 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including James C. Smith, Miranda Jennell, Justin Zellers, and our lifetime supporter, Nathan Anderson. Thank you for all the time, Nate. On this episode of DTNS, do you want to buy a car on Amazon? Well, now you can, depending on the car, plus more evidence that AI is disrupting that old assistant market. And Tim Stevens is here to talk about the future of tires. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, November 17, 2023. From Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. From upstate New York, I'm Tim Stevens. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Jain. Oh, Tim Stevens, we are so glad to have you back with us and hopefully at home and able to relax over the holidays because you are a man on the move. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I was just in Korea last week, in Japan the week before that, and Barcelona the week before that. So yeah, it's good to be home for a little while. Well, listen, breaking news right before show time. Sam Altman, out as CEO of OpenAI. In a statement, the company said that following a board review, he was deemed not consistently candid in his communications. CTO Mirat Muradi will become interim CEO. Well, there will be more news about this on Monday, but in the, you know, yeah, let's start with a quick heads. Following Elon Musk's Twitter, now ex-takeover last year, API pricing changes have proven challenging to researchers trying to access and study the platform's data. Article 40 of the Digital Services Act requires large platforms to offer data access to vetted researchers. An update to ex's developer terms now allows researchers in the EU to access and use the social networks licensed data for DSA-related research purposes. The update says that data should only focus on the detection, identification, and understanding of systemic risks in the European Union. The European Commission has temporarily suspended advertising on ex based on widespread concerns relating to the spread of disinformation. The Commission's deputy chief spokesperson, Dana Spynet, says recent disinformation on ex led to the institution to recommend to temporarily suspend advertising on this platform until further notice to avoid risk of reputational damage to the Commission. Speaking of the European Commission, Apple filed a legal case contesting decisions by the EC under its recently introduced Digital Markets Act. The new legislation targets 22 gatekeeper services that are run by six tech companies. These are kind of the big six, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. The proposed legislation is designed to make it easier for people to move between competing services. Also requiring services to interoperate their messaging apps with their rivals and let users decide which apps to pre-install on their devices. The U.S. Department of Justice wrapped up its main arguments against Google on Thursday in the two months long trial where Google is accused of breaking antitrust law. The DOJ stands as that Google is acting as a monopoly. Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia did not indicate which way you're playing the rule saying, I have no idea what I'm going to do. Well, you know, at least being honest, right? Social Network Blue Sky had some good news announcing today. It's hit two million users and also said its public web interface will go live by the end of this month and importantly will also launch Federation early next year. Federation allows anybody to run their own service and connect to any other service using the same protocol, at least if it works as advertised. Blue Sky's protocol is the AT protocol. The other major decentralized social network Mastodon uses a well-established protocol called ActivityPodlet. All right, let's talk about buying a car on Amazon at the Los Angeles Auto Show this week, Hyundai and Amazon announced a joint partnership starting in 2024 where U.S. auto dealers will be able to sell new vehicles on Amazon, which makes Hyundai the first automotive brand to offer this option to its customers. Now, the company said in a joint statement, this will make it easier for somebody who wants a new car to buy it on Amazon from a local dealership, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, they're going to say that and then they can pick it up or have it delivered. These services already exist, but not on Amazon until today. As part of this partnership, Hyundai will also include Amazon's assistant, you know who she is, in the branded cars beginning in 2025. Now, Tim, this could be the way of the future. This could be a terrible idea. Where do you stand? I'm excited about the potential here, but I think it's important to note that this is a pretty small step. Right now, Hyundai is saying that somewhere around 15 to 20 of their dealerships are going to be on board with this. They have over 800 dealerships in the U.S., which means the vast majority, at least for now, have not opted to sell their cars through Amazon, which means that the vast majority of people won't be able to buy a car locally through Amazon, even if they do want a Hyundai. That's because dealers really still feel like they want to own the relationship with consumers directly. They don't want any intermediaries between them and the people that are buying their cars because it's just one more middle man who's going to have to take a cut out of the pie. Right now, I think it's a small step, but ultimately, I think this is a good step. I wouldn't be surprised if those dealers that do sign up for this are able to show some strong numbers and ultimately strong satisfaction from their consumers. Hopefully, that'll mean it'll spread out and become much bigger, much more quickly. I kind of wonder, when I initially saw this, I initially thought, the dealers aren't going to be happy with this. Then, of course, it showed that the dealers are actually on board it's going through dealers, but I still wonder who's going to lose the points because it's not like Amazon is going to do this and not make anything. That means that someone at a dealership is going to make a little bit less when a car sells through Amazon because the points that go to them normally would now go to Amazon. I'm just curious how that's going to work. How are the dealerships going to keep their salespeople happy if they're not actually selling all the cars? Yeah, we don't have the details on the terms for this, just yet exactly what those cuts are like. But yeah, for sure, there's definitely going to be some money going to Amazon. But that's one of the reasons why manufacturers, new manufacturers, manufacturers like Tesla are trying to cut out dealers entirely. The upwards of $2,000 to $3,000 are added onto the cost of a car just in kind of dealing with that dealer representation. But most states in the US require the dealer to be part of the loop. That's the way it has to be for now at least. I mean, is there anything... This is obviously, it's a big deal. Like you said, Tim, it's a small deal really in the grand scheme of buying a car. But is there anything on Amazon that would work in this capacity with a dealership selling something? When I say dealership, I'm meaning car dealership because we're talking about cars. But in any way where this has been proven to work successfully for Amazon and the dealers. That's a good question. I don't know of any examples of this working in the past. There are certainly plenty of other vendors that offer this kind of a service. So there are plenty of online retailers for cars. But the majority of them that have been most successful are all offering used cars because used car sales in the US aren't protected in the same way that new car sales are. So when you buy a car online, typically if you want to flax everything without having to go through a dealership, it's typically for a used car. Or one of those new startup manufacturers that are trying to get around the dealership laws like Tesla or Lucid or Rivian or something like that. But I haven't seen a partnership where Amazon is kind of dealing with like a co-sale sort of thing. We talk about them maybe having warehouse deals where small companies can have their inventory stored within Amazon. But this is a bigger step in a much more close partnership than we've seen. So I'm definitely curious to see how this evolves. Yeah, this is a it's pretty interesting. But you know, we're really talking about cars here. And let's switch over to talk about specifically EV. So one of the things you might miss when you move to an EV is the lack of a traditional mechanical transmission, aka a stick shift. But Toyota thinks what some people might be missing is their shiny inner shiny new electric car is a gear lever. So Toyota developed a manual BEV concept, an electric car with a manual gear shift. So Tim, I know your test drove one of these when you were in Japan. Can you explain the thinking behind the design? And you know, what did it feel like when you drove it? Yeah, this is an interesting prototype that Toyota put together. It's built on one of their existing EVs. Actually, it's a Lexus EV. And one of their engineers basically wasn't happy that EVs basically aren't as fun to drive as his current car, which is a Toyota with a manual transmission. He wanted to make EVs as engaging and as fun to drive. So what he did was he basically created a pretend transmission that he then came up with all the complicated software to replicate the behavior of manual transmission in his EV. So what you've got is basically a six speed transmission that is effectively just a joystick that sits between the seats in the normal position. There's a clutch pedal that is also mounted to the left of the brake pedal in its typical position. But that clutch pedal is only connected to a potentiometer, like you might have an accelerator pedal on a set of sim racing pedals for Gran Turismo or that kind of thing. So it is effectively the same kind of controls that you would have for playing a video game at home. But now it's connected to the EV. And the magic is all in the software. So when you get in this EV, when you turn the car on, when you enable the system, you immediately hear an engine idling, even though there's no engine. If you step on the accelerator, you hear the engine revving as if you were in neutral revving a car, even though there is no engine. And when you put the car into first gear, if you don't put the clutch in, the car will immediately stall. And then not only will the car stall, but it'll buck as if you had, you know, not come off the clutch as smoothly as you should. As you shift from one gear to the next, you can do things like rev matching, you can do towheel downshifting, you can do double clutching, all to make the experience more realistic and more natural. And so it's a really interesting simulation of a manual transmission. But the most interesting thing is that there's absolutely nothing happening. It is still an EV. There are no gears in the car. It's all just being simulated. And I thought I would hate it because it's just, you know, it's just you pretending to shift to pretend thing. But I surprised myself by actually really enjoying it. It was a lot of fun. So my question for you is that was good. Yeah, go ahead, Rob. I was just going to say when you, so when you hit the clutch, do you actually feel the loss of torque and it feels like the car slows down a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So if you're driving along and you kind of ease into the clutch, the revs will start to climb. Just like you're slipping a clutch in a real car and the car will start to lose speed. And then if you come off the clutch very abruptly, the car will leap forward just like you did that in a real manual transmission. He's got the simulation down. Absolutely perfect. It's amazing. Okay, that that is that is cool. I feel like, you know, this as a person who used to have manual shift cars, basically because they were the cheaper cars for, you know, in my formative years and was fine with it and also lived in San Francisco where it's like, you know, you got to get good on a clutch, you know, if you're driving a car around that city or anywhere, you know, there were a lot of hills, etc. I haven't had a manual car in quite some time, but you know, it does feel like a fun throwback era type thing. Now I had pulled a couple of people who are more kind of car snobby than I am about this exact story earlier, Tim, you know, and they were sort of like, I mean, but it's fake. It's all fake. It's not real. This doesn't do anything except enhance the driver experience. And I was like, but isn't that exactly what as a driver you would want? Like who really cares? If you're having fun, you're, you know, you're enjoying being in the car. This seems like a really good option. Yeah, absolutely. I've had a number of people tell me that this is a horrible idea because they're very strong driving purists. And they think that it's just adding unnecessary complexity to the system. But ultimately, there are a lot of people who still prefer to buy manual transmissions. In fact, Porsche has brought manual transmissions back to more of its cars, for example, because their consumers want these manual transmissions. But if you're the kind of buyer who will select a car specifically because it has a manual transmission, you are intentionally choosing to get a car that's probably slower, probably less efficient than a car that has something like a dual clutch transmission. Yeah, exactly. Because you want that driving experience. Now, whether or not that experience is real or not, whether that even matters is debatable, but you're making a choice ultimately to have data technology in your car. This is kind of the best of both worlds because you hit a button, you can have the full manual experience if you want it, hit that button again, and it goes away and it just drives like a normal EV. So it's kind of a nice solution in that way. But it is absolutely just kind of a, I call it a pantomime transmission. It is absolutely fake. There's absolutely no reason for it whatsoever, but it is fun. I mean, lots of things are fun because they're fun. You know, I mean, make driving fun again. I love that idea. Absolutely. I don't know, Rob, what do you think? I have actually driven like F1 simulators and it feels real after like 10 seconds, even though you are not accelerating really, even though you're not braking really, it feels like it because it tilts you up, it tilts you down. So this is, you will get the feel in your car of when you're going faster, when you're slipping your clutch, when those kind of things. So if the software is that good, unless you just, I have to drive a manual transmission, which you're just going to go buy, you know, an ICE with a manual transmission in it, I think that this will work for a lot of folks. Like I'm thinking right now, this would be fun for me. And I know as soon as my wife gets over into the driver's seat, she's going to turn it off. So it works for us. And there is actually a practical reason for this. As you mentioned, Sarah, it takes a while to really get good on a clutch and to figure out how to drive these cars. But with this system, there's nothing mechanical to break in the car. You can slip the clutch, you can over rev it, you can do all those things you want to and there's nothing to damage in the car. So if you're training someone new how to drive a manual car, this is a beautiful way to do it. All right. Well, all right. Let's talk about a little bit more of Amazon news today. The company says it's shifting the priorities of its assistant team, assistant team being, you know, the A team to focus more on generative AI, which includes things like shelving various initiatives and eliminating several hundred employee roles. Womp. This is part of a broader shift in priorities and a focus on developing new forms of artificial intelligence, according to an internal memo sent to employees Friday morning that Geekwire reported on. This is also something we've been musing about for some time here on DTNS. We're in a fast paced AI LLM world. How do the incumbents that would be, you know, Amazon's assistant or Siri or, you know, the Google Home, et cetera, a space, how do they compete? Well, what do we all think? So when it comes to what Amazon has been doing in this life, they've been losing money. They have been kind of behind, you know, I don't want to say everyone else, but they've definitely been behind behind Google in this space. So regardless of what's going on with AI, I think that they were looking to to make some changes here to maybe streamline. And this may be, you know, I don't want to call an excuse, but it may be a reason as to why they're going to make some cuts. But ultimately, I think that, you know, you know, in the last year in a couple of months, like, you know, last 14 months, AI has just driven everything news related. And they're like, okay, well, we're not there. So we need to catch up. So we've got to do something. And maybe this is the something that's going to allow them to try to catch up to what you have Google doing, what you have Microsoft doing, definitely what you have OpenAI doing. Yeah, I totally agree, Rob. Whenever I see some company talking about laying off people and talking about making a strategic shift, and they're not then pivoting those people to new roles or hiring new people as well, then it's kind of hard for me to not read that as just them needing an excuse to lay some people off. And that's what this feels like to me. But I will say that Amazon's AI summaries of customer reviews is probably the AI feature that I've used most across all the other AI services. And I will say that I think it's probably also the most valuable. So I do think there's a lot of potential within Amazon's broader brand to, you know, double down on AI stuff and bring a lot of practical use to customers and to all its media platforms and everything else too. But yeah, I have a hard time not reading this in a very cynical way. Pardon me. Dave Limp, who recently announced in about a couple of months ago that he was leaving, heading up the Devices and Services Division, said he would be leaving Amazon at the time. It was sort of like, hmm, that sounds interesting. We've got Panos Panay, former Microsoft executive coming in. So there may be some interesting new life going on. But yeah, as an Amazon assistance fan, because I talk to her all day, every day, she's right behind me now, in fact, and I don't want to say her name because I don't want to wake her up and upset everybody. I, you know, there's been a lot of talk of, well, you know, the Amazon, you know, that whole division, they really, they missed the mark here. They've got this kind of long in the long in the tooth assistant that is just not keeping up with the birds and the, you know, chat GPTs and this and that. And I've kind of, this entire time been like, yeah, but it works like really well for certain facets of my life. But also that's what you say until you're given something that works way better. And then you go, Oh, okay, I see where this was all going in the first place. That's kind of where I hope this is all going, you know, in a sense, anytime you have hundreds of people who are dismissed from a company that is the size of Amazon, you go, Hmm, that's interesting. Especially because Amazon is for sure working on new AI initiatives and why those particular people didn't get folded into some new division is, you know, maybe a little inside baseball, but I am curious about that. Yeah, like Tim said, they didn't fold the, you know, these folks into a new division. But a thing that is also true is that they're behind and they need to catch up. So it's probably two things happening. Convenient time to do a layoff if there ever is such a thing and the time to announce that, Hey, we are going to go after AI. So we're not significantly behind our competition because they compete with Google. They compete with Microsoft. They compete with open AI regardless of whether they're doing these things or not. And a Friday rip for the holidays is always a good time to lay people off if you're going to do it. Oh yeah. So you know what we should talk about? Just lighten the mood up a little bit. Let's talk about Tom's top five. So watch Tom's top five show where Tom breaks down the top five things you need to know about technology. This week, Tom covers the top five geekiest snacks, the foods that power you. You're all night gaming or coding sessions. You can catch Tom's top five at youtube.com forward slash daily tech news show. All right, this is going to be fun because it is Friday after all transitioning away from internal combustion engine cars to EVs won't magically make pollution disappear as much as we would hope it does. For example, cars, EV cars need tires. That's what cars run on tires also have an impact on the environment. In fact, they can be pretty big pollutants. So Tim, you've been following the story and let's talk a little bit about what's going on with tires and where we might go from here. Yeah. So when people think about tire pollution, I think a lot of folks think about the emissions from tire manufacturing perhaps or the things that are put in the environment as tires are being produced or maybe the mining to get the raw materials for tires. Or if you see a landfill full of tires that's on fire, obviously that's a pretty easy thing to perceive as well. But what a lot of folks don't really appreciate is the significance of the pollution that tires create when you're just driving around on them up to something like six million tons of particulates are put into the environment from tires every year. And that's just from the normal wear and tear of a tire that as you're driving around. And a recent study found that 78% of all the microplastics in the ocean originated in tires. So if you think about all the efforts to cut down on microplastics, the stuff that Patagonia is doing with the clothing, that kind of thing, all of that seems a little bit tiny by comparison. You think about the massive quantity of microplastics are being put into the environment by tires. So I looked into this quite a bit for this verge article basically digging into the volume of the problem and the things that are happening from a manufacturer standpoint to try to improve the situation, ultimately cutting down on those emissions from tires, and also some of the chemical implications from those tires as well and how those are impacting the environment and probably impacting our health as well. Yeah, that was going to be my question is how do you manufacturers knowing this information, how do they address it? Do they have to? They increasingly do have to, yes. So there are some regulations in place that are ultimately going to be cutting down on this in the EU. For example, they're putting regulations in place to monitor the overall emissions from a car. You know, we've for a long time been looking at CO2 outputs from a car with internal combustion, things like that. But really, we haven't been monitoring things like the pollution that your tires create. Going forward in the EU at least, we will be going forward having a mandate for the maximum amount of emissions from tires as well. And we'll probably see that picked up in California before too long and then probably spreading across the US after that. So that will help to some degree. But there are some more specific concerns that are also being addressed with this kind of evil compound called 6PPD, which is a tire preservative. And that in particular is being addressed in the Pacific Northwest and in California. 6PPD is a preservative that's basically used in tires to prevent them from breaking down in the sun. And when 6PPD hits the sun, it basically forms this compound called 6PPD quinone. And basically, there were issues with fisheries in the Northwest. A lot of fish populations were dying at a very young age right after rainfall. Environmental researchers found that it was because of the 6PPD compound was causing these fish to act erratically and ultimately die soon after birth. Because of that, there are now regulations in place that if manufacturers are going to continue to use 6PPD, they need to also invest into research into alternatives. There are no alternatives to 6PPD. This research was only a few years ago. So it's still really kind of breaking, cutting edge stuff. But that research is ongoing. And again, the manufacturers are being very proactive in working to find alternatives to research, the implications of this compound. So there's a lot of research ongoing and things are, you know, in general, there's a lot more awareness about these issues. But these issues are still in place and tires are still having a pretty significant impact on the environment. Yeah, that's a problem because people tend to drive outdoors most often. And that's where the star, you know, the star we call the sun hits them like literally whenever it's daylight. So that's a, I guess you never really think about, I think that when we think about tires and you know, and how they, you know, pollute the environment is always what happens after the tire comes off the car. But a lot of this is showing that there's a lot that goes into the environment just because the tires are on the car regardless of whether you're driving it or not. Yeah, I was I was thinking the same thing, Rob. It's like, I mean, if you set a tire on fire, well, that's don't breathe that smoke, you know, kind of thing. But I think, well, I mean, unless we're doing that, I mean, you know, the tires are just they're just doing their thing. But you could say that about, I don't know, plastic Tupperware as well. You know, the more we know, the better off we all are. And it sounds like, you know, this is all going in the right direction, right, Tim? Right. And actually, one of the craziest things that I learned has to do with tire burning. So half of all the tires, so about 250 million tires each year are disposed of in the US alone. That's that's a lot of tires. And half of them are burned, burned for fuel. And that's, that's actually pretty well known. So it's kind of a scary statistic, but that means 125 million tires are burned each year. But the really interesting thing that I learned was that burning a tire for fuel is actually roughly the same implication to the environment as burning coal. It's actually no more or less dangerous to the environment than burning coal, which to me was pretty indicative of just how not great burning coal is for the environment. But, but yeah, there are a lot of implications, as you said, Rob, you know, we don't want our tires to break down in the sun, but we also don't want our tires to be polluting our fish. So they're working on alternatives there. But we also see a lot of things. Goodyear and British own and other manufacturers are working on alternate sources for rubber. There's a plant called guayale, which is a natural way of growing rubber in the southwestern US, even in drought conditions that can grow and form rubber. So things like that are offsetting some of the more dangerous things that are in tires. We still have a long way to go, but all the manufacturers very actively working on it. And there is reason for optimism. Well, Tim Stevens, there is nobody better to tell us about the future of tires and cars in general than you. And thank you so much for bringing your knowledge to the show and just a reminder that we've got a bunch of links in our show notes for anybody who wants to know a little more, as it were, about our conversation about cars and tires and manual transmission and all the things. But for now, we're going to thank Len Peralta for drawing a story of a tech story that we've been talking about behind the scenes. So Len, let's check in with you now and see where we are. Sure thing. So here's the way my mind works. We talked about buying cars on Amazon. We talked a little bit about this, the new shifter and tires here. And, you know, I'm a big fan of big daddy at Roth and ratfink. And that's sort of where this came from this image. I have a crazy thought of just tires rubber burning. And I felt it was like, Oh, wow, this has never been done before. At least I don't know, calling it the like an EV sort of ratfink image. And I call this one I call this speed and evil EV being the the big thing there. So apologies to big daddy at Roth. And we love hearing about cars and hearing about tires and shifters and all that good stuff. So it was a lot of fun to draw. If you are interested in this piece, if you're a big fan of big daddy, you can go to my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len where you get it. If you back me at the DTS lover level, you get this image immediately or go to the old fashioned way, go to my online store at Len Brawl the store.com. You can pick it up right there. And you can also order a custom drawn holiday card. It is that time of year and they do make a great gift. So think about it. And thanks a lot for having me up. Yeah. So when we love having you draw stuff for us on the show, but we also love having Tim Stevens on the show. Tim, why don't you tell us what you're into? You know, working folks get ahold of you. Thanks, Rob. Yeah, you can read that article about tires on the verge. You can check out my EV impressions over on Ars Technica and you can follow me on a lot of social media platforms. I'm Tim Stevens, most places and Tim Stevens dot substack commons, where I try to keep folks up to date with what I'm up to. Well, Tim Stevens, we're so glad to have you on with us. Thanks for being here. And also thanks to our patrons. Patrons, stick around for the extended show. Good day internet. It is Friday after all. And that means another round of who am I? That's the game where we all try to figure out why these people are famous before somebody else does. But just a reminder, we do the show live. We're on demand as well, but you can catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4pm Eastern 2100 UTC. And you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We're back on Monday doing it all again with Nika Montford joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of daily tech news show were created by the following people. Host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and cohost Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding, our mods, beatmaster, W. Scottus 1, bio-cow, capped kipper, Steve Boaterama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget vs. Uozo and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustapha A, ACAST and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, ACAST's ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeil, contributors for this week's shows include Allison Sheridan, Scott Johnson and Tim Stevens. Guests on this week's show included Will Saddleburg and Will Smith. Thanks to all our patrons, you make this show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.