Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Friday, August 18, 2023. I'm Brian McCalla today, more drips and drabs, threads, feature releases. Meta is readying a code llama, throwback Friday with uber and lift threatening to leave a major municipality. Our first fall hardware event is on the calendar and of course, the weekend long-rate suggestions. Which you missed today in the world of tech.
Meta has updated threads with a repost tab on users profile pages and added repost to the reverse chronological following feed, quoting J. Peters in tech crunch. Threads is adding reposts, aka retweets to its reverse chronological following feed, Instagram head, Adam Mosary announced in a threads post on Thursday. It's a small but nice addition to the app that makes the following feed a bit more useful.
And while Mosary said Meta added it based on your feedback, the following feed does still have its flaws. That's not the only repost related update for Meta. It's also rolling out a repost tab on your profile so that you and others can more easily find the threads that you've reposted. I don't appear to have either update on iOS yet but I do have the repost tab when I view my profile on the web. I think I need to repost more.
The new updates probably aren't enough to bring over the many threads users that haven't returned to the platform. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on August 4th that improved search and a web client will arrive in, quote, the next few weeks, which might convince some lapsed users to come back. On Wednesday Zuckerberg hinted that the web client might be imminent, replying directly to my desperate plea with two emoji soon and, quote, quote.
Sources are telling the information that Meta is also preparing to release code Lama, a free code generating AI model based on Lama 2, as soon as next week, quote, Meta platforms is preparing to launch software to help developers automatically generate programming code, a challenge to proprietary software from OpenAI, Google, and others, according to two people with direct knowledge of the product.
Meta's code generating artificial intelligence model, dubbed code Lama, will be open source and could launch as soon as next week, one of the people said, the new coding model rivals OpenAI's codex model, and built on Meta's Lama 2 software, a large language model that can understand and generate conversational text.
Lama 2, which is open source, upended the AI field by making it easier for companies to make their own AI apps without paying for software from OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft, code Lama will make it easier for companies to develop AI assistants that automatically suggest code to developers as they type, and it could siphon customers from paid coding assistance, such as Microsoft's GitHub Co-Pilot, which is powered by codex.
Generating automated code suggestions has been among the most popular uses of LLMs, as code is based on language. LLMs also power conversational text services like ChatGPT. GitHub a year ago began charging developers $10 a month for code pilot, and a slew of other coding assistant companies have raised venture funding in recent months.
Companies might gravitate to using an open source coding model to develop their own coding assistant in order to safeguard their source code, said one person who has worked on code Lama. This is like a blast from the past story. Lift and Uber are threatening to leave Minneapolis, if the mayor of that town signs a minimum wage bill on August 23rd, that mandates at least $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute for driver pay, quoting CNN.
In a 7-5 vote, the Minneapolis City Council pass an ordinance that includes a number of rideshare worker protections, including a minimum wage for Uber and lift drivers. Mayor Jacob Frey has the opportunity to veto the ordinance and has until next Wednesday, August 23rd to do so. The proposed ordinance mandates at least $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute within Minneapolis be paid to drivers.
Minneapolis is debating the minimum wage as gig workers across the country are advocating for fair wages and job benefits. In recent years, states and cities have attempted to pass legislation regarding the growing gig economy or freelance work through apps like Uber and GrabHub, but have generally met with fierce opposition.
On Tuesday, lift sent a letter to the council saying, quote, should this proposal become law, lift will be forced to cease operations in the city of Minneapolis on its effective date of January 1st, 2024. Lift, according to a statement sent to CNN Thursday, said the bill would be detrimental to drivers who would ultimately earn less, quote, because prices could double and only the most wealthy could still afford a ride.
The committee said the bill had been, quote, jammed through the council and urged Frey to veto the bill and instead allow time for the state's rideshare task force to complete its research. Uber sent an email to its drivers on Monday, urging them to contact the mayor and city council to ask them to oppose the move. Uber said its drivers sent over 700 emails on Thursday, but did not specify what was in those emails.
In its email, Uber said the legislation could, quote, greatly limit its ability to remove unsafe drivers from the platform and increase the cost of rides. If this bill were to pass, we would unfortunately have no choice but to greatly reduce service and possibly shut down operations entirely, Uber wrote, quote. Mark your calendars.
Microsoft is planning to hold a special event in New York City on September 21st, likely to announce Surface Hardware including the Go4, laptop studio 2 and laptop Go3. Quoting the verge. Microsoft has been rumored to be working on a Surface Go4, Surface laptop studio 2 and Surface laptop Go3 for the fall. Windows Central recently reported that the updated Surface laptop studio 2 will ship with Intel's latest processors, a more powerful GPU and an improved selection of ports.
Microsoft also reportedly postponed a Surface Go4 with an ARM processor in favor of an Intel one instead. The Surface Go3 is rumored to ship with Intel's 12th gen processors and an improved base level configuration. Microsoft's special event will be the first that is held since it changed its hardware portfolio amid layoffs earlier this year. Those changes resulted in no more Microsoft branded mice, keyboards and webcams with the company focusing on the Surface brand instead.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft has any new Surface brand at accessories this year, particularly webcams. The event could also include details on the next big Windows 11 update. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it's planning to release a September update for Windows 11, which will include native support for RAR, which is that RAR, is that the pronunciation, and seven zip files, a new settings homepage, a better volume mixer and early access to Windows co-pilot end quote.
Some weird podcasting news here. Did you know how popular white noise podcasts have become on Spotify? So much so, apparently that Spotify was considering shutting them down. Go to Bloomberg. As I wrote last year, these podcasters who shows Intel playing various noises like crashing waves or bird sounds on repeat could make at least $18,000 a month through advertisements that Spotify placed in the programming.
I posited in that story that some algorithmic magic seemed to be pushing people to this content. And now over a year later, documentation from Spotify confirms as much. As of January, according to an internal document Bloomberg viewed, white noise and ambient podcasts accounted for three million daily consumption hours on the platform inadvertently boosted by Spotify's own algorithmic push for talk content versus music.
Once Spotify realized how much attention was going to white noise podcasts, the company considered removing these shows from the talk feed and prohibiting future uploads while redirecting the audience towards comparable programming that was more economical for Spotify. And so, according to the document, would boost Spotify's annual gross profit by 35 million euros or $38 million. The proposal and question did not come to fruition. We continue to have white noise podcasts on our platform.
A Spotify spokesperson responded via email. Still, some odd events have occurred. One Reddit thread documents a time when white noise podcasts vanished from their account. Other users joined the thread saying they saw the same issue. One white noise podcaster who asked to remain anonymous because they didn't want to draw attention to their show. They've seen their episodes go missing on the platform twice this year.
The first time, the missing episode problem lasted around three weeks and cost them an average of 50,000 downloads per day. The second time, which lasted around 10 days, caused them to lose an additional 20,000 downloads per day. They still haven't recovered that lost audience. They said, though the episodes are live again. Spotify's challenge with white noise podcasts mirrors a similar conversation happening in the world of music.
While music groups, CEO, Lucien Grange and Werner Music CEO, Robert Keinal have both voiced their displeasure at the fact that songs filled with noise are paid out of the same royalty pool shared by their superstars.
But what they, and likely even Spotify, might not have realized, is how the biggest streaming platforms push into podcasts would not only take listeners time away from Drake or Ed Sheeran, but also drive them into the calming fuzz of things like white noise soundscapes removing them from the music ecosystem altogether. Did you know that 80% of men will experience hair thinning in their lifetime? It's normal, but it doesn't have to be your fate, you can get ahead of thinning with neutrophole.
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Next up the journal has a rare look at the finances and business of SpaceX quote the privately held company generated $55 million in profit on 1.5 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2023 according to results in documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal. The slim earnings came after two years of significant but narrowing losses at SpaceX, which is pouring money into a rocket that remains on proven and poses difficult technical challenges.
Hawthorne, California based SpaceX has grown rapidly since its early days and was valued at roughly $150 billion during a recent employee stock sale putting it on par with intel or Disney. Before SpaceX's small quarterly profit at the start of this year, the company reported about 5.2 billion in total expenses for 2022 up from 3.3 billion the year earlier the document show revenue doubled to $4.6 billion helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559 million from $968 million.
Next, it's the 25th anniversary of the iMac which as the verge in this piece rightsfully points out is the device that saved Apple from oblivion set the table for the company that we know today, but they also make two other important points aside from the easy connectivity and cute colors as the things that made the original iMac stand out. I think they're right to also highlight number one.
The internet moment was really why the iMac succeeded in the end and also number two, how it bequeathed to us the iMoniker which we may never really be rid of. Quote, after Windows became dominant, the max greatest liability was simply its incompatibility.
One of the reasons to get a computer at home during this era was to run the same programs you ran at school or at work and while many schools had max few businesses did outside of the design and publishing industries while Apple had built up a community of customers who felt the product was superior to the competition. Most people just opted for the default and that was Windows. But the rise of online services and the internet in the mid-1990s gave Apple a unique opportunity.
On the internet nobody knew you were using a Mac. Once you connected you were using AOL or a copy server just your local internet provider and a web browser or email app. While some sites didn't function if you weren't using internet explorer for Windows, most worked just fine. So if you were a family looking to get on the internet why wouldn't you buy an iMac? It worked with the internet, would look great on a desk or table and was easy to get up and running.
And sure if you wanted to run Microsoft Office they made that for Mac OS 8.2. Upon its release the iMac became so well known that it may have even eclipsed the Apple brand for a little while. It was at least a strong enough signifier that Apple began using it for other products. The iBook laptop was an obvious choice but in 2001 the company chose to reuse the branding for its new music player the iPod. The iPod didn't connect to the internet but it didn't matter.
Apple was declaring that the i stood for another cool Apple product you'd want to buy and people bought an awful lot of iPods. Apple began slapping the lower case i in front of a lot of its hardware software and services culminating in the release of the iPhone and iPad. This is also history but a bit off the beaten path. I present for you the scientific history of the humble paper airplane. Quote.
Chinese engineers are thought to have invented what could be considered the earliest paper planes around 2000 years ago.
But these ancient gliders usually crafted from bamboo or paper or linen, resembled kites more than the dark shaped flyers that have earned numerous Guinness World Records in recent years Leonardo da Vinci would take a step closer to the modern paper airplane in the late 14th and early 15th centuries by building paper models of his aircraft designs to assess how they might sustain flight. But Da Vinci's knowledge of aerodynamics was fairly limited.
He was more inspired by animal flight and as a result his design for craft like the ornithopter, a hang glider sized set of bat wings that used mechanical systems powered by human movement, never left the ground. Paper airplanes helped early engineers and scientists learn about the mechanics of flight.
The British engineer and aviator Sir George Kaley reportedly crafted the first folded paper plane to approach modern specifications in the early 1800s as part of his personal experimentation with aerodynamics.
He was one of the early people to link together the idea that the lift from the wings picking up the aircraft for a stable flight must be greater or equal to the weight of the aircraft says Jonathan Ridley, PhD, the head of engineering and a scholar of early aviation at Solent University in the UK. Actually, it turns out that paper airplanes are still heavily studied and heavily in use for scientific purposes at high level labs around the world to this day. Read this piece.
It's way more detailed than I'm able to quote from here like scientifically detailed. Turns out also by the way, the world record time a paper airplane has stayed in the air is 30 seconds. Maybe a weekend project for you to get an again as book of world records. Finally, last week I shared a profile of Paul F. Tompkins, a comedian who does a somewhat famous Werner Herzog impression.
Well, here's a piece this weekend about the man himself, the film director Werner Herzog and there's an AI angle to this to boot. Quoting the Times. If artificial intelligence had a voice, what would it sound like? Calm like Hal 9000? Perky like Alexa, polite like C3PO. For the editors of I am code and artificial intelligence speaks, a collection of poems generated by AI, the answer was obvious.
Werner Herzog, the 80 year old German director, actor and author, is a titan of independent cinema whose films often concern the hubris and folly of humankind. His speaking voice, known to audiences mostly through the stark literary voice over narration that accompanies many of his documentaries, carries an existential pathos and tutonic gravitas that made it a pop culture trademark.
Something like this anyway was on the minds of Brent Katz, Josh Morgan Thau and Simon Rich, the editors of I am code, when they reached out to Mr. Herzog to ask if he would lend his formidable instrument to the audiobook version of their project. They had an understanding that I wasn't the best choice, I was the only choice. Mr. Herzog said in a phone interview, when you look at the text, it becomes quite self-evident. He added and quote.
I usually shy away from these, but okay, here's my Werner Herzog impression, because it's simple. It's only one word, you ready? Look at those bails, the bails. No bonus episodes for you this weekend. Taxi勺頸!