By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

It’s Trash

San Francisco is in the midst of a $537,000 bake-off pilot program to determine which of six different models of new trash can will be rolled out across the municipality, or in local parlance, the tech is A/B testing in beta. While some have wondered why precisely San Francisco needs an extremely customized public trash can when clearly there must be some off-the-rack solution or one in use in literally any other city on Earth, nope, they’re doing a trash-off, with handy QR codes on the trash cans — which each cost upwards of $12,000, but would cost $2,000 to $3,000 as mass-produced units — to solicit resident feedback.

Joe Kukura, SFist

RRR

Tollywood film RRR, the Telugu-language action flick that was the most expensive film ever made in the language, has become a global sensation, combining wild action with dance and a buddy mystery drama that has been a hit the world over. The movie made north of $150 million worldwide on a record $72 million budget and has been burning up the Netflix charts, where it’s since enjoyed global distribution. It’s dubbed in Hindi and subtitled in 15 different languages, and has charted among the Netflix top 10 films in 62 different countries; I mean come on, who could have guessed that a movie about fighting British colonialism could possibly have global appeal in a whole lot of countries.

Jake Coyle, The Associated Press

AI, AI, Captain!

New technology designed to automate the piloting of commercial vessels on long-haul transoceanic cargo hauls found that AI tools have had some success in increasing the efficiency of shipping. HD Hyundai’s navigation tech was found to boost the fuel efficiency of the tanker Prism Courage by 7 percent and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent, which writ large that global shipping could have enormous benefits. Autonomous tech still is a long way off from completely replacing human captains, and it’ll most likely first be incorporated on survey vessels and ferries before larger commercial ships. After all, AI lags human captains when it comes to routine operations, like the idiosyncrasies of a given ship or area, identification of unexpected impediments like marine life, developing an attuned craving for vengeance against marine life, monomaniacally chasing down marine life that on previous voyages bit off appendages, fashioning crude prosthetic legs from a whalebone, fanatically risking crew and cargo in your quest to defeat the aforementioned marine life in a doomed man-versus-nature battle that speaks to mankind’s crude obsession with conquering the natural world at any cost, and being dragged down to the depths with the very quarry it seeks to kill. That said, if you type it at login the AI will call you “Ishmael.”

Rebecca Heilweil, Recode

Beyond

The next stage in the quest to produce artificial and plant-based meats is pepperoni, but it’s proven to be a boondoggle for many of the large players in the space. All told, vegan pepperoni units shipped to restaurants and retail food service were up 174 percent in the year ending April, meaning that demand is indeed up. Hormel sells one, as does Greenleaf, but Beyond Meat has sought to broker a number of partnerships with major chain restaurants to provide meatless pepperoni that have nevertheless presented problems. The margins are low in the space, which means little room for error, and a number of mishaps — including an explosion at the factory that produces cryogenically frozen pellets of fat that add to the texture of Beyond’s faux-pepperoni that paused production — has allegedly presented problems in getting conceived pepperoni products into mass production.

Deena Shanker and Leslie Patton, Bloomberg

Instagram

An analysis of 81 million Instagram posts found that the app’s algorithm has been choking off engagement for conventional photos posted on the platform as it endeavors to compete in the short-form video space against the likes of TikTok. In 2019, the average engagement rate for in-feed posts was 5.6 percent, which by the end of 2021 had collapsed 44 percent and is now at just 2.9 percent. The study traces this to the introduction of Reels, launched in August 2020 as a clone of the TikTok short videos that had been eating Instagram’s lunch, and then the reprioritization of the app around Reels at the expense of other posts on the platform.

Pesala Bandara, PetaPixel

USPS

The USPS has walked back a plan to butt up a massive amount of internal combustion engine vehicles, now saying that at least 50 percent of its initial $3 billion, 50,000-vehicle purchase will be battery electrics, up from just 20 percent initially. The USPS’s 212,000 vans comprise the largest civilian fleet of vehicles in the world and is a third of all vehicles owned by the federal government. The move comes amid criticism that the USPS was replacing its aging fleet with vehicles that would be more efficient as battery electrics.

David Iaconangelo, E&E News

Pets

Neopets got hacked, and over 69 million Neopets account holders may have been swept up in the data breach. The long-lived online digital pet breeding game is an internet institution, and the complete database and source code was thrown up online for four bitcoin (about $100,000); email addresses and passwords have been compromised as part of the hack. This is the latest in a series of tech problems for the game, for which the end of support for Adobe Flash in 2020 served as an existential crisis that was only overcome after a substantial transition to HTML-5.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Last week in the Sunday Edition I spoke to Russ Mitchell, who wrote “‘We are killing people’: How technology has made your car ‘a candy store of distraction’” for The Los Angeles Times. I loved this because distracted driving is so often understood just to be about phones, when in reality the distraction is increasingly built into the very vehicle itself. I dropped the paywall on this one, do check it out, and Mitchell can be found at The Los Angeles Times, on Twitter and at his website.

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