“Netflix’s stock has tumbled 41% from the all-time high it hit just two months ago,” reports CNN Business.
“It’s gaining subscribers at a painfully slow pace. Competition is heating up. The company’s answer to all that: It just raised prices on North American customers.”
Netflix ended 2021 with 221.8 million subscribers. That’s significantly more than others in the streaming marketplace, including Disney, one of its closest competitors. Disney had 118.1 million subscribers as of October, and it grew subscriptions 60% between October 2020 and October 2021. During that same period, Netflix grew just 9%. Disney hasn’t yet reported its financial results for the last three months of 2021. But Netflix’s growth slowed even further in the fourth quarter to just 8%. (And Disney’s growth last quarter spooked Wall Street too….)
The problem with relying exclusively on subscriptions for revenue is: after a while, you run out of people who haven’t subscribed. That’s bad news for Wall Street investors who are mostly concerned with companies’ abilities to grow. Zak Shaikh, vice president of programming at research-based media firm Magid, believes that Netflix’s fall is more of “a Wall Street thing” rather than “something that reflects the business is in trouble…. They still added subs, and they still have the same high usage and viewing metrics,” he added. However, even Shaikh pointed out that in the long term, “Netflix will have to deal with the fact that you can’t keep adding subscribers.”
One way the company has tried to offset its slowing growth is by investing in other verticals, such as gaming. Another way is to raise prices, but that could prove difficult as fierce competition ramps up. Although price increases will probably help to offset its sluggish sign ups, they could also lead to more stagnation for Netflix. For some consumers, price increases — even small ones — are a lot to ask considering that so many competitors are at Netflix’s gates.
Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson, specifically predicted to CNN Business that 2022 will be a year “of concern about growth and competition for Netflix.”
Back in 2001, one of the key creators behind the original Xbox console, Seamus Blackley, compared gaming to masturbating. Apparently, this didn’t go over well with Bill Gates and other high-ranking Microsoft execs. According to Blackley, he nearly got fired for the quote.
Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media have released SVT-AV1 0.9 with nearly one year worth of changes to this high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoder. SVT-AV1 0.9 is now even faster as shown by our latest benchmarks.
Sony Pictures Classics has picked up the rights to an animated movie entitled A Winter’s Journey, which will be made in part using the PlayStation game-creation tool Dreams. According to Deadline, the film will blend live actors with CG and hand-painted animation and is an adaptation of Franz Schubert’s set of 24 songs for voice and piano called Winterreise. It tells the story of a lovelorn poet who embarks on a dangerous journey that takes him across mountains and snow in 1812 Bavaria.
Dreams was originally created by Media Molecule, the studio behind LittleBigPlanet, for the PS4. The studio pitched it as a way to create “art, movies and video games” from the start, and we once described it as “an engine, learning suite and distribution platform rolled into one.” Since then, people have been using it to create their own games, realistic renders of nature, immersive experiences of their favorite movies, among other things. A Winter’s Journey, however, will reportedly be the first time Dreams will be used on a feature film.
The movie has yet to get a release date, but shooting is expected to start in June in Wrocław, Poland, with actors that include John Malkovich and Jason Isaacs. It’ll likely take some time before it’s ready to premiere. As for Dreams itself, it’s currently on sale in the US PlayStation Store for $10, and it includes a rotating list of the most creative games made using the tool.
“The year of Linux” kind of, sort of comes every year, wherein a few more people give it a try, and enthusiasts continue to love it. It’s an OS that’s gotten better for gaming and one that’s made such an imprint on Windows Central that not all of us even bother much with Windows anymore.”The year of Linux” kind of, sort of comes every year, wherein a few more people give it a try, and enthusiasts continue to love it. It’s an OS that’s gotten better for gaming and one that’s made such an imprint on Windows Central that not all of us even bother much with Windows anymore.
Don’t expect the US Federal Reserve to issue a digital dollar any time soon. CNBCreports the Reserve has published its long-in-the-making study of a central bank cryptocurrency, but took no stances on whether or not it should pursue the technology. The paper instead explored the potential benefits and pitfalls of digital currencies, and asked for public comments.
The Fed cautioned that existing cryptocurrencies tend to be highly volatile, consume lots of energy and frequently have significant transaction limitations. A central bank-backed format might overcome some of those problems, the Reserve said, by serving as a “bridge” between payment services, making finance more inclusive and providing “safe and trusted” money. The Reserve also believed the digital money could improve cross-border payments and protect the role of the US dollar on the world stage.
However, the government also warned that official digital cash would need to account for possible changes to the financial world, such as encouraging more runs on financial companies. It would also need to maintain privacy, protect against crimes like fraud and be resilient. The Reserve floated the possibility of offline capability to enable transactions when internet access isn’t available, such as during natural disasters.
The agency stressed its report was a “first step” in discussing the possibility of a central bank cryptocurrency, and that it would give the public until May 20th, 2022 to offer feedback and answer questions. For now, though, the Reserve will remain neutral and will only work on a digital currency if longer-term research supports the concept. It’s resisting the pressure to act quickly, even if other countries are already moving forward.
“Three studies released Friday offered more evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are standing up to the omicron variant, at least among people who received booster shots,” reports the Associated Press:
They are the first large U.S. studies to look at vaccine protection against omicron, health officials said. The papers echo previous research — including studies in Germany, South Africa and the U.K. — indicating available vaccines are less effective against omicron than earlier versions of the coronavirus, but also that boosters doses rev up virus-fighting antibodies to increase the chance of avoiding symptomatic infection.
The first study looked at hospitalizations and emergency room and urgent care center visits in 10 states, from August to this month. It found vaccine effectiveness was best after three doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines in preventing COVID-19-associated emergency department and urgent care visits. Protection dropped from 94% during the delta wave to 82% during the omicron wave. Protection from just two doses was lower, especially if six months had passed since the second dose. Officials have stressed the goal of preventing not just infection but severe disease. On that count, some good news: A third dose was at least 90% effective at preventing hospitalizations for COVID-19, both during the delta and omicron periods, the study also found.
The second study focused on COVID-19 case and death rates in 25 states from the beginning of April through Christmas. People who were boosted had the highest protection against coronavirus infection, both during the time delta was dominant and also when omicron was taking over…
The Journal of the American Medical Association published the third study, also led by CDC researchers. It looked at people who tested positive for COVID-19 from Dec. 10 to Jan. 1 at more than 4,600 testing sites across the U.S. Three shots of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were about 67% effective against omicron-related symptomatic disease compared with unvaccinated people. Two doses, however, offered no significant protection against omicron when measured several months after completion of the original series, the researchers found.
In the face of daily pandemic-induced upheavals, the notion of “business as usual” can often seem a quaint and distant notion to today’s workforce. But even before we all got stuck in never-ending Zoom meetings, the logistics and transportation sectors (like much of America’s economy) were already subtly shifting in the face of continuing advances in robotics, machine learning and autonomous navigation technologies.
In their new book, The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers (leveraging insights gleaned from MIT’s multi-year Task Force on the Work of the Future) exam the disconnect between improvements in technology and the benefits derived by workers from those advancements. It’s not that America is rife with “low-skill workers” as New York’s new mayor seems to believe, but rather that the nation is saturated with low-wage, low-quality positions — positions which are excluded from the ever-increasing perks and paychecks enjoyed by knowledge workers. The excerpt below examines the impact vehicular automation will have on rank and file employees, rather than the Musks of the world.
THE ROBOTS YOU CAN SEE: DRIVERLESS CARS, WAREHOUSING AND DISTRIBUTION, AND MANUFACTURING
Few sectors better illustrate the promises and fears of robotics than autonomous cars and trucks. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are essentially highspeed wheeled industrial robots powered by cutting-edge technologies of perception, machine learning, decision-making, regulation, and user interfaces. Their cultural and symbolic resonance has brought AVs to the forefront of excited press coverage about new technology and has sparked large investments of capital, making a potentially “driverless” future a focal point for hopes and fears of a new era of automation.
The ability to transport goods and people across the landscape under computer control embodies a dream of twenty-first-century technology, and also the potential for massive social change and displacement. In a driverless future, accidents and fatalities could drop significantly. The time that people waste stuck in traffic could be recovered for work or leisure. Urban landscapes might change, requiring less parking and improving safety and efficiency for all. New models for the distribution of goods and services promise a world where people and objects move effortlessly through the physical world, much as bits move effortlessly through the internet.
As recently as a decade ago, it was common to dismiss the notion of driverless cars coming to roads in any form. Federally supported university research in robotics and autonomy had evolved for two generations and had just begun to yield advances in military robotics. Yet today, virtually every carmaker in the world, plus many startups, have engaged to redefine mobility. The implications for job disruption are massive. The auto industry itself accounts for just over 5 percent of all private sector jobs, according to one estimate. Millions more work as drivers and in the web of companies that service and maintain these vehicles.
Task Force members John J. Leonard and David A. Mindell have both participated in the development of these technologies and, with graduate student Erik L. Stayton, have studied their implications. Their research suggests that the grand visions of automation in mobility will not be fully realized in the space of a few years.15 The variability and complexity of real-world driving conditions require the ability to adapt to unexpected situations that current technologies have not yet mastered. The recent tragedies and scandals surrounding the death of 346 people in two Boeing 737 MAX crashes stemming from flawed software and the accidents involving self-driving car-testing programs on public roads have increased public and regulatory scrutiny, adding caution about how quickly these technologies will be widely dispersed. The software in driverless cars remains more complex and less deterministic than that in airliners; we still lack technology and techniques to certify it as safe. Some even argue that solving for generalized autonomous driving is tantamount to solving for AGI.
Analysis of the best available data suggests that the reshaping of mobility around autonomy will take more than a decade and will proceed in phases, beginning with systems limited to specific geographies such as urban or campus shuttles (such as the recent product announcement from Zoox, an American AV company). Trucking and delivery are also likely use cases for early adoption, and several leading developers are focusing on these applications both in a fully autonomous mode and as augmented, “convoy” systems led by human drivers. In late 2020, in a telling shift for the industry from “robotaxis” to logistics, Uber sold its driverless car unit, having spent billions of dollars with few results. The unit was bought by Amazon-backed Aurora to focus the technology on trucking. More automated systems will eventually spread as technological barriers are overcome, but current fears about a rapid elimination of driving jobs are not supported.
AVs, whether cars, trucks, or buses, combine the industrial heritage of Detroit and the millennial optimism and disruption of Silicon Valley with a DARPA-inspired military vision of unmanned weapons. Truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, auto mechanics, and insurance adjusters are but a few of the workers expected to be displaced or complemented. This transformation will come in conjunction with a shift toward full electric technology, which would also eliminate some jobs while creating others. Electric cars require fewer parts than conventional cars, for instance, and the shift to electric vehicles will reduce work supplying motors, transmissions, fuel injection systems, pollution control systems, and the like. This change too will create new demands, such as for large scale battery production (that said, the power-hungry sensors and computing of AVs will at least partially offset the efficiency gains of electric cars). AVs may well emerge as part of an evolving mobility ecosystem as a variety of innovations, including connected cars, new mobility business models, and innovations in urban transit, converge to reshape how we move people and goods from place to place.
TRANSPORTATION JOBS IN A DRIVERLESS WORLD
The narrative on AVs suggests the replacement of human drivers by AI-based software systems, themselves created by a few PhD computer scientists in a lab. This is, however, a simplistic reading of the technological transition currently under way, as MIT researchers discovered through their work in Detroit. It is true that AV development organizations tend to have a higher share of workers with advanced degrees compared to the traditional auto industry. Even so, implementation of AV systems requires efforts at all levels, from automation supervision by safety drivers to remote managing and dispatching to customer service and maintenance roles on the ground.
Take, for instance, a current job description for “site supervisor” at a major AV developer. The job responsibilities entail overseeing a team of safety drivers focused in particular on customer satisfaction and reporting feedback on mechanical and vehicle-related issues. The job offers a mid-range salary with benefits, does not require a two- or four-year degree, but does require at least one year of leadership experience and communication skills. Similarly, despite the highly sophisticated machine learning and computer vision algorithms, AV systems rely on technicians routinely calibrating and cleaning various sensors both on the vehicle and in the built environment. The job description for field autonomy technician to maintain AV systems provides a mid-range salary, does not require a four-year degree, and generally requires only background knowledge of vehicle repair and electronics. Some responsibilities are necessary for implementation — including inventorying and budgeting repair parts and hands-on physical work—but not engineering.
The scaling up of AV systems, when it happens, will create many more such jobs, and others devoted to ensuring safety and reliability. Simultaneously, an AV future will require explicit strategies to enable workers displaced from traditional driving roles to transition to secure employment.
A rapid emergence of AVs would be highly disruptive for workers since the US has more than three million commercial vehicle drivers. These drivers are often people with high school or lower education or immigrants with language barriers. Leonard, Mindell, and Stayton conclude that a slower adoption timeline will ease the impact on workers, enabling current drivers to retire and younger workers to get trained to fill newly created roles, such as monitoring mobile fleets. Again, realistic adoption timelines provide opportunities for shaping technology, adoption, and policy. A 2018 report by Task Force Research Advisory Board member Susan Helper and colleagues discusses a range of plausible scenarios and found the employment impact of AVs to be proportional to the time to widespread adoption. Immediate, sudden automation of the fleet would, of course, put millions out of work, whereas a thirty-year adoption timeline could be accommodated by retirements and generational change.
Meanwhile, car-and-truck makers already make vehicles that augment rather than replace drivers. These products include high-powered cruise control and warning systems frequently found on vehicles sold today. At some level, replacement-type driverless cars will be competing with augmentation-type computer-assisted human drivers. In aviation, this competition went on for decades before unmanned aircraft found their niches, while human-piloted aircraft became highly augmented by automation. When they did arrive, unmanned aircraft such as the US Air Force’s Predator and Reaper vehicles required many more people to operate than traditional aircraft and offered completely novel capabilities, such as persistent, twenty-four-hour surveillance.
Based on the current state of knowledge, we estimate a slow shift toward systems that require no driver, even in trucking, one of the easier use cases, with limited use by 2030. Overall shifts in other modes, including passenger cars, are likely to be no faster.
Even when it’s achieved, a future of AVs will not be jobless. New business models, potentially entirely new industrial sectors, will be spurred by the technology. New roles and specialties will appear in expert, technical fields of engineering of AV systems and vehicle information technologies. Automation supervision or safety driver roles will be critical for levels of automation that will come before fully automated driving. Remote management or dispatcher, roles will bring drivers into control rooms and require new skills of interacting with automation. New customer service, field support technician, and maintenance roles will also appear. Perhaps most important, creative use of the technology will enable new businesses and services that are difficult to imagine today. When passenger cars displaced equestrian travel and the myriad occupations that supported it in the 1920s, the roadside motel and fast-food industries rose up to serve the “motoring public.” How will changes in mobility, for example, enable and shape changes in distribution and consumption?
Equally important are the implications of new technologies for how people get to work. As with other new technologies, introducing expensive new autonomous cars into existing mobility ecosystems will just perpetuate existing inequalities of access and opportunity if institutions that support workers don’t evolve as well. In a sweeping study of work, inequality, and transit in the Detroit region, Task Force researchers noted that most workers building Model T and Model A Fords on the early assembly lines traveled to work on streetcars, using Detroit’s then highly developed system. In the century since, particularly in Detroit, but also in cities all across the country, public transit has been an essential service for many workers, but it has also been an instrument facilitating institutional racism, urban flight to job-rich suburbs, and inequality. Public discourse and political decisions favoring highway construction often denigrated and undermined mass transit, with racial undertones. As a result, Black people and other minorities are much more likely to lack access to personal vehicles.
“Technology alone cannot remedy the mobility constraints” that workers face, the study concludes, “and will perpetuate existing inequities absent institutional change.” As with other technologies, deploying new technologies in old systems of transportation will exacerbate their inequalities by “shifting attention toward what is new and away from what is useful, practical, and needed.” Innovating in institutions is as important as innovating in machines; recent decades have seen encouraging pilot programs, but more must be done to scale those pilots to broader use and ensure accountability to the communities they intend to serve. “Transportation offers a unique site of political possibility.”
If you are in the rare group of folks still relying upon floppy disks and doing so while running up-to-date software stacks, Linux 5.17 will be of interest to you…
Fans of Riot’s Arcanehave a long wait ahead of them before season two of the animated series arrives. In the meantime, you can at least play a few matches of Fortnite with a new character from the show. Epic Games will add Jinx’s sister Vi to the battle royale’s in-game Item Shop today (January 22nd) at 7PM ET. You can buy her outfit alongside a handful of themed items, including a punching practice emote.
Unfortunately, Vi won’t come with her signature Hextech gauntlets. Instead, Epic will offer Jayce’s Warden Hammer, which the company maintains is Vi’s “weapon of choice while her gauntlets are being repaired.” If you purchase the skin through the Arcane Vi Bundle, you’ll also get the rad Piltover’s Finest loading screen.
What’s more, if you missed the chance to buy Jinx’s skin when it debuted back in November, you now have another opportunity to add it to your collection. Epic will relist the outfit, alongside the Jinx Arcane bundle, at the same time it adds the Vi outfit to the Item Shop.
Enlarge/ The 2022 Wagoneer. Uncooperative weather forced us to rely on Stellantis media images for this review. (credit: Stellantis)
Even as the automotive industry charts a course into a mostly electrified future, internal combustion engines still rule the roost in most segments. This includes the full-size SUV segment dominated in the US by the Chevy Tahoe and Ford Explorer. Although Jeep parent Stellantis forecasts having 40 percent of its sales come from BEVs by the end of the decade, it needs to challenge GM and Ford with its own three-row SUV: the all-new Wagoneer.
Starting at $71,845 for the base model, this is not your father’s Jeep Wagoneer. While the grille screams Jeep, that word doesn’t actually appear on this massive SUV. Instead “Wagoneer” appears in numerous spots inside and outside. And it is truly massive—the Grand Wagoneer measures a whopping 215 inches (5,461 mm) from head to tail, a couple of inches longer than the competition from GM and Ford.
Smooth sailing on smooth pavement. [credit:
Stellantis ]
To propel this beast of an SUV, Jeep has gone with a 5.7-liter V8 with eTorque (a 48 volt battery-powered motor generator designed to help with performance and fuel economy) and an eight-speed automatic transmission. Although it uses the same box-on-frame design as the Ram pickup truck, the rear-wheel drive Wagoneer’s independent suspension gives it a much smoother ride than the Ram 1500 with its solid rear axle. The upside is nearly 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) of towing capacity, surprisingly quick acceleration, and smooth rides on the highway. The downside of this combination of power, weight, and size? Disappointing mileage. The EPA estimates 15 mpg in the city, 20 mpg on the highway, and 17 mpg overall. Our week of late fall driving resulted in just 13.5 mpg. (This is a reminder that it’s not just EVs that lose range in cold weather.)
Cleaning your bathroom may not be your favorite household chore, but at least it’s pretty straightforward. In fact, you probably have some sort of routine down pat: Putting cleaner in the toilet to work its magic while you clear off the floor and counters, giving everything a quick-but-thorough wipe-down, running the…
Recently, news broke that the adaptation of the YA series Children of Blood & Bonefrom Nigerian-American writer Tomi Adeyemi would be developed at Paramount. What was notable about it was how it was originally in development at Disney and Lucasfilm, and something they openly touted as in development back in 2020…
The Washington Post profiles Lasso Loop, the startup behind “a hefty home appliance machine that automatically sorts and breaks down the recyclables you toss inside it,” saying the company tackles “a flaw in our waste management systems that many people probably aren’t aware of.”
As it turns out, much of the material we toss into our recycling bins doesn’t actually ever get recycled. That’s for a whole host of reasons: improperly cleaned materials can contaminate others that would have been recyclable otherwise, and some of the items people might just assume are recyclable — say, plastic cutlery — usually aren’t. And ultimately, that means more trips to the landfill….
In its current form, the company’s Lasso machine is bigger than a dishwasher but smaller than a fridge, though the team hopes to be able to squeeze the final model under your countertops. What’s more interesting is the stuff inside: Lasso growth manager Dominique Leonard said the machine uses a smattering of sensors, cameras and AI to determine whether the stuff you’ve put inside it can be recycled. (Anything that doesn’t pass muster, like certain kinds of plastic, are summarily rejected.) From there, the remaining plastic, glass and metal products are steam cleaned, broken apart — seriously — and stored separately in a series of bins based on type to prevent contamination….
[T]hat sophistication will come at a cost, especially at first. The Lasso team plans to sell its machine for $5,000 — or $3,500 with a prelaunch discount — to start, though it hopes incentives from local governments will help lighten the load on potential customers.
The Post adds that Lasso is launching a pilot program with customers in the San Francisco Bay area next year, in which “owners are meant to schedule pickups from a smartphone app” (which summons Lasso subcontractors).
The Post also profiled ClearDrop, a startup from Texas businessman Ivan Arbouzov that makes a trash can-sized compactor just for single-use plastic bags:
You’re meant to feed all of your soft plastics into a slot onto the top of the machine, and once it has had enough — Arbouzov said that usually takes around a month — the Minimizer heats and compresses the bags to form a slightly squishy brick. If your municipality is one of the rare ones that accepts soft plastics, you should be able to toss those bricks into your recycling bin. “If worse comes to worse, you can still take it to Walmart and put it in their box,” said Arbouzov.
In other words, you’re meant to toss your (acceptable) plastics into both machines and move on with your life.
This podcast chronicles the fascinating story of how Simlish, the language spoken by characters in the popular game franchise The Sims, was created. And not only the how, but why it worked well and how it became a popular choice for musicians.
“Having watched the new release (twice) with my little one recently — and then listened to its soundtrack on repeat ever since — the message seems fairly clear: America is broken (but don’t worry, all is not lost),” McTague writes.
Enlarge (credit: TCD | Prod.DB | Apple TV+/ | lamy)
In the first episode of the Foundation serieson Apple TV, we see a terrorist try to destroy the space elevator used by the Galactic Empire. This seems like a great chance to talk about the physics of space elevators and to consider what would happen if one exploded. (Hint: It wouldn’t be good.)
People like to put stuff beyond the Earth’s atmosphere: It allows us to have weather satellites, a space station, GPS satellites, and even the James Webb Space Telescope. But right now, our only option for getting stuff into space is to strap it to a controlled chemical explosion that we usually call “a rocket.”
Don’t get me wrong, rockets are cool, but they are also expensive and inefficient. Let’s consider what it takes to get a 1-kilogram object into low Earth orbit (LEO). This is around 400 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, about where the International Space Station is. In order to get this object into orbit, you need to accomplish two things. First, you need to lift it up 400 kilometers. But if you only increased the object’s altitude, it wouldn’t be in space for long. It would just fall back to Earth. So, second, in order to keep this thing in LEO, it has to move—really fast.
Out of all the foods that are off-limits to dogs, chocolate is probably the one people are most familiar with—even if they don’t have a dog of their own. And it’s for good reason: Chocolate is toxic for dogs, and could make them seriously ill.
The usage of Go is growing rapidly. It is now the preferred language for writing cloud-native software, container software, command-line tools, databases, and more. Go has had built-in support for testing for quite some time now. It makes writing tests and running them using the Go tool relatively easy.
As good news not only to future Steam Deck users but all Linux gamers making use of the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Valve is sponsoring additional continuous integration (CI) testing of Mesa commits…
