Hello.
I put my seat back in the upright position,
but stuff still happens.
So what's up?
The price of oil is skyrocketing.
But not that kind of oil.
Olive oil.
Massive droughts in the Mediterranean have messed up olive oil production so much
that prices have skyrocketed to a record high.
Prices are now as high as $8,900 per ton.
I don't have, I don't have any idea what normal is.
I don't tend to buy olive oil by the ton.
But that's a lot apparently.
This massive price hike has led to heists, and we love a good heist here.
One of the biggest heists reported is about 50,000 liters of extra virgin olive oil
amounting to about $450,000 worth of product.
That is a lot of virgin.
The moral of this story is that if you have olive oil in your kitchen,
lock that shit up,
because you never know when someone's gonna come steal that greasy goodness.
Unity promises change.
In a normal world, that would be like a campaign slogan,
or like a notion that if we all work together, we can make the world a better place.
But in this timeline, it's a company going back on their pricing model.
Extraordinarily quick recap.
Unity, it's a game development engine.
They recently announced a new pricing structure that pissed everyone off.
They are now saying that they're gonna make changes to the pricing structure they announced,
and the changes are probably not going to be, we're not doing that after all.
Instead, the changes are gonna be, we're gonna clarify stuff and make it a little simpler perhaps.
But we're still gonna change the pricing structure on you.
Deal with it.
Here's the thing, if you're not like a game developer, or you don't really know how all that works,
game development is a multi-year task,
and one of the foundational things you do is choose an engine.
You can't really switch engines on a whim.
And so there's a bunch of developers who have spent years and millions of dollars of assets
to build a game.
And now they have to deal with Unity just changing the pricing structure,
and potentially bankrupting them.
Even if they do make decent changes to this,
they've already shown us their ass.
They can't really be trusted to not change the rules again.
And so a lot of developers are like, nah, we're done, we're out,
we can't deal with this, we can't trust you.
And mind you, Unity is a publicly traded company, so crashing and burning, lol.
Speaking of gaming, Microsoft is really going through it right now.
Microsoft has suffered two egregious leaks.
The first one I'll talk about is a 38 terabyte leak from AI research.
For context here, one terabyte is a thousand gigabytes.
It's a lot of data.
And it's apparently a bunch of internal company data that they were using to train AIs or whatever.
And just... that's just out there.
Like, leaking a terabyte of data is a lot.
Leaking 38 terabytes of data is... holy crap.
They maintain that no user data was leaked and say it was all internal company data.
Which also still sucks.
Anyway, the other leak was from a court filing.
They accidentally uploaded a ton of internal communication and market plans
and things that we weren't supposed to see as an attachment on a court filing.
Like, we've learned a lot. There's just so much tea here, it's out of control.
Apparently, the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, at one point floated the idea of buying Nintendo.
We now know ahead of time what the next Xbox is gonna look like,
and they're gonna be getting rid of discs apparently and making it a cylinder.
Oh, and also, they didn't think that Baldur's Gate 3 was a game that was gonna be noteworthy.
They were like, this is gonna be a whatever.
So it's just kind of a lot, um, and very hilarious.
It turns out people aren't super into AI.
Who'da thunk it?
A new poll of about 2,000 US adults has shown that most people are more concerned
with the potential problems of AI than the potential solutions it brings.
At the top of the concerns were like data harvesting, privacy, misinformation, political stuff.
And lower down the list was, it's going to replace my job.
So most people are really concerned about just how much it'll fuck up just talking to each other.
And yeah, despite every tech company ever trying to cram an AI chat bot into their app,
the majority of people, a slight majority, like 54%, are just not feeling it.
That changes as you break down into demographics.
For example, older responders were typically more suspect than younger responders.
Men were significantly more into AI than women.
Wow.
But here's the strange one.
Millennials were the most optimistic about AI.
Even beating out Gen Z, which I don't understand.
I'm on the younger-ish side of millennial,
and I don't understand why anyone in my generation would be happy
about the next generation of tech overlords fucking up the world.
Like, what?
Like, have we been on the same internet?
Did you watch the social network?
But as a reminder, the vast majority of all this AI stuff is being pushed because of venture capital investments.
It's just the new hotness and the term that gets the most investors right now.
There's a lot of overinflation of what the AIs are actually doing right now.
And while AI does have an actual place in this world,
especially in like medical research and whatnot,
the vast majority of what all these people are talking about with AI taking over the world
is just trying to ramp up investors.
Like, we're already seeing a stark decrease of trust in AI and usage of AI tools like ChatGPT,
and they're trying to find more ways to keep putting it in front of you so they can keep making a buck.
It's pretty much where we went after crypto didn't pan out.
Probably something else is going to come along.
But maybe I'm wrong.
But at least this has slightly more of a real-world application than crypto did.
On this day in 1378, a second pope was elected in the start of what would be known as the Western Schism.
Cardinals in the Catholic Church couldn't agree on who was the correct pope,
and so they just got two of them, and they beefed for like 40 years.
Pope battle.
Yeah, these two popes just tried to out-pope each other for a while,
and eventually a third pope entered the ring.
We had three popes at once.
I would pay so much money to watch a pope cage match.
Just a hell of a lot of popery.
Lightning round.
Pennsylvania's governor has announced that the state is going to start automatic voter registration.
I do not know why that's not a national standard.
I mean, I know why, but still.
Elon Musk's Neuralink company is moving forward with human trials soon.
Notably, they've already been beaten to the market by companies that have like actual medical research goals and whatnot.
Please don't let Elon Musk put a chip in your brain.
Speaking of Musk, he also recently floated the idea of putting the entirety of Twitter behind a paywall.
Please do that.
Speaking of which, this is just a general reminder.
If you're an artist and you're on Twitter, and that's like the place that you've been staying despite all of this happening,
he can screw you over at any point.
Please, please diversify.
Have a backup on another something, someone.
Far-right personalities have come out in droves, again, Musk included,
to voice support for Russell Brand after he was hit with a bunch of rape and sexual assault allegations.
Stanford's particle accelerator can now do some cool, cool x-ray stuff that I don't understand,
but I read the article and it had cool words in it about like subatomic phenomena, and I'm excited about that.
But finally for today, the cast of Baldur's Gate 3 is going to be doing a one-shot D&D campaign on the High Rollers channel on Twitch.
I believe that's this Friday.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Head to Stuff Keeps Happening.online for sources, bonus content, and the current time of day.
As a reminder, I'm going to be off on Friday and the next coming Monday.
So I'm going to be back on Wednesday.
Take care and be well.