 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you right there listening right now. Thanks to you, maybe your Tim deputy, or Brandon Brooks, or Hector Bones, or one of our brand new bosses, Connoru or Harold. Both just started back on us on Patreon. Thanks, Connoru and thanks, Harold. Coming up on DTNS, what is a digital twin? Rob DeMillo has worked with them and he explains the difference between a twin and a model. Plus, Direct TV still has the NFL, kind of, and do you like the new Leica? Sarah does. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, May 26, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, Chief Technology Officer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Rob DeMillo, welcome back. Hello, everyone. Good to see you. Thank you for bringing your twin knowledge. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Your digital twin. My digital twin knowledge, yeah. Yeah, be specific. Are we talking to Rob or Rob's digital twin? We'll never tell. You'll never know. You'll never know. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Google started rolling out its search generative experience to search results for some users that already requested early access. This not only uses generative AI for results, but also sorts responses into colorful cards. The experimental feature is opt-in, and Google said the feature would initially be available for a limited time. The augmented reality glasses maker N-Real announced it is no longer called N-Real. It is now called X-Real. They just fought to have the right to use the name N-Real and then thought, you know what, let's just change it anyway. The company also announced the now called X-Real Beam, a small device that lets its glasses connect to a smartphone, gaming console or PC, either wired over USB-C or wirelessly. It's about the size of a deck of cards or an old iPod, something like that. Pre-orders open June 1st, no pricing was announced. Well, we do have pricing for Twitter API Pro, the company's new API pricing tier that costs $5,000 per month. It includes the ability to gather up to 1 million tweets and post 300,000 tweets per month as well. In other API news, an email seen by The Independent shows that Twitter plans to require academic researchers using its Decahose feed to subscribe to its enterprise pricing tier when their existing contracts renew. Current contracts cost a few hundred dollars a month. The Decahose provided academics with a random 10% sample of the Twitter fire hose. Twitter also said academics not renewing contracts would have to expunge all Twitter data stored and cashed in your systems. Good luck with that. The computer brain interface company Neuralink announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared it for its first human-in-human clinical trial. Yeah, not dogs, humans, in-human clinical trial. No word on what the study would specifically look at, and Neuralink said it had not started recruiting for it yet, but it is a big step for Neuralink to go from just demos and statements to actually being allowed to conduct trials. According to the app intelligence firm Data.ai, OpenAI's chat GPT iOS app surpassed 500,000 downloads within six days of launching. In fact, they could launch just a week ago today. Since 2022, only the Truth social app saw more downloads in the U.S. in that same window. All right. Let us discuss sports bars. Rob, you are excused from this conversation. Thank you. I'm going to just excuse myself. I'll have a question for you at the end of this, as someone who never goes to sports bars, but YouTube TV may have the rights to show NFL Sunday ticket to home users in the U.S., but if you go to a bar or a restaurant or even like a casino or something, the games still come from Direct TV. NFL Sunday ticket lets subscribers pay to watch all the Sunday NFL football games if you're unfamiliar with how it works. And after 28 years, the service is moving to YouTube TV for home users. Yeah, after 28 years, not 28 years now. No, 28 years of Direct TV, and now it's moving to YouTube TV. Yeah, but as you mentioned, bar and restaurants still need a special license to show games, which Direct TV for Business does cover. Direct TV has renewed that part of the deal with the NFL. And you might not realize that Direct TV's business service also carries games streamed exclusively on Peacock, Apple TV Plus, and Amazon Prime Video. If you're thinking that, well, that would be great. I want that in my home as well. The price is in the past has been based on occupancy of the business, starting at $650 per season for Sunday ticket and getting more expensive for larger venues. YouTube TV's version starts at $349 for the season. Yeah, so I just thought this was interesting because a lot of people may not realize that when you're watching in a bar, it's not a cable subscription. Even if you're watching Amazon Prime Video, it's not Amazon Prime Video. You are watching Direct TV business in most cases. There are a few other providers out there. I know a lot of the cable companies have commercial versions of services, but Direct TV is the biggest provider of these sorts of things because they have all these deals. And while they've been letting them go with their consumer version of the service, they are beefing them up and becoming the place to go if you want to have a sports bar. I was at a sports bar, well, a bar that shows sports last night. Just this morning. Just one hour ago for lunch was real quick. No, it was you. We were watching some basketball and some golf. But yeah, this particular bar, which shall not be named, does not subscribe to this. They're kind of doing a little bit of a, we're acting like a home, but we are a business type thing. And because of that, things are a little bit more limited. You can't just sort of say, hey, put on the game on channel, whatever, because you're going to have it. So, you know, whether or not you're worried about getting in trouble, there are some restrictions there. But otherwise, yeah, I'd love to have bar privileges to watch everything for $150 or $350 rather for a season. No, it's going to cost you $650. And you have to have the business service, I think. I don't think you can just get an NFL Sunday ticket and the business service is more expensive as well because it's covering the licensing that allows you to essentially do a public performance. When you show TV in a bar or restaurant, it's considered a public performance. So whenever you hear those disclaimers on sports, you know, the rights are reserved by the Major League Baseball, any public performance, et cetera, et cetera, that's what they're talking about. Like, you need to have, you need to pay extra to have those rights. Direct TV covers that. Other companies cover it too. And it looks like Direct TV for business is covering it well. The other piece of Direct TV news today is that Direct TV Stream is going to start giving away those tele-free TVs that we talked about, the ones that have the very intense terms of service. Really? Yeah. So the way that's working is if you are a Direct TV Stream user who takes advantage of that offer, you'll be put higher on the priority list, on the wait list for that free tele-TV. That is the question I have for you, Rob. Like, that terms of service requires that TV to be your primary television. You can't put it in a spare room. You've got to let it spy on you. Would you want it even if it was free with a subscription? Why? Yeah. I mean, why would you do that? I mean, if you can get all this stuff on YouTube TV, you know, if they're running all those deals on YouTube TV, why would you agree to do something like that? Well, and to be clear, Direct TV Stream is the home version of Direct TV. Of course. So it's not going to give you all of this stuff that's on Prime Video. You know what? I'll put out a couple of beers, open up the windows, invite a few friends over, and then get the Direct TV service. All right. Sarah, there is a camera that seems to have caught your eye today. Indeed. It has. I haven't bought a standalone camera in some time, but I like to follow the camera news as does our very own Rich Drafilino, who's sort of our resident camera person, who threw this story our way. Leica introduced the Q3, which is an update to its 28 millimeter fixed lens, full frame camera, offering a new 60 megapixel sensor, can shoot up to 8K video, and record in Apple ProRes at 1080p. It's the first in the Q series to offer a tilting rear touchscreen and also uses more modern phase detect auto focus. It's IP 52 water and dust resistance, offers wireless charging through an optional hand grip and is available for pre-order if this all sounds good to you for $5,995. Now Rich noted when you saw that we were going to talk about this today that it's been a week for camera announcements. We had the Sony ZV12, we had the Canon R100, the Fuji XS20. Those are all fairly creator focused vlogger cameras, if you will, but this one's pro, right? It's very pro, and the price reflects that. If you're familiar with Leica, Leica is a... I mean, I don't want to say it's a hipster camera because it's a beautiful camera, and its line of cameras are sort of top tier, not only... It's a hip brand. It's a hip brand, yeah. No, certainly not. It's been the camera for... I mean, it is the camera. Yeah, like if you can, if you can part with $6,000 and you're going to use the features, this is, you know, certainly going to be in the running. One of the things, though, that seems to have people very divided is that tilting rear touchscreen. You know, like... Sorry, Roger, go ahead. Oh, no, no, I was going to say, it's like... I'm going to jump all over that. They finally included an articulated screen on the back of the camera that they didn't have for the longest time. Yeah, you may think that's not that big of a deal out there, but if you're a Leica fan, this is something you've been maybe jealous of that other cameras had that Leica did not. Is it though? I mean, so if you're a Leica fan, you're probably a professional photographer or a semi-pro, or a very excited... You like expensive furniture. Why? You get it? Yes, I get it. I see what you do there. This is not a selfie camera. This is not a thing where... Who cares? Nobody wants... You've got your phone. You want to take a selfie with your phone. Go ahead and do that. This is for high-resolution photography. This is for all the bells and whistles that you normally get with... that you used to get, actually, with physical lens cameras. And it's in the same price range that professional cameras have always been. So I think they're just hitting that spot, that's all. I mean... Okay, go ahead. Let's do it, Roger. I can see it. I can see your eye. Leica, at least in the digital space for the longest time, has been positioned as kind of the camera person's camera. That in the same way that the BMW has always been the driver's machine. Honestly, I think six grand is kind of a bit much. You're paying for maybe $3,500 worth of technology and then spending another $2,500. So you have, like, glue to the front. It's a very capable camera. It does feature a lot, but there's a lot of granted, bulky or larger cameras that do a lot of the same things and additional functionality for around the same price. So it is a compact, very small form factor, full frame. And this is the key. It's a full frame sensor. So you can get a 60 pixel shot with a backlit sensor that is going to look stunning, but the question I still have, is it worth six grand? And everything I've read up on it doesn't really point to yes on it. Everyone who's tested really enjoys it, but when you come down to the value proposition, is six grand really... Do you think it's better to spend $6,000 on another camera? Or a camera with some accessories that you would be able to afford? Or a cheaper camera that you could gin up with some accessories. Yeah, because I mean, anybody who's in that prosumer level knows that. I mean, just buying a couple lenses. Well, it depends on the lenses, but that's going to go up to $6,000 pretty quickly. Just lenses alone. When you buy a camera, I mean, at least if you're doing it either as a hobby or as a living, you buy into the system, right? You're buying either into the Canon mount, you're buying Nikon mount, Sony mount, whatever. And then hopefully maybe there's a third party like Tokina that makes a lens for your mount. It's definitely a very attractive, a very seductive product. Six grand, still pretty steep. It is pretty steep, but nothing's changed. I mean, that has been... You know, their price point has been the three to six to eight thousand. For a long time, right? So your beef is not with this camera. Your beef is with Leica. It's the cost of putting that name on it. Yeah, of course. But there's a reason for it, right? I can't believe I'm being a Leica apologist here. Somebody needs to be. Thank you, Rob. So in my old world of doing animation and all the rest of this stuff, Leica did a lot of experimentation. So they put a lot of money into these kind of funky $250,000 rigs that would do interesting things for special effects and do tracking and all that other stuff. So they're doing a lot of work in the optical engineering space. And there's a price for that. Comma, yes. And Leica adds another couple of grand under the name on the camera. I mean, even the glass if you use with like an adapter from 20 years ago, still amazing, right? I mean, that's just a quality manufacturing, but also the formula that they put into making the glass. You get a great lens on a good body, but again, you go back to there are a lot of competent competitors to this product. So, all right, so there are $300 watches. There are $25,000 watches. That's a good guess. Does one make one better than the other? I mean, the $25,000 watches is assembled by hand by a little old, you know, Swiss guy in a back room somewhere. But it's a little different though because the $25 watch tells time. Well, I'm sure there's a clock in Leica. Perfectly. You don't say, you know, the time was a little blurry on that. No, the time is worth $10,000. The argument here is luxury item versus non-luxury item, prosumer versus consumer. That's your actual concern and there's a valid argument there, but to take that camera out of that realm and put it into is it worth it? Yeah, of course it's worth it. For a camera. Yeah, why would you not? Well, jump in, let us know. Where are you? Are you following this spectrum? Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Meanwhile, I'm going to tell you something entirely uncontroversial that you will just agree with. I have decided what the top five greatest tech companies of all time are and it's in my new episode of top five available at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. No, there's no reason to argue all the time and I've decided unilaterally what they are. Who could possibly disagree with me? Go find out what they are at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. Can I guess, Singer Selling Machine, ETSL? No spoilers. Like a... Like a... I thought you were starting a sentence. You're saying like a... Back on April 7th we discussed a next web article about digital twins. It talked about a book from professors Peter Konveny and museum director Roger Highfield about using digital twins of people modeling all their internal workings just like you would with an airplane. So a couple examples we discussed back then were Barcelona Super Computing Center's Alia Red, which is a digital twin of a heart used to do things like help position a pacemaker. Comp Biomed worked with Germany's Super Muck NG to model blood flow in a 26-year-old and some models have been approved for what are called in silico drug trials where you use the model to do drug testing. Rob, you've actually worked with digital twins. Tell us a little bit about your experience and what the difference is between this and just a model. So I've worked with them a few times in my career. So digital twinning comes from NASA. So a long time ago they were using digital twins to model rocket engines and how they would respond to turbulence and heat and a bunch of other things and design changes and that kind of thing. So I used to work with NASA JPL and so there's some of that there but my biggest brush with digital twinning came when I worked for the FAA where we would model weather around airports digitally and then we'd put planes in the air test pilots in the air to run through where the model predicted that's ahead. Did digital test pilots then? A little bit. Actually there was a fun crew and there's a whole story we could tell about this at some other time. So were people actually in planes in real life? Yeah. These are the guys that flew through hurricanes. All you do is we predict like a microburst or a wind shear at a given location and they would go and roll the sensors on the plane and fly through it and make sure they're there. So we'd feed that back into the model and that's kind of the point. Right now I'm at an architecture firm and we're looking at digital twinning for architecture as well. So the difference and the reason that I lit up when you guys were talking about this in the early April timeframe was there is a bizarrely enormous yet subtle difference between digital modeling and digital twinning. So all of the examples that were given in that specific episode and the ones you just listed digital models are exactly what they sound like. You are building a digital model of a human heart you're building a digital model of a building of a plane whatever it is and it can be incredibly exacting and you can run all sorts of tests on that digital model you can take a digital model of a plane and run it through a digital wind tunnel to see how the wind behaves over the wings and how it acts in wind shear all that stuff. That's true. The point at which it becomes a digital twin is when you start introducing real world sensors into the physical object. So in the example I gave for the FAA that was the case we would model a heavy weather condition an invisible heavy weather condition we would load this plane up with sensors we would fly through that heavy weather condition and those sensors would inform the model and that's the key point. This is a digital model that is running and it can be as exact as you want it to be but it's still just a model you've used math to create that thing and prior information and data that you've collected through other means you can do a CAT scan of a human being using your heart model you can do a CAT scan of a human being get down to the nanometer on the heart itself and build that model and then when you start putting cardiomunus devices into the heart so that they can measure what's happening in the physical world and then that physicality that measurement of the physicality re-informs the model and software changes the model to match the reality. I think I've got this but let me know if I'm expressing it right here so in those examples that we were giving they probably sounded like models because we didn't I was giving it like a surface description of them but let's go to the one from Germany from SupermucNG they modeled blood flow in a complete circulatory system that's a model that's very good but it's not anybody's circulatory system in particular until they created the digital twin of a 26 year old woman called Yoon Sun and now it's her circulatory system with sensors sending feedback of what her actual system is doing and they can use that to try things on Yoon Sun that they wouldn't actually want to try on the actual Yoon Sun but they can try it on her digital twin is that right? 100% right so the first model you gave was they set up the circulatory system they probably ran computational fluid dynamic algorithms and took in the viscosity of blood as it moves through the system they modeled exactly what they think was going to happen the second half of that paragraph that you just gave they were putting sensors in so they knew so they had this computational fluid dynamic model of blood flowing through the circulatory system then they put sensors in and they went our model's not quite right because we have to do this, that and the other thing now where it gets interesting and this is where it personally interests me is that in addition to sensors there are actuators to the equation and an actuator is a device that takes an action okay so in the case of, let's talk about architecture let's talk about the actually we can stay on the heart or we can talk about architecture let's stay on the heart so you would put as sensors you'd put a pulse device or a cardiomemes device you're added to the circulatory system to take that measurement action with the blood flow and present that back to the model that is a legitimate digital twin now it gets interesting now you say okay I'm going to put an actuator into this equation I'm going to put a a stimulator, electrical stimulator on the heart and now my model is saying okay this person is starting to get arrhythmia I can control the arrhythmia by sending an electrical signal to that heart actuator and make sure because I'm monitoring the blood flow that what I'm doing is working and then it can re-inform itself that way and you get this feedback loop that becomes interesting in architecture it's the same thing you would put IoT sensors in a building you would model the airflow through a building you could control the windows and the AC and the HVAC units and the vent controllers so that the building is operating a peak efficiency how is that difference from just monitoring like where does the digital twin come into that? there's a computer in the middle so it's doing a little like let me just look into the future in my digital twin and see what would happen okay yeah that's the right thing there's something that's happening with the sensors that was here's no way to think about it all red does that with positioning pacemakers so that makes sense to me yeah so a really really good digital model like a beautiful digital model it's still a model it's somebody mathematically modeled that thing and it may be it may take into account all the latest knowledge and everyone's understanding of how blood flows through vessels and everything to do with that but it is still just a model it is not reality so the second you put a sensor into that equation now you've got a situation where you started out with the human brain's idea of what a circulatory system was and you modeled that and then you put sensors into the actual person and now you're getting feedback in real time or near real time so that you can take that into account in your model and so now you're getting an accurate portrayal of what's happened to that specific individual if that makes sense yeah it does we're short of being able to do a digital twin of the brain otherwise I'd be worried about the actuators digital twinning a robot version of me that replaces me see your neural link we're short of it today so anyway well we should probably travel while we are still able to be ourselves before digital twins can take over indeed Tom I know you traveled recently chat GPT is trying to help people with their travels GPT is encroaching on many aspects of many people's lives and now including on how we plan our travels the amateur traveler is going to explain how this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute you might have heard of chat GPT it's gotten a little bit of press over the last few weeks they recently announced 70 different plugins that were in beta mode on March to 12 and that included at least three big players in the travel space Expedia kayak and open table and so you can picture that you might in sometime in the future be able to make your travel reservations or perhaps book a table at a restaurant near you using chat GPT be interesting to see how much that's going to disrupt things hasn't disrupted the travel podcasting space just yet but we shall see this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler thank you Chris all right let's check out the mail bag we got great responses to Roger's latest two cents his his newsletter this one is titled $70 broken games which addressed games being shipped before they're ready so read a few of the responses these all came in through patreon so thanks everybody clint wrote steam has added a 1.5 hour experimental free trial to the dead space remake maybe that's a little better I guess with the free trial and two hour return period you can get 3.5 hours total I would still prefer a 14 day return like you've suggested Roger especially for triple A games be evil C said smaller companies I have some allowance for and some do really spend time eventually delivering a quality game no man sky being an example of a rushed game that has actually become amazing over seven years since it was first released messaging also a part of it a bad beta is accepted better than a bad release if one knew the game work needed to be worked on and fixed when it was released maybe that would be better and then Phil wrote in the two hour refund limit I get for indie games many of them only take a few hours to complete the game and if everyone went for the free refund after completing it then the indie developers would lose out a lot but there could be a different system for triple A titles or expensive games that are full of bugs alright that was great the column from Roger is available at patreon.com and if you are a free tier patron you get access to that column so you can join with those folks who have been responding to Roger's writings patreon.com doesn't cost you nothing now Len Peralta was going to illustrate today's show but he got called away with a last minute emergency but I believe that he did illustrate today's show regarding Roger's emails these are titles of games that maybe weren't a good idea to release maybe they just weren't ready yet like No Man Plays or Time Waster 6 little big software update which I assume just updates the software and you never actually have any other game and of course the ever popular cash grab you can find these from Len you can get a print of your own digital or physical just go to LenPeraltaStore.com I miss Len we always miss Len when he's not here on Fridays hopefully we'll see him next week but it was nice to have you Rob DeMillo oh stop you oh I won't but you cannot stop letting people know where they can keep up with you the rest of the time if you go to my About Me page about me Rob DeMillo it's got any sort of frequent activity going on there I still use About Me a lot of people do you're not alone Patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet you get that through your RSS feed on Patreon so if you're a Patron and you're not getting the RSS feed you'll want to go do that and today is Friday which means it's time for the Friday Quiz which also means the free tier gets this episode so get in sync with us you're not a new kid it's tech and boy bands you know this is gonna be fun you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern that is 2100 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com this Saturday check out the latest Live With It featuring me talking to Chris Ashley about his experience living with the F 150 that's the Ford Lightning EV pickup and we're off Monday for the U.S. Holiday but we are back on Tuesday with Will Smith joining us have a great weekend everybody 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 Host Rich Strfalino Video Producer and Twitch Producer Joe Coontz Technical Producer Anthony Lemos Spanish Language Host Writer and Producer Dan Campos News Host Writer and Producer Jen Cutter Science Correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns Social Media Producer and Moderator Zoe Deterding Our Mods! Beatmaster W. Scottus 1 Captain Kipper Steve Guadirama Paul Rees Matthew J. Stevens AKA Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway Modern Video Hosting by Dan Christensen Music and Art provided by Martin Bell Dan Looters Mustafa A. Acast and Len Peralta Live Art Performed by Len Peralta Well not on the show live but live earlier today Acast add support from Tatiana Matias Contributors for this week's shows include Justin Robert Young, Chris Ashley Scott Johnson, Megan Maroney and Chris Christensen and our guest this week was Rob DeMillo Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible