 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Howard Urmish, John Atwood, and Pat. Coming up on DTNS, why Meta is campaigning against the Leap Second. Also, we'll explain what a leap second is. Logitech's inclusive computer accessories and the Instagram backlash signals the end of the social networking era for us. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 26th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In the Big Apple, I'm I.S. Akshar. And then the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my goodness. We have Kardashians. We have backlash. We have leap seconds. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. In an internal memo, Shopify told employees it will cut roughly one thousand workers or 10 percent of its global workforce in response to slowing growth after a hiring boom due to the pandemic. Shopify, obviously, is not the only company to be scaling back at this point. CEO Toby Lutke says the layoffs are necessary as consumers resume old shopping habits and pull back on the online orders that fueled the company's growth over the last two plus years by old shopping habits. He means the shopping habits of the late 70s when nobody bought anything. Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics says it completed a commercial run between Texas, California and Florida for Ten Roads Express, a USPS mail carrier. So this is autonomous trucks going from Texas to California to Florida and back. It's Kodiak's first time running an autonomous freight service to Florida and is a total 5600 mile round trip. They started in San Antonio, went to San Francisco, California and then to Jacksonville, Florida before ending up back in San Antonio. The trip took 114 hours total. And if you're like, hold on, it's illegal to test or deploy heavy duty autonomous commercial vehicles in California right now. Kodiak's head of external affairs, Dan Goff says that when they cross the border into California, they operated a level two system, which is advanced driver assistance. So you basically had the human in charge for the part where they went to San Francisco and back. That's the news on Kodiak Robotics. Alibaba announced it's applying for a primary listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange that's in addition to its already US listing set to be in effect by the end of this year, 2022. Right now, Alibaba has a secondary listing in Hong Kong for context. In its first six months of 2022, Alibaba's average daily trading volume in the Hong Kong market was about 700 US dollar or 700 million US dollars rather compared to 3.2 billion in the US slowly clawing all those tech companies back into China. There's a race on together enough materials to make electric vehicles. As we mentioned recently, Ford locking up contracts for battery supplies. Now GM says it's reached a deal with Korea's LG Chem to ensure a supply of cathode active materials or CAM, a material that makes up about 40 percent of the cost of an average EV battery cell. GM says it should be enough to make five million EVs between the end of this year and 2030. They're also building two battery factories in North America in conjunction with LG Chem and will source lithium for batteries from geothermal deposits in the US. Inflation eventually comes for six months after Amazon announced Amazon Prime prices were going up in the United States. Now you might be a prime member and say it's worth it. Amazon Prime prices are also now rising in Europe, though the new price hikes come into effect September 15th, 2022 and very widely across the region. So for example, in France, customers will pay an extra 43 percent on the existing 49 euro cost and Germany will be 30 percent more on 69 euros. And in the UK, the UK will see a 20 percent on top of their 75 pound fee. The price changes affect all new members and also renewals. So it will affect you if you're a prime member. Another inflationary news meta announced it will raise the price of the quest to buy $100 in August. Hey, that means the base model goes from $299 to $399 and the 256 gigabyte model from $399 to $499. Yeah, big price hikes there. Meta says cost to make and ship the quest to have risen. They also are going to throw in Beat Saber, but that only really cost you $30 if you bought it separately. So it doesn't quite make up the difference. Go on and on about how they also promised they'll never track. They didn't say that. All right. Let's talk accessories. Sarah, what do we got? Oh, Tom, I'm glad you asked a few interesting ones that got introduced in the last day or so. We'll start with Razer's new mechanical keyboards, the Death Stalker V2. Yes, that's actually the name. Wireless V2 Pro and V2 Pro 10 key less features improved optical mechanical switches that should last longer and respond more quickly. If you like that sort of thing and you can either choose a click or linear low profile switch in all three of those models, the two wireless models can either be Bluetooth or RF with a low latency dongle. The V2 Pro is available now for $250. The other two come in Q3. I mean, if you're into these these Death Stalker keyboards, these are nice improvements. I don't know that they're for everybody, but they're mechanical keyboard person though, aren't you Tom? I am, I am, but I'm also a very old don't give me LEDs. I'm going to use my Logitech K120 until it dies and then pull the old one out of the closet, which is actually what I did last year. Yeah, what about you, these prices in red or? No, not to me because I usually go with the cheapest keyboard possible that has travel that doesn't suck. That's my big thing with keyboards. I'm looking at these prices. I'm looking at the lights and I'm thinking my kids going to love this is becoming a gamer. And I'm like, oh, no, now I have to worry about actually hearing the clicky clacks. I mean, we do video a lot. You don't want to be able to hear the keyboard and my mic's here and my keyboard there. So I usually avoid this. That means I'm going to be hearing this and being asked for this in no time flat. I don't see that the clicky keyboards are a problem on live video, right? No, not at all. I don't hear anything. You know, we always know when Tom's got some to say. Let's just put it that way. Meanwhile, Logitech announced it's a rora collection of PC gaming accessories designed to be more inclusive. The $230 headset has LEDs around the ear cups and braille on each sidearm to identify left and right. It's designed to work better for smaller heads, earrings and glasses and offers different colored boom mics and ear pads. There are also keyboards with LEDs, a volume wheel and a cloud shaped wrist rest for 170 bucks wired or $200 wireless and a $100 wireless mouse designed to work better with smaller hands. Battery life on all three is the low 40 hours for the mouse 25 for the keyboard and 56 for the headset. If the LEDs are off, which they probably wouldn't be if you wanted to use that headset to get that headset. You don't want the fancy, glowy LEDs. These are supposed to be a little bit accessible. I like the accessibility feature, the one accessibility feature and also appeal to women. Sarah, speak for all women. Because we have small hands, Tom. I don't know. I mean, anytime I hear like, ooh, something for small handed people. I'm like, that's me. I actually don't use mice. I'm a trackpad person. I have been for years. I mean, I can use a mouse. I'm capable of using one, but it's not a peripheral that I'm all that interested in. However, if accessibility is of interest to you, I think the sort of stuff, you know, the more the merrier really 40 hours for a battery life for a mouse means you're charging that thing every single night. You know, as you as you decide I'm done with the computer, you know, that that that has to be something that you work into your repertoire. But but it's possible. I, you know, I'd be curious to see who out there says yes, this is exactly the thing I've been waiting for and I can't wait to buy it. And I think the price is right. At least they'd made them more than just pink, which they also did. But the pink gadgets upset me and there's something wrong with pink. If you like pink, great. Just don't like it marketed towards women. All right. We got one more anchor revealed its third gen gallium nitride, a.k.a. GAN chargers called GAN prime automatically adjusting power to the needs of the device checking every three minutes, monitoring temperature three million times per day. So they're really on top of that anchor is there are six models available in the U.S. As of now from the 65 watt seven thirty five, which has a U.S. B.A. and two U.S. B.C. ports for $60 on up to the one hundred fifty watt seven forty seven with one U.S. B.A. and three U.S. B.C. ports U.S. B.C. ports for one hundred ten dollars. There are also variations with AC power outlet if you're interested in that as well. Yeah. I mean, if you're in the GAN chargers, great GAN chargers, decent prices, a wonderful selection of ports, whatever your port needs. What's not to love? The Earth's rotation is not something not to love. It's something to love. It keeps us grounded to the ground, but it doesn't fit perfectly into our system of timekeeping. It slows down and speeds up like any spinning object and overtime has been generally slowing down. That means our machine run clocks, even if they're pegged to an atom, dripped out of sync by very small amounts. But scientists often need to be accurate within very small amounts. So 27 times since 1972, folks added a leap second to the official UTC clock to bring it back into sync. And the way this happens is the clock will say 2359.59, 2359.60, which usually doesn't happen. And then all zeros. Yeah. So the thing is computers, they don't handle this well. You can tell a computer that there are 86,400 seconds in a day. And it's going to handle that just fine. You can even tell a computer to change that number on a regular period, like add an extra day every four years for instance. But it does not deal well with the irregular addition of a leap second. It expects 59 to be followed by zero zero. If the atomic clock tells it 59 is followed by 60. Well, it goes poorly. In fact, it deals so poorly with leaf leap seconds that it caused outages on Reddit, LinkedIn, and Yelp among other sites in 2012. It caused fewer problems, but still caused problems in 2015 and 2016. So what's the solution? Get rid of it. At least that's what meta makers of fine products like Facebook and advertising say. Two meta production engineers wrote posts called it's time to leave the leap second in the past. Get it? Meta says it uses a method called smearing that was pioneered by Google to avoid the 59 to 60 problem. It slows down its clock and spreads a leap second over 17 hours. But that means the system is open to problems, especially if there's an outage during that smearing period. So it doesn't love that as a solution. Instead, they recommend we quote, stop the future introduction of leap seconds and remain at the current level of 27, which we believe will be enough for the next millennium. The argument runs that since the leap second, quote, mainly benefits scientists and astronomers and quotes, it's easier and less harmful in general for the scientists and astronomers to adapt their software to the lack of a leap second than to make everyone else correct UTC for everyone on the planet. And meta is not alone on this. CNET reports that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon as well as heavy hitters in the international measurement community like the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST and Francis BIPM, which I call BIPM, are all on board as well. I have to say, I've come around on this. Pretty much everybody is like, how many folks will be confused by this? How many astronomers will be pleased by this? Let's go with all of the people who be confused by this. Yeah. We got a millennium. Not many people. And of us will be around by the time this is a real issue. Yeah. Well, that's great, right? Let's kick it down the road to when we're all dead. Let someone else deal with it. Yeah. You know, great Korean kids. They'll deal with it. I've come around on this. When I first saw the story, I thought, oh, sure. Just discount the scientists because you're an engineer. It doesn't want to deal with it. The more I read about it, the more I realized, yeah, it causes a lot of work for people to adapt to something that is of limited utility. And it's not like we can't add a leap minute at some point when we need it to correct everybody. I understand that if you're an astronomer, you're probably yelling at me right now. And I totally get that. But I think maybe that is right on this one. Yeah, I looked at this and I first thought, OK, how much of an impact is this going to have on real life? Like, will sunset change from like, let's say 4.30 in the afternoon to like 4 o'clock? Because that's going to screw up everybody's timing. But looking at this, talking about it ahead of time, it's like it's going to be a minuscule change for 1,000 years. And then I was reading the Facebook post talking about, in the case we have to remove a second, some software, it doesn't like the fact that time goes backwards. Time can't go backwards in programming. So that's going to screw up a lot of things. So I don't like the idea of kicking it down the road. But if you're going to have specialized software for specialized communities, maybe that is the software that needs to be tweaked. And not necessarily everything else that can get bricks because we're trying to be technically accurate, which is the best kind of accurate. But the negative time thing really frightens me. But that could also be a scare tactic for all I know. Normally, I like the idea of just having one standard for time. No matter who you are, this is the most accurate time. So it's countered to my nature to advocate for two separate time streams. But that's essentially what this says, is let astronomers adapt and have their own set of time and let everyone else just live without the leap second for a little longer. And it all comes down to the Earth. It's the Earth's fault. If the Earth just rotated on a standard rotation, we wouldn't have this issue. Oh, always blaming the Earth. What do you want to go to Mars next, Tom? Geez. You know what I actually found? Mars has the same problem. Right. You know, it's just colder. The fact that Metta said, OK, so the technique we're using, which is something that Google invented, the smearing technique to slow down a clock and spread that leap second over 17 hours, that was really interesting to me. Yeah. I mean, that is a teeny, tiny little piece of a second over the better part of a day. Did not know this was happening. So what a hack. Like a hack in the sense of like a workaround, right? And at the same time, you know, at least the engineers at Metta say, OK, we can do this, but it doesn't really, you know, it's unnecessary work when we could just say, let's not. Let's not even know. And it can cause other problems. You know, it's not risky in the sense of like, you know, world ending. But yeah, if your computer goes out in the middle of the smear, it's hard to recover from that because you don't know where you were. All right, here's some even more frightening news. Dan Campos from NTX has a quick update on loan applications, not the pieces of paper, but apps, apps that let you borrow money that are run by criminals. Hello, DTNS crew. In Mexico, more than a hundred instant loan applications have emerged, which are used by Montadeudas, which is the form of organized crime focused on extortion, fraud and robbery. Thanks to the data obtained by operating these applications. After requesting the loan, the Montadeudas, demand advance payments and use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp to threaten, attack and defame the person who requested the loan, as well as their relatives and contacts, publishing photos, documents, contacts or videos obtained from the intervened cell phone. Applications such as GoPeso, Cashbox, Peso Prestamo, are used some of the 129 applications that are cataloged in this category, with 35 of them available in the Google Play Store. The Congress of Mexico City has request the investigation of these applications by the local cyber police. For more information about this, check the latest episode of Noticias de Tecnología Express. Back to you, amigos. And today, I learned the word Montadeudas. So thank you, Dan, for that and go check out more at NTX, Noticias de Tecnología Express. If you have a thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address, you're an astronomer who's like, I'm also against the leap second. Email us feedback at DailyTechnoShow.com. Recently, Instagram changed what appears in its main feed. Instead of an algorithmically determined order of photos from people you follow, it offers an algorithmically determined mix of photos and videos from not only the people you follow, but also people that think you might be interested in, even if you don't follow them. In Instagram's words back in March, it is adding quote, recommendations to your feed based on your interests. They know better than you what you're interested in. And whenever you change something, it brings opposition. Sometimes it brings opposition from trend-setting celebrities like Kylie Jenner or Kim Kardashian or both. When Kylie Jenner tweeted in 2018 that she didn't use Snapchat anymore, it was the modern equivalent of Frank Sinatra saying, I think it's going to rain in a club. A lot of people left. And Snap's stock market value dropped more than $1 billion. So, Sarah, what did they say this time? Well, the two celebrities and sisters posted the following texts to Instagram stories on Monday, saying, make Instagram Instagram again. Stop trying to be TikTok. I just want to see cute photos of my friends sincerely, everyone and X as in, you know, a kiss. Kylie Jenner has 350 million followers on Instagram. Kim Kardashian has 326 million. There's obviously a lot of overlap there. Still reaching a lot of folks. The posts have more than 1.6 million likes and resulted in nearly 140,000 signatures on a petition started by the fashion photographer, Tati Brewing. Tuesday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri wearing a lovely saffron shirt and gold-pended necklace shared a video on Twitter. He clarified that a full-screen version of the Instagram feed is just a test, if you're seeing that. That's not what anybody had been talking about. But in case you saw that, it's a test. He says in his words, quote, it's not yet good. And they're not going to roll it out to everybody until they make it good. He also said that they are going to continue to support photos but added, I do believe more and more of Instagram will become video over time just because that's what people are posting. People are posting more videos. They're watching more videos. So it doesn't really matter that they're forcing all of you to watch more videos. He also reminded folks that if they don't like recommendations in their feed, you can X them out. You can click on the little three-dot menu and say, don't show me that. You can snooze recommendations for a month. A lot of people might not have known that. Or you can just go to the following feed, which is confusing because it's a drop-down menu from the Instagram logo that says it's already checked. But you still have to tap it if you actually want to see your following feed. Anyway, it does feel like maybe we're reaching a sea change for social networking, doesn't it? It does. It does. This Instagram issue, along with Facebook's redesign, very recent redesign to include more algorithmically selected content, more or less viral content that you may not see otherwise. Not to mention the rise of TikTok and the troubled sale of Twitter, which is ongoing, has led to Axios' Scott Rosenberg to declare that this is the end of the social networking era, which began with the rise of Friendster in 2003. Rosenberg believes that discovery engines like TikTok will compete with streaming services like Netflix for attention on one end, and messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp will be the province of small group and personal communications. This would leave that big middle, the space once dominated by forums, message boards open for rising stars such as Discord. I'll be honest. I think Rosenberg might be right. I mean, considering Friendster was in 2003, it's about time for a sea change. And once he explained to this idea of, yeah, you've got YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, they're all just competing for the same attention space in your brain, which is I want to watch a thing. I want to watch an entertaining thing that makes me laugh or cry or whatever versus social networking, which was I want to interact with people, whether they're my friends or new friends or online friends. And instead, we're doing group chats, which we do with our closest friends and family, but we don't meet strangers. So there is this wide open space out there for casual acquaintances to interact. And I feel like, I feel like Facebook and Instagram are all chasing the TikTok dream, which up until now has worked for Instagram, but it doesn't feel like it's working this time because, and this is just one data point because it's just me, obviously, but I have found myself reading Instagram less because I go into the feed and I see stuff I don't follow. And I'm like, oh yeah, I'm not that interested and I put it down. I mean, this is obviously some sort of wide rollout. My Instagram has not changed. Everything I'm seeing in my feed is just people that I follow, accounts that I follow. I don't necessarily know everybody, but I manually followed everybody. So recommendation thing is rolling out wide. So what most Sarah would say is, Sarah, you are getting recommendations to things you don't follow, but we're good at it with you. We're just not good at it with Tom because it should be. But it's all people I follow. I mean that they can't be 100% right that they would recommend all of that stuff. That's odd. It doesn't really matter to me. What will matter to me is if the experience that I have, and I used to be, and I post on Instagram, I try to post at least once a day. There's so many things to take beautiful photos of. It is not that social network anymore. It is if you want it to be, but that's not what the company itself is hoping to go for. It's hoping to go in another direction. I've been wondering for years. I don't want to say I've been predicting this for years because lots of people have, but I just been wondering for years, when does the Facebook thing start to break down? And when I say the Facebook thing, I'm talking about the meta universe in general. Not the metaverse, but the Facebook, Instagram, what's that? All of the things that are under the meta umbrella and it's not happening tomorrow, but it has been happening particularly for the younger set of folks for some years now and chasing the TikTok dream is, I mean, why not? It actually might be fruitful. The Kim Kardashian saying, hey, I missed the old Instagram. That does matter. It doesn't mean that the company is going to change course overnight, but it does signal that nobody really knows what they're doing right now. I wonder if that's the case. I heard the stories looking at the story and thinking, okay, this is a great jumping off point. The Kardashians will have their own social network where it's all your feeds with your friends and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Seems like that's just a given or Instagram will bifurcate and there'll be another version of it where it's just your friends and it's different. But I'm wondering if some of this is in reaction to all of the analysis on Facebook, all of the analysis on Google, Twitter, all the way you get information. If you have Instagram and you have less scrutiny because you have, you actually have algorithms controlling what you're seeing, eventually Instagram could be a lot more like Netflix where you're not seeing a lot of user-generated content or if it's user-generated, it's like it happens to be by Disney or whomever. This could avoid a lot of trouble long term because if Facebook wants, sorry, Meadow wants Instagram to keep growing, it's got to make sure that it's not being scrutinized heavily by the government. If it controls the feed, that's a double-edged story. Either they can show you stuff and they can make sure that okay, the stuff you're seeing is completely vetted or they can say, and that means the government could go, okay, well you're controlling this, that's one thing. Or they can be like, we know we're getting in trouble for this, we're gonna make this a whitewash, you're not gonna see anything that would be controversial because we control what you see. I don't know, I think TikTok is good at that and it's controversial because it's a Chinese-based company but it's good at that and I don't get the evidence that Instagram is good at that. Maybe they'll get better at that but I wonder if this is Instagram and Facebook's AOL moment. We used to be big, we used to be successful and we just couldn't keep up with the time. Honestly, I think Zuckerberg knows that which is why he's betting on the metaverse and Oculus and pouring money into that and raising the price of the Quest 2 so that he can plow that money into research and development. And there's hints that Facebook's gonna lay off a lot of people so they're just gonna milk Facebook knowing it's a dying breed. They're gonna milk it till it's done and Instagram too. I think they feel like Instagram could survive but I'm getting the first sense that maybe it isn't. All right, let's check the mailbag. Let's do it. So Kome wrote in about Mike's comment we read in the mailbag from yesterday. Mike was saying, Sony has two short charging cables. I don't like them. Kome says, I actually do. Kome says, when I go on a trip, I have like 10 devices, phones, cameras, headphones, batteries and USB chargers with a long cable to charge them. If I had long cables to charge everything, a little hotel desk would be totally covered by all the cables. The USB chargers themselves have long cords from the power outlet so I can put them anywhere. But I prefer a short USB cable between the charger and each device. Kome says, I recently decided to buy short USB cables while being at it, I converted all of my gadgets to USB-C by attaching mini to C and micro to C adopters. Good work Kome. Kome says, I quickly found that the chargers with multiple USB-C ports are more expensive. They have fewer ports than the USB-A versions and aren't as compact as I had hoped. I learned it's because USB-C specs require the charger and each device to negotiate the optimal current reliably and the circuitry just isn't cheap yet. For now, I had to make a compromise. Keep using those USB-A chargers with these A to C adapters. I hope the USB-C all the way day will come soon. Kome says though, it's not here yet at least for the cost conscious. I first thought when I read Kome's was that's genius. My second thought was Mike should send all his short cables to Kome and Kome should send his long cables to Mike and then they're ready to be happy. It's a different social network right there. It's just a cable exchange. Is that what you're doing here? Yeah, it's our new startup idea. It's going to be huge. Well, and it just goes to show you it really depends. You know, Kome says, you know, do a fair amount of travel. I kind of like all my stuff in one place. The long cables end up being cumbersome. And Mike had the exact opposite experience. It just depends on how you use your tech. It's a style, right? Mike, Mike may have fewer gadgets than Kome. I don't know, but Mike just likes to plug them all directly in for whatever reason. And Kome is like, no, no, I plan for this. You know, some people don't want to plan for it. But I love that. I love that these emails show that there are different approaches and it kind of depends on what your style is, what's going to work for you. I'm still on Mike's side where I'm like, I don't love getting the short cable. I would like that to be a choice that Kome could make and say, yes, please give me the short cable. Sure. Easy to make a longer cable short than the opposite. Thanks to everybody. I just science physics everybody. Come on. You know, what, what are we going to go to Mars next? Thanks to everybody who writes in with questions, comments and ideas. Please do keep them coming and makes our show better every day feedback at daily tech new show dot com. Also, thanks to you as actor for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Sorry, folks, go to this old nerd dot com. I'm spending today actually updating the site has been like a billion years and I'll tell you what I'm looking at this problem with the short cables, long cables. I have a travel bag that's specifically for short cables and I have long cables for home. I got extension cables for other stuff because sometimes you've got to be situationally aware and then you don't want to think about it. So I have a little bag for travel in other words. In other words, if you want to deal with all of these things and you want your tech life to be better. Go to this old nerd dot com because we're coming back after a nine year absence. I was like doing things in between. I think I was taking a nap for some of it. But since my couch finally came in, I can actually do projects in my home because so many reasons you follow me on Twitter. You'll know why it's at eyes and I'm excited. Some fun stuff's coming up. Very cool. We also want to extend a very special things, whether you like short or long cables. Mike, Ascucha is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, Mike. Couldn't do it without you. Yeah, there's also a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We call it GDI for short available at patreon.com slash DTNS. We roll into it right after we wrap up this here show. But just a reminder, we do the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 2800 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we're back doing it all again tomorrow, talking retro vintage gaming with Dimitri Genakis, a.k.a. the modern vintage gamer. Talk to you later. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.