 1: dev and Art, mid Journey, and our buddy Stability AI
Speaker 1: that we just talked about like Getty. These artists argue
Speaker 1: that the companies have made illegal use of copyrighted works
Speaker 1: in order to train their respective AI models to generate images.
Speaker 1: Ours Technica has a great article about this, and they
Speaker 1: site and AI analyst named Alex Champion Dard, who has
Speaker 1: pointed out some potential problems with the lawsuit. For one,
Speaker 1: the lawsuit states that quote, when used to produce images
Speaker 1: from prompts by its users, stable diffusion uses the training
Speaker 1: images to produce seemingly new images through a mathematical software process.
Speaker 1: These quote unquote new images are based entirely on the
Speaker 1: training images and are derivative works of the particular images
Speaker 1: stable diffusion draws from when assembling a given output. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: it is merely a complex collage tool end quote. So
Speaker 1: they're they're really saying that there's nothing original in any
Speaker 1: image that stable diffusion produces, that everything has come from
Speaker 1: one element of one of the images in its massive
Speaker 1: mound of training images. That's not really how genera to
Speaker 1: AI works. The language says, the AI is just taking
Speaker 1: this massive amount of content as a starting point and
Speaker 1: then using that to create a new image, almost like, well,
Speaker 1: let me take the nose from this one, and the
Speaker 1: eyes from this one, and this smile and that hairstyle,
Speaker 1: and then putting them all together to make the quote
Speaker 1: unquote new image. But that's not actually how these models work.
Speaker 1: It's an oversimplification. It's more akin to how a human
Speaker 1: artist would study works made by other people before they
Speaker 1: start producing their own work. They would not necessarily be
Speaker 1: copying someone else's work directly. I mean, that could be
Speaker 1: an exercise to see if you can master the same
Speaker 1: techniques as some other artist. But if you're making your
Speaker 1: own work. You're not trying to copy someone else's work. Instead,
Speaker 1: you're using other people's work as sort of an inspirational
Speaker 1: launching ground on how to proceed. That could include things
Speaker 1: like a color palette, the brush technique, the perspective, all
Speaker 1: these sorts of things. So that's a little bit closer
Speaker 1: to what these AI models are doing. And Champion Dard
Speaker 1: points out that the lawsuit could lead to nothing if
Speaker 1: the defense is able to argue that what they're being
Speaker 1: accused of doing is just not true. But then, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, the real issue is that there isn't
Speaker 1: law that outlines the parameters to which generative AI can
Speaker 1: rely upon existing copyrighted works as training material. I mean, presumably,
Speaker 1: if we're looking at the written word, most writers have
Speaker 1: read a lot before they start writing. So as long
Speaker 1: as a writer is not plagiarizing some other writer, would
Speaker 1: you argue that a writer owes money to all the
Speaker 1: authors that they themselves have read before they produce their
Speaker 1: own work, Because surely by reading that influences your own style,
Speaker 1: it influences your own sensibilities. So if we if we
Speaker 1: take this to an extreme, you would say, ah, you
Speaker 1: owe money to anyone who has influenced you in the
Speaker 1: production of your own work. That's clearly not realistic or uh,
Speaker 1: you know, reasonable. But when it comes to AI, it
Speaker 1: gets a lot more tricky because you're literally using these
Speaker 1: materials to train up the AI to make its own So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to keep a close eye to see
Speaker 1: how this develops throughout this year. We're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about some
Speaker 1: more tech news. We're back, and we're not done with
Speaker 1: AI yet. Several news outlets have reported that the chat
Speaker 1: GPT three point five system successfully passed sections of the
Speaker 1: US Bar Exam. That's the exam that lawyers have to
Speaker 1: pass here in the United States before they can law
Speaker 1: your year or something. I understand that the Bar exam
Speaker 1: is very challenging and that for lots of lawyers in
Speaker 1: may take more than one attempt to pass the Bar exam. Now,
Speaker 1: to be clear, chat GPT did not pass the full exam,
Speaker 1: so it it it didn't pass it, and it is
Speaker 1: certainly not currently allowed to practice law. Rather, it passed
Speaker 1: sections on evidence and torts, and I was disappointed to
Speaker 1: find out torts are not pastries filled with fruit m
Speaker 1: raspberry tort The program fell short when it came to
Speaker 1: taking the full exam. It scored fifty point three on
Speaker 1: a test that sets a minimum passing grade of sixty
Speaker 1: eight percent. And I don't think anyone is expecting the
Speaker 1: US legal system to recognize AI lawyers in the near future,
Speaker 1: but some of the field have already expressed concern about this,
Speaker 1: and then others have said these tools could be really
Speaker 1: useful as a way to augment human lawyers as they
Speaker 1: go about their jobs. For example, this kind of a
Speaker 1: chatbot might be able to generate a first draft aft
Speaker 1: of deposition questions, but a lawyer would then subsequently go
Speaker 1: through this draft and then refine it. So in other words,
Speaker 1: the chat bot could do what we hear advocates say
Speaker 1: AI is good for all the time. It can make
Speaker 1: jobs easier and more efficient, but it doesn't actually replace
Speaker 1: the human behind the job. Of course, for it to
Speaker 1: do that, it has to work well enough to be
Speaker 1: useful rather than distracting or counter productive. And as we've
Speaker 1: seen with chat GPT, it's it's really impressive, but it's
Speaker 1: not there yet, and AI powered chat bots are not
Speaker 1: likely to disappear either. In fact, I'm sure we're gonna
Speaker 1: hear a lot more about them. Microsoft just announced that
Speaker 1: it is increasing access to chat GPT, making it generally
Speaker 1: available to its customers. In an earlier news episode, I
Speaker 1: mentioned how Microsoft is apparently planning a massive investment in
Speaker 1: open Ai that's the startup behind chat g pt, and
Speaker 1: effectively it would mean Microsoft would end up buying just
Speaker 1: a scoch under ownership of the startup. Well, Microsoft has
Speaker 1: not yet confirmed those reports. It has indicated that it
Speaker 1: will let more Microsoft customers make use of chat GPT
Speaker 1: tool via Microsoft Cloud Services. What this means in the
Speaker 1: nearer and long term, I can't really say. I sure
Speaker 1: do hope we'll see, uh that we do not get
Speaker 1: an era of AI generated news and entertainment, because that
Speaker 1: would be kind of the opposite of what we really
Speaker 1: want AI to do, Like we wanted to augment but
Speaker 1: not replace. So I don't want to see it doing
Speaker 1: stuff like what we saw was c net, where we
Speaker 1: just assigned AI these writing jobs and they churn out
Speaker 1: low value articles. Um, I don't really want to see that.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, what I want to see is high
Speaker 1: value articles created by talented human writers. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: would be pretty darn hard to be a professional creative
Speaker 1: in a world where we accept the level of creative
Speaker 1: output generated by a I as being desirable. Um, it's
Speaker 1: very hard already to make your living as a creative
Speaker 1: with all the competition that's out there. It would be
Speaker 1: even more difficult if we say, yeah, this AI stuff,
Speaker 1: it's not great, but it gets the job done, so
Speaker 1: let's just go with it. That would make it even harder.
Speaker 1: Musician Nick Cave knows what I'm talking about. A fan
Speaker 1: sent him an AI generated song that mimicked the musician's style.
Speaker 1: And for those of you not familiar with Nick Cave
Speaker 1: of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fame, he wrote
Speaker 1: the song Red Right Hand, which is featured heavily in
Speaker 1: the Scream franchise. It's also in a lot of other media.
Speaker 1: He's known for dark, gothic and often melodramatic ballads and
Speaker 1: other style songs. And I recommend listening to him. Depending
Speaker 1: upon your mood and the song you've picked, you'll either
Speaker 1: find him really intriguing or very very silly, or perhaps both. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Nick Cave very much did not like the AI generated piece.
Speaker 1: He said, quote songs arise out of suffering, by which
Speaker 1: I mean they are predicated upon the complex internal human
Speaker 1: struggle of creation. And well, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: algorithms don't feel end quote. He also said the song
Speaker 1: was quote a grotesque mockery of what it is to
Speaker 1: be human, and well, I don't much like it end quote.
Speaker 1: And you know, I find it difficult to disagree with him.
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty true. The song had lyrics like quote,
Speaker 1: in the depths of the night, I hear a call,
Speaker 1: a voice that echoes through the hall. It's a sirens
Speaker 1: song that pulls me in, takes me to a place
Speaker 1: where I can't begin end quote. It's not exactly meaningful.
Speaker 1: I think I mentioned in an earlier news episode that
Speaker 1: actually tried to have chat GPT create a high kup
Speaker 1: and the program produced something that's superficially looked like a hiku,
Speaker 1: but it lacked any poetic value, and further, it didn't
Speaker 1: adhere to the structure of a hiku poem. And generally
Speaker 1: that's what I found when I've used chat GPT. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I find that a little surprising, Like I would think
Speaker 1: the rules part would be something that a program would
Speaker 1: be better at handling. Clearly that's not what chat GPT
Speaker 1: was intended for, So I mean, I gotta cut it
Speaker 1: some slack in that sense. But when it comes to
Speaker 1: two works of art that have specific form and structure
Speaker 1: that you're supposed to follow, I would think computer programs
Speaker 1: would be better at doing that. It wouldn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: the stuff created would be any good, but it would
Speaker 1: at least adhere to the rules of the art form. So,
Speaker 1: for example, sonnets, that it would adhere to the number
Speaker 1: of of versus and the uh the rhythm of them
Speaker 1: and the rhyme scheme. But it doesn't. So oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of surprising to me on that. But except
Speaker 1: for the fact that I do know, chat gpt wasn't
Speaker 1: exactly designed to be a sonnet producing machine. Uh but yeah, like,
Speaker 1: we're not at the point where these programs are capable
Speaker 1: of generating artistic content that has real merit to It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean we won't get there, and doesn't mean that,
Speaker 1: you know, it can't at least mimic the lower lower
Speaker 1: forms of pop art. And I don't mean to dismiss
Speaker 1: pop art because I love a lot of pop art,
Speaker 1: but uh, it's hard to argue that certain popular songs
Speaker 1: aren't trivial and simple when they very much are. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm with Nick Cave on this one. Okay, moving
Speaker 1: away from AI, Meta is in the news again, and
Speaker 1: for once, Meta is the one doing the suing. So
Speaker 1: in this case, Meta is suing a company called Voyager Labs,
Speaker 1: and Meta says that Voyager Labs created thirty eight thousand
Speaker 1: fake accounts as part of an effort to scrape Facebook
Speaker 1: and Instagram and other social networks of user data. So
Speaker 1: Meta says that the effort pulled data from more than
Speaker 1: half a million Facebook pages and Facebook groups, including stuff
Speaker 1: like the posts people were putting onto Facebook, their photos,
Speaker 1: their friends lists, and any other information that was set
Speaker 1: to be publicly viewable. And well, people who may have
Speaker 1: set their profiles so that only their friends can view it,
Speaker 1: you have to remember they could still end up popping
Speaker 1: up in other pages. So even if you are someone
Speaker 1: who isn't on Facebook at all, some of your information
Speaker 1: maybe up there just because some friends of yours shared
Speaker 1: some stuff. So Voyager Labs is a company that's based
Speaker 1: in Israel, and it describes itself as an AI powered
Speaker 1: investigation company, and it mostly works with agencies like law
Speaker 1: enforcement or military organizations, and one of those is apparently
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles Police Department. But it's not just here
Speaker 1: in the United States. It's all around the world that
Speaker 1: this company does business. So Facebook has long maintained that
Speaker 1: scraping its sites for data violates Facebook's policies that you
Speaker 1: are not allowed to do that. You cannot create tools
Speaker 1: that are meant to go across all of Facebook and
Speaker 1: just pull down as much data as you possibly can.
Speaker 1: Only Facebook is allowed to collect personal information on that
Speaker 1: kind of scale and then exploit it. I guess what
Speaker 1: I'm saying is I'm just grouchy. I hate all this
Speaker 1: data collection stuff. It doesn't matter to me who ends
Speaker 1: up using it. I just think it's a bad thing
Speaker 1: that we've allowed to have happened in general. Uh Now, admittedly,
Speaker 1: it is way more scary when the agency that's maying
Speaker 1: use of this information is say, law enforcement or the military,
Speaker 1: because we've got very long histories of those kinds of
Speaker 1: institutions disproportionately harming specific populations. So I don't mean to
Speaker 1: diminish this. It is definitely scarier that this is being
Speaker 1: used in relation to things like law enforcement but in general,
Speaker 1: I just think this massive amount of data collection and
Speaker 1: analysis is inherently harmful, whether it's a law enforcement agency
Speaker 1: that's relying upon it, or it's the platform itself like
Speaker 1: Facebook or Instagram. Uh, it's just the older I get,
Speaker 1: the less comfortable I am that we allowed this to
Speaker 1: happen and that it has grown to the extent that
Speaker 1: it has. Okay, I don't mean to be a fear mongerer.
Speaker 1: Let's take another quick break. When we come back, we'll
Speaker 1: have some other news stories to talk about. We're back
Speaker 1: over in the UK, Parliament is drafting an amendment to
Speaker 1: the Online Safety Bill. That's a bill that's intended to
Speaker 1: mostly protect children against harmful content that is proliferated upon
Speaker 1: the Internet, and this particular amendment is likely to have
Speaker 1: tech executives sweating. So a group of lawmakers proposed an
Speaker 1: amendment last year that would seek criminal charges against tech
Speaker 1: executives who failed to protect children from harmful content on
Speaker 1: their respective platforms. So, in other words, Mark Zuckerberg could
Speaker 1: be held criminally responsible for allowing harmful material to perpetuate
Speaker 1: on Facebook, and if if the court could show that
Speaker 1: he didn't do enough to protect Chill Drin then he
Speaker 1: could face criminal charges for that in the UK. So
Speaker 1: this whole thing created kind of a lively debate within
Speaker 1: Parliament between the desire to protect children, which is obviously important,
Speaker 1: and protecting freedom of speech, which is also really important.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's why we have these concepts like safe
Speaker 1: Harbor on the Internet, where a platform is not responsible
Speaker 1: necessarily for the content that its users post to that
Speaker 1: platform because the platform didn't generate it. It's just it's
Speaker 1: just a a place where people gather. So this had
Speaker 1: kind of a struggle within Parliament, and ultimately the Prime
Speaker 1: Minister of England has indicated that what they're gonna do
Speaker 1: is they're going to create a similar amendment to the
Speaker 1: proposed one that aims for the same goal, that will
Speaker 1: hold tech executives responsible for a failure to protect children,
Speaker 1: and that will then be drafted and a amended to
Speaker 1: the Online Safety Bill. The original proposed amendment will be withdrawn.
Speaker 1: I can't pretend to fully understand the political process here,
Speaker 1: except that maybe the goal is to have a more
Speaker 1: focused amendment put in place. Anyway, this would be a
Speaker 1: really dramatic step if it does in fact go through,
Speaker 1: which it seems like that's the case, and it should
Speaker 1: really worry anyone who is a leader in a social
Speaker 1: network because it could mean that they could potentially be
Speaker 1: charged as a criminal in the UK in the future
Speaker 1: if they failed to live up to the Online Safety
Speaker 1: Bills requirements to protect children. And again I think protecting
Speaker 1: children is absolutely critical. I I I have worried about
Speaker 1: social networks effects on children, even beyond the really obvious stuff.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this is a this is a dramatic step
Speaker 1: and we'll have to see how it plays out. It
Speaker 1: also points to the kind of precarious position that the
Speaker 1: UK Prime Minister is in because his own party is
Speaker 1: not fully united. So sometimes they're going to be cases
Speaker 1: where they're going to be making some compromises that otherwise
Speaker 1: they probably wouldn't if they had a united party behind them,
Speaker 1: the Conservative Party in this case. So yeah, probably means
Speaker 1: we're gonna see some more political drama over in the
Speaker 1: UK this year. Next up, the Sony Walkman is coming
Speaker 1: back sort of, so for those of you all too
Speaker 1: young to remember, the original Walkman was a portable cassette player. Uh.
Speaker 1: It really helped promote music cassettes as being able to
Speaker 1: take your music on the go was a new thing
Speaker 1: when the Walkman first debut back in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: You know, remember we didn't have streaming services or MP
Speaker 1: three's and such. Back then, we had cassettes that stored
Speaker 1: music on magnetic tape that sometimes we get tangled up
Speaker 1: and then you'd have to use a pencil to unwind
Speaker 1: the tape. Then you'd have to untangle the tape, and
Speaker 1: then you use the pencil to wind it back up again.
Speaker 1: And we liked it anyway. The new Walkman models aren't
Speaker 1: cassette players at all. Instead, they are digital media players,
Speaker 1: kind of like a fancy version of an iPod, and
Speaker 1: Sony is positioning them as being able to provide lossless
Speaker 1: audio quality, meaning you get you know, ce D quality
Speaker 1: audio out of these babies, instead of the super compressed
Speaker 1: stuff that you would get if you were just listening
Speaker 1: to your basic streaming service. Of course, this will depend
Speaker 1: upon how the music was encoded in the first place.
Speaker 1: It can't just magically make all music sound better. And
Speaker 1: you might wonder, is this product going to do well?
Speaker 1: Will it take off? Now? I'm a little skeptical. I
Speaker 1: think most folks have proven that they value convenience more
Speaker 1: than they do quality. I include myself in this category.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously we would all love our music to
Speaker 1: sound as good as it possibly could. That I think
Speaker 1: goes beyond question, Like we could all want that. But
Speaker 1: if we're making a choice between that and being able
Speaker 1: to have our music whenever and wherever we like, we're
Speaker 1: probably gonna go with the second choice, unless you're an
Speaker 1: audio file, in which case you might just be like,
Speaker 1: I can't even I can't even stomach the thought of
Speaker 1: listening to highly compressed audio. But uh, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're headed back to an age where people rely
Speaker 1: on specific technologies to perform specific tasks. But it has
Speaker 1: been years since I've carried a dedicated digital media player
Speaker 1: because my phone can do all of that stuff. But
Speaker 1: maybe we're seeing that trend take a turn. Maybe we're
Speaker 1: going to head back to where people start to go
Speaker 1: with more simple phones and they go to dedicated digital
Speaker 1: media players and they separate out their tech. Again, that
Speaker 1: would be weird to me, but I don't understand young
Speaker 1: people anyway, So maybe this is what young people are doing.
Speaker 1: I don't get out much. Finally, tomorrow officially marks the
Speaker 1: point where Google will end Google Stadia service. Now, if
Speaker 1: you're not familiar, Stadia is, and pretty soon I'll have
Speaker 1: to say, was a cloud based streaming gaming platform with
Speaker 1: a WiFi connected controller. So subscribers could purchase this game
Speaker 1: controller and then using a compatible system like a television
Speaker 1: that has Chrome cast capabilities, they could access a selection
Speaker 1: of game titles. They could also purchase games to add
Speaker 1: to their virtual library, and then they could access that
Speaker 1: game at any time. But Stadia struggled and flailed around
Speaker 1: a bit, and Google decided to pull the plug. However,
Speaker 1: the company is doing some stuff to take a little
Speaker 1: bit of the staying out. For one thing, Google says
Speaker 1: it will release a quote self serve tool to enable
Speaker 1: Bluetooth connections on your Stadia controller end quote. So at
Speaker 1: least that means Stadia owners will be able to pair
Speaker 1: their otherwise useless controllers with other systems such as a PC,
Speaker 1: and use the Stadia controller as a standard wireless game
Speaker 1: pad kind of device. This is a pretty big deal
Speaker 1: because previously there are only two ways you could connect
Speaker 1: the Stadia to something else. You could use a physical
Speaker 1: USB cable, but you know a lot of folks hate
Speaker 1: using wired controllers, so that was a non starter for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, or you could use WiFi, but
Speaker 1: nothing else uses WiFi as a connectivity standard for game controllers,
Speaker 1: so unless you enable Bluetooth support, the controller just can't
Speaker 1: connect wirelessly to other devices magically. Anyway, it's good to
Speaker 1: hear that Google is at least making some efforts to
Speaker 1: avoid Stadia controllers. Transitioning from that thing you never used
Speaker 1: because you forgot about the nervis too e waste. It
Speaker 1: extends the useful livelihood of the hardware, and that's important.
Speaker 1: Also means that once that Bluetooth connectivity is enabled, I
Speaker 1: can use my Google Stadia controller with my computer and
Speaker 1: play games on it without having to, you know, use
Speaker 1: an Xbox controller or something like that. So I'm all
Speaker 1: for it. And that's it. That's the tech news I
Speaker 1: have for you Tuesday, January three. If you have suggestions
Speaker 1: for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: please reach out to me. You can download the I
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