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 Young. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, April thirteenth, twenty twenty three, and first up, Carl Bode of tech Dirt has an article about how telecommunications companies are running into trouble when it comes to accessing the money meant to fund the rip and replace mandate they are under all right, So to understand this, we actually have to go back a little bit. Several years ago, beginning under the Trump administration, the US government demanded that US telecom companies remove and replace any telecom infrastructure components that came from the Chinese company Huawei. The main concern is that these components could potentially serve as a way for Huawei and then by extension, the Chinese government, to penetrate US communications networks and spy on US. Essentially, this is understandably a concern for one thing. As Boat actually points out, the US has a history of doing this to US telecom companies itself. See also the NSA and HECK if we're going to do this to ourselves, doesn't it stand to reason that other people will try to do it to us too. Snarkiness aside, and we should still be concerned about our own government, those of us in the United States. That's where I am, but our own government spying on us should always remain a concern. It's also a concern that foreign governments could try to do similar things by building into components this capacity. So the government told companies, hey, if you got any Huawei gear in your infrastructure, you need to ditch and replace it with something else. And to that end, the government has authorized around two billion dollars in funds to help companies do this, particularly these smaller telecom companies that don't have the same resources as the ginormous telecom companies. But now it appears as though one the money allocated isn't nearly enough to cover the job, and two a lot of companies have encountered resistance or at the very least and unresponsive government as far as getting hold of those funds goes. Meanwhile, Bode points out the government has sort of pivoted to really focus on TikTok rather than Huawei, and while TikTok may also pose a risk to some degree. By comparison, it's really nothing when you take into account the actual infrastructure of the communication system within the United States itself. So I think it's fair to say that Bode at least feels leaders are leaning harder on optics and easier to sell story than they are in putting in the work to actually follow through on an earlier mandate. On the AI front, China's Cyberspace Administration has published proposed regulations with regard to AI development, and to be specific, we're talking about generative AI stuff like chat GPT, for example, And I'm currently working on an episode that will cover stuff like AI and regulations because I feel like, similar to what Bode was saying about TikTok in the earlier story, we're kind of being led to a perspective on AI that I think is reductive and also ultimately misleading. Now I am not saying that we shouldn't be concerned about generative AI, but I am concerned about generalizing generative AI to mean artificial intelligence in total, because I think it misses the big picture and creates opportunities for lots of comes down the road. But anyway, that's for a future episode that's going to take me a long time to put together. Anyway, officials in China are pushing for laws that would place tight restrictions on generative AI. Such AI. These regulation state would need to avoid creating statements that undermine or contradict the state itself. Now, some of this comes across as being kind of reasonable, right, like, not the upset the state, but that generative AI should have some restriction so that doesn't do stuff like promote terrorism or extremism. That sounds reasonable, though we do have to remember that what China officials define as terrorism and extremism can cover a wide spectrum and can include stuff like I'm not sure the government is doing the right thing here. Anyway, it should come as no surprise that China wants to avoid a future in which AI could subvert the state's power, because that's powerful the course for China in general. A lot of stuff in China law. The laws in China ultimately kind of lead back to cementing the state's authority. Now that being said, many of the proposed regulations are not that different to what we're hearing in other countries, including the United States. Namely that generative AI should not compromise a person's privacy. That's reasonable. They should respect laws, including those protecting intellectual property. That's something that a lot of creators have been calling for. That they should not create discriminatory content. They should not promote things like hate speech and racism, they should not propagate misinformation. All of these are regulations that we're hearing about, or at least proposed regulations. We're hearing about all over the world, not just in China, and I do think that regulations for generative AI are likely a necessary step. You could argue, hey, we should just leave this up to the companies to build in these protections themselves, but generally speaking, when you just leave stuff to an industry, the stuff that comes out is not necessarily the best for the public good. Overall, I feel that a lot of nations can look at China's example, or rather it's proposed example, and use that when thinking about how to frame their regulations. They can sit there and say, well, here are things that we should try and aim for, and here are the things that we should try to avoid. Right, so you can take it as both an example of what to do and what not to do. There's a line, and maybe sometimes it's a fine line between protecting the public and then protecting the status quo. Also on the subject of AI and a bit about Elon Musk, but trust me, this is not going to be like Tuesday's episode, where more than half the show focused on Musk and Twitter. Ours Technica and Business Insider have reported that Musk is purchasing around ten thousand GPUs or graphics processing units. In fact, that he's already done so and spent millions in the process, And you might wonder, well, why would you want ten thousand GPUs. That's not entirely clear, but the speculation is that this is part of Musk's plan to create a competing artificial intelligence lab. So y'all might remember that a month or two ago I did an episode about open ai, and in that episode I mentioned that Musk was one of the founders of open ai, but that he left the organization in twenty eighteen. There are different stories about why he left, and it's possible that the truth is either unknown to the public or that the truth is actually a combination of the various stories that are out there. But one thing that's pretty clear is that Musk did not like the direction open Ai was going in. According to Ours Technica, one complaint Musk had was that open Ai was to quote unquote woke. Now, Originally, when I was framing out this episode, I had a whole lot I was going to say about that, But honestly, anyone who has listened to me for a while already knows where I would go with that. So I'm going to drop it because there's no need for me to get on the soapbox anyway. Musk's move seemingly contradicts his participation in signing a letter for AI Research to kind of pump the brakes a bit out of a concern that AI could do more harm than good if we don't create some checks and balances. And for the cynics among you, you might say, Aha, Musk was doing this not because of his concern that AI is going to go all terminator on us, but because he wanted to put a freeze on the AI industry in general so that he could make up some lost ground because they're getting started late in the game. And I'll leave it to you to figure out, like what scenario was most likely true. We don't know at the end of the day. You know, unless you happen to be one of Musk's closest circle, you'd probably don't know. But yeah, you know, it's kind of fun to speculate. One other quick update on Twitter related stories. NPR, which I mentioned earlier this week, Twitter had previously labeled as state affiliated media, and then after objections were raised, they change that label to government funded has now said sayonara to Twitter. So reportedly National Public Radio will halt the use of its fifty two Twitter feeds. Individual NPR stations, like the local affiliates, may or may not follow suit. A lot of them already have. Also, NPR is not forcing staff to suspend their own personal Twitter accounts. They can maintain them if they want to. PBS, that's the public broadcast TV organization here in the United States, has also issued a statement indicating that it will no longer use Twitter. So for people like me, this feels like a pretty massive blow to Twitter. Now, I recognize that my own experience on Twitter is not universal, so I don't want to fall into the trap of generalizing from my own experience and then just projecting that on everybody. Instead, I will say that when I was on Twitter, regularly. There were three main things that drew me there. One, Twitter gave me a platform where I could share my thoughts, which more often than not were stupid jokes that were not very funny to anyone other than myself, which is essentially the kind of stuff I say on the show all the time. Two, I could follow celebrities, and that was fun because there were people that I admired in show business, and sometimes they would tweet to other people that I also admired in show business, and it was kind of like I was eavesdropping on famous people chit chatting with each other, and that was kind of fun. And Three, and most importantly, I would go to Twitter because news outlets were using Twitter to post breaking news stories. So if you just kept Twitter running on in the background, it meant that you were keeping up to date with the latest news. But for a major media organization to pull out of Twitter, well that takes a swing at one of those foundational pillars for Twitter content. Now, of course, I have no clue what the majority of Twitter users use as the reason they go to Twitter, right Like, I don't know what most people use Twitter for. It's entirely possible that the vast majority of them don't give a fig about the news. And even if other media organizations follow the lead of NPR and PBS, these users are not going to bat an eyelash at that, because that's not what they go to Twitter four in the first place. I just think that for folks who are like me, this becomes yet another reason to just ditch Twitter. Okay, we've got more news stories to cover before we get to those, let's take a quick break. We're back. So morale over at Meta is unsurprisingly on the decline, according to various news reports. The company has obviously held a couple of high profile rounds of layoffs, with potentially more in the future, and according to The Straits Times, those layoffs amount to nearly thirty percent of the company's staff. So just imagine. Let's say that you work in a company, or you know, whatever business you work at. Imagine that you're in a room with all of your coworkers and you're told that out of every three of them, one is going to be laid off. One out of every three employees are going to be laid off, which may or may not include you. And it's all in the name of the Year of efficiency. That's what Zuckerberg has said. The Straits Times goes on to say that while Zuckerberg has been pushing employees to go back to the office, the same is not necessarily true for upper management. A lot of executives have ended up working remotely from other locations, and so unlike the rank and file of META, they are not required to come in. So you're being coerced or forced to come back to your office. But meanwhile you are seeing that the leadership are not under the same rules. That also starts to contribute to problems with morale. There becomes this very obvious disconnect between what's expected of you and what's expected of leadership. Zuckerberg himself is on parental leave, which you know, first of all, parental leave is a great benefit. All employees should have access to parental leave. Parental leave is what allows parents to spend that time they need with their children in order to make certain that their kids are going to be growing up healthy and safe. And I am fully in favor of parental leaf for all employees. And I'm not a parent, like I don't have kids and I'm never going to have kids, but I am fully in favor of parental leave because I want those kids to grow up to being well adjusted, productive members of society so they can take care of me when I'm too old to do anything. So it is in my own self interest to care about the kids. But anyway, I'm not going to throw shade at anybody for taking parental leave, and that includes Mark Zuckerberg. I am not going to shame the leader of the company who's telling people to go back into the office for taking time off if that's if it means that he's spending time with his child is newborn. To me, that's justifiable. However, his absence again adds to morale issues within the company. Employees have said that they felt increased pressure to show that they are working hard on projects. You know, a lot of the framing of this has been around executive saying that they had more employees than they had work to do, and that a lot of employees we're spending the majority of their time not really being productive at all because there wasn't enough work for them to tackle. So part of this was talking about like a reorganization to bring into alignment the workload with the workforce, and that may or may not be true. It probably is true to a certain degree, and the remaining employees feel that they need to justify their employment right, that they need to make certain that they are not doing anything that could potentially put their job at risk in the current economic climate. That is incredibly understandable. But meanwhile top leadership is largely absent from Meta HQ. Also, the company has been scaling back on employee benefits like meals and subsidies for ride healing services and that kind of thing, which again makes sense the companies cutting back on costs, although employees might be asking, are these the costs that make the most sense to cut back on its stuff that affects quality of life. You have already laid off a third of us. The bosses are never around. You know, you're making us come back into the office, but are pulling out some of the benefits of working in an office. The icing of the cake, of course, is that tech companies at large are implementing hiring freezes or they're even actively downsizing. So it's not like the solution for the employees just to hand in their resignation and then go find their dream jobs somewhere else. It is a really bad situation. Potentially made worse by Meta continually emphasizing business strategies that, at least in the near term, are not likely to generate significant revenue, which means that not only are the employees getting more and more unhappy, that's not going to make shareholders happy either, which in turn will potentially fuel other cutbacks in the future, and it becomes this kind of perpetuating cycle. The state of Arkansas has followed the state of Utah's lead in passing a bill that will require anyone under the age of eighteen to get parental consent before they can open a social media account. Rob Thubron of tech Spot has a piece about this in which he talks about how the law has some perplexing exceptions, some of which could potentially really undermine the whole law itself. So, for example, Lebron says that some of the amendments to this bill appear to exempt social platforms where users can quote generate short video clips of dancing, voiceovers, or other acts of entertainment in which the primary purpose is not educational or informative end quote. So, first of all, there's all sorts of content on all of these social platforms, right, some of which is intended to be educational at least to some degree, or informative. You know, you have the infotainments where it's trying to teach you something, and that same platform may also host content that has nothing to do with education or information. It's all about just entertainment, right, like making you laugh or creating a scary video or whatever it may be. And with this wording, it makes it sound like a platform like TikTok, for example, would potentially be exempt from the rule because it's a platform that allows users to generate short video clips of dancing and voiceovers and other kinds of entertainment. So that's weird because the government in general is really down on TikTok right now. But based on that wording, it sounds like TikTok would not be subjected to these rules. Potentially, a platform like Instagram or Snapchat would not be subjected to that rule. In addition to those other amendments, exempt services like email and messaging services as well as video streaming, professional networking, and gaming focused social services. So with those exemptions, it sounds like okay, so LinkedIn would not be covered by this rule. You could create a LinkedIn account and not have to go through age verification. But then that kind of makes sense. I mean, what thirteen year old wants to build a LinkedIn profile? But then you start to wonder, well, if gaming focused services are potentially exempt, does that mean that Twitch is exempt from this rule as well. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that there sounds like there's a ton of wiggle room with these amendments, and it could be that this particular law won't actually do anything but take up space in a rule book. So the intent is to make sure that children receive some protection, particularly when it comes to the practices of data collection and exploitation, and I'm fully in agreement with that. I don't think that kids should be necessarily subjected that. I don't think anyone should. Honestly, I think at this point that the power of our information should be shifted back toward the individual, kind of the way the EU tries to do it. I think that that needs to be sort of a global rule. It just isn't. But I certainly think that that should apply to children. But I'm not sure that this bill as reported achieves that goal. Maybe I'm wrong anyway. For the few social platforms out there, that somehow cannot argue their way out of being subject to this rule. They will have to enlist the services of a third party verification company, which will end up going through steps so that users will have to submit information about themselves to prove their identity and their age before citizens in Arkansas have a chance to sign up for an account. This does not go It's not retroactive, so existing accounts are grandfathered in. If a fourteen year old already has, say a Facebook account, that fourteen year old doesn't have to go through this process, but moving forward, knew users would have to, assuming that the platform was subjected to this kind of restriction, and anyone below the age of eighteen will need parental consent before they are allowed to create that profile. So yeah, I don't know. We'll have to see. I haven't. In full disclosure, I have not read this law. I haven't sat down to read the actual language of the law itself. I'm not an expert in law either, so even if I did read it, I would probably not walk away with a full understanding of it. But yeah, it sounds to me like there's some pretty big gaps here, and it's potentially a useless law. If it turns out that everyone falls under at least one exemption, then the law doesn't apply to anybody, So we'll have to see. I do know that the state of Utah's version is far more restrictive than the state of Arkansas, so that's a much different story, and other states are currently debating their own version of this kind of law. Again, I do think it's important to have laws in place to protect children. I don't know if age verification is the big one. I guess it's part of it, because you do need to know who needs to be protected, right, But I think there need to be some laws that just are going across the board to protect the privacy of children online and to do it better than the way it's been done in the past, because often it feels like the cannon is being pointed in the wrong direction. But again, I'm no expert in law, so all I know is that the consequences often end up being unintentionally harmful toward parties that have very little to do with the actual problem. All Right, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a couple more stories I want to cover. All right, Now, here's some good news. Today, Apple posted that the company has set a target to use one hundred percent recycled cobalt by twenty twenty five in Apple design batteries. This follows some other initiatives that also look to increase recycled material content and Apple products. In fact, Apple said that you know, for products that have magnets in them, they're going to aim for one hundred percent recycled rare earth elements by twenty twenty five. Now, I've talked in past episodes about how modern electronics require some specific materials, and some of these materials are difficult to come by. Some of them rely upon mining operations in areas of the world where the mine operations are using what amounts to slave labor. Like it contributes to human misery, it contributes to human trafficking. It also ends up supporting militias that end up creating instability in various regions. It's a really big human rights nightmare in some parts of the world, and even in the places where that's not an issue, where the human rights piece of the puzzle isn't really relevant, all of these mining operations create environmental problems. So switching to recycled materials is a huge deal. It removes the reliance upon new mining operations for those particular components. It drastically reduces e waste, which is a huge deal. It's incredibly frustrating that we've got mountains of defunct or unwanted electronics that either are not being reused so that they continue useful life beyond their initial one or recycled. The recycling process is tricky. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and to do it in a way where you're actually doing it economically and efficiently is hard. So in some ways it's understandable that there's this issue here, but Apple is framing this as part of the company's overall strategy to achieve carbon neutral status by twenty thirty. And I really hope Apple achieves these various goals because it helps deal with some really troubling problems in tech that we don't often talk about because they're they're not always obvious, and that includes e waste, which I've talked about on this show before, and I hope to see more companies follow suit. And of course, activist groups and consumers should always keep an eye on companies to pressure them to make these sorts of goals and then to sincerely pursue those goals, not just to say they want to do this, but then to follow through. And it may mean that in the long run, certain things get more expensive because it's not always you know, economically advantageous to go the recycling route versus mining new materials, but it may do the best public good in the long run, and you have to start balancing these things out at some point. We can't just all continue to live like it's the nineteen eighties. I lived through the nineteen eighties. We don't really need to go back there, y'all. I mean, the music was dope, you know, new wave, fantastic, but there was a lot of other stuff about the eighties that was not good. We now know when Google is going to shut down Google Currents, which is yet another Google service that will shuffle off its digital coil and go into the great Graveyard of Google products and services. So Google introduced this a couple of years ago, back in twenty nineteen actually, and now we'll shut it down. But it's done that with lots of stuff. In fact, if you are to look at a list of things that Google introduced then later shut down it is a very long list. I've done full episodes about it and only covered like ten percent of the various products that Google has abandoned. And I also think that probably a lot of y'all are unfamiliar with Currents. So Currents was a collaborative platform. Technically it still is. It hasn't been shut down yet. It's a collaborative platform for G Suite customers. And the g Suite is a suite of productivity services that companies use, so kind of like Microsoft Office, it's a cloud based group of services, and it comes out of Google. So Currents was kind of a collaborative tool that worked with these various G Suite services and itself, it was kind of a replacement for Google Plus. Google Plus was shut down by Google several years ago. At this point, Google introduced Currents in twenty nineteen, like I said, and now the company has indicated it will start to shut it down beginning on July fifth. Now we've known that Google was going to phase out Currents for a while. It's just that the news now is that we know when it's going to start to happen. And that's like I said. The fifth of July. Also, Google already has a kind of a replacement in line. It's a service called spaces. This is also pretty much Google's m O. The company will introduce something, it will then evaluate that's something that product, It will scavenge all the most useful features off of that product, and then incorporate those features into something else, either a new Google product or maybe an existing Google service, and then it will kill off whatever the original something was so fairthee well Google currents, we didn't even know ye. Finally, the state of Colorado has passed the Consumer Right to Repair Agricultural Equipment Act this week. It makes Colorado the first state to pass a law giving farmers and independent technicians the legal right to repair equipment agricultural equipment beginning next year. As I have covered on this show, there's been a history of companies such as John Deer. It's not the only one that does it, it's just arguably the most famous one to include features on the equipment they sell to farmers. That makes it difficult or even impossible, for someone to do their own maintenance on equipment that they have purchased. Instead, farmers would have to haul their equipment to the closest licensed John deer repair operation for maintenance and repair. So for people who depend on heavy machinery working properly in order to do their jobs, and these are jobs that are on a deadline when it comes to stuff like planting and harvesting while avoiding waste. Right, you have a limited amount of time where you can work before you're losing the yield you could have, and you don't want to contribute to things like food waste that's already a huge problem. So this is a big obstacle. Right if you are not able to do this maintenance and repair work when you need it, and you have to take more time out of your operations in order to transport a piece of equipment, however many miles it may be to the closest licensed repair center, that's a huge deal. And without the legislative system stepping into force companies to allow customers a chance to maintain and repair their equipment, there was very little reason to believe that it was ever going to change. The agricultural equipment industry has spent a decent amount of time and money lobbying against this kind of legislation, arguing that as equipment becomes more sophisticated, it can become dangerous or impractical for anyone not licensed to work on the equipment to be able to access it. I mean, based on this argument, that you can make the dang problem so much worse. But critics have argued that this stance is at best not the whole story. At worst, it's completely insincere, and that the real reason behind turning equipment into a black box is just to provide an ongoing source of revenue because those repair shops have to pay licensing fees to the company like John Deer in our example, and having a closed off ecosystem creates a lot more revenue streams that all go to you instead of potentially to some independent repair person. So the new law, which takes effect next January, will require manufacturers to provide diagnostic tools and repair manuals and similar resources to farmers and independent repair technicians. There are a couple of exceptions, however, matters relating to security or to emissions are not covered by this new law, so farmers will still have to rely on officially licensed technicians for repairs or maintenance that fall under the situations. Now we'll have to watch to see if the industry tries to categorize pretty much every single problem as falling into one or both of those buckets. And that's it. That's all the news I have for you today, Thursday, April thirteenth, twenty twenty three. Hope you are all well. If you would like to reach out to me, you can still do so on Twitter. The handle there is tech Stuff hsw. I will have to get an alternative to that, because it's hard to do story after story about problems at Twitter and then still give people a Twitter handle in order to reach out to me. You can also download the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download, it's free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff by putting it in the little search field. It'll have the podcast page pop up. You go into that, you'll see a little microphone icon, and if you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in link. Let me know what you'd like to hear in a future episode, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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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 Young. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, April thirteenth, twenty twenty three, and first up, Carl Bode of tech Dirt has an article about how telecommunications companies are running into trouble when it comes to accessing the money meant to fund the rip and replace mandate they are under all right, So to understand this, we actually have to go back a little bit. Several years ago, beginning under the Trump administration, the US government demanded that US telecom companies remove and replace any telecom infrastructure components that came from the Chinese company Huawei. The main concern is that these components could potentially serve as a way for Huawei and then by extension, the Chinese government, to penetrate US communications networks and spy on US. Essentially, this is understandably a concern for one thing. As Boat actually points out, the US has a history of doing this to US telecom companies itself. See also the NSA and HECK if we're going to do this to ourselves, doesn't it stand to reason that other people will try to do it to us too. Snarkiness aside, and we should still be concerned about our own government, those of us in the United States. That's where I am, but our own government spying on us should always remain a concern. It's also a concern that foreign governments could try to do similar things by building into components this capacity. So the government told companies, hey, if you got any Huawei gear in your infrastructure, you need to ditch and replace it with something else. And to that end, the government has authorized around two billion dollars in funds to help companies do this, particularly these smaller telecom companies that don't have the same resources as the ginormous telecom companies. But now it appears as though one the money allocated isn't nearly enough to cover the job, and two a lot of companies have encountered resistance or at the very least and unresponsive government as far as getting hold of those funds goes. Meanwhile, Bode points out the government has sort of pivoted to really focus on TikTok rather than Huawei, and while TikTok may also pose a risk to some degree. By comparison, it's really nothing when you take into account the actual infrastructure of the communication system within the United States itself. So I think it's fair to say that Bode at least feels leaders are leaning harder on optics and easier to sell story than they are in putting in the work to actually follow through on an earlier mandate. On the AI front, China's Cyberspace Administration has published proposed regulations with regard to AI development, and to be specific, we're talking about generative AI stuff like chat GPT, for example, And I'm currently working on an episode that will cover stuff like AI and regulations because I feel like, similar to what Bode was saying about TikTok in the earlier story, we're kind of being led to a perspective on AI that I think is reductive and also ultimately misleading. Now I am not saying that we shouldn't be concerned about generative AI, but I am concerned about generalizing generative AI to mean artificial intelligence in total, because I think it misses the big picture and creates opportunities for lots of comes down the road. But anyway, that's for a future episode that's going to take me a long time to put together. Anyway, officials in China are pushing for laws that would place tight restrictions on generative AI. Such AI. These regulation state would need to avoid creating statements that undermine or contradict the state itself. Now, some of this comes across as being kind of reasonable, right, like, not the upset the state, but that generative AI should have some restriction so that doesn't do stuff like promote terrorism or extremism. That sounds reasonable, though we do have to remember that what China officials define as terrorism and extremism can cover a wide spectrum and can include stuff like I'm not sure the government is doing the right thing here. Anyway, it should come as no surprise that China wants to avoid a future in which AI could subvert the state's power, because that's powerful the course for China in general. A lot of stuff in China law. The laws in China ultimately kind of lead back to cementing the state's authority. Now that being said, many of the proposed regulations are not that different to what we're hearing in other countries, including the United States. Namely that generative AI should not compromise a person's privacy. That's reasonable. They should respect laws, including those protecting intellectual property. That's something that a lot of creators have been calling for. That they should not create discriminatory content. They should not promote things like hate speech and racism, they should not propagate misinformation. All of these are regulations that we're hearing about, or at least proposed regulations. We're hearing about all over the world, not just in China, and I do think that regulations for generative AI are likely a necessary step. You could argue, hey, we should just leave this up to the companies to build in these protections themselves, but generally speaking, when you just leave stuff to an industry, the stuff that comes out is not necessarily the best for the public good. Overall, I feel that a lot of nations can look at China's example, or rather it's proposed example, and use that when thinking about how to frame their regulations. They can sit there and say, well, here are things that we should try and aim for, and here are the things that we should try to avoid. Right, so you can take it as both an example of what to do and what not to do. There's a line, and maybe sometimes it's a fine line between protecting the public and then protecting the status quo. Also on the subject of AI and a bit about Elon Musk, but trust me, this is not going to be like Tuesday's episode, where more than half the show focused on Musk and Twitter. Ours Technica and Business Insider have reported that Musk is purchasing around ten thousand GPUs or graphics processing units. In fact, that he's already done so and spent millions in the process, And you might wonder, well, why would you want ten thousand GPUs. That's not entirely clear, but the speculation is that this is part of Musk's plan to create a competing artificial intelligence lab. So y'all might remember that a month or two ago I did an episode about open ai, and in that episode I mentioned that Musk was one of the founders of open ai, but that he left the organization in twenty eighteen. There are different stories about why he left, and it's possible that the truth is either unknown to the public or that the truth is actually a combination of the various stories that are out there. But one thing that's pretty clear is that Musk did not like the direction open Ai was going in. According to Ours Technica, one complaint Musk had was that open Ai was to quote unquote woke. Now, Originally, when I was framing out this episode, I had a whole lot I was going to say about that, But honestly, anyone who has listened to me for a while already knows where I would go with that. So I'm going to drop it because there's no need for me to get on the soapbox anyway. Musk's move seemingly contradicts his participation in signing a letter for AI Research to kind of pump the brakes a bit out of a concern that AI could do more harm than good if we don't create some checks and balances. And for the cynics among you, you might say, Aha, Musk was doing this not because of his concern that AI is going to go all terminator on us, but because he wanted to put a freeze on the AI industry in general so that he could make up some lost ground because they're getting started late in the game. And I'll leave it to you to figure out, like what scenario was most likely true. We don't know at the end of the day. You know, unless you happen to be one of Musk's closest circle, you'd probably don't know. But yeah, you know, it's kind of fun to speculate. One other quick update on Twitter related stories. NPR, which I mentioned earlier this week, Twitter had previously labeled as state affiliated media, and then after objections were raised, they change that label to government funded has now said sayonara to Twitter. So reportedly National Public Radio will halt the use of its fifty two Twitter feeds. Individual NPR stations, like the local affiliates, may or may not follow suit. A lot of them already have. Also, NPR is not forcing staff to suspend their own personal Twitter accounts. They can maintain them if they want to. PBS, that's the public broadcast TV organization here in the United States, has also issued a statement indicating that it will no longer use Twitter. So for people like me, this feels like a pretty massive blow to Twitter. Now, I recognize that my own experience on Twitter is not universal, so I don't want to fall into the trap of generalizing from my own experience and then just projecting that on everybody. Instead, I will say that when I was on Twitter, regularly. There were three main things that drew me there. One, Twitter gave me a platform where I could share my thoughts, which more often than not were stupid jokes that were not very funny to anyone other than myself, which is essentially the kind of stuff I say on the show all the time. Two, I could follow celebrities, and that was fun because there were people that I admired in show business, and sometimes they would tweet to other people that I also admired in show business, and it was kind of like I was eavesdropping on famous people chit chatting with each other, and that was kind of fun. And Three, and most importantly, I would go to Twitter because news outlets were using Twitter to post breaking news stories. So if you just kept Twitter running on in the background, it meant that you were keeping up to date with the latest news. But for a major media organization to pull out of Twitter, well that takes a swing at one of those foundational pillars for Twitter content. Now, of course, I have no clue what the majority of Twitter users use as the reason they go to Twitter, right Like, I don't know what most people use Twitter for. It's entirely possible that the vast majority of them don't give a fig about the news. And even if other media organizations follow the lead of NPR and PBS, these users are not going to bat an eyelash at that, because that's not what they go to Twitter four in the first place. I just think that for folks who are like me, this becomes yet another reason to just ditch Twitter. Okay, we've got more news stories to cover before we get to those, let's take a quick break. We're back. So morale over at Meta is unsurprisingly on the decline, according to various news reports. The company has obviously held a couple of high profile rounds of layoffs, with potentially more in the future, and according to The Straits Times, those layoffs amount to nearly thirty percent of the company's staff. So just imagine. Let's say that you work in a company, or you know, whatever business you work at. Imagine that you're in a room with all of your coworkers and you're told that out of every three of them, one is going to be laid off. One out of every three employees are going to be laid off, which may or may not include you. And it's all in the name of the Year of efficiency. That's what Zuckerberg has said. The Straits Times goes on to say that while Zuckerberg has been pushing employees to go back to the office, the same is not necessarily true for upper management. A lot of executives have ended up working remotely from other locations, and so unlike the rank and file of META, they are not required to come in. So you're being coerced or forced to come back to your office. But meanwhile you are seeing that the leadership are not under the same rules. That also starts to contribute to problems with morale. There becomes this very obvious disconnect between what's expected of you and what's expected of leadership. Zuckerberg himself is on parental leave, which you know, first of all, parental leave is a great benefit. All employees should have access to parental leave. Parental leave is what allows parents to spend that time they need with their children in order to make certain that their kids are going to be growing up healthy and safe. And I am fully in favor of parental leaf for all employees. And I'm not a parent, like I don't have kids and I'm never going to have kids, but I am fully in favor of parental leave because I want those kids to grow up to being well adjusted, productive members of society so they can take care of me when I'm too old to do anything. So it is in my own self interest to care about the kids. But anyway, I'm not going to throw shade at anybody for taking parental leave, and that includes Mark Zuckerberg. I am not going to shame the leader of the company who's telling people to go back into the office for taking time off if that's if it means that he's spending time with his child is newborn. To me, that's justifiable. However, his absence again adds to morale issues within the company. Employees have said that they felt increased pressure to show that they are working hard on projects. You know, a lot of the framing of this has been around executive saying that they had more employees than they had work to do, and that a lot of employees we're spending the majority of their time not really being productive at all because there wasn't enough work for them to tackle. So part of this was talking about like a reorganization to bring into alignment the workload with the workforce, and that may or may not be true. It probably is true to a certain degree, and the remaining employees feel that they need to justify their employment right, that they need to make certain that they are not doing anything that could potentially put their job at risk in the current economic climate. That is incredibly understandable. But meanwhile top leadership is largely absent from Meta HQ. Also, the company has been scaling back on employee benefits like meals and subsidies for ride healing services and that kind of thing, which again makes sense the companies cutting back on costs, although employees might be asking, are these the costs that make the most sense to cut back on its stuff that affects quality of life. You have already laid off a third of us. The bosses are never around. You know, you're making us come back into the office, but are pulling out some of the benefits of working in an office. The icing of the cake, of course, is that tech companies at large are implementing hiring freezes or they're even actively downsizing. So it's not like the solution for the employees just to hand in their resignation and then go find their dream jobs somewhere else. It is a really bad situation. Potentially made worse by Meta continually emphasizing business strategies that, at least in the near term, are not likely to generate significant revenue, which means that not only are the employees getting more and more unhappy, that's not going to make shareholders happy either, which in turn will potentially fuel other cutbacks in the future, and it becomes this kind of perpetuating cycle. The state of Arkansas has followed the state of Utah's lead in passing a bill that will require anyone under the age of eighteen to get parental consent before they can open a social media account. Rob Thubron of tech Spot has a piece about this in which he talks about how the law has some perplexing exceptions, some of which could potentially really undermine the whole law itself. So, for example, Lebron says that some of the amendments to this bill appear to exempt social platforms where users can quote generate short video clips of dancing, voiceovers, or other acts of entertainment in which the primary purpose is not educational or informative end quote. So, first of all, there's all sorts of content on all of these social platforms, right, some of which is intended to be educational at least to some degree, or informative. You know, you have the infotainments where it's trying to teach you something, and that same platform may also host content that has nothing to do with education or information. It's all about just entertainment, right, like making you laugh or creating a scary video or whatever it may be. And with this wording, it makes it sound like a platform like TikTok, for example, would potentially be exempt from the rule because it's a platform that allows users to generate short video clips of dancing and voiceovers and other kinds of entertainment. So that's weird because the government in general is really down on TikTok right now. But based on that wording, it sounds like TikTok would not be subjected to these rules. Potentially, a platform like Instagram or Snapchat would not be subjected to that rule. In addition to those other amendments, exempt services like email and messaging services as well as video streaming, professional networking, and gaming focused social services. So with those exemptions, it sounds like okay, so LinkedIn would not be covered by this rule. You could create a LinkedIn account and not have to go through age verification. But then that kind of makes sense. I mean, what thirteen year old wants to build a LinkedIn profile? But then you start to wonder, well, if gaming focused services are potentially exempt, does that mean that Twitch is exempt from this rule as well. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that there sounds like there's a ton of wiggle room with these amendments, and it could be that this particular law won't actually do anything but take up space in a rule book. So the intent is to make sure that children receive some protection, particularly when it comes to the practices of data collection and exploitation, and I'm fully in agreement with that. I don't think that kids should be necessarily subjected that. I don't think anyone should. Honestly, I think at this point that the power of our information should be shifted back toward the individual, kind of the way the EU tries to do it. I think that that needs to be sort of a global rule. It just isn't. But I certainly think that that should apply to children. But I'm not sure that this bill as reported achieves that goal. Maybe I'm wrong anyway. For the few social platforms out there, that somehow cannot argue their way out of being subject to this rule. They will have to enlist the services of a third party verification company, which will end up going through steps so that users will have to submit information about themselves to prove their identity and their age before citizens in Arkansas have a chance to sign up for an account. This does not go It's not retroactive, so existing accounts are grandfathered in. If a fourteen year old already has, say a Facebook account, that fourteen year old doesn't have to go through this process, but moving forward, knew users would have to, assuming that the platform was subjected to this kind of restriction, and anyone below the age of eighteen will need parental consent before they are allowed to create that profile. So yeah, I don't know. We'll have to see. I haven't. In full disclosure, I have not read this law. I haven't sat down to read the actual language of the law itself. I'm not an expert in law either, so even if I did read it, I would probably not walk away with a full understanding of it. But yeah, it sounds to me like there's some pretty big gaps here, and it's potentially a useless law. If it turns out that everyone falls under at least one exemption, then the law doesn't apply to anybody, So we'll have to see. I do know that the state of Utah's version is far more restrictive than the state of Arkansas, so that's a much different story, and other states are currently debating their own version of this kind of law. Again, I do think it's important to have laws in place to protect children. I don't know if age verification is the big one. I guess it's part of it, because you do need to know who needs to be protected, right, But I think there need to be some laws that just are going across the board to protect the privacy of children online and to do it better than the way it's been done in the past, because often it feels like the cannon is being pointed in the wrong direction. But again, I'm no expert in law, so all I know is that the consequences often end up being unintentionally harmful toward parties that have very little to do with the actual problem. All Right, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a couple more stories I want to cover. All right, Now, here's some good news. Today, Apple posted that the company has set a target to use one hundred percent recycled cobalt by twenty twenty five in Apple design batteries. This follows some other initiatives that also look to increase recycled material content and Apple products. In fact, Apple said that you know, for products that have magnets in them, they're going to aim for one hundred percent recycled rare earth elements by twenty twenty five. Now, I've talked in past episodes about how modern electronics require some specific materials, and some of these materials are difficult to come by. Some of them rely upon mining operations in areas of the world where the mine operations are using what amounts to slave labor. Like it contributes to human misery, it contributes to human trafficking. It also ends up supporting militias that end up creating instability in various regions. It's a really big human rights nightmare in some parts of the world, and even in the places where that's not an issue, where the human rights piece of the puzzle isn't really relevant, all of these mining operations create environmental problems. So switching to recycled materials is a huge deal. It removes the reliance upon new mining operations for those particular components. It drastically reduces e waste, which is a huge deal. It's incredibly frustrating that we've got mountains of defunct or unwanted electronics that either are not being reused so that they continue useful life beyond their initial one or recycled. The recycling process is tricky. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and to do it in a way where you're actually doing it economically and efficiently is hard. So in some ways it's understandable that there's this issue here, but Apple is framing this as part of the company's overall strategy to achieve carbon neutral status by twenty thirty. And I really hope Apple achieves these various goals because it helps deal with some really troubling problems in tech that we don't often talk about because they're they're not always obvious, and that includes e waste, which I've talked about on this show before, and I hope to see more companies follow suit. And of course, activist groups and consumers should always keep an eye on companies to pressure them to make these sorts of goals and then to sincerely pursue those goals, not just to say they want to do this, but then to follow through. And it may mean that in the long run, certain things get more expensive because it's not always you know, economically advantageous to go the recycling route versus mining new materials, but it may do the best public good in the long run, and you have to start balancing these things out at some point. We can't just all continue to live like it's the nineteen eighties. I lived through the nineteen eighties. We don't really need to go back there, y'all. I mean, the music was dope, you know, new wave, fantastic, but there was a lot of other stuff about the eighties that was not good. We now know when Google is going to shut down Google Currents, which is yet another Google service that will shuffle off its digital coil and go into the great Graveyard of Google products and services. So Google introduced this a couple of years ago, back in twenty nineteen actually, and now we'll shut it down. But it's done that with lots of stuff. In fact, if you are to look at a list of things that Google introduced then later shut down it is a very long list. I've done full episodes about it and only covered like ten percent of the various products that Google has abandoned. And I also think that probably a lot of y'all are unfamiliar with Currents. So Currents was a collaborative platform. Technically it still is. It hasn't been shut down yet. It's a collaborative platform for G Suite customers. And the g Suite is a suite of productivity services that companies use, so kind of like Microsoft Office, it's a cloud based group of services, and it comes out of Google. So Currents was kind of a collaborative tool that worked with these various G Suite services and itself, it was kind of a replacement for Google Plus. Google Plus was shut down by Google several years ago. At this point, Google introduced Currents in twenty nineteen, like I said, and now the company has indicated it will start to shut it down beginning on July fifth. Now we've known that Google was going to phase out Currents for a while. It's just that the news now is that we know when it's going to start to happen. And that's like I said. The fifth of July. Also, Google already has a kind of a replacement in line. It's a service called spaces. This is also pretty much Google's m O. The company will introduce something, it will then evaluate that's something that product, It will scavenge all the most useful features off of that product, and then incorporate those features into something else, either a new Google product or maybe an existing Google service, and then it will kill off whatever the original something was so fairthee well Google currents, we didn't even know ye. Finally, the state of Colorado has passed the Consumer Right to Repair Agricultural Equipment Act this week. It makes Colorado the first state to pass a law giving farmers and independent technicians the legal right to repair equipment agricultural equipment beginning next year. As I have covered on this show, there's been a history of companies such as John Deer. It's not the only one that does it, it's just arguably the most famous one to include features on the equipment they sell to farmers. That makes it difficult or even impossible, for someone to do their own maintenance on equipment that they have purchased. Instead, farmers would have to haul their equipment to the closest licensed John deer repair operation for maintenance and repair. So for people who depend on heavy machinery working properly in order to do their jobs, and these are jobs that are on a deadline when it comes to stuff like planting and harvesting while avoiding waste. Right, you have a limited amount of time where you can work before you're losing the yield you could have, and you don't want to contribute to things like food waste that's already a huge problem. So this is a big obstacle. Right if you are not able to do this maintenance and repair work when you need it, and you have to take more time out of your operations in order to transport a piece of equipment, however many miles it may be to the closest licensed repair center, that's a huge deal. And without the legislative system stepping into force companies to allow customers a chance to maintain and repair their equipment, there was very little reason to believe that it was ever going to change. The agricultural equipment industry has spent a decent amount of time and money lobbying against this kind of legislation, arguing that as equipment becomes more sophisticated, it can become dangerous or impractical for anyone not licensed to work on the equipment to be able to access it. I mean, based on this argument, that you can make the dang problem so much worse. But critics have argued that this stance is at best not the whole story. At worst, it's completely insincere, and that the real reason behind turning equipment into a black box is just to provide an ongoing source of revenue because those repair shops have to pay licensing fees to the company like John Deer in our example, and having a closed off ecosystem creates a lot more revenue streams that all go to you instead of potentially to some independent repair person. So the new law, which takes effect next January, will require manufacturers to provide diagnostic tools and repair manuals and similar resources to farmers and independent repair technicians. There are a couple of exceptions, however, matters relating to security or to emissions are not covered by this new law, so farmers will still have to rely on officially licensed technicians for repairs or maintenance that fall under the situations. Now we'll have to watch to see if the industry tries to categorize pretty much every single problem as falling into one or both of those buckets. And that's it. That's all the news I have for you today, Thursday, April thirteenth, twenty twenty three. Hope you are all well. If you would like to reach out to me, you can still do so on Twitter. The handle there is tech Stuff hsw. I will have to get an alternative to that, because it's hard to do story after story about problems at Twitter and then still give people a Twitter handle in order to reach out to me. You can also download the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download, it's free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff by putting it in the little search field. It'll have the podcast page pop up. You go into that, you'll see a little microphone icon, and if you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in link. Let me know what you'd like to hear in a future episode, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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