Tech News of The Week 04-30-24

Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, the legendary blue Meanie, finally back from retirement.

Welcome to Telegram nautical opiate Ted Williams. Those are all words that I put in order, and they make no sense. It's our weekly tech news podcast where Chris and I discuss 4 things that jumped out to us in the tech news media. Chris, you get to go first. But before you do, did you know we have a new website?

What's a website?

It's pod.chaosleverdot com. Eventually, I'll redirect the Apex domain, but I'm not quite there yet. I have to fix some links.

So we're pod people?

We are pod people. And if you want to leave us a message, a comment, or anything else, check out the new website. You can do that. You can leave us a voice mail. Not gonna listen to it, but you can do that.

With that out of the way, Chris.

The metaverse is a generational thing, and we ain't that generation. Nope. Listen, kids. If Apple can't make it happen, it's not gonna happen. Last year, to great fanfare and extremely expensive marketing campaigns, Apple released the Vision Pro.

Why was it the Pro model when it was the only model? Shut up. That's why. Anyway, after the buzz died down, it appeared that this $35100 ski goggle thingamajig with batteries is not exactly what's the word? Popular.

Popular is the word that it's not. It's not. It's not. It's not popular. Apple has cut guidance in half on expected sales from 800,000 units to 400, and the smart money is actually on them missing that target too.

A lot of the initial buzz, if you can call it that, was forcibly driven by Apple through influencers, which is a word that I hate, and they apparently didn't influence shit. This is not some kind of Tide Pod challenge, people. This is a gimmick that costs 2 mortgage payments. It looks like the majority of even the techno literati, which is a word that I wish I had to have made up, they bought it, made their little reaction video, and then promptly returned it to the store, never to be thought about again. Do I need to remind you $35100?

Expense to the one side. To my mind, as fun as this tech is to talk about, it is just not ready for prime time. It's too heavy. It doesn't last long enough on battery power. You have to carry a battery on your belt.

There's no compelling applications or use cases, yada yada yada, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. The other thing I think is that society just doesn't want the metaverse. Nope. We've seen Tron. We've seen Ready Player 1.

We've read Snow Crash. These are all virtual worlds. Only bad things happen in them. We don't want it. It failed for Facebook.

It's failing for Apple. In my opinion, it is a failed idea for now. Time doth march on. Let's go ahead and take the metaverse and put it back in the Skunk Works for a good decade or 3, then we can take it from there. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go run outside and yell at clouds until I fall asleep.

It is a Friday. FTC agrees that competition is good.

What? I know.

Imagine for a moment that you go to work for Joe's Lemonade Stand for a summer. You learn a ton about making lemonade, customer service, pricing and marketing, and young love. Next summer, you apply for a manager position at Jill's Lemonade Stand, citing your previous experience. Jill is excited to have such a seasoned application and offers you the job on the spot. At which point, Joe takes legal action to prevent you from accepting the offer.

That's stupid. Right? You worked for Joe in what I'm sure was an at will status, meaning that you can be dismissed at will anytime for any reason. Now you want to go work for Jill. Joe should have no say in the matter.

And yet, if you signed a noncompete clause as part of the hiring process at Joe's lemonade stand, you might be up a creek. Joe has effectively locked you out of the lemonade biz. Life has given you lemons and you legally cannot make lemonade. The FTC agrees that this is ridiculous and has issued a final ruling that invalidates the majority of noncompete clauses across the country. Most of these clauses were already found to be legally unenforceable anyway, but not everyone has the wherewithal to fight a lawsuit from their previous employer.

The ruling does have carve outs for executives with policy making power, but still, the vast majority of us no longer have to worry about these anticompetitive clauses. Ironically, the US Chamber of Commerce has pledged to sue the FTC for what they describe as, quote, a blatant power grab that will undermine American businesses' ability to remain competitive, end quote. Ah, yes. The US Chamber of Commerce, that bastion of worker rights.

AWS retires the snowmobile because nothing in the world is fun anymore. Okay. I mean, look. I think we can agree. This was a silly idea to begin with.

Did anyone really need a data center on wheels capable of ingesting a 100 petabytes of data to roll up to their place of work to do a data dump that would then be put directly into AWS and save a questionable amount of time and ingress fees? No. Of course not. But at least a few people did it because it sounds awesome. Totally.

The year was 2016, and the data center on wheels was an oversized 18 wheeler called AWS Snowmobile. Well, now it is 2024, and the Snowmobile is no more. Hey, that rhymed. That was a sad, sad song. Now, reasonably, AWS cited that there was even less reason now for a snowmobile to exist than there was even 8 years ago, but still, Whatever happened to shock and awe?

How are you going to let your boring neighbors know that not only are you moving into the cloud, you're plunking down 6 figures to do it. Hell, they might have even let you take a picture and make it look like you were driving. The big truck. Hell, I don't know. I definitely do know that if I was renting that thing, I would ask if I could at least do a lap.

I drove a column shifter once. I know how to double clutch. Like, what was the question again?

Snowmobile. Right. Right. Right.

So, Snowmobile is no more, mostly because hard drives are huge and all pipes are gigantic. Everybody has a gig of everything going everywhere. This takes Amazon's line of snow type products, which are hardened devices that you can throw things onto, down to just 2 at the moment. With the still impressive 14 terabyte Snow Cone and the, I am sure they still don't know what this means, don't look it up, the Snowball still going strong at 210 terabytes.

Anybody who's watched Clark's knows what that means. TikTok ban appears impotent I mean, imminent. Cut one head off, 2 shall grow in its place, or something like that. Listen. I'm not a historian.

President Biden has signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which has no good acronym, so I'll simply call it the TikTok bill.

What's wrong with the pah faka?

Get out. The contents of the bill give the president power to ban foreign adversary controlled applications, specifically calling out ByteDance, TikTok, or its entities. Once the bill is signed into law, the clock begins ticking on ByteDance. So sorry. It gives them 270 days before the app is blacklisted.

TikTok could be sold off to a US based company, but the government would need to be convinced that the separation from ByteDance and the PRC is total. Naturally, ByteDance intends to fight the bill in court, although I don't hold out much hope for them. We, at chaos lever, would like to point out 3 things. Number 1, the ability of the US to effectively ban an application is highly questionable. Number 2, allowing the US government to ban apps arbitrarily sets a dangerous precedent.

And number 3, even if TikTok is effectively banned, something worse will take its place. The best way to ensure youth stop using TikTok is to either wait 5 minutes till they get distracted by something else or have the president start using TikTok every day, thereby making it deeply uncool. Alright. That's it. We're done.

Go away now. Bye.