The Metaverse is on Life Support

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You thought there was a lot of AI headlines before?

You were wrong. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has launched API support for ChatGPT among other services. If you're not familiar, an API is a way for companies to let developers and other companies make use of their technology. In essence, this is basically saying "other people can much more easily embed ChatGPT into their apps now."

So if you thought we were seeing a lot of companies shoehorning AI chatbots into their product before, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Who had multiple train disasters in Q12023 on their bingo card?

A horrifying, disastrous train collision in Greece has left nearly 50 people dead and more injured. A passenger train collided with a freight train on the same track. The station manager involved in the collision has been arrested and emergencies teams are working day and night to sort through the wreckage.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Ohio train disaster, another train carrying hazardous material has derailed in Florida. Among the cars on the train were tankers carrying propane. Thankfully there have been no injuries and no spillage has been reported. Leeeeeeeeeeet's hope it says that way.

TikTok trying to save face while the US government does some dumb shit with it

It is no secret that the US government really loves to dunk on TikTok. Between being bought by major tech firms and loving to rag on anything China-related, boosted further by the fact that older people don't tend to care about or even like TikTok, it's a slam dunk topic for politicians.

The US house (currently owned by Republicans) is moving forward with a bill that would give a sitting president the ability to ban TikTok. It's not explicitly worded that way, but they're not being shy about the intent of the bill. I should say that this is likely not going anywhere. I strongly maintain that this is all about pretending to be strong against China. Actually banning TikTok would be political suicide.

Meanwhile, in an effort to seem like they care at all about mental health of teens (they don't), TikTok is adding a thing where teens under 18 will have a 60 minute limit on their usage of the app. Notably, this can be turned off.

The MeTaVeRsE is not lookin' great right now

Probably won't be surprising to hear that the metaverse is not doing super great right now. Meta (Facebook) is really the only company who is still trying to make it happen, and has now become so famous for just buying up VR companies that they've recently had lawsuits brought against them over it.

But even they are looking iffy. Meta has slashed a handful of ongoing headset projects and will be slowing down in general. It seems that their recent Quest Pro headset absolutely flopped, and now they're talking about AD SUPPORTED AUGMENTED REALITY which is just a nightmarish concept.

More Stuff

• The USPS is beefing up their EV fleet
• This year's Iditarod has the smallest starting group ever
• Lori Lightfoot will not be re-elected as Chicago's mayor
• Twitter had another major outage

Programming Note

Hello dear reader!

Starting next week, Stuff Keeps Happening will be moving from Mon-Fri to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule.

I am not thrilled to be reducing the schedule, but I do need to acknowledge that I need to reclaim a bit of time from my schedule to get some breathing room for other projects, as well as to keep SKH sustainable in my current workload. I'm not going anywhere! I love making SKH, I just think reducing the schedule a bit will give me more room to make more varied, better content overall.

Additionally, I will be ramping up more "Extras" content for paid supporters which dearly helps to make all of this possible!

So see you tomorrow and then again on Monday!