 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Mike Aikens, Norm Fasikas, and Chris Allen. Coming up on DTNS, Sony sets a date for the PSVR 2. Who wants it? Plus, Google's AI event unleashes new algorithms for translation, wildfires, and writing fiction. And you can finally look for that thing on Etsy. Just take a picture of it. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 2nd, Dia de los Muertos 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. Sir Elaine's off today, but we are not, and we have very fun tech news for you today. I just want to put that right there out front. This is not, this is not, you're not going to get angry. You might even, you might get a little like, I don't know, but you're not going to get angry about today's tech news. I've seen the lineup and I'm not irritated about any of it. Not one little bit. Let's start with the quick hits. Here's what'll make somebody happy. Tumblr updated its community guidelines to allow nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes when using the appropriate community label on posts. Very sex-positive. Visual depictions of sexually explicit acts, however, remain prohibited. The platform previously had banned all adult content back in 2018 when it was owned by Verizon, but it is now owned by Automatic, Matt Mullenweg's company. Can you hear them now? Facebook will end its practice of using humans to curate the Facebook news section and go back to relying on algorithms. Back to the robots. Facebook news is a section, or sorry, in a section in some markets will show notable local and international news. Most of it is already generated by algorithm, but the top story is selected. Selection has been selected by journalists at Axel Springer's Upday. The change will begin in early 2023. I think they're just moving away from news because nobody reads that part of Facebook. Over the coming weeks, Google will roll out new parental controls for Google Assistant, Google Home, and FamilyLink apps on both Android and iOS. That'll let parents add a kid's dictionary for age-appropriate answers to questions, kid-friendly voices with slower, more expressive responses. Seems patronizing, but all right. Disable Assistant features and services that they don't want the kids to be able to use, as well as establishing downtime hours, where it's like, Matt, you should be brushing your teeth and going to bed. Don't use Google Assistant. These will be available in Assistant settings for a child's account. Also, Google expanded its beta test of Google Play for Windows that started this past January. It's now available in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Adding to the places it was already available, which were Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, and Thailand. Very nice. DJI announced the Mavic 3 classic drone, which starts at $1599. That's $1,599. $450 less than the standard Mavic 3. So, you know, a little better price entry. It drops the original telephoto lens, but uses the same 20 megapixel 24 millimeter equivalent main camera. Its flight time safety features and transmission systems are otherwise the same, and it's available right this second. You say Mavic, I say Mavic. Let's just call the whole thing more money than I'll pay. Sure. It's cheaper, though, so that's good. With the phasing out of 3G service by U.S. mobile networks, Lexus vehicles have largely lost access, at least the ones that relied on 3G, to convenience and safety features as part of its Inform service as of October 31st. So, that's going to impact your Lexus vehicles that were made between 2010 and 2018. So, not even that long ago. Vehicles will lose things like remote locking, remote start, collision notification, virtual assistant, and stolen vehicle tracking. It does not impact navigation. Lexus said it didn't plan to retrofit vehicles with new radio, so you're not going to get LTE or 5G in there unless you pay for somehow doing it yourself. But Lexus will give pro-rated refunds to subscribers with active subscriptions. All right, let's talk about the dates for the PSVR 2. Me and the PSVR 2, we got a date. I have two of them. Sony announced its next-gen VR headset will go up for pre-order on November 15th, the Ides of November in markets including the US, UK, France, and Germany. Game pre-orders are going to open later in the month, so you'll be able to get the games and the headset at the same time when it ships in February. PSVR 2 costs $550 US, €600, £530, or $74,980, ships on February 22nd. So, you can order it November 15th. You're going to have to wait until after Valentine's Day to get it. If you want a charging station for the controllers, instead of just plugging them in by a wire, that's going to cost you a separate $50. Now, if you're vague on the details, Sony's previously announced because they have been kind of drip-feeding us for a while now on what the PSVR 2 was going to be all about. The headset has OLED screens, 110-degree field of view, up to 120 Hz refresh rate, and 4K HDR support. It has four outward-facing cameras and connects with just a single USB-C wire to your PS5. So, no more external camera or maze of cables. It is quite the setup with the previous unit. Also, those move controllers were garbage, and these new controllers seem pretty great. It is not backwards-compatible, though, with games from the original PSVR. It's got a lot of people, a little upset. But a few dozen games will be available at the ship date, including the much-ballehood Horizon Call of the Mountain, which a lot of people have had hands-on with at these events and really like it. Yeah, a lot of ballehood. I've noticed all that. I haven't had a chance to use the word ballehood in a long time, so that's why I used it. There's a few dozen games coming, so it's not like you won't be able to get games, but you will have to order new ones if you want this. So, it starts when you do the like, okay, who's this for? Well, if you want the cheapest VR headset, well, you're going to get the Quest, so it's not for you. If you want a powerful headset, maybe, but it's still going to require you to get a PS5. So, if you don't want to get a PS5, then you're out. If you're like, okay, I have a PS5, and I want a headset to play with that, and I've got all these games from my PSVR one that might dissuade you, because you're not going to be able to play those old games and you're just going to have to keep your PSVR original, so maybe you'll do that. It's really for somebody who doesn't play VR games or is looking forward to these improvements, and there are significant improvements over the original PSVR. It's a slice, Scott. It's a slice of people who are already in the PS5 or want to be in the PS5 universe and want to play improved virtual reality games. That's probably enough to make it worth being a product, but it's certainly not going to make Sony a leader in the space. Probably not. It would also follow that I think Sony is probably going to end up putting out or at least publishing or making available to third parties, publishing games that were previously on the previous gen or sold as new PS5 games. I hope they do something for previous owners. They can. They'd be tied to an account and they'd be able to say, oh, you've bought this before. So this new, up-res version that runs on the PS5, we're going to give you a $20 discount. That would be good. That would be good. None of this has been talked about, so who the heck knows, but I kind of hope they do that. I think that would go a long way to soothe the Savage Beast that is players who are annoyed by Sony's inability, it seems, to care much about backwards compatibility and sort of across the board, not just exclusive to PlayStation VR, it's exclusive to Sony in general. And I don't think this helps that. Even though I know from a technical standpoint, this is a generational leap in technology. This is a far superior headset with far superior controls and way better rendering system, faster refresh rate, inside-outside tracking, like all these cool features that this device includes, I think make it worth the price upgrade and also the sad news that it doesn't play your previous games. I just don't think that's good from the current sort of PR river Sony finds themselves in with having bad relationship with backwards compatibility. All of that being said, the one part people make sure to point out about this, this officially makes the device, the actual add-on device of a VR headset more expensive than the PlayStation 5 you're connecting it to. That's unusual and compared to the previous gen, it's also unusual. That thing debuted for less than the PlayStation 4 was at launch anyway. That may have tipped the scales later on during the lifecycle of the console. So that's a little, not weird, but a little bit like you need to know that going in. You're going to spend 12 to $1,500 potentially on this combination. If you've already got the PS5, then I guess you're ready. It's still hard to get PS5s. That may change around the holidays. I don't know. So I don't know. I find all this kind of interesting also that this isn't a holiday release is a little bit weird. Yeah. It must be a surprise. That's all I can figure. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see what happens. We want to get people to put a slip of paper in a wrapped box in December that says in February you're getting a PSVR for Christmas. There must be why they're taking the orders now is they think they can get a lot of orders, but they can't build them until February. I don't think we made it clear about Horizon Call of the Mountain. This is in the Horizon Zero Dawn series of games. It's a standalone VR game and they're giving you a voucher with this thing that will give you a code and download it and it's yours. So they are giving something away with this otherwise a little bit expensive expansion to your living room experience. Good point. Yeah. Well, check this out. Are we in the cusp of a visual search trend? I don't know. Google just added a lens button to the Google.com homepage in the search bar. This lets users upload an image to access visual matches, text, translate tools, all that sort of stuff. Google rarely changes at home page. So it's a big vote of confidence in the lens, but Google is not the only one. Yeah. Etsy. One of crafty things and fan art and more is testing visual search and it ain't bad. If you're in Etsy's iOS app, they say it's coming soon to Android, but it's in iOS right now. You can tap the camera icon in the search bar and either take a photo or upload one. And Etsy will use that to return a search of items with a similar look. Engadget's Igor Bonifacek pointed it at his keyboard and it gave him similar replacement keycaps in the right colors for his color scheme of his keyboard. I pointed it at a black mug I have that says good vibes only on it in yellow. And I didn't get the exact matchback, but I got a bunch of similar black mugs with yellow script writing on them that kind of fit the profile. If I was looking for, you know, something to match the style. I went in and I asked Eileen like, what's something you bought on Etsy? And she pointed to this BT 21 notepad. So I took a picture of it. It didn't show me that one again, but it did show me a lot of similar kinds of items on Etsy. So yeah, it's not going to help you find exactly the thing it doesn't feel like, but it's certainly good at like, oh, you want stuff like that. Here you go. Right. And it feels like magic a little bit when you get a good result. I scanned in this for audio listeners at home. You won't see this, but I'm holding up a tiny Christmas ornament that is basically a replica version of the joust arcade cabinet, little tiny video game arcade cabinet. And I thought, well, let's just take a front shot of that real quick with my phone and see how this Etsy app did. And it did really well. It didn't give me this. This isn't where I got it, of course, but it gave me a ton of arcade and retro suggestions and results. A lot of them were arcade cabinets, homemade stuff, stickers to put on your existing ones, replacement control stuff from 3D printers. Like that category was definitely resulted to me based on this original image, but it wasn't exactly like, oh, they've given me another version of joust. I can also hang on my tree. Like I didn't get the exact thing I was looking for, but maybe that's not what this is ever going to really be for. Maybe the point will be with visual search depends on how we all use it. But maybe the point will be to give me all the stuff around what I took a picture of, not necessarily the exact result of, hey, there's that thing again. I already own. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think the ultimate aim of like, I want to find this exact thing is there and people still want it. But I found this useful. I found this like, you know, I want this kind of thing. But I don't know how to describe it. It wasn't necessary if I've got this or I want to find something like this. I would like it, you know, if I'm looking for those red cups you used to find at Pizza Hut back in the day. You know, I want to be able to find a picture of that and upload it and find somebody selling a used version of those cups. But this is pretty useful. And it's a thing that I remember reporting on Google, even adding image search like back in the buzz out loud days, you know, 15 years ago. So it feels like it's a long time coming for this to finally start breaking the mainstream and going back to what you said about Google adding it to the homepage. That's that's a big vote of confidence that it's good enough. Yeah. And there's also this, I do have a question about a language of use thing and briefly explain this, but people are very used to pulling up there. Etsy app or any other app they search with and putting in the cursor, typing the thing and hitting go. And I wonder how many of them will even notice the little camera over there. It that may take some time for people to go, oh, there's this alternate way and it was and it was more convenient than me just typing in joust arcade cabinet. Maybe maybe this is the better way to search for things. I think that's a little bit of a hill to get over, but if they can do that with good UI and I don't know, encouraging messages on their sites and so on. Google Etsy and everybody else who may be trying this out might, you know, might be onto the way we do things. And if we, you know, we get down to the to these headsets, I'm predicting in the future of AR VR, you know, big enough to or small enough to look like glasses on your head. But, you know, Google glass your way through life. Then you're just looking at stuff. And yeah, the search results are happening. I want that. Well, folks, if what you want is less complicated, like our holiday card, time to get our list in order. Each year we send every patron who wants one a holiday gift card with exclusive art from Len Peralta. I think this year is his most beautiful yet. If you'd like the card, make sure you're a patron. Patreon.com slash DTS and check Patreon.com slash pledges to make sure we have your proper mailing address. Do that by November 15 and we will attempt to send you the exclusive DTS holiday card right here from us to you. Thank you. Lots of stuff announced at Google's AI at event. So let's break it down or at least talk about a few of these. Google's letting its imagine text to speech, image or excuse me, generator out into the public. I'm so excited about this. All right, I don't know why I'm just excited to get it from Google because I know they have a lot of data already. You'll be able to make two types of limited requests in Google's private AI test kitchen app. One call or one type rather called city dreamer. And this lets you ask image and to make a city around. Sorry. Excuse me, a city theme around you that you would choose. So that's pretty cool. Like a city of pie. All right. So think that way. Think weird. Tom, you want the city of pie? That's my example. I wrote that example. I had a feeling and it outputs isometric designs think SimCity. So, you know, three dimensional isometric SimCity style results, except in this case, pies. The other type of request is called a wobble, which sounds like a word will rip off, but it's not. Let you make a small monster out of material you choose and then tell it what to wear. They can then bounce around and you can poke it. So a little bit of, a little bit of good fun there, I suppose. So I don't know. Go ahead. Oh, the one that you have, what's the one that's just out there open source that anybody can use? Well, there's Dali mini, which is, oh, you mean the. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. I'm blanking on the one, but it's like open and people are like, that's irresponsible. You shouldn't just let everyone. And then the other end you have Google like, we'll let you do two really limited things that are not exactly useful. But at least they show you what we're capable of. Right. And I think that's stable diffusion. Thank you, John. There it is. Yeah. I'm, you know, I'm for, I don't know why I say this because I don't actually believe this. I want to run a really mess with this, but giving me only two is probably smart for now. Let, let us see what it's capable of. We don't need a thing flooding my feeds again about all the junk people like to make with these, with these AI generators just yet. Also, it's, it's, it's behind the AI test kitchen app, which you have to be approved to use. I'm not, I can't use this. So it's really them just collecting feedback. It's not meant to get you to do anything at this point. Yeah. It's interesting to see, to just follow this race though of trying to be the next thing we all make stupid stuff with. It's pretty exciting. Weebles wobble, but they're not AI. Next, Google's Lambda engine. That's, that's the one that the guy was like, I think it's sentient, but it's not. Google's Lambda engine is powering something called Wordcraft, not Warcraft. Wordcraft. It's a tool to help writers, but it goes beyond what stuff like Grammarly can already do. Wordcraft helps you punch up your writing style. For example, you can ask the tool to describe an object like I want to, I want some eggs and it'll like describe them like the white pearly eggs sat on the bench or whatever. It can, you can also do things like make the sentence funnier and it'll attempt to like, you know, turn it into a joke. It can suggest writing prompts like give me a story idea. Google tested it with 13 writers who all said they appreciated its help as a tool, but it didn't seem to be able to replace their work. Wordcraft's writing didn't stick to a consistent style. It played its safe using a lot of cliches, avoiding mean characters, probably because there's so many safeguards on it. It's not available for the general public anyway, but, but an interesting tool and I could see using this of like, not even if I'm kind of stuck, but just sort of like, all right, I don't want to do the work to describe this thing. Describe it for me, you know, or, or punch it up and then I'll probably tweak it, but give me an idea of how to make this funnier. I like this. Yeah, it's not bad. I had an author tell me a couple of days ago because there's other competing things that tried to do this. They're not as high profile as Google, but he was trying to convince me that there may be a future for authors working with AI as partners. And the way he described it was you do a very brief kind of outline of your book, your characters, your overarching story, the world it's set in the year, whatever, whatever these bits of information you can feed it. And then it pushes out essentially a rough draft, very rough, but all the pieces and parts and it kind of does it in the acts you need them to be in and all of that. And then your job as an author is to say, all right, I've got my skeleton. I'm going to go put some flesh on this thing. That's a really interesting concept. And I think our authors already do this themselves, right? They do their own quote unquote sketch, but it reminds me of art and also artists who are talking about doing this with AI as well, visual artists. You get the sketch out and then you go beef it up. And I don't know that I'm as back and forth as I am on this AI assisted stuff. I think I'm kind of for the idea that the AI helped me get there, but I did the big meaty part of it. Yeah, I agree. To me, it's just a supercharged version of the spell check, right? It's like it's suggesting things that I could take or not. And if they're good suggestions, that'll help me along my way. My writing process is generally I come up with an idea, sketch it out. And then during November right now during National Novel Writing Month, I do the AI part. I do the like, let me just push out a rough draft that's super rough. And then after that is when I go and I do all the polishing. So essentially this replaces nano-rimo. It says instead of forcing yourself to write the 50,000 words, have the machine do it. And then you get to do the fun parts, which are coming up with the idea and polishing it up and making the idea perfect. Yeah. And then there's the, you know, I still have questions about a possible future where the AI gets so good at this that it can write an entire Stephen King length novel based on you giving it five or six prompts of things you like. And now you've got a finished, readable, well-written book. That may be the future. Yeah. Far-flung maybe. Or even I don't know. Five years. I don't know. Then human written novels become a thing that people sell like, like handcrafted chairs. Sure. You know, like we all, we all buy machine made furniture all the time, but then a handcrafted chair costs a little more because it was made by you. See, I like that. I like that. I hope that that value remains right where he said. So Google also announced a large language model trained on more than 400 spoken languages with a goal of eventually including a thousand languages. That is a lot of languages. The model can generate language and translate. One of the advantages of using such a large model is it can do something called zero shot learning where it knows enough about similar languages to translate a new one, which is pretty crazy. Google said it's already begun integrating the model into search and plans to use it for Google translate and YouTube captions, which I think is a perfect place for that. Yeah, this is going to really be good for helping underserved languages. Google also demonstrated a project called code as policies or CAP to let robots write their own code. It's not as bad. It's not as bad. It's not as wild as it sound. It uses language models and a few shot prompting to write the code, letting a robot perform a variety of complex tasks without having to be specifically trained for those tasks. But it can't program just anything. It's not general purpose. It's not creative. The system is limited by which third party libraries and APIs it has access to. Google released the open source code on GitHub, though, if you want to try it out. Yeah, go check it out. Finally, Google said it's bringing its wildlife detection, wildlife wildfire detection system to the US, Canada, Mexico and parts of Australia. Might be some wildlife in there. I don't know. Machine learning models are trained to predict where fires will spread to help first responders take measures to control that fire. Google has a similar flood forecasting system to the announced back in 2018. That's also being expanded. I really like that initiative. I think that's cool. Yeah, it's very helpful for places where Scott and I live. That's right. We get a little burning sometimes. Absolutely. All right. CNET's Bridget Carey recently reviewed something called Hollow Ride. It's a VR platform for playing games in a moving car. I know we should probably have a trigger warning on this for those who get motion sick. But Carey tested a version running on an HTC Vive flow and said she didn't throw up once. She played a game called Cloud Breaker where you fly around shooting enemy spaceships. And what Hollow Ride does is it connects by Bluetooth to the car to get real-time data on acceleration, braking, steering and location. It can match the landscape in the game to your location too. So like a building, your driving pass could be a mountain in the game, stuff like that. Of course, it matches the motion. So when the car turns, your ship turns. Carey said she gets motion sick in cars because the motions match the game, though, she didn't get motion sick while playing Cloud Breaker. As long as she looks straight ahead. She said it got a little thicky if she was looking right or left. She also demoed watching Netflix with a screen that stood stable and that definitely made her queasy. Hollow Ride includes the HTC Vive headset, a controller and a one-year subscription to the Hollow Ride platform for games. It only works with Audi cars for now. They want to expand that, though. If you're in Germany, you can buy it right now. Go and order it for 699 euros and they plan to bring it to the U.S. next year for 699 dollars. Hollow Ride also told Carey more news would be announced at CES in January. So we might get details on that. I'd be really curious about what other experiences they might offer with that thing. It just seems like such a very limited use case. Not that there aren't a lot of people with this that would benefit them, but it just seems like how are you going to build a library of games that aren't necessarily mainstream? They only work in this situation? I have a lot of questions about it, but it's a fascinating application of VR for sure. Yeah, it's a game design challenge. They say they've got a bunch of games that are on this platform. Carey just reported on the Cloudbreaker one, but I'm curious about that as well. Little gimmicky, you know? But kind of interesting, kind of fun. There's a lot of technology for rides as well. So there's some some amusement parks that use it. I think it was Universal City Walk uses it right over here in Burbank. So cool. Interesting stuff. I try it. My wife gets very ill inside of these headsets. Anything would be better for her. So we'd look at it. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Bodie from the kilowatt podcast. Hi, Bodie wrote in and said, dearest to DTNS, I enjoyed the segment on electric vehicles with Tim saying, hey, I have some things to add. It is very much okay. It's welcome. Thank you, Bodie. Tim mentioned an FDNY captain saying that if there's an emergency involving an EV, firefighters often don't know where to cut when performing an extrication to avoid the high-voltage lines. Most auto manufacturers have emergency response guides for their EVs. These guides give firefighters direction on how to mitigate an emergency involving the vehicle. For example, how to disable the high-voltage lines. The FDNY captain also offers a free ebook, which is essentially a collection of the auto manufacturer's emergency response guides. Another thing to mention is that these guides feature alternative fuel vehicles which include compressed natural gas, hydrogen, EV, ethanol, propane and more. The NFPA website features emergency response guides for more than 35 auto manufacturers who produce alternative fuel vehicles. Bodie says over the last six years I've developed and taught several classes on this subject, so I have much more to add. But I want to keep the email short. If you'd like additional information, let me know. We're going to have to get Bodie on the show and talk about this. This is really cool. No, you should totally have him as a guest. I think this does fascinating fact and tell this email. I didn't know. Think about it. Of course, these EVs have a different everything. So if you don't want to hit high-voltage lines while trying to save somebody's life, how do you know what to do? Is there a disparity between manufacturers that need to really study up on this? And is that a whole new mess for emergency responders here on an Audi, but cut there on a Tesla? Yeah, that's fascinating. Like what standards are there? He should come on and I'd make it Wednesday. Roger, make a note. Let's get Bodie on a Wednesday. All right. Tim said yesterday during the extended show we were talking about streaming sports and Rich talked about moving to YouTube TV and how that meant he wouldn't be able to watch Cleveland Guardians baseball games when they come back next spring, so he'd have to find another solution then. Tim to the rescue. Tim wrote Bali Sports launched at the end of September a new streaming product which lets you get your local market games without needing cable or direct TV, direct TV stream, anything like that. You can pay monthly or yearly and it works on all streaming devices. Currently this is for NHL and NBA games only. However, they plan on providing Major League Baseball next season. If you check their fact, they've already negotiated rights for a few teams and hope to have all the rights secured by the start of the 2023 season. Sadly, that will not work for me because I have spectrum. The Dodgers are on spectrum, but it'll work for Rich, so thank you, Tim. Appreciate that. That's awesome. Rich, I know Rich needs his Cleveland Guardians fix, so you did it. Congratulations, Tim. Well done, Tim. And well done, Scott Johnson. Thank you for being on the show. What do you got going on these days? Well, as usual, lots of content, but if you want to zero in on something that's a lot of fun right now, we just finished a whole month of what we call Sacktober on the podcast Film Sack which we have been running since October of 2009 and still going strong. We did, we do all Halloween movies in that month, so it's a great time to kind of catch up on maybe a few episodes and decide whether this shows for you or if you want to sit down and watch 1994's True Lies, which is a shock we haven't done this yet. So yeah, get your Schwarzenegger on this weekend on Film Sack. Film Sack.com for details or Film Sack wherever you get your shows. 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