Tech News: Twitter Fires and then Re-hires Some Employees

Stuff feed. The Restless Ones is a show I host where I interview leaders in tech positions across different industries to talk about things like technical challenges and innovations and leadership strategies and things along those lines. I think you'll dig it all right, But onto the news, and we're gonna start with Twitter. Of course, there's a lot of Twitter news because a lot has been going on over there.

So last week was kind of a dumpster fire over at Twitter, and this week has already proven to be chaotic and we're barely into it. Last week I talked about how the word was that Musk was going to lay off approximately half of Twitter's staff, and that did happen, and Musk tweeted out quote regarding Twitter's reduction in force. Unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over four million dollars a day end quote. But the move to layoff staff was so rushed that well, there were

there were regrets. Apparently at least some of the folks fired at Twitter, we're not supposed to be fired at all. They got lumped in by accident. Their accounts were discontinued, they were suspended, and they were effectively laid off without meaning to be laid off. That's pretty gush darn awful. That speaks to a certain level of incompetence on the part of management. But on the other hand, there really was a very short timeline to announce that kind of layoff.

I mean, that was such an extensive move that and you had so little time. Mistakes were bound to happen. It's just when those mistakes are wrapped up in people's lives and their careers that's it's just really hard to get past. Right. Then, there were leaders who found out that some of the folks that they had laid off were whoopsie daisy, folks who are knowledgeable about specific projects and who are responsible for a lot of work and Without those folks, Twitter would be set way back on

those projects. And since Musk has been setting aggressive, in fact unrealistically aggressive deadlines to get certain features built into Twitter or overhauled at Twitter, they still need some of those now former employees. And so, in a move that I think you can only describe as embarrassing, various Twitter folks began to reach out on some various platforms to try and entice recently laid off employee is to come back,

asking could you please return to work? Now, keep in mind these employees had already been locked out of company systems, So if they had a company computer in their position, they got locked out of that. They were locked out of Twitter's slack channel, they were locked out of their employee email. So yeah, not a good look. Some affected former employees are worried that if they refused to come back after being laid off, then they will get fired. Now you might think, if you've been laid off, how

could you be fired? Well, if you've been laid off and then the company says, wait, that we didn't mean to do that, come back to work, and you refuse to come back to work, then the company can say we never really laid you off. We're firing you now.

And by being fired rather than laid off, the employees could potentially lose the sixty days of severance pay that otherwise they would have received if you know, the layoffs had stuck in the first place, which you might imagine creates really nasty ral issues, and you'd be right in fact, I honestly, I can't even begin to think of how

I would feel if this were happening to me. Meanwhile, for the folks who are still at Twitter who didn't get laid off, you have employees who are unsure of what team they fit in, or or who they report to because the company has been gutted, and reportedly some employees and a lot of employees are left wondering about health benefits because Twitter's open enrollment period was to begin this week, but management has been pretty quiet on that front,

with no real word on what health benefits are going to be. Now that Twitter is a private company, it's no longer the same company that it was, you know, a couple of weeks ago. So that's really concerning too. I mean, in this country, healthcare is at a point where if you don't have insurance, you're really really in trouble and insurance changes all the time, So having open enrollment is important. And I don't know if that's been

resolved yet. It might have been, but the news as I'm reporting it now did not have any indication of that. My hope is that Twitter sorted that out, because that's incredibly important to employees. Twitter also rolled out the eight dollar a month Twitter Blue subscription over the weekend. This is the version of the subscription that's going to come with it a new verified check mark, so you don't

have to go through the old verification process. You can subscribe to Twitter Blue for eight bucks a month and get that checkmark on your your account. However, the company has subsequently decided to hold off on actually instituting the check mark changes until the midterm elections are over here in the United States. Those elections happened today, so we

should see the rollout happened later this week. But there was concerned that people could rush to get verified accounts and then use that check mark to lend credibility to misinformation campaigns. Right if you're sending out lies about the election, but you have that little blue check mark next to your name, people might think oh, this person's legit. So for that reason, Twitter held back on actually implementing this

change so far. On a similar note, we learned that free speech absolutist Elon Musk actually does have limits to free speech. For example, if you make an account and you claim to be Elon Musk and you're not clearly stating in your bio that it's a parody account, Ellen will ban you permanently one strike, and you're not just out of the game, you are out of the league,

which is interesting. Musk said that now that the company is rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning if someone chooses to impersonate someone else without clearly labeling the account as a parody account. Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin, both comedians, changed their verified names to Elon Musk, which illustrated how having a verification system that doesn't, you know, actually verify that someone is who they claim to be

is just downright broken. Sort of like how full self driving on Tesla vehicles isn't really full self driving. I'm

sensing a little theme along Elon Musk companies here. Another issue is that Musk has said Twitter Blue accounts will receive half the ad load of a regular Twitter user, and analysts say if that happens, Twitter will miss out on about six dollars of ad revenue per Twitter Blue subscriber in the United States, and once Google and Apple have taken a cut of the subscription transaction of eight dollars per month to be in Twitter Blue, it's actually

possible that subscribing to Twitter Blue will cost Twitter money so as people pay Twitter to use it. If in fact, this all stays the way it is, then Twitter will lose money because it will not be showing as many ads to those people and won't be able to monetize their activity. So yeah, there's some questions about that long term strategy, as it does not appear to be helping the problem of losing more than four million dollars per day.

The Verge reports that at least some verified users are now finding it impossible to change their names in Twitter, leading some to wonder if perhaps the company is trying to head off a mass musk ing, or just to avoid Twitter turning into that free for all hell escape

the Musk was saying definitely would not happen. Elizabeth Lopato of The Verge reported that she and her verified coworkers all encountered an error message while they were trying to change their names, but that her unverified coworker was able to change his name on the platform without a problem, which does sound curious. Also, Musk warned that verified users who changed their names would quote cause temporary loss of

verified check mark end quote. Elizabeth pointed out that if she changed her Twitter name to Liz, which is a name that some of her friends and colleagues use for her, that would technically mean she would be unverified, at least temporarily, even though she was just aaging one form of her name to a different form of her name, not changing her name to something else entirely, and still twittering over here.

News outlet The State not to be confused with the old MTV comedy Sketch group with folks like Thomas Lennon and Joe Latrulia in it reports that quote Twitter's rules under new CEO Elon Musk, published Monday do not include policies about misinformation end quote. That's a big old yikes that is concerning now there are rules in place. They did publish rules for content moderation, So for example, it's against the rules to engage in targeted harassment. You cannot

call for violence or glorify violence. You can't promote terrorism that kind of thing. Also, they had rules against dox sing. You cannot reveal personal information about someone else on Twitter. That's against the rules. So there are content rules in place, but when it comes of things like misinformation, none of

that is included in the rules. The State reached out to Twitter asking if the company would allow clear misinformation campaigns to to proliferate across the platform without moderation, and seem to get the indication that Twitter will still look for that kind of stuff, but it's not codified in the rules. So who knows. Platformer, a tech newsletter written

by journalist Casey Newton, whose work is really good. By the way, you're not familiar with Casey, you should check out his work, revealed that Musk is allegedly considering putting

all of Twitter behind a paywall. Now, it sounds as though this plan is to allow for a certain amount of browsing on Twitter each month for free, but once you hit a limit, let's say, like it's like I don't know, five hours or something, then you would have to pay to continue using Twitter for the rest of that calendar month, or you'd have to wait for the next month before you could use Twitter again, which sounds a lot like some mobile games I've played, where the

game is designed to hook you into activity and then has a cool down period, but you can skip the cool down if you pay cash. As of this recording, there is no word on how seriously Musk and his team are considering this option. I would be really interested to see if this got implemented. I mean, I'm already kind of off Twitter myself, but yeah, I could definitely see that brands would want to pay in order to continue using Twitter. But if your average user isn't, obviously,

that would not be a very sustainable model. I guess they're they're really banking on people being addicted to using Twitter. Will be back with some more news, including stuff that doesn't involve Twitter at all. After these messages. One thing that some Twitter users have been doing is dumping Twitter entirely and migrating over to Mastodon. Uh. Then a bunch of people go to Mastodon and their left saying, what

the heck is this? How does this work? So? Mastodon allows you to post messages, it allows you to engage with posted messages, so you can comment on someone else's message, you could repost other people's messages, that kind of stuff. So it has a lot of features that are similar to what you can do on Twitter, but Mastodon is organized in a totally different way from Twitter. Twitter is a centralized service hosted on Twitter servers. Mastodon is decentralized.

It is hosted on multiple servers that are owned and operated by different people and organizations all around the world. So when you start using Mastodon, the first thing you have to do is choose a server to join. Servers tend to have focus to them. That focus could be topic based, It could be regionally based, could be like this is a server for you know, Southeast UK, that

kind of thing. It can be demographically based. There are a lot of lgbt Q friendly servers, and the server you choose ends up becoming part of your handle slash address. Folks who are on the same server that you're on can just look you up by your handle, right, It's like you're both in the same room in a house. They can just look across the room and see you there. But they can do that just by using your handle.

If they're on a different server. They have to know what server you belong to in order to look you up, so they use your handle plus whatever server you belong to, and then they can send you messages and things of that nature. All that being said, anyone on any server can technically communicate with anyone else on any other server, but discovery is pretty challenging. Uh, it's a little more

umbersome that what you would find on Twitter. Also, if whatever entity or organization runs your server stops supporting it, you effectively lose your account. You would have to start over by establishing a new account on another server. So that is an issue with Mastodon. Uh. There are people who are working to create kind of a buffer so that if an organization plans to shut down a Mastodon server, people will have time to migrate their stuff over to

a different server. But as I understand it right now, that's not the case. It's just kind of taking on faith that the server you've joined, we're will still be around tomorrow. Anyway, Mastodon has reported an influx of users that's really pushed Mastodon to the limit on some servers. You know, a certain servers got way more popular then that increase in traffic has really strained the server load, and it's you know, been a pretty quiet utility for

the last several years, except within certain communities. If you are thinking about joining Mastodon and checking it out, I feel that I should add Mastodon tends to lean left politically,

not exclusively, but it is a tendency. Now. I'm personally a left leaning kind of guy, which I'm sure everyone out there realizes based upon my my uh commentary in episodes, but I realized not everyone is, and likely a lot of listeners will disagree with me politically, so I thought it's only fair I mentioned that there is a somewhat liberal leaning environment at Mastodon. As for whether I will set up a tech stuff space over on Macedon, I'm still thinking about it, and I will let y'all know.

Several news outlets are reporting that Meta maybe gearing up for its own round of layoffs. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported we may hear about thousands of layoffs beginning tomorrow, which would be Wednesday, the ninth of November to thousand, twenty two for those of y'all listening to old news episodes in the future. If these layoffs happen, they will mark the first broad scale downsizing across Meta

in the company's history. It's not exactly shocking because CEO Mark Zuckerberg has indicated several times this year that he suspects Meta has more employees than there is work to do, and that some folks aren't necessarily putting in significant effort in their jobs, and that there are employees who may not need to be there. And this is all talk that indicates that there's a leader in place who feels

it's time to clear out some office space. Plus, Zuckerberg continues to focus on his Metaverse project, which is costing Meta billions of dollars each year. If you're going to keep up with that kind of cash drain, you may eventually have to look at making cuts elsewhere, like with your head count on projects that are not directly connected to your Metaverse vision. We've already heard reports that there are folks in Meta who say they are on MMH projects,

which stands for make Mark Happy. That one way to stay in good graces with management is to tackle whatever pet project Zuckerberg has in mind at the time. But that this gets tricky because Zuckerberg also is known to change his mind about stuff, often due to the public reception of his ideas, which then necessitates pivoting those projects and being able to respond to new criteria. Now, I'm no expert in any of this kind of stuff, but to me, it sounds like Meta isn't a bit of

a vicious cycle right now. Investors are generally unhappy that the company isn't performing nearly as well as it used to who which is putting it lightly, And they're really not happy that Meta is spending billions of dollars on a project that will not see fruition for years if it succeeds at all. And there's still plenty of skeptics, myself included, who think that the vision of the metaverse, particularly as something that necessitates VR and a R headgear,

is not likely to have broad acceptance. You're gonna have probably a narrow band of extremely enthusiastic fans of it, but I just don't see it extending beyond that without like a lot of growing pains. Now that being said, shares of Meta rose a bit after news broke that layoffs are coming, because that's cheerful, And as of this recording, shares of Meta are trading and around ninety six dollars per share. Now, this is up from its low of eighty eight dollars per share, which was what it was

posting it just a few days ago. But ninety six dollars a share is way way down from the company's high this year of around three forty dollars a year back in January. So yeah, it was trading at three dollars at the beginning of the year. Now it's less than a hundred dollars per share. You know, towards the end of the year. Uh, it did have a little bit of a recovery compared to its low, but yeah, that is not in a great place. Whendows eleven users might notice some new ads popping up as they go

to shut down their computers. Bleeping Computer reports that users have noticed flyout ads popping up as they go to shut down their machines. So they go into the start menu and they pull up the little menu that comes up when you hover over the power selection, and the ads are really simple. It's just an option that if you were to click on the option would take you

to a product page. So for example, like when you would hover over that power button, you would get a little menu that give you options like change account settings, lock to lock your computer, or sign out. But now if you do it, you would also get a little advertise service at the top. It would just be listed

as another option among these that are already there. So you might see an option that says back up your files, and if you click on it, it actually takes you to Microsoft's one drive product page, or you might see one that says sign up for Microsoft account. So, in other words, the first option in the menu is trying to sell you something specifically some sort of Microsoft service. Interesting.

People are already upset about it, which I get like there they don't want to be confronted with sales messages when they're just trying to access basic functions of a computer like turning it off. So yeah, interesting little report there. And you know, we already talked earlier about how Microsoft is apparently considering going down a strategy where they offer PCs that are subsidized by advertising so that you could

purchase it for very little money relatively speaking. And the tradeoff would be every time you're using your computer, you're getting ads served to you, and that offsets the purchase price of the computer. Uh, we've heard about that last week.

Still no word on whether or not they're moving forward with that, but we are starting to see Microsoft incorporate Microsoft specific advertising in basic functions of Windows eleven, so maybe that is where they're going over on the Activision Blizzard side of things, which just as a reminder, Microsoft is still attempting to acquire Activision Blizzard, but the deal is facing some scrutiny in different parts of the world, So no guarantee that that's going to happen or what

timeline it might happen on. But let's talk about Call of Duty Modern Warfare two and the upcoming free to play companion title Call of Duty war Zone two point oh. Engadget reports that Activision is launching some content moderation tools meant to deal with toxicity in communications within the games.

And I'm sure that if any of y'all have ever played any sort of competitive online game that features voice chat or text chat, you have run into situations where someone is being incredibly offensive and vulgar and are harassing other players that you can hear like some of the

worst stuff imaginable in these games. And for folks who make say they're living streaming, people who live stream games, this can be a real problem because that kind of language can get the streamer and hot water with whatever platform they're using, like if it's YouTube or Twitch, even if the streamer is not necessarily engaging with the toxic player, like if there's proximity chat on and another player is in the same general space as the streamer and then

just starts letting loose with ethnic slurs, that affects the streamer too, right, So not to mention just normal players who don't necessarily want to encounter that kind of abuse online. Well, Call of Duty is going to have active moderation teams who, once they verify that a player has engaged in toxic voice chat or text messages within the game, they will mute that player in all communication channels. That person will

no longer be heard or be able to text. They'll still be able to play unless they have violated some other rules, in which case they could get you know, booted and banned, but they won't be heard by anybody, which I think is a blessing. Uh. In order for this to work, however, is being a reactive system. Players will still need to flag offensive gamers to alert the moderation team to look into them. So if you're playing, and you encounter someone who is just being the worst,

you can flag them. Then, at least hypothetically, the content moderation team will take a closer look and listen in on chat and start looking at the text messages, and if they see that, in fact, there are instances of a use, they will then mute the player. Still, considering all the types of stuff that can get shouted about in these games, I think that's a good choice. It's not the best. There are more proactive approaches to this kind of thing, but at least it's a way of

addressing it. And that's going to be important because war Zone being a free to play game is bound to attract a ton of players, and not everyone's going to be a hateful jerk, but some of them definitely will be. As for me, I'm not good at these kind of first person shooter multiplayer games. I can't play at a competitive level. I would just be a bullet sponge. So you won't find me playing these online. I just I can't. My reactions are not good, my aim is not good.

Even with aim assist, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna compete at a decent level, So I just go through single player first person shooters and then I yell at computer controlled enemies because I know I can't hurt their feelings. Um. But yeah, I'm glad to hear this news because I do watch some streamers and I never want them to have their their career impacted by things that are outside

their control. The Verge reports that AMC theaters here in the US and Zoom are partnering to bring interactive meeting calls to some AMC theaters, allowing the theater to become kind of a giant meeting space, capable of holding more than a hundred people as they participate in like a

remote meeting. And I can see that as being an attractive option for say a large company that has offices or stores that are all over the place, like if it's a nationwide company, for example, employees can get together in a physical space and watch an all hands meeting on a big old screen. The other thing that this does is that can reinforce that feeling that your boss literally towers over you and that the power dynamic is incredibly unbalanced, and that helps you visual is that enormous

gap between your position and that of your boss. Maybe I'm getting a bit too cynical about this, But honestly, that's the first thing that popped into my head is like, gosh, what would make me feel like I had really been put in my place? Oh? I know what if my boss were five stories tall and looking down at me

while telling me about the company. AMC says it's planning on installing the service in seventeen major US markets next year, so it's not coming to every AMC everywhere, but it should be rolling out throughout If I'm being serious, I can see the value of this, Like I getting people together does have a certain value to it, and uh, for a distributed company, one that has locations across lots of different regions, it could be a practical solution as

opposed to having every single person individually logging into a meeting from their own computer. But yeah, it's hard to get around that fact of you're looking at an enormous movie screen and by necessity everything has to be enlarged so that the folks sitting in the back can have a view of what's going on. To also the thought of my boss's voice coming over a surround sound system with like Dolby Base to it also terrifying. Maybe I'm

thinking about this too much. You know what, We're gonna take another quick break and I'm gonna calm down, and then we'll cover the rest of the tech news. Some engineers and researchers at m I T, the University of Minnesota, and Samsung have developed a new kind of Terra Hurts camera that can operate at room temperature and room pressure, which opens up the possibility for this tech to be used in many different areas, including stuff like airport security.

So the cameras capable of generating and detecting waves and the terror Hurts range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This puts this kind of radiation between microwaves and visible light. It inhabits that space, and these waves can penetrate lots of different kinds of materials, non metallic materials, not all of them, but a lot of them, and that's one reason why

it could be useful in security operations. They can also detect signatures of certain molecules, so in an industrial setting, you could use this kind of technology to analyze materials for certain types of molecules, but you can do it in a non invasive, nondestructive way that could be really valuable to the camera works by sending out light. It stimulates these little particles called quantum dots, which I've talked about in tech stuff episodes from a long time ago.

I probably need to do a new one. But it stimulates quantum dots by using a terror hurts wave. So it generates a terror hurts wave, sends that to affect these quantum dots, which then emit light, and that light can then be recorded by a sensor similar to the kind we use in digital cameras. The team created a device that produces images that not just show what was imaged, but can show the polarization state of terror Hurts waves, which can give you ideas as to the nature of

whatever was image. And I think of this tech as being similar to kind of like thermal imaging sensors. Thermal imaging goggles, for example, detect infrared radiation and they send that data to a system that converts the information into

something we can see. So when you put on thermal goggles and you see like that heat signature, you know, like predator vision, that that's thanks to a system that is taking the thermal information and then matching that two colors that we can see in order to indicate levels of heat. Otherwise it would just be invisible to us, So it has to be converted into the visible range for us to be able to see it, right, That

makes sense, Same sort of thing here. The researchers have made big strides towards solving some massive engineering challenges when

using terror hurts cameras. You know, being able to operate a room to sure and at room pressure is huge, But there are other obstacles that we have to overcome before this tech could go into widespread use, namely, generating terror hurts waves in the first place is a complicated process, and the current tech that we have to rely upon uses really expensive large laser systems, so it's not something

that would be practical right now. We would need to make greater strides in being able to create terror hurts waves without the reliance of things like laser systems, which people are working on, but we have ways to go. Recently, representatives at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Observatory in Chile, which houses large important radio antenna that are used in astronomical observations, revealed that the facility had to shut down

starting in late October due to a cyber attack. The rep said the attackers did not affect scientific data, so they weren't able to compromise information from recent observations. Nor were they able to get actual access to the antennas themselves, so they weren't able to damage the array of radio antennas. But other network systems were affected, you know, things like administrative systems, email systems, that kind of stuff, so they

had to shut it down to contain it. The statement indicated that the attack has been contained, but an investigation is ongoing and as of now they are unsure when the observatory will be able to go back to normal operations. I've done episodes about AI powered machines competing against humans in various games, as well as the related topic of

solvable versus unsolvable games. So a solvable game is one that, if you assume both players are playing perfectly, you can predict the outcome from any position even before a single move is made. You know, you have to have complete information about the game in order for this to work,

but it is possible. So for example, in Connect four, assuming that both players are playing perfectly, player one will all days win just from the beginning Anyway, there are other games that have lots of different potential outcomes, and some of those are games that humans were for a very long time able to dominate. So you've likely heard about the various chess programs like Deep Blue that played at superhuman levels and were able to beat chess champions.

But another board game that computers for a long time we're good at, but not not better than humans. But then eventually overtook us is Go. So back in two thousand and sixteen, Alpha Go and AI emerged as a formidable computer opponent, defeating the best human Go players, and so for the first time in history, a computer was able to play Go at a level better than expert humans. But recently, some researchers found that they could beat a go playing AI called Cateago, which is also capable of

beating human champions. But they could beat Catego using a very quirky strategy. So the researchers took a much weaker go playing AI program. So they got like a computer program that can play Go, but it plays it at a level where even amateur players human players can defeat

this AI without much trouble. And then they took this week Ai Go game playing system and put it up against Catego, which has beaten human champions, and they found that if they trained the weak AI to go after some blind spots and Catego strategy, they could actually have this inferior AI defeat a much stronger one, which sounds really weird, right. I mean, we humans can get pantsed by Cateago, but we can beat this weaker AI system. However,

the weaker AI system can beat Catego. It's kind of like paper rock scissors in that way, and you might think, well, how is this even possible? Bowl Well, during the training process for Catego, Catego would refine its approach by playing millions of games against itself. But this refining process meant that over time, Catego would naturally concentrate on particular moves and sequences within the game and migrate away from more rare,

outlying possibilities. And that meant that some legal moves were largely ignored because they were just not likely to occur. But this weaker AI, by focusing on those unlikely moves, was able to make moves that Catego wasn't able to anticipate. And that's interesting because it meant that this system that could potentially just beat the best go players could be defeated by something far inferior, and that should also raise

red flags to us not not for go necessarily. This is an entertaining version of a larger issue that we should really pay attention to. When I hear a story like this, I think about other uses of AI, especially AI that has been trained through machine learning in processes similar to kindago and AI can sometimes, on the surface appear to be really capable, but knowing that it can be thrown for a loop if it encounters something that's

outside its training parameters should make us wary. Take, for example, self driving cars. While we can train autonomous driving systems in countless scenarios, and we can take information from real world experiences and use that to continue to to augment as self driving systems capabilities, the fact is the real world could throw some really strange stuff at us occasionally.

And while humans might be able to make a split second decision and avoid an accident even if they encounter something they have never seen before, and AI system can lack that capability and make a bad choice, which is one of the biggest challenges when we come to truly refining AI for specific use that we need to remember that with these these machine learning processes, we can create

blind spots, and those blind spots. If it's a possibility that those blind spots could occur in the real world, they will occur, and when they do, it's going to throw these AI systems for a loop. Whether that AI system is used to detect things like you know, financial uh, misappropriation of funds, or it's designed to control a car as it goes down the highway or whatever. If there are blind spots that are possible, then they will happen at some point or another, and we need to be

on the lookout for that kind of thing. It's fun with go not so much fun if you're in a car that's being controlled by a robot and there's no human controls available to you. That would be scary. Finally, talking about scary, Palmer Lucky, who's the guy who created the oculus and then subsequently went on to reveal that he can be a pretty awful person, has created a VR headset that can kill you. He posted about this

on his blog over the weekend. Because November six, two twenty two is an important date in the fictional series Sword Art Online. So in that series, a deranged tech genius creates a really immersive game and a VR headset used to access that game, and it's supposed to be the most incredible experience ever. But what people don't know is that he also built into this headset, which is called the Nerve Gear, a system of powerful microwaves that are designed to kill the user if they die in

the game. So if you die in the game, you die in real life. It's an old sci fi trope. Similar Literally, you cannot remove the nerve Gear without activating the kill switch, which makes me think of movies like Battle Royale where you've got characters wearing explosive collars. That the Hunger games is the same way the explosive colors, where they can activate the collar and kill someone if they are breaking the rules of the game or they're

in the wrong region at the wrong time. Well, Palmer thought this was such a cool idea he built something similar. He didn't use microwaves because he can't really mantorize that technology to a point where you could fit it into a headset. So instead of using microwaves, he has used explosives.

He has positioned three small explosive devices on the headset, and they are wired, so that should the headset indicate that the player has died in the game by flashing a red screen up at a certain frequency, the explosives will trigger and the player's head would get blowed up in real life. So you die in the game, this

headset kill you. Palmer then goes on to say he has yet to build in a system that would make the headset explode if you tried to take it off, so it's not like it's tamper proof, so shucks, and that he also is not sure that the explosives couldn't be triggered by accident, So in other words, you might be playing the game not die, but the explosives get triggered and you get blown up. Anyway, he calls it

more of an office art piece. So yeah, this is one of those cases where I feel that fandom has gone a little too far, because sometimes people take away the wrong lessons from fiction, Like I can just imagine that Palm are lucky reading or watching Hunger Games or Battle Royal for that matter, and thinking oh that's a good idea. That means you you learned the wrong lesson Palmer.

That's not what that's not what they're trying to teach whatever. Anyway, you know, I I don't assume that anyone's ever going to actually be putting these things on unless we truly enter a dystopian sure, in which case I'll be roving the deserts looking for gas. Because I've already decided the mad Max approach is my way. I kind of dig the punk aesthetic, so that's that's kind of my I'm not gonna be worried about the virtual reality stuff so much. It will be going after petrol. I guess that's it

for this news episode of tech Stuff. We will be back on Thursday with another news episode. As a reminder, tomorrow, we are publishing an episode of The Restless Ones in the tech Stuff feed, and I encourage you to listen to it. It's a good show and you might discover that you want to dive into the entire series because I talked to a lot of interesting people this past year. Um and yeah, check it out. If you have suggestions for future topics I should cover in tech Stuff, please

reach out to me. A couple different ways to do that. You can download the I Heart Radio app, which is free to downloads free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff by putting tech Stuff in the search field you'll see on the tech Stuff page there's the little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds long let me know what you would like to hear in future episodes, or if you prefer, you can get in touch with

me over on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Tech Stuff is an i Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.