 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Rodrigo Smith Zapata, John and Becky Johnston and Chris Benito. Coming up on DTNS, how B Real wants to make money, Instacart wants to eat Amazon's lunch after it lets you buy the ingredients easily with their new technology. And some algorithms may soon host this show. D-I-D keeps advancing the way it is. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 19th, 2022 in Los Angeles. Am I Tom Merritt? From Studio Redwood, I think I'm Sarah Lane. I might be in Los Angeles. I'm Lamar Wilson. I'm pretty sure I'm Roger Chang. The show's pretty sure. That's what a D-I-D avatar would say. Tight broadcast already, everyone. Good work. Alright, we're going to get to that, the possibility that algorithms can just do all the video and we'll be able to relax and drink my ties. But first, let's talk about some tech things you should know. Texas HB20 is a law that bars platforms with more than 50 million users from acting to block, ban, remove, de-platform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, or deny equal access or visibility to or otherwise discriminate against expression based on viewpoint. This law and a similar law in Florida have been making their way through the courts with the Supreme Court likely being the ultimate destination here. The latest hop for Texas's version of the law was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which just ruled that Texas HB20 does not violate the First Amendment rights of social media platforms. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in May that the Florida version of the law did violate First Amendment rights. The U.S. Supreme Court could now be asked to weigh in to resolve the conflict between the two decisions. Alright, we'll keep an eye on that one. According to John Petty Research in a forum post from a product manager, the graphics card manufacturer EVGA will no longer make GPUs for NVIDIA exiting the GPU market entirely. So they're not going to make GPUs for NVIDIA or anybody else. It will continue to sell the current generation cards until it runs out of stock. So if you see them on shelves, that's why. According to CEO Andrew Hahn, it made the move out of principle, citing a lack of communication from NVIDIA about new products. John Petty Research reports that the move comes as gross margins for GPU board partners continue to shrink down from over 20% in 2000 to less than 10% in 2020. We talked a little bit about this right as it broke on Friday's Good Day Internet. If you're a patron, you might want to check that out. The Wall Street Journal reports that shipments of industrial robots to China increased 45% on the year in 2021 to over 243,000, accounting for 49.9% of all shipments globally. Data from the International Federation of Robotics shows China installed nearly twice as many new robots at factories compared to the Americas and Europe. While global industrial robot installations grew 27% on the year in 2021, installations in China's automotive sector increased almost 90% on the year while electronic makers increased robot installs by 30%. A user on GTA forums posted 90 videos that they claim came from a test build of Grand Theft Auto 6. Footage lines up with previous leaks indicating the game will take place in Vice City and have multiple playable characters. The user claims they were also behind the recent cyber attack on Uber. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier's sources at game developer Rockstar confirmed the footage is legitimate, though it cautioned its early and unfinished. Rockstar said it recently suffered a network intrusion where somebody downloaded early development footage of the game. Tile has been providing a way for you to track lost items long before Apple and Samsung came along with their air tags and their smart tag competitors. Tile works differently, though, relying primarily on Bluetooth and other Tile users. Practically speaking, all our systems where you attach a small tracker to a thing. Maybe it's a keychain, maybe it's your suitcase handle, something that you don't want to go missing with the idea of being able to track it over the internet. But not everything works well with that system. For example, earbud cases, almost the same size as trackers, or books don't have a lot of attachment points. So Tile has launched something called QR code labels that don't have that same technology. You decide what people will see, what they'll see, when they scan the sticker. But the idea is to give them a way to tell you that they found your item, such as your email address. Hey Sarah, you left this book at the airport type thing. Tile has included QR codes on its trackers in the past, but these new labels are just the QR code. That's all they are. You can buy them now from Tile. For $14.99, you get 15 total labels. Yeah, I mean the idea would be contact info. Like contact me here, but I guess if you had a disposable email address just for that purpose. I'd be a little weird putting my contact info available to anybody who could see the QR code on my textbook. But yeah, maybe you got to pay for them too, which is weird. Well, yeah, I mean you pay for that for the service, right? What do you want that book, Lamar, that you left behind? In 1999, not that much. You know, yeah, your mileage may vary. You can do it for other things besides 1999 era textbooks. I'm not sure what else I would use it on either. All right, let's talk a little more about groceries. Let's do it. So when you think about technology for retail stores, grocery stores being included in that, you might start with Amazon's Just Walkout technology. We've talked about it on the show quite a bit in the past. That technology is slowly rolling out to more Whole Foods locations at the moment, but it's definitely not the only game in town. In fact, Instacard announced a new connected store platform that combines new and existing technologies to help retailers create a personalized experience and better bridge online and in store shopping. Now that sounds like a lot of marketing speak. So Tom, what's going on here? Yeah, so one of the elements would be called scan and pay. Not sure how this is going to work in practice, but the idea is to do what you do at the Apple Store with the Apple Store app. You would scan an item and then pay for it with your phone. How they tell whether you paid for it or not is the part that I'm unclear on. But if they can make that work, that seems pretty convenient and easy for grocery stores to put in place. However, if they want something a little more sophisticated and with more obvious, secure elements, Instacard also updated its caper cart smart system. Instacard acquired caper AI last year and the new generation of the caper carts, the second gen, way less. They're easier to push around. They're larger though, 65% more capacity. And they work the way the Amazon carts at the Amazon Fresh Store work. That isn't just Walkout. That's the one that has scales and sensors and computer vision. So as you put things in the cart, your item is scanned and taught it up for you to be able to pay for it. With the Instacard caper cart, you can also link your shopping list to the cart using a QR code and it'll automatically check things off your shopping list as you put them in the cart. Once you're done, you pay right from the cart. Other in-store tech includes something called carrot tags. Users can select an item on a phone and the corresponding tag on the shelf will flash LEDs to let you know where it is. I like this. Yeah, I know. I like this too. If you happen to be like, well, I love cheez-its, but there's like 16,000 types of cheez-its these days and I would really like just the kind that I'm looking for. This would help you do that. You just want the white cheddar runs, which I never would, but it's okay if you do. Carrot tags can also show product information like whether something is gluten-free, maybe it's kosher, that kind of stuff. And then there's department orders, which lets you order from delis or bakeries on your phone and then pick up your items when they're ready. I mean, they're within the store themselves, but it's the particular sections. So nowhere standing in line, waiting for number 57 to be called. But I'm 56. Yeah, exactly. The first of these is going to be a Bristol Farms in Irvine, California, right down there in Orange County. They will use caper carts, scan and pay. So maybe I can run down there and see how it works. Shopping lists, syncing, and the carrot tags so that you can find your cheez-its. Instacart is also working with Wake Fern food if you have any grocery stores in that chain. And they're going to implement the caper carts. And Schnooks, the friendliest stores in town, are going to use the carrot tags in their stores. There's a few other stores in the works as well. So what do you think Lamar, because you and I have experienced both the Amazon fresh version of this and the Whole Foods Just Walkout version of this. What do you think of Instacart's entry into this race? I like their entry. I like the fact that they are bigger in the sense that they've got more relationships with other grocery stores. There's a chance for more people to be able to use this. And listen, I believe there is just the one with the phone, right? You can scan items with your phone. I really like that idea. So like here's my scenario. Scan items with my phone, go through the store, click checkout on the app. You know, like the Whole Foods where we visit it. And then a QR code pops up. You remember that, and then we scan it on the thing at the end, and then you leave. And so now stores will may have to accept that a certain percentage is going to be stolen. A certain percentage is going to be not scanned properly, but they already factored it into prices today. So I just think if they, you know, you take a loss, but you get a more efficient system. You know, think about how grocery stores are today. You got frozen items. You got heated items. And you're sitting there for 20 minutes in line because there's 17 lines that are just packed because it's after work. You know, so they will make the money up if more people can flow through more. But you got to take that risk of, yeah, there will be some, you know, unscrupulous people or just some mistakes made. But we got to fix grocery stores. And I think Instacart's idea is what the phone is really smart. Yeah, that's my campaign thing. I want to go run for office. Fixed grocery stores. It was very inspirational. Very, very passionate. You know, my first reaction was like, didn't Instacart used to work with Whole Foods, which it did. Yep, it did. That was pre, you know, Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods. And it was phased out. I see them around. I may not be totally at the target market because I'm in a little bit more of a rural area. But the idea of the carrot tags, it really appeals to me. You know, I don't currently, I don't know, care for somebody who has extremely strict dietary restrictions. You know, and it's not me either. But something like this would be the difference between, you know, we made the cheeset joke like, oh, there's so many different kinds of cheesets. But if somebody actually needs something where, you know, an ingredient either is there or is not there. I think that that makes a lot of sense. And just the idea that this would be rolled out to something that isn't necessarily owned by Amazon. And I have no problem with Amazon, honestly, like I'm not an Amazon hater. I use them every day. But this just opens up more opportunities and Bristol Firms is a nice store. Instacart is showing that they are competitive and they're not just going to roll over because Amazon's coming into their space. They have better relationships with more grocery stores than Amazon does. Amazon wants to sell their just walk out stuff. But to do just walk out, you have to put in a lot of equipment. You have to hang sensors everywhere. You have to deal with customers who don't like the fact that there are sensors and cameras hanging everywhere. Instacart is showing like, hey, you can just do scan and pay at the very minimum. Or you can do our carts. You don't still don't have to install a bunch of equipment if you do our carts. We will provide stuff. You know us. You work with us. We want you to succeed. We're not competing with you through Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. I think Instacart is doing an excellent job here. And Batfink was like, is this a solution looking for a problem? No. If you haven't stood in a long grocery line, well, gosh, bless you, Batfink. But at least in my local grocery store, I'm like Lamar. Like at certain times of day, it can just be a nightmare. And being able to just check out fast and get out of there is a huge advantage. And it's going to make people want to go to your grocery store more if you're the one that gets it first. So I think it's smart of Instacart to push this out here. And I think they've got a chance of getting more uptake than Amazon does. Well, and that whole, before we move on, the whole idea of, well, but there's self-checkouts at most grocery stores now, right? Yeah. It depends on what you're buying. And almost every time I do it, something goes wrong. And somebody who works at the store has to come and help me. You know, it always seemed like a stopgap measure. Well, that could happen with these two, right? It could. But if this was any way more seamless, I'd be into it. It's going to be faster, even with problems than the self-checkout. And the self-checkout is faster than the human checkout lines. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about social media. The stately quadril continues. Meta is implementing features seen on TikTok announcing a new Facebook Reels API, which will let third-party apps use a share-to-reels feature to post Reels and post to pages they are admins of. Of course, TikTok is not immune to this dance. Having recently announced the very B Real sounding TikTok now. We talked about that last week. But if B Real really wants to play this game, Lamar, it's going to need to step up its own game. Absolutely. And B Real is playing the game by trying to copy, well, having an app that generates revenue. Get it? No? Okay. The natural time sources say that B Real began by exploring monetizing its system. So the plans don't call for advertising yet. Instead, it's looking at in-app purchases. What I thought was pretty interesting. Now, advertising isn't completely off the table long-term, but it won't be considered anytime soon. And the main photo sharing aspect of B Real would remain free. So, Tom, what does it look like then? Yeah. So if B Real seems to be imitating anyone with its monetization plan, it's probably Discord. Discord, you pay a monthly fee for bonus features. You get Nitro. You get stickers. It doesn't look like B Real is going to do this anytime soon though. So we won't be finding out right away. Reportedly, they're not looking to implement any plans until the second half of next year. They still have a lot of bugs to squash, given the meteoric rise in usage. The Financial Times says there are more than 15 million daily active users right now up from 10,000 a year ago. I think the basic question here with B Real has always been, okay, lots of people seem to like to use it. Not everybody, but 15 million people do. How are they going to not ruin it? Because the attraction for people who do like it is, it's once a day, I see my friends. I don't have to share this publicly if I don't want to. That's great. And in-app purchases where you buy features and stickers could be the way that they keep that sensibility and yet still maybe encourage people to spend a little money with them. I mean, I guess my question, and I've got nothing wrong with stickers. I have no personal vendetta against stickers. But when you say features and stickers, it's like, okay, well, stickers aside, what would the features be? That's the question. What other features would I be willing to plunk down on B Real for? Would it be more retakes, extra time? Mm-hmm. I mean, I don't think they want to do filters because they want to do B Real, but maybe there's some like sharpening or image improvement, lighting, something like that. I mean, I don't know. I always love these platforms that, and I'm not a B Real user. I signed up today for the first time. I know. I'm very late to the game. Thank you for funding me, too. I appreciate it. Welcome, Yash, you, Lamar, Eileen, a couple other people. We're done. But this idea of something being so sort of simple, so kind of antithesis of that social media, Instagram model kind of stuff, and people going, yeah, we like this. This is fun. This is a fun kind of a game, right? Because there's a time element to it. And for the company to be like, okay, how do we not ruin this but also make it more complex? Yeah. Which is what people kind of, they loved the non-complexity about it. Not necessarily make it more complex, but give you something that is worth paying for. Yeah. And also, I was thinking just from a person who deals with products like you all do, what if, for monetization, for both of us, maybe to encourage people to want to use it, whatever picture I take of, they're probably scanning them anyway. And there's a TV in the back or a product I'm showing. And what if some monetization sharing can be like, oh, do you like that? Here's a link below or click it. I mean, that's already happening. YouTube, I believe, has been trying to do that for quite a while. But something like that. It's almost like an associate link of something. Yeah. Where I make something if I want to, and like everybody is driven by that, but then they could make some money too. That would be advertising though. And they're saying they don't want to do advertising. Is it advertising? Is it advertising? It's an affiliate program. Which I think a lot of people would look at as advertising. Yeah. Huh. Okay. But I don't know. Maybe they'll be able to get away with it. I'm just saying if they did it, I think a lot of people would point and accuse them. That's right. Maybe all they need is stickers. I mean, stickers are the things that all the journalists came up with. Be Real hasn't said anything. So we shouldn't condemn them like, the only idea they have is stickers. The only idea we have as journalists is stickers. Unfortunately. People, they do tend to be like, you know, fun things like stickers. Yeah. Sure. You might like stickers or not. You know, many people would be like, I'm just there. I am very anxious. Doesn't mean anything to me. You weren't, you said you weren't anti-sticker. I am. I'm on the record. I don't like stickers. I don't care. No stickers on Be Real. No stickers from Tile. Like stickers out. Yeah. No, I'm anti-sticker. Discord. Don't even send Lamar a sticker. No, they already know. I called them. I called them. I said, don't send me stickers. Yeah. I called them on the phone. Hi, Mr. Discord. This is Lamar. Wow. You got to give me Discord's number. I'm a rotary phone. I did. Yeah. Well, folks, you don't have to use a rotary phone to get in touch with us if you don't want to. We also have electronic mail. But if you don't know our address, well, here it is. Email us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Last year, the genealogy service MyHeritage got some press when they offered deep nostalgia that uses some technology from DID to animate the faces of loved ones in still photos. In March, the service expanded to let users add voices to the animated pictures. This was powered by DID, an Israeli startup that developed a video reenactment technology. DID has worked on a lot of non-Macabre applications if that puts you off, such as with Warner Brothers on a personalized movie trailer. We talked about that. Integrating the tech into the short-form video app, Josh, which is very popular in India. But what else has it got going on, Sarah? Well, Tom, I'm glad you asked. It's launching its own consumer-facing platform called the Creative Reality Studio. So you can either select a pre-created presenter or, perhaps more impressive, upload your own still image. Paid users can access premium presenters who are more expressive, better facial expressions, hand movements than the default ones, just kind of the better options. However, once you get the animation going, you can then type in text to be synthesized into speech. Basically, you're making the avatar talk as if you would, and it's not so much an avatar as kind of looking like a real person. Maybe yourself, maybe somebody else. You can also upload a pre-recorded audio clip that would be used as is. And the animation of the still image will still look like a video of the person in the image speaking the words that you provided. The idea of being able to have it do a foreign language in your voice, very appealing. DID is also trying to stay ahead of any controversy with this tech. It uses Microsoft Azure's text moderation API to filter offensive language, filters out famous people's images. The filter is pretty conservative. It blocked me. I couldn't make one of myself. You're famous, Tom. I'm like, you're a definition of famous. It's pretty far out there. The terms of service also prohibit political videos. So if they catch you trying to do a political video, a violation would result in account suspension and removal of that video just to try to dissuade people from using it for that. So if you're thinking, OK, what are the use cases here? Customer service portals, great one. Corporate training, marketing videos. DID also launched a PowerPoint plugin that can have a preset digital presenter read slides. If you happen to be using PowerPoint all that often, you might think, well, that would make sense. But DID would also like to develop real-time video call translation. So you could tell a version of you what to say without actually having to be on camera. And it could find a role in the metaverse. Whatever the metaverse ends up being, I don't hate the idea of having a bad day and saying, DTNS, this is the version of me you get. Yeah, I think on the mundane end is the HR department that doesn't have time to shoot videos for all its training materials, looks at this as a godsend. Like, OK, we can just put the manuals in and have people speak them in normal language. And on the other end is the metaverse, and the actual Sarah Lane can talk and do things without Sarah having to do a live stream of her actual self. Lamar, where do you fall in that spectrum? What do you like? Yeah, we were talking pre-show, and Roger had this crazy idea about this, like, replacing, like, my YouTube videos in a sense of, like, I don't feel like being on. I can input the text and have some... And as silly as it sounded, I'm actually really intrigued by the idea of... Because you mentioned, like, 80% of YouTube could probably use something like this, like the videos. And I'm very intrigued now. I wouldn't want to lose revenue myself doing it, but, you know, like Sarah said, if I had a bad day or a bad week, but I got to get some context out about the new iPhone, I can be there without being there. I'm very intrigued, Dennis. The part I would like, if they can get the voice synthesis to mimic you, I don't think that's what it does yet. But it could get there very easily. Then being able to take a video I do and say, all right, have it translate that video into 128 languages, go. And then suddenly, my video is available to 128 times the number of people. Not exactly, but you know what I mean. It's available to a lot more people in their language. And it's still me. It's still me saying it. Yeah. I assumed with this that you gave them a sample of your voice, and then, over time, they would learn to synthesize that. Right now, it's you choose a pre-made voice, or you can upload yourself recording, and it'll match the video to your voice. That's the mistake I thought I was doing. That technology you're talking about can happen. This company isn't offering it yet, but they say they could. So that might come down the line. Yeah. Yeah, if anybody out there is saying, wait, this is the perfect use case. You guys just aren't talking about it yet. Do email us. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. All right. I guess we're going right into the mail bag. I guess we are. So Mike wrote in, this was in response to our conversation we had with Tim Stevens on Friday's show about Mustangs. Mike says, I've owned a couple Mustang GTs, including on the FoxBody models that the new gauges can emulate. And I really like the new model. However, I think you oversold the outlaw drifting inspired handbrake. Looks more like a traditional center console mounted parking brake handle found on a lot of performance cars than the vertically mounted handbrake found in modern drift cars. I also don't think this item encourages people to brake the laws any more than accelerator pedals or on virtually any car produced today does. If the speed limit in almost every location is 75 miles per hour or less, why not question every car that can exceed that speed? No, it's a fair question, Mike. And I think maybe we confused folks a little. So I appreciate the chance to clarify. Tim and I weren't saying that the existence of the feature was the problem. What we were marveling at, I would say, is that Ford was promoting it. So an analogy would be if Ford introduced the accelerator for the first time and said, well, if this accelerator, everybody can go 150 miles an hour and you're in a country where that's never legal. It would be surprising that they would be promoting the breaking the law aspect of it. So yes, it wasn't the fact of the handbrake necessarily. It was the fact that Ford was like, here's what you can do with this handbrake. Totally illegal stuff that surprised Tim and I, I think. I mean, I don't know. I feel like sometimes it's like, well, you wouldn't, right? Well, yeah. And that's the cool thing about this. If you're the company introducing something, you are now liable because they're like, well, but Ford told me I could do it, right? So I just wanted to add one thing to what Mike was asking a question about the parking brake. So the parking brake is fully digital. There's no mechanical linkage. It's run by a computer. And that drifting mode is enabled when you enable the car in track mode. So it's not like when you have it in a regular street mode that you can drive, that you can tear around a corner and hit the brake, the handbrake, and do a drift around a corner because you feel like it. It's a very specific mode that's enabled when you go into a track mode. Now what's really fascinating is because it is digital, you can enable different sensitivities and different performance levels depending on how they program it for different use case scenarios. So it is, I know it just looks like a standard parking brake, but it's actually really cool because it's stuff that you normally wouldn't be able to do in a car without spending a lot more money into customizing it. You can put it in track mode when you're not on a track, right? Yes. But to get to the point of Mike's email, that's the part that surprised us. Not that they had made something that you could do that with but that they had used it as an example. I guess what Ford would say was like, oh, we were pointing out that it had to be in track mode and you shouldn't use track mode if you're not on a private track, right? And I will add really shortly that it's something that car manufacturers have been doing with the performance cars for at least the past decade where they have, for example, the previous Gen Mustang, they had a drag start mode that would allow you to do a drag start at high RPMs for doing like bracket racing or something. And so it's, I mean, whether or not it's a good idea, I mean, that's still a question of the debate, but car companies have been allowing little bits like this in track mode operation on their performance cars for a number of years. I feel like we're making a mountain out of a bull hill here, don't you? Definitely. Drifting for all. Drift to your hearts if you want it. Legally on a private track. Yes, yeah, but also have caution. Thanks to Lamar Wilson, a very cautious person. You know, really a model for the rest of us. Lamar, what have you been up to lately? I guess I am. Yeah, I make fun short form vertical videos on nearly every platform, so you can find me at lamar.tv at your platform of choice. This time this week I am unboxing and showing how I have set up a $1,500 router. And so that's pretty fascinating. So stay tuned for that. I did not have to pay for it. Excellent. $1,500. You get to keep it though. It's better. I do, but the video is the... Not. Yeah. But I really do like it. It's awesome. You know, we also like brand new bosses, and we have one. And you know what, we're on a roll. All last week we had new bosses on every single show, and we do this week. We're on a roll again with Alexander joining us. Alexander is our brand new boss. Thank you so much, Alexander. Thank you, Alexander. Thank you. Keeping the streak going. Appreciate it. Indeed. Speaking of Patreon, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet, which we roll right into after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, if you want to catch the show live, you can. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back to it all again tomorrow, and we're talking brain-computer interfaces with Dr. Kiki Sanford. See you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Thank you for watching.