Month: September 2023
Supreme Court to Hear Challenges to State Laws on Social Media
The tech industry argues that laws in Florida and Texas, prompted by conservative complaints about censorship by tech platforms, violate the First Amendment.
The tech industry argues that laws in Florida and Texas, prompted by conservative complaints about censorship by tech platforms, violate the First Amendment.
Roll the credits: Netflix is sending out its final DVD rental discs today
This is how Netflix started, a long, long time back – a quarter of a century ago, in fact.
As of today, Netflix has officially axed the service whereby it posts physical discs of movies out for subscribers to watch.
As you may recall, this was how Netflix began way back in 1998 – as a DVD-by-mail service, long before streaming was ever an option for your movie (and TV show) viewing.
But after a quarter of a century of posting out DVDs to customers – and some five billion discs mailed, as of 2019, and no doubt more since – the service is officially shuttered. While this comes as no surprise given that Netflix informed us this was happening earlier this year (in April), it’s still a momentous day.
The iconic DVD-bearing red envelopes are no more, then, with the final discs going out literally today (and subscriptions being automatically canceled). Viewers will have until October 27 to return their last batch of DVDs – but as we’ve previously reported, some subscribers will be able to keep that final disc delivery (which is a pretty cool parting gift).
Going forward, though, these folks are going to have to stream content if they want to continue with Netflix (and may want to peruse our best Netflix shows and best Netflix movies guides to see what’s out there, perhaps).
Analysis: Discontinued discs did have their positives
(Image credit: Netflix)
It’s certainly the end of an era, though it’s difficult to see DVDs delivered by post as anything but an archaic practice at this point.
There are still some advantages, of sorts, to a DVD mailing service – like being able to access some of the more obscure films that aren’t covered by the best streaming services.
Furthermore, for those who have poor internet connections, or just don’t want to be subject to streaming hiccups like buffering – which happens to the best of us at times – DVDs offer a local option with a guaranteed quality level. (Assuming no bugbears like scratches on the physical discs, but in our experience as Lovefilm subscribers way back, that was pretty rare).
So, the service isn’t without some plus points, but the truth is that it just wasn’t making financial sense for Netflix any longer.
Oddly, though, the streaming giant had no desire to sell off its DVD-by-mail division, even though there was definite interest in buying it (from DVD rental outfit Redbox). Make of that what you will, but the red envelopes are now very definitely a thing of the past.
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Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub lose bid to block NYC’s new wage rules for delivery workers
Photo by Leonardo Munoz / VIEWpress
New York City’s delivery workers will get a significant pay bump after a judge rejected a request by Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub to block the city’s new minimum wage rules from going into effect.
The ruling by New York Acting Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne will allow the law to go into effect, which requires companies to pay gig workers a minimum wage of $17.96 per hour. That wage will rise to $20 an hour by 2025.
Delivery worker advocates celebrated the ruling, claiming it puts them “one step closer” to earning a living wage for their work. New York City has the largest delivery workforce in the country, comprised of at least 65,000 mostly undocumented immigrants who earn less than $8 an hour after expenses.
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A post shared by Workers Justice Project (WJP) (@workersjusticeproject)
“Multi-billion dollar companies will not profit off of the backs of immigrant workers and get away with it,” the Worker’s Justice Project and Los Deliveristas Unidos said. “This landmark victory is a stark reminder that workers will always win.”
But more hurdles could still emerge. Last July, the judge stopped the law from being implemented while he considered the companies’ request to block it until the case was resolved. And while the law will now go into effect, the companies’ lawsuit will still need to work its way through the courts.
“Multi-billion dollar companies will not profit off of the backs of immigrant workers”
According to the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the new rules could force the app companies to limit their supply of workers or eliminate tipping. “The Department anticipates that the greatest adverse impacts from the rule for workers are likely to be the actions apps take to reduce platform access for workers whose time generates relatively little revenue or to alter requirements in ways some workers find undesirable,” the department said in a November 2022 report.
Here’s how the rule will work: apps can either pay workers per trip, per hour worked, or come up with their own formula, so long as the result is a minimum pay of $17.96 per hour on average (up to $19.96 by April 2025). That works out in 2023 to 30 cents per minute before tips for hourly workers or, if an app only pays by active trip minutes, approximately 50 cents per minute of trip time.
The companies argued the new rules would force them to shrink their service areas as they absorb new labor costs, which could impact their customers and make their delivery service less reliable.
Apps can either pay workers per trip, per hour worked, or come up with their own formula
“We’re disappointed with the judge’s decision to move forward with this version of the regulation and are evaluating our next legal steps,” Grubhub spokesperson Patrick Burke said in a statement.
“The City’s insistence on forging ahead with such an extreme pay rate will reduce opportunity and increase costs for all New Yorkers,” DoorDash spokesperson Javier Lacayo said. “We will continue evaluating our legal options moving forward.”
“The City continues to lie to workers and the public,” Uber’s Josh Gold said. “This law will put thousands of New Yorkers out of work and force the remaining couriers to compete against each other to deliver orders faster.”
Photo by Leonardo Munoz / VIEWpress
New York City’s delivery workers will get a significant pay bump after a judge rejected a request by Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub to block the city’s new minimum wage rules from going into effect.
The ruling by New York Acting Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne will allow the law to go into effect, which requires companies to pay gig workers a minimum wage of $17.96 per hour. That wage will rise to $20 an hour by 2025.
Delivery worker advocates celebrated the ruling, claiming it puts them “one step closer” to earning a living wage for their work. New York City has the largest delivery workforce in the country, comprised of at least 65,000 mostly undocumented immigrants who earn less than $8 an hour after expenses.
“Multi-billion dollar companies will not profit off of the backs of immigrant workers and get away with it,” the Worker’s Justice Project and Los Deliveristas Unidos said. “This landmark victory is a stark reminder that workers will always win.”
But more hurdles could still emerge. Last July, the judge stopped the law from being implemented while he considered the companies’ request to block it until the case was resolved. And while the law will now go into effect, the companies’ lawsuit will still need to work its way through the courts.
According to the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the new rules could force the app companies to limit their supply of workers or eliminate tipping. “The Department anticipates that the greatest adverse impacts from the rule for workers are likely to be the actions apps take to reduce platform access for workers whose time generates relatively little revenue or to alter requirements in ways some workers find undesirable,” the department said in a November 2022 report.
Here’s how the rule will work: apps can either pay workers per trip, per hour worked, or come up with their own formula, so long as the result is a minimum pay of $17.96 per hour on average (up to $19.96 by April 2025). That works out in 2023 to 30 cents per minute before tips for hourly workers or, if an app only pays by active trip minutes, approximately 50 cents per minute of trip time.
The companies argued the new rules would force them to shrink their service areas as they absorb new labor costs, which could impact their customers and make their delivery service less reliable.
“We’re disappointed with the judge’s decision to move forward with this version of the regulation and are evaluating our next legal steps,” Grubhub spokesperson Patrick Burke said in a statement.
“The City’s insistence on forging ahead with such an extreme pay rate will reduce opportunity and increase costs for all New Yorkers,” DoorDash spokesperson Javier Lacayo said. “We will continue evaluating our legal options moving forward.”
“The City continues to lie to workers and the public,” Uber’s Josh Gold said. “This law will put thousands of New Yorkers out of work and force the remaining couriers to compete against each other to deliver orders faster.”
The synthetic social network is coming
Image: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge
This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.
Today, let’s consider the implications of a truly profound week in the development of artificial intelligence and discuss whether we may be witnessing the rise of a new era in the consumer internet.
I.
On Monday, OpenAI announced the latest updates for ChatGPT. One feature lets you interact with its large language model via voice. Another lets you upload images and ask questions about them. The result is that a tool which was already useful for lots of things suddenly became useful for much more. For one thing, ChatGPT feels much more powerful as a mobile app: you can now chat with it while walking around town, or snap a picture of a tree and ask the app what you’re looking at.
For another, though, adding a voice to ChatGPT begins to give it a hint of personality. I don’t want to overstate the case here — the app typically generates dry, sterile text unadorned by any hint of style. But something changes when you begin speaking with the app in one of its five native voices, which are much livelier and more dynamic than what we are used to with Alexa or the Google assistant. The voices are earnest, upbeat, and — by nature of the fact that they are powered by an LLM — tireless.
A bot that’s smarter, more patient, more empathetic, more available
It is the earliest stage of all this; access to the voice feature is just rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and free users won’t be able to us it for some time. And yet even in this 1.0 release, you can see the clear outlines of the sort of thing popularized in the decade-old film Her: a companion so warm, empathetic and helpful that in time its users fall in love with it. The Her comparisons are by now cliche when discussing AI in Silicon Valley, and yet until now its basic premise has felt like a distant sci-fi dream. On Thursday, I asked the speaking version of ChatGPT to give me a pep talk to hit my deadline — I was running back from the Code Conference and inching up on my deadline — and as the model did its best to gas me up, it seemed to me that AI had taken an emotional step forward.
You can imagine the next steps here. A bot that gets to know your quirks; remembers your life history; offers you coaching or tutoring or therapy; entertains you in whichever way you prefer. A synthetic companion not unlike the real people you encounter during the day, only smarter, more patient, more empathetic, more available.
Those of us who are blessed to have many close friends and family members in our life may look down at tools like this, experiencing what they offer as a cloying simulacrum of the human experience. But I imagine it might feel different for those who are lonely, isolated, or on the margins. On an early episode of Hard Fork, a trans teenager sent in a voice memo to tell us about using ChatGPT to get daily affirmations about identity issues. The power of giving what were then text messages a warm and kindly voice, I think, should not be underestimated.
II.
OpenAI tends to present its products as productivity tools: simple utilities for getting things done. Meta, on the other hand, is in the entertainment business. But it, too, is building LLMs, and on Wednesday the company revealed that it has found its own uses for generative AI and voices.
In addition to an all-purpose AI assistant, the company unveiled 28 personality-driven chatbots to be used in Meta’s messaging apps. Celebrities including Charli D’Amelio, Dwyane Wade, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, and Paris Hilton lent their voices to their effort. Each of their characters comes with a brief and often cringeworthy description; MrBeast’s Zach is billed as “the big brother who will roast you — because he cares.”
How many hours would you spend with AI Taylor Swift?
All of this feels like an intermediate step to me. To the extent that there is a market of people who want to have voice chats with a synthetic version of MrBeast, the character they want to interact with is MrBeast — not big brother Zach. I haven’t been able to chat with any of these character bots yet, but I struggle to understand how they will have more than passing novelty value.
At the same time, this technology is new enough that I imagine celebrities aren’t yet willing to entrust their entire personas to Meta for safekeeping. Better to give people a taste of what it’s like to talk to AI Snoop Dogg and iron out any kinks before delivering the man himself. And when that happens, the potential seems very real. How many hours would fans spend talking to a digital version of Taylor Swift this year, if they could? How much would they pay for the privilege?
While we wait to learn the answers, a new chapter of social networking may be beginning. Until now we have talked about AI in consumer apps it has mostly had to do with ranking: using machine-learning tools to create more engaging and personalized feeds for billions of users.
This week we got at least two new ways to think about AI in social feeds. One is AI-generated imagery, in the form of the new stickers coming to the company’s messaging apps. It’s unclear to me how much time people want to spend creating custom images while they text their friends, but the demonstrations seemed nice enough.
More significantly, I think, is the idea that Meta plans to place its AI characters on every major surface of its products. They have Facebook pages and Instagram accounts; you will message them in the same inbox that you message your friends and family. Soon, I imagine they will be making Reels.
And when that happens, feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.
Will it feel more personalized, engaging, and entertaining? Or will it feel uncanny, hollow, and junky? Surely there will be a range of views on this. But either way, I think, something new is coming into focus.
Image: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge
This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.
Today, let’s consider the implications of a truly profound week in the development of artificial intelligence and discuss whether we may be witnessing the rise of a new era in the consumer internet.
I.
On Monday, OpenAI announced the latest updates for ChatGPT. One feature lets you interact with its large language model via voice. Another lets you upload images and ask questions about them. The result is that a tool which was already useful for lots of things suddenly became useful for much more. For one thing, ChatGPT feels much more powerful as a mobile app: you can now chat with it while walking around town, or snap a picture of a tree and ask the app what you’re looking at.
For another, though, adding a voice to ChatGPT begins to give it a hint of personality. I don’t want to overstate the case here — the app typically generates dry, sterile text unadorned by any hint of style. But something changes when you begin speaking with the app in one of its five native voices, which are much livelier and more dynamic than what we are used to with Alexa or the Google assistant. The voices are earnest, upbeat, and — by nature of the fact that they are powered by an LLM — tireless.
It is the earliest stage of all this; access to the voice feature is just rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and free users won’t be able to us it for some time. And yet even in this 1.0 release, you can see the clear outlines of the sort of thing popularized in the decade-old film Her: a companion so warm, empathetic and helpful that in time its users fall in love with it. The Her comparisons are by now cliche when discussing AI in Silicon Valley, and yet until now its basic premise has felt like a distant sci-fi dream. On Thursday, I asked the speaking version of ChatGPT to give me a pep talk to hit my deadline — I was running back from the Code Conference and inching up on my deadline — and as the model did its best to gas me up, it seemed to me that AI had taken an emotional step forward.
You can imagine the next steps here. A bot that gets to know your quirks; remembers your life history; offers you coaching or tutoring or therapy; entertains you in whichever way you prefer. A synthetic companion not unlike the real people you encounter during the day, only smarter, more patient, more empathetic, more available.
Those of us who are blessed to have many close friends and family members in our life may look down at tools like this, experiencing what they offer as a cloying simulacrum of the human experience. But I imagine it might feel different for those who are lonely, isolated, or on the margins. On an early episode of Hard Fork, a trans teenager sent in a voice memo to tell us about using ChatGPT to get daily affirmations about identity issues. The power of giving what were then text messages a warm and kindly voice, I think, should not be underestimated.
II.
OpenAI tends to present its products as productivity tools: simple utilities for getting things done. Meta, on the other hand, is in the entertainment business. But it, too, is building LLMs, and on Wednesday the company revealed that it has found its own uses for generative AI and voices.
In addition to an all-purpose AI assistant, the company unveiled 28 personality-driven chatbots to be used in Meta’s messaging apps. Celebrities including Charli D’Amelio, Dwyane Wade, Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, and Paris Hilton lent their voices to their effort. Each of their characters comes with a brief and often cringeworthy description; MrBeast’s Zach is billed as “the big brother who will roast you — because he cares.”
All of this feels like an intermediate step to me. To the extent that there is a market of people who want to have voice chats with a synthetic version of MrBeast, the character they want to interact with is MrBeast — not big brother Zach. I haven’t been able to chat with any of these character bots yet, but I struggle to understand how they will have more than passing novelty value.
At the same time, this technology is new enough that I imagine celebrities aren’t yet willing to entrust their entire personas to Meta for safekeeping. Better to give people a taste of what it’s like to talk to AI Snoop Dogg and iron out any kinks before delivering the man himself. And when that happens, the potential seems very real. How many hours would fans spend talking to a digital version of Taylor Swift this year, if they could? How much would they pay for the privilege?
While we wait to learn the answers, a new chapter of social networking may be beginning. Until now we have talked about AI in consumer apps it has mostly had to do with ranking: using machine-learning tools to create more engaging and personalized feeds for billions of users.
This week we got at least two new ways to think about AI in social feeds. One is AI-generated imagery, in the form of the new stickers coming to the company’s messaging apps. It’s unclear to me how much time people want to spend creating custom images while they text their friends, but the demonstrations seemed nice enough.
More significantly, I think, is the idea that Meta plans to place its AI characters on every major surface of its products. They have Facebook pages and Instagram accounts; you will message them in the same inbox that you message your friends and family. Soon, I imagine they will be making Reels.
And when that happens, feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.
Will it feel more personalized, engaging, and entertaining? Or will it feel uncanny, hollow, and junky? Surely there will be a range of views on this. But either way, I think, something new is coming into focus.