 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Dale Mulcahy, Matt Zaglin and Kelly Cook. On this episode of DTNS why Microsoft only cares if the US, UK and Europe approve its acquisition will explain why that is plus your favorite map apps and it's not AI it's the humans replacing the game NPCs turn about his fair play at the seas. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday July 19th 2023 in Los Angeles I'm Tom Merritt and from studio gang gang gang gang I'm Sarah Lane from Salt Lake City I am Scott Johnson and I'm the shows pretty sure if you're laughing hilariously at Sarah Lane right now you're gonna love our main segment today if you're not you will explain in our main segment today you might also know what I'm doing and also not be laughing in which case sorry in advance and then you'll want to comment on today's segment today all right there's no wrong answers here let's start with the gang gang. Bloomberg's Mark Ehrman sources say that Apple is developing a chatbot in its own large language models framework called Ajax Ajax runs on Google Cloud and was built with the Google's JAX machine learning framework apparently internally some engineers call it Apple GPD employees have also used it to do product prototyping reportedly anyway although Apple is not officially commenting and has not a set a set a product strategy yet but may make an AI announcement later this year. Hmm Apple earlier this week Intel announced it would discontinue its small next unit of computing the NUC PC and we were all very sad but it said it would seek a partner to keep them alive and it has Intel announced it gave ASUS a non-exclusive license so there could be others joining this party to use the NUC product designs ASUS can manufacture 10th gen through 13th gen NUC systems develop its own NUC units based on new Intel chip designs and offer NUC system support. The UK's competition and markets authority announced that it has taken an initial view that Broadcom's proposed acquisition of VMware would not substantially reduce competition the CMA will consult on these findings and also issue a final decision on September 12th EU regulators approved the deal last week so the US Federal Trade Commission has yet to decide if it will sue to block the deal. Roblox announced it will soon let developers offer subscriptions on its platform Roblox already offers the ability to sell you stuff but they're all one-time things like a one-time fee one-time virtual item special pass to an experience stuff like that it has not allowed ongoing charges now it will no word on when subscriptions will roll out but if you're looking at who's going to be the metaverse Roblox just took a step forward because fortnight doesn't allow direct sales of anything virtual items or subscriptions not yet anyway uh threads received its first major update for iOS now offering a follows tab in the activity feed to see if you're on it who recently followed your account the app supports translations for post text as well users can also subscribe to unfollowed users to get notifications of new posts maybe you want to just keep track of somebody and some updated numbers on threads are as follows data ai estimates that threads past 150 million downloads and that 32 percent of those came from india followed by brazil the us mexico in japan oh there we go i i think people forget the stuff when they're we're making their snap judgments about social networks so well nobody uses it like oh have you talked to the entire subcontinent of india about that because maybe they have a different idea indeed all right let's talk about microsoft and activision blizzard because you would think perhaps the story could not continue but boy it has legs so microsoft and activision blizzard agree to new terms of their ongoing deal the most significant change is to the deadline to avoid a breakup fee there are actually three deadlines now so let's talk about those the breakup fee is what either side would pay if one walked away from the deal that's a three billion dollars it's a big breakup fee but it rises to 3.5 billion dollars on august 29th and 4.5 billion dollars on september 15th the drop dead deadline for the deal to get done is now october 18th so it has been extended but there's a lot of money at play here the staggered breakup fee schedule is meant to encourage both sides to get the deal done early if possible the extension of the deal also includes new provisions to carve out some businesses in the uk if that's what it takes to get this merger done microsoft really wants to get the merger done so that's what they did tom tell us why they did all of them yeah so again those those fees don't happen if the date passes they they just go up the longer it takes in case the deal fall apart let's take a step back and look at the calendar here microsoft right now is negotiating with the uk competition and markets authority well i don't know if they're doing it right now they might be at the pub but you know they're in the middle of this negotiation to see if they can change the deal in a way that gets the uk to remove its objections it sounds like everybody thinks that's possible but on august second so just a couple weeks from now the united states federal trade commission will be taking its objections to this deal in front of an administrative judge now if it were to win that this whole thing gets a lot more complicated again but given the way the judge ruled against giving a preliminary injunction it's probably going to lose so we're probably not going to see the ftc prevail in august second but august second's worth paying attention to if the ftc loses august 29th is the next important date microsoft wants to settle with the uk by then because the breakup fee goes to goes up if they pass that date and because that is the uk's new deadline to make its final decision on its investigation so everybody would like to get it done that seems to be the new the new end line now if it doesn't settle with the uk by august 29th it could be that the uk would extend its own deadline again they just extended it from july 18th they could extend it again if everybody's very positive and they just need a few more days to do the paperwork or we might start looking at whether microsoft would carve out activision blizzard in the uk as a separate company something the new merger agreement now specifically allows you just heard sarah tell you that but that also becomes very complicated and people would like to avoid that as well scott does this make sense to you it does um we've been covering this pretty extensively on core and also every time i'm on here it feels like a new breaking bit of the news is happening uh so this all makes sense to me it's clear that microsoft and activision both want this to go through and have through the entire process so so they are going to go to whatever length it takes to to separate things out i mean if something catastrophic happened like somebody stock went uh took a dive or took a leap they may have to have additional communication about what that means to the value of the acquisition of the merger but for the most part unless something crazy like that happens i think that they are both sort of in tandem willing to do whatever it takes to get through these hurdles and this feels like the right timeline it all still feels like there's a ticking bomb though and i think that's important i think that's on purpose you know there's there's a reason why they didn't say you know what let's just put it off till october they could probably have done that but they didn't do that well why will they want to keep the heat on the regulatory yeah they want to get it done yeah exactly yeah for sure so this this is both against them and for them in a weird way to have these deadlines and um if they do end up having to segment things out so the uk's happy no one's gonna love that no but i think they could pull that off if they had to so yeah yeah it feels like uh you know the gun and the drawer uh approach they don't want to open that drawer if they don't they don't have to but uh just to summarize for folks on those dates august second is the check-in like is the fdc gonna win no okay and then august 29th is the big one right right well uh for anybody who has been following microsoft stock uh company not doing terribly you thought i was gonna say terribly well didn't you no no it's it's actually stock stock is stock is good for stock holders right now however related to all of this we got an email from daemon um and this i think might echo some sentiments of other people daemon was wondering so why is microsoft only waiting on certain countries to give them approval to purchase activision blizzard before that couldn't complete the purchase so we seem to hear about companies waiting for approval not just microsoft but others from places like the uk eu germany the us but not from places like mexico some countries in south america some countries in africa do other countries not care about such things you know i think daemon sort of says in parentheses although he didn't write it or do we not care about them if we are microsoft daemon says why don't they wait for approval from every country that they sell their product in or do business in uh this is a great question daemon i covered this on an episode of editors desks so some of you patrons already know this answer uh if you're a patron at the five dollar level and up you might have listened to that but here's the short version they have approved at least the countries that have a law requiring approval 40 countries have approved the activision blizzard merger that's not news when they approve it's only news when they don't approve most of the countries that have not approved either don't have a law requiring approval or they're the uk uh the us for example does not have a law requiring a merger to be approved in the us what you do is you have the federal trade commission sue to stop a deal and that's what the ftc is doing with this one in countries that have a law about this it's usually referred to as merger acquisition control uh about 80 to 100 countries depending on how you look at it have some form of merger acquisition control law and if you do business in a country that has a law like that in other words if you're selling stuff to citizens if you've got world of work or after call of duty available uh then you are subject to those rules now some countries the reason you've only seen 40 don't approve until after the deal which seems weird but that's how it works most countries though you have to apply for approval before if they have a law about it and in practice almost all countries approve mergers it's a paperwork thing they just want to have it down on paper what are the terms who's paying what they're not trying to stop mergers they're trying to record them in fact china rarely objects to a merger they have such strict rules about whether you can operate in their country or not that if you meet those rules you're probably fine they're probably going to allow your merger the eu and the us have stricter antitrust laws and have had them for longer so they are more likely to object and a lot of the other countries that might object are perfectly happy to let the us and eu spend their time and money to investigate this stuff and then sort of take their lead they're they're sort of outsourcing the investigation to the us and eu so that's why you hear about the us eu and now the uk that the uk has exited the eu uh because they're the ones that other countries are looking to for investigation although most countries just rubber stamp stuff well you might have also heard that netflix has removed at least one subscription plan for new users in the us and the uk but first removed it in canada and this is the basic ad free plan for a ten dollar in the us uh subscription that lets users watch netflix content on a single screen in 720p quality so it's limited but it was the free non ad supported version the cheapest one rather exist not free ten dollars uh existing users can use this plan going forward so if you're on this plan you say what no it you're probably fine but if you're a new subscriber or perhaps you've lapsed and are coming back to netflix and are are a returning subscriber you no longer have this option when you sign up uk-based website code busters first noticed this change and mused that netflix might discontinue the plan in all countries where it has rolled out an ad supported standard plan because it sounds like that's going pretty well on tom yeah it's worth reminding folks that the ad supported plan first launched in november in canada and mexico a couple days later uh in the us uk france germany italy australia japan korea brazil uh and in april this year netflix updated basic with ads to standard with ads they renamed it and it supported simultaneous streaming on two devices full hd resolution which means 1080p cost you seven dollars a month in the us five pounds a month in the uk and the company said its ad supported tier now has more than five million users worldwide so they consider it a success data from antenna shows that netflix's ad supported plans probably account for around 17 to 20 percent of new signups at least between march and june of their estimation period so scott it sounds like ad supported options are working for netflix was the basic without ads just no longer attractive to the company given the interest elsewhere i think that the the fact that there are so many competing services that come at you with an entry level either no pay or low pay ad supported version of the of their service i think force them into this at least to consider this i think prior prior to all of that when i say success but i guess i just mean the the flooding of market of potential cheaper and less expensive or even free options for people i don't think they had any interest in that at all in fact i feel like they said as much years ago that they just were not interested in ad supported versions of their of their content um but i just think that writing was on the wall the minute other services did it and have seen success with it and now they're seeing that mean those are that's not small numbers you may look at and go well five million in the larger scheme of netflix things isn't that many people but that's a that's still a lot of people but it was it was you know it was a large uptick in a short amount of time yeah that's yeah yeah that's the other thing was fast right really yeah even if netflix was like huh we really didn't think ad supported was the way to go if you have enough users who clearly care about it in a variety of markets i could see the company just saying all right well let's get rid of the tier that doesn't seem to have the most traction and it sounds like that that formerly basic ad-free tier uh just didn't make sense anymore you know again if you're a legacy user you're not getting kicked off of it at least not now but uh you can't sign up for it now uh netflix wants to point you in other directions that might work better for you based on what other people like have anyone has anyone here experience the ad version of things i'm curious at what the i haven't tried it no i've never you know i've never i've never had an ad supported version of netflix but i mean i i have on hulu and a variety of other sources i mean i um sources of content i sometimes apparently the ad load on netflix is very low compared to some of the others is it yeah and i mean even even sometimes when i'm getting ads and maybe they're a little invasive it's like i know why they're there i can't really think of a situation recently where i've paid for something on some level or or maybe not at all um and thought well this is just you know outlandish i think it's i usually i i i kind of you know turn a blind eye i guess it is a little annoying to see that price 699 and remember that we were darn close to that for what netflix was in those early days yeah i think one of the reasons this is getting so much buzz is that it's seven dollars a month in the us for ads and then practically double the price 1549 for the next tier without ads uh i think it's also notable that this happened exactly the same way in canada on june 26th and you didn't see nearly as much outrage then why were you not outraged for the canadiens why i look i'm always looking out for my canadian brothers and sisters but in this particular case i think i just slept on that one uh you pour people up there you struggled through this this transition and i hope you're all okay i can i can hear the canadians yelling right now we told you you just weren't last night and also we're used to you ignoring us uh well canadian are otherwise if you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show get in touch with us there's so many ways uh we have at dts show on twitter and masted on mstdn.social at daily tech news show on tiktok i just posted on our s tiktok today i got a question for you go check it out and dts picks on instagram and of course because it's on instagram also on threads find us we're there nice in many modern games non-playable characters and pcs are an integral part of the experience they inhabit the world you're in a lot of times they provide clues or contexts that help you along your journey sometimes just sort of being there to make the world feel more real this could be anything from a character sitting outside a store who tells you how he took an arrow to the knee uh to zelda herself since in the legend of zelda as they point out in the washington post today you're playing as link you're trying to save zelda zelda is technically an npc just a really important one uh you probably think if you haven't listened closely to the t's that we're going to talk about ai and npcs again like we did back in march but no this time we're talking about humans replacing npcs sarah explain please okay i'm gonna do my i'm gonna do my best on this uh because if you're if you're if you're familiar you're going to go oh gosh here we go but if you're not let's start from the beginning so this is an interesting story npcs aren't really designed to do that much in most games besides exist like tom said they might have you know a line of dialogue or maybe two or three but there's not much to them they're they're not really helping your gameplay they're just sort of there so they often get a line that if you continue to interact with them might get repeated over and over or you might get to a point where you go okay yeah this character isn't doing anything anymore i'm gonna go ahead and mosey on my journey enter the world of tiktok live now this is where some creators you have to have a certain amount of followers uh who have a big enough following have streaming live access this is not unlike how you might go live on twitch some of those creators uh a small subset but a subset are acting like npcs non playable characters for views and also sometimes for money a tiktok user named pinky doll made the rounds recently boy has she gotten some attention she's a very popular streamer who acts as an npc based on the gifts that she gets while she is live she's also very good at this now you might say okay well what is she doing how does she act like a non playable character this is in a game right this is just a live stream for example you send her an ice cream and she says hmm ice cream so good you send her a cowboy hat and she says oh you got me feeling like a cowgirl you send her a gg emoji and she says gang gang this is all in real time you have hundreds of gifts pouring in at once so there's a fun aspect to it if i want to send her a gift and i get thanked i you know feel seen and heard as an audience member it's not unlike being thanked in general on any live stream you know scott you might go live and i might you know send you some money over whatever platform where you you're using and you say thank you i am sarah lane dot com you know that sort of thing but this seems to be a little different because it's very specific than what streamers already do no well there it's an interesting bit of performance that sets it apart definitely if you saw saw somebody streaming your favorite game and you sent them some bits on twitch uh you might even get a little animated something pop up on screen it says so and so gave you bits and then the streamer might say hey thanks so and so for those bits think of that as the what we're used to that's like nothing no big deal what this reminds me is is that this bit of rapid fire machine gun style interaction between you and the streamer and all the streamer is doing for some reason gang gang should be gg usually stands for good game so i'm not sure where we got gang gang from but they still they're using it as gang gang but if that's what you want them to say and then they say it immediately you get this immediate thing of oh i've interacted i paid for this i got noticed they said thank you and then they moved on but she doesn't go off and then do other things on her stream she's just going and going and going and taking these requests and taking these requests joe joe has the uh has the example if we want to throw it up you should uh and you're nice be so good take a jackie gang gang gang gang gang gang oh special gang gang gang gang gang gang gang gang galoon it's like a glitched and it's so that was good in a way yeah yeah so you got me feeling like a cowgirl let me run it's huh yeah yeah so you got me feeling like a cowgirl let me run it's huh and it's and it's you know you might go this is insanity i mean she's saying the same thing over and over well it all depends on what she's getting right now there there's a part of me who's like yes this is very silly i don't i have never seen any of these streams actually in live form i've only seen stuff that's been shared on you know first i saw this on twitter and i've seen it on tic tac afterwards you know but these go on for hours yeah i saw her so i saw one live this was her she popped up in my feet don't know why it just happened to because she's super popular probably yeah and it's after i had heard about this so this was kind of i was like oh oh my gosh i'm getting fed her account didn't even know her name prior to this and uh she was actually there for five hours i didn't watch all five hours yeah she'd been there three was going to go for another exhausting and at one point only one time did i see her break character and yell at a dog or a cat or something um and it was well and now that's the thing too and that's that's become the thing of like watching the npc live feed where you you're waiting for them to kind of go like i need a glass of water or like hey dogs stop yelling and that's that's kind of the key here like i was the comparison i can think of is let's say you're playing nintendo dogs on your nintendo ds or you're playing a pokemon game you got to feed your pokemon you got to feed your pets and some of these pet based games um and when you do that you expect the little animated character to go um you fed me um you fed me and if you do it over and over again you get that kind of repetition you get that dopamine rush and we're used to that from inanimate computer generated creatures or people we're used to this when it what makes this different and why i think it's taken off so crazy and gotten so much attention is this we know this is a flesh and blood human on the other side and we know that we are interacting with that person a lot like we are used to in these other ways but i'm getting this real live person to acknowledge me to make the sound to move on and do it again and it's a combination that i think is really alluring for a lot of people and it is easy to judge it and go out this is too weird for me where we're living in cyberpunk town uh and maybe we are maybe these maybe it's early days of cyberpunk conversion but but uh at the end of the day i i think the motivations are very similar it's just kind of hyper realized uh and it is very gamified whether whether we've noticed it or not it's this reminds me of playing games but in a much stranger way i guess i think yeah i mean listen if if this is something appeals to you then you know then it does there are a lot of people um who you know i feel like there's like there's sort of three popular ways that people respond to this either i have no idea what this is the second is i know what this is and i don't like it nobody should be doing this you know this you know feels like a human who's you know in a cage kind of thing and the third is i know what this is and this human is making money and she's really he or she or they are very good at this and this is actually kind of fun and you know this is a way to sort of gamified the gamified things um those first two reactions are the common reactions to everything that happens right in the world on the internet like i don't understand what this is i think it's dumb so throw those out because you're going to get that at every new thing it is interesting to see people engage in this you know and and have fun with it i think it was better when there was more of them standing there bobbing before they got popular and then you send the emoji and you you make that happen that manic presentation that we just saw of pinkie doll is is its own form of manic entertainment but it it's not as much like an mpc anymore is it it's also a sign that she wouldn't be so manic if she didn't get so much attention right yeah no i know if you got if you got a little coin or something you know every 30 seconds then it would be a very different experience yeah it is a reminder to there's some game theory in this but um there there's there's a once in a while you remind yourself that a lot of what i'm doing is about numbers going up when i play a video game when i play diabolo i have the beautiful world that's set in i see these amazing graphics and voiceover and story and then really at the end of the day though what i'm trying to do is get numbers to go up i'm trying to get loot and get numbers up and if you start boiling that down to its most primordial ooze that's what this is yeah dopamine wanting to see yeah dopamine hits watching numbers go up watching things flash on the screen i'm watching a reaction and it's worth your two bucks your three bucks your four bucks one of one of the best uh i i have gone down quite a few internet holes uh over the last week about this because i find it so fascinating what the best response is to someone saying this is so stupid why would anyone do this nobody should be participating they were like this woman is very talented she should be an auctioneer yeah none of us could do what she's doing like there is a talent here we're just you know we're we're we're we're we're making it happen in real time no cap yeah all right let's check out the mailbag let's do it we got a lot of feedback from our conversation yesterday about uh map apps that we use uh specifically we were talking about apple maps potentially being a lot better than they used to be here are a few examples ronard writes in one of the reasons that google maps had always been better because it had years and years of data including the time when iphones were using google maps ever since apple maps came to the phone i chose to use apple maps because i wanted apple to get that data in order for the app to get better if you don't give a data it won't get better matthew wrote in to say he was a big fan of apple maps especially through carplay until he moved to ecuador he writes apple maps is largely able to locate very little around keto ecuador or bogota columbia two cities with populations in the millions i can understand not having great rural data out in the amazon but to not be usable any of the major cities makes it useless this remains true in all the major cities in ecuador as i've explored the country i've largely given up on apple maps for other than learning geography that is that is a that's a good note depends on where you are jordan also wrote in uh saying they prefer apple maps for turn-by-turn directions carplay and transit directions but still give an apple maps the high marks for cross-platform accessibility still gives google maps high marks google maps rather yes thank you cross-platform accessibility and retail and restaurant reviews because there's you know that that google data uh matthew did say oh wait was it matthew no one one person wrote in and said that uh they they like uh ways um but most people were talking about google maps or apple maps as if those were the two options so it feels like those are the two everybody uses yeah well if you are listening saying well no but i still have another option do yeah write in map quest users yeah people are still printing their map quest somewhere someplace open map users let's hear from you remember map blast that was the yahoo map quest alternative oh yeah i wasn't a map blast user i don't really know why uh well uh no matter what kind of map uh service you use scott johnson we sure are glad that you make your way into this show um but you know if we're lucky uh once a week sometimes more let folks know where to keep up with the rest of your work well sure if you're interested in uh all the hot takes around this microsoft activision uh merger business or really anything in the realm of video games coverage i have a show every week that does just that it's called core it happens on thursdays and uh core is me and my two buddies talking about video games and doing it i think the best there is we really like this show i think you'll like it too so check it out that's at frogpants.com slash core or just look for core wherever you get your shows yesterday i had gpt4 write the patreon promotion mm we got zero patrons as a result oh no so today today smell it tom it's a human appeal it's a human appeal if you're listening to the free feed and you support value for value you like what we do and you want us to keep doing it consider signing up patreon.com slash dtns it's a human asking i liked that i liked it was very npr review uh you can also catch the show live hold on hold on that wasn't that patron stick around for the extended show good day internet we're going to talk about google's pilot program that has a few thousand of its employees working without the internet they cut off the internet for their employees another great incentive come into the office for google stick around we're going to talk about that um sorry tom something about the humanization of all of this i know through me for a loop yeah but just a reminder we as humans and we really are uh do the show live Monday through friday at 4 p.m. eastern at 200 utc and we'd love to have you join us live if you can we're on a man too but if you want to know more daily tech news show dot com slash live is where to go to find more about that we are back doing it all again tomorrow with dustin robert young joining us talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this robert