TWIT 858: The Meat CEO

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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E3 is definitely dying but I disagree that it’s bound to fail because of lack of attendance from the big companies. As far as I remember before covid Nintendo was the only big (gaming) company that didn’t do a Keynote at E3. Though when Nintendo stopped doing big Keynote presentations at E3 they kept doing their Treehouse Live presentations all through E3.

Another advantage of E3 (and other conferences) is that publications and creators can get press credentials to these conferences even if they aren’t big/well known enough to be recognized to get the private sessions.

Virtual CES is terrible (I’m lucky that CES for some reason recognized me as press because of my tiny blog as press) since CES recognized me as press but the exhibitors don’t know who I am I don’t get offered any demos. At an in-person CES I wouldn’t have to contend with that. It’s also hard to decide what demos to request because alot of exhibitors only give a vague description of what they do and nothing about their products.

On smart speakers: I have a Lenovo Smart Clock on my night table I use it to control my lights, as an alarm clock and, to listen to podcasts sometimes. We also have a Google Home Mini in our kitchen, whenever my mom is in (or anywhere near) the kitchen she listens to the radio on it. I think in the grand scheme of things we thought that we’d have questions to ask it more often and that adoption of other IOT gadgets would have been higher.

Despite apparently being “new” at CES 2022, Techmoan reviewed “the world’s smallest dishwasher” some time ago:

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The massaging robot reminds me of Project Hail Mary. Oh my.

My take on e3 is it isn’t needed anymore. Look at the success of Valheim. That game isn’t complete and would have been a great candidate in the past to be shown at e3.

Not sure if anyone remembers, but back in the day on PalmOS the messaging app supported several services in one application, while this didn’t solve the actual issue, it made talking to everyone across different communication platforms a lot easier … I would expect something like this now with all the end-to-end encryption, but mentioning it as I found it really helpful at the time and I do miss that feature.

:frowning:

There is very little in Google’s product lineup that I believe is improving over time.

  • Gmail hasn’t really changed in 5-8 years - perhaps the most significant feature addition has been the addition of delayed send.
  • The Pixel phones have been plagued by reliability problems just about every generation.
  • Google Chat is worse than Google Hangouts, because it does not integrate with Gmail nicely - particularly the search.
  • Google search itself is less useful than it used to be, because of the advertising. I’ve noticed scammers are buying Google search ads for company names, forcing companies to bid higher for searches for their own name. This is a serious problem, because lots of people just type “Amazon” into the Chrome bar, and expect the first result to be Amazon. But if the scammer is buying an ad, bidding higher than actual Amazon, you get directed to a scam instead.
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Integrating services is a great feature. Windows Phone was built around the notion of hubs that connected multiple apps/services, and it was great so long as third parties supported it. It became increasingly difficult for Microsoft’s integrations to keep up with the separate apps as each progressed and built new features. As Leo referenced in regards to RCS, platforms evolve faster than protocols, and in this case Microsoft didn’t even have protocols to work from-- they were dependent upon API access. Facebook, Instagram, etc. increasingly wanted to own the user experience so the writing was on the wall.

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Google search seems to include more ads every year, and the ads are less well marked than they used to be. It continuously reminds me that Google is an advertising company with a big software engineering team.

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Thinking about the “color” changing car, I can see after car purchases to get custom looks and at the time of purchase, Ad free or not as options. Then again, aren’t we supposed to move away from private car ownership?

This e-ink cladding only works in a world of driverless cars where it never bumps into anything. Any damage would likely require the entire panel to replaced. $$$$

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Possibly, but the potential for continued income for automakers might justify the effort to push this. They may also incorporate the panels into locations of the car that have lower chance of damage in typically day-to-day accidents.

It’s not the automakers that are going to be paying to repair these cars anyway… Us consumers get to have high insurance rates for fun things. :joy:

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I gotta say, I needed a Xanax after listening for 1/2 hour. Maybe it was different watching it, but listening was tough. Everyone seemed to be yelling, & talking over each other. It was anxiety triggering for me. :slightly_frowning_face:. Normally, I like Christina & Rich, but it was chaos on this episode.

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Yeah, the video for this one would be better as you can see the products being discussed. Chaos happens.

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Seems as though several of the Twit Shows have migrated toward 2 or 3 speaking at the same time. Used to be when Leo talked, others would be still but not the case these days. Maybe the age of the co-hosts meaning that generation is used to multiple conversations. That poor Ashley certainly has the “like disease”. Every other word was “like”. Another example is Rene Ritchie on MBW who is really bad about talking over the other guests. Used to think it was a technical glitch in their audio feed - not being able to hear each other. Either way - they talk faster than I can think.

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I used to watch the shows more than I do now, & I agree with Jbattman that at times, watching can make more sense out of the going’s on. Yet, in the past, I’ve also listened to MBW when bike riding, & didn’t seem to notice the same level of everyone talking at the same time as I do now. I think as I get older, my annoyance tolerance for stuff like this is diminishing.

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