Yesterday, Apple finally unveiled its mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro, which will set you back $3,500 in 2024. Plus, we learn about some new challenges in the crypto world as well as reports about whether or not aliens have visited us.
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 iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, June sixth, twenty twenty three. And I'm sure you've already heard all about it, but yesterday Apple finally unveiled one of the worst kept secrets in the industry, the company's mixed reality headset. Apple calls it the Vision Pro and that pro part should tip you off that the company's target audience is business users. Certainly, the three five hundred dollars price tag puts it out of the reach for most consumers, though I'm sure there will still be several tech enthusiasts who have deep pockets who are going to shell out the dough to be one of the first to own the headset. By the way, Business Insider reports that there was a collective grown in response to hearing that price tag during the Worldwide Developer Conference, or WWDC That's where this announcement happened. Apple ended up confirming a lot of rumors that had been circulating about this headset for months now. It is a pass through system that means the headset has an opaque screen, like it's a display that has a solid back to it, and it uses cameras to capture live video and then feed that to the display in front of the user's eyes, so you're not actually looking through the headset, you're looking at a live video feed on what's on the other side of the headset, now, the opposite side from your peepers, the part that other people can see. There is a display that looks kind of like you're wearing ski goggles on top of a headset, and this display can show your eyes to people who are looking at you, or rather an image of your eyes, so it doesn't look like you just have a screen strapped to your face, even though that's exactly what you do have personally. The video demonstration I saw made it look kind of creepy, kind of like Uncanny Valley ish, but that could just be me. The system works with gesture controls. I think these controls actually look really impressive. Like Apple's great at things like user interfaces and gesture controls. One of their strongest suits, I would argue is in their user interfaces, and this seems to be no exception. I thought that the gestures looked really compelling, like it was really cool how you could navigate through the system, So I like the interface as presented in Tim Cook's keynote. I still don't think the technology really has the applicability for mainstream audiences or even for most businesses. I don't think it has enough utility to warrant being an actual thing yet, but that could be a Chicken and the Egg sort of problem. And by that I mean until we see some really amazing features, you know, like killer apps that are designed for the hardware, we can't fully grasp how useful that hardware will be. But then unless there's a good amount of support for the hardware and demand for the hardware, well there'll be very little incentive for developers to make those killer apps in the first place. I think Apple's tech looks really impressive, limited in use, but also price to a point where it will be a real challenge to make it a success. And obviously this is a big step down from what Tim Cook had hoped for initially, namely a technology that would fit in the form factor of a normal pair of eyeglasses that actually have transparent lenses in them. But maybe this is just a case of having to learn to crawl before we can learn to walk, or run or even fly. I'm very curious about whether this product is going to end up being a foundational cornerstone of Apple's business in the future. I have my doubts, but I would love to be proven wrong, because despite all my skepticism, I really think augmented reality is super cool and potentially it's a game changer for lots of different applications. Also, the headset is technically capable of VR, but Apple kind of ignored that in the presentation. From what I understand, representatives were adamant about not talking about virtual reality at all. It was pretty much all augmented reality or AR all the time. Perhaps this was to highlight the pro stuff even more because I think VR typically gets put into a bucket that is associated with gaming, even though VR can be more than just gaming, it's just that's what it's primarily associated with. Anyway, if you've got three thousand, four hundred ninety nine American dollars burning a hole in your pocket, you can unburden yourself a that cash. In early twenty twenty four to get a pair of the suckers. I should add that the Vision Pro was really just a one more thing moment at the WWDC, which harkens back to how Steve Jobs would drop a bombshell of an announcement at the end of lots of other announcements. So that means that Apple also unveiled tons of other stuff besides this mixed reality or if you prefer, augmented reality headset. So that includes a new fifteen inch MacBook air which will be available starting next week. You can preorder it now for one two hundred and ninety nine dollars. This would be the largest screen yet for the MacBook air Line. The next generation of Mac Pro and the Mac Studio computers will get Apple's latest M two Ultra microprocessor that boosts the power of those two computers considerably. The price tag on those really drive home the increase in power, so Mac Studio comes in at a starting price of two thousand dollars. That's the starting price for the base model. If you're talking about the Mac Pro, well, that starts at seven grand. Yowza. Apple also unveiled new features for iOS seventeen, including a standby mode, so if you are charging your iPhone and you have it mounted so it's horizontal. It can act as a kind of smart display if you want. Apple also showed off widgets. Hey, y'all remember widgets, Like widgets were a big thing like fifteen years ago. Well they're back, baby, just like POGs out's back in pog form. Well they're on pretty much everything now. Widgets are like Apple showed off widgets all over the ding dang darn place, including the Apple Watch. And there were a lot more announcements, but it gets into some pretty nitty gritty stuff with Apple, and I've got a lot more news to cover, so I'm just gonna leave that for now, and people who are really really into Apple can look into it further. There are no shortage of articles out there about all the announcements at WWDC. Moderators at stack overflow, which is a software developer forum, are on strike, at least some of them are now. First of all, these moderators are volunteers, so it's not like they are paid to be moderators of this forum. They're upset due to a change in forum policy dictated by stack Exchange, which is organization that owns stack Overflow and the moderators have been told that they are not allowed to moderate AI generated content just for being AI generated. So moderators have been arguing that generative AI is untrustworthy, that it can present incorrect information but do so in a way where it's acted as if it's factual and reliable info, and that generative responses could potentially include hallucinations just made up stuff. And that is true as we've seen. Generative AI attempts to construct relevant answers to queries, but can on occasion just make stuff up if it lacks relevant information to use in its place. Plus, as moderators have pointed out, it can also engage in plagiarism. It can present work that others have created without giving proper credit, which is a big no. Note. The moderators are also concerned that the policy will mean that the value of information across the forums will go into decline, that there won't be guardrails place to prevent misinformation and mistakes from proliferating across the forums that in turn could help developers as they try to create the next generation of apps and software. So the moderators also have said that this change in policy was communicated one way in private to the moderators themselves, but in a totally different way when it was communicated to the public at large within the forums, and they say that this is a problem with transparency within the organization. Stack Overflow says that only slightly more than ten percent of moderators have refused to work as part of this strike. And further, the change in policy wasn't due to misplaced trust in AI. It's not to say, oh no, we totally trust AI to give the right answers. Instead, it was more an indication that stack overflows AI detection duel is not very good, that their detection duel creates a lot of false positives, meaning it will flag posts that were actually written by a real human being as being AI generated. So, in other words, the concern is that moderators could end up removing posts that were written by people simply because a faulty tool said it had been created by AI. And this just creates a very complicated problem. We see here that the moderators have a good point, right, you don't want misinformation to spread across your forums and to make life more difficult for developers. On the flip side, you don't want to start striking content off the forums because a tool told you it was made by AI, when in fact it was created by people. So yeah, complicated issue here. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more tech news to talk about. We're back. So this week marks the first week for Linda Yakarino as Twitter's new CEO. Elon Musk has relinquished control. I mean, he's staying on at Twitter in various capacities, So maybe it's a bit grandiose for me to say he's relinquished control, but he's at least stepped back from the chief leadership position at the company, and it is also a notable step in Twitter's journey toward trying to re establish confidence with advertisers and users. Musk also intends for Twitter to transform into an everything app, something that encompasses everything from communication to commerce and beyond, and this is something he's talked about a lot in the past, So he says that's part of Linda's job is to kind of guide Twitter through this transition, which maybe that'll still happen, but I feel like it's going to take an awful lot of work to repair Twitter's image to make that a successful app. It is very hard to be a successful app if you have alienated a ton of the user base and corporate partners. Right, there's a lot of bad blood between Twitter and tons of different other entities. So this is a pretty tall mountain to climb. So hopefully Linda Yakarina will be able to do this. I actually I wish her all the best. I hope Musk isn't too involved in day to day decisions. I also assume Tesla stockholders are hoping for that as well. They've long been complaining that Elon Musk has spent way too much of his time and energy on Twitter at the expense of Tesla. So let us be cautiously optimistic that things will change for the better, and we'll just have to keep eyes on it in the meantime. Last week I mentioned that a developer who created a third party Reddit app said he was going to have to shut down the app due to reddits change with its policy for its API or application programming interface. So Reddit is going to charge developers for requests that are made to the Reddit platform. And by that I mean the more frequently an app references Reddit, and the more people who are using the app, the more expensive it will be for them to to maintain that relationship. The developers will be made held responsible for paying a bill. Essentially, Reddits Tim Rathschmidt said the reason for this decision is that the company has to spend millions of dollars in hosting fees, and that means that the more people use the platform, the more expensive it is to run the platform, and that these third party apps can drive up that usage quite a bit, and thus Reddit needs to offset the costs by billing the app developers. If the apps weren't so dang popular, it wouldn't be as expensive for Reddit to be Reddit, but because of the increase in activity, Reddit needs to charge developers to recoup costs. That's essentially the argument that Reddit is making. That explanation hasn't really satisfied a lot of Reddit users, though, and several subreddits are playing to go dark for a couple of days this month to raise awareness and prote the change in policy. And again, this comes down to a pretty complicated matter. Reddit is not a not for profit organization. It's trying to generate revenue. It's a business, and it does have to pay hosting fees and if apps are driving those fees up, the money to pay for those fees has to come from somewhere. On the other hand, really useful apps may not have a way to generate enough revenue to pay what Reddit is demanding, So if they can't raise the money to pay those fees and be a coherent business on their own, they have to fold. It may be that the app is incredibly useful, but it's not necessarily a big revenue generator, and thus it'll just go away. That can ultimately lead to a situation where users have no options other than the official Reddit app to access Reddit, and then you get into a situation where you're looking at non competitive practices and a potential monopoly which would get Reddit in trouble with regulators. So again, it's super complicated, and I can't pretend to have the answers here. I don't have a solution that would solve all of these issues across the board. Now it's crypto time. Gosh, it feels like it's been a while since I've had a bunch of cryptocurrency related stories. Once the fallout from FTX collapsing kind of settled, things went a little quiet, but we are off to the races again. So first up, the United States Securities Exchange Commission or SEC has filed more than a dozen charges against Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, and its founder, Chong pen Jao akacz So. Among those charges are that Binance has operated as an unlicensed securities exchange and also that the company has co mingled customer funds with the company's own funds. That's not that different from what was going on over at FTX before it collapsed. By the way, there are also accusations that Binance has used its US subsidiary, Aabinance dot Us as a kind of smoke screen, that Binance dot Us was created to make an illusion of obeying the law, but then the larger international Binance was operating outside of the law and was actually pulling all the strings. All the transactions were really happening at this higher layer where it's the wild West. Actually I would say it's not even the wild West, because even in the wild West you still had laws. Anyway, these charges appeared to be supported by the testimony of two previous CEOs for Binance dot Us. That's not good. These two CEOs, who were not named but were former CEOs of the company said it became pretty clear that they were a little more than window dressing and that CZ was really the guy calling the shots, or, as one of the two unnamed CEOs apparently said, quote, I'm not actually the one right this company and the mission that I believe I signed up for isn't the mission And as soon as I realize that I left end quote. Seems to be a pretty big blow to Binance's claims that everything is on the up and up. CZ for his part, denies all these charges. He says they are meritless, that Binance operates within the boundaries of the law and has been cooperative with the SEC, and that there's nothing to see here. We'll see about that. This also has not satisfied some investors, who understandably are a little bit concerned about the whole thing, particularly after the drama that was ftx's collapse and the collapse of several other crypto related companies in the past year. Reuter's reports that since the SEC filed those charges, investors have pulled nearly eight hundred million dollars of assets from the crypto exchange. Now that's not to say that money isn't also flowing in. It is. It's just that, at least for some cryptocurrencies, more money is going out than is coming in. So, namely, in Ethereum, seven hundred and seventy eight point six million dollars have left the exchange in a net loss. So eight hundred and seventy one million in ethereum entered Binance, but more than one point six billion in ethereum left it. Now, it's too early to say what the long term effects, if any, the SEC's charges are going to have to Binance. It may just be another little roadbump for Binance. It could be something much more serious, which I know comes across as super wishy washy, but literally, I think it's too early to draw any conclusions. I'm not ready to say, oh, this is the beginning of the end, because it may not be. Binance has been through a lot and has stuck around, so whether or not this will just be another little footnote in its history remains to be seen. However, Binance is not the only crypto exchange in SEC's crosshairs. The agency also sued Coinbase this morning, accusing the company of behaving as an unregistered broker and exchange. SEC chair Gary Ginsler elaborated on this and pointed out that the New York Stock Exchange is not allowed to operate both as a stock exchange and also a hedge fund company, but that Coinbase combines a lot of services across different financial institutions that effectively means they're trying to be all things to all investors, despite the fact that regulations would say that that's not allowed. So the complaint says that Coinbase's core businesses break securities laws. Now, again, this is in the very early stages of a legal process, so it is too soon to predict how this is going to affect Coinbase in particular and the larger crypto community in general. It could be that the process forces Coinbase to fundamentally change how it operates, or also to pay a settlement perhaps a side Maybe it would go even more extreme, maybe Coinbase would be forced to shut down. Or it could pan out that Coinbase successfully argues it hasn't broken any laws at all. However, one thing that is clear is the struggle between regulators and the crypto community is going on strong. It's not going to stop anytime soon. Okay, I've got a couple of bizarre stories that I need to talk about. But before we get to those, let's take another quick break. Okay, y'all. I'm actually kind of reluctant to talk about these next couple of stories because I feel like it's very difficult to approach them in a way that is responsible. But at the same time, I feel like I have to or else people will ask me why I didn't talk about them. So first up, NASA held its first public meeting about unexploed anomalous phenomena or UAP. So once upon a time we would refer to this stuff as UFOs or unidentified flying objects. I actually prefer unexplained anomalous phenomena because, for one thing, not every UFO incident is actually involving an object. Sometimes it's not an object, it's an illusion, and an illusion is not a thing, so object is a misleading term. For another, not every incident actually involves something that's flying, so flying can be an inaccurate term. Some UAP ends up being just a really mundane situation that can be misinterpreted. So here's an example. There can be a pilot who's flying at night over the ocean on a particularly cloudy evening, and the clouds could obscure the pilot's view of the Moon, but the Moon's light might still hit the water at some distance and create a reflection. Now, the pilot can't see the Moon, but the pilot can see the reflection, and because it's dark, it might not be easy to tell that this is just a reflection on the surface of the water. It's just to the pilot it looks like a light off on the horizon. And next thing the pilot knows, this light seems to be traveling with them, and it seems to maneuver in strange ways as the pilot moves course. But in fact there's nothing flying at all, unless you count the Moon. I don't the moon already thinks it's so big? Yeah, I see you, Moon, not getting any props from me anyway. According to the report that NASA gave at this meeting, all but two to five percent of the hundreds of UAP reports are something that we could easily explain, right, All but two to five percent of those those remaining incidents quote display signatures that could be anomalous end too quote. Now, of course that doesn't mean anything, right. They could be anomalist or they could be totally normal. And mundane. We lack the information to be able to make a judgment. So saying that we don't have enough information isn't the same as saying there's stuff out there that defies explanation and must be non terrestrial or at least non human in origin. I'm sure some people are frustrated that NASA didn't go so far as to say, I don't know, maybe it's aliens, but to go that far would require extraordinary proof. Now there's another story that I feel I have to tell that ties into this kind of concept as well, and it's because it's getting a lot of circulation as I'm recording this episode. So The Debrief published a very long article by Leslie Keene and Ralph Blumenthal this week that details claims from a person they name as David Charles Grush, who, according to the article, is a former Department of Defense operative. He worked for the Department of Defense in various capacities and has said that the United States has in its possession intact vehicles and parts of vehicles of quote unquote exotic origin, meaning created by non human intelligence. That is obviously a truly extraordinary claim, and the report, like I said, it's spreading like wildfire. As I record this episode, everyone seems to just be referencing this one article, Like, I haven't seen any investigative journalism that went to verify this article. They're just kind of using the article as the foundation and then repeating claims that were made in it. So I want to raise a couple of red flags. None of this is to say that the article is inherently untrustworthy. It's just stuff that makes me a little skeptical. So, first off, the authors of this article, Leslie Keane and Ralph Blumenthal, they are both notable journalists, all right, They have long careers in journalism, distinguished careers. However, they are also both published authors who have written books in the UFO and aliens space. So that raises some red flags for me immediately. I don't know if that means they are predisposed to believing extraordinary claims that involve things like UFOs or UAPs, but it does concern me because they've already been writing about this stuff for a while and these claims never seem to ever produce anything, right. We hear about them occasionally, but we never actually see anything produced. Secondly, I tried to find some information about David Grush earlier before I started writing this episode. But my search has pulled up nothing other than variations of this article. So, like I said, it's spreading like wildfire right now. So when I did a search for his name, I just got countless versions of this story, and again it all seemed like they were kind of summarizing what was already published in the debrief, but not verifying anything other than one exception. I did find one web page on a defunct Space Force website for the Shriever Space Force Base that had a person named David Grush who was promoted to the rank of captain. David Grush was one name, along with dozens of others of lieutenants who had received this promotion. That's the only other instance I could find of David Grush's name. That's not to say that other stuff doesn't exist out there, maybe it's just buried under these recent reports. But what I'm saying is these sort of things make me remain skeptical. Now. If it comes to pass that these are in fact real reports of real vehicles from non human intelligence, that would be beyond disruptive. As it stands, it would be pretty darn and credible because it would mean either some sort of non terrestrial entity has visited us, and you know, we haven't detected any evidence of intelligent life anywhere within our vicinity, and our own history of radio communications only dates back a little more than a century, which means for anyone to have known about us, to know that we exist, would require them to be within say a hundred light years of Earth. That then you have to think about actually traveling to Earth, Right, Why would anyone travel to Earth randomly? I mean, maybe just by chance, but that seems to be pretty crazy to think about. But if they're coming here because they've detected life, well then they would need to be you know, probably within a hundred light years of us, and then they would have to have some means of try travel that could take them to Earth within you know, one hundred one hundred years, and that just seems like that's a big commitment. It's just it's hard to align all of this so that it makes sense, because to travel to Earth would require a lot of time. We know that matter cannot travel at the speed of light, so if something's one hundred light years away, it's going to take way way, way longer. For a physical craft to travel that distance, barring some weird wormhole technology, which I guess is possibly within the realm of possibility, but would require such an enormous amount of energy that, again, the investment to going to Earth would be so great that it's hard to imagine why anyone would agree to do it. So I guess what I'm saying is that there are a ton of factors that would have to fall into place, some of which appear to contradict our understand ending how the universe works for this to actually be true. Now, there is another possibility. You could argue, well, maybe the discovery of non human intelligence created materials doesn't mean that it came from outside of Earth. It just means there was some sort of non human intelligence present on Earth at some point that made a vehicle. That also seems unlikely to me, because you would think that there would be more evidence that would have been uncovered independently of these activities, and that not all of those could potentially have been kept quiet by some cabal of official government agencies. So I'm just saying red flags abound. Now, maybe the whole story is true. Maybe it is, but it will require extraordinary proof to actually have me, you know, come around to that. As it stands, I remain very very skeptic, and uh yeah, I'm not even saying that anyone is telling an outright lie necessarily, just that it doesn't it doesn't pass the smell test for me. But I also admit that I could be completely wrong about this. I don't feel like I am, but I could be. Now. Our last story is partly goofy and partly a warning about the excesses of venture capital activity. The information reports that the company Zoom spelled zume is no more, and that is notable because that startup launched in twenty fifteen and raised nearly four hundred and fifty million dollars in funding, and yet has now gone out of business. Initially, the company aimed to bring pizza delivery into the future, so the business model would combine robotics with essentially food trucks. So the idea was that a customer would order a pizza, you know, like through an app or whatever, and the food truck driver would get a notification to drive to that customer's location. Meanwhile, in the food truck part, a robot in the truck would actually make the pizza so it'd be cooked to order, so you get a really fresh pizza this way, right, the pizza's actually being cooked as it's being delivered to you. Apparently, this business model was a bust. The company spent way more money than it was generating in revenue, and apparently part of the problem was that the cheese would slide it all over the place if the truck hit any bumps in the road, so you would end up with a substandard pizza as a result of all this, so that is an issue. The company attempted to pivot by going to a more traditional like stationary food truck route with still maybe using delivery, but the food truck itself wasn't the one moving around. You would have the food truck be stationary with the robot making its pizzas. But this also didn't end up being a sustainable business. Then the company changed directions completely. It totally dumped the pizza business and instead switched to designing sustainable packaging. That is a pretty big change in your business model. Anyway, that didn't work either, and last month the company folded, according to the information. So the story illustrates that venture capital can frequently dump a ton of money into businesses that aren't really viable. And you might think at first that too much money isn't really that bad of a problem, but it definitely can be. It can lead to very bad decisions that in the long run, will doom a startup. We saw it again and again leading up to the dot com bubble bursting a couple of decades ago, and yet it seems as though the investment world hasn't really taken those lessons to heart. Well in the meantime, farewell zoom, we hardly knew ye, And now I'm craving pizza. Finally, I would like to recommend an article that is a really good piece to read, but it kind of goes beyond a news item. So today I want to recommend an article that was published June first in The New Yorker. It's titled A Confession Exposes India's Secret Hacking Industry. It was written by David D. Kirkpatrick. It explains how India is the source or maybe I should say outsource of hacking assets used by various entities around the world. It's a good read and you should definitely check it out again. That is A Confession exposes India's secret hacking industry in the New Yorker, and as always I have no connection to the New Yorker. I do not know David Kirkpatrick. This was just an article I thought was worth reading. That's it for today's news episode. I hope you are all well. We will not have a news episode on Thursday. If all goes as planned, we will have a full length tech Stuff episode in its place, unless things change. But as it stands right now, that's the plan because that's what I recorded. But we will see. I hope everything's going well for you, like I said that already, and I'll talk to you 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.