Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on Friday, June twenty first, twenty twenty four. And we've had a little shuffle this week for the title of world's most valuable company. And by that I mean how a company is valued based upon the number of shares that are available and the price per share. All the contenders are tech companies and earlier this month, Apple toppled Microsoft after Apple held its Worldwide Developer Conference and got investors all excited, but that victory was short lived. Microsoft regained the throne just two days later. This week, a new challenger pushed past Apple to take a swing at the king that was Nvidia. Like Apple, Nvidia achieved the title of most valuable company in the world, only to relinquish it back to Microsoft a couple of days later. But on June eighteenth, Nvidia was on top of the world with a market value of three point three four trillion dollars. Geez Louise. Anyway, since then Nvidia stock price dipped about three point four percent, and that was enough to give Microsoft the top spot again, even though Microsoft had also had a smaller dip in stock value in that same time. Now, in case you're not familiar with Nvidia, it's a microprocessor design company. Like they make the designs for things like, you know, microprocessors, specifically graphics processing units or GPUs, and then other companies fabricate those designs. Recently, in Vidia's really big business has been in designing chips that are used by companies for the purposes of running AI implementations. On the tech and politics front, the US White House has banned the sale of products and services from the Russian cybersecurity company Kispersky Labs. So Kispersky Lab it's a huge name in the cybersecurity space. They've played a key part in identifying and mitigating various threats across the Internet. Kisperski also makes lots of different products, including antivirus software. So why would the US ban it? Well, the main concern is that the White House believes the Russian government could and would force Kaspersky Lab to harvest and weaponize data from other countries, you know, primarily the United States obviously, but there's also a fear that the Russian government could force Kisperski Lab to actually serve as a delivery system for malware rather than as a protection against it. Imagine being told that your antivirus software needs to be updated, and so you update it, but secretly it's actually delivering malware to you. That's part of the concern. Now, Kasperski Lab has protested this ban, which makes sense, and have said that well, this is a case where the US government is reacting to a perceived hypothetical threat as opposed to know an actual threat, which is a sentiment that we may have also heard regarding the upcoming US ban on TikTok. I'll talk more about that in just a moment. Kasperski Lab says it will pursue all legal avenues open to the company to push back against this ban. I don't know how I feel about this one, honestly, because I mean, Kaspersky Lab undeniably has done some amazing work, and without their contributions, I do believe the Internet would be a much more dangerous place than it is already. On the flip side, I don't think there's any way you can deny that Russia has an authoritarian government in place with various agencies that have shown in the past to be more than willing to put pressure on whatever levers they have to gain an advantage. But is that potential enough to justify a ban. If you don't have a specific instance to point out of saying yes, this is happening, then are you justified in banning. I don't know. It doesn't feel good to me, but at the same time I can understand the concern. So you could also argue that this is really just more political posturing, that it's the US attempting to kind of shut down an important business that's in Russia as a way to indirectly pressure Russia itself. I'm not smart enough to understand all the ins and outs, so I just look at it and think, wow, that's a big mess. Also, speaking of TikTok, Reuter's reports that TikTok and its parent company byte Dance, the Chinese company, have requested essentially a dismissal of the upcoming national ban on TikTok in the US that's scheduled to happen on January nineteenth, twenty twenty. So the argument that TikTok is making is that despite several attempts to negotiate a solution to the various concerns the US government has raised regarding TikTok and its relationship to its pairing company, the US government has refused to really engage on a serious level since twenty twenty two. So TikTok is saying, We've come forward in good faith in an attempt to work this out, and the government has just roadblocked us and then gone to a ban which doesn't seem fair. And then also TikTok's arguing that this is a violation of First Amendment rights as well. TikTok reps have also claimed that divestiture from the Chinese pairing company is quote not possible technologically, commercially, or legally end the quote. I don't know. I feel like I need to call bs on at least the first two of those three, simply because we've also read reports that TikTok has quietly been working on an alternative recommendation algorithm, which sounds like it could be a contingency plan if this band does go through. You know, the band hinges on TikTok's relationship to Byte Dance and by extension, China itself. The band has said that if TikTok were to be divested from Byte Dance, that this band would not necessarily happen. So the fact that TikTok has apparently been working on this alternative recommendation algorithm, one that's distinctly independent of the version that Byte Dance uses for say du Yan, the Chinese version of TikTok or the Chinese you know, like close cousin of TikTok, That to me suggests that TikTok is quietly exploring those possibilities. But obviously the company wants to avoid having to do that at all, and it would be better for the company if they didn't have to go through the whole divestiture process. As for commercially, I mean, TikTok still operates rather independently from the other products of Byte Dance, so I would imagine that divesting it commercially actually is entirely possible. I mean, no one by Dance wouldn't want to do it because TikTok makes money, so why would you want to? But I still think it's possible. I don't think it's impossible. That's based on my own opinion, but yeah, the legal part, that's harder for me to answer. That's what the courts are for. I personally have doubts that the courts are going to reach a decision as to whether the ban is legal or not before the deadline actually gets here, But we'll see. Reuter's also reports that Apple has recently switched gears and has stopped work on a successor to the Apple Vision Pro, which is Apple's mixed reality headset. That headset has a hefty price tag, and it's also had a fairly slow start, which I believe mostly comes down to two really big reasons. The first is obviously the base cost. It is huge. It's a whopping three five hundred dollars at the beginning, before you've done any like upgrades or accessories or anything like that. And that's a lot more money than most people can PLoP down for a new tech gadget. But the other big barrier is that development for this platform is still in its very early days, which means there's really not that much you can do with the darn thing. Yet every review I have read of the Vision Pro says that it performs really well. It's really impressive. But that outside of the basic things you're able to do, there's just not much there yet. And for developers, I could see why there'd be a reluctance to jump on board because if the installed base of potential customers is a very small one, you might not be able to capitalize on the invested time and energy it took to make something compelling because there's just not enough people to pay that investment off anyway. Now, Apple is reportedly backing away from making a true Apple Vision Pro two or whatever they would call it, but the company is still working on a more affordable mixed reality headsint at that would be available before the end of next year. Presumably such an affordable model will have fewer features than the Vision Pro. What I find interesting is whether or not customers will flock to a cheaper version of this platform, or if the lack of those certain features is going to sap away any excitement about the technology and people won't be willing to pay for it because you know, it'll be a cheap imitation of the thing that came out a couple of years earlier. If I had to make a guess, I would say more folks would be willing to buy a less expensive headset made by Apple, because Apple's reality distortion field is still a thing, and maybe we would hear folks later complain that the headset isn't as impressive as they were led to believe, but who knows. I guess we'll find out before the end of next year. Okay, we've got more tech news to cover before we get to that, though, Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Ilia Sutzkev, one of the co founders of open ai, who later was forced to resign from the board of directors and then a couple months later resigned completely from the company itself, is now starting his own AI company, which is called Safe Superintelligence, and as the name indicates, the founding principles are similar to what inspired the initial creation of open Ai, before that company began to embrace profit to a greater degree. The Safe Superintelligence website says the company will have offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv. Sutzkever posted on x that the plan is for the company to focus entirely on the safe development and deployment of AI, without regard to stuff like market forces and trends and things like that how he's going to achieve that remains to be seen because AI development is a really expensive thing. In fact, that's why open Ai launched a for profit arm in the first place. But I do think it's a lofty goal to aim for. I just don't know how achievable it is. AI company Anthropic has unveiled the Claude three point five Sonnet AI language model this week. In fact, I've already started seeing ads online for this thing. The model can do pretty much all the things we associate with chatbots built on generative AI. You know. It can respond to prompts, it can write code, it can analyze text. According to Ours Technica's Binge Edwards, it can be really difficult to compare different AI models to each other for various reasons. But that being said, Claude three point five Sonnet seems to perform pretty well impressively so. In fact, now I haven't used it yet, but then I don't use any AI models on a regular basis. I've only dipped my toe in goofy ways to see what kind of response I can get for silly queries. But for those of y'all who are either researching AI or occasionally making use of AI. It might be something you want to check out just to see if it gives you better responses than alternatives on the market. Back to Reuters, which reports that Amazon is looking to monetize its Alexa service soon. The plan, which is code named Banyan, is to introduce a more advanced version of the Alexa assistant, capable of holding generative AI conversations with users. Access to this level of Alexa will actually require a monthly fee somewhere in the neighborhood of five dollars a month. The report says that Amazon is given developers until August to get this version of Alexa ready, though that doesn't necessarily tell us when such a service would actually launch. I honestly don't know if this is going to work from a commercial standpoint. I'm not sure most folks care if their personal assistant is generating a conversation or just pulling something directly off the web to answer various questions. That's possibly due to the fact that as I get older, I see fewer reasons for me to use tools like this for anything beyond really basic stuff like, you know, asking for an update on the weather or whatever, which is like ninety nine times out of one hundred, if I'm asking my smart assistant speaker for something, it's to give me an update on whether. Other times it's to play music so that my dog can listen to music while I'm leaving the house. The rare occasions I do that or to ask if certain fruits are safe for dogs to eat. Those are like my three go tos. But Amazon's trying to find a way to make Alexa moneymaker, and maybe this will work out for them. I personally have my doubts. I think a lot of people will say, why am I going to pay for something that previously I got to use for free, even if the new version is at least in theory better. Meta has reorganized its Reality Labs division. A quick reminder, this is the part of Meta formerly Facebook that is tasked with bringing the metaverse into reality, whether people want it or not. It's the division that Meta has dedicated billions of dollars to in that effort, which is something that has concerned many investors in that company. But anyway, this reorg has divided Reality Labs into two major organizations, one that will focus on wearables and the other that will focus on the metaverse. So wearables are things like the Quest VR headsets and the ray Band smart glasses. The Verge reports that the reorganization also meant the company laid off a quote unquote small number of employees, although I haven't seen any sources that give more detail as to how much a small number actually is. Bloomberg reports that Elon Musk is pushing hard to get an X payment service launched before the end of this year. You might recall that one thing Musk wanted to do with Twitter, apart from opening it up to folks who had previously been banned from the platform for violating various policies, was to convert it into sort of an everything app, an app where you could chat with friends, post to the general population, shop for goods and services, and pay for stuff like transfer money, all from one app. The payment service thing is part of this overall puzzle, and one that Musk has aggressively pushed for this year. To that end, X has secured payment transmitter licenses with twenty eight states here in the US, by the company's goals to secure such licenses for every state by the end of the year. It sounds to me like this is really a matter of when not if, and at some point we will see the X payment services roll out, possibly with many other features to follow. Must's goal is to get users to rely on X for financial transactions and to store their money in high yield savings accounts, which might work. It might actually entice people who have so far either stayed off of the platform for various reasons or who left due to similar reasons, and to have them come back and jump in and order not to lose out on an opportunity. However, I think it's safe to say that skeptics like myself, you know, folks who have seen Musk apply the ban hammer on X in a very mercurial way, are less eager to put our money into a platform where the owner has been shown to be unpredictable, temperamental, perhaps unreliable is another good word. I just I think it would be very risky to do personally. That's my own opinion though, so you know, if you don't value my opinion. One, I don't know why you're listening, but thank you anyway, And two, yeah, do you don't make your own decisions? It's totally cool if you happen to live near Dallas, Texas or King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I have a homework assignment for you. Don't worry. It's not coming up anytime soon. It'll be next year, but it's to visit either of the two Netflix House venues that are opening up in the upcoming months. They're slated to open in twenty twenty five. Netflix first announced the intent to debut some brick and mortar locations, and now we know where those first two are going to be. Dallas, Texas, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. They'll be taking over the spaces of former department stores and shopping centers, which I don't know. Maybe that'll breathe some new life into malls. I haven't been to a mall in years, but in fact, the place where I used to go when I was a kid is now essentially vacant. I think there's like only a handful of stores that are still open and everything else is closed down, which, as I understand, it is not that unusual today. But then I don't ever leave the house, So what do I know anyway? What's going to go on in these Netflix houses beats me. Netflix has not shared a whole lot of information. They have said that there will be themed experiences as well as some special food and drink offerings, and that presumably these are going to draw inspiration from original Netflix films and series. And when I think back to some of those originals on Netflix, I'm not convinced I really want to experience that stuff myself in real life, but I am definitely curious, and heck, maybe I'll go to the King of Presha one because my partner has family up in that area, So maybe if we're happy to be there, I'll be like, hey, let's go see what this is all about. The two astronauts who recently journeyed to the International Space Station aboard a Boeing Starliner spacecraft are staying a little bit longer than they had planned. This is because the Starliner experienced some technical issues that engineers really want to review further before bringing the astronauts back home in the spacecraft on June twenty six. So, during the trip to the ISS, the star Liner had a few helium leaks, like five of them. Now, helium itself is non toxic, it's non flammable, so as long as the leaks weren't bad enough to displace oxygen and cause asphyxiation, then the astronauts were deemed to be safe. Then five of the twenty eight reaction control system thrusters on the star Liner also failed as the spacecraft was nearing the iss. It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to chance when you're bringing folks back home, as these thrusters play a part in orienting the spacecraft properly upon re entry. NASA reps have said the agency wants to review the test spacecraft's issues before signing off on future missions, which makes perfect sense to me. Okay, some quick reading recommendations for y'all. Mickey Carroll has a piece for sky News titled self driving cars found to be safer except at dawn, dusk, or when turning according to a study. I recommend reading that it's one of the biggest selling points for R and D and self driving vehicles. This idea that you know, ideally they would be fre safer on the roads than vehicles that were driven by human beings. But as this study points out, there are still scenarios in which AI powered vehicles are more prone to accidents, and obviously that shines a spotlight on areas where engineers need to improve safety. Next up is a piece by Mike Masnik at tech Dirt titled five hundred thousand books have been deleted from the Internet Archives Lending Library. I talked a little bit about this when I did an episode about the Internet Archive recently, but this piece dives into how publishers have leveraged their considerable power to deny the archive access to library copies of various works. And last up is a piece by Ashley Bellinger of Ours Technica titled lawsuit Meta engineer told to resign after calling out sexist hiring practices. This article details the claims made by a former Meta employee who says the company retaliated against him after he brought forward concerns and misogynistic practices in the company. All of those are well worth your time to read. That's it for this week. I hope you are all well and I will talk to you again again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for the week ending on Friday, June twenty first, twenty twenty four. And we've had a little shuffle this week for the title of world's most valuable company. And by that I mean how a company is valued based upon the number of shares that are available and the price per share. All the contenders are tech companies and earlier this month, Apple toppled Microsoft after Apple held its Worldwide Developer Conference and got investors all excited, but that victory was short lived. Microsoft regained the throne just two days later. This week, a new challenger pushed past Apple to take a swing at the king that was Nvidia. Like Apple, Nvidia achieved the title of most valuable company in the world, only to relinquish it back to Microsoft a couple of days later. But on June eighteenth, Nvidia was on top of the world with a market value of three point three four trillion dollars. Geez Louise. Anyway, since then Nvidia stock price dipped about three point four percent, and that was enough to give Microsoft the top spot again, even though Microsoft had also had a smaller dip in stock value in that same time. Now, in case you're not familiar with Nvidia, it's a microprocessor design company. Like they make the designs for things like, you know, microprocessors, specifically graphics processing units or GPUs, and then other companies fabricate those designs. Recently, in Vidia's really big business has been in designing chips that are used by companies for the purposes of running AI implementations. On the tech and politics front, the US White House has banned the sale of products and services from the Russian cybersecurity company Kispersky Labs. So Kispersky Lab it's a huge name in the cybersecurity space. They've played a key part in identifying and mitigating various threats across the Internet. Kisperski also makes lots of different products, including antivirus software. So why would the US ban it? Well, the main concern is that the White House believes the Russian government could and would force Kaspersky Lab to harvest and weaponize data from other countries, you know, primarily the United States obviously, but there's also a fear that the Russian government could force Kisperski Lab to actually serve as a delivery system for malware rather than as a protection against it. Imagine being told that your antivirus software needs to be updated, and so you update it, but secretly it's actually delivering malware to you. That's part of the concern. Now, Kasperski Lab has protested this ban, which makes sense, and have said that well, this is a case where the US government is reacting to a perceived hypothetical threat as opposed to know an actual threat, which is a sentiment that we may have also heard regarding the upcoming US ban on TikTok. I'll talk more about that in just a moment. Kasperski Lab says it will pursue all legal avenues open to the company to push back against this ban. I don't know how I feel about this one, honestly, because I mean, Kaspersky Lab undeniably has done some amazing work, and without their contributions, I do believe the Internet would be a much more dangerous place than it is already. On the flip side, I don't think there's any way you can deny that Russia has an authoritarian government in place with various agencies that have shown in the past to be more than willing to put pressure on whatever levers they have to gain an advantage. But is that potential enough to justify a ban. If you don't have a specific instance to point out of saying yes, this is happening, then are you justified in banning. I don't know. It doesn't feel good to me, but at the same time I can understand the concern. So you could also argue that this is really just more political posturing, that it's the US attempting to kind of shut down an important business that's in Russia as a way to indirectly pressure Russia itself. I'm not smart enough to understand all the ins and outs, so I just look at it and think, wow, that's a big mess. Also, speaking of TikTok, Reuter's reports that TikTok and its parent company byte Dance, the Chinese company, have requested essentially a dismissal of the upcoming national ban on TikTok in the US that's scheduled to happen on January nineteenth, twenty twenty. So the argument that TikTok is making is that despite several attempts to negotiate a solution to the various concerns the US government has raised regarding TikTok and its relationship to its pairing company, the US government has refused to really engage on a serious level since twenty twenty two. So TikTok is saying, We've come forward in good faith in an attempt to work this out, and the government has just roadblocked us and then gone to a ban which doesn't seem fair. And then also TikTok's arguing that this is a violation of First Amendment rights as well. TikTok reps have also claimed that divestiture from the Chinese pairing company is quote not possible technologically, commercially, or legally end the quote. I don't know. I feel like I need to call bs on at least the first two of those three, simply because we've also read reports that TikTok has quietly been working on an alternative recommendation algorithm, which sounds like it could be a contingency plan if this band does go through. You know, the band hinges on TikTok's relationship to Byte Dance and by extension, China itself. The band has said that if TikTok were to be divested from Byte Dance, that this band would not necessarily happen. So the fact that TikTok has apparently been working on this alternative recommendation algorithm, one that's distinctly independent of the version that Byte Dance uses for say du Yan, the Chinese version of TikTok or the Chinese you know, like close cousin of TikTok, That to me suggests that TikTok is quietly exploring those possibilities. But obviously the company wants to avoid having to do that at all, and it would be better for the company if they didn't have to go through the whole divestiture process. As for commercially, I mean, TikTok still operates rather independently from the other products of Byte Dance, so I would imagine that divesting it commercially actually is entirely possible. I mean, no one by Dance wouldn't want to do it because TikTok makes money, so why would you want to? But I still think it's possible. I don't think it's impossible. That's based on my own opinion, but yeah, the legal part, that's harder for me to answer. That's what the courts are for. I personally have doubts that the courts are going to reach a decision as to whether the ban is legal or not before the deadline actually gets here, But we'll see. Reuter's also reports that Apple has recently switched gears and has stopped work on a successor to the Apple Vision Pro, which is Apple's mixed reality headset. That headset has a hefty price tag, and it's also had a fairly slow start, which I believe mostly comes down to two really big reasons. The first is obviously the base cost. It is huge. It's a whopping three five hundred dollars at the beginning, before you've done any like upgrades or accessories or anything like that. And that's a lot more money than most people can PLoP down for a new tech gadget. But the other big barrier is that development for this platform is still in its very early days, which means there's really not that much you can do with the darn thing. Yet every review I have read of the Vision Pro says that it performs really well. It's really impressive. But that outside of the basic things you're able to do, there's just not much there yet. And for developers, I could see why there'd be a reluctance to jump on board because if the installed base of potential customers is a very small one, you might not be able to capitalize on the invested time and energy it took to make something compelling because there's just not enough people to pay that investment off anyway. Now, Apple is reportedly backing away from making a true Apple Vision Pro two or whatever they would call it, but the company is still working on a more affordable mixed reality headsint at that would be available before the end of next year. Presumably such an affordable model will have fewer features than the Vision Pro. What I find interesting is whether or not customers will flock to a cheaper version of this platform, or if the lack of those certain features is going to sap away any excitement about the technology and people won't be willing to pay for it because you know, it'll be a cheap imitation of the thing that came out a couple of years earlier. If I had to make a guess, I would say more folks would be willing to buy a less expensive headset made by Apple, because Apple's reality distortion field is still a thing, and maybe we would hear folks later complain that the headset isn't as impressive as they were led to believe, but who knows. I guess we'll find out before the end of next year. Okay, we've got more tech news to cover before we get to that, though, Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Ilia Sutzkev, one of the co founders of open ai, who later was forced to resign from the board of directors and then a couple months later resigned completely from the company itself, is now starting his own AI company, which is called Safe Superintelligence, and as the name indicates, the founding principles are similar to what inspired the initial creation of open Ai, before that company began to embrace profit to a greater degree. The Safe Superintelligence website says the company will have offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv. Sutzkever posted on x that the plan is for the company to focus entirely on the safe development and deployment of AI, without regard to stuff like market forces and trends and things like that how he's going to achieve that remains to be seen because AI development is a really expensive thing. In fact, that's why open Ai launched a for profit arm in the first place. But I do think it's a lofty goal to aim for. I just don't know how achievable it is. AI company Anthropic has unveiled the Claude three point five Sonnet AI language model this week. In fact, I've already started seeing ads online for this thing. The model can do pretty much all the things we associate with chatbots built on generative AI. You know. It can respond to prompts, it can write code, it can analyze text. According to Ours Technica's Binge Edwards, it can be really difficult to compare different AI models to each other for various reasons. But that being said, Claude three point five Sonnet seems to perform pretty well impressively so. In fact, now I haven't used it yet, but then I don't use any AI models on a regular basis. I've only dipped my toe in goofy ways to see what kind of response I can get for silly queries. But for those of y'all who are either researching AI or occasionally making use of AI. It might be something you want to check out just to see if it gives you better responses than alternatives on the market. Back to Reuters, which reports that Amazon is looking to monetize its Alexa service soon. The plan, which is code named Banyan, is to introduce a more advanced version of the Alexa assistant, capable of holding generative AI conversations with users. Access to this level of Alexa will actually require a monthly fee somewhere in the neighborhood of five dollars a month. The report says that Amazon is given developers until August to get this version of Alexa ready, though that doesn't necessarily tell us when such a service would actually launch. I honestly don't know if this is going to work from a commercial standpoint. I'm not sure most folks care if their personal assistant is generating a conversation or just pulling something directly off the web to answer various questions. That's possibly due to the fact that as I get older, I see fewer reasons for me to use tools like this for anything beyond really basic stuff like, you know, asking for an update on the weather or whatever, which is like ninety nine times out of one hundred, if I'm asking my smart assistant speaker for something, it's to give me an update on whether. Other times it's to play music so that my dog can listen to music while I'm leaving the house. The rare occasions I do that or to ask if certain fruits are safe for dogs to eat. Those are like my three go tos. But Amazon's trying to find a way to make Alexa moneymaker, and maybe this will work out for them. I personally have my doubts. I think a lot of people will say, why am I going to pay for something that previously I got to use for free, even if the new version is at least in theory better. Meta has reorganized its Reality Labs division. A quick reminder, this is the part of Meta formerly Facebook that is tasked with bringing the metaverse into reality, whether people want it or not. It's the division that Meta has dedicated billions of dollars to in that effort, which is something that has concerned many investors in that company. But anyway, this reorg has divided Reality Labs into two major organizations, one that will focus on wearables and the other that will focus on the metaverse. So wearables are things like the Quest VR headsets and the ray Band smart glasses. The Verge reports that the reorganization also meant the company laid off a quote unquote small number of employees, although I haven't seen any sources that give more detail as to how much a small number actually is. Bloomberg reports that Elon Musk is pushing hard to get an X payment service launched before the end of this year. You might recall that one thing Musk wanted to do with Twitter, apart from opening it up to folks who had previously been banned from the platform for violating various policies, was to convert it into sort of an everything app, an app where you could chat with friends, post to the general population, shop for goods and services, and pay for stuff like transfer money, all from one app. The payment service thing is part of this overall puzzle, and one that Musk has aggressively pushed for this year. To that end, X has secured payment transmitter licenses with twenty eight states here in the US, by the company's goals to secure such licenses for every state by the end of the year. It sounds to me like this is really a matter of when not if, and at some point we will see the X payment services roll out, possibly with many other features to follow. Must's goal is to get users to rely on X for financial transactions and to store their money in high yield savings accounts, which might work. It might actually entice people who have so far either stayed off of the platform for various reasons or who left due to similar reasons, and to have them come back and jump in and order not to lose out on an opportunity. However, I think it's safe to say that skeptics like myself, you know, folks who have seen Musk apply the ban hammer on X in a very mercurial way, are less eager to put our money into a platform where the owner has been shown to be unpredictable, temperamental, perhaps unreliable is another good word. I just I think it would be very risky to do personally. That's my own opinion though, so you know, if you don't value my opinion. One, I don't know why you're listening, but thank you anyway, And two, yeah, do you don't make your own decisions? It's totally cool if you happen to live near Dallas, Texas or King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I have a homework assignment for you. Don't worry. It's not coming up anytime soon. It'll be next year, but it's to visit either of the two Netflix House venues that are opening up in the upcoming months. They're slated to open in twenty twenty five. Netflix first announced the intent to debut some brick and mortar locations, and now we know where those first two are going to be. Dallas, Texas, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. They'll be taking over the spaces of former department stores and shopping centers, which I don't know. Maybe that'll breathe some new life into malls. I haven't been to a mall in years, but in fact, the place where I used to go when I was a kid is now essentially vacant. I think there's like only a handful of stores that are still open and everything else is closed down, which, as I understand, it is not that unusual today. But then I don't ever leave the house, So what do I know anyway? What's going to go on in these Netflix houses beats me. Netflix has not shared a whole lot of information. They have said that there will be themed experiences as well as some special food and drink offerings, and that presumably these are going to draw inspiration from original Netflix films and series. And when I think back to some of those originals on Netflix, I'm not convinced I really want to experience that stuff myself in real life, but I am definitely curious, and heck, maybe I'll go to the King of Presha one because my partner has family up in that area, So maybe if we're happy to be there, I'll be like, hey, let's go see what this is all about. The two astronauts who recently journeyed to the International Space Station aboard a Boeing Starliner spacecraft are staying a little bit longer than they had planned. This is because the Starliner experienced some technical issues that engineers really want to review further before bringing the astronauts back home in the spacecraft on June twenty six. So, during the trip to the ISS, the star Liner had a few helium leaks, like five of them. Now, helium itself is non toxic, it's non flammable, so as long as the leaks weren't bad enough to displace oxygen and cause asphyxiation, then the astronauts were deemed to be safe. Then five of the twenty eight reaction control system thrusters on the star Liner also failed as the spacecraft was nearing the iss. It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to chance when you're bringing folks back home, as these thrusters play a part in orienting the spacecraft properly upon re entry. NASA reps have said the agency wants to review the test spacecraft's issues before signing off on future missions, which makes perfect sense to me. Okay, some quick reading recommendations for y'all. Mickey Carroll has a piece for sky News titled self driving cars found to be safer except at dawn, dusk, or when turning according to a study. I recommend reading that it's one of the biggest selling points for R and D and self driving vehicles. This idea that you know, ideally they would be fre safer on the roads than vehicles that were driven by human beings. But as this study points out, there are still scenarios in which AI powered vehicles are more prone to accidents, and obviously that shines a spotlight on areas where engineers need to improve safety. Next up is a piece by Mike Masnik at tech Dirt titled five hundred thousand books have been deleted from the Internet Archives Lending Library. I talked a little bit about this when I did an episode about the Internet Archive recently, but this piece dives into how publishers have leveraged their considerable power to deny the archive access to library copies of various works. And last up is a piece by Ashley Bellinger of Ours Technica titled lawsuit Meta engineer told to resign after calling out sexist hiring practices. This article details the claims made by a former Meta employee who says the company retaliated against him after he brought forward concerns and misogynistic practices in the company. All of those are well worth your time to read. That's it for this week. I hope you are all well and I will talk to you again again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.