 Coming up on DTNS discord pivots away from gaming an algorithm to make you more polite and 3d print your fake meat This is the Daily Tech news for Tuesday, June 30th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane and from the rainy forests of Finland. I'm Patrick Beja I am not in the forest and I'm the shows producer Roger Chang We were just talking about messaging and how Difficult it is sometimes because everybody wants to be messaged in a different way If you want to get that conversation get our expanded show good day internet become a member at patreon.com DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know Users of Airtel, Vodafone and other Indian service providers report that they are unable to access tiktok ISPs said that they had not blocked tiktok But that the app itself had shut down access in the country India's Department of Telecommunications has ordered ISPs to block tiktok With immediate effect the company has also gone from app stores Although other Chinese apps ordered removed by the Indian government remain available Suggesting that tiktok itself pulled the app the governments of India and China are in a dispute over border conflicts in the Himalayas Amazon announced it will bring the game crucible back into closed beta at 12 Eastern on July 1st Those who joined before they can I'm sorry those who joined before then can play in in steam But there will be scheduled sessions with developers joining for feedback Qualcomm announced two new wear OS processors today the snapdragon wear 4100 and the always-on 4100 Plus Qualcomm promises 85 percent faster speed than the previous generation two and a half times faster GPU performance and faster memory First watches with the chips will arrive in the coming months Google confirmed it has acquired Canadian smart glasses company North the North staff will work on Google's ambient computing future North's focals 2.0 has been canceled and support for focals 1.0 will end on July 31st All North customers will be refunded the full amount of focals purchases You may see benchmarks for the new ARM based Apple Silicon floating around Mac rumors reports they seem to be coming from benchmarking software run on developer transition kits containing a variant of the A12z chip found in iPads This is not expected to be the chips the chip used in Macs other things to note If you look at these benchmarks the benchmarking software seems to be running in emulation And while the A12z in the iPad has eight cores the benchmark shows only four cores The black innovation alliance launched Tuesday The BIA will work with organizations like black and brown founders founders of color black female founders HBC you dot VC and more to create a system to support black entrepreneurs startup founders and creative technologists BIA plans to build a streamlined infrastructure for black entrepreneurs to go from ideas to revenue to exit BIA co-creator Ania Williams welcomes VC interests telling TechCrunch We've just built this table and you can have a seat at it if you step correct The New York Times sources say uber is in talks to buy post mates Ubers food delivery arm uber eats has the second largest market share in the US after Dora-dash That's according to research firm Edison Trends uber previously was in talks to buy grubhub Which you might recall ended up being bought by just eat takeaway instead TechCrunch's sources say that regulatory concerns kept uber from getting grubhub Although publicly executives have said that just eat was just the better deal However, it's worth noting that post mates is smaller than grubhub and combined uber eats and post mates would still be smaller than door dash Android's nearby sharing feature to let users share files between Android devices quickly easily and wirelessly much like apples and airdrop feature is now rolling out as a Play services beta Android police tested nearby share and notes It works for photos and videos and other shareable content like tweets and URLs and fitness apparel company Lululemon announced plans to acquire home exercise startup mirror mirrors the one that offers live and on-demand exercise classes through a wall-mounted Mirror Lululemon hopes to close the sale by the end of September Mirror will continue to run as a standalone company within Lululemon. All right. Let's talk about Amazon's new little video feature Amazon Prime video is launching watch party which will let up to a hundred Prime subscribers view film and TV together once over the internet together at once over the internet The feature is rolling out to US users in the browser though. It is not supported by Apple's safari Amazon says thousands of titles will be eligible to watch party and all subscribers will be able to host and participate I Continue to be skeptical that this is the sort of thing that will catch on but certainly While a lot of people are staying home Whether mandated or not people are just staying home more This is a chance for for folks to get together and watch things over the internet It is a feature that came to twitch already prime. You could watch prime video stuff on twitch With your audience, but this allows you to not have to use twitch this and there's no streaming video of you involved You just host it and then everybody shows up in a chat room and it shows up on the right I mean you guys into this sort of watch party thing I keep waiting for it to catch on. I you know, I have a lot of friends who don't live anywhere near me We're never gonna get into the same living room together. So this is perfect and you know We talk about watching stuff all the time That said the whole you know that watch party stuff and and a lot of platforms offer this now It it doesn't really work because yeah, you know, everybody's busy and time zones and the whole thing Like I want this to be a thing more than it is a thing Although I feel like company after company keeps adding it as like hey, you can do this now with your friends It's gonna be really fun because you're all stuck at home It is definitely something that should work in theory but ends up never Actually working out and there's no real reason for it other than people just don't do it You could totally say That time that day we all get together and we watch it as if we would if we were Going to each other's places and it's just you know It's just not the same and even if people do it once it seems they don't do it again So maybe this will finally be the thing that starts it But I also I'm a little bit wary of the Thousands of titles that sounds like a lot But I'm betting that the one title you do want to watch with everyone is not available in that list Yeah, when you're talking about a service that has hundreds of thousands of titles It's not that big of a percentage and just for completeness. There is an extension called Netflix watch party out there It's not part of Netflix, but it does work with Netflix and HBO is has contracted a company to develop this for them So we're we're gonna see more of this Well speaking of having lots of users Facebook told Axios that it will rank Original English language reporting higher in the news feed and rank lower stories that aren't transparent about who wrote those stories That would mean that either there's no byline or in some cases No listing of editorial staff at all an algorithm will analyze stories to identify which one was cited most often as the original source Well, the news feed still only shows stories from outlets followed by you or your friends Within that pool the original story is intended to show up higher Facebook hopes to apply the feature to non-English stories in the future Patrick what do you think? Thank you for that one It's no I think it it makes sense obviously you're always gonna have examples of Articles or cases where you might not want to apply the algorithm in that way, but I think in general one of the signals to have reliable information would be knowing who wrote it who's behind it and not having that kind of information is kind of a hint that Maybe don't trust it as much as you would something else. It doesn't mean, you know, don't use it at all maybe but Not trusting it as much ranking it a little bit lower seems like a reasonable approach to this issue You know when I first Came across the story this morning. My my initial reaction was like oh, it's tech meme for Facebook Because it's you know your the idea is to pinpoint. Okay, where the story originate is it from a reliable source? You know other outlets, you know took hold, but it kind of comes back to this one But that's not actually the way anybody who's familiar with tech meme That's not totally the way that tech meme works because it does rely on human curators To figure out not only who was first but who has sort of the best story the best version of this that is you know You know it has the best information, you know, but the then that other outlets have have taken hold of so I mean I'm all for this that you know the more that people kind of understand how news is disseminated and you know how it might show up in their news feed all the better But but focusing on AI Completely at this point and I know it's sort of a limited rollout. It sort of remains to be seen how good it is Oh, what are you talking about? Facebook relying entirely on algorithms have never stood them wrong in the past Yeah, I was trying to be kind No, I think this is a good thing. It's not gonna fix everything obviously It's probably not even gonna fix most things that people criticize Facebook about but it will help improve The ability to find out well who broke the story? Where did the story originate when that's a thing like you say sometimes it's just a press release and everybody wrote it up And there isn't a source other than I guess the press release. Maybe that'll bubble up I don't know how they're gonna choose these sources. I will point out that the economist doesn't use by lines That is a long tradition going back into the 19th century for them They used to even try to hide the columnists identities They don't really try to do that any day these days the columnists actually host podcasts now So it's clear who they are but they still don't put by lines on their stories So that's why you see them say or editorial staff because the economist is perfectly trustworthy And they'll they'll tell you who their staff is on their editorial staff page So it's interesting the little quirks to this that an algorithm may or not may or not be able to handle without some human touch Who wants an 8 terabyte drive me I do yes me too Because Samsung wants to sell us one in its announcement of the new 870 QVO solid-state drives coming June 30th Samsung announced an 8 terabyte model will arrive in August They didn't give us a price, but an Amazon page spotted by Tom's hardware earlier this month marked it at $900 coming August 24th. So that may have been placeholder data. Maybe the real data the 870 series is Two and a half inch say to drives Samsung says they're 13% faster than the last generation 560 megabytes per second read speed 530 megabytes per second write speed and You can get one that stores eight terabytes that they have smaller ones, too But why would you care about those Samsung says it can handle two thousand eight hundred eighty terabytes of transfer through its lifetime Which is I think the highest consumer Rating of any drive they have it's not the first eight terabyte SSD but it's the first consumer marketed one the first one that you'll have an easy time getting just through your normal sources Well, I mean as as you know somebody who does a lot of post-production work and the files are big I have lots of external drives Usually they're one or two terabytes and they kind of run somewhere from 80 to a hundred bucks each So to have eight terabytes at a time for just under a thousand dollars would come in handy You know, I don't have like a pressing need for it right the second But you know if you're doing a lot of stuff where you got to back up a lot of data Um, I mean it's so convenient to have one drive rather than eight. Yeah, I mean Yeah, yeah, I think Price-wise it's not that crazy. I would have expected it to be maybe a little bit higher than that. So All right, let's talk about printing meat Israeli startup red fine meat announced it will launch 3d printers to produce plant Alt-stakes that taste similar to beef the startup claims 3d printing helps mimic the structure of real muscle redefine meat will I said red fine. It's actually redefine Meat will market the 3d printed stakes to high-end restaurants this year next year It will roll out into industrial printers to meet distributors capable of printing 20 kilograms an hour at a lower cost than real meat I love this story. I don't know what it is about it that just captured my imagination but the fact that it's it's 3d printers that it's gonna bring This kind of plant-based meat down to a lower cost Than real meat which would increase adoption That it's it's going to maybe improve the texture and that's what their claim is We'll wait and see but maybe improve the texture because they'll be able to mimic that structure Of actual muscle that goes into meat. I feel like this is a real tech story There's been a lot of like trying to get the the plant-based meat into technology and they showed up at CES But it's like oh now we have 3d printers printing it. I just wish these things were healthier I mean, they are arguably healthier than real meat But they have a lot of oil in them and arguably how are they healthier than real meat because you don't have the cholesterol content You know, you know, you know There's a there's a few advantages to them But there's not as many advantages as actually just switching to a plant-based diet, right? Yeah, I mean the whole idea, you know, if you eat a lot of red meat. Yeah, I mean That's an issue if you can 3d print some all meat that you know gives you the taste without the cholesterol That's awesome. You know, it always comes down to, you know, someone eating, you know A burger or whatever something on their plate and saying this either is you know I can't distinguish between the two or it's fine, but I can tell that isn't real or it's bad You know, it's one of it's one of the three of those things I'm astounded that in the advantages of alt meat You didn't mention the ecological aspect. It's I was talking specifically about nutritional, but you're right There is also an ecological benefit as well. Yeah But you know the big thing maybe I missed a couple of episodes and the alt meat saga, but isn't Ground beef is, you know burgers are relatively common nowadays. This is actual steak, right? Yeah So this is something that is I don't think I've seen stories about Marketed coming to market steaks before maybe I missed some of them That's a good question because what I see usually is Is the Beyond Meat burgers I do believe they have some steaks. I just don't think they're very good Again because they don't have again. That's the thing. Yeah, it's like is it is it technically, you know comparable Yes, is it good that That's the only way that people are going to adopt this kind of thing is if it's good Which to be fair this one might also not be good I guess we don't know but but burgers have come to to a point where they're a Decent alternative even to people who just like, you know, maybe they're not Adores of burgers, but I like a good burger and I've eaten more than one That was that was absolutely fine that I'm happy to eat So if that happens with the 3d printing technology that manages to create the texture of the muscle That would be pretty good Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University developed a politeness transfer engine to automatically make north american english written communication more polite By workplace standards the engine is similar to those used on images to convert from one style to another like Making a photo of you would look like a 16th century painting for example The politeness engine was trained on a data set of half a million emails from nron employees made public as part of legal proceedings applications could Include customer service chat bots or autosuggesting text in email Support for the research was provided by apple and vidya the nsf the air force research laboratory and the office of naval research I Yes, we do Because first of all politeness is uh, uh, uh great Characteristic of everything, but it's not just you know for having fun on a a a test project it can be used as Potentially of course chat bots are a great use for that, but I can absolutely imagine the same way Program helps you with your grammar. Maybe it could help you with your politeness. Uh, that would improve The nuance and tone is so difficult to uh to to to Transmit through written text I think that would be very helpful if it actually works and could improve communication online communication as a whole Yeah, we in a uh an upcoming episode of work in sanity hosted by myself and patrick masia We had a question from a listener about how to keep the tone in your email Right and this would be the kind of tool you could use for that if this was out there to say like Hey, look this over algorithm And let me know where I could improve the politeness of of what i'm writing It sounds silly, but we so often in written communication think one thing and people receiving the communication Read another and just having a third party check that Is a is a great way to reduce misunderstanding I wonder if this could be used on social media. That's Why not? Here's hoping Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com Discord posted tuesday that it will shift its focus from video game communication to broader community creation In practice, this means they've got a streamlined setup experience Some updated templates to make it easier to set up a discord server stuff like that just just a little less geeky For broader appeal discord also said it will have fewer jokes within the app that reference games Then i get rid of all of them, but you know not everybody gets all the jokes So they're gonna broaden out the jokes to it. That's one of the things I like about discord is their sense of humor And discord says it will quote continue to take decisive action against white supremacists racist and others who seek to use Discord for evil So there's a whole safety center they've set up that they're going to keep working on to to help people feel like They can keep themselves safe in discord discord's new tagline is now your place to talk Discord usage since the beginning of the year has risen 50 in the us doubled in france and spain and tripled in italy This is a really interesting one, you know discord has started To be being used in as they're saying many different fields and areas way beyond gaming i've personally had Reports from people who are telling me in france They're using it for classroom work or they were during the the lockdown and of course when you think of collaboration tools for Communities or companies discord and slack i think are the two that have been in the past few years taking the entire space Of course, there are upcoming others But discord and slack are very similar and in the case of slack their insistence of on On making revenue which they achieve by inciting people to pay for the service and for additional features has kind of let i think Given discord a little bit more more space to attract people with additional features getting back to the thing about schools One teacher was explaining to me that they were very simply labeling voice channels in discord, which you don't have for In slack if you unless you pay for stuff Voice channels in discord as classrooms, you know, they would give classroom numbers and students would go from one classroom to another Through the classroom number as their classes, you know, their schedule would move through the day And these it's just one example, but I really think that discord has had this User growth mentality that is a little bit Early 2000 social network or early 2010s social networks and user growth before revenue And that has given them it's been a success for them when it doesn't always work out that way Yeah, I mean the whole kind of gamer aspect of Of of discord It kind of reminds me of the first days of twitch where there were people who I wanted to work with and twitch was A good platform for certain things and they were sort of like we was about video games Like i'm not really sure how this works for me Discord kind of had that issue at first didn't have an issue with people who are you know gamers That used it as a platform, you know to talk to each other about all of that stuff But it was a little bit of like a barrier to entry I think for people who weren't sure that this was something that they could use for other things And you know as platforms get big You have to open it up to a lot of folks. So this makes a lot of sense to me Yeah Well and twitch used to specifically forbid anything that didn't involve video game talk discord never even did that Which I think was smarter because it allowed it to grow I mean, I maybe it's not smarter because twitch was doing a different thing and transitioning away from justin tv Etc But but what I think discord did well was realize. Hey, this is where our community is taking us Let's let's make that better for them Slack doesn't want to be A tool for community slack wants to be a tool for business So what they're doing makes sense, which is like, hey, you know, you could try it out for free But really if you want to make it useful you need to pay us because we're for the enterprise And they're competing with microsoft teams rather than competing with discord discord is better for just an open community And that's why I am in way more discord than I am slacks because slack is productivity oriented Discord is enjoyment oriented. And so every patreon that I'm a member of I'm in like 20 discord servers Just, you know, most of them from patreon alone And and it is more friendlier to being able to just chat with people Slack you can do it, but you kind of have to to work around their purpose And it's really not what they wanted you to do. They want you to use it for for enterprise Yeah, and I hope I was I didn't sound too dismissive of slack because it was actually paying them a compliment on their business approach because they actually have a lot of paying users and That's probably a good way to go if you want to be a successful business But it certainly does afford opportunities to other players in that field and I feel like over time Slack has solidified their where for business stance and discord is kind of raking in Everyone else and of course, there's you know teams and others. I think Zoom and even google meets are interesting Things that are kind of in the same space, but of course they're just for conference goals and that call alone Discord provides a much fuller type of experience and service Including very robust video calls now. So I think it might be a An alternative for many different people that don't realize it could be and it's very smart of them to go chasing them It seems like the nitro that you pay for which gets you some little perks Is making them enough money right now. I wonder if it can scale. I hope that it can scale Because I don't want them to put major features behind the paywall like slack does And and it seems like that's working before we wind up this topic though We do need to honor our ancestors and say thank you irc for taking the way Because really all these are just kind of like takes on irc in in prettier packages with with bells and whistles So, you know irc still kicking out there. Don't forget about it Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our sub reddit. Sometimes irc stories show up there Sometimes it's something completely different. You can submit stories and vote on others at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com Oh, let's check out the mailbag. Oh Let's uh, we got a good one from Gregory Who's a developer because we've been talking recently about, you know Where developers are coming from when they make the rules that they make for their apps Gregory says i'm a developer by profession I can tell you that data sets are typically collected and collated by people independent of developers Developers seldom collect data used in this modeling. A good example is weather related data used in forecasting models Another is tesla's driver data collection used in improving their self-driving algorithms An independent uh firm group set of sensors or a different branch of a company Will typically do this data collection and provide the data to the developers to test to use in testing and proving their algorithms I'm not providing a pass for these companies lack of diversity But I would like to make it clear that if there are gaps in the data being used to develop a technology Such as facial recognition that is not usually the fault of the developer or development group But a fault in the project oversight management. Yeah, that's a really good point Gregory It's it's there needs to be pressure put on the people who make the data sets available To make a wider range of data sets available with with with better data in them and the developers can put that pressure on them Which is why Gregory is like i'm not giving people a pass But it's if the developers are trying to develop something and they only have a certain number of data sets to choose from You could say well, can't you make your own data set? That's a whole other job And it's a difficult one to to put together these data sets Not saying they couldn't do that, but that would increase quite a bit the time and cost Of development. So, you know, hopefully the developers are asking The data set projects out there to improve their data sets Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including michael akins chris ellen and jeffrey zelks also thanks to patrick beija You know, it's summer in finland. What else has been going on? Rain, uh, it was very warm for a few a couple of weeks now. It's been raining like cats and dogs and other kinds of animals But if you like what I do and want to check out other things that I do tom mentioned the Work from home podcast work insanity, which is pretty cool 15 minutes every monday to give you tips About working from home and I will would also recommend you check out Pixels, which is a show about games and I will be doing a Spoiler full review of the last of us part two Probably tomorrow so subscribe to pixels now and you'll get it tomorrow You can always support our show at any level at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon It's where we get the majority of our money It's why all of us here are eating Thank you at for some morning us at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon next week is security week We're going to focus on security on next week show starting monday july 6 Featuring special security guests each day of the week including alan alford mike johnson from the siso series podcast Seth rosenblatt who covers technology and security elissa miller covering topics like improving your security while telecommuting and understanding deep fakes So be sure to tune in for daily tech news show next week on security week In the meantime if you have some burning questions or comments You can email us our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com We're live monday through friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern That's 20 30 utc and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with scott johnson talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com The club hopes you have enjoyed this program