Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland, Diamond executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech News for Thursday, July twenty twenty two, and we are going to cover a ton of news about meta slash Facebook because the company recently held an earnings call for Q two of twenty two, that's second quarter in case you're not familiar with the terminology, and it gives us more insight into the company and its priorities. Also, we've got other meta stuff that wasn't part of the earnings call, for example, and executive blogged about how the company hopes that it's totally okay to ease off on the crackdown for COVID misinformation. But we'll get to that in a bit. First up, let's talk about we learned during that earnings call, and one really big piece of news is that net income is down by thirty six percent compared to this time last year. Now that is net income, mind you. That's when you take your total revenue and you subtract costs from it. If we go by total revenue. The company is actually only down by a single percentage point compared to this time last year, so Meta brought in a little less money overall than Facebook did last year. This is fun because remember the company changed its name from Facebook to Meta in late so Q two METAe is actually Facebook. Anyway. Meta made way less profit in Q two twenty twenty two than Facebook did in Q two one, and by way less, I don't mean that Meta is, you know, strapped for cash or is in danger of going out of business. Is far from it. In Q two, the company brought in nearly seven billion dollars in profit. That is an unfathomable amount of money, at least for someone like me. I would love to fathom it, but my tax brackets like not even in the same solar system as that. Anyway. The Wall Street Journal claims that this is the first time in metas history that it actually had a drop in revenue, even though again it was just a one percent drop in revenue drop in profit year over year. The company also reported it saw a modest increase in the number of users across its platforms. Facebook the platform, their average daily users increased by three percent. Users across the company's platforms overall increased by four percent, which is better news than what Facebook reported earlier this year, when the company saw a decline in users on some of its properties. Another thing that Mark Zuckerberg revealed ring that earnings call is that your experience on Instagram, if in fact you do use Instagram, is going to change. Now. Already, MENA realize on artificial intelligence to promote content to users, content from accounts that those users don't necessarily follow, and that is not going away. In fact, it's going to increase. Zuckerberg revealed that they were essentially going to double how frequently this happens. So currently AI is responsible for recommending around of the content that shows up in your feet as you're scrolling through Instagram. Soon that's going to go up to so nearly a third. So you could think of this as like every third thing you see on Instagram will be presented to you from this AI algorithm, and you're gonna see a lot more stuff from accounts that you don't actually follow. This also means that the content that is posted by your friends and the accounts that you're actually interested in is going to get more diluted by all this other stuff And you might say, why, Well, it all comes down to money. Really, Uh, it's a continuing effort to compete against TikTok. TikTok has a recommendation engine that has proven to be incredibly effective at keeping people on the platform, and Zuckerberg says that since introducing the AI recommendations on Instagram, the company has seen engagement on the rise. And by engagement, we're really just talking about the amount of time the average user spends while on the platform. That directly ends up translating into how much AD revenue Metic can generate off each user. So Meta's goal is to coerce users into spending as much time on their platforms as is possible, and according to Zuckerberg, AI recommended content gets the job done. Oh brave new world to have such algorithms in it. Getting back to that earnings call, one thing that factored into the thirty six percent drop in net income was the cost of operating the Reality Labs division. Now that's the division within Meta that's responsible for stuff like mixed reality hardware like the the stuff that used to be Oculus essentially, and also the Metaverse R and D department. Reality Labs generated four hundred fifty two million dollars in revenue in Q two of twenty twenty two. That's actually up from the previous year. So Q two one the division brought in three hundred five million dollars, so four fifty two million dollars good, we get to see an increase. But the division overall lost two point eight billion dollars. That's up from two point four billion this time last year. That being said, in Q one of this year, the division actually lost two point nine six billion. Now last year overall, that division lost ten billion dollars for for Meta. Essentially they said they spent ten billion UM. By the way this is going, we might be looking at between eleven and twelve billion for this year. We'll have to see unless things dramatically change in the second half of the year. Uh and Meta is trying to bring the concept of the metaverse into reality, so that does require a lot of money in order to make it happen. We're also about to see some changes in Meta strategy with this division. The company is about to hike prices on the Meta quest to VR headsets, so each of those models of those headsets is about to become a hundred dollars more expensive, the prices going up by a hundred bucks for each of them. Other peripherals will also get a price hike, and you might wonder why a company is increasing prices on hardware that's it's been selling for quite some time now. It's not like this is brand new, it's not like it's a new generation. It's the hardware that the company has been selling. It's just now going to be a hundred dollars more expensive. And one reason for this is that, like much of the industry, Meta was selling hardware at a loss, or at least at a much lower price than what it could have demanded. This was in an effort to create a large install base. You want to get as many people out there as possible using the product, and we see this with video game consoles all the time. You know, video game companies like you know, Microsoft and Sony will sell their consoles for less than what it cost to make the consoles because they know they're gonna make their money back in game sales and subscription services, specifically the subscription services. That's gonna be like an ongoing theme throughout this episode, even when we get away from Meta. So you could see this as a move that Meta is going to ease off on, you know, subsidizing it's VR hardware at least to the extent that it had been uh and that some more of that expense is going to fall on customers. Related to this, the US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, has sued Meta in an effort to block a planned acquisition of a company called Within. Now. Within makes a v our workout app called Supernatural, which has a subscription revenue model, so you pay an ongoing monthly fee in order to keep using this this particular app. The FDC argues that the reportedly four million dollar deal would reduce competition in the VR fitness space, which would potentially make Meta a monopoly for that specific market. Now that sounds pretty niche to me, right. It's it sounds really kind of laser focused in a way. So I find it an interesting approach. And while I don't necessarily disagree with the FTC on this, I'm actually left to wonder if maybe this is a case where a regulatory agency is looking for footholds in order to grab opportunities to reduce the company's influence. I have no way of knowing that all of that is just wild speculation on my part, and that could be totally the furthest from the truth. But one thing that might have set off FTC is that Meta has been acquiring various VR software developer over the last few years. That includes the company Beat Games, which makes the popular VR title Beat Saber. The FDC also argues that Met up, you know if they own both Beat Games and Within. If they own both of those companies, those two companies will have no incentive to innovate because their main competitor is no longer a competitor. They both belong to Meta. That's the argument is that you know, identifying Beat Games and Within as being chief competitors in the space, and when you have a lack of competition, there's typically a lack of innovation. There's no reason to innovate. You don't need to because you've already got all the players. So why spend the resources to innovate if there's no competition? Uh, and that this ultimately hurts consumers, and it's an interesting take. We'll have to see if it's successful or if Meta will continue its trend of gobbling up other companies in an effort to achieve corporate goals. Meanwhile, as Meta tries to the biggest Fish is also looking to reduce employee head count so the company can buy other companies, but it can't afford to pay the folks who do its work, which is interesting, I can't afford them being snarky here, Zuckerberg says he expects to do more with less, potentially reducing head count by as much as ten percent by the end of the year. According to inCider, the process has already started. The company has been slowing down headcount growth also known as hiring, across pretty much all of its departments. That's going to continue, and then some teams within the company will, in Zuckerberg's own words, quote, shrink so we can shift energy to other areas inside the company end quote. He said that work at METTA will require more intensity with fewer resources, and that he kind of sees this as a trial by fire situation in which the company will emerge stronger on the other side. This echoes things that we've heard Zuckerberg say before, like he essentially said there are people who work at Facebook who probably shouldn't be working there, and that this process is in part a way to shake the tree pretty hard. So that the folks who shouldn't be there will fall out of it. That's weird analogy for me to use, but I think it's accurate and Gali, we're still going with a meta stories here. So next up, The Verge managed to get a recording of an internal company meeting at Meta in which Zuckerberg named Apple as a top rival when it comes to developing the metaverse. Zuckerberg argued that Apple's approach would be to create a closed off ecosystem, and yeah, that's pretty much in line with Apple's m O. All you have to do is look at how the company has traditionally handled everything from the Macintosh platform to iOS devices to see that Apple is all about creating uh an entire ecosystem, a foundation, and then maintaining tight control and influence over whatever is built on top of that foundation. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If it's done well. It can help ensure that the content and services that are created to be on top of that platform all meet certain standards. But this also makes Apple the final arbiter and also the fee collector. That's something that has left Apple in the target sites of various regulatory agencies around the world. So in this Meta internal meeting, Zuckerberg said that Meta's approach would be a little more open than Apple's. Uh. He also argued that Apple is a company that counts on profit from hardware sales, at least to a point. I would actually argue that Tim Cook has really been guiding Apple to lean much harder into becoming a services company and less of being a hardware company in recent years. But Zuckerberg's point was that, you know, Apple sells iPhones at really high prices. They're not like marking down the cost or the price rather of these devices and selling them at cost or even lower than at cost to customers, whereas Facebook had been doing that at least with things like mixed reality headwear. Even with the recent news of the price hike, my guess is that the hardware that there, you know, the price that they're selling the hardware at is probably still pretty close to at cost for the company. So he said, you know, that's a totally different approach. We are trying to create an enormous user base, and then we will really rely on services to generate revenue, which ultimately, again I think takes it right back to Apple's own strategy. It's just that Apple is kind of transitioning from being so so much hardware focused to being services focused, and Meta in this case is looking at just going services focused from the get go. But I would argue that they really aren't that different in the long run. All Right, last Meta story for today, and then we're gonna move on to other stuff. Nick Clegg, Meta's head of global affairs, released a statement indicating that Meta is as king it's oversight board if maybe, possibly it would be okay for the company to start allowing misinformation about COVID to post on the site now that everything's fine again. But Jonathan, I hear some of you say things are most certainly not okay. Well, yeah, that's that's true. That's reality. But Meta's argument is that, you know, maybe things are okay and we're back to normal now, maybe or something. Anyway, Clegg said that what the company is considering is a major change in policy. Currently, the official policy at Meta is that the company will prevent or remove posts that promote COVID misinformation in an effort to protect users. Now, some people argue that this infringes upon free speech. I would counter that argument by saying, free speech has never been entirely free. There have always been limitations in place. Namely, if the speech were to cause harm to others, it is not protect it as free speech. Anyway, Meta would like to change this policy they have been using so that the company could maybe go back to perhaps pushing misinformation posts lower in priority for its recommendation algorithms, so in other words, it would still allow the posts to post, but they wouldn't spread as far in theory, and they would have less reach, and maybe also to include labeling them as potentially including misinformation rather than just outright banning the post entirely. And The Guardian and several other news outlets have all kind of positive that since the oversight boards recommendations are not mandatory, like Meta is under no obligation to actually enact any suggestion the oversight board makes. They're more like advisors in this In this capacity, this could be a case where Meta actually already has a plan in place of what it is going to do, like it they've already decided, but that the company is trying to use the oversight board to kind of shoulder some of the responsibility for that decision so that all the hate doesn't hit Meta itself. In other words, Meta is probably going to ease off on how it police has misinformation because there's way more money. If it allows misinformation to proliferate on the platform, it just gets more engagement, and that means more money, and the company loves that money, especially since you know, in the last couple of quarters things have been a little more shaky and they really need to reassure stakeholders shareholders that the company is is heading in a strong financial direction. Uh, but you know, the company who still would really like someone else to kind of take at least some of the heat for that decision. So if the oversight board says, yeah, you know, this is a reasonable thing for you to to switch gears because how things have changed in the world, you don't need to ban everything, well, then the oversight board can take some of the heat for that decision one that I think again that Meta has already made so it it becomes theater. In other words, now the oversight board has actually opened this matter up to public comment, which I suspect will be very active, and I can't predict what the board will conclude. I just feel fairly sure that no matter what the board says, Meta is heading to a future where it will not be taking a hardline stance against misinformation as it had been forced to do in the recent past. All Right, we've got a lot more news today. Before we get any of that, let's take a quick break. Yesterday, which was Wednesday, July twenty two, for those of you from the future who for some reason decided to listen to a news episode of tech Stuff, Google announced several new policies that will affect developers who are creating apps for Android. Now. A lot of those policies are for small technical things. Uh. For example, they're going to be restrictions on the types of apps that will be able to access the alarm function on an Android device. So if the app doesn't fall into one of a couple of specific categories, then it should not tap into that that particular function, and any app that's discovered to do that that doesn't fall in those categories could be removed from Google Play. Other policies are much more sweeping, such as measures that are meant to limit the spread of misinformation through apps, also to limit things like impersonation. So this means Google is going to crack down on apps that advocate. For example, harmful health practices, conversion therapy being a big and terrible example of that. If an app is found to promote that sort of stuff that is fundamentally harmful, Google will remove it. Uh. Also, if an app actively spreads misleading claims about stuff vaccines, like if an app says this vaccine will alter your DNA, which is a false claim, Google will remove it. It's it's this is these policies are are the rules that Google establishes so that it has the authority to do things like remove apps from the play Store. Right. This is this is saying, hey, we told you what the rules were. If you don't follow them, then we get to act um. And as for impersonation, well, that actually covers a lot of ground. Like impersonation in this sense doesn't mean an app that somehow impersonates a person necessarily. Instead, it's like creating false expectations or false representations in the eyes of app users. So, as an example, it is against Google's policy now for you to design your app in such a way that it implies that you have a relationship with some other well known entity, which could be another app, it could be a famous person that could be an official organization, and yet no actual relationship really exists between the two of you. So if I were to make an app that implied that somehow the app was connected to the FBI, but that was not true, that there was no connection to the FBI, but I was claiming that, then I would be in violation of that policy and Google could remove my app from the play Store. Um Or if I made an app that just claimed to be the official app of some celebrity, let's say Tim Curry, I say it's the Tim Curry Official app, but I provide no evidence to prove that it's the Tim Curry official app, that there has been any involvement with Tim Curry or anything like that. Again, I would be violating Google's new policy. Other changes will create more positive experiences for customers, including a policy that or required developers to make it easier for users to cancel a subscription. Now this change requires developers to make cancelation settings easier to find. It has to be included in the apps account settings that cannot be obfusekated, or buried like ten menus down, and if you click on the cancel uh feature or option in that menu, then you are supposed to be taken directly to that apps cancelation process or to Google Place subscription center. If the app is using the Google architecture for that and there, you should be able to cancel your subscription. It should not set you on a wild goose chase where the whole goal again is to discourage you from canceling, not by convincing you that the services worth having, but by convincing you it's too much trouble to go through the process to actually cancel the ding dang darn thing. There are a lot of other policy changes that Google announced, including some really important ones, like restrictions on apps that have been marketed as surveillance or spying apps, like apps that are meant attract people's movements, that kind of stuff. Uh, there's a policy that now restricts developers that are using the VPN service function on Android from collecting personal user data without first giving prominent disclosure and getting consent from the users. Developers will have a thirty day grace period to make sure that their apps are conforming to these new policies before Google will start to take any action against apps that you know don't do that. The US Senate has voted in favor of a bill that will ultimately allow for subsidies, grants, and tax brakes valued at more than fifty billion dollars in an effort to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States on a grand scale. Uh, that's not to say that it doesn't happen in the US already. It does, it's just at a fraction of what it used to. So quick history lesson. We used to have a lot of silicon manufacturing here in the United States, but other regions, namely Taiwan, invested huge amounts of money to build out facilities that could make chips cheaper and at enormous manufacturing scale. Naturally, this meant that most semi conductor manufacturing would move overseas, and today the US makes up just twelve percent of the world's chip manufacturing. Taiwan is producing nearly half of all semi conductors used around the world. And it's it's even more than that when you start looking at advanced semi conductors, not just like simple ones for you know, micro controllers and stuff, but when you're looking at advanced semiconductors, Taiwan produces more than half of those and Taiwan's um relationship with China is a big cause for concern. You know, Taiwan is an island that's just off the coast of mainland China. UH. The history of these two regions is tightly intertwined. The the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China, but the Republic of China, which was in charge of the whole country up to nineteen forty nine, effectively retreated to Taiwan and still lays claim over mainland China. Mainland China is ruled by the People's Republic of China, and it lays claim over Taiwan. So you've got these two entities that simultaneously claimed that they're in charge of the other. Uh. Except that China is way bigger than Taiwan is, and there's always this concern that China might invade Taiwan or otherwise use methods to force Taiwan under Chinese rule. And if you are dependent upon semiconductor manufacturing and an economic and political adversary is in charge of the manufacturing center, that's a bad thing. It's not good for national security, it's not good for self reliance. And as we have seen with the pandemic. When there are interruptions, then there are massive disruptions across multiple industries. The semiconductor shortage has a affected everything in tech. So also there's also the concern about China and industrial espionage. This this, at least this perception, if not reality, that China is actively attempting to steal technologies from other countries, primarily the United States. So moving manufacturing back over to the United States in large amounts would help the US become more self reliant, and it would improve national security. It would improve the chances for the United States to make up some lost ground against China in high tech fields like artificial intelligence, machine learning, that sort of thing. And personally, I think that this move is well past do. The effects of the pandemic really highlighted how necessary it is to diversify your manufacturing process for things that are as critical as semiconductors. If you rely really heavily on a small number of manufacturing facilities in a particular region and that region is disprop ortunately affected by something, whether it's a pandemic or a natural disaster or a war or whatever it may be, you see where that ends up having this massive consequence for everybody else, so it's good to diversify that. However, I also think this is just the beginning of a series of investments that the United States is going to have to make into promoting semiconductor manufacturing within the country if the US expects to keep them here because other nations are doing that other than that's why. That's how Taiwan got the semiconductor industry established there in the first place. The government poured billions of dollars worth of investment into that to make it a reality. If the United States doesn't do that, other countries will, and then ultimately companies will say, hey, we have an obligation to our shareholders, and for us to do business that's profitable, we have to go overseas or else we're wasting money, and shareholders hate that, and then you start to see where we get stuck where we are now. Samsung has admitted to false advertising in Australia regarding exactly how water resistant certain Samsung Galaxy Line smartphones actually are. So the argument here is that Samsung ran some marketing campaigns, like commercials and things like that claiming that these phones are more water resistant than reality would reflect, and that if people were to actually put these phones through any kind of activities that would get them wet, they might find them turn out to be, uh, you know, inoperable. So the company copped up to the fact that between two thousand and sixteen and two thousand eighteen it exaggerated that water resistant feature on seven different smartphone models. So the Australian courts levied a fourteen million dollar fine that's Australian dollars on the company. Now, if you earned fourteen million Australian dollars upside down, you find out it's about nine point eight million US dollars. That is a big fine. But obviously for really huge companies, you know, ten million dollars US is as a relatively small expense once you get down to it. I mean, you never want to see a ten million dollar expense if you can avoid it. But it's not like this cripples Samsung. Uh. You might even argue that it might not be enough of a slap for Samsung to to purposefully avoid this kind of thing in the future. But it is good for the Australian court system to get Samsung to own up to false advertising. And my hope is that you know, I don't think this is gonna stop false advertising, but I do hope it makes people a little more critical when they evaluate products, because while companies are supposed to be fourth right when they describe what their products do, that's not always the case. And I would argue many times companies will use language lets them creatively enhance the truth. Let's say, in recent episodes about Apple's former head of industrial design, Johnny I've I mentioned that the company has long been at work designing a car, but that project has taken more time than expected because, as it turns out, that's hard to do, and there have been a lot of delays because of different things that have happened within Apple and within that project specifically. However, Apple has recently hired Luigi tera Borelli, who previously worked at a little supercar company called Lamborghini. In fact, he worked there for more than twenty years. Must have been a heck of an offer for Apple to convince tera Borelli to come over to Apple from Lamborghini. Now, Apple has still not come out and said what Tara Borelli will be doing at the company or what this project is, but the obvious conclusion is that he's going to be working on Apple's attempts to design and build its own electric vehicle. Apple's internal name for this project, which is technically still secret, it's just a very poorly kept secret, is Project Tighten. And it's been going on for at least eight years already. Now does this mean it's actually building up the traction that's going to be needed to develop an Apple electric vehicle? I don't know. It has been long in development. I don't know if it's getting any closer to becoming a reality. I don't know if Apple will ultimately kill this project before we ever get to see an actual like prototype, let alone a production model. It would be interesting. I've long been curious to see what an Apple vehicle would look like. Of course, without Johnny I've there, the design is not necessarily going to have his influence built into it, though I've did work on designs for this project while he was there. Are It's just again, they never came to fruition. We'll have to wait and see, But I am very curious. Okay, I've got some more stories to cover before we get to those, let's take another quick break. So a few weeks ago, I mentioned in a news story that BMW is testing out something in a market, not the United States, but in South Korea, in which it is turning its heated seats option into a subscription service, and how folks got upset about that because the actual electronics that are necessary to heat the seats are already in the vehicle models right like it's there, it's just waiting to be turned on. So everything you need to heat a seat is still is already installed in the car. But to access the feature, drivers in what the test market, South Korea, would first have to subscribe to a service, and only then with the vehicle actually provide heating to the seats, it's behind a paywall. In other words, this led to discussions about car options and whether or not it makes sense to charge for those kind of features up front, where you know, at the time of purchase it's built into the price tag of the vehicle, so you're buying the vehicle and all the options right then and there, or if it makes sense to go to an ongoing subscription based service. And a few news outlets like Wired and Vice are reporting the drivers are already seeking out hacks that will let them get around this lock on the feature, so bypassing the need to subscribe to BMWs services in order to get access to it. And I think we're seeing consumers draw a line between ongoing services that are largely software driven, such as a subscription to Internet radio. That's something that a lot of people feel. Okay, I understand this is an ongoing sir of this that does not exist within the vehicle I am paying for that that makes sense to be a subscription versus subscriptions that just enable functions that are already present in physical hardware. That's there seems to be like this fundamental barrier there, which I understand. I would think, Hey, if if the thing I bought can do this, but the manufacturer won't enable that function unless I cough up even more money. That's infuriating. Now, just to be fair to BMW, it does look like this subscription approach with the heated seats, it's really a pilot program. They're testing the waters of what will and won't fly in the market. I'm guessing ultimately this is going to be one that will fall into the won't fly category, but you never know. It might be that people get distracted by something else and then they're like it stinks but my seats cold, so I'm going to cough up the dough. Tesla has adjusted its free data connectivity feature, which is called Standard Connectivity. That's a feature that provides basic connectivity features like Bluetooth streaming for your music and some basic navigation services. Well, now if you own a Tesla vehicle after eight years, that free service expires and you will have to subscribe to premium service Premium Connectivity, or you're gonna lose those functions completely. Now, some Tesla owners might not be too concerned about that because maybe they plan to trade their vehicle before they get to owning it for eight years. But it's definitely gonna have an impact on some Tesla drivers as well as second hand buyers. Like if you buy a four year old Tesla, then you're gonna only have four more years of this basic connectivity, the standard connectivity available to you, and then after eight years, you'll be prompted to subscribe to a premium connectivity service which costs ten dollars a month or if paid, and really, according to the Verge, even accessing FM radio could be behind a paywall. Now, I don't see this as quite as egregious a move as the BMW story, but it is another example of how car companies are shifting toward more subscription services just like everybody else, you know, just like Tim Cook is doing with Apple. We're seeing car companies say, you know what model works, the services model. Let's push even harder toward that. So, yeah, it just seems like that's where everyone's going, just like with video games a few years ago, where lootboxes were the way to go. Uh and after some some lashing out by various regulatory agencies around the world, we've seen that ease off a little bit. But you know, now we're seeing this services model throughout a lot of tech companies. Here's some intriguing news out of Columbia University's AI program. So, in a project, researchers set up an AI so that it would be able to observe physical phenomena through a video feed. And then the AI was meant to suss out what was the minimal set of fundamental variables that would describe and enable the physical phenomena. So, in other words, based upon what you saw, what are the variables that determine how this plays out? And this reminds me a little bit of an experiment back in two thousand nine at Cornell, which in fact included some of the same people working on this project, And that was when we heard about the computer program that was able to deduce the natural laws of physics by observing physical phenomena, namely the swinging of a pendulum, but only because it also had certain variables that were identified in advance, so it didn't have to figure that stuff out on its own. This new approach is about figuring out those variables themselves. So one experiment used a double pendulum, which you know, based upon our understanding of physics tells us has four state variables. So this pendulum is a double armed structure, and the four variables that we know are important to determine the activity of the pendulum are the angle of each arm as well as the angular velocity of each arm. So that's the four you know, angle of arm one, angle of arm two, angular velocity of arm one, angular velocity of arm two. Now, the AI observed the swinging arms with any quote unquote knowledge of those variables and attempted to suss out what, you know, how many variables determine the movements, and they came up with four point seven and the team said, well, that's close. It's not exactly what we have, but it's close. It's also weird to have points seven of a variable. But then the team had to try and figure out what variables did the AI program identified, Like what what were those variables? Because that's not easily understood. The AI has no way of communicating that to the team, so they had to review the data that the AI had generated and had analyzed and determined that two of the variables the AI identified were in fact the angles of the arms of the double pendulum, so that correlates with what we understand, but no matter what, they could not figure out what the other two variables were. So what what did the AI figure out? Was also determining the movement of this double pendulum, So the AI was able to identify some variables that determine how this thing operates. We're able to identify variables that determine how this thing operates, and we both end up with similar answers for how it operates, but we're using different variables in order to describe it. And that is intriguing because it raises questions about if there are different ways to describe how things work. That are equally valid, but on a fundamental level, they are different. They include different variables. It's kind of mind blowing when you think of it that way. The team also discovered that if they repeated the experiment by turning off the system and restarting its essentially making the AI learn all over again, it would still come up with the same number of variables, but the specific variables were different each time. So yes, it would still say, oh, there's like four point seven variables that determine how this moves, but the specific variables were different from the time that it ran previously. So it's saying it's it behaves this way because of these four things. But those four things changed every single time it was run, which is crazy. Uh, Now, why would you want something to be able to identify variables in the first place. When you start looking at very complex systems where you have, you know, dozens of variables at play, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict how those systems are going to behave over any given amount of time. Easiest example I can give you is weather forecasts. You know, weather forecasts take a lot of variables into account, but not all of them. Right, there are probably variables that we have yet to identify that are important in the formation of weather systems. And that's why when you look at a weather forecast, you cannot be certain that what has been forecast is actually going to happen. So creating ways of identifying variables is is a step toward being able to have a deeper understanding of these kinds of complex systems. That is, if we don't also discover that every system can be described by you know, X number of variables uh in x different configurations, Because then you start getting to a point where you're saying, well, does anything mean anything anymore? But I'll leave that to people who are way, way, way smarter than I am to figure out. The journal the Royal Society Open Science, which is a peer reviewed scientific journal. It's published by the Royal Society, has some news that probably has gamers happy. Namely, the journal published research saying there has been no causal link found between playing video games and poor mental health. Now there is a caveat here. The caveat is as long as the gamer in question is playing because they want to play, and they're not playing because they feel they have to play, there's no negative impact on mental health. So by that you might say that professional streamers and pro gamers could experience mental health issues that are related to gaming because they're obligated to play. It's part of their job. If they aren't producing content, or if they're not training for the next professional tournament, then their income can be affected. But if you're a gamer who just likes to settle in for a nice, friendly evening of being called horrible things as you play war Zone, good news. It's not bad for your mental health the gaming bed anyway. The abuse is a different story. This research, by the way, is based off a survey. That's important to note because, i mean, let's face it, it's challenging to develop a survey that produces scientifically reliable results because you can't really control for all the variables, and it's hard to ask questions in a way that doesn't lead people to specific answers. So that's another caveat we should throw in here, is that this is based off a survey. But still it seems like it's pretty good news for gamers. And finally, Bloomberg reports that rock stars next title in the Grand Theft Auto series will feature a pair of protagonists, and one of them for the first time in the game's history since it switched away from being an overhead view video game is going to be female, so gamers will be able to play as a female protagonist in the main campaign of g t A six for the first time since it went to a three D perspective. Now I should add that you can create female characters for the online multiplayer version of Grand Theft Auto, but that's different from the campaign, which you know, features characters that have prescripted responses to things. Right, you're playing out a story in the single player experience as opposed to having an online multiplayer experience. So in addition to that news, Bloomberg also revealed that rock Star plans to introduce cities to the campaign over time, meaning they will release content over time and the initially when the game launches, it will focus on a single main city. It's rumored to be rock Stars version of Miami, which is known as Vice City. And this kind of reminds me of how some other games have been releasing content to players like I. I I think of things like the Telltale games, which would release in chapters. You get a new chapter every so often, and then you could play through and then you had to wait for the next one or the recent Hitman series where you would have levels released over time, and that approach has several benefits. For one, it keeps gamers engaged with the title, and since more and more games are launching with ways to generate ongoing revenue, either with in game purchases or online components are both, keeping your player base around is important for the bottom line. It's a long tail revenue generation model. For another, it gives development teams the opportunity to dedicate more time and hopefully avoid too much crunch time before they release a product. They don't have to release the game with every single city built out. They can focus on one part, get that part of the game out, and then transition to working on the next bit, so the game scale can still be huge, it just is accessible gradually. As for when we can expect a release of g t A six, that's still up in the air. Analysts are saying it's probably going to be at least two years from now, and that's mostly due to disruption that's happened within Rockstar and internal issues that have caused delays in production. Now. I don't want to suggest that that disruption was necessarily bad because from what I understand, it sounds like a lot of the reason for the delays are connected to a genuine effort to overhaul the corporate culture at rock Star and to eliminate negative working conditions, So everything from making sure that the company is treating employees in a more equitable way to making sure that they're not working people to death by trying to hit some some release date that is more or less arbitrary and doesn't take into account the amount of work that still needs to be done in order for a game to go out and not be broken. That's another thing that I think a lot of gamers are are frustrated with, is this tendency for games to be released only to be broken in some way and require you know, some some sort of uh uh work in order to make them play a bowl. Um. But the flip side of that is delaying the release. Gamers don't tend to like that either. Gamers are hard to satisfy. My suggestion for any game developers out there, don't announce the release date of your game. In fact, don't even talk about your game until it's ready to go gold, and that will do you the best at avoiding this issue. Also, it really excites gamers when they find out about a game for the first time and then they're told, hey, by the way, this is available today. They lose their their minds over that kind of stuff. So that's my advice to game developers, who probably know all too well about this stuff. Anyway, that's it for the news for Thursday July two thousand twenty two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. One way to do that is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download. You can navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app and you can leave a little voice message. You click on the microphone icon leaves up to a thirty second message there for me, Or you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland, Diamond executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech News for Thursday, July twenty twenty two, and we are going to cover a ton of news about meta slash Facebook because the company recently held an earnings call for Q two of twenty two, that's second quarter in case you're not familiar with the terminology, and it gives us more insight into the company and its priorities. Also, we've got other meta stuff that wasn't part of the earnings call, for example, and executive blogged about how the company hopes that it's totally okay to ease off on the crackdown for COVID misinformation. But we'll get to that in a bit. First up, let's talk about we learned during that earnings call, and one really big piece of news is that net income is down by thirty six percent compared to this time last year. Now that is net income, mind you. That's when you take your total revenue and you subtract costs from it. If we go by total revenue. The company is actually only down by a single percentage point compared to this time last year, so Meta brought in a little less money overall than Facebook did last year. This is fun because remember the company changed its name from Facebook to Meta in late so Q two METAe is actually Facebook. Anyway. Meta made way less profit in Q two twenty twenty two than Facebook did in Q two one, and by way less, I don't mean that Meta is, you know, strapped for cash or is in danger of going out of business. Is far from it. In Q two, the company brought in nearly seven billion dollars in profit. That is an unfathomable amount of money, at least for someone like me. I would love to fathom it, but my tax brackets like not even in the same solar system as that. Anyway. The Wall Street Journal claims that this is the first time in metas history that it actually had a drop in revenue, even though again it was just a one percent drop in revenue drop in profit year over year. The company also reported it saw a modest increase in the number of users across its platforms. Facebook the platform, their average daily users increased by three percent. Users across the company's platforms overall increased by four percent, which is better news than what Facebook reported earlier this year, when the company saw a decline in users on some of its properties. Another thing that Mark Zuckerberg revealed ring that earnings call is that your experience on Instagram, if in fact you do use Instagram, is going to change. Now. Already, MENA realize on artificial intelligence to promote content to users, content from accounts that those users don't necessarily follow, and that is not going away. In fact, it's going to increase. Zuckerberg revealed that they were essentially going to double how frequently this happens. So currently AI is responsible for recommending around of the content that shows up in your feet as you're scrolling through Instagram. Soon that's going to go up to so nearly a third. So you could think of this as like every third thing you see on Instagram will be presented to you from this AI algorithm, and you're gonna see a lot more stuff from accounts that you don't actually follow. This also means that the content that is posted by your friends and the accounts that you're actually interested in is going to get more diluted by all this other stuff And you might say, why, Well, it all comes down to money. Really, Uh, it's a continuing effort to compete against TikTok. TikTok has a recommendation engine that has proven to be incredibly effective at keeping people on the platform, and Zuckerberg says that since introducing the AI recommendations on Instagram, the company has seen engagement on the rise. And by engagement, we're really just talking about the amount of time the average user spends while on the platform. That directly ends up translating into how much AD revenue Metic can generate off each user. So Meta's goal is to coerce users into spending as much time on their platforms as is possible, and according to Zuckerberg, AI recommended content gets the job done. Oh brave new world to have such algorithms in it. Getting back to that earnings call, one thing that factored into the thirty six percent drop in net income was the cost of operating the Reality Labs division. Now that's the division within Meta that's responsible for stuff like mixed reality hardware like the the stuff that used to be Oculus essentially, and also the Metaverse R and D department. Reality Labs generated four hundred fifty two million dollars in revenue in Q two of twenty twenty two. That's actually up from the previous year. So Q two one the division brought in three hundred five million dollars, so four fifty two million dollars good, we get to see an increase. But the division overall lost two point eight billion dollars. That's up from two point four billion this time last year. That being said, in Q one of this year, the division actually lost two point nine six billion. Now last year overall, that division lost ten billion dollars for for Meta. Essentially they said they spent ten billion UM. By the way this is going, we might be looking at between eleven and twelve billion for this year. We'll have to see unless things dramatically change in the second half of the year. Uh and Meta is trying to bring the concept of the metaverse into reality, so that does require a lot of money in order to make it happen. We're also about to see some changes in Meta strategy with this division. The company is about to hike prices on the Meta quest to VR headsets, so each of those models of those headsets is about to become a hundred dollars more expensive, the prices going up by a hundred bucks for each of them. Other peripherals will also get a price hike, and you might wonder why a company is increasing prices on hardware that's it's been selling for quite some time now. It's not like this is brand new, it's not like it's a new generation. It's the hardware that the company has been selling. It's just now going to be a hundred dollars more expensive. And one reason for this is that, like much of the industry, Meta was selling hardware at a loss, or at least at a much lower price than what it could have demanded. This was in an effort to create a large install base. You want to get as many people out there as possible using the product, and we see this with video game consoles all the time. You know, video game companies like you know, Microsoft and Sony will sell their consoles for less than what it cost to make the consoles because they know they're gonna make their money back in game sales and subscription services, specifically the subscription services. That's gonna be like an ongoing theme throughout this episode, even when we get away from Meta. So you could see this as a move that Meta is going to ease off on, you know, subsidizing it's VR hardware at least to the extent that it had been uh and that some more of that expense is going to fall on customers. Related to this, the US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, has sued Meta in an effort to block a planned acquisition of a company called Within. Now. Within makes a v our workout app called Supernatural, which has a subscription revenue model, so you pay an ongoing monthly fee in order to keep using this this particular app. The FDC argues that the reportedly four million dollar deal would reduce competition in the VR fitness space, which would potentially make Meta a monopoly for that specific market. Now that sounds pretty niche to me, right. It's it sounds really kind of laser focused in a way. So I find it an interesting approach. And while I don't necessarily disagree with the FTC on this, I'm actually left to wonder if maybe this is a case where a regulatory agency is looking for footholds in order to grab opportunities to reduce the company's influence. I have no way of knowing that all of that is just wild speculation on my part, and that could be totally the furthest from the truth. But one thing that might have set off FTC is that Meta has been acquiring various VR software developer over the last few years. That includes the company Beat Games, which makes the popular VR title Beat Saber. The FDC also argues that Met up, you know if they own both Beat Games and Within. If they own both of those companies, those two companies will have no incentive to innovate because their main competitor is no longer a competitor. They both belong to Meta. That's the argument is that you know, identifying Beat Games and Within as being chief competitors in the space, and when you have a lack of competition, there's typically a lack of innovation. There's no reason to innovate. You don't need to because you've already got all the players. So why spend the resources to innovate if there's no competition? Uh, and that this ultimately hurts consumers, and it's an interesting take. We'll have to see if it's successful or if Meta will continue its trend of gobbling up other companies in an effort to achieve corporate goals. Meanwhile, as Meta tries to the biggest Fish is also looking to reduce employee head count so the company can buy other companies, but it can't afford to pay the folks who do its work, which is interesting, I can't afford them being snarky here, Zuckerberg says he expects to do more with less, potentially reducing head count by as much as ten percent by the end of the year. According to inCider, the process has already started. The company has been slowing down headcount growth also known as hiring, across pretty much all of its departments. That's going to continue, and then some teams within the company will, in Zuckerberg's own words, quote, shrink so we can shift energy to other areas inside the company end quote. He said that work at METTA will require more intensity with fewer resources, and that he kind of sees this as a trial by fire situation in which the company will emerge stronger on the other side. This echoes things that we've heard Zuckerberg say before, like he essentially said there are people who work at Facebook who probably shouldn't be working there, and that this process is in part a way to shake the tree pretty hard. So that the folks who shouldn't be there will fall out of it. That's weird analogy for me to use, but I think it's accurate and Gali, we're still going with a meta stories here. So next up, The Verge managed to get a recording of an internal company meeting at Meta in which Zuckerberg named Apple as a top rival when it comes to developing the metaverse. Zuckerberg argued that Apple's approach would be to create a closed off ecosystem, and yeah, that's pretty much in line with Apple's m O. All you have to do is look at how the company has traditionally handled everything from the Macintosh platform to iOS devices to see that Apple is all about creating uh an entire ecosystem, a foundation, and then maintaining tight control and influence over whatever is built on top of that foundation. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If it's done well. It can help ensure that the content and services that are created to be on top of that platform all meet certain standards. But this also makes Apple the final arbiter and also the fee collector. That's something that has left Apple in the target sites of various regulatory agencies around the world. So in this Meta internal meeting, Zuckerberg said that Meta's approach would be a little more open than Apple's. Uh. He also argued that Apple is a company that counts on profit from hardware sales, at least to a point. I would actually argue that Tim Cook has really been guiding Apple to lean much harder into becoming a services company and less of being a hardware company in recent years. But Zuckerberg's point was that, you know, Apple sells iPhones at really high prices. They're not like marking down the cost or the price rather of these devices and selling them at cost or even lower than at cost to customers, whereas Facebook had been doing that at least with things like mixed reality headwear. Even with the recent news of the price hike, my guess is that the hardware that there, you know, the price that they're selling the hardware at is probably still pretty close to at cost for the company. So he said, you know, that's a totally different approach. We are trying to create an enormous user base, and then we will really rely on services to generate revenue, which ultimately, again I think takes it right back to Apple's own strategy. It's just that Apple is kind of transitioning from being so so much hardware focused to being services focused, and Meta in this case is looking at just going services focused from the get go. But I would argue that they really aren't that different in the long run. All Right, last Meta story for today, and then we're gonna move on to other stuff. Nick Clegg, Meta's head of global affairs, released a statement indicating that Meta is as king it's oversight board if maybe, possibly it would be okay for the company to start allowing misinformation about COVID to post on the site now that everything's fine again. But Jonathan, I hear some of you say things are most certainly not okay. Well, yeah, that's that's true. That's reality. But Meta's argument is that, you know, maybe things are okay and we're back to normal now, maybe or something. Anyway, Clegg said that what the company is considering is a major change in policy. Currently, the official policy at Meta is that the company will prevent or remove posts that promote COVID misinformation in an effort to protect users. Now, some people argue that this infringes upon free speech. I would counter that argument by saying, free speech has never been entirely free. There have always been limitations in place. Namely, if the speech were to cause harm to others, it is not protect it as free speech. Anyway, Meta would like to change this policy they have been using so that the company could maybe go back to perhaps pushing misinformation posts lower in priority for its recommendation algorithms, so in other words, it would still allow the posts to post, but they wouldn't spread as far in theory, and they would have less reach, and maybe also to include labeling them as potentially including misinformation rather than just outright banning the post entirely. And The Guardian and several other news outlets have all kind of positive that since the oversight boards recommendations are not mandatory, like Meta is under no obligation to actually enact any suggestion the oversight board makes. They're more like advisors in this In this capacity, this could be a case where Meta actually already has a plan in place of what it is going to do, like it they've already decided, but that the company is trying to use the oversight board to kind of shoulder some of the responsibility for that decision so that all the hate doesn't hit Meta itself. In other words, Meta is probably going to ease off on how it police has misinformation because there's way more money. If it allows misinformation to proliferate on the platform, it just gets more engagement, and that means more money, and the company loves that money, especially since you know, in the last couple of quarters things have been a little more shaky and they really need to reassure stakeholders shareholders that the company is is heading in a strong financial direction. Uh, but you know, the company who still would really like someone else to kind of take at least some of the heat for that decision. So if the oversight board says, yeah, you know, this is a reasonable thing for you to to switch gears because how things have changed in the world, you don't need to ban everything, well, then the oversight board can take some of the heat for that decision one that I think again that Meta has already made so it it becomes theater. In other words, now the oversight board has actually opened this matter up to public comment, which I suspect will be very active, and I can't predict what the board will conclude. I just feel fairly sure that no matter what the board says, Meta is heading to a future where it will not be taking a hardline stance against misinformation as it had been forced to do in the recent past. All Right, we've got a lot more news today. Before we get any of that, let's take a quick break. Yesterday, which was Wednesday, July twenty two, for those of you from the future who for some reason decided to listen to a news episode of tech Stuff, Google announced several new policies that will affect developers who are creating apps for Android. Now. A lot of those policies are for small technical things. Uh. For example, they're going to be restrictions on the types of apps that will be able to access the alarm function on an Android device. So if the app doesn't fall into one of a couple of specific categories, then it should not tap into that that particular function, and any app that's discovered to do that that doesn't fall in those categories could be removed from Google Play. Other policies are much more sweeping, such as measures that are meant to limit the spread of misinformation through apps, also to limit things like impersonation. So this means Google is going to crack down on apps that advocate. For example, harmful health practices, conversion therapy being a big and terrible example of that. If an app is found to promote that sort of stuff that is fundamentally harmful, Google will remove it. Uh. Also, if an app actively spreads misleading claims about stuff vaccines, like if an app says this vaccine will alter your DNA, which is a false claim, Google will remove it. It's it's this is these policies are are the rules that Google establishes so that it has the authority to do things like remove apps from the play Store. Right. This is this is saying, hey, we told you what the rules were. If you don't follow them, then we get to act um. And as for impersonation, well, that actually covers a lot of ground. Like impersonation in this sense doesn't mean an app that somehow impersonates a person necessarily. Instead, it's like creating false expectations or false representations in the eyes of app users. So, as an example, it is against Google's policy now for you to design your app in such a way that it implies that you have a relationship with some other well known entity, which could be another app, it could be a famous person that could be an official organization, and yet no actual relationship really exists between the two of you. So if I were to make an app that implied that somehow the app was connected to the FBI, but that was not true, that there was no connection to the FBI, but I was claiming that, then I would be in violation of that policy and Google could remove my app from the play Store. Um Or if I made an app that just claimed to be the official app of some celebrity, let's say Tim Curry, I say it's the Tim Curry Official app, but I provide no evidence to prove that it's the Tim Curry official app, that there has been any involvement with Tim Curry or anything like that. Again, I would be violating Google's new policy. Other changes will create more positive experiences for customers, including a policy that or required developers to make it easier for users to cancel a subscription. Now this change requires developers to make cancelation settings easier to find. It has to be included in the apps account settings that cannot be obfusekated, or buried like ten menus down, and if you click on the cancel uh feature or option in that menu, then you are supposed to be taken directly to that apps cancelation process or to Google Place subscription center. If the app is using the Google architecture for that and there, you should be able to cancel your subscription. It should not set you on a wild goose chase where the whole goal again is to discourage you from canceling, not by convincing you that the services worth having, but by convincing you it's too much trouble to go through the process to actually cancel the ding dang darn thing. There are a lot of other policy changes that Google announced, including some really important ones, like restrictions on apps that have been marketed as surveillance or spying apps, like apps that are meant attract people's movements, that kind of stuff. Uh, there's a policy that now restricts developers that are using the VPN service function on Android from collecting personal user data without first giving prominent disclosure and getting consent from the users. Developers will have a thirty day grace period to make sure that their apps are conforming to these new policies before Google will start to take any action against apps that you know don't do that. The US Senate has voted in favor of a bill that will ultimately allow for subsidies, grants, and tax brakes valued at more than fifty billion dollars in an effort to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States on a grand scale. Uh, that's not to say that it doesn't happen in the US already. It does, it's just at a fraction of what it used to. So quick history lesson. We used to have a lot of silicon manufacturing here in the United States, but other regions, namely Taiwan, invested huge amounts of money to build out facilities that could make chips cheaper and at enormous manufacturing scale. Naturally, this meant that most semi conductor manufacturing would move overseas, and today the US makes up just twelve percent of the world's chip manufacturing. Taiwan is producing nearly half of all semi conductors used around the world. And it's it's even more than that when you start looking at advanced semi conductors, not just like simple ones for you know, micro controllers and stuff, but when you're looking at advanced semiconductors, Taiwan produces more than half of those and Taiwan's um relationship with China is a big cause for concern. You know, Taiwan is an island that's just off the coast of mainland China. UH. The history of these two regions is tightly intertwined. The the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China, but the Republic of China, which was in charge of the whole country up to nineteen forty nine, effectively retreated to Taiwan and still lays claim over mainland China. Mainland China is ruled by the People's Republic of China, and it lays claim over Taiwan. So you've got these two entities that simultaneously claimed that they're in charge of the other. Uh. Except that China is way bigger than Taiwan is, and there's always this concern that China might invade Taiwan or otherwise use methods to force Taiwan under Chinese rule. And if you are dependent upon semiconductor manufacturing and an economic and political adversary is in charge of the manufacturing center, that's a bad thing. It's not good for national security, it's not good for self reliance. And as we have seen with the pandemic. When there are interruptions, then there are massive disruptions across multiple industries. The semiconductor shortage has a affected everything in tech. So also there's also the concern about China and industrial espionage. This this, at least this perception, if not reality, that China is actively attempting to steal technologies from other countries, primarily the United States. So moving manufacturing back over to the United States in large amounts would help the US become more self reliant, and it would improve national security. It would improve the chances for the United States to make up some lost ground against China in high tech fields like artificial intelligence, machine learning, that sort of thing. And personally, I think that this move is well past do. The effects of the pandemic really highlighted how necessary it is to diversify your manufacturing process for things that are as critical as semiconductors. If you rely really heavily on a small number of manufacturing facilities in a particular region and that region is disprop ortunately affected by something, whether it's a pandemic or a natural disaster or a war or whatever it may be, you see where that ends up having this massive consequence for everybody else, so it's good to diversify that. However, I also think this is just the beginning of a series of investments that the United States is going to have to make into promoting semiconductor manufacturing within the country if the US expects to keep them here because other nations are doing that other than that's why. That's how Taiwan got the semiconductor industry established there in the first place. The government poured billions of dollars worth of investment into that to make it a reality. If the United States doesn't do that, other countries will, and then ultimately companies will say, hey, we have an obligation to our shareholders, and for us to do business that's profitable, we have to go overseas or else we're wasting money, and shareholders hate that, and then you start to see where we get stuck where we are now. Samsung has admitted to false advertising in Australia regarding exactly how water resistant certain Samsung Galaxy Line smartphones actually are. So the argument here is that Samsung ran some marketing campaigns, like commercials and things like that claiming that these phones are more water resistant than reality would reflect, and that if people were to actually put these phones through any kind of activities that would get them wet, they might find them turn out to be, uh, you know, inoperable. So the company copped up to the fact that between two thousand and sixteen and two thousand eighteen it exaggerated that water resistant feature on seven different smartphone models. So the Australian courts levied a fourteen million dollar fine that's Australian dollars on the company. Now, if you earned fourteen million Australian dollars upside down, you find out it's about nine point eight million US dollars. That is a big fine. But obviously for really huge companies, you know, ten million dollars US is as a relatively small expense once you get down to it. I mean, you never want to see a ten million dollar expense if you can avoid it. But it's not like this cripples Samsung. Uh. You might even argue that it might not be enough of a slap for Samsung to to purposefully avoid this kind of thing in the future. But it is good for the Australian court system to get Samsung to own up to false advertising. And my hope is that you know, I don't think this is gonna stop false advertising, but I do hope it makes people a little more critical when they evaluate products, because while companies are supposed to be fourth right when they describe what their products do, that's not always the case. And I would argue many times companies will use language lets them creatively enhance the truth. Let's say, in recent episodes about Apple's former head of industrial design, Johnny I've I mentioned that the company has long been at work designing a car, but that project has taken more time than expected because, as it turns out, that's hard to do, and there have been a lot of delays because of different things that have happened within Apple and within that project specifically. However, Apple has recently hired Luigi tera Borelli, who previously worked at a little supercar company called Lamborghini. In fact, he worked there for more than twenty years. Must have been a heck of an offer for Apple to convince tera Borelli to come over to Apple from Lamborghini. Now, Apple has still not come out and said what Tara Borelli will be doing at the company or what this project is, but the obvious conclusion is that he's going to be working on Apple's attempts to design and build its own electric vehicle. Apple's internal name for this project, which is technically still secret, it's just a very poorly kept secret, is Project Tighten. And it's been going on for at least eight years already. Now does this mean it's actually building up the traction that's going to be needed to develop an Apple electric vehicle? I don't know. It has been long in development. I don't know if it's getting any closer to becoming a reality. I don't know if Apple will ultimately kill this project before we ever get to see an actual like prototype, let alone a production model. It would be interesting. I've long been curious to see what an Apple vehicle would look like. Of course, without Johnny I've there, the design is not necessarily going to have his influence built into it, though I've did work on designs for this project while he was there. Are It's just again, they never came to fruition. We'll have to wait and see, But I am very curious. Okay, I've got some more stories to cover before we get to those, let's take another quick break. So a few weeks ago, I mentioned in a news story that BMW is testing out something in a market, not the United States, but in South Korea, in which it is turning its heated seats option into a subscription service, and how folks got upset about that because the actual electronics that are necessary to heat the seats are already in the vehicle models right like it's there, it's just waiting to be turned on. So everything you need to heat a seat is still is already installed in the car. But to access the feature, drivers in what the test market, South Korea, would first have to subscribe to a service, and only then with the vehicle actually provide heating to the seats, it's behind a paywall. In other words, this led to discussions about car options and whether or not it makes sense to charge for those kind of features up front, where you know, at the time of purchase it's built into the price tag of the vehicle, so you're buying the vehicle and all the options right then and there, or if it makes sense to go to an ongoing subscription based service. And a few news outlets like Wired and Vice are reporting the drivers are already seeking out hacks that will let them get around this lock on the feature, so bypassing the need to subscribe to BMWs services in order to get access to it. And I think we're seeing consumers draw a line between ongoing services that are largely software driven, such as a subscription to Internet radio. That's something that a lot of people feel. Okay, I understand this is an ongoing sir of this that does not exist within the vehicle I am paying for that that makes sense to be a subscription versus subscriptions that just enable functions that are already present in physical hardware. That's there seems to be like this fundamental barrier there, which I understand. I would think, Hey, if if the thing I bought can do this, but the manufacturer won't enable that function unless I cough up even more money. That's infuriating. Now, just to be fair to BMW, it does look like this subscription approach with the heated seats, it's really a pilot program. They're testing the waters of what will and won't fly in the market. I'm guessing ultimately this is going to be one that will fall into the won't fly category, but you never know. It might be that people get distracted by something else and then they're like it stinks but my seats cold, so I'm going to cough up the dough. Tesla has adjusted its free data connectivity feature, which is called Standard Connectivity. That's a feature that provides basic connectivity features like Bluetooth streaming for your music and some basic navigation services. Well, now if you own a Tesla vehicle after eight years, that free service expires and you will have to subscribe to premium service Premium Connectivity, or you're gonna lose those functions completely. Now, some Tesla owners might not be too concerned about that because maybe they plan to trade their vehicle before they get to owning it for eight years. But it's definitely gonna have an impact on some Tesla drivers as well as second hand buyers. Like if you buy a four year old Tesla, then you're gonna only have four more years of this basic connectivity, the standard connectivity available to you, and then after eight years, you'll be prompted to subscribe to a premium connectivity service which costs ten dollars a month or if paid, and really, according to the Verge, even accessing FM radio could be behind a paywall. Now, I don't see this as quite as egregious a move as the BMW story, but it is another example of how car companies are shifting toward more subscription services just like everybody else, you know, just like Tim Cook is doing with Apple. We're seeing car companies say, you know what model works, the services model. Let's push even harder toward that. So, yeah, it just seems like that's where everyone's going, just like with video games a few years ago, where lootboxes were the way to go. Uh and after some some lashing out by various regulatory agencies around the world, we've seen that ease off a little bit. But you know, now we're seeing this services model throughout a lot of tech companies. Here's some intriguing news out of Columbia University's AI program. So, in a project, researchers set up an AI so that it would be able to observe physical phenomena through a video feed. And then the AI was meant to suss out what was the minimal set of fundamental variables that would describe and enable the physical phenomena. So, in other words, based upon what you saw, what are the variables that determine how this plays out? And this reminds me a little bit of an experiment back in two thousand nine at Cornell, which in fact included some of the same people working on this project, And that was when we heard about the computer program that was able to deduce the natural laws of physics by observing physical phenomena, namely the swinging of a pendulum, but only because it also had certain variables that were identified in advance, so it didn't have to figure that stuff out on its own. This new approach is about figuring out those variables themselves. So one experiment used a double pendulum, which you know, based upon our understanding of physics tells us has four state variables. So this pendulum is a double armed structure, and the four variables that we know are important to determine the activity of the pendulum are the angle of each arm as well as the angular velocity of each arm. So that's the four you know, angle of arm one, angle of arm two, angular velocity of arm one, angular velocity of arm two. Now, the AI observed the swinging arms with any quote unquote knowledge of those variables and attempted to suss out what, you know, how many variables determine the movements, and they came up with four point seven and the team said, well, that's close. It's not exactly what we have, but it's close. It's also weird to have points seven of a variable. But then the team had to try and figure out what variables did the AI program identified, Like what what were those variables? Because that's not easily understood. The AI has no way of communicating that to the team, so they had to review the data that the AI had generated and had analyzed and determined that two of the variables the AI identified were in fact the angles of the arms of the double pendulum, so that correlates with what we understand, but no matter what, they could not figure out what the other two variables were. So what what did the AI figure out? Was also determining the movement of this double pendulum, So the AI was able to identify some variables that determine how this thing operates. We're able to identify variables that determine how this thing operates, and we both end up with similar answers for how it operates, but we're using different variables in order to describe it. And that is intriguing because it raises questions about if there are different ways to describe how things work. That are equally valid, but on a fundamental level, they are different. They include different variables. It's kind of mind blowing when you think of it that way. The team also discovered that if they repeated the experiment by turning off the system and restarting its essentially making the AI learn all over again, it would still come up with the same number of variables, but the specific variables were different each time. So yes, it would still say, oh, there's like four point seven variables that determine how this moves, but the specific variables were different from the time that it ran previously. So it's saying it's it behaves this way because of these four things. But those four things changed every single time it was run, which is crazy. Uh, Now, why would you want something to be able to identify variables in the first place. When you start looking at very complex systems where you have, you know, dozens of variables at play, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict how those systems are going to behave over any given amount of time. Easiest example I can give you is weather forecasts. You know, weather forecasts take a lot of variables into account, but not all of them. Right, there are probably variables that we have yet to identify that are important in the formation of weather systems. And that's why when you look at a weather forecast, you cannot be certain that what has been forecast is actually going to happen. So creating ways of identifying variables is is a step toward being able to have a deeper understanding of these kinds of complex systems. That is, if we don't also discover that every system can be described by you know, X number of variables uh in x different configurations, Because then you start getting to a point where you're saying, well, does anything mean anything anymore? But I'll leave that to people who are way, way, way smarter than I am to figure out. The journal the Royal Society Open Science, which is a peer reviewed scientific journal. It's published by the Royal Society, has some news that probably has gamers happy. Namely, the journal published research saying there has been no causal link found between playing video games and poor mental health. Now there is a caveat here. The caveat is as long as the gamer in question is playing because they want to play, and they're not playing because they feel they have to play, there's no negative impact on mental health. So by that you might say that professional streamers and pro gamers could experience mental health issues that are related to gaming because they're obligated to play. It's part of their job. If they aren't producing content, or if they're not training for the next professional tournament, then their income can be affected. But if you're a gamer who just likes to settle in for a nice, friendly evening of being called horrible things as you play war Zone, good news. It's not bad for your mental health the gaming bed anyway. The abuse is a different story. This research, by the way, is based off a survey. That's important to note because, i mean, let's face it, it's challenging to develop a survey that produces scientifically reliable results because you can't really control for all the variables, and it's hard to ask questions in a way that doesn't lead people to specific answers. So that's another caveat we should throw in here, is that this is based off a survey. But still it seems like it's pretty good news for gamers. And finally, Bloomberg reports that rock stars next title in the Grand Theft Auto series will feature a pair of protagonists, and one of them for the first time in the game's history since it switched away from being an overhead view video game is going to be female, so gamers will be able to play as a female protagonist in the main campaign of g t A six for the first time since it went to a three D perspective. Now I should add that you can create female characters for the online multiplayer version of Grand Theft Auto, but that's different from the campaign, which you know, features characters that have prescripted responses to things. Right, you're playing out a story in the single player experience as opposed to having an online multiplayer experience. So in addition to that news, Bloomberg also revealed that rock Star plans to introduce cities to the campaign over time, meaning they will release content over time and the initially when the game launches, it will focus on a single main city. It's rumored to be rock Stars version of Miami, which is known as Vice City. And this kind of reminds me of how some other games have been releasing content to players like I. I I think of things like the Telltale games, which would release in chapters. You get a new chapter every so often, and then you could play through and then you had to wait for the next one or the recent Hitman series where you would have levels released over time, and that approach has several benefits. For one, it keeps gamers engaged with the title, and since more and more games are launching with ways to generate ongoing revenue, either with in game purchases or online components are both, keeping your player base around is important for the bottom line. It's a long tail revenue generation model. For another, it gives development teams the opportunity to dedicate more time and hopefully avoid too much crunch time before they release a product. They don't have to release the game with every single city built out. They can focus on one part, get that part of the game out, and then transition to working on the next bit, so the game scale can still be huge, it just is accessible gradually. As for when we can expect a release of g t A six, that's still up in the air. Analysts are saying it's probably going to be at least two years from now, and that's mostly due to disruption that's happened within Rockstar and internal issues that have caused delays in production. Now. I don't want to suggest that that disruption was necessarily bad because from what I understand, it sounds like a lot of the reason for the delays are connected to a genuine effort to overhaul the corporate culture at rock Star and to eliminate negative working conditions, So everything from making sure that the company is treating employees in a more equitable way to making sure that they're not working people to death by trying to hit some some release date that is more or less arbitrary and doesn't take into account the amount of work that still needs to be done in order for a game to go out and not be broken. That's another thing that I think a lot of gamers are are frustrated with, is this tendency for games to be released only to be broken in some way and require you know, some some sort of uh uh work in order to make them play a bowl. Um. But the flip side of that is delaying the release. Gamers don't tend to like that either. Gamers are hard to satisfy. My suggestion for any game developers out there, don't announce the release date of your game. In fact, don't even talk about your game until it's ready to go gold, and that will do you the best at avoiding this issue. Also, it really excites gamers when they find out about a game for the first time and then they're told, hey, by the way, this is available today. They lose their their minds over that kind of stuff. So that's my advice to game developers, who probably know all too well about this stuff. Anyway, that's it for the news for Thursday July two thousand twenty two. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. One way to do that is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download. You can navigate over to the tech Stuff part of the app and you can leave a little voice message. You click on the microphone icon leaves up to a thirty second message there for me, Or you can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.