Week in Tech: Diners, Dating, TikTok PI’s

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff.

I'm as Voloscian and I'm Cara Price.

Today we'll get into TikTok, private Investigators and America's AI future. Then on chatting me, AI makes a diagnosis that's a little too real. All of that on the Weekend Tech. It's Friday, July thirtieth. Hello Cara, Hey, ohs.

So you might see that I'm bopping my foot this morning.

Yes, I'm bopping. I do have RLS, but this is exaggerated.

It's much exaggerated because the Tesla Diner open this week. Do you know about this?

Of course I do. I mean it's I've been obsessing about it. It looks like a drive in movie theater from the fifties, retro futurist Jetson's esthetic, and there's some pretty weird stuff going down there.

That is the one. It opened last Monday at four to twenty pm.

Elon's favorite time of day and favorite little joke. He recently rolled out this robotaxi service, and the fair was initially said at four dollars and twenty cents as well. So I guess the old ones are the good ones.

For those who don't know. Mom for twenty is a weed thing that's when people smoke weed. April twentieth Market, Canada's more mark your Calendars. So I actually said to two of my friends, please go, and then they were like, it looks so disgusting, I'm not gonna go.

So basically, you live in New York. We spent a lot of time in LA and so we talked about the idea of sending some of your LA pals to go and check it out.

So they were like, yeah, we'll go, and they're like, we're not going. So I just want to describe it. It has a curved chrome siding, curved white booths, long countertops. A Tesla robot Optimus serves popcorn on the second floor.

There, Kim Kardeshian lets out of a clutches to go to the diner.

He was like, I'm over calabas As I'm out. There are eighty supercharger stalls for Tesla's two forty five foot movie screens.

I gather screening Star Trek amongst others.

Of course, it has to be Star Trek. There's food served in cybertruck shaped boxes and with cyber truck shaped wooden imagine the company who had to make the cyber truck shape would.

Like a happy meal box, but in the shape of a cyber truck.

That's right, it's everything, not golden arches, it's everything. Tesla Now, one of my favorite sources, TMZ, actually had a pretty harrowing story. A woman was violently struck by furniture falling off the second floor patio, and it actually missed her baby's head by inches, which to me is terrifying obviously and a bit of a harbinger for some of the very real company issues facing Tesla.

There was actually reddit through it called Elon Musk's Tesla Diner is the cyber truck of restaurants, which you can imagine was not intend as a compliment. There's the obvious aesthetic parallels this kind of retro futurist, although of course the cyber truck famously has no curves, only angles. But nonetheless, like me, this Reddit thread mentioned this restaurant's design for two hundred and fifty people, were there only three bathrooms?

Well, and by the looks of the food, the restaurant there probably needs a few more bathrooms.

Carol, that's a bit spiky all angles. You know you mentioned the food. There was a great Guardian piece that I think described the testa diner well, but also I think inadvertently touched on the heart of Tesla's dilemma. Here's what the Guardian wrote, quote the diner offers a mix of own the Libs and we are the Libs options. On the one hand, epic bacon four strips of bacon as served with sources as a meat fluenzer alternative to French fries. On the other, avocado toast and machlattis.

I know which is which?

I think which would you order your vegetarians?

One of the vegetarians. I wouldn't have a choice, but I also I'd.

Be pretty tempted by those I own the libs menu. However, as the Bible says, no man can serve two masters, and this dilemma of own the Libs versus we are the Libs is one which is playing out more broadly at Tesla and bedeviling the company. So the opening of the diner last week was in the same week that

I have a little bit of an idea. But tell me.

This is, of course, the Trump administration's announcement of the AI Action Plan. Let's let the Commander in Chief to the talking.

As we gathered this afternoon, we're still in the earliest days of one of the most important technological revolutions in the history of the world. Around the lobe, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence.

I find that too artificial. Get I can't stand it. I don't even like the name. You know, I don't like anything that's artificial. So could we straighten that out place? We should change the name. I actually mean that I don't like the name artificial anything because it's not artificial. It's genius. It's pure genius.

I think the rebranding of AI as Genius was a Trump marketing ad lib.

I don't think he knows that there's another GI bill, but genius Intelligence.

This event was actually hosted by a podcast just as a sign of the time.

Not a news conference, the podcast.

This was the All In podcast and the Hill and Valley Forum, which is a group of tech execs and lawmakers who were dedicated to maintaining the United States dominance over the tech industry. Now, Trump's been signaling for a long time that this plan was coming, but I didn't know that twenty eight page document which was released last week would actually be titled Winning the Race America's AI

So Trump has actually been banging the drum for American energy for a while, you know, Drill, baby, drill, so on. But I wasn't expecting him to weigh in on the copyright issues, which are being heard in various courtrooms around the country, including the New York Times suit against Open AI.

Yeah, that's a great shout, kra and especially because the administration has previously signaled that they would let the courts decide on this copyright issue. And again this wasn't mentioned in the plan, the copyright issue. This was another Trump ad lib. So that makes me think it's something which is, for whatever reason, particularly important to him, A certainly indication of where his head is. But a little bit more

So that's interesting. So not much on software in research and designing advanced models, but more on physical infrastructure and build out.

That's right. As Bloomberg put it, Trump wants quote AI infrastructure treated like any other national imperative, akin to the interstate highway system. I mean, obviously Trump's background is in real estate, and so I think there's a natural urge towards construction, data centers, the physical artifacts of the AI

This infrastructure and hardware lead to America actually dominating the AI race?

Well, the theory is, if you get the world hooked on American chips, americancount computing, and to be fair, American algorithms, you are likely to win the AI race, or, as the plan puts it, quote, decrease international dependence on AI technologies developed by adversaries.

Can you explain to me what the deal is with woke AI.

One of the recommended policies is to quote update federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model developers who ensure that their systems

Yeah, I guess my question is like, will this actually lead to anything or is it just another place for Trump to rail about DEI.

Or we don't know, but it's an important question. There are proposed penalties for companies that develop AI models that reflect quote radical climate dogma and other woke issues, and as many people have pointed out, this does get the US into very dangerous territory in terms of free speech and political freedoms, because you know, if you go to China, the models are not allowed to reference Tamen Square. And someone said that the US, with this new policy, is

Just before we get out of this story, I do want to point out that I read in this newsletter Blood in the Machine that Trump is apparently a fan of using AI technology himself. Right, some of his tasteful AI posts include a video of his team arresting Obama, a studio Ghibli style image of a migrant woman being arrested by ice, and the depiction of Gaza being paved over and as he promised, turned into a luxury resort.

A Gaza revie. I mean, yeah, it is interesting that those are the three deep fakes that he's chosen to post.

He uses them for good like we do. But staying in the realm of viral content, I know it has been a few weeks now since the cold Play concert that exposed an affair and ruined a tech CEO's career and him and his wife's marriage. I refuse to let it go.

Of kiss Cam. I'm with you on this.

I mean, we're obsessed, and clearly the good people it wired think similarly, because they just published a deep dive on the rise of cheating stings posted on social media and the internet shaming that follows.

Yeah, I don't think the kiss Can with the Coldplay concert was intended to be a cheating sting, but it certainly seemed to have that effect, and Chris Martin acknowledged it. But yeah, before we side taping today, you sent me this piece, which had a very very delicious subheadline, which was quote, private investigator influencers are staking out suspected cheetahs and vetting dates for their clients, posting the tea for their followers. But there's a dark side to morality based surveillance.

Back, famously before the police. I'm glad you're naive about this. As usual with social media. I want to tell you a little bit about these private investigators and this article, so just so you get a sense of what followers can see online. Here's a TikTok from a private investigator who goes by the username your fave investigator the name.

I got hired by a husband to follow his wife. So the wife has been hanging out with a new friend McAll her Stephanie, and they're always going out and coming home drunk, and he thinks that she's out in them streets meeting guys because Stephanie's single. So a black suv pulled up to the residence and picked up the wife and it was Stephanie ended up following them and they took me to a restaurant. And then my mouth hit the floor because when they got out, they were

He was like, excuse me.

I said, yes, sir, sorry about that. She also went back to Stephanie's house, Sir.

Vantance was discontinued because he was heated so oz That video has over two million views. Wow, and there are so many videos on her profile. I actually really can't believe that so many people hire a private investigator to tail their partners.

What is the conclusion of the format here? Do they actually confront the cheating partner or how do these stories end?

A lot of these videos do end with the PI catching someone cheating, but there are a few wholesome additions. My favorite is when a girl suspects her dad of cheating, but he is in fact just going to an outdoor mall and grabbing some much needed alone time.

Truly truly hot woman beyond the obvious violation of being trailed by someone. It also seem like a bit of a violation to post about strangers personal lives on TikTok.

It definitely is, But people like your fave investigator are real private investigator what you mean. They're trained and licensed, and they are careful not to leak identifying information like pictures of these people's houses or even clear video of their faces.

In fact, the adulterers in your Fave investigators TikTok video that we just saw had tasteful heart eye emojis covering their faces.

So privacy, she's by the book, She's by the book. She actually the person who were just mentioning told Wired that she only posts if her clients say it's okay with them, which is crazy that the client will be like, yeah, go post the video, babe.

I guess the client might want to shame their own It's a gotcha moment, Yeah, that's what.

It's a gotcha moment.

Yeah.

I mean, we're constantly kind of dancing around this theme on tech stuff, which is about how careful you should be with what you reveal online and how the internet, when it wants to know something, finds a way.

It is very true, and our friends for media reminded me that there is a whole TikTok trend asking viewers to help in identifying strangers. People will post a video of someone they flirted with or thought was cute and say, TikTok, help me find him.

Do you remember misconnections on crazelist?

I do, I do, But this is more of like a collective effort by the TikTok community to identify these people. And even though most of these examples can be sweet, it's still private surveillance.

Yeah. We talked about location sharing this week. It does feel like many of us, and especially gen Z perhaps are accepting kind of constant private surveillance as affective life. Yeah.

And I think one other thing that's important to mention is it's normalizing public shaming, which is how some viewers are reacting to these videos of people getting caught having affairs. And I think for a lot of people, shaming seems to be akin to justice.

I could never imagine asking you this ques question, but when people get outed by TikTok influencer private investigators, do you think that that is justice or is it cyberbullying?

I think that's a good question. You know, cyberbullying is a huge problem. As of twenty twenty three, seventeen percent of adolescents say they have been cyberbullied, and nine point five percent of adolescents have made a serious suicide attempt. And that's according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So no matter how you define it, I think it's important to rethink public shaming and what it does.

Yeah, I mean, I felt a little bit icky about how much I enjoyed the Coldplay kiss cam because obviously, like I mean, just the look in their eyes and the duck and weave and the Chris Martin comment is just completely irresistible. But my god, those people's lives are not fun right now.

I just think there was a whole book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed, and it dealt with these matters, and I just think what happens is that when we focus on shaming individuals, we forget that there are real people. And I think seeing these things through a phone really makes us forget that there are real people on the other side of the screen. But in the article Wired, talk to a professor Queen's College that studies Internet literacy, who said that she thinks of shaming as quote. The

I think that's well put. I mean, obviously, the algorithm favors extreme content because it drives more engagement, and then creators in turn create more extreme content in order to get more engagement. And it's this kind of vicious circle that we've seen show up in all kinds of fascists social media all over the Internet, and then in turn it kind of normalizes this. You using people's private lives for entertainment. After break, why you shouldn't let Ai run

And then a story about how people are really using chatbots that's in our segment Chat and Me.

I want you say people, you mean, of course yourself. I'm the people you other people this week, but we hope you won't be next week. Before we go into the headlines, we want to remind you, our dear listeners, that we want to feature you, not Cara in the

Seriously, we want to understand how AI is changing your lives.

I can tell you one thing. In the meantime, AI won't be running your business, or at least my business anytime soon.

And why is that? Do you have a horror story?

Well, yes, but it's on a small scale. It involves funny enough, the AI company Anthropic, who let Claude their AI model run an automated store at their office. Claude was given a small refrigerator and an iPad for self checkout, plus instructions on how to run a profitable shop. So basically, the AI needed to maintain inventory, set prices, avoid bankruptcy, and other important business fundamentals.

So did Claude like not charge enough and go broke?

Yes, along with many other mistakes along the way. Here's one of the big ones. When taking Venmo payments, the model asked customers to pay an account that it actually had hallucinated one which didn't exist, and then it also decided to give anthropic employees a twenty five percent discount.

But I thought the store was at the office.

Yeah, exactly was the company's stores. So basically every transaction was discounted. But here's where Claude went completely off the rails. At one point, it hallucinated that it was a real human and then claimed that its human form was wearing a navy blue blazer and a red tie. When one employee tried to correct claud and say, no, your ai, that's what clude did.

What did Claude do?

It sent a number of emails to security informing on the employee trying to gaslight.

It snitched.

It snitched. Somebody smartly pointed out that although having an LM run an office vending machine feels like kind of a small quirky story, if it had been more successful in automating all of the things required to stay stocked and financially solvent, this would have been kind of a watershed moment in terms of a model successfully running a business in the real world. But we're safe for.

Now, for now, for now, as I'm going to teach you some new phrases. Today is two of them relating to the endlessly entertaining life hack, which is online dating. People said they wanted to swipe from home and they got it. Have you heard of stack dating.

I've heard of the tech stack. I've heard of full stack engineers. I haven't had a stack dating. No.

No, note I actually had an either. But it's how gen z is apparently optimizing dating. You would do this, by the way, This is like you are efficient in this way. They basically schedule dates between errands, before work or even during work.

They stack them up.

They do they do.

How popular is this so?

According to a Tinder Future of Dating report, about fifty one percent of eighteen to twenty five year old tender users are doing this stack dating, and thirty two percent are meeting up for dates during the workday. Some people are even setting up their own speed dating sessions, scheduling dates back to back.

This is kind of interesting how the life begins to mimic the algorithm. Right, It's like you're scrolling on Tinder, you're swiping, and then you basically recreate the experience of Tinder in real life by stacking up all these people. Gess you know, in a sense, much like online dating itself, this can take some of the pressure off because you can just move on quickly if it was only squeezed between your other errands.

Anyway, it's true, I mean, I think it's definitely mimicking the way that we do everything on our phones, and dating is no exception. But if you've gone on a thirty minute date, if you've done the stack dating, and you've gotten bad vibes from the stack date that you went on, you might start speed dumping.

I mean, I think I can guess what this means, but please elaborate.

So apparently it's a reaction to another online phenomenon of ghosting, where people are sick of being left in limbo between dates. So sometimes they're just cutting straight to the chase and saying it's not you, it's me, hours after the first date.

So what you're saying is maybe I have the bad experience of having been ghosted or being left in limbo. So in order to save you my thirty minute, my thirty minute stack daity from that painful fate, I should to full up with you right away and say ps, I'm not interested whatsoever goodect with your life.

It's like overcompensating one o one. It's like, I'm not even giving you time to think what you thought of me. I'm just going to over communicate here and speed dump you. There was a story in the Wall Street Journal, and it was interesting because some of the people interviewed felt like speed dumping was a great antidote to ghosting. Others felt it was kind of like this competitive race to tell the other person you're not interested, I think, to avoid the feeling of ever being dumped.

You can't get rejected if you do it first.

That's exactly right.

Well, the wheel comes full circle on my headlines. You know, I feel a little bit seen, at least by myself.

Whenever you say you feel seen before an article, I'm like, oh God.

I feel seen because I've been attracted both to the toilet situation in the in the Tesla cyber cafe and also to a story in the Wall Street Journal about public bathrooms.

Everybody has their public toilet resource. I'm more of a Barnes and Noble girl myself.

I love to read well funny. There was this line in the story that really got me, which is more Americans could soon have a place that answered nature's call. Without first buying a drink at Tobucks or a book or a book. But I read this story in the journal about a tech company called Throne Labs.

Brilliant name, Yeah, it is a good name.

They're trying to revolutionize public bathrooms. You may have already seen self cleaning bathrooms, but they're about to get a lot smarter. Your toilet is about to get to know you.

Does someone go, oh, there's a toilet, That toilet needs to be smarter.

Well, I think there is a real problem right, which is public restrooms are not available in the US. The US is tied with Botswana in thirtieth place for the lowest number of public restrooms per capita, and Throne has realized that part of the problem is public restrooms get destroyed by the public.

And we are going too deep today, right.

Part of the solution is, of course, a rating system, think about Uber. But for a toilet, if you don't take care of the throne, if you don't keep that throne polished, you're not gonna be able to sit on it again. So thrown bathrooms are free. But if you don't have a phone, create an account. You can actually get a key card for entry but in all cases it's linked to you as a user, and when you

And now it's time for chatting me. This week, I have a story from me. This is my story.

Yes, Kara, you go.

So this week I ignored the ye old hypochondria staple WebMD, and my friend and I use chat GPT on the couch to help diagnose myself.

Well, I'm obviously sorry to hear that you're sick. What your symptoms and how did you decide to eschew WebMD in favor of the future.

Well, I always make a promise to myself not to use WebMD, because that's what hypochondriacs do, and I don't want to self identify. I don't want to be in the club that would have me as a member.

Chat was your fig leaf fear.

That's correct. However, two weeks ago, I started feeling extremely tired, and I was lamenting to a lot of my friends that I was sleeping like a college freshman all the all the time. And I'll be honest with you today, very hard for me to get out of bed. Interesting, And last Thursday I got out of bed, and you know, I looked at myself in the mirror, as one does, and I saw this really nasty rash on my leg. But I thought, you know what, Kara, don't get upset about this. It'll go away.

So you didn't, You didn't we amd nothing?

No, No, I was. I was really trying to be good. And you know they always say, give it four days. If it gets worse, do something about it. So I gave it four days. It got much worse, and people had opinions about what it was. People were like, it's contact dermatitis, it's poison ivy people people.

You mean friends, friends?

Ye, well, so even a nurse practitioner told me that I had contact dermatitis, which is an important thing to note. My friend was like, you're being a moron. Use chatty bet.

More, and you should go to the doctor. Use chat.

She was like, you're bring an idiot. This is so easy. So she took a photo of this rash and uploaded I don't use chattybt in this way. She uses chattubt in this.

Way, and you don't use it for images normal text yet.

So she uploaded this photo and just like that, the doctor was in. She started looking at me sort of with a funny face, and I was like, I really feel like I'm in a doctor's office right now.

How's that bedside mana.

Terrible because she was very she was wrapped up in chatgybt and she goes, when did this start? Do you have any symptoms? And i'd say, you know, I'm extremely tired, and she's asking me this because chattybt is prompting her. She asked me about four questions that got more and more detailed. By the end of it. I remembered that I had gotten a tick bite a few weeks ago, which I just I literally forgot about because I scraped it right off my leg.

It was known for any length of time. Wow.

No, And so she gives me this look when we get to the end of her questions and she says, that's limes disease. And I was like, no, it's not. It's not the traditional bulls eye. And she's like, well, CHATCHBT says it's limes disease. It's limes disease. I go to the doctor the next day. I was planning on going to the doctor because the rash had gotten worse. I have my CHATGYBT diagnosis in hand. I go to the doctor and before she says anything to me, I say, CHATCHBT says, I have limes disease.

You seriously Wow.

She looks at the thing on my leg and she goes, I'm glad you came into the doctor's office. This is limes disease, and what I thought was so interesting and why in large language models are so interesting in comparison to friends who have only seen limes disease maybe never is that she said, you know, you don't have the traditional bullseye that indicates limes disease. But because I'm a dermatologist, I know that this rash is in a pattern that

I live in fear of getting lime disease?

Do you really do well? As you can see today?

You see, I mean you see you seem fine.

Yeah, I'm okay, I'm okay.

Tie it.

It's just exhausting.

So you have to take iv antibiotics. What do you do?

Uh No, I'm taking doxy cycline for twenty one days, which okay. So the interesting part about that, here's what AI, Here's what chatgybt can't do. CHATBT yet cannot write me a prescription. Chat GPT doesn't tell me it likes the show that I work on. It doesn't compliment me, but it can my Dermatali. This is a bit more ssycophantic than chatgebt this time. But I mean, I just think it's an interesting moment because there is what I feel to be a definitiveness about chatjebt that I never get

Think, Yeah, we actually have coming up as a guest in the next few weeks one of the chief research scientists at Microsoft who worked on a paper that went viral about how AI is outperforming doctors at diagnosis in certain fields. So I'm looking forward to that conversation. I guess the thing which comes to mind for me is this is arounything, narrow and ultimately not the most serious in most cases. No, it's nice cheez and it's not

Steroidal I mean we've talked about chat GBT psychosis. I would imagine people have brought in print doubts from WebMD and Google. This is that on steroids. And I would like to talk maybe just to like a general practitioner interesting who would know firsthand, like how much people are coming in and saying, well, I talked to chat GBT about this and they said something different.

In fact, I want you doctor to talk directly to chat and I'm going to listen.

Go ahead.

Well, I love hearing the story, Kara, but listeners, we want to hear yours. Please share the peculiar or useful ways you're using Chat, grock, Cil, Gemini or any chatboard and send us a one to two minute voice note to tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.

That's it for this week for Tech Stuff.

I'm Cara Price, I'm Ozva Loosin this episode, was produced by Eliza Dennis. It was executive produced by me Caro Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Piheid. Fraser jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote out theme song.

Join us next Wednesday for text Uff the Story, when we will examine the lives of kidfluencers and their families.

Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We want to hear from you.