Tech News: AI Stalks Us on Friday the 13th

hockey mask wearing psychopath. We start off this episode with some stories about AI, as is our wont to do so. First up, Kylie Robinson of The Verge Robison, perhaps my apologies, Kylie. Kylie of the Verge has an article titled open AI releases OH one, its first model with reasoning abilities, which sounds pretty significant, and Kylie explains that one is the first of several planned sophisticated AI models that should be capable of answering complex queries. While in development, this was

known to the AI crowd as the Strawberry Model. That's actually the first I've heard of that code name. But then again, I'm not exactly brought in to hear about all things AI. The model is said to be able to tackle multi step problems, which is something that earlier AI models have had troubled doing, and doing this comes at a couple of costs. There's the cost of time, because it does take a little longer for this model to create an answer, although it typically is still faster

than humans would be able to do it. But then there's also the financial cost. These models aren't free to use, and they come with a fairly hefty fee for access. That fee is like three to four times more expensive than using the current AI models for other purposes. Now, according to open ai representatives, the one model is less prone to hallucinations than earlier models are, but it is

still not immune to them. So the challenge of creating an AI model that you know is dependable and accountable without having to worry that it's just making stuff up, Well, that problem persists. It's also apparently pretty good at coding. It can't outperform the best of the best of human coders, at least not yet, but I feel like if open ai can convince companies that you know, their AI models are equivalent to exceptional coders. Maybe not the best, but

really good coders. That's a pretty big sales bitch. Coders who don't have salaries, they don't have healthcare plans, they don't have stock options or retirement accounts or anything like that. You know. I know that AI ideally is meant to augment humans so that they can do their jobs better and they can offload the really tedious work to automated processes.

But I still have concerns that, at least in the short term, there are going to be business leaders out there who will view AI as kind of a shortcut to downsizing staff and outsourcing work to the robots. Marie Baran of Newsweek wrote an article this week titled AI generated junk science is flooding Google scholar studied claims, and assuming that the study is correct, it illustrates one of

the many concerns I have about generative AI. Essentially, the study found that AI generated science papers, fake science papers in other words, are showing up in Google scholar right next to legitimate, you know, scholarly articles within search results. So Google has been indexing pages that are made by

AI bots, you know, like chat GPT. The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review published this study and identified one hundred and thirty nine papers that are likely generated by AI, and more than half of those identified papers focused on topics that relate closely to stuff like climate change, health concerns, and other policy relevant subject matter. And the danger here

is obvious. The papers may appear to be from legitimate researchers who followed rigorous scientific practices in order to you know, draw their conclusions, but in reality, they could just be propaganda that's pushing a specific point of view and disguised as a legitimate scientific paper and considering a lot of people quote unquote research by just looking for passages and papers that appear to confirm what the people already believe,

you know, just cherry picking. In other words, this could lead to situations in which folks are citing fraudulent papers because those papers support specious arguments. Now y'all already know that I call out for critical thinking regular on this show, and this trend really drives home how important critical thinking is. I am just as guilty as anyone else of grabbing

onto a source that appears to confirm my biases. I actually have to remind myself to take a closer look to one make sure that the source is legitimate, and then make double sure that what it's actually saying is what I think it says, because that's not always the case.

I have been known to misinterpret stuff like that has happened, so I have to be careful about this too, and I don't always succeed, but it's good to keep it in mind, like this is something to strive for, use critical thinking, and it sounds to me like this is just going to get more challenging to do as time goes on. One thing that could help is if Google

developed some tools to make Google scholar more reliable. You know, knowing that these things are going to exist, how can Google scholar better differentiate between legitimate papers and those that were generated by AI. That might involve improving transparency regarding how Google Scholar indexes and ranks scholarly results in the first place, or giving more tools so you can filter stuff out, like make sure that the articles you get

are from legitimate peer reviewed sources. I suppose I should

also throw in this potential pitfall. If future generations of AI models train themselves on fake scientific papers that were created by earlier AI models, then the quality of content on the Internet will further decline reasoning AI models like the aforementioned one would be more likely to create incorrect solutions if the training material it used included this sort of stuff, these fraudulent scientific papers, because AI can't just

magically know what information is relevant and dependable and which one is just invented in order to push forward a narrative. Emma Roth that The Verge has an article that it's titled Google is using AI to make fake podcasts from your notes, and it kind of makes me think of

a recent episode I did on tech Stuff. I titled it this episode was written by AI sort of, So in that episode, I use chat GPT to create a tech podcast episode not just not of tech stuff, just a tech podcast, and it was supposed to trace the history and the technology of airbags. And I read the entire generated episode out in that podcast episode of tech Stuff. I then spent the rest of the episode fact checking

and critiquing the AI's work. Now, the most disturbing thing I encountered with this experiment was that the AI kept inventing fake experts to deliver various bits of information. Sometimes that information was wrong, and all the experts didn't really exist anyway. In Roth's article, it unfolds that Google created a feature in its notebook LM app that will take

notes that you have written down. It will then generate this you know, AI created podcast hosted by a couple of AI bots posing as the hosts, and the podcast has hosts having a discussion about whatever the research topic is, and it uses your notes to create a conversation between these two bot hosts, and it kind of riffs off the information that you have gathered. It sounds like the AI is careful to only draw information from your notes, so the output you get should reflect the input that

the bots relied upon. So in other words, if something is wrong in the episode, it would be because your notes have wrong information in them or incomplete information. The AI wouldn't necessarily be hallucinating or confabulating, you know, drawing from some source you've never seen either, And that's a good thing. It does remind me. In the case of the AI episode that I generated, Chad gbts was actually unable to share with me what the sources were that

it was pulling information from. I asked it to, and it couldn't. Instead, it gave me a list of sources that the information might have come from, but there was no guarantee that any of the information used in the episode actually came from those sources. Now, in this case, with Google, the sources you or at least the notes that you've taken. And I think this approach is interesting. It doesn't strike me quite as off putting as what I experienced with chat GPT for one thing. To me,

this feels more like a study tool. I mean, we all know that people have different learning styles, right, so I think this tool could potentially be good for someone who does take meticulous notes, but that doesn't really help them absorb the information, right they don't really understand they've got the notes, but it hasn't kind of sunk in.

So I think this kind of approach could create a way of synthesizing and contect rualizing the information that could be more impactful depending upon the subject matter and you know, the learning style of the person involved. So as a studying tool, I think it's a pretty neat idea. Now, I also wonder if this will ultimately lead to people using this tool to create podcasts that are hosted by AI,

which could be a problem. I mean, especially considering that it's going to be based on whatever notes were made to create the podcast, so you could do it to make them say whatever you wanted, or you know, not make them say, but they would say things drawn from your own perspective in the notes you created. Now, that could be funny if you were to create really weird notes about obviously fake stuff, not in an effort to mislead listeners, but rather as a way to entertain them.

And I'm thinking about shows that are something along the lines of existing fictional podcasts out there, stuff like Welcome to night Vale or Old Gods of Appalachia or my friend Shay's podcast Kadi Womple with the Shadow People. And yes, that last one is real. Kadi Womple with the Shadow People is a real podcast, and yes I am plugging my friends podcast sort of. So if Southern gothic fantasy with a healthy dose of feminism is your kick, you

should check it out. In fact, you should just check it out anyway, give an episode a listen, because Shay is a great storyteller, and you know, maybe it's your jam, maybe it's not, but yeah, I could see this tool being used for that kind of thing. That arguably that does bring into question the artistry although you would still need to put in the work to create the source notes that the hosts are drawing from. So it's a

gray area for me. Like generally, I tend to be pretty negative or pretty critical at least about generative AI, But if it comes down to something like this, where you have done an enormous amount of work to build the source material, I'm not quite as adamant the generative AI is a bad tool to use in this context. But maybe I just need to think on it more. Now back to artificial intelligence in general. So on Science Alert, David Neil has an article that's titled AI chatbots have

a political bias that could unknowingly influence society. Now, I don't think this should come as a surprise because bias has been a big issue in AI for decades. Some experts have argued that not all bias is bad, right, Like, you might build an AI model that is quote unquote biased to pick out instances of say, medical images that could indicate a health hazard, like the presence of say a tumor, for example. But unintended bias is bad, and we've seen lots of examples of that with AI, like

with facial recognition, technologies and the like. Neiled cites a computer scientist named David Rosato from Otago Polytechnic and New Zealand who uses various political questionnaires to test different AI chat models to see where they fall on the political spectrum based upon their responses to these questionnaires, and according to his results, the models all fell somewhere left of center on political matters, and they tended toward a more

libertarian point of view rather than an authoritarian point of view. None of the models were coming out as like hard left evangelists or anything like that, but the bias was present and it was significant. Rosatto doesn't believe that the bias was intentional, but rather it's sort of an emergent quality. And why is it emerging at all? Well, the best guess is that the material used to train the AI models skews left more than it does right. Not all of it, but that overall, when taken as in it,

you know, a hole, it skews more left. That there are more pieces written from a left of center perspective than right of center. This in turn imbalances the material, so that leads to a bias in the models. And it kind of makes me think about how matter and antimatter are. So when matter and antimatter come into contact

with one another, they annihilate each other. So if there had been a perfect balance of matter and antimatter at the dawn of time, there would be no universe to speak up, because it would have all blowed up before it could even get started. But for some reason, there was a little bit more matter than there was antimatter, and we got the universe. So with these AI models, the training material had more left of center perspective material than otherwise, which y'all you know, I lean left so hard.

I walk around at a forty five degree angle. But I don't think having a biased perspective in the tools themselves that are meant to provide and contextualize information is a good thing, even though that bias kind of leans toward the way that I view the world. I don't think a bias is good in that respect. It needs to be as objective as it possibly can, in my opinion, So if the bias means we can't rely on the results provided, that ends up being a big problem, especially

considering how gung ho everybody is on AI. Now. Despite these findings, we have also seen examples of generative AI engaged in recreating some really ugly biases as well. I'm thinking primarily of image generating models that tend to be guilty of perpetuating racial stereotypes. So I guess you could see this issue as a wake up call regarding our own prejudices and biases on top of the issue we have with AI. Okay, we've got a ton more news to get through. Let's take a quick break to thank

our sponsors. We're back and we're not done with AI just yet. Just Weather Bed of the Verge has a beast titled Meta fed its AI on almost everything you've posted publicly since two thousand and seven. And yeah, that article starts off with a whammy. In fact, I'm just going to quote whether Bed at the beginning of the article.

Who writes quote Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since two thousand and seven have been fed into its

artificial intelligence models. End quote. Now this is significant for many reasons, one of which is that Meta executives had previously sort of denied that this was the case when asked by Australian legislators if user data was being exploited in this way, but ultimately they did cop to the practice when lawmakers really cornered them with pretty direct questions

that they couldn't just deflect. So essentially, unless users had set their content to something other than public, you know, like friends only or private or whatever, then that content was up for grabs and Meta grabbed it for the purposes of training AI. Meta didn't go so far as to explain if there's a cutoff for when the data

scraping happened. So, for example, assuming that it does go all the way back to two thousand and seven, can the bots scrape everything that was ever posted to the platform, at least publicly? And could that be the case even if the person who posted that stuff was a minor at the time, so all of those posts, including images, could be up for grabs. Now, Meta has said it does not scrape profiles of users who are under the

age of eighteen. Fine, but what about users who today are adults but have been on Facebook long enough so that the earliest days of their Facebook use was when they were under the age of eighteen? Did the data scraping include their data from that time? I mean, yeah, today they're adults. But when they posted those things back in say, two thousand and seven, they well, that question is more murky, and to be truthful, the Meta representatives

didn't really have an answer for it, and that's very concerning. Now. Meta does allow users to opt out of this data scraping practice if those users happen to live in the European Union, where regional laws mandate that Meta create this option to opt out. Likewise, laws in Brazil required Meta to cut out the data scraping for AI there as well, But everywhere else in the world, it's fair game, baby.

If it ain't expressly against the law, Meta is doing it, which might be food for thought for all the other countries out there, at least the ones with any interest

at all regarding protecting citizen data from massive corporations. Metta is also in the news here in the United States, as Republican Congressman Tim Wahlberg has some pretty harsh words for the company after it responded to concerns over how it has hosted ads for illegal drugs, which I talked about in an earlier Tech Stuff episode, so to kind of summarize, Legislators had sent an inquiry to Meta following reports from the Tech Transparency Project as well as the

Wall Street Journal that detailed how advertisements for illegal drugs were appearing on Facebook and Instagram, both prescription drugs and recreational drugs, like log on and suddenly there's an ad for cocaine on your Facebook feed. And this means that Meta was not only providing a platform that these illegal ads got to use, but Meta itself was profiting from these illegal advertisements. Now, Meta didn't create the ads, They're just hosting them, but they are profiting from them because

the advertisers have to pay Meta to have this space. Right, So the lawmakers sent more than a dozen questions to Meta to really get down to how big an issue this is, how prevalent is this problem, and what the heck is Meta doing about it? And Meta essentially responded by saying, and to be clear, I am paraphrasing like crazy here, but they said essentially like, yeah, you know, that's crazy. We agree that's crazy. But Meta is all about doing its part to fight illegal activity. This is

a big issue beyond any one platform. This is this is major. This isn't just us, This is this is a big problem. Now, Wahlberg was not buying this and called the response unacceptable. I agree with him. He went on to say, quote Metta's response not only ignores most of the questions posed in our letter, but also refuses to acknowledge that these illicit drug ads were approved and monetized by Meta and allowed to run on their platforms

end quote. The director of Tech Transparency Project, Katie Paul, also accused Meta of deliberately sidestepping questions of accountability in an effort to deflect and to claim that this is just a bigger issue, much bigger than Meta and its platforms. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said on a podcast interview that he thinks in the past he has made the mistake of accepting responsibility for stuff that subsequently he believes

his company wasn't actually guilty of doing. Like he said, we got to stop saying we're sorry for stuff that isn't our fault. Essentially is how it came across to me anyway. But this particular subject seems pretty cut and dried to me, because either Meta was selling ads to clients who ultimately made those ads about illegal drugs, or Meta did not do that. So either Meta profited off of illegal advertisements or it didn't. There's not grey area here,

you know. And sure Meta could argue that the scale of its business as such that it can't police every ad or ensure that an ad that was sold actually ends up being for whatever it was sold to be. But shouldn't they because advertising is their business, that's what Meta does. It's where the vast majority of the company's revenue comes from. So it seems to me that the company absolutely should prioritize that it ensures that its core business is legal. Maybe I'm being unreasonable here. I don't

think so, but maybe. David Shepherdson of Reuter's has a piece titled TikTok faces crucial court hearing that could decide fate in the US. So you might remember that lawmakers here in the United States decided that TikTok would have to divorce itself from its parent company, Byteedance, which is headquartered in China, if it is to be allowed to continue to operate in the United States, and subsequently, TikTok

has argued that such a separation is technologically impossible. Now that's a claim I personally find hard to believe, though I do think any separation would require huge changes to how TikTok operates. It also said it's legally impossible and

financially impossible. Well, next week, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear arguments about that legal side from TikTok's legal team, and they're saying that this law is unconstantitutional that violates the First Amendment, which is also known as the freedom of speech. Well, no matter what the outcome is of this particular case, I think chances are pretty good it's going to get pushed

upward to the Supreme Court. Both the US Department of Justice and TikTok's lawyers have asked the Court of Appeals to render a decision by no later than December sixth, and that will be just a little over a month before the nationwide ban is to go into effect, which is on January nineteenth. That's assuming that, you know, there's no challenge to this, and it provides very little time for the Supreme Court to get involved to make a decision as to what might happen once it gets to

the Supreme Court. That beats me, because I mean Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices during his presidency and At that time, Trump was actively trying to ban TikTok by executive order. That was a big deal. However, since then, Trump has flip flopped about TikTok. Whether that has anything to do with a billionaire TikTok and who made significant

campaign donations to the GOP, I can't say. But certainly Trump's own explanations of well, you know, kids really like it, that doesn't seem to be a compelling reason for his one to eighty degree turn on TikTok. Anyway, I have no clue if the current Supreme Court would side more on what past Trump said back when he was president or what he says now when he's trying to be president again. But that decision will happen after the election, so maybe that could have an impact, I have no

way of knowing. Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration here in the United States issued a press release that announced that Apple AirPods pro headphones have qualified to be labeled as over the counter hearing aids software devices, and that is a first. It's the first over the counter hearing a device or software device I guess that has ever received that designation here in the United States. Previous hearing

aids have not been over the counter. You had to go through a pretty lengthy sequence of visits with various doctors before you could get a medical device to age your hearing. With Apple, users can customize the performance of their AirPods to meet their hearing needs, assuming that they have mild to moderate hearing impairment. Beyond that, they would

still need to go through the medical pathway. But folks who have experienced mild to moderate hearing loss can order directly through Apple without first going through the whole medical system, so they don't have to seek out an examination from their doctor and then you get referred to audiologists and all that kind of stuff. For people who have insufficient time or health coverage, this is a huge deal. The

FDA's designation lends credibility to this technology. There's no shortage of tech out there that claims to be helpful in various ways in the medical field, but if the products lack the FDA designation, then there's no authority out there saying, yes, this stuff works for that intended purpose. Now, I am not an Apple user, but I do think this is a great day for folks who have mild to moderate

hearing loss and gives them a lot more options. Maybe we'll get an Android compatible candidate that also meets FDA requirements to receive this sort of designation. I would find that pretty helpful. I mean, I went to way too many loud music shows when I was in college, and I'm certainly paying for that now. This week, Sony announced that starting on November seventh, you can order yourself a

brand new PS five Pro. This model has more oomph than the previous PS five consoles, so earlier gamers had to make a choice. They could play games at the highest visual settings enabled, but they would do so while taking a hit on stuff like frame rate, so the performance of the game would take a bit of a hit, but it would look gorgeous. Or they could optimize for performance, which means the graphics wouldn't look is pretty, but the

game would run much more smoothly. So this new PS five Pro model is meant to eliminate that problem by providing enough power to run games at their higher visual settings without impacting the performance, and it would only set you back seven hundred US dollars, obviously priced differently in different regions. On top of that, however, this particular Pro

model does not have a disk drive. It's digital only, so if you wanted a console that could also play discs, well, then you would need to buy an external drive for the PS five and connect it to the PS five Pro to get that capability. I think that's kind of rough for folks who depend upon a game console to be a multitasker. Now a lot of game publishers have ditched physical media in favor of digital downloads, So for a lot of games, there is no physical disk to

buy anyway. The only way to get the game is to download it digitally. But there's still a lot of us out there who are either still collecting physical media like movies and TV shows on disc, or we have recently gone back to physical media after we got tired of streaming services dropping the films and TV shows we love from their respective libraries. I fall in that camp.

For a while, I was digital only, but eventually I did get fed up with constantly having to play leap Frog to figure out which service has the movie that I wanted to watch on it. Now forget it. I'll just buy a copy of the movie so that way I always have it if I want to watch it. Well, consoles have obviously not served just as game centers, they've also served as physical media players, so ditching the drive is tough on those of us who want both. Now.

I've heard that sales of PS five external disk drives have spiked in the wake of this announcement, and also a lot of analysts have interpreted Sony's move to indicate that future consoles will likewise leave off the disk drive, it just won't be part of the system. Analysts are also cheesed off that the seven hundred dollars price tag is pretty hefty, considering you do not get a disk

drive in that model. Now, you could argue, yes, the microchips are more advanced, they're more powerful, but it's still hard to feel like you're not paying more for diminishing returns, particularly if you're someone who can't really see the difference in the various graphic settings to begin with, like me, I have trouble seeing much of a difference between the highest settings and the ones that allow you to play with little impact to gameplay. Now, I don't doubt that

there is a difference. I'm sure there is, but my television isn't large enough and I don't sit close enough to it to be able to pick out those differences. So I suppose one argument supporting the PS five pro is that in the future there will be PS five titles that will require that horsepower to run well. But then, assuming that there will be future PS generations, we're likely at the halfway point for the current console's life cycle, so there's a lot to balance out when making a

decision as to whether you're going to buy one or not. Okay, I've got a few more news stories to get through. Let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. So Microsoft has held another round of layoffs for its Xbox division. Reportedly, some six hundred and fifty employees are going to lose their jobs as part of these layoffs. That sucks. Sorry for anyone out there affected by that. That stinks. This is according to reporting from Matthew Schomer of Game Rant.

He has an article titled Xbox has reportedly been told to go dark today. So by go dark, what Schomer means is that allegedly the Xbox division has been directed to say nothing on social media, and this is an effort to sidestep the reaction to this layoff decision. So, according to Microsoft, game being CEO Phil Spencer. The layoffs are a continuation of the restructuring that has had to

happen in the wake of Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard. You might recall that particular acquisition was a very lengthy process. It took way longer than what was anticipated, and it was not guaranteed to work out because there were various regulators around the world who are raising concerns that the acquisition would lead to a decline in competition in various

gaming markets, most notably in the cloud gaming market. You might also remember that Microsoft has already held rounds of layoffs that the company claimed to be connected to this restructuring in the wake of the acquisition. When Microsoft did this back in May, the company became the target for a lot of online criticism. Tom Warren of The Verge posted that Microsoft has directed employees to avoid posting social media in order to try and prevent a similar online

backlash situation this week. I'm not sure that's really going to work out for them. The gaming industry as a whole has been hit with a lot of layoffs in the last year and a half, and it concerns me as I know there are thousands of talented people who are following their passion for video games and you know, making a career out of that passion, and they have subsequently found themselves out of work, which again stinks. I really hope anyone affected by this lands on their feet

very quickly. Boeing continues to get hit by bad news. Union workers who are machinists at Boeing have voted to authorize a strike after more than ninety four percent of union members rejected a proposed contract agreement, which would have seen a twenty five percent pay raise over the course

of four years. Interestingly, the union leaders who were at the negotiating table with Boeing had prompted members to agree to this, but the union as a whole disagreed with the team that negotiated this agreement and said, no, this is not good enough. The strike effectively began this morning, one minute after midnight, and thirty three thousand machinists are represented in this union, which means all work on things

like Boeing aircraft has come to a halt. Now, a twenty five percent raise ain't nothing right, So you might be saying, what are the workers expecting, Well, they had been asking for a much more aggressive raise schedule. They wanted forty percent increase in raises over the course of three years, So they wanted more money, and they wanted

it on a shorter timeline. They say, it's that the twenty five percent is not enough to compensate for how employees have been made to make concessions regarding compensation and pensions since two thousand and eight. So they say that, you know, the previous sixteen years went with no raises at all, and that a twenty five percent increase would not put them on equal footing of where they would be had they been and getting year over year raises

the way you would typically expect. So what they're saying is this isn't good enough. It doesn't bring us to where we should be, and it doesn't address the other issues that we have. So we're going on strike pretty rough situation last up, and then we're going to get to some reading recommendations. Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis became the first two private citizens to go on an EVA

or extra vehicular activity in spice or space. This is also known as a space walk, and they did this as part of Polaris Dawn, which is a SpaceX mission that carried the two private citizens up to space along with two other crew members, so four in total. The pair each spent about eight minutes out there in space in their space suits. They were not fully outside the capsule, so they weren't like walking around or drifting around the capsule. Their legs were still inside the cap so their upper

half was kind of poking out. They did try different experiments to use tools and test their spacesuits maneuverability and how useful it would be in the instance of actually doing a spacewalk where you're trying to perform some sort of engineering task. Everyone obviously had to wear space suits because there's no airlock in this SpaceX Dragon capsule. The whole cabin had to be depressurized to allow for this exercise.

But the exercise was a success, and it's a huge achievement for all the people at SpaceX who have been working for years to get to this point. I know, I get really critical of Elon Musk and his various antics, as well as the companies he oversees, but there is no denying that the folks at SpaceX have hit some pretty impressive milestones. They were incredibly ambitious, and they were achieved. Hopefully, one day people who aren't billionaires or SpaceX engineers will

get a chance to have a similar experience. Right now, well, it remains well out of range of let's say, typical people. I almost said ordinary, but that's making a judgment against SpaceX engineers. I don't feel bad judging billionaires. They can afford it. I'll judge billionaires all day long and they'll be just fine. Okay, now we're at recommended reading time. I've actually got four articles I want to mention. There

were so much going on this week. Well, three of the articles I have to mention are all from Here's no surprise, Ours Technica. Again, I have no connection to Ours Technica. I'm just a fan. So first up, we've got Kevin Perdy's Ours Technica article. It's titled Music Industries

nineteen nineties. Hard drives, like all HDDs are dying. So this piece details how a data storage company has discovered that around twenty percent of the hard disk drives that were sent to them by media companies are ultimately unreadable. And that really makes it clear that poorting data over to other storage methods needs to be a priority for anyone who's still relying on legacy hard disk drives from

decades earlier. As the equipment fails, it becomes harder and sometimes impossible to retrieve the data that's been stored on them, and so we run the risk of irretrievably losing some of the information that could include things like master tracks for some of the most popular songs of the past. This is actually reminding me that I should probably get some cloud storage solutions for some media files I currently have stored on an external HDD, but that's a meat problem.

Next up, there's a piece by Rebecca Valentine of Ign about how the entire gaming staff of a video game development studio has recently resigned. That studio is on a Purna and the reasons behind the mass resignation are pretty interesting. So the article is titled Anna Perna's entire gaming team

has resigned, So go check that out. Eric Berger back at Ours Technica has an article titled the future of Boeing's Crude as in crwed spaceflight program is muddy after Starliner's return, so it follows up on the tale of the beleaguered star Liner spacecraft, which obviously it experienced malfunctions as it was nearing the International Space Station. It ultimately returned back to Earth safely, but without its human crew aboord it. They remain on the ISS for the time being,

so check that out. It's kind of bringing into question where does Boeing go from here? How does NASA handle this? Will the two organizations be able to move forward or is it really in limbo? Now? Finally, there's Jennifer Oulette's article in Ours Tetnica. It's titled Meet the Winners of the twenty twenty four iig Nobel Prizes. Now. I did a tech Stuff episode about the ig Nobel Prizes a

while back. If you're not familiar with the Ignobels, these prizes celebrate weird and unexpected achievements in various fields, usually in science and technology, but also other areas as well, and the general philosophy of the prizes is that they go to projects that first make you laugh, then they make you think. So check that out as well. Maybe I'll do a follow up episode to my ig No Bells to just talk about some of the stuff that won.

Often I feel like it's better for me to wait and do those in roundups of multiple years because often a lot of those projects are only tangentially related to tech, and while they are funny and interesting, they don't necessarily meet the rubric of tech stuff. I've been listening to

a lot of the Besties podcast It's again. I have no connection to the Besties, but it's a show about video games and stuff, and they use the word rubric a lot, especially in their Patreon episodes, so it's kind of gotten stuck in my vocabulary recently, just from osmosis. I guess that's it for today's episode about tech news for the week ending scept Member thirteenth, twenty twenty four. Happy Friday the thirteenth. Everybody be safe out there. I hope you're all well, 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.