The Tech Jawn

At Tesla’s We Robot event last week in Los Angeles company CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Optimus line of humanoid-looking robots, but, they didn’t seem to be all that autonomous. 14 State Attorneys General sued TikTok claiming the social media platform was designed with the express intention of addicting young people to the app.Matt Mulleweg, one of the creators of WordPress, and WP Engine, a WordPress-managed host, are going through it legally.And we shine The Tech Jawn Spotlight on Dr. David Harold Blackwell, the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

Brothatech wants to get a new camera to look good on video. He wants something better than a webcam, but, without all the complexity of a DSLR.Maybe we don’t want ChatGPT speaking in ebonics after all because AI seems to make the same racist decisions based on dialect as humans do.Police seldom disclose the use of facial recognition when used to identify suspects and often lie about its use in public-facing reports. And when you put cameras in glasses, real-time facial recognition was bound to follow.Link to Show Notes

Verizon experienced a nationwide outage on Monday. An outage any day is bad. Right after a hurricane is particularly bad timing. Who knew that your interest in electric vehicles could depend on what side of the aisle you sit on politically? It seems like maybe auto manufacturer execs should have known.ChatGPT can speak in ebonics. We do a live test during the show and the feature is surprisingly good.A Common Sense Media Study shows that Black students are twice as likely to have their work flagged as AI-generated when indeed it is not.Link to Show Notes

Some new hotness made its way to the Apple Store last Friday.  BrothTech stopped by to pick up a new iPhone 16 Pro Max and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and today he gives us his first impressions.The government appears to be taking child online safety more seriously as the  House Committee on Energy and Commerce forwards two bills on to the full House of Representatives.Section 230 protects online platforms from liability for what users post, but, according to a three-judge panel, not from what platforms recommend. And are you using a digital note-taking app on your smartphone?  Chances are, you probably should be.Link to Show Notes

iOS 18 has been released and is now available. We cover a few of the new features and ponder if you should go ahead and update now, or, wait until 18.1 comes next month with Apple Intelligence.The Fearless Fund, which awarded $20,000 grants specifically to Black women-led businesses, shut its Striver’s grant as part of a settlement in its appeals case.Oprah Winfrey did an ABC special on artificial intelligence, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman seemed to remove some of her skepticism about AI.And Amazon orders all of its corporate employees back into the office 5 days per week starting in January.Link to Show Notes

In this episode of The Tech Jawn, we are joined by Malcolm Coley, Chief Technology Officer at Futures First Gaming, who chops it up with us about all the things announced at Apple’s iPhone 16 “Glowtime” event before telling us a bit more about Futures First Gaming, a STEM.org Accredited Ed. Tech, Media, and Esports Entertainment company that convenes esports enthusiasts to engage in competitive and recreational gaming events, fosters a gaming community, and presents opportunities for participants to explore educational and career development pathways in science, technology, art, and relevant esports disciplines.Link to Show Notes

Will Melody Hobson’s $1.45 billion Project Black fund which plans to “minoritize” existing businesses help to narrow the wealth gap?Spotify has invested less than 10% of the $100 million it pledged to its Creator Equity Fund during the Joe Rogan controversy, and it doesn’t appear it ever took the pledge seriously from the jump.Things just keep getting worse for Twitter as the social media giant issued a copyright takedown notice to GitHub after finding out parts of its source code had been posted online for months.And Congress seems to be unified and serious about banning TikTok in the United States. Link to Show Notes

French authorities arrested Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov over the weekend as part of an investigation related to charges of "complicity" in various crimes that happen on the cross-platform messaging service. Apple lost its lead when it comes to podcast listening market share. The iPhone maker sits in third place with 12% solidly behind YouTube with 31% and Spotify with 21%. The Justice Department is suing real estate startup RealPage whose software helps landlords price fix rental prices.And Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter is the worst deal for banks since the financial crisis.Link to Show Notes

Pittsburgh may be the latest major city to drop Shotspotter, the gunshot detection system that uses a network of microphones to alert police to gunfire incidents because the technology just doesn’t work.Former Google CEO and board chair Eric Schmidt walks back his comments about Google being behind startups like OpenAI because ‘work-life balance was more important than winning’.The U.S. DOJ is considering a breakup of Google to address its monopoly on search.And, everybody should check to see if their data was stolen in the NPD data breach. Sadly, the chances are that it probably was.Link to Show Notes