Hello, weekend readers.
This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.Last week, I talked about how Alexa wasnt forgetting what you requested because that data was more valuable than one might think.Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesThe big storyIn thinking about what to highlight in this weeks newsletter, I was tempted to talk about Zoom and Apple and Superhuman and the idea that secure communications can get screwed up when consent is bypassed, and Im sure thats something Ill dig into down the road, but what intrigued me most this week was a single factoid from Googles self-driving unit.Waymos CTO told TechCrunch this week that the company has logged 10 billion miles of autonomous driving in simulation.
That means that while you might have seen a physical Waymo vehicle driving past you, the real ground work has been laid in digital spaces that are governed by the laws of game engines.The idea of simulation-training is hardly new; its how were building plenty of computer vision-navigated machines right now hell, plenty of self-driving projects have been built leveraging systems like the traffic patterns in games like Grand Theft Auto.
These billions of logged miles are just another type of training data, but theyre also a pretty clear presentation of where self-supervised learning systems could theoretically move, creating the boundaries for a model while letting the system adjust its own rules of operation.I think what makes it a good simulator, and what makes it powerful is two things, Waymos CTO Dmitri Dolgov told us.
One [is] fidelity.
And by fidelity, I mean, not how good it looks.
Its how well it behaves, and how representative it is of what you will encounter in the real world.
And then second is scale.Robotics and AV efforts are going to rely more and more on learning the rules of how the laws of the universe operate, but those advances are going to be accompanied by other startups desires to build more high visual fidelity understanding of the worldThere are plenty of pressures to create copies of Earth.
Apple is building more detailed maps with sensor-laden vehicles, AR startups are actively 3D-mapping cities using crowd-sourced data and game engine companies like Unity and Epic Games are building engines that replicate natures laws in digital spaces.This is all to say that were racing to recreate our spatial world digitally, but we might just be scratching the surface of the relationship between AI and 3D worlds.Send me feedbackon Twitter@lucasmtnyor emaillucas@techcrunch.comOn to the rest of the weeks news.(Photo: by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Trends of the weekHere are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.Trump must unblock his Twitter criticsTwitter is a consumer product, so politicians using it might feel like its their own personal account, but when they use it for political announcements it becomes an official communications channel, and using features like blocking stifles national free speech.
So says an NY-based appeals court this week of President Trumps habit of blocking critics.
Its undoubtedly a ruling thats going to have far-reaching implications for U.S.
political figures that use social media.
Read more here.Nintendo switches up the SwitchThe Nintendo Switch arrived on the scene with the bizarre notoriety of being a handheld system that was also a home console, but its not enough for the Japanese game company to capture the hybrid market, its looking to revisit the success it had back in the peak Nintendo DS days.
The company announced the Switch Lite this week, which strips away a number of features for the sake of making a smaller, simpler version of the Nintendo Switch that is handheld-only and sports a longer battery life.
Read more here.Google and Amazon bury the home-streaming hatchetAt long last, one of the stranger passive aggressive fights in the smart home has come to a close.
Amazons Prime Video is finally available on Googles Chromecast and YouTube is now on Fire TV after a years-long turf war between the two platforms.
Read more here.AT-T maxes out its HBO ambitionsWhen AT-T bought HBO, via its Time Warner acquisition, execs made clear that they had acquired a premium product and planned to shift its standing in the market.
The company announced this week that it will be launching a new service called HBO Max next year that will bring in new content, including Friends.
Read more here.GAFA GaffesHow did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:Apple nips a security nightmare in the bud:[Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to vulnerability]Amazon warehouse workers plan strike:[Amazon warehouse workers in Minnesota plan to strike on Prime Day over labor practices]Extra CrunchOur premium subscription service had another great week of deep dives.
My colleague Zack Whittaker revisited the WannaCry ransomware that hit in 2017 with a lengthy profile and interviews with the researchers that stopped the malware dead in its tracks.
After you dig into that profile, you can check out his Extra Crunch piece that digs further into how security execs and startups can learn from the saga.There is a good chance that your networks are infected with WannaCry even if your systems havent yet been encrypted.
Hankins told TechCrunch that there were 60 million attempted detonations of the WannaCry ransomware in June alone.
So long as theres a connection between the infected device and the kill switch domain, affected computers will not be encrypted.Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers.
This week, we talked a bit about the future of car ownership and innovation banking.Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign uphere.