and we're live on the new set
again whoa this is like the third set in the last
two months month two months are you counting the between two ferns kind of
yes yeah definitely yeah so fourth
okay so we had the original set yeah then we had between two ferns temporary
we had between two ferns deluxe but i don't think that necessarily counts
because it was like between six ferns um and then we had like the we're in a
corner and it's weird and then now we're here it was like the attack linked
sideshow yeah like yeah tech dinked get out of here
get out of here relegated to the corner now dedicated hex wall yeah this is blue
this is the new set the the orange chair is a little clashing uh though the white
and grey chair works pretty well uh maybe we'll try to swap that one out who
knows it'll probably never happen doesn't matter this is the new set
welcome to the new gnawan shed bizarre
yeah it's weird it's it's also very weird because we've had the WAN Show in the
other corner of the office near where the workshop is
uh for the longest time not not the entire
time that we've been here because rancho was technically like in some weird spare
room for a little while and all this kind of stuff but for many years it's
been in the same corner facing the exact same direction and now we are like
almost as far away as possible from that point at the complete other side of the
office should be quieter over here it should be a lot quieter and i think the
sound absorption stuff in general should be a lot better um
we'll have to i wonder what the twitch chat is saying let's do a straw poll
actually i'm going to set up a straw poll straw poll dot me
i want to ask people
whether it's like thumbs up or thumbs down for this set versus the other set
all right do you prefer the old area do you like the new area
a new set better
worse worse wait third option
i d g a f
i don't care
f whoa
i don't care fatso hey
that's mean i resent that okay what the heck
what just happened i'm gonna refresh what is that there we
go all right i want to see what twitch chat
has to say um
there we go i missed the old set i expected that i expected a lot of people
were gonna bring that up we fear change
yeah a lot of people do fear change in general what do you think ed
new set old set which one um i'm working on throwing a light at
you guys ed's trying to give us another light i think it looks mostly okay
no background yeah it's a little weird background
yeah yeah get out of there you're blocking us instead of lighting
okay let's see way to go ed it's like you work around camera some people just
aren't camera aware you know so we got lots of sweet oh wait
are you still talking about straw poll i am okay here we go we got nothing never
mind we've made it so a lot of people don't care
majority people uh if they care think it's worse but
that's not super surprising because again people fear change we're gonna ask you next week we're gonna ask you next
week again we're gonna maybe keep this poll going also the lighting is like
really not perfect yet uh but we'll we'll we'll see how it goes i'm i'm
interested in what people think i think it should be darker oh just mood lighting yeah get some
candles yeah the flickering yeah that phillips hue tech candle okay but now
on to the actual show what do we have lots of sweet topics
tons of topics we finally found out for sure what happened in the unfortunate
uber accident from march where that woman was killed yeah we also now know
that apple knew that the iphone 6 would
bend they knew it was going to bend before it launched
now we know that that's sick that is actually pretty
interesting also nintendo bans all online access to switch devices owned by
hackers this is on a account basis we'll talk more about that later and there has
already been gdpr complaints made against google and facebook in the least
surprising news ever this is the deadline day for gdpr so you should stop
getting mass emails about it pretty soon here um i'm sure you
received a lot by the way we're updating our privacy policy i didn't even know i
subscribed to you unsubscribe
i did a thing with the forum which is it's gonna annoy some people for
suresies but instead of emailing everyone i mean so the next time you go
log in yeah it's just like hey i saw that and it confused me at first i was
like god type the wrong thing in and i load it again i was like i'm gonna have to scroll down see my problem is i did
the same thing so i think a lot of people are gonna be pretty confused you gotta scroll down and click the agree
button sorry about that we're all in trouble a little confusing let's press the button let's go
uh oh really
oh yeah it's a beautiful lagoon hold on never
leave hold on how do i i can't just
yeah okay what's wrong
will that do something hey yes yeah that
will give you swamp butt yeah
oh i'm dead thanks ed killing me off in the intro
maybe that's why i left
savage jerky savage just like ed um moss backpack the black pack yeah and
then a bloody game nutty gaming keyboard
and we're back i'm happy that i fixed the uh fix the intro
i wonder if that's the only time that it's been broken and then came back to
life eventually um a new intro for a new beginning
speaking of what is that doing the reddening he's
messing with the light whatever keep keep it going speaking of uh not new
beginnings old old old happenings what just happened you may remember
what have you done can i keep going i fixed it
travel back in time too yes september
2014 when the iphone 6 came out
and unboxed therapy was like biggest video of all time drop
okay yes yeah so there's a bunch of viral
content videos and pictures of people like look at my nice new shiny iphone
all bent to the shape of my legs my hips or jeans are so tight and then all the
iphone haters like me were like
and then yeah like they i've got an Android phone they don't always design things good
it's a brick it doesn't bend and then apple basically said like this
isn't a design flaw
it's designed good it's just there's like some bad apples
out there you know we made a million of these things get it
but now information contained in internal apple
documents filed under seal in a class-action lawsuit show that apple
knew that the iphone 6 and 6 plus were susceptible to bending prior to the
phone's launch the company found in an internal
investigation that the iphone 6 is 3.3 repeating of course times more likely to
bend than the iphone 5s and not surprisingly the 6 plus is 7.2 times
more likely to bend than the iphone 5s
that's kind of a weird statistic because like the big one's more likely to bend
than the small one no no kidding yeah yeah i was going to say that make
sense so then the phone launched and everyone found out they were bending and
that was bad and then in early 2016
many iphone 6 and 6 plus devices start to exhibit symptoms of what's called
touch disease so you would get like a flickering gray bar
at the top of your screen or your your screen would be working only intermittently or not at all yeah
and then it was determined by various third-party repair
people that that was happening because the the
integrated circuit responsible for transiting the touches
to code was getting lifted off of the board
because your phone got bent so then the chip would get lifted off a little bit
so then people started complaining about that and apple didn't say anything they didn't confirm
that but they quietly started to put what they call underfill underneath the
chip so that future phones that got shipped would actually be stronger but
they didn't say that to the public they did not publicly acknowledge touch
disease until november 2016 even though it was may of that year that they
started fixing all of the chips
and they only acknowledge it in november right because there was like widespread
news reports about the issue and then that at that time they said
that they were going to start replacing touched disease phones for a mere 150
and that had previously been a 350
charge and in its public announcement
when they said they were going to do all this they didn't actually say that they changed
that they started fixing them yeah they didn't say that yeah
they just said they're gonna replace the touch disease once yeah
it's like i can't say i'm surprised but it is really interesting news
it's probably gonna hurt some at least some amount of the apple fanboys and but
the apple fanboyism hasn't been doing very well over the last few years well this is the thing it's just an another
episode in a series of trust betrayals over the last while whether that's iOS
rollouts i've had all these bugs or whether it's what else did they do
uh naming schemes or
help me out here the the 10 came out and
while a lot of people do like it there's a huge amount of issues with it um
taking away the headphone jack pissed a lot of people off big one including
loyal fans like like they i i know this is coming from a pc
fan and like an Android fan but
i feel like sentiment really isn't there lately like
back when i used to work in a computer store there was like you'd have the mac
people come in and they were really hardcore and i worked with people that
were there that were mac fans and they were really hardcore and it was kind of hard to
debate because it came down to both sides were giving logical arguments it
just was that one side put more weight on one thing yeah the other side put
more weight on a different thing sure so that made it so they liked different
things it was fine it was an interesting battle now it's kind of
getting a little worse because the stuff that they used to
trash on like like pc stuff or Android
stuff for is starting to happen on their side as well and then i think that google's closing
the gap now that we have a flagship device that kind of represents Android
being the google pixel then it's kind of easier although
apple's still ahead in that and this we're talking about phones here let's
acknowledge as a Windows user Windows sucks i'm like this close to the
switching to mac what what what version Windows do you run
uh i don't think i have the spring creators update on 10 oh yeah um that might that
might be why i shouldn't have to use like 2004 software i know to get a good
experience like like 2018 stuff should be the best
stuff if you can make it work without being a pirate um
you can get the the embedded systems Windows 10 version it's far better
or i would recommend uh the same situation embedded systems but you don't
have to be a pirate to get it uh Windows 8.1
it's just a lot better yeah it's one of my favorite things is
when you're like hey i want to disable Windows update and they're like or
no it's like
what that's not how a computer is supposed to work anyways i think we're
probably good for that topic no there's more interesting things about it okay so
bad in a court filing in the class action case apple's lawyers wrote that
its rigorous and comprehensive reliability test data proved that
enclosure bending and twisting cannot cause
the the the touch disease issue unless the phone had already been repeatedly
dropped on a hard surface and i think that's so interesting
because what what it says to me is like look
we made a design choice
but that choice like sure it might cause bending but it's that choice is not
going to brick your phone and cause this touch disease unless you already screwed
up by dropping it a bunch it harkens back to i believe it was the iphone 4
circa 2010 where you're holding it wrong is that right
well i don't know it was they couldn't get good qual uh call quality because
there was a band of aluminum around the outside so calls were dropping and their
official response was making phones is hard we're really good at it but no one
could make a phone that's perfect so we're still the best it's just phones
are hard so they what they what they're doing and they need to do
this is they need to continue to promote this and propagate this this
like fiction that we all buy into where apple has superior engineering as soon
as that myth erodes then what do they have yeah
so i think this is very own brand for the lawyers to have this
this statement that stance yeah that makes sense
um we're moving on to a hard topic now
uh it's it's something that's difficult to
approach in general and people have talked about it people have mentioned it
in in twitch chat already asking why uh it wasn't like the first topic it wasn't
the first topic because i just didn't necessarily think we would lead with
this i wanted to bring something slightly more upbeat to the table um
we have had this man on the WAN Show in the past who's one of our guests quite a
long time ago when we used to bring a lot more guests on but uh john
totalbiscuit bane has passed away um
he has succumbed to a four-year battle with
cancer uh he's just 33 years old
uh in in the notes but i'm gonna go off notes is talking about how he contributed a lot to gaming as a whole
he was really big into the starcraft 2 scene uh his his youtube channel was
pretty massive in terms of reviews if you're in the pc gaming community you
probably know of him you've probably seen one of his game reviews especially
indie games especially indie games that was very cool because i really liked
indie games for a long time uh very few people in the audience might
remember this but i used to have indie game reviews from pax they got like no
views compared to the rest of our content so i stopped but still um
his wife jenna is is still around um and has stated
that she's going to continue the co-optional podcast as well as her own
youtube channel so if you want more of that flavor of content uh be sure to
tune in and unless you have something to say i don't
i don't think i'm gonna keep going um if
if you if you want check him out the the
youtube channel is still there his twitter's still there you can still watch all his old reviews of indie games
if you want to check different things out um and if you did that if you consume
that content today you'd still be supporting those who survived him like
his like his wife jen for example check out her youtube channel keep watching co-optional
podcasts do all that kind of stuff um yeah rest in peace jon rest in peace
john and moving on because i don't want to no
possible segway literally no no possible segway now no
um so here's a story that we reported on when it first broke in march
the the accident that happened in arizona with a self-driving uber
that uh again this is actually also kind of dark it was the first pedestrian
death in a self-driving car case so
there's there's been a report published by the national transportation safety
board it has all the details of what happened what parts of the car's systems
failed uh the human error the software all of it we know now
finally so
there's really a play-by-play in the report which you'll be able to um click
through it's source number three if you get access to the wan dot doc or if you
go to the rs article that luke has on the screen yeah
you'll be able to click through as well from the first paragraph this plan doc will be available on the forum after the
show by the way and this was posted on the forum by the way by spartaman64
thank you so for those who don't know there was a
self-driving uber cruising down a i believe it's
there's two lanes it's at night there's two left turning
lanes and then there's a bike lane on the right and basically it's night time
and a woman crosses the street not at a crosswalk which is pretty much
irrelevant walking her bicycle and the car strikes
uh the woman and she eventually died because of her injuries
there's also dash cam footage that um was released that shows what the car is
heading towards and also inside the car and the view inside of the car you can
see an uber employee who's supposed to be responsible for taking over in tricky
circumstances who appears to be looking down possibly at a smartphone and no one
knew if this person was being negligent or what
but now we have more details so
this is just crazy so what apparently what happened was uh shortly after the story broke we
learned that the there's a statement from the producers of the lidar systems
that they believe that they had checked and that their systems had performed
properly and the report confirms that so
what happened was as the vehicle approached um i believe her name was
elaine at first the vehicle detected just an
object this is at six seconds away from
collision then as it gets closer it's decided okay that's a vehicle and then
finally that's a bicycle but here's the problem
as hold on at 1.3 seconds before impact the
self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to
mitigate a collision according to uber emergency braking
maneuvers are not enabled while the car is under computer control
to reduce the potential for an erratic vehicle behavior so the car sees that oh
this is going to be crazy uh it's going to need some tricky steering to for us
to avoid this i'm not allowed to do that the driver has to do that so i should
probably notify the driver there are no alerts set up
the system is not designed to alert the operator wait it gets worse so then
you're thinking okay so but if there's someone in the driver's seat i'm just going to say this is still a problem
because it the car shouldn't have to alert the driver they should be paying
attention well it still should alert the driver because you could be yes but it shouldn't have to
it shouldn't have to it should like okay no it should have to sorry but it it the
the problem should have still been solved right so you should presumably the person sitting in the driver's seat
they're saying they're thinking oh this looks weird i should take over yeah but
you would still like to see like you might be thinking when is this a
situation where the car is going to do it or not it'd be nice if the car was
like baby bang and then you're like yeah okay i'm going to take over but it gets
worse because the driver is actually responsible for monitoring
diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the
vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review that's
what she's looking at oh she's looking down not at her phone i mean this is
as for her statement she did have a personal and a business phone in the car
but she claims she was actually just looking at the interface that she is
supposed to be looking at yeah so now you've got a situation where uber's
paying drivers to sit in the car and look at it and not look at the road
basically and then the car is not going to go ding ding ding look up
and then it plows into a pedestrian
causing that person's death jeez like
you should have seen that coming that is silly designs that's like negligent
that's a bad system presumably when these when the engineers
are working on this system they would be you would pay most attention to this
kind of case this isn't like an edge case this is the critical what could
happen case your takeover driver is constantly not looking at the road
that's not that can't work that way
you could even like it you said something along the lines of like oh they have to make note of
different events and stuff like that i feel like you could just have a log
where you have some form of like controller that's on the steering wheel
while you're like this type of event just happened this type of event just happened to just keep constantly keep
notes and then fill it out later at the cameras and stuff at the very
least it needs to go ding ding ding looking down yeah
just crazy so now um after that accident happened uber
suspended its self-driving testing in lots of different places
um a hud would work someone yeah someone just said a hud would work yeah you
could have something on the freaking yeah i feel like the driver should
definitely be able to be looking up the fact that they have to look down is
really stupid there's got to be some whether it's a simplified controller or
it's one of those like dial things that are super popular in cars so they can at
least still be looking up and just have it post up onto the windshield sorry
continue uh just the upshot is that uber has now
pulled its self-driving program out of arizona laying off 300 people
and as far as i could tell i think that all of its self-driving operations now
are happening out of its um advanced technology center in pittsburgh like its
own comp compound or campus and no longer in test cities okay
so that's gonna hurt yeah probably i
think one of the biggest um one of the biggest things that's gonna
hold back automated driving and automated almost
anything is companies being careless with it
and having stupid things like this happen um and i hope that the companies that
aren't being careless with it um and this isn't me elon musk jumping there's
definitely more than one um
keep pushing forward i guess well almost
every high-profile company has had some kind of story about this whether that's
tesla or waymo and there's been a bunch with tesla too yeah
it's uh yeah it's a fine line though because they're all trying to push to be
first to market there's going to be a huge first mover advantage and there's
something to consider that is like there will always be some amount of failure
rate um and
it's comparing that failure rate versus the failure rate of human drivers and as
long as we're beating that then good but like i it needs to
every single time that it does happen because it's an automated system we can
go in and look at what happened with with a human driver it's much harder
yeah it's much much much for sure and you rarely have a camera looking in the
vehicle at the driver so you can't tell you can actually diagnose these problems
and yes ideally solve them every iteration should be improved all
right yes yes exactly so not necessarily even solve it but like make it less
likely to happen at the very least and that's on a system level yeah like if
you get into an accident you may never repeat that mistake again but that
doesn't affect how i drive it doesn't improve humanity yeah right
but it's kind of like uh cars versus airplanes you know people feel unsafe on
airplanes yeah they're much safer but it's about control you don't control the
plane that's fair a lot of the time though like
okay so i've always found that you you brought up the cars versus airplanes thing um i've always found it
interesting that everyone's like oh have a safe flight have a safe flight everyone seems so confused i'll try but
then like if if you jump in like a taxi or they send you away in an uber or
something like all right get out of here like people say drive safe
yeah that's true people do say drive safe i just think it's like the like
have a safe flight thing is like like a guaranteed yeah
i don't know and what are you gonna do about it yeah what is that i'll put my
seat belt on yeah i will listen to that demonstration do
you i'll put that mask on before i put it on my kid that's the extent of safe
flight that i can guarantee you where's where's your uh floatation device oh
underneath my seat usually nice sometimes it is the seat cushion itself
i like when they have that little straw on they go the little website they pretend to blow
it oh yeah if it doesn't inflate itself you can
manually inflate your your thing have you ever uh flown with air france
no they have a video it's that then the pre-flight check thing plays as
a video and the video is like the people demonstrating are five victoria secrets
models and they're all being really cute and funny and it's very effective
at getting your attention that's actually pretty funny
that's a that's a i mean if it makes if it makes more people watch like you know
maybe it's not a bad thing who knows it's so it should have the same it's the frenchest thing you've seen
of course they did that yeah speaking of of course they did that i'm
gonna talk about Floatplane for a second uh it's a wonderful platform you should
check it out um i heard that if you uh
if when you go to watchful plane if you pop some popcorn and like dim the lights
a little bit and stuff that it will increase the viewership experience so i
would i would recommend doing that the Linus tech tips channel on here has
been going ham so if you want to check it out you've got Linus tech tips tech
quickie and TechLinked all publishing all under the
same freaking channel uh which i don't think was in the agreement uh when we
first started this so but if you want to check them out
there's there's tons of videos also there's bit wit ultra who's uploading
fantastic stuff and tech deals who
uploaded by far the longest video that we've had on full plane which was like
that did it stress the system it it stressed
me a little bit but everything was okay everything worked fine it was great we
didn't even didn't even let didn't let us know it was coming which was actually
cool oh yeah because i heard through another person like oh wow there's this
super long video on the platform and i was like it worked you don't that's cool
exactly anxiety attacks again about control it's in the past but you still
have to experience i'm happy that transcoded and worked at
all but yeah anyways Floatplane's great it's three bucks per creator so far
because everyone has decided to have the same price you can check it out Floatplane.com you can uh watch videos
they look great they sound great uh the comment section is much less cancer than
it is on youtube things are good so yeah check out Floatplane and now for the
rest of the sponsor stuff we've got bloody gaming uh can you say your thing
play diamond there you go see i think that's actually pretty good i'm like oh
pretty bad though it's like the worst person in in england
like who sounds like that i can't do accents at all in it
riley is really good riley's really good at that that would make sense i could see him being really good there we go
here's my notes uh today we're talking about the bloody gaming b975
keyboard which um isn't this one despite this being a
bloody keyboard i don't have it here today but uh wait no this is the b945
there we go which has the i can't even show you because under my laptop wait
yep i can the numpad is on the other side so like this is where wasd is and
then this is the numpad i think that's way better for gaming
it depends on so it's actually kind of interesting especially if you don't use the numpad
that often for like transactional data detail or
something but you might want it for macros yeah it's an interesting idea because
you wouldn't normally have your hand on that side of the keyboard but if you're doing like accounting and stuff you
would much more often be full keyboard when you're gaming you're very often
just one hand so having macro yeah you just have all those that much more real
estate for your macros and then you've also got this added benefit of having your mouse closer more ergonomic less
shoulder strain so yeah shoulder straightening like you're using a it's
like you're using a poker or like a 60 keyboard but you're not a lot of people
will go with uh 10 keyless keyboards and then get a separate 10 key so they can
put it on the other side of their mouse so that they can be squared up
shoulder shoulder down to mouse everything's okay and then go over for
numpad but this is really easy too yeah just a different idea but we're talking
about the 975 which is standard full size for those
that don't want to switch form factors like me double shot abs keycaps
less gamer front text kind of stuff and much more clean look
it includes a wrist rest with two colors black and red and still has a 25 off
deal with promo code tech tips check it out on amazon or in the links below if
you are on youtube then next up we have the moss backpack
black pack the black oh it is literally called the black pack yeah i wasn't
joking i thought you just were repeatedly making the same joke you can't trust anything i say that was
fantastic i joke too often i was like it is it is black yes it is
in fact not on the inside yes okay this is one of my favorite
thing about this backpack is that it's bright orange on the inside i've had
this with a couple bags it's it's way more important than you might realize at
the beginning because you can find anything immediately there's a power
cable in the bottom it's right there you can see it so easily it's actually great
i love backpacks that have bright orange insides because almost nothing else is
ever bright orange so if you need to find anything it's super easy it's also
reflective so you notice how it like glows a little bit just it helps i don't
know i don't know i like it a lot don't worry about it i'm into backpacks it's a
thing but speaking of that power cord
you have the ability to plug your backpack in where's the external access
bit
i know it has it because i watched their video but i don't know here it is
so in the side of the backpack you can pull out a power cable
there it is this can plug directly into the wall through a side access port so
you don't have to completely open your bag you just open where the power cable
is then on the inside of the bag so you can charge your laptop or whatever else
yeah doesn't it come with i thought i saw in their video that like
came with a battery bank or something
i don't want to say it does if it doesn't here yeah is it in the notes
you know what it does have is a there's a waterproof pocket there's a pocket
over here just for your water bottle so you put your water in there and it's
completely sealed off and everything's safe and if your bag's too full you can
pull that out and just have the water hanging on the outside that's cool i
like that but attached to that power cable is a standard power plug for like
your laptop or something and then two usb ports which is actually pretty sweet
i like that a lot because then you can charge your laptop and you can charge
your mobile devices it has a pass through right here into the front so if
you have your phone lodged up in the front or something then that will work
um but yeah you can charge your you can charge a battery battery bank you can
charge your phone and your laptop all by plugging your backpack into the wall
without needing to take anything out of it that's super cool if you're a commuter or something like that you just
want to come home and plug the bag in you don't want to take all your stuff out that's fantastic
um they call that a reach c power adapter
pretty cool it's a 60 watt usb type-c port
for a macbook or other type-c device that is sweet
but yeah great backpack feel free to check it out also
last sponsor is savage jerky
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what it's about but i'm gonna go over it anyways jerky is made with the best
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it isn't supposed to be bad for you either that's cool people seem to like
the sriracha bacon apparently that's quite popular um i like
pretty much everything they have every one of these bags is open because
yeah you just they always get eaten they do people find the box and then steal
them my favorite personal one is moho but again i like literally all of their
flavors so that that works for me uh you can use offer code LTT to save 10 off
their products which is cool um and they also have one of them i'm not sure where
it is ivan keeps eating it so it could be gone
but one of theirs is made with the like the hottest peppers in the world the
carolina reaper they have a reaper jerky oh yes that's pretty dang hot
probably kick your butt so if you're into that
feel free to check it out and
we're back oh we're going back what do you want to do now let's talk about alexa oops sorry i said it amazon echo
oh no so there was a family
in i believe oregon portland and they were hanging out and suddenly a
phone call came in to the husband and it was one of his employees who
lives in i believe seattle many many miles away and the guy was
like quick unplug all your a-l-e-x-a devices
you're getting hacked and what had happened was
for whatever reason the echo started recording at uh at a
time that the inhabitants of the house did not know it was recording and
recorded a big uh conversation they had then it proceeded to send
the audio files to a random person in their contact list
and so this guy called and uh you know the husband's like
what are you talking about you're just joking like yeah right haha good one and
the guy's like no you were talking about your hardwood floors like i heard it and they're like oh god
and so then they caught they contacted amazon and amazon put an engineer to
investigate right away and eventually a statement came out first the engineer
said like there will be a fix it kind of made it seem that he didn't
just brush it off as user errors like we're gonna fix something but then the
statement comes out and it's kind of
it's not user error but it the system acted kind of as
intended so here's what the where the heck are we here
here's the here's the the events what happened echo woke up due to a word in a
background conversation sounding like the hot word
then the subsequent conversation was heard as send message requests at which
point the echo said out loud to whom
now if the volume was turned down they and they were crank far away then they wouldn't have heard that right
at which point the background conversation was interpreted as a name
in the customer's contact list so they kept having this conversation and the
echo is just kind of picking out where it's like i think it said send message i
think it said to craig and then
and then it carried out that uh that request and so as unlikely as a string
of events like that is amazon is evaluating the options to make
the case even less likely at the same time
like oh you have you have a smart home device
yeah how often have you had it spring up and do something weird lately
seems like more than before quite a bit quite a bit so i've got my my google
home mini i've went into the settings and and
turned on the settings so that when you hail it it goes bidding
which is off by default normally it just would light up and i had people across
the house they'd be trying to hail it and maybe they're not very experienced with it and they wouldn't know whether
or not it had heard them so i put on the feedback noise but that's also super
helpful too because if i'm watching a movie and the movie says something like
um no hugo and that sounds like yeah hey
then um i'll hear it and i can just say never mind and it'll it'll turn off
again but um i guess what's happening here is
the way that these that this that machine learning works uh basically
with this kind of thing is there's a probability
that when i hear something it'll say okay that's a
that's a a 0.8 out of 1. let's say there's an 80 chance that they just said
what i think they said and then there's a decision threshold so
the engineers will say anything greater than a 0.75 is good
and so that counts as we're going to call that a positive so
you can shift that decision threshold based on the stakes of whatever you're
talking about so if you're talking about a spam email for example
calling something um letting in spam when it's not spam
that's not that high stakes because then you log into your email and you have a
sp you have some spam and then you're like oh that's annoying i'm just going
to delete it but calling it an email that is not spam
spam is can be catastrophic because then you
don't get back to the client or you miss an important appointment or whatever so
what they need to do to fix this i think is they're probably going to have to
adjust the decision threshold so that they get
less false or fewer false positives but then the flip side of that is you're
going to be like it's going to be more frustrating to use hey and it's not
going to hear you when there's music playing or something like that so they just need to
dance around that yeah it's it's that's an extremely delicate
and difficult thing to do especially because there's going to be so
many different environments that it's going to be used in there's gonna be so
many different accents vocal levels some people are quiet some people are loud
like it's they're probably gonna have to personalize it on a per user basis
just have it learn each one learn its own owner yeah that'd be cool
well i mean i know that the google one does that already for my voice they have
a voice match so it's like when i say call mom it calls my mom or plays good
music to me is different than good music to my wife who's just listens to dead
most and that's it strobe is a good song
she learned that on piano we got a piano she only learned that song
it was like it was not easy so it took her like
months that's all she played and then she figured it out and then she never played piano again i was like you need
to you would learn the song faster if you just learned easy songs first
that's fantastic um speaking of fantastic or not
essential is up for sale like the phone company it's a rumor
it's a rumor they haven't officially announced it but it's come the story's coming from
you know those in the know yeah
um i hate rumors so i'm not really that interested but apparently the next phone
also rumor has been canceled also rumor
so i don't know do people care
a lot of people seem to care i saw a lot of comments on
the forum that were like i didn't buy it but i was interested in it and i was
about to buy it or i was planning on buying the next iteration
because i actually didn't really know much about the essential phone i was looking at it today and i was like
that thing's sick yeah it's sweet
so i actually kind of recommended it to a few different people
or at least the idea of looking into it and comparing it for their own option um
but i don't i don't know general public wise like how much people
they didn't do a whole lot of advertising they didn't have like a
had a lot of fanfare maybe in tech circles but for the public
not sure it looked pretty bold i mean this was the first phone with a notch
it came out before the iphone 10 and the notch is smaller it's almost
completely completely bezel-less it's a it's nice
looking i don't care i care samsung or apple
only or i don't care samsung or apple only what about like
google phones that that would be i don't care or i care one of the two
the samsung or apple only option is like a weird way of me being like
i'm not really that into phones oh okay because i i i see when people
don't really know phones too that much they're like oh i don't know if i should
buy an apple or a samsung because they just don't even like the
Android category is seen as samsung you know what i get a lot especially when
iphone 10s were new this would be sitting on the table is
that an iphone 10 no it's not oh what is that thing it's an lg v30
interest lost an lg
i could i could have a guy and get roasted at the bar you're trying to
wheel some lady and get wait what got roasted
uh like she's like what kind of phone is that it's like oh it's an lg and she's
like like iphone or die but
like delete your tinder you have an lg
like i don't actually really want to have an lg but this is a sweet phone
like they just have quality control issues i don't really dig this is like
my third one just incidentally and everyone's had like the same kind of
problem like it doesn't detect my sim or something like that i really liked a g3
out of lg g3 yeah i really like that phone so most people don't care 50 51 of
people say i don't care straight up uh 80
18 of people say samsung or apple only i
expected there'd be a surprising percentage there and then 31 of people care that's
actually way more than i thought well so that's that's cool the thing with the
essential phone was that it was like the closest to stock Android you could
get outside of a pixel and that's awesome amazing yeah and it was way cheaper
eventually when it launched it was 700 bucks i don't think it could have competed against other flagships in that
price range but when they were struggling and they dropped it to 500 or
even less then it was like a hell of a deal
maybe they should have opened up with that but then they had 300 million dollars of investment they spent 100
million of it developing the phone so they just needed to sell these things
yeah central raised about 300 million dollars from several investors like you
just mentioned yeah tencent the least surprising uh
group on this list ever amazon.com and red point ventures as
well it was valued at 900 million to a
billion dollars a year ago
so if it is indeed for sale today it'll probably be a lot less than that i would
also assume the same um current discussions are focused on again
this is rumors current discussions are focused on a sale of the entire company
including its patent portfolio and hardware products like the original
smartphone an upcoming smart home device
and a camera attachment for the phone essentials engineering talent which
includes those hired from apple inc and alphabet inc's
alphabet inks google would likely be a part of the deal which is probably quite
valuable do you think the the founder of Android who who made this um was his
name ruben andy rubin would also be in that yeah
i don't know or is he the one selling it and getting the heck out maybe but there
could be one of those like don't remember the name of it right now but it's those clauses where when the
company gets bought you have to like stay on in order to get the
good chunk of the money i don't know golden handcuffs yeah people call that
not necessarily handcuffs is a that's not necessarily with mergers that's just
like any employee yeah like it takes four years for your shares to vest or
whatever so you kind of need to stick around before you get the real money
yeah golden handcuffs is used for a bunch of different stuff
just when it has to do with like i am staying basic money
uh apple and volkswagen are apparently
gonna be making driverless cars um
it's a interesting two names to be in the top the the apple making a
driverless car thing has been uh that was guest by Linus like five
years ago or something like that um
it makes a lot of sense like since they like design
the holy grail of design of industrial design is cars so
it's a pretty easy guess but it's been a roller coaster since they they did have
announced that they were gonna make a car that was gonna disrupt detroit and
just kick all the butt but then they scaled that back to being like
well it's actually really hard to make a car so why don't we just uh we'll make
the internal components and all the sensors and everything for the
self-driving and we'll partner with someone like bmw because tim cook loves
bmw or with mercedes and then those
companies were like nope because apple wanted to control all the data or
some some other aspect that yeah those companies they bailed so it's like
they're and then they had negotiations with negotiations with i believe lexus
now they're on there like their fourth choice volkswagen's like yeah we'd love to work with you
and they're not even ugh
it's gonna be a like a standard volkswagen uh what is it
it's a particular model here t6 yeah t6 van
t6 transporter the frame wheels and chassis
of the t6 vans will remain but apple is replacing many components such as the
dashboard and the seats the computers and sensors and they're of course
putting in a large electric car battery now this isn't going to be a consumer
product oh no it's not like they're just
they're making these vans and you're gonna be able to buy one this is a project for them to just start getting
their feet wet with self-driving it's gonna be a van that transports their own
employees between various apple campuses so they can
it's kind of close that's an interesting like hey if you screw up your
engineering project you'll kill all your friends
wow uh yeah make make sure you do it well guys um yeah that's that's
interesting i i was i was very surprised to read the like
not gonna be initially commercially available except for literally just
themselves line but that's probably a fairly sensible way of going
about that yeah apparently it's been quite a cluster there's no
indication right now if volkswagen will be on for anything beyond the internal
van experiment and according to the the uh article that we cited here from the
new york times there was a bunch of okay sorry someone in chat will they
call it the bend wagon i love it
i don't get it because the the the first topic of the show oh nice
i like it i think it's good they would never call
it that that doesn't make sense that joke doesn't make sense
oh i disagree it's not good they would call that like
impeccably designed engineered with purpose wagon
it's a feature not a bug wagon 6.
i wagon but so the the all the reporting came from
ex-employees and they basically said that the whole project was this brutal
executives executives leading apple's car project
had told tim cook that the shuttle would be completed by the end of 2018 but that
deadline will almost certainly be missed according to one of these people and
they also said that the project reportedly lacks a clear plan beyond the
vans including any near-term commercial goals
so it's hey there's a big wave
but we don't really know what to do steve jobs is dead
help us we're not making very good company decisions joni ive just wants to
design fashion speaking of company decisions
best segue amazon bans users for too many returns
boom cnet article apparently you buy you keep
yeah amazon is banning customers who take advantage of its generous return
policy and closing their accounts according to the national retail
federation 11 percent of sales are returned that seems like a lot compared to my
track record of returning things and 11 of those are fraudulent which sounds
super coincidental but whatever uh they have 300 million customers customers are
not being warned of bans but amazon has reinstated the accounts of those that
appeal convincingly yeah because some a lot of people are
really mad because they get banned
and they're like i returned six things in the last year
which actually depending on how much you buy it could be a lot or not and then
each one of those things had a good reason you know like
it sucked it didn't the things in the box weren't
what was expected or whatever so
but i don't blame amazon for not giving some kind of um threshold like
you need to if if you return more than x per year or if you return 15 of your
stuff then you're gonna get banned it's obviously they're not going to give those numbers out because then people
will just game it yeah and just and right along or turn as much stuff as
they can while slowly getting away with it so it makes sense that they
that they would do that or like buy a bunch of really really low ticket things they
don't care about and then screw with the return policy on the
higher stuff i don't know but yeah i don't get it it also makes
sense that if you like first of all they need to clean out this kind of behavior
because it's a lot of money with you talking about that many returns that
makes an impact that's millions of dollars on on the
top line or bottom line or whatever line makes sense i don't really know finance
and it also makes sense to just ban everyone in one fell swoop and then just
take on the appeals as they come in and yeah then a human can just directly
deal with it and then reinstate your account if if you're worthy of that something they
can probably do and the wording of that made it sound like they're probably
doing this is like if you appeal you'll probably get back in well i wrote
that okay that wasn't even copy paste well all right then but i bet you it's
that way anyways um if you appeal you'll probably be fine
yeah if you're if you're like yeah well i just didn't necessarily all problems
they'll probably let you back in um because most people if you ban
someone and it was like okay no that's not true
because of moderating on the forum people will do terrible things and then
you ban them and they're like what so yeah no i don't know actually
we'll see it's going to be easy for them to be to keep band the people they ban
who are actually offenders of this in a big way
like the people who are buying 800 things a year returning
700 things or something like that or or just like repeatedly buying a tv
and returning it so they can have yeah or some kind of other discernible pattern like that
yeah i feel like it'll have to be pretty blatant for them to like keep your ban
after an appeal yeah i know that they do they're pretty
savage with some other things i was talking to a friend who has an amazon um
he's like an amazon seller for a business as his business and
there's they're really strict about fake reviews right but what they're doing was
like they'll actually send you a product for you to review
um so you bought you bought it from them you can be a real seller a real buyer of
the product and then you get the product and then you're supposed to give a five-star review and the way that um
uh they did this was that they gave discounts to every all of those
potential reviewers because you don't want to like sell an item full price
amazon takes a large part of that um
just to get this that's like a high cost for a fake review you want to get your fake review at the cheapest level
possible so then you just if it's a 100 item you send it you give 95 off so it's
like five bucks and then amazon just gets a dollar or whatever and then you
get your fake review so what amazon did is they went through and they said any
item that was sold at a discount was all those reviews are gone now so you just
lost like a third of your reviews good
i don't know i think that's completely okay because the amount of like well
unless you actually just had a discount code or something like that that was
legit and all those people were like super happy yeah i tried it for the first time
it's great i i just came to amazon.com or whatever and got my product and i
loved it and here's a five-star review that's legit but it's gone now because
they're throwing at the baby with the bathwater yeah okay that's fair i just
something that drive drove me insane was i was i'm not going to disclose who and
largely because i don't know if they ended up actually ended up doing anything with this guy um i know the guy
was there but i don't know what type of association there was i don't know if
they were actually doing any business et cetera et cetera so i'm not going to say the company name but one year at ces i
went to a company's hotel suite to film a video and there was a dude there and
he was hanging out and i was waiting for my meeting so i was just like hey let's let's talk i'm i'm
we're both overtired we're at ces let's chat about stuff just asked him what he
did he was one of the uh
like business acquisition guys for a company that post fake reviews oh on
amazon there's a whole giant company there's a
huge industry of like click farms all people do all days like create
accounts and then like pages he was like essentially one of those guys and i
remember like i may have not been the nicest person
you are a dirt you are a single unit of dirt
um because it kind of pissed me off but like these are absolutely a thing oh
yeah uh they're running around ces with badges like this was this was yeah this
is a pretty big industry so i'm very happy that they're showing it i think
that in some countries it's like a large sector just like tourism is a big sector
in some countries yeah click farms is like a big deal in
individual particular countries yeah just like scams are in some parts of
western africa it's like we're all we're all making money just
scamming north america those phone numbers that call you and
try to get your banking info hackerville hackerville hackerville is an
interesting thing anyways the show is over
oh boom see ya later
see you never whatever guys i'll see you next week bye uh
can i see what we're doing next week i don't know
better just probably you better just sign up for a plot flame club
and then get early access to whatever it is we're doing on plot plane club
yes all right bye guys we're filming skyrim