Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you. It's time for some tech news that
Speaker 1: caught my eye this week. We are on February twenty third,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. Let's get to it now. Yesterday was
Speaker 1: a bit of a doozy for cellular carriers here in
Speaker 1: the United States. Disruptions and service plagued AT and T customers,
Speaker 1: and reportedly some folks who patronize other carriers had similar problems.
Speaker 1: It was a massive outage and it lasted for several hours.
Speaker 1: Those with Wi Fi capable phones could still make calls
Speaker 1: over Wi Fi networks, but once out of the electromagnetic
Speaker 1: embrace of the router, they found themselves without servants. Speculation
Speaker 1: range from a technical glitch to a possible cyber attack
Speaker 1: as being the cause of the issue. That last possibility
Speaker 1: got the authorities involved, as more than seventy thousand dollars
Speaker 1: reports flooded in from cities like Houston and Dallas and Texas,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. Out in California, Chicago and Illinois and my
Speaker 1: hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. As for those other carriers, T
Speaker 1: Mobile and Cricket Wireless reported some of their customers had
Speaker 1: also mentioned a loss of service, and curiously, it seemed
Speaker 1: to happen after those customers had tried to call AT
Speaker 1: and T customers. I should also add that Cricket Wireless
Speaker 1: actually piggybacks off of AT and t's network, so maybe
Speaker 1: it's not such a big surprise that they had some
Speaker 1: issues with their customers. The Federal Communications Commission, or FCC,
Speaker 1: has launched an investigation into the incident. The US Cybersecurity
Speaker 1: and Infrastructure Security Agency also looked into it, plus the
Speaker 1: Department of Homeland Security started to investigate it. But this morning,
Speaker 1: AT and T says the problem that came down to, quote,
Speaker 1: the application and execution of an incorrect process used as
Speaker 1: we were expanding our network end quote. That's according to
Speaker 1: an actual AT and T release. This lines up with
Speaker 1: an earlier analysis from the Cybersecurity Agency. They said that
Speaker 1: the most likely cause of the issue was a fault
Speaker 1: in a cloud computing configuration error. While it took hours
Speaker 1: to restore service to all customers, AT and T says
Speaker 1: that process is now complete so hopefully if you have
Speaker 1: AT and T you don't have any issues right now.
Speaker 1: And now a quick update on Cruise. Not Tom Cruise,
Speaker 1: but rather the autonomous taxi company that famously got in
Speaker 1: trouble when one of its vehicles struck and then dragged
Speaker 1: a pedestrian for twenty feet or so while the car
Speaker 1: was pulling over, and then allegedly Cruz was attempting to
Speaker 1: cover up the incident by not sharing their video of
Speaker 1: the actual accident. Anyway, the state of California has revoked
Speaker 1: Cruise's license from operating within that state, but the company
Speaker 1: is looking at other cities and is reportedly preparing to
Speaker 1: return to service with actual drivers in the seats as well.
Speaker 1: Spokesman Pat Morrissey said, our goal is to relaunch in
Speaker 1: one city with manually driven vehicles and supervised testing as
Speaker 1: soon as possible, once we have taken steps to rebuild
Speaker 1: trust with regulators and the public. End quote. Now. I
Speaker 1: would like to think that our trust would require a
Speaker 1: lot of work to rebuild, but I just don't know,
Speaker 1: because some folks just love them sell some technology. But
Speaker 1: then again, Cruz has to turn things around if it
Speaker 1: is to remain a viable business. Since that accident, the
Speaker 1: company has had several top leaders jump ship, and it
Speaker 1: has also downsized more than twenty percent. So they definitely
Speaker 1: need to make things start to happen, or else there's
Speaker 1: not going to be a company anymore. Google is back
Speaker 1: in the hot seat because it's newly renamed AI, which
Speaker 1: is now known as Gemini, has a tendency to go
Speaker 1: a little overboard for the sake of diversity. Now, I
Speaker 1: think most of us understand that in most contexts, diversity
Speaker 1: is important. It brings fresh perspectives and methods to bear.
Speaker 1: Generally speaking, we all benefit when we concentrate on making
Speaker 1: sure we are championing diversity. But if you wanted to
Speaker 1: create a historically accurate portrayal of a group of people,
Speaker 1: such as, oh, I don't know Nazi soldiers, you might
Speaker 1: be shocked if the AI generated image included people of
Speaker 1: color dressed in Nazi uniforms. The Nazis famously were not inclusive.
Speaker 1: This sounds a bit like Godwin's law, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the law that says any conversation on the Internet
Speaker 1: will inevitably gravitate toward Hitler as folks disagree with one another.
Speaker 1: But the genesis of the complaints gets a little bit
Speaker 1: more murky because they start in the anti diversity crowd,
Speaker 1: or folks who are kind of like white rights people,
Speaker 1: or they just are I guess they would position themselves
Speaker 1: as anti woke. But these were people who are complaining
Speaker 1: that if you asked Gemini to create images of like, say,
Speaker 1: an American woman, that it would create some images that
Speaker 1: included people of color, and maybe you'd end up with
Speaker 1: more people of color than white people. Maybe you'd even
Speaker 1: end up with a group of people and there's no
Speaker 1: white person represented in that group. This has led to
Speaker 1: some of these people arguing that Google is pushing anti
Speaker 1: white propaganda on the public, which, you know, let's be serious.
Speaker 1: I mean, the examples I've looked at at least have
Speaker 1: had white folks in those examples. It's not like they were,
Speaker 1: you know, completely left out. And goodness knows, America has
Speaker 1: a very long history of producing media that studiously ignored
Speaker 1: the fact that people who are not white also live
Speaker 1: in America. See also the sitcom Friends. You would think
Speaker 1: that New York was almost entirely white based on that show. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the Nazi thing indicates that perhaps Google has been a
Speaker 1: little heavy handed when trying to force diversity into image generation. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: there are different ways to have diversity work its way
Speaker 1: into your product, and brute force is not necessarily the
Speaker 1: best way. You can almost imagine that the algorithm has
Speaker 1: a little like switch at the end of the sequence,
Speaker 1: as is the group of people that you've created diverse
Speaker 1: if not insert people of color. Now, obviously that is
Speaker 1: not appropriate in every context, and honestly it points out
Speaker 1: that true diversity and fairness is really hard to achieve,
Speaker 1: even if we're just talking virtually. That doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: we shouldn't bust our butts to try and achieve it.
Speaker 1: And I would recommend Adam Robertson's article on the Verge
Speaker 1: titled Google apologizes for missing the mark after Gemini generated
Speaker 1: racially diverse Nazis. If you'd like to read more, it's
Speaker 1: a very good article. In other Google Gemini news, Google
Speaker 1: incorporated an AI writing generator into Google Chrome this week.
Speaker 1: Now to use this, you actually first must enable it.
Speaker 1: You have to go into settings to do this, and
Speaker 1: I did that this morning, but I haven't really had
Speaker 1: a chance to take this out for a spin to
Speaker 1: see what it's like. I'll be sure to report back
Speaker 1: once I've had some time with it. I did try
Speaker 1: the tab organizer option. There's an option that's supposed to
Speaker 1: reorganize your tab so that they make sense, but I
Speaker 1: had already kind of grouped my tabs into relevant research.
Speaker 1: So I guess there just wasn't anything left for Gemini
Speaker 1: to organize because nothing happened. But you know, it's either
Speaker 1: that or it just didn't work anyway. You can also
Speaker 1: do things like you can click within a text field online.
Speaker 1: Let's say you found an online form, like maybe you're
Speaker 1: leaving a review for a product, and you can choose
Speaker 1: help me write by right clicking, you know, write write.
Speaker 1: That will get Gemini to either write or rewrite your stuff.
Speaker 1: So maybe you want to sound particularly educated while you're
Speaker 1: writing your next review about a pair of sneakers or whatever,
Speaker 1: you can use this option. I have not tried this yet,
Speaker 1: so I don't know what it's like, but it's good
Speaker 1: to note that if you do use this feature, Google
Speaker 1: will collect some data about the whole process, like what
Speaker 1: site you're on and what you wrote or had Gemini
Speaker 1: write for you, and further this then could be reviewed
Speaker 1: by human beings further along the chain, as a way
Speaker 1: to make sure that Gemini is on track and is
Speaker 1: improving over time, So there could be human review added
Speaker 1: into this, So for the privacy minded, you might want
Speaker 1: to think twice before you activate this feature, you know,
Speaker 1: and otherwise the things you write are possibly going to
Speaker 1: be reviewed by human beings, and if you're writing stuff
Speaker 1: that you'd rather human beings not actually see, which I
Speaker 1: don't know why you'd be writing on the internet if
Speaker 1: that's the case, but maybe don't use this. The website
Speaker 1: Reddit is about to go public, so it's about to
Speaker 1: hold its initial public offering, as in, you know, become
Speaker 1: a publicly traded company. This is a really big deal
Speaker 1: for several reasons. Reddit the site that lets users create
Speaker 1: and manage pages called subreddit. It's about pretty much any
Speaker 1: topic you can imagine, and probably a few you can't.
Speaker 1: It has served as a sort of gathering ground for
Speaker 1: interesting links to all sorts of stuff online, and it's
Speaker 1: been around for years, but it has never turned a profit.
Speaker 1: In fact, it lost more than ninety million dollars last year. However,
Speaker 1: it did post a twenty one percent growth in revenue
Speaker 1: year over year, so it made more money, which meant
Speaker 1: it lost less money overall. It also recently went through
Speaker 1: a really rocky situation where the company changed its Application
Speaker 1: Programmer Interface policy or API policy, and in the process
Speaker 1: it alienated a whole bunch of its user base. You know,
Speaker 1: Reddit saw users deliberately sabotaged several popular subreddits as a
Speaker 1: result of that, and the experience left many Reddit users
Speaker 1: sour on the site. Now that being said, Reddit has
Speaker 1: offered something of an olive branch, at least to the
Speaker 1: most prolific Reddit users. They will have the chance to
Speaker 1: purchase shares and Reddit before it goes active on the
Speaker 1: stock market. That means you can potentially buy shares at
Speaker 1: a lower price than what it will be when it
Speaker 1: is trading on the stock market, though that's not a guarantee.
Speaker 1: They can be pretty exclusive, as you know insiders in
Speaker 1: this case. So there might be some prolific redditors out
Speaker 1: there who still hold a grudge against Reddit for those
Speaker 1: changes the API. But I have seen people really fall
Speaker 1: over themselves for the chance to be part of an
Speaker 1: exclusive group, even if that group isn't really impressive. So
Speaker 1: I'm guessing a lot of the folks who have the
Speaker 1: opportunity to make those purchases will in the interest of
Speaker 1: full disclosure, I'm definitively not one of those people. I
Speaker 1: use Reddit for research, but I do so pretty much
Speaker 1: only as a lurker. I think I may have posted
Speaker 1: on Reddit perhaps half a dozen times total across my
Speaker 1: entire history with the site, and it's almost always as
Speaker 1: a comment to an existing thread. But in other interesting news,
Speaker 1: Open Ai co founder and former CEO and then reinstated CEO,
Speaker 1: Sam Altman is one of the top shareholders on Reddit.
Speaker 1: He boasts an eight point seven percent share in the
Speaker 1: company that's more than twice as much as CEO Steve
Speaker 1: Huffman possesses of his own company. This means that Altman
Speaker 1: can actually outvote the CEO on shareholder matters. Altman's shares
Speaker 1: means he's the third largest shareholder overall. The company's Advance Publications,
Speaker 1: which owns Conde Nast among other things, and the Chinese
Speaker 1: company ten Cent, which owns pretty much everything, are ahead
Speaker 1: of him. Also probably not related, but Reddit has started
Speaker 1: to negotiate with AI companies to allow them to use
Speaker 1: Reddit to help train AI in return for paying a
Speaker 1: hefty amount of money. So Google recently forked over sixty
Speaker 1: million dollars and have agreed to do that per year
Speaker 1: for the privilege of using Reddit to train AI. Which
Speaker 1: is interesting that Sam Altman has such a prominent place
Speaker 1: in the shareholders and Reddit is taking money from Google,
Speaker 1: a competitor to open Ai, for this training privilege. I
Speaker 1: really wonder if open ai will have to cough up
Speaker 1: money to do the same thing. I guess we'll find out. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more news after this. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1: So Yahoo is shaking things up over at in gadget.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with the inn gadget, that's a
Speaker 1: site that reports on tech topics and offers up stuff
Speaker 1: like product reviews. The company laid off ten people in
Speaker 1: the editorial department, including top leadership positions like the editor
Speaker 1: in chief, and it also split the editorial department into
Speaker 1: two groups, so one group will focus exclusively on news
Speaker 1: and features and the other one on reviews. Reportedly, this
Speaker 1: is to realign the editorial staff in an effort to
Speaker 1: drive more traffic to the site, because more traffic means
Speaker 1: more advertising revenue. And Gadget's general manager issued a memo
Speaker 1: that said the changes will quote increase our velocity in
Speaker 1: the quote that raises huge red flags for me as
Speaker 1: someone who used to write articles for a website. Increase
Speaker 1: our velocity sounds a lot like making deadlines much tighter,
Speaker 1: requiring writers to write far more pieces per given amount
Speaker 1: of time, and giving writers less time to research and
Speaker 1: understand a topic, which makes it harder to write something
Speaker 1: that isn't just a regurgitated press release. And that doesn't
Speaker 1: really help anybody. Now. I don't have any attachment to Engadget.
Speaker 1: I don't know any people who work there or used
Speaker 1: to work there, but I really hope everyone find it, finds,
Speaker 1: you know, gainful employment. They end up in a good place,
Speaker 1: because it's a rough time to be out of work
Speaker 1: as a web based writer. Now I probably should have
Speaker 1: put this next story after the cruise story, but here
Speaker 1: we are. So. The State of California has put Alphabet's
Speaker 1: application to expand Robotaxi services in the San Francisco and
Speaker 1: Los Angeles areas until June nineteenth. The California Public Utilities
Speaker 1: Commission states that the application is suspended for further staff review. Now,
Speaker 1: this is a standard procedure if the agency does not
Speaker 1: approve an application within thirty days of it having been submitted.
Speaker 1: So it's not like this is totally unusual. It's not
Speaker 1: like it. It's definitely an indication that California is pushing
Speaker 1: back against alphabet and WEIMO. My guess is that the
Speaker 1: state of California is reevaluating their stance on autonomous vehicle
Speaker 1: operation in the wake of the cruise incident as well
Speaker 1: as other accidents involving autonomous vehicles, and that it might
Speaker 1: be a wild for it issues any approvals to expand
Speaker 1: service until the state legislation decides upon suitable rules and regulations.
Speaker 1: Go back just a couple of years, and a lot
Speaker 1: of car manufacturers boasted of plans to switch over to
Speaker 1: only making electric vehicles in the near future. Mercedes Benz,
Speaker 1: for example, said the plan was to go all EV
Speaker 1: by the year twenty thirty, but now the company is
Speaker 1: backing out of that promise. So the problem you see
Speaker 1: is that folks are not buying as many evs as
Speaker 1: the companies thought they would, and so the companies are
Speaker 1: scared that going all EV will just devastate their industry,
Speaker 1: and so companies are starting to change their tune, saying
Speaker 1: that they won't be quite as aggressive in pushing evs
Speaker 1: to the market, and that they will continue to produce
Speaker 1: gas and hybrid vehicles instead. That's a blow to environmentalists
Speaker 1: who are really hoping to see consumer transportation make a
Speaker 1: really big change. But the market dictates where these companies
Speaker 1: are going to go, and it's hard to argue that
Speaker 1: a company should produce itself out of business. That doesn't
Speaker 1: do really anyone any good. Now, one could argue that
Speaker 1: issues like vehicle costs and charging station availability are really
Speaker 1: having an impact, but in fact it's a really complex
Speaker 1: challenge and maybe it's just too complex to follow through
Speaker 1: on promises that were made just a few years ago.
Speaker 1: Blue Sky, one of the federated social platform alternatives to
Speaker 1: x slash Twitter, made a really big move this week.
Speaker 1: The company will now allow you to choose who hosts
Speaker 1: your data. So by default, blue Sky hosts all your information,
Speaker 1: but you can designate another party to host all of
Speaker 1: your data, and that includes stuff like all the stuff
Speaker 1: you post, all of your likes, all of your follows, etc.
Speaker 1: And that even includes yourself. If you want to store
Speaker 1: your data on your own server, you can do that
Speaker 1: and it doesn't have to be forever. Blue Sky structure
Speaker 1: allows you to port data from host to host, so
Speaker 1: if you change your mind, you can move your stuff.
Speaker 1: Now this is huge since most social platforms require you
Speaker 1: to host all of your information on their own servers
Speaker 1: because your data is valuable and the platform wants to
Speaker 1: leverage it. Being able to choose where it all goes
Speaker 1: gives more power to the user, and if the user
Speaker 1: determines that they're the current host is doing something shady
Speaker 1: or it's a poor steward of their information, they can
Speaker 1: change where it's stored. If you want to read more,
Speaker 1: there's a post on blue Sky. It is titled blue
Speaker 1: Sky an Open Social Web and it has all the details.
Speaker 1: Our next story is cool because it suggests we can
Speaker 1: achieve incredible boosts and processing power without having to fight
Speaker 1: against the laws of quantum mechanics to do it. A
Speaker 1: UC Riverside Associate professor named Hungwai Seng has published a
Speaker 1: paper titled Simultaneous and Heterogeneous multi Threading and it explains
Speaker 1: this concept. So basically saying points out that modern computers
Speaker 1: typically have multiple processors. You know, you might have a
Speaker 1: CPU and a GPU, you might have hardware accelerators for
Speaker 1: stuff like machine learning or AI, and all of these
Speaker 1: handle information separately, kind of like as if they are
Speaker 1: in a silo, and then information can travel from processor
Speaker 1: to processor. But this means the overall process is inefficient.
Speaker 1: So Saying In his team demonstrated that by multi threading
Speaker 1: processes across all of these different types of units, he
Speaker 1: could speed things up considerably. He nearly doubled processing speed
Speaker 1: while at the same time almost cutting the amount of
Speaker 1: energy needed to complete those processes by half. So not
Speaker 1: only does it boost computational speeds, does so in a
Speaker 1: really energy efficient way. It's pretty insane that he could
Speaker 1: get nearly double the output just by using multi threading
Speaker 1: across processors without having to do a single hardware upgrade.
Speaker 1: And this has the potential to create enormous benefits. So
Speaker 1: imagine that you were able to double the output and
Speaker 1: half the energy requirements of a data server farm for example.
Speaker 1: Like that would mean that you would need less water
Speaker 1: to cool the data farm, you would be using less
Speaker 1: energy to run it, so it'd be more cost efficient.
Speaker 1: You'd be able to double the output. That's incredible. Of course,
Speaker 1: we could probably just screw that up by doubling the
Speaker 1: number of servers we're storing in that server farm, and
Speaker 1: then we're right back to where we started. But you know,
Speaker 1: you get the point. Satan himself is actually cautioned that
Speaker 1: a lot more work has to be done to figure
Speaker 1: out when this methodology will be practical and applicable, because
Speaker 1: it might be that for some applications it's ideal, but
Speaker 1: for others we might see far less impressive gains and
Speaker 1: that it wouldn't make sense to implement it. So it
Speaker 1: is good to keep that in mind. But still pretty
Speaker 1: darn cool. Now, before I sign off, I do have
Speaker 1: an article i'd like to recommend to y'all, and this
Speaker 1: one is from Wired. It's by Lauren Good and it's
Speaker 1: titled tech Job interviews are out of Control. So the
Speaker 1: piece explores how the culture in the tech sector has
Speaker 1: changed dramatically over the last couple of years. You know,
Speaker 1: once upon a time, developers and engineers found themselves courted
Speaker 1: by headhunters and they were constantly being lured to greener
Speaker 1: pastures on a regular basis with bigger compensation packages and benefits.
Speaker 1: But now an interview process might require proving your worth
Speaker 1: by working on a project without you know, actually being
Speaker 1: an employee. So there you are doing real work for
Speaker 1: free in order to prove that you're worth high hiring,
Speaker 1: and meanwhile you're taking up time and energy you could
Speaker 1: be using to actually land a gig, which is pretty
Speaker 1: crazy stuff. But the full article goes into way more
Speaker 1: detailed it's well worth reading. As always, I have no
Speaker 1: connection to Wired or to Lauren Good. It's just a
Speaker 1: good article and I think you should check it out.
Speaker 1: That's it for the tech News for February twenty third,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. I hope you are all well. I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
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