 This 10th year of Daily Tech news show is made possible by you. Thanks to every single one of you including Vince power Rodrigo Smith Zapata and John and Becky Johnston coming up on DTNS an AI that can understand a whole novel in 22 seconds and why you should care a Google open source tool to play games with just your face and Who is this new Twitter CEO anyway? That's our story This is the Daily Tech news for Friday, May the 12th 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom errant and I'm Chris Ashley coming from your local barbecue And on the show's produce sir Roger jay. All right folks. We've got a packed show. So let's start right in with the quick hits Now you know China wants to develop domestic companies that can make chips So that they can get around those restrictions from the US you know that because you listen to Daily Tech news show your smart person Well, two stories right now indicate some setbacks for China in that effort pay attention to these China's top smartphone maker oppo always in the top five smartphone makers in the world says it's shutting down Ziku ZEKU its chip development division oppo attributed the shutdown to uncertainties in the global economy and Smartphone industry so no in-house designs for oppo and the second story China's biggest domestic chip maker SMIC posted its first quarterly revenue decline in three years US sanctions prevent SMIC from getting chipmaking tools to make the most advanced Semiconductors now and it's having an effect SMIC is still seen as China's best chance of catching up with chip industry Dominators like Samsung and of course the Titan Taiwan's TSMC Meta announced a new AI sandbox available to select advertisers. It provides three features One let's advertisers generate variations of the same ad copy for different audiences There's a background generator to create different media assets, you know, like images and an image cropping feature to more easily Post content across mediums and social chains. Meta plans to expand access to the AI sandbox in July All right, so now we know what they're using their AI for Wiz spelled WIZ has launched a new home monitoring feature that combines motion sensing from its light bulbs with an indoor security camera A new camera from them to send you alerts if there's somebody moving around when there shouldn't be the bulbs use a system That detects changes in Wi-Fi signal strength. We've talked about this on DTS before too So it changes it detects those changes in Wi-Fi signal strength and then it knows if there's motion The bulb will then tell if somebody's there and the new security camera will let you see what's going on to take advantage Of the new feature Wiz is offering a home monitoring starter kit That puts three of these bulbs and the camera together for 159 euros 99. That is available starting June 15th No US price yet for that bundle But the camera is coming on its own if you already have the bulbs you can get the camera in the US for $70 later this month Well, if you drive a Toyota and you've been wondering why random people know how much miles Toyota disclose that a database of vehicle data for 200 sorry 2.15 million users in Japan has been accessible without a password since November 2013 Ouch So if you know anybody tried to look they could have seen it all Data left public included vehicle locations and identification numbers now Toyota made this data private in mid April Thank goodness and said there were no reports of it being misused But really who's gonna say they left the door unlocked. They have no evidence There's no footprints on the inside of the database, right? Oh by the way, Tom Nobody told Toyota that they actually took the data They left a note nobody left a note. Yeah I mean, it's possible that thing has just been unlocked for 10 years and they just noticed and nobody else noticed Right. It's also quite possible. That's not true either. So, yeah Yeah, well this one is for the adults in the room adult communities often want to allow Legal let me emphasize these we're talking about legal stuff here But adult images on reddit things not safe for work in the past those might be hosted on imager But of course as we've talked about imager is tightening its restrictions against adult content So reddit is stepping into the gap itself if your community is set as 18 plus and reddit has a system for that It can now allow NSFW images to be uploaded directly to reddit from the desktop This feature was already available on mobile, but they have now expanded it to the desktop All right, let's talk chat bots. Do you use barred or chat GPT or any of those things Chris? No, I just having fun watching all the other people use it and all the crazy stuff that people are doing with it But it's not my I don't have a use case today where I'm just gonna go play around with it Gotcha. Gotcha. If if you were you you might run into a couple problems Perhaps I'm just speaking theoretically here You tried to put in your whole novel and ask the chat GPT to proof read it And it said your novel was too long and you tried not to take that personally Or perhaps you've been chatting and this happens a lot the bot sort of forgets things You said earlier in the conversation you chat long enough that it's like it's not referring back too far That's because both of those things are because of something called a context window Remember that these work by breaking words up into tokens and then figuring out sequences They're they're just making predictions, right and how many tokens of information the model can process at once is called the context window. All right Chat GPT can handle 4096 tokens. That's about 3,000 words. So if you're like, okay, yeah, that's why it started forgetting things Open AI's GPT for API is a lot better. So if you're using the API, you can handle up to 32,000 tokens at a time Well, and throw up and announced that it's clawed API for its business partners can now process up to a hundred thousand tokens That's roughly 75,000 words Your whole novel that's more Exactly very Anthropic demo demo this capability by processing the entire novel the great Gatsby and to look for a single edited sentence They say to find the sentence took a 22 seconds to process all of Gatsby and find the sentence that larger context window Also means it can carry on longer conversation So apparently this thing can go for days and still remember context from a couple days before that's crazy Yeah, so this is really interesting One of the things I remember back when Apple first announced or even I think it was Bing actually dead at one They were talking about their Cortana and how it could be more conversational with you And then you know Siri caught up and was able to be a bit more conversational with you And I imagine that the problem was the same which was remembering the context of the conversation. So so this is the natural Trajection I would expect for to see in this but I could see things like for me personally like if I'm I'm trying to get better about planning some of like my project. So currently I'm building a Table and a console table from for to go on to my TV And if I could just have like a conversational planning session with with the chat GPT And I'm like, okay this is the dimensions that I want to use and You know, here's the what the tabletop is gonna be and here's the overhang that I want to have on the top and the you know The space inside. Okay, what type of wood? Well, what are my what is my cut plan needs to be and then I can you know spit it out and then say okay? Well based on that, you know, I don't like the way it sits. So can I you know mean so being able to work through a solution? You know or a project because you know that the absolute that exists out there to do that and they're not tear, you know Crazy hard to use but I just not interested in learning how to use them For a cut list so being able to have a conversation around that and then having it spit back to me It's like here's your cut list go by a four by eight piece of plywood You know make these cuts right here I can spit out the difference and you know and being able to adjust those plans on the fly That's something I could I could get behind and see some really cool because you could go back to it over days Exactly, and it remembers your project and all that. Yeah, not to mention you could actually upload home manuals Right the tools you're using right and why not sense of what you're using. Yeah, right and they help me put it together Yeah Yeah, so and you know oftentimes off you'll find when you're in the middle of a project like that and you know Something you had an idea of how it should work But one they're practical of cutting it or making it, you know, putting it together Not not so much, you know, the idea was great in your head, but not so great And you know in when you're actually building. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anthropic because this is in their enterprise API, this is probably not too surprising, but they imagine this being useful for businesses. So large troves of documents You would be able to just say can you find me all the instances of whatever? And and throbik says this should outperform the existing vector-based search the company's used now So well imagine when you're in the middle of You know either a lawsuit and then you know as a law firm, you'll you know Give me all of these emails You have to feed those emails into something and then be able to search the context of the emails to find whatever it is You're looking for. Yeah, I could definitely see it from that professional aspect maybe Honestly, you know when you have a lot of these European countries that are super stringent on You customer user data, you know, you could use something like this to say hey You know go find all the instances of this customer data so we can make sure we properly delete it So don't you know from a business standpoint. I could see those things as well That's interesting like where is it hidden like what what other documents was it copied over to what other databases? What databases are left with a password? Perhaps you could find that for me to find all open passwords. Yeah Yeah Yeah, this new Context window is available right now if you're a user of the Claude API that's restricted by a waitlist So there's not a ton of those out there right now, but but yeah, it's I I think Anthropic is making a play this week. We had them talk about their Constitutions earlier this week now they're talking about how they they've expanded this token space this context window in a huge way These are both. Let me let me Hurry to say these are both real advancements. They are real projects and they're they're worth talking about But it is clear that Anthropic wants to steal a little of that limelight from open API Well, and from Google because Google's you know touting all their AI stuff this week, too, right? Well, the interesting thing that always I think a lot of people miss when new software comes out is It's always exciting to see the new software and what it can do But I actually kind of take a step back and kind of look to see what are the APIs that are available And what are people doing to you know take advantage of those APIs? You know me because that's one the real Fun and the real you know awesome this starts to come in when you have people that you know Really grasp of what you're trying to do and then figure out ways to make it do more Well, we've got some other Google news out of Google IO this week that isn't exactly Well, it is AI, but it's not a chat bot. It's not chat bot related The verges West Davis wrote an article called Google's open source AI tool Let me play my favorite Dreamcast game with my face Google calls it project game face It replaces head tracking mouse gear which usually costs in the hundreds of dollars So it's it's not super expensive, but it's not cheap with software that just uses your webcam So you can program up to six facial gestures to act as your mouse or keyboard actions And then a just typical mouse setting so jitter speed all of that stuff The algorithm is able to use what it sees from your webcam and translate that to head tracking so that you can do Tilts open mouth that kind of stuff to control This was developed in in conjunction with a gamer named Lance Carr after a fire destroyed his head tracking mouse And they were able to make this work for him The get hub project right now So not everybody's gonna be comfortable navigating get hub But if you are you can go try it right now and it's available for free under an Apache 2.0 license Yeah, this is really really cool. First off I love seeing like accessibility stuff that people are doing for gaming and even though You know because a lot of times stuff will start out in gaming But quickly it becomes available in other aspects of life But you know the older I get and I'm playing these games and and I'm just realizing like man I don't have a lot of time left to be playing this competitive stuff The old fingers just can't keep you know if I could add in a head nod while I'm using my controller Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, so it's just like okay, you know make me let's even the playing field for the old fella you know mean but You know, I love the idea of that how they allow you to move and you know just to tell you of course You know the one downside is that you don't have a lot of inputs, right? There's only yeah, just so much you can do with your head. So, you know You'd hate to be somebody looking in the window and you're flicking your tongue Do some type of battle and somebody's like oh this guy's got problems. Yeah. No, I'm just playing a game I want to know why they're looking in your window Which came first the tongue yeah looking in the window. Yeah They but I'll kidding aside that they do definitely need to have more than six and they plan to expand on that To have a wider range, but the fact that it just replaces the head tracking stuff altogether is is pretty really really awesome Yeah, West Davis from the Verge tried it with res from the Dreamcast That that's one where you you fire your weapon You move your cursor and you trigger the shoot everything So it's it's not a car, you know, it's not like a strategy game It's it's a move around shoot game, but it's but it's a fairly simple one And he said like it took him a little time to dial in the right settings But sure but once he got it going it was totally playable and he said the lagging latency wasn't bad Maybe not competitive, but it wasn't bad. Yeah. Yeah, and that's definitely what it would have boils down to is Just the proper use case in the type to a proper type of game for it Because I imagine that if you go from a gamer and then all of a sudden, you know some tragedy hits And you can't game anymore, but you can do something something is better than nothing even with my brother After he had a stroke and he lost a lot of the dexterity in his hands But the doctor said, you know what if you can give him a controller and let him mess around and stuff Let him do it because it's familiar to him, you know, and it'll help the brain rewire And you know, it's good for him. So, um, yeah So anything that I see that can help, you know, folks that have had some type of accident or just, you know Haven't had the ability but now they have the ability man. I'm all for it. This looks like it's a very promising. Yeah, and and This is called project game face. It's obviously its use cases gaming But uh, this could be used for any mouse interaction for any reason. So It's useful in that way as well All right, folks, uh, we have a series on our youtube channel called top five If you haven't checked it out yet, uh, we got a bunch of episodes over there The latest one relives the decade of gas lines and disco the 1970s Get your big collars and your bell bottoms and watch tom's top five as we break down the most memorable pieces of consumer technology from the 70s Including top loading vcrs Uh, I'm just gonna give that one away. But what else is in there? Is there computer stuff? Yes, there is you can catch it youtube.com Slash daily tech news show that's youtube.com slash daily tech news show get the top five right now All right, I'm really looking forward to talking about this one Let's go isn't everyone Uh thursday during dtns the news broke that elon musk said he had chosen a ceo and she would start in about six weeks That wasn't entirely true Uh 24 hours later We know that in fact, he did choose mbc universals head of advertising linda yakarino and It looks like she might be starting now not in six weeks Uh, all right. Yeah, you want to hear some interesting notes about how the announcement went down chris. I'm sure you follow I got it. I got it here. Yeah, so Uh, yakarino was scheduled to present mbc's pitch to advertisers at its upfront on monday So when this came down yesterday, I'm like, well, she's obviously not gonna start They're not gonna make this announcement for real till after she does the up fronts And in fact, yesterday when mbc was asked for comment mbc said no, she's in back-to-back rehearsals for the upfront Then friday morning NBC said oh about that her rehearsals are done They didn't say that part, but they did say she has resigned effective immediately And then musk announced that indeed linda yakarino will take over as ceo of twitter now He didn't actually say when but it kind of implied that well, she resigned I guess the time is now, right? We get right and uh, so we'll have some fun with this Right off the bat because you know a common tactic I've seen uh companies is when you announced you're leaving. Oh, you can just go right now Yeah, I mean, so i'm wondering is that what happened here? It was like, well, you know, I did plan I was going to put my notice that no no you can go right now. Yeah, it's like we don't need you so Did they get hurt? I think this is most interesting because Uh, it is the first example And maybe elon musk does this sort of thing on purpose of like get used to it. This is how I work, right? It sounds like Yakarino had given six weeks notice was going to do the up fronts Then make her announcement and dignified leave NBC and join twitter And that when elon musk spilled the beans yesterday That caused an uproar and NBC is like, well, you can't do the up fronts now There's too much of an uproar around you, right? So did she start sweating because the other day when he said I've already found my new My new ceo did she start sweating and I was like, please don't ruin this for me. Please don't ruin this for me I can't tell even it has to be one of the two right either It was like, oh man, what are you doing? Like we had a plan or it's it was Them saying well, he can say he's found someone and no one will know and then the wall street journal went and figured out who it was So, yeah, maybe they just didn't plan well. Oh, yeah, that is a viable option They hey, do you want to we believe this person's coming on? Can you comment? It's fine to drop a hint. But yeah, yeah, yeah, okay fair enough I mean A normal disciplined business wouldn't even do that at all. So there's there's that Let's talk about linda yakarino though. She has been with NBC since november 2011 She has been in her current position as head of global advertising and marketing for NBC since 2020 Before NBC she was a turner and those are the only two jobs listed on her linkedin So as far as we know, she's always worked in advertising and marketing Her entire career Do you know her nickname? I did not pick up her nickname. No wall street journal says they call her the velvet hammer Right because she's got great relationships with everybody, but she's got hard nose negotiating tactics I don't know who gave her that nickname, but they need help in making nicknames. I don't like you don't like that one It's very descriptive velvet because she's got good relationships hammer because she you know hammers home the negotiation You don't like it. It's too. It's just too much I don't know. I'm not a wrestling that one. But yes the velvet hammer Now, uh, you when you and I were talking about this earlier today You pointed out that everybody's making a big deal about the fact that she seems amenable to musks free speech stuff Yeah So I found weird. Yeah announcement because and you know a lot of times when something big happens I'd like to see all the different people reporting on it and see what's the common thread because you know I'm starting to you know figure out that a lot of these times. Here's what you're going to say and then everybody repeats what what they're told to say And uh, the common thread that I was finding was that she had done an interview with uh, mr musk And uh, she hosted the interview. She was interviewing. Yeah. Yeah, and then she pointed out she's like, um, Yeah, uh, we believe in the uh In in in the first amendment I agree with you in the first in in his take on the first amendment and I was like, that's kind of but everybody was reporting it Let's let's give her the exact quote here Oh, right if if freedom of speech as he says referring to elan is if freedom of speech as he says is the bedrock of this country I'm not sure there's anyone in this room who would disagree with that and then elsewhere in the conversation She said remember freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach which is parroting a thing that musk says a lot So when I saw that I was like, okay, we got to break this piece down I don't know why it struck me But the problem is I think most people that looked at what elan musk was saying about freedom of speech Was like, come on, dude. That's nonsense, right? It's you're not the government So you have nothing to do with freedom of speech so when um, when she when they pointed this out it's like Did she tell him that and then because she was marketing to elan musk for a job Um and selling herself as far as like, yeah, I was only a month ago. So yeah Right, you know what I mean? Because it's like that Freedom of speech, you know, it's it's there's nothing there But then I was like I started looking at her credentials. I was like, oh, she's got a game Like she's done some very successful marketing campaigns um She did one with the pope and that was very successful and it was just like, okay She's got a lot of games. So I don't know if you picked up on the uh on the whole Journalists were trying to both sides this and show like she's friendly to musk's freedom of speech, which I I'm a little bit different than you. I think it's a worthwhile conversation to have like what speech should be allowed on the platform I know what you're saying. It's not about the first amendment, right? Right, but but I I think freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach is an interesting Thing I don't think it's as crazy as it sounds I think a lot of people were trying to take this as a like she's in his pocket Uh, I think more telling and interesting is the fact that she served on president trump's council on sports and nutrition Which a lot of people would not serve on on that administrations Councils at all, but she was willing to serve, you know, tim cook Served on some some councils and stuff as well But she was also chair of the task force on the future of work at the world economic forum a decidedly not conservative Organization, right and she pushed for workplace diversity At that which I thought was interesting as well. She definitely Is not on a particular Easily pinned to a particular spectrum Right and that's why I find this overall very a very interesting move and something, you know Us who like to do from the podcast and we talk about tech news You know, this would probably be something we'll be Revisiting a lot throughout this year because to see the move she makes because the one thing that I've that I found Was like, okay. She's definitely got game. She's definitely top-notch in marketing as far as I can tell with all the reporting That's out there and then the things that she's accomplished. So How the biggest problem with Twitter right now is the fact that Elon Musk ruined their marketing dollars, right? Almost cut it in half With all the changes and all the things that he did So you hire this expert in marketing to fix what you destroyed But she's also then Supposed to help move the company forward because clearly, you know It's been reported that he wants to make Twitter like that center platform for everything Okay. Yeah. Yeah, and she's an expert at finding ways to monetize things. She's an expert Well, well said because Musk says she's going to handle business operations while he focuses on product design and technology. So you're absolutely right That's code for she's going to fix the revenue. She's going to repair the relationships with the advertisers She's going to do better marketing And he also wrote looking forward to working with linda to transform this platform into x the everything app He's still on that So here's why I find this like I I think she has a lot of work ahead of her So as a lifelong A commander's fan here in the area in the dc area We love our team, but we dislike our owner So no matter what general manager they brought in they were always kneecapped by the owner So having seen that and how that usually plays out in the end Are we going to see the same thing here where she has great ideas? Great implementation But The the guy that has proven to make some knee-jerk reactions that are detrimental to the company Will he kneecap her ideas constantly to the point where she's like, I can't do this. How long do you think she lasts? Well, so interesting question I'm going to give her at least a year. Why? Because it from just looking at what she's accomplished and uh, you know, how highly sought off Saw after she probably is She's probably like I don't care what this dude. She's gonna have that energy in the beginning for a while You know, I mean like I'm going to write this shit because if she writes this ship Oh, man, she can do anything, you know at that point, right? It's like I fixed twitter Yeah, you understand what that looks like on a resume. Here's a resume. I fixed twitter That's a wrap like okay. If she can out if she can outlast him, right? I think that's the key, right back up the prankstruck Yeah, yeah Real quickly before we get out of here. I want to get your reaction to this thing called oak scan It's from a cooperage cooperages make barrels For well, they make barrels and this particular cooperage rado Makes them for wine They developed a near infrared spectrometry scanner That can instantly measure the properties of the wood that they are going to make the barrels out of To save wineries and distilleries hundreds of hours of testing Because different wood even from the same trees that are a few feet apart Can release different polyphenols that affect the appearance the taste and the smell of whatever you store it in the wine whiskey, etc So radoo can not only tell you really quickly like oh, this barrel is going to have this flavor profile But also replicate the profiles of woods that you want by being able to say Oh, we'll make it out of this wood and it'll give you that flavor profile First off props to them for being able to amass the knowledge to determine what the effects of one versus the other It's going to be on the outcome of the wine. I that blows my mind Now at the same time, I'm like you're wasting your time with wine and bourbon Come over here scan this brisket and let me know exactly when to take it off So it's gonna be perfect. I thought you were gonna go for the wood chips. You went right for the brisket. Yeah Scan this brisket. Let me know exactly 12 hours Five minutes 38 seconds. Perfect. That's fantastic. We're good to go. Give me that flavor profile Well, if you want to read more on this, there's there's a lot more about this and and a bourbon company That is using this technology that you can read in an engadget article by billy steel go to engadget.com Or we'll have a link in the show notes as well Regarding the pixel fold we got an email From scott who wrote while I agree that $1,800 is an eye watering high amount to spend on a phone. It's worth taking a historical look here Consider the first flip phone the original Motorola star tack which came out in 1996 for $1,000 adjusted for inflation That's a thousand eight hundred sixteen dollars today So pretty much the same price Over time that star tack came down to the price point where even poor me had one says scott And they became extremely common and popular Hey, listen, you can if you can find this is the key If you can find a context to make you feel better about your expensive purchases You are living a good life Because I have buyer's remorse for everything I buy that is expensive for at least a month The the more expensive it is the longer the buyer's remorse lasts. Yeah I it's a it's a good point The comparison to the star tack is great because I think we think of the star tack as being cheap I think what what this reminds me is like, all right, the star tack was once also very expensive Right when it first came out Well, before we let you go chris ashley what you got going on to talk about to the folks I know you just mentioned a brisket. I'm sure there's a good barbecue and tech cooking Yeah, so we just released our last episode of season four And we had another awesome pit master on there Marcus mcnack from crimson creek smokehouse And uh, he had some great gems or tips and uh, you know, he had a different upbringing when it comes to getting into barbecue Which I thought was super interesting and a great conversation So yeah folks that love barbecue tech or just love a great conversation in general come check this one out for sure Yeah, good new episode fresh off the grill folks go and get it bbqantech.com Also, thanks to our brand new bosses denis and thomas who just started back in us on patreon. Thank you denis Thank you thomas uh for for joining Folks, you can you can join our patreon for free. This is a new thing. We just started doing this week If you don't have funds, but you want to get in in case, you know, at some point you can get a little funds You can join for free at patreon.com slash dts. You won't get everything, but you'll get monthly updates You'll get rogers column, uh, and you'll get the friday gdi where we play games So just scroll on down past the paid options at patreon.com slash d t All right denis thomas and the rest of you patrons stick around for the extended show good day internet It's friday and we have games I'm going to try to figure out chris ashley's personality type. Maybe i'll do roger too So, uh, you you might want to stick around You can also catch the show live monday through friday 4 p.m. Eastern 200 utc find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back on monday with justin robert young talk to you there This week's episodes of dailytechnewshow were created by the following people host producer and writer tom merit host producer and writer sarah lane executive producer and booker roger chang producer writer and host rich straffolino Video producer and twitch producer joe kunz technical producer anthony lemos spanish language host writer and producer dan compos news host writer and producer gen cutter science corresponded dr nicky ackerman's social media producer and moderator zoey debtarding our mods beatmaster w scottis one bio cow captain kipper steve guadirama paul reese matthew j stevens aka baggadget virtuoso and jd galloway mod and video hosting by dan christensen music and art provided by martin bell dan looters moustapha a a cast and lenn peralta a cast ad support from tatiana matias contributors on this week's show included justin robert young patrick norton shannon morse scott johnson and chris ashley And thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible This show is part of the fraud pants network Get more at frogpants.com Ironman club hopes you have enjoyed this program