 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Michelle Serju, Miss Music Teacher James C. Smith and our brand new patrons helping us further our goals. David, Dr. X 17, Simon and Rye guy on this episode of DTNS. Instagram wants to replace Twitter with threads. How are we all dealing with the unprecedented competition in what you would call micro blogging or Twitter replacements? Plus, you can use AI and still win a Grammy and TikTok heralds the end of the era of user control. We must decide nothing anymore. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, Cinco de Julio 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from a scarlet letter studio. I'm Sarah. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. How in Nathaniel Hawthorne of you know, I just keep trying to get creative here. If anyone has studio ideas, I would welcome them because I'm running out. Yes, keep those studio ideas coming, everyone. Discord feedback and Daily Tech News show dot com. But while you figure that out, we shall start with the quick hits. One plus announced its midrange successor to the 2T, the 6.7 inch Nord 3 foam. It has a 120 Hertz refresh rate for smooth motion. The screen resolution bumps up from 1080p to 270, 72 by 1240. It can fast charge wirelessly to 60 percent in just 15 minutes. And it has the same camera as the higher end one plus 11. All of that in at least three years of major OS updates and four years of security fixes. You can order it now, starting at four hundred forty nine euros in 16 EU countries, shipping July 12th. A more affordable Nord CE3 will come to India in August. But neither is coming to the U.S. or UK because of logistical challenges with custom. The old customs thing. OK, it sounds like there's something else to that. Last week, OpenAI introduced a browse with Bing feature if you are a subscriber to chat GPT, or even if you're not. This let the chatbot search Bing for answers to questions that extended beyond the training data of its underlying GPT for model, which goes up until September 2021. However, on July 3rd, OpenAI disabled browse with Bing because it discovered instances where chat GPT was pulling in the full text of an article, even if it was behind a paywall. So basically people who were using browse with Bing were able to get around paywalls by asking chat GPT to browse with Bing to paywalled articles. People figured that out, started doing it. Of course, they did. Well, Judge Terry A. Dowdy, you might be familiar with the judge. You might not issued an injunction barring some officials in the White House, CISA, the FBI and Homeland Security from contacting social media companies about moderating content protected under the First Amendment. The stems from a lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri against President Biden, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the Department of Homeland Security, a legend alleging a legend, I suppose, that since 2017, government officials began planning for a systemic and systematic campaign to control speech on social media. The judge also issued the injunction saying that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their case. This injunction includes exemptions for national security threats, public safety and other malicious activity. Now, you might say, Justin Robert down would be a great person to unpack the story a little bit more, and we are going to talk about that with him because he'll be on the show with us tomorrow. Fantastic. The port of Nagoya is Japan's busiest port. It accounts for about 10 percent of the country's total trade volume. You may say, cool fact, Tom, why are you telling me this? Well, Nagoya's administrative authority issued a notice that a ransomware attack on July 4th impacted its unified terminal system, canceling loading and unloading operations from ship containers onto trailers. So basically shutting down the port. Authorities say they plan to restore the systems and resume operations by the morning of July 6th, which for a lot of you is already happening, depending on when you're listening to this. But that's a day lost at a busy port like that is a lot. Well, Fairphone and Marina are bringing the Fairphone 4 to the U.S. after debuting in other markets in September of 2021. It's been a while. These phones will run Marina's privacy-focused Android-based E-slash-OS EOS, which uses Marina Cloud Apps by default rather than Google services. The Marina Fairphone 4 is available now, starting at $599 and comes with an extended five-year warranty and five years of security and feature updates as well. Seems fair to me. I like it. And it's a phone. All right. Let's talk about who gets a Grammy. It's not going to be me, not anytime soon anyway, but you know, never say never. But last month, the Recording Academy announced it had some changes, kind of just modernizing changes to who is going to receive Grammy Awards going forward. The one that got a lot of attention, though, was a new rule that only human creators could win, saying that a work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any category. Now, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. talked to the Associated Press and clarified what they meant by that was music including AI-created elements remains eligible for awards, but portions of a work that's generated by AI can't be considered. Mason Jr. said, what's not going to happen is we're not going to give a Grammy or Grammy nomination to the AI portion. Okay. So if you're still unclear, here's an example. A track with AI voice modeling performing a vocal could still be eligible in the songwriting category, just not the performance. The AI did the performance and didn't write the song. So they're not going to give a Grammy to the performance because the AI did it, but they could still get a Grammy for the songwriting. Conversely, if a song was sung by an actual human in the studio and they did all the performing, but an AI wrote lyrics or the track, then the song would not be eligible in the composition or songwriting category. That's direct out of Mason Jr.'s mouth there, that last part. There are going to be questions about where that line draws if it's like, well, part of it was written by an AI, most of it was written by me. In fact, Mason said, as long as the human is contributing in a more than day minimus amount, which to us means a meaningful way, they are, will and always will be considered for a nomination or win. That distinction is still not real cut and dry. Is it, Sarah? Are we in trouble here? Well, this reminded me very much. And the AP also notes Paul McCartney recently saying, we used AI to extract John Lennon lyrics from something that John Lennon himself had recorded in the past, but needed to be cleaned up quite a bit in order to release some future tracks that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. And we didn't think we're really ready for primetime otherwise. Now that's AI. And when asked about it, Mason Jr. said, well, I'm not really sure. I don't know enough about this particular, you know, the particular way that the AI was used here to know if this would be something that is eligible or ineligible for a Grammy nomination and or win. He's waiting to hear the track. He wants to know like, what was actually done and let me hear it first, right? Exactly. Because if it's really just sort of like, oh, remember it used to be so scratchy and now it's just clearer. Yeah. Then you go, yeah, I mean, it's him, right? It's the artist. It's a human. If there's more to it, and we really don't know the answer to that, then there is more to it. Now, I don't, I don't think that the, you know, folks putting on the Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy are wrong here. But I think they're, they are waiting into treacherous waters where something that is a mechanism, such as a human holding a mic. Something that is considered a meaningful amount of contribution rather than, you know, a negligible amount of contribution, whether it is a human or an AI is going to, it's going to need to be unpacked. And I'm not sure that they're ready to do that before next January or next February rather when the next Grammy Awards are going to be, you know, handing out awards to people. Well, when would they be ready? I mean, the water is around them, right? Like they, they're in the water. They didn't wait into it. The water came to them. People, people are using these tools. I look at this and I feel like you're not wrong that it's going to be dicey to be able to decide, okay, why is that considered meaningful? And that's not. But this is the best I can think they could do to say like just because you use AI, we're not going to disqualify your song. I think that would be going too far. That would be the only way to make sure you never gave something to AI. But I think that would be overdoing it. So saying, we'll know it when we see it. It's brand new. We need to get used to it. We could create more distinct guidelines as we learn and go along. That feels reasonable to me. It does. And at the same time, I just feel like, and listen, I don't work in the music industry, you know, in any capacity that anybody would ever give me a Grammy. But, you know, there's so many tools that humans use to make humans work better. And I know that AI, in this particular instance, they're talking about something different. It's was that a human or was that a robot? But for so many years now, we have been talking about, you know, sampling other tracks and, you know, using software to make humans be able to, you know, sound like they play the drums better than they play. So I don't know exactly where we're going here. I think these are good questions to be asking. I just, I expect a little backlash, if not a lot. Yeah, well, because humans are involved, there will be backlash. It's pretty fair to say. I do think that there will be situations like you're saying where someone will be upset about the ruling. But that's true now. When they decide how to portion credit, like, did someone sample something? And should that sample be now counted as writing or is it just a sample? And it's only part of the production. Right. Is it copyright infringement? Yeah. Or is it, you know? Well, we're not dealing with copyright with Grammy Awards, but sure, it's similar to that, right? It's like, how do you apportion that? So I think these lines aren't new. And as Johander was saying in our chat, the whole business about awarding an award to a song for being the best is subjective to begin with. So I feel like you're not going to, you're not going to avoid that no matter what you do. All right, let's talk about microblogging. That's something much easier to solve, right? What's that, Tom? Threads is the name of a Twitter-like service coming from Meta's Instagram. It'll be a separate platform, but linked to your Instagram ID. It has a pre-listing already on Apple's App Store. You may have heard it briefly showed up in the Google Play Store and on the web at Threads.net. But the official launch day is Thursday, July 6th. Unless you're in the EU. Meta is dealing with so many allegations of privacy violations there that it's probably just holding off until it's sure how that all plays out. So it's not going to launch threads in the EU. It doesn't have anything in China, but everywhere else is going to get threads. Also, Threads intends to support Activity Pub. That's the protocol that Mastodon uses. So the idea would be you'd be able to follow people from threads on your Mastodon instance, and people on Threads would be able to follow you from threads, except that's not going to be available at launch. Instagram head Adam Massari said, given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, we're not doing that, but it's coming. Yeah. So all right, we're, you know, as of this recording, a day ahead of Threads being launched in many places that you might live. But this also comes following chaotic weekend, another one of that where it stopped users from getting any posts unless logged into Twitter. The company also limited to how many posts that people could see in a day, even when logged in depending on whether you were verified or unverified or newly unverified. There were all sorts of, you know, parameters there. That caught the attention of the large part of its user base that hasn't followed, you know, the Elon Musk drama acquisition of the company. It just said, this isn't working for us anymore. What else do I have? Well, Facebook cultures have flocked to other platforms. Now you might say, yeah, I like Mastodon or maybe Blue Sky or T2 or, you know, some of your other options. BTS army though, started heading to Weverse. Japan illustrators went to Waibo and lots of folks have showed up on, like I said, Mastodon, Blue Sky, or Spill or Post. There are yet more. I can currently see posts without being logged in on Twitter. So things seem to be shaping up. You know, at last look on my Twitter macOS app, things looked pretty good, even though they were very booked over the weekend. Rate limiting seems to have been adjusted. So most people don't have to run into it anymore. But the momentum is building once again to perhaps use something other than Twitter or at least know what your options are. Let's talk about what we're all doing in response. Sure, using almost everything. I'm not on T2. I've applied to be on Spill, haven't been invited yet. I am on Post, but I always forget about it. But otherwise Mastodon, I've got two instances that I have accounts on, Blue Sky, I'm in, Substack Notes, I use that. And of course, Twitter itself. So I just end up using all of them right now. Well, I guess not. I guess I just admit it. I don't use all of them. I've got four of them that I pay attention to. And I could probably shift that if the winds shift a little bit and everybody starts going to one or the other. But it does feel like using Blue Sky, Twitter, Mastodon and Substack. I'm seeing most of the people I'm used to seeing across those four. I'm noticing, and I'm kind of in the same camp as you, Tom. I'm sort of checking in to everything right now just because I want to see what sticks and what's better. And maybe where, I don't know, we're reinventing the wheel a little bit. That is not sustainable for me. And I work in tech news journalism. So I can't imagine that many people will be doing what we're doing even if they are out of curiosity right now. You're going to have the place where you kind of go and maybe another place that you check out. What I have the biggest problem with, and I hope, and I think it's temporary, is that so much of what's happening outside of Twitter is about, well, here's why Twitter sucks. So here's why this is going to be the better place. Here's why this is news that you're going to hear here instead of at Twitter. So there's still this kind of owning thing happening where there are these networks that have decent traction pickup, going from nothing to something. I mean, that's traction, right? It's a place to start. And Twitter has not failed yet, and that's not even what we're talking about at this point. I just want the conversation to become something where, if I go to T2, for example, it's not about how T2 is better than Twitter for these sedians. It's about the conversation itself, and that becomes a little bit more, the platform is in the background. I think every platform suffers from that at the beginning. I noticed that about Blue Sky the first time I got invited in, but it seems to have waned there. Mastodon certainly isn't just talking about that anymore. So I think that's part of the cycle. And also having too many choices is part of the cycle. This is good. This is what competition looks for. And then finally, it will shake out into like two or maybe back to just one and we'll all complain that we don't have enough choices. But for now, that's the way the pendulum swings, right? Yeah. All right, folks, if you've got a thought about this, if you're like, you both are crazy, let me tell you what's really going on. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is the email address. You can also send emails that say we're brilliant. Either way, feedback at Daily Tech News Show. Vox.com Sarah Morrison has a write-up today that will resonate with at least some of us. She says, I've aged out of the intended and desired audience for popular new apps. I'm going to pause her quote and say, welcome, Sarah. It's about time you made it. Back to what Sarah wrote. They're no longer made with me in mind and there's a steeper learning curve that I'm less willing to overcome. Apps used to be intuitive to me and gave me the experience I wanted but TikTok does not. Okay, so clearly Sarah could be talking about a lot of apps but she is mostly focusing on TikTok, pointing out that TikTok's for you page is quote, a controlled experience that's optimized to know or decide what we want and then deliver it to us. Now, TikTok originally spiked in popularity with younger internet people. We've been talking about that for some time but now people of all ages are using TikTok for content creation or content consumption or just looking up breaking news using it almost like internet search. Now, Morrison notes that everything that used to be the key for search driven results is different on TikTok and that might be why the older folk in particular have a little bit harder time wrapping their heads around it. Thumbnails offered in a search don't have titles or dates or descriptions. These are all things people of a certain age used to use as data and if you're talking about me, still do to find that thing that you're looking for, that specific thing, if you're looking for something specific. Morrison spoke to several people for the story including Aya Karpakisha, person in school design professor who teaches about the history of interface who likened TikTok to the pre-on-demand days of TV where, I don't know, maybe you were getting a Sunday night movie, you knew it was going to be there, 8 p.m., you were ready, but you didn't have a voice in what was actually going to be played. It just got served to you and you liked it or you didn't like it. TikTok is kind of like that but on a bigger and more global scale. Yeah, it's nice to see the millennials starting to catch up with Gen X in the six periods because I first had it with Snapchat where I got Snapchat and I did not understand it. When I said I didn't understand it, I didn't understand why people were using it or how they were using it, but also how to use it. I was so ingrained in like, well, but you need a hamburger menu and then you need links and like, where do you tap? It took me a while to get used to it and that was the first app that felt that way to me where I didn't immediately get it and since then I've adapted to understand that I'm old and I won't immediately get stuff so I have to work a little harder to figure out how it works but once you get over that hump then you can start enjoying things and start to figure out if they're still for you or not. I will add that it's a very interesting experience because as you guys both alluded to like it is very interesting. Younger demographic easily grasped onto it. My kids take to it like fish to water but I think at least not just our demographic but the group of people that've been raised on the internet since the 2000s everything was about choice about what you wanted about what you wanted to find and now you're kind of turning that kind of entire paradigm where we'll just cycle through things and if you like something you swipe on it if you don't you swipe on to the next thing and it's a jarring but it's also, initially very frustrating because there were very specific things I wanted to see, very specific. That's an old way of looking at it though. It is but in a way I liken it to kind of build on Aya's reference of old pre-demand TV. It reminds me when I first got cable TV and I spent literally the evening flipping channel surfing like I was flipping channels every five minutes and I had 100 plus channels. And now you've got a million plus channels and they're tailored to you unlike cable television. There's something about this though and I've found this this is not a TikTok only experience to me Instagram reels and basically the Instagram clone of TikTok is the same. I have these extremely creative people that I follow on both of those platforms and you know, well not everybody knows but if you're working any kind of video production you look at that and you go that took them a while and that's why I like it and it's cool, got it. Maybe there's a dog involved so Sarah wants to see more of this but there is something about the algorithm being too smart about what I want because I want something weird in there you know, like stop knowing me this well like you're right you do know what I like and then it's kind of like Roger and my pre-days of Before Cable where you're just like, I'll just watch this thing because I don't have any other options there's something about it that it bothers me to the point that I start to you know, TikTok is very addictive it's like eating ice cream and so I don't go there very much anymore because I'm like, you're just too smart and you don't throw me enough curveballs I liken that to the mom effect where your mom at a certain point when your child starts just handing you food that she knows you'll like but after a while it's like, well yeah you kind of get frustrated I wouldn't say resentful but you get like well you don't know me completely and chovies on my pizza or you don't like, I don't know I would argue that the algorithm is failing if you feel that way maybe it's like, it's not perfect because if it knew you well enough Sarah it wouldn't surprise you and give you weird things exactly so I think you found a gap in how good these can be maybe for me, yeah they're still really good for a lot of people and the point that Sarah Morrison is making the Sarah without an H from Vox is that that's different because all Sarah Morrison's life and I think all of our lives too the internet was about choice the internet was you can go anywhere you can do anything, you decide what you get and people are experiencing decision fatigue so they don't want to think about using things, there's too many choices they want someone to just give them something they enjoy they're tired of picking the food Roger, they just want mom to hand them something they know they will like and that's where TikTok comes in and maybe that really is like a delineator of age where I'm like I still like the thrill of the hunt I'm going to find that video and I'm going to figure out how to do it on the internet I don't think much is saying don't make me think but it's not don't make me think I'm lazy it's I've had to think too much and there's a limit to how much we can think and sometimes you just need a break yes and uh yeah yeah I will say I would argue it's less about an age demographic than just people who've experienced too much of one thing you now have the pendulum has shifted over to something else um well uh you might want to shift over to major league baseball this weekend the MLB is unveiling a new virtual ballpark to the public on Saturday for its annual celebrity softball game this is something that you know you get celebrities you get you know a certain amount of people watching it the MLB says that fans will now be able to interact with each other some avatars the park will include minigames the ballpark as you see it which is a web view has a giant screen where games and other content will be live streamed not totally clear what other content would be live streamed but it would be part of the experience it was created by a VR company called improbable based in the UK which previously had been working on a military metaverse but apparently scrapped that for more commercial ideas such as this one improbable says it'll be an ultimate lag free experience again web based experience so some obvious questions might be ok well why would a VR company be doing something that doesn't sound like VR at all but maybe this is the first step to see who's interested it is VR it's just not in a VR headset it's just on 3D at this point that's smart because you don't want to limit your audience you want to show the audience what they could get if they did have a VR headset so I understand this this is major league baseball saying look that vision pros coming out next year nobody has that yet and some people have quests but not enough but let's show people what we can do let's take this for a trial run and let's make it so that the largest number of people can view it you can go to second life in your browser too that doesn't make it not VR it's just a it's just not the optimal way to experience VR right so I think this is them like you say dip in a toe and we would I expect there will be more from major league baseball which has a relationship with Apple on the vision pro at all-star game 2024 yeah you know this is one of these things that I'd say might be a throw away but I'll check it out and there might be more to it yeah there might be more to it you know and that goes for lots of other sports too do it on the softball game that they do at the all-star game that was always fun because you get some former major league players and you get some TV stars and movie stars you can wander down on the field with this virtual thing that's a good time alright let's check out the mail bag alright Marty wrote in about our discussion with Trisha Hurchberger on Monday's show talking about competing gaming resolutions we don't know if AMD's marketing partnerships are preventing games from supporting DLSS and Marty explains why even the idea of such a thing is worrisome to him he says in my opinion experience FSR or Fidelity FX Super Resolution is worse than DLSS and that's my concern DLSS does as advertised boosting frames per second by a 30 to 60 frames per second and depending on your upscale setting makes things a big grainier or a lot grainier on the ultra performance setting but whenever I've used FSR it usually worsens performance by about 10 frames per second at the cost of making everything mostly backgrounds looks pixelated to the point of not being able to tell what I'm even looking at maybe just bad implementation or it doesn't work well on Nvidia GPUs but that seems like the opposite of what it's supposed to do yeah I fully expect to hear from an AMD fan telling us why you're wrong Marty but this is your fairer experience so I think it's fair to say and imagine that you're not unrepresentative there's probably other people who are partial to DLSS as well so thanks for writing in appreciate that patrons stick around the extended show good day internet we're going to talk about why the Dutch are banning devices in classrooms phones tablets and smartwatches they want to say nope if you're a kid in school you can't use them in the classroom with some exceptions sort of we're going to talk about that stick around just a reminder you can catch our show DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live Justin Robbie Young is back tomorrow we'll be talking some politics and lots of other stuff with him don't miss it this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com