Hello. I stayed on the line for a brief hold, but stuff still happened.
So what's up?
Strikes keep happening. Get it? Like what I say? That wasn't very good.
After 118 days of striking, the Actors Guild has come to an agreement with employers,
getting them most of what they were looking for.
As of yesterday, the president of SAG-AFTRA has said it's time to go back to work,
you can resume your obligations, and so on and so forth.
So the strike is officially over, and among the highlights of the deal they made are
better wages, better residuals, stronger wages for people participating in streaming,
protections from AI, and more.
Protections from AI. That's a thing that has to get negotiated now.
These companies wanted to essentially scan actors and then pay them once and then use
their likeness forever using AI instead of paying the actor. Real artistic shit.
Anyway, this is another in a long line of historic strikes that have happened recently,
and resulted in significantly better pay and working conditions.
There might be something to this whole class solidarity thing.
Zuck likes broken teenagers.
According to 42 state attorneys general.
Quick aside, I hate attorneys general. I hate that. Stop it.
It's like saying AirPods Max.
Stop it. Like if you're referring to multiple pairs of the large version of Apple's wireless
headphones, are they AirPods Max's? If you're like, what if you're referring to multiple groups
of attorneys general from multiple countries? Is that attorneys generals?
Send help in the form of don't actually answer that question, because it was a joke and I don't care.
Um, Facebook. That's what I was talking about.
42 US state attorneys general have brought a lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and
Instagram, alleging that they made conscious decisions to essentially exploit underage kids,
specifically in the space of designing their app to be harmful and addictive for children.
Consciously.
Recently unsealed evidence shows that in internal communications,
experts and internal product managers were all suggesting doing stuff like disabling beauty
filters and like stats and whatnot for kids on the app. And when they took it to Zuckerberg,
he was like, no. So with like pediatric recommendation that this is not healthy,
he was like, nah, it's good. Do it. Instagram and every other major social media app uses
algorithms to optimize how long people spend time on the platform so that they can optimize
data collection and ad sales. It is in their best interest to keep you on the app as long as possible
by any means necessary. And very often those means are, Hey, you're awful. Stay here and find out how
you can fix it. Welcome to Instagram, small child. You are ugly and unloved. Would you like to have
an ad on how you can fix that? Follow these suggested accounts. They'll guide you to the
proper products. Anyway, you know that classic adage, don't film an airplane for several hours
using high powered lights because you might cause damage to the exterior windows and cause them to
come off while they're in mid flight with a commercial flight the next day. No? Well, now you
do. Cause an Airbus A321 took off from London and once they reached about 10,000 feet, they realized
that they were missing a few windows. A couple of exterior windows in the back of the plane were
like damaged and falling off and passengers flagged down staff saying, Hey, it's really loud and cold
in here. What gives? The flight crew went to check it out and they're like, wow, it is actually real
loud back here. What's going on? Oh, we're missing windows. They were only at about 10,000 feet. They
alerted the pilots who decided to stop climbing and instead turn around and land the plane.
Thankfully the plane landed uneventfully and no one was injured. Upon investigating what the hell
happened, it turns out that this plane was used in like some sort of quote unquote filming event
the day prior and it had high powered lights pointing at the plane for hours, which probably
melted some of the adhesive on the windows or something. So there you go. Before you board
your next plane, ask them if it was recently used in a filming event. Otherwise it may not be safe.
It's probably safe. This is a reminder that air travel is actually pretty safe. Compared to being
run over and then dragged by a robo taxi, at least cruise, a fully self-driving robo taxi company
is recalling 950 cars, their entire fleet after one of their cars hit a pedestrian and then dragged
them along the pavement. Oh, sorry. After one of their cars hit a pedestrian that had already been
hit by another car and then dragged them across the street. According to the recall report,
a hundred percent of their fleet are affected by a quote software issue that caused the car to
miscategorize the situation and decide to go ahead and drive. So someone got hit by a car that was
being driven by a human and then fell over in front of a driverless car that then also hit them
and dragged them across the street. Cause it was like, Oh, I don't know what that was. This event
comes after previous issues with cruise safety has been raised. For example, apparently their cars had
trouble recognizing children and they've previously run into emergency vehicles or run over active fire
hoses that were in use, stuff like that. But don't worry, cruise says that they have a software update
ready to fix the whole hitting a pedestrian and then dragging their body along asphalt thing.
If you will afford me a quick tangent, I have talked about this a little bit before, but I know
that self-driving cars seem really appealing, but they really just ain't it. It is very easy to say
that this is just growing pains and that eventually once we have every car equipped with self-driving
technology and they can all perfectly communicate with each other, there will be no more accidents
and everything will be great. It's a fallacy. There will always be a need for specialty human
driven vehicles. There will always be a need for emergency vehicles. There will always be roads that
are too poor to have some sort of computer system drive on. There will always be animals crossing
the street. There will always be people who are staging protests on highways. There will always be
something. Roads are weird and confusing and messy and dangerous and they don't make a whole lot of
sense. One person causing an accident can block an entire highway. One person having one bad day,
making one bad decision can impact hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people who are just
trying to get to their destination via road. It's really easy to say that like, oh if it's all AI
and if it's all self-driving cars, then they'll be perfect, but no software glitches. It'll take one
glitch to cause an infinite amount of problems. Cars are multi-ton metal vehicles propelled by
fire and lightning. Humans are fleshy meat bags. We just don't mix. There are cheaper, safer,
and more efficient methods of making automated transportation, but they want to go for cars
because whoever solves that problem wins the favor of all of the auto industry. And there is a lot
of money in the auto industry. And a lot of that money goes towards lobbying, stopping any other
kind of project. On this day in 1944, the USS Mount Hood exploded while docked at Siedler Harbor.
When I say exploded, I mean it ceased to exist. The USS Mount Hood was an ammunition ship. Its
whole purpose was to carry thousands of tons of explosives. On the morning of November 10th, 1944,
17 men from the ship were off to go collect the ship's mail. They were walking along the beach
about four kilometers away from the ship when they were thrown to the ground by a shockwave.
When they got up and turned around, there was just a plume of smoke where once there was their ship,
but nothing was recovered. Well, one thing was recovered. A 16 by 10 foot piece of metal
that was found in the newly formed crater right below where the ship was docked. A massive
underwater trench that was created from the explosion, 300 feet long and 40 feet deep.
Of course, hundreds of sailors lives were instantly claimed and many vessels within a
two kilometer radius were damaged or entirely destroyed. According to investigations, the cause
of the explosion was inexperienced crew and poor management. On a ship that's supposed to carry
thousands of pounds of explosives, I guess go off the Navy. Lightning round. Valve is releasing a
slightly updated steam deck with an OLED screen and better battery life. Some scientists in a lab have
successfully grown some yeast that has more than 50% synthetic DNA. Snapchat has laid off 20 project
managers in an attempt to increase their speed of decision making. Hey, you know that like venue
that you're probably seeing a lot recently from Las Vegas. It's just like a big sphere that does
like light shows on the outside and the inside. They're hemorrhaging cash. It turns out they're
operating at like a 90 plus million dollar loss and their CFO just recently quit reportedly after
a shouting match with the CEO. Hulu and Disney Plus are combining into one app because they're
at the end of the end of time there will be exactly one app and it will suck. After the recent election
results in the US, GOP strategizers are starting to get a bit concerned about their hardline stance
on abortion. I wonder why. Rockstar Games has announced that they will be releasing a GTA 6
trailer in December and finally for today, pour one out for a real one as Omegle has shut down.
While yes, there was a lot of problematic stuff about Omegle, I didn't have a second half of that.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening. Head to
StuffKeepsHappening.online for sources, bonus content, and a pat on the back.
My name is Endeavorance, I'll be back on Monday, take care and be well.