 Do you want a holiday card from DTNS? Well, become a patron and give us your address by November 15th and we'll send you a special DTNS holiday card. Coming up on DTNS, Meta might open a store so you can try out the quest headset. Can teaching robots to love each other help us love ourselves? And Apple makes it harder to repair an iPhone screen. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday. Remember, remember the 5th of November, 2021 in Los Angeles, but still celebrating Guy Fawkes Day. I'm Tom Merrick. On the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, AVXL host Patrick Norton. How are you, Patrick? I'm wearing my, uh, my Eckert's farm sweatshirt. I forgot to show you during the joy that is Good Day Internet. I've been to Eckert's many a time and my youth. Look at that. Elvin Eckert, Belleville, Illinois. Not a paid sponsor. Hey, we were just talking to Amos about, uh, lots of cool things about Alaska, including the fact that there are no roads leading to its capital. If you'd like to understand why, get Good Day Internet available at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our top patrons like Justin Zellers, Eric Holm and Carmine Bailey. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Middle East Eye reports that streamers in Turkey have been uncovering a money laundering scheme that uses Twitch's bits. Twitch viewers can buy bits and use them to express appreciation for streamers. If you don't realize that, uh, that contributes to the streamers earnings. The Turkish streamers found references in that leaked Twitch payment information to Twitch accounts that were earning up to $1,800 a day and only had 40 to 50 viewers. The scheme was to take stolen credit cards, buy the bits, strike deals with Twitch streamers where they would use the bits and then those streamers would refund like 80% of that money to other accounts. A Twitch spokesperson told Middle East Eye, quote, we will not hesitate to take decisive action against accounts engaged in prohibited content. The street finds its own uses for things to quote Mr. William Gibson. Oh, so true. So true. New York City's mayor-elect Eric Adams announced he will take the first, his first three paychecks in Bitcoin. Adams tweeted Thursday that New York City is going to be the center of the cryptocurrency industry as follows. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez announcing Tuesday he would take his next paycheck in Bitcoin. Oh, we got a beef. Miami and New York City. Who's, who's the biggest Bitcoin user? DJI announced the $2,199 Mavic 3 drone. It includes a custom Hasselbad L2D-20C camera using a four third S sensor with a 24 millimeter prime lens and a 28 X hybrid zoom telephoto lens able to shoot 4K at 120 frames per second offers 46 minutes of flight time and a video transmission range of 15 kilometers. There's also a $4,999 Mavic 3 Sine edition like, you know, cinema, S C I N E. That includes a terabyte solid state drive and the ability to encode video as if you're Denis Villeneuve. No, it's actually an Apple ProRes 422 HQ. It doesn't give you any actual talent. You have to bring that yourself. But ProRes is nice. Microsoft, it is nice. Oh my goodness. Microsoft has fixed an expired certificate that was causing some features in Windows 11 to fail including the snipping tool, touch keyboard and emoji panel. The certificate expired on October 31st. Microsoft issued that of the band Update Friday to resolve the issues. I was like on the fence about putting this in the show yesterday because it broke right as we were doing the show. And I thought, you know what? I'll wait and see if they fix it and they did and I'm happy. Good job, Microsoft. Alphabet announced a new company called Isomorphic Laboratories is being formed to use artificial intelligence methods for drug discovery. So you put those machine learning on looking for new combinations and maybe finding some that'll work. It'll build off the work of another alphabet subsidiary DeepMind which uses AI to predict the structure of proteins. DeepMind CEO Demi Hassibis will serve as CEO of Isomorphic as well. All right. Let's talk, let's get physical. If I may quote Olivia Newton-John. Xiaomi is the latest tech company to expand its physical retail presence. Announcing it will open 20,000 shops across China in smaller towns and cities. They already have shops open in like Beijing and a few places, but they're gonna open larger Xiaomi stores and some may even be selling Xiaomi's electric vehicles. Also, the New York Times sources say that Metta has been examining the idea of opening its own shops since last year. The sources describe the locations as possibly being demonstration spaces. If you've ever been to like a Sony or a Samsung experience store, something like kind of like that. Showoff ideas being researched by Metta's reality labs. It could also show off current devices like the Quest VR headset, portal smart displays, Ray-Ban stories glasses. The documents that were seen by the New York Times indicate that the goal of the shop would be to provide a quote, judgment-free journey while experimenting with the devices. First store would be, if they do decide to do this, which they may not, but the first store would be in Berlin Game, California, which is near reality labs offices. But Patrick, I know both of us have been to those experience stores where they like, you know, let you run around and have fun and bond with the brand. Seems like that's a no-brainer for a company that's got VR headsets and wants to get more into building a Mettaverse, right? Yeah, and then $114 billion sitting around waiting for something to do. It's interesting because on one hand, the whole Metta concept has made me be like, VR is dead to me practically, almost, except for the gaming. And on another goal, it's also, I think they already know that a big problem they have with making Facebook, I mean Metta, usable by everyone. So many people are like, uh-uh, I'm not putting that on my head. No, are you ridiculous? That's ridiculous. I'm not putting that ridiculous thing on my head. And I think they just want to give people the opportunity to embrace the Metta, to block that thing on the back of your skull and make sure that you work for IO 24-7 until your debt is paid. I wanted to make fun of the Judgment-Free Journey Club, but when now that you've explained that, I'm like, oh yeah, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about that. I don't want to look stupid. It's like here, try it on, look in the mirror. This obviously is banking on the idea that things like Ray-Ban stories become the norm. Where you're like, actually, that doesn't look bad. I may not like it for other reasons, but at least I don't feel embarrassed to wear it. And in that case, it's like any kind of clothing store or eyeglasses shop, right? It's like, hey, try it on. See what you think. It's funny to watch because I've traveled to a bunch of places in the last year and a half where mall culture is actually fairly thriving. But I'm curious to see whether or not these pop up, what the experience is like, can they keep them running? How often do you have to clean the nose piece on the headset? Yeah, I don't want to work in one of these. That's for sure. And obviously, if they're talking about starting it in Berlin Game, that means it's an experiment. They just want to try out the idea. When they say they're going to open one in Tokyo or Seoul or New York City or London, then we know they're getting serious. They're getting serious. Let's talk chips. One of the biggest differences between Apple's M1 chip and an Intel or AMD chip is you can't buy an M1 chip from Apple and build your own machine with it. But if you could, I think a lot of folks might. The chips are fairly universally praised for their performance. A lot of that is due to Apple's chip design team and some of that is down to the M1s being built on TSMC's 5-nanometer process. That gives them a lot of advantages. The information has sources that gave them a peek at Apple's chip roadmap. Apple's not at releasing this, but according to the information, here's what we've got to expect. In 2022, next year, expect Apple to generate a second generation of chips, perhaps to be called the M2, I get. I don't know. These would still be on the 5-nanometer process. They'd be an updated or upgraded 5-nanometer process. So overall performance and efficiency gains would be there, but they wouldn't be drastic. They'd be small. But sources say that some of these second generation of chips might feature two dies, which would double performance in larger machines like desktops. In fact, the first second gen chip from Apple is expected to show up in a MacBook Air, but Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has previously reported his sources expect a two-dye chip to show up in a Mac Pro. Farther down the road in 2023, Apple would plan to use TSMC's forthcoming three-nanometer process and make chips to feature up to four dies and up to 40 cores. These third generation, dare I call them M3s, would be reportedly codenamed Ibiza, Lobos, and Palma, which you've at least named one of your dogs that one of those codenames. Remember you having an Ibiza or a Palma. Also, the A-series chips for the iPhone may move to three-nanometer processes in 2023 as well. That's right, you're codenamed Lupin, not codenamed Lobos. It was another friend of mine had a Wolf hybrid named Lobos. Anyway, exciting news. I don't think any of this is shocking, but it's kind of fun to hear what the roadmap is and see how many cores we might be headed into. Obviously, three nanometers well ahead of a lot of competitors, but anybody can use TSMC's foundries if they've got the right amount of money. I'm curious what you make of this and I'm also curious what you're thinking of the Alder Lake announcement from yesterday. It's been really interesting to watch. I have a couple friends that literally bought these notebooks. In one case, they're doing video production. In the other case, they crunch massive amounts of code and massive, massive chunks of database. They've both been universally freaking out at the performance and then just looking at their Intel machines and being like, I'm too embarrassed to give this to my spouse or my older children. I'll just give it to the dog or the cat to use now. I'm exaggerating slightly, but only slightly. The memory bandwidth on these is ridiculous. It's like enterprise processors for most other companies. It's been really interesting to watch Intel with the Alder Lake release that they're sort of competitive again in a lot of ways in terms of multivariate performance compared to AMD. I think Intel's picking up speed again, but also Pat Gelsinger has been talking a lot lately about how we're going to win back Apple's business and I'm like, boy, you're going to have to move faster. I'm really curious to see what that happens. I also would really like to see Apple reduce the price of the memory and SSD upgrades on the laptops or the desktops. I'm not even going to hold my breath for a microsecond waiting on that, but these would be more accessible to more people if they weren't, so it's particularly huge, the vague between sort of what these cost versus what the same basic chips cost inside of the Apple hardware. And I haven't complained about that in a long time, but I remember being like, wow, that's a really spendy upgrade on storage that you can't upgrade any other way. The storage particularly, the RAM, they don't really give you a whole lot of options because they don't really need them the way they design the chip, but the storage options are just like almost abusive once you get past a couple of terabytes. That said, M1, I'm on one right now and it's silent. I haven't heard a fan in this room from the Mac. I've put together a massive state-of-the-art AMD workstation and I literally am tempted to go back to OS X for the first time since 2016. It's so good. I'm just like, oh. Yeah. We often focus on how humans and robots get along on the show, but what about how robots get along with other robots? MIT's C-sale scientists are trying to teach robots how to interact with each other. The scientists created a simulated 2D environment in which virtual robots pursued social and physical goals. So a physical goal might be you need to move from here to that virtual tree over there. Another physical goal might be you need to take some virtual water and water the virtual tree. A social goal would be help another robot water the tree. The simulation had three kinds of robots. The first only had physical goals. The second had both kinds of goals, social and physical, but assumed that all the other robots only had physical goals. And then the third had both goals and assumed all the other robots had both goals. No matter what, it resulted in robots exhibiting behaviors recognizable as social by human observers in most instances. So they had people look at this and say, do you think these robots are acting socially? And most instances they said, yeah, they are. So the next step is to create more complex 3D environments for testing and then obviously down the road do this with actual robots out in the real world. And the project not only helps to enable robots to work collaboratively with robots and humans, but also help encourage better social interaction among humans. If they can learn what causes good social interactions with the robots, we might be able to learn from that ourselves. In fact, Engadgett quotes senior author Andre Barbu, quote, can we make an objective test for your ability to recognize social interactions? Maybe there is a way to teach people to recognize these social interactions and improve their abilities. I'm laughing not because this is funny or an unknowable goal because, but because I'm raising children. And so you would like this research to be done sooner? No, it's like obscenity. I may not be able to define it, but I know when I seen it. So an objective test, I'm sure it would be useful. Everybody knows which kind of robot they're dealing with in the workplace. Yeah, I mean, all kidding aside, I think there's something here to be able to say, like we might be able to improve how we identify social interactions in a way that that is useful in a way that helps us understand. And man, especially if this could be applied to social networking and interactions on social networks. I mean, I think that is a problem that everyone complains about and everyone pretends they know why it happens, but nobody does. This study is not touching on that yet, but I'm sort of jumping two steps from the study. In the meantime, just having robots be more collaborative and be able to identify when you need help, like a robot in the workplace that can run over and go, oh, let me pitch in on that huge advance in workplace. You look emotionally distraught at that new deadline. Yeah, let's help plan out a new course of action. You just dropped your groceries. All right, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? You want more robot talk? Let us know. One way to let us know is in our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. I fix it, confirmed that third-party display repairs on the iPhone 13 disable face ID in almost every instance unless you really know what you're doing. The old way of replacing screens is going to disable face ID. That means that mall repair shop is going to be slower if they offer it at all for replacing a screen on an iPhone 13. The problem is the iPhone pairs to its screen now in the 13 using a small microcontroller. And if you want to reactivate face ID, you need to log the repair to Apple servers and sync the serial numbers of the phone and the screen. That's a security measure. And it can be done by any shop that is either an Apple authorized service provider or part of Apple's new independent repair program or AIRP. So it's more widely accessible than it would have been in the past. But a lot of repair shops don't like the terms of Apple's AIRP. If you haven't heard about this, we haven't talked about it on the show before, but the AIRP requires shops to agree to unannounced audits for up to five years after they stop being part of the program. So you sign up, you're agreeing to at least five years from the moment you stop if you ever stop. It also requires shops to share names, phone numbers and home addresses of Apple repair customers. Likely stuff that Apple might already have if you bought something from Apple, but a lot of shops are like, yeah, I'm not comfortable sharing my customer's info that way. Apple has not provided another way to pair a new screen. So if you're not going to be part of AIRP or an authorized service provider, then you got to figure out a workaround. iFixit said the shops can physically move the chip from the original screen onto the replacement. That would keep it synced up with Face ID, but that requires micro soldering, a sophisticated skill that takes a lot of practice to acquire. I imagine I might not even be able to acquire it at all personally. This pairing requirement is new to the iPhone 13. Previous Face ID implementations in the 12 and before did not have this issue. So Apple did not consider this a requirement for Face ID to be secure until the iPhone 13. It's interesting to look at the article, Calvin's part. No, this is Kevin Purdy put this out over at iFixit. And you know, one of the texts they said is like, look, three in 10 screen repair shops can do soldering like one in three can deal with the level of complexity in soldering this device. There's been some sounds and noises around this being an operating system update and it'll be fixed. At this point, the only operating system update they've seen is that the phone now tells you it is unable to activate Face ID on this phone. I'm waiting to hear Apple give some like technical to Dale about why this is important for security moving forward on the platform. And part of me is also looking at this and being like, this seems like a nice way to just push more shops into being part of their program. And I also gotta give a shout out the idea of, it may not sound like much. Oh, you just have to keep phone numbers and contact information, but to do that for every customer and then to have to be responsible for holding on that information for five years under the threat of Apple's crack legal team taking your life apart. One billable hour at a time for your lawyer at the receiving end is I can see where people would be less than interested in that. It's frustrating to look at stuff like this. Just to give the other side of this, because I see Nick with a C saying, ah, news, Apple's anti-consumer. This is not going to harm most consumers. Most consumers will go to an authorized service provider if not Apple itself to get their phone fixed. A lot of consumers will want that. They'll choose that. They'll say, I don't want to go to an independent shop. So there's a defense of Apple to say like, they are making repairs wider than ever. Also, I tend to look at these things and think, yeah, the knee-jerk reaction is to assume they did it on purpose. Usually with Apple, they've done something because they had a reason and they didn't consider repairability. To me, that's their sin. It's not that they actively try to stop you from repairing. It's that they do something because they think it's better and if it makes it less repairable, they don't consider that a reason not to do it. They're like, well, so what? That's your problem. You could also argue that do the vast majority of people, what percentage of iPhone owners actually break their screens? Right. And if a minimal number or a tiny percentage do, then it's not that big a deal, right? Except to those. I mean, I've figured out between tempered glass and armor. I've managed to keep my last two iPhones from shattering a screen and or bending the bending part being particularly frustrating. But it's always frustrating when things are more onerous. I mean, I've been having parallel. There's the engineers at Chrysler who built the Dodge Truck Eye Dive decided to take a lot of old school, simple circuit breakers and or fuses and to miniaturize them and make them computer controlled in a way that is accessible only by someone with a dealer level software system, which wasn't too bad around 2006-2007 when my truck was built when they figured out that there was a problem with these. But now you can't even find the knowledge locally at the dealers. I mean, I have to go in with a stack of information because there was a short, you know, I had to basically, there's a lot of unintended consequences. I hear what you're saying, Tom. It would just be nice if once in a while the unintended consequences made things easier and more affordable to repair. Yeah, I think what we're circling around here is this is not the worst thing Apple could do. And I don't think it helps your cause to make it sound like it is. But at the same time, it not being the worst thing Apple could do should not be an excuse to let Apple off the hook for it. So, you know, try to strike a balance there. And I think I fix it. It does a very good job of striking a balance in its post about this to say like, hey, they did this, they did that. This isn't so bad. This is pretty bad. This is the state of it. You should know about it. Let's be transparent. And so, yeah, I think I hope that Apple can do a firmware update and will do a firmware update to make this easier for personal repair if nothing else to be done, right? You shouldn't have to acquire micro soldering to be able to fix the screen yourself. Why not? It's a career skill. They just want to, they just want to provide a path for people to, I'm just going to stop right now. Look at your face. All right, we talked earlier this week about TikTok, Snap and others becoming super apps, apps that let you do everything, you know, like make payments at a physical store, buy movie tickets, message your friends, do some shopping. The usual example of this is Tencent's WeChat in China. That's the example we used when we talked about it before. But FinTech companies are also developing super apps. So, instead of messaging apps that branch out and become super apps, these are payment apps that branch out and become super apps. The quintessential example of that is India's Paytm. You may have heard us talk about them before. There's also Revolute in the UK, New Bank and UBANK in Latin America, Alipay in China. In the US, the super app hopefuls include SoFi, Chime and of course PayPal, among others. These kinds of apps are finding good early success. Brazil's New Bank, for instance, is seeking a $50 billion valuation in its forthcoming IPO, which would make it more valuable than Lloyd's Banking Group or even BBVA. So, you know, this isn't DeFi. This is FinTech, but it's definitely the convergence of we want to be the app on your home screen that you go to most often. And whether that started as messaging or started as payments, there's a lot of people trying to become that. And a lot of people are investing in that. I mean, I think New Bank, Berkshire Hathaway, did a major investment in that in their last round. When they were valued at a mere $30 billion. Yeah, I always get it early. Those clever Berkshire Hathaway folks. All right, real quickly. Carl Streathern, research fellow in computing at Edinburgh Napier University, writing for the conversation and then republished where I saw it on the next web, describes the need for robotic eyes to appear more human, specifically pupil dilation, which you probably don't think about much, but that is a signal of emotion and understanding that the pupils dilate and constrict. Fixed robot eyes have that glassy stare in part because their pupils aren't moving. Streathern was inspired by meeting John Coppinger, one of the engineers who worked on Jabba the Huts, dilating eyes for Star Wars Return of the Jedi. It turns out that Jabba had very big eyes. So it was a lot easier to make that work in very big eyes. It's a little harder to make that work at human scale, but Streathern made a silicon membrane coated with graphing to act as the muscle in a robot's eye. The graphing could be thin enough to let light pass through and the membrane would then expand and contract the pupil in response to a field of static electricity. A microprocessor was used to control the reactions and responses both to light, which you just need a sensor for, and emotional cues. So they had a machine learning algorithm trained to recognize facial expressions for happiness and sadness and then programmed the pupil to dilate appropriately. I feel like we've made not one, but two steps closer to Skynet and the Terminator because we've got more realistic pupils, which makes her more realistic eyes and social cooperation. So robots working together. Yeah. Can we collaborate them before they collaborate us? All depends on Cyberdyne system, sir. Yeah, and when you think of the uncanny valley, this is one thing I don't hear discussed as much is the pupil dilation because we definitely respond to it, but we don't think about it. You don't think about, oh, that guy's pupils really dilated, right? It's just a subconscious response. But when it's not there, you interpret the face as being weird somehow. Well, on one hand, yes, I agree. On the other hand, if you have a, let's say a family member or a co-worker that maybe has some substance abuse issues, then you're definitely overtly reacting to the gigantic dilated pupils. Some of us may be more to it and certain people than others. It's a fair point, definitely a fair point. Another fair point comes from James C. Smith in our mailbag feedback at Daily Tech News Show.com. Said the chip shortage is affecting many things, including cars. Every time chips are mentioned in the context of cars on DTNS, Tom calls them out as display chips. Is it really the display chips that are a problem for car manufacturers? Or is it the dozens of other chips in airbags, aniloc brakes, engines, and more? In other automotive news sources, I don't see people focused on display chips the way DTNS does. Every time you mention display chips, which is very often it makes me wonder which chips are truly the problem. Well, James, you're right. It's all of them. I use display chips as an example of the microcontrollers that are a big problem for cars. And the display chips are one of the more frequent ones. They're one of the ones that sideline trucks for Chevy and Ford. But they're all examples of microcontrollers that are really old. They're on, you know, we're not talking about 10 nanometers here. We're talking about 14 or larger nanometer processes, which means they're on fabrication processes that nobody wants to invest to build new ones for because chips are just getting smaller. But yes, it's not just display chips. I use display chips because I think that's the easiest one for people to wrap their heads around. But I'll stop doing that all the time. It's crazy, right? Because one of the shortages that a friend of mine is dealing with is USB controllers, which are on a 44 micron processor. Oh, wow. There's literally two or three dozen fabs that can do that around the world. But there's just so much demand right now. But I think it was the Detroit News, one of the local papers did a whole thing on the chip shortage. And they talked about a typical automobile right now or truck having somewhere between 500 and 1500 chips inside of it, which I thought was a little high. But even if it was just 50 or 75 or 100, that's just a lot of silicon to source right now. And that's going to contribute to it. James is absolutely right when he points that out. Though it is the older and kind of dumber microcontrollers that are more often the problem, because like you say, there's fewer fabs. People don't want to keep fabs going for stuff that old, right? And so you only have a few, from what I read anyway, you only have a few clients in auto manufacturers that need these kinds of chips that often. It didn't also help that one of the largest providers of automotive specific. Like they're responsible for something like 30% of the world's automotive microprocessors had some incidents at a factory. When I say incidents, I believe I mean fire. You mean burning down? Yeah. Burning down. There's been a lot of burning down. We've lost AKM, we've lost. There's been a lot of fires. That's why it's so hard to, from people like, why is there a chip shortage? Like, well, there's the toilet paper thing that happened with everybody believing there wasn't going to be any need for chips. And then suddenly everybody needed chips. And so then everybody started stockpiling chips, which made the problem worse. And then there's the weather that messed with plants ability to get power in Texas and some rain in other places and a lack of rain. And then there's the fires. Then there's the shipping containers all piling up in one part of the world when they're needed in other parts of the world. So yeah, it's a whole bunch of different stuff. Turns out when you turn the world off for a few months and then try to turn it back on, it shakes things up a little. You have to turn it back on in the right order. Now, it's not as good as it is for your computer to turn it off and turn it on again. Real quickly, a big thanks to our brand new boss, Greg H, who just started backing us on Patreon. Greg got all the love to himself today. Thank you, Greg, for backing us on Patreon. It could be you tomorrow. If you're listening out there, you can get a holiday card mailed to you, you get all kinds of other perks, patreon.com slash DTNS. Thank you, Patrick Norton. A pleasure talking tech with you again, my friend. What do you got going on to tell folks about it if they want to hear more? Oh, my goodness, Robert Herron. Then I recording the next episode of Avi Excel this afternoon after this show later on today. And I would like to point out that it has been very cold here in St. Louis. I've been getting to wear sweaters that I haven't worn in forever. This is delightful. I'm glad you'll, I hope you keep enjoying the cold weather in St. Louis. Folks, we are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. east through 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back on Monday with Rich Strapolino and Sarah Lane doing well. And we're hoping to see you back soon. So keep those good vibes coming. 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 host Rich Strapolino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterty. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottis 1, BioCal, Captain Kipfer, Jack Shid, Steve Rotterama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens and J. D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast, Creative Ast Arts and Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show included Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Patrick Norton. And guests on this week's show were Tim Stevens, Nate Langson and Sean Hollister. Thanks to all the patrons too who make this show possible.