Hot Mess Express is, of course, the segment where we pull slips of paper out of a train car, discuss them, and then decide what kind of mess was this.
All right, let's get going. Number one, Ring has canceled its partnership with Flock Safety after a surveillance backlash, as a story from The Verge. So, Casey, this is one of the most bizarre stories in recent months from the tech industry. Did you see the Super Bowl commercial that Ring put out?
So, this was supposed to be a heartwarming commercial about a tale of a lost dog being united with his family again.
The whole dog or just the tail?
The whole dog. So, Ring puts out this ad during the Super Bowl that says that they are starting to link their technology, their doorbells, to save lost pets by basically connecting all the footage from all these cameras and detecting whether, you know, Fluffy is down the street at a neighbor's house, you know, or stuck in a tree somewhere. But instead of being a heartwarming tale, this led to the destruction of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a company that is known for deploying camera systems and license plate readers for law enforcement. Because people were so creeped out by the notion that these doorbells and these cameras could be like spying and connecting their information that they said, "Wait a minute, you were doing what?" People are saying, "Get the flock out of my neighborhood." Yes. So, this is probably the least successful Super Bowl ad ever created.
I mean, I'm so sympathetic to everyone who protested here. I truly do not want a networked set of cameras across every neighborhood in America. And if you believe that the uses of this thing are going to stop at finding lost dogs, you got another thing coming, buddy.
Yes. So, congratulations to the marketing team over at Ring and Flock for their great Super Bowl ad.
This is a particular kind of mess that they call a dog's breakfast.
Yes, hot mess. Okay, next down the tracks. Oh, this one is a good one. This one comes to us from the Financial Times. Japan's largest toilet maker is an undervalued AI play, says activist investor. Casey, would you believe that Toto, the Japanese company best known for its toilet seats, is becoming a major player in the global semiconductor supply chain?
Is that right? Well, because, you know, everybody who works on AI has to go to the bathroom.
No, this is about some advanced ceramics that Toto makes that help to stabilize silicon wafers during chip production, which is part of the supply chain, the way that you create these GPUs that go in these gigantic data centers. Toto, the humble toilet company, is playing a major role in that. And so there's an activist investor in the UK who sent a letter to the board of Toto exhorting it to make more of its advanced ceramics. Basically, stop making so many toilets and start making chip parts. Yeah. The next time you use a Toto toilet, I want you to just realize that it could have been making AI, and I want you to reflect on that. And maybe I don't actually know what you would do with that information, but it is something that you could think about. Kevin, I think this is turning into a storm.
No, I think this is a good sign for Toto, a high-growth industry. And I actually have a new slogan that I think they should use for the semiconductor supply chain part of their business. You want to hear it?
Toto, we put the PU in GPU.
Next up, Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its smart glasses. This was a great scoop from your colleagues at The Times. This feature, which has internally been called Name Tag, would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta's AI assistant. And this is apparently something that the company has been considering. I was told this week it is still being considered. But I think the quote that got everyone's attention from this story, Kevin, was from an internal document published last May inside the company in which Meta Reality Labs wrote, quote, "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns."
What do you think they're talking about there?
This is a hot mess. Yeah, this kind of thing.
It has been the nightmare scenario of privacy advocates in this country and around the world for many years. It was something that people thought was going to be technically possible, but that the big tech companies had, in their wisdom, decided that they were not going to do, because what could be more horrifying than that? And Meta in 2021 actually deleted the face prints of over one billion people that it had been painstakingly building for many years because it said there are just so many societal concerns about the ways that this could be misused. And about four years and change after that blog post, we are now learning that the company is back at it again.
Back at it again. Well, I will say something that I think frequently, which is it's a really good thing that Meta sucks at developing AI, because if they were good at it, it would be terrifying.
All right, next up. This one comes to us from Sky News Australia. Outrage as Aussie Uber driver charges $5 to turn on air conditioning unit during heatwave. This was a story that came to us from TikTok where a woman named Lexi Pickering detailed her recent Uber ride from the airport. She said that during the 35° heat, which is Celsius, I believe that's very hot, she requested that the driver turn on the AC. However, the driver allegedly refused unless she paid him $5. Casey, what did you make of this?
I'm still trying to figure out how much 35° is in Fahrenheit.
Hold on. That's 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Kevin.
So, do we have any insight? By the way, for some reason, the funniest words ever said on this podcast: "this story comes to us from TikTok." How do we know it's even true? Is this person just rage-bait farming on TikTok?
So, this became the talk of Australia, and an Uber spokesman actually had to respond because this was all filmed and put up there, and they said, "We are shocked by this," and apologized to the rider for her experience. And they added that this is a violation of Uber's community guidelines on the driver's part.
Here's what I'd like to know. Why would it cost the driver any more money to, you know, have AC?
