Hello. My name is Professor Backbitches, but stuff still happens.
So what's up? It's Earth Day! Earth Day! I made a whole day for it. Wild.
It's Earth Day. Uh, we're on a rock in space. It's Earth Day. It's a day on Earth. Moving on!
You've probably seen ads for the AI pin, and if not, congratulations, you're living a better
life than I am. The long story short, a bunch of AI tech bros poured a bunch of money into a company
called Humane that was making a pin that is an AI pin. They were like, hey, what if we took Siri
and put it on your lapel and made it slow and worse? This product is supposed to be like the
next evolution after smartphones. That's what they're building it as. And it's like device that
sits on your lapel and you can like press a button and it has a mic and you talk to it and it sends
what you ask to the cloud and then chat gpt does things. And it does basically nothing. Like it
can't schedule a calendar event, for example, but it can look at what's in front of you and tell you
what you're looking at, which is like cool from an accessibility perspective. But that's like
not what this is trying to be. This is a $700 device with a $25 a month subscription that
doesn't connect to your phone and doesn't use your existing phone number. It's not good. Anyway,
yeah, basically everybody was like, this device looks like it's gonna bomb. And then it came out
to reviewers and reviewers just absolutely destroyed it. So much so that MKBHD when he reviewed it
called it the worst new product he's ever reviewed. And that was so harsh that a bunch of business
boys were like, these reviewers are being too mean. Bad reviews kill a product as if products have
an inherent divine right to exist and be successful, maybe make a better product than what you made.
Because it's bad. I distinctly remember seeing an ad for this thing on TikTok and they were like,
look at our new Google Calendar integration. It can tell you what the next event on your
specifically just Google Calendar is. And this woman was like, look how easy it is. What's the
next event on my calendar? And then it got back to her. Like I remember watching it in real time
and being like, there's no way, there's no way they recorded this. And they were like, this is a
good idea to post. Anyway, while Boeing, a paragon of safety, after a year of a bunch of planes not
really staying in one piece during flight, Boeing is now under renewed scrutiny, possibly also because
of the whistleblower that was like, hey, things aren't good at Boeing. And then that whistleblower
was no longer alive. But a different whistleblower who is still alive recently testified in front
of Congress, Sam Sallapore said that he had been at Boeing for 17 years. And he brought safety
concerns to his superiors. And they were like, shut up, get back to work and stop saying things
that might cost us money. And so Congress is like, oh, wow, that sounds bad. We should fix that.
And the FAA was like, we want to get on in this. Okay, let's, I am very concerned about Boeing.
Note to the audience, they're not concerned about Boeing. They're concerned about Boeing having a
bad image because Boeing is a very important company to the US government. So too big, too fair.
Yeah, I mean, Boeing, like, they make a lot of stuff and the US is not keen to be like, we're
gonna punish Boeing. And that's, I mean, that's partially why Boeing gets away with what they
get away with. But hey, maybe, maybe, just maybe, they can at least pretend to care enough to make
it such that there's policy that says, hey, if you make commercial airliners more often than not,
your airplane should land with all of the pieces it took off with. I feel like, I feel like we
can come together and agree on this. I'm starting this segment off with a warning. If you come to
my comments, and you make a joke about how Google's slogan used to be, don't be evil, I'm preempting
your joke here. Google has fired 28 employees after a sit-in in protest against a $1.2 billion
contract that Google has with Israel. It's called Project Nimbus. It is cloud infrastructure stuff
for Israel. It's essentially a bunch of employees were like, Hey, I don't like the idea of my work
being used to promote apartheid and genocide. And Google was like, why? There's money. And so a
bunch of employees across multiple offices performed protests, sit-ins in meeting rooms and offices and
whatnot. And they basically were just like, stop doing this. They were then arrested and fired.
Cool. Chris Ricalewall, Google's head of global security, had the following to say, quote,
The overwhelming majority of our employees do the right thing. If you're one of the few who are
tempted to think we're going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again. This man
straight up said, look at all of your coworkers. See how they sit down and shut up. Why aren't you
doing the same? Real cool. Real cool. Do the right thing, everyone. Never cause a stir. Don't stand
up for your morals and never demand more of your employer. It is important to remember our place
and to accept that things are how they are. And we have absolutely no control nor influence over
anything. And as long as we all believe that, it will remain true. I literally forgot about the
Apple Vision Pro. It came, it was everywhere. It was all over my 4U page. A bunch of dumb dinguses
walking around with a thing on their face. And they're like, haha, it's so revolutionary. And
they all returned it like a week later. Anyway, it's still a thing. And apparently the tech was
sound. It just doesn't have a use case. But Kimmy G, a tech reporter at Mashable recently
tried to use the device on a trip. They were like, hey, okay, I want to go on vacation. And
flying is stressful. Maybe the Vision Pro will let me have a more comfortable experience. Nope.
No. So here's the thing. It's supposed to be a spatial computer. That's like how they are
portraying this device. When you're sitting in an airplane seat with no room whatsoever,
there's not much space to compute. Doing gestures isn't really going to work. And if you like,
look away or down or anything, it just, it can't really track. And so it just falls apart. And so
this notion of like, oh, put on this headset and you'll have a cinema like experience while you're
on the plane. No, not really. But also it just, it's still just, it just looks, it just looks so dumb.
It looks so bad. My understanding is that it's actually a pretty technologically impressive
device. That's what everybody seems to be like, wow, the hand tracking is amazing. The eye tracking
is amazing. What do I do with it? Between this and the AI pin, it's just like, we made smartphones
and, and like that worked. That was really good. And then that broke every tech person's brain.
They're like, okay, so we know that there's some combination of components. And if we cram them
all together, everyone will change the entirety of reality to be around our product. But how do
we do that? What components do we need? And where do we strap the screen to your face? Yes. Gaming news.
Hey gamers, it's gaming news time. Uh, here we go. Twitch is planning to roll out a TikTok-like
discovery feed to everyone soon, which is good because discovery on Twitch is trash. Any,
any attempt at fixing that is good. We got another look at Hades 2 and it looks hype,
and they made the gods even hotter somehow. Baldur's Gate 3 won the BAFTA Game of the Year
award, which makes it the first game to sweep every major game of the year award, beating out even
Elden Ring. After the brutal layoffs at Bungie last year, a bunch of former leads on Destiny have
gotten together and made a new game company. We will see how that goes. Sturdy Valley got
another content update. Again, again. And hey, uh, City of Skyl- I'm talking to uh,
I'm talking to Cities by Diana here specifically. I'm so sorry about Cities Skylines 2, and also I
know that your handle is no longer Cities by Diana, but still. Um, Cities Skylines 2 has been kind of a
huge disappointment, and they had a big DLC recently that was also a huge disappointment, and they're
like apologizing. Rough. Like, uh, that sucks. Lightning round? Did you know that hedgehogs can
inflate? That's a thing. They can apparently get air trapped under their skin. And some people on a
bus in the UK saw an inflated hedgehog and reported it, and it was saved. They deflated it. Elon Musk
wants to make it so that if you're a paying member of Twitter, his AI can write tweets for you.
Vietnam has sentenced a billionaire to death for essentially swindling $44 billion from their
economy. Let's uh, let's do that. More. Giancarlo Esposito, the person who played Gus in Breaking
Bad, apparently once considered arranging his own murder so his children could get the insurance
money. But then he landed the part. Tesla has recalled all 3,878 cyber trucks that have been
delivered because you can get the accelerator stuck in the full down position. YouTube is rolling
out a design change for their desktop website. It's not, it's a big shift. Man sent himself
on fire in front of the ongoing Trump trial that I don't care about the trial. Um, but this guy
thought that Trump and Biden were in cahoots for a fascist takeover of America. He died. And finally
for today, there is concern on the rise for the increasing use of ketamine and the effect it's
having on young people's bladders. If you're not aware, ketamine kind of destroys your bladder
and makes it so you're just going to piss your pants. Whoops. Thank you so much for listening
to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening. Head to Stuff Keeps Happening to online for sources,
bonus content, and a step by step guide on how to become too big to fail. My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday. Take care and be well.