 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers, and Pepper Geesey. Coming up on DTNS Max, Govill gets us up to date on the summer of game news. Backblaze has the data on SSDs versus spinning drives and Tik Tok copies B Real. Tik Tok over now. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 15, the Ides of September 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, senior writer and host at IGN Max Govill, welcome back. Howdy, thanks for having me. Good to have you, man. Did you survive the Ethereum merge? You know, I had like a little bit of a reaction, but otherwise I think I got through it okay. Put a salve on it and everything's fine. Yeah. The Ethereum merge has gone down successfully. You can see Wednesday's show if you want to know what that means. Let's start this show with a few tech things you should know. Adobe announced it plans to acquire the collaborative design platform Figma in a $20 billion deal expected to close in 2023, although it still needs regulatory and Figma stockholder approval. Co-founder and CEO Dillon Field will remain in charge of the company, saying that Adobe was deeply committed to keeping it autonomous. Figma currently has over 4 million users. Bloomberg's Katie Roof reports this is the largest buyout of a private software company ever. Yeah, autonomous and free. Free would be nice too. Snap made Snapchat for web available to all users. So if you didn't have access already, well now you do. Feature launched back in July, but was limited to Snapchat plus subscribers in select markets. As somebody who uses Instagram on the web, I welcome this. Might maybe use Snapchat a little bit more often. Intel ARM and Nvidia published a draft specifications for an open and license free 8-bit floating point standard or Fp8 for AI development. Floating point formats are part of building an AI system. More bits generally mean higher accuracy, but they also require more memory to train an AI model on the Fp8 standard. In a white paper, on that standard, Nvidia says it shows comparable accuracy to 16-bit precision in many use cases. Earlier this month, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority gave Microsoft five days to resolve concerns about its pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The financial time sources say Microsoft did not offer any remedies because it was unclear any would have prevented the investigation. Basically they're like, anything we said wouldn't have mattered so we didn't say anything. The CMA is now expected to begin an in-depth phase two investigation of the deal. Microsoft also faces an in-depth investigation in the European Union and the company is going to file its case there formally in the coming weeks. Microsoft still hopes to close the deal by June next year. Good luck with that. As to what conditions it might have to agree to, Sony has some ideas. Sony would like guarantees that it will have access to all Activision Blizzard games on equal terms to everybody else in perpetuity. That's a lot to ask, but Microsoft has said it wants, quote, people to have more access to games, not less. So maybe there's a middle ground. In its latest ruling, Metta's oversight board criticized the company's automated moderation tools. This stemmed from a political cartoon of a Colombian police officer beating a man with batons. Metta added the image to its media matching service database, meaning that it would automatically be taken down whenever posted. 215 people appealed different removals, with 98% of appeals deemed successful. However, Metta didn't remove the image from the database until the board took up this case. The board called for a more responsive system that would trigger a review of the media matching service when an image was successfully appealed. It asked Metta to publish error rates for content mistakenly included in the database. Alright, let's get to that story that's just going to end TikTok. It's over. It's over for it, right? Tom, maybe not. Maybe not. Hear us out. TikTok announced it will launch TikTok Now in the US, which sends a daily prompt at a random time that gives you three minutes to capture a photo or a 10-second video using the front and rear cameras. You might say, doesn't this sound a lot like Be Real? And you would be right. It's because that's exactly what it does. Right down to the alert that uses a lightning emoji at either end instead of the alert emojis that Be Real uses. So pretty much a ripoff here. A mock-up shows a dedicated Now tab where the Friends tab is. And TikTok says markets outside the US may get time to now as a separate app. The default setting will only be to let friends, that's people that you follow who also follow you. So, you know, it's a two-way street, see these posts at this time. If you're over 18, you can change that and share with the Explorer feed so other people can see it as well. Now, I'm kidding about TikTok being over, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and we've seen it before. Snapchat recently added the front and back dual camera, just like Be Real, to its main camera toolbar. Instagram added a feature called dual, D-U-A-L, to Reels. Let's use the front and back camera. Even more like Be Real, in August, an app researcher named Alessandra Peluzzi showed off screenshots of an Instagram prototype called IG Candid Challenges, which sent a notification at a random time that gave you two minutes to capture and share a photo. So, does this mean that Be Real is simply such a great idea that it got absorbed into existing platforms? Could it be the next Snapchat, which Instagram also tried to copy several years ago and kind of legitimized with stories? Or is TikTok simply trying to catch up and so it's hurting for ideas, copying newer apps? What does it all mean, Sarah? Well, good question. I think that to use the Instagram versus Snapchat example, Instagram has been pretty successful there. Snapchat certainly has lots of users still, but many Instagram stories users are former Snapchat folks who said, well, everybody was on Instagram anyway, and it was the same thing more or less, so I'm just there now. In fact, it's part of the most, part of Instagram that I feel many of my friends spend time on the most, even though I don't. Be Real, I'm not a Be Real user currently. Max, I'm not sure if you are, but I know that it is definitely the new hotness and it just makes sense that any company, especially TikTok, which is still kind of its new hotness, would want to use those features and fold them into their own platform. Yeah, I mean I think it's smart because obviously TikTok has a huge wealth of users to pull from, and if they add a feature that's not too much of a lift to kind of put that there and give their users the option to use it, that's going to prevent them from moving on to whatever the hot new thing is, and it's probably smart to do that now rather than to try to have to play catch up later. I mean, we just talked about how Snapchat adding web support, that feels a lot like they're trying to catch up with TikTok, because I see so many TikToks posted on a browser. Yeah, yeah. I mean, most of what I absorb on TikTok is on the web just because I like web interfaces. We talked about this on GDI yesterday. It's like, give me a web interface. I will use this more. I think the question is whether BeReal is Meerkat or Snapchat and TikTok, right? Instagram put in stories, which actually did okay imitating Snapchat, didn't run Snapchat out of business though, and Reels, which imitates TikTok, and Jerry's still out on, some people think Reels is a flop, but it certainly didn't hurt TikTok, whereas Meerkat was taken on by Periscope and Twitterbot Periscope, and nobody remembers Meerkat anymore. So is BeReal that thing that is quickly spiking right now but will fade away because it's just a feature, not a business? Or is it going to be more like Snapchat where it expands and finds other things that it's good for? I don't know that I have the answer. I'm a little skeptical that BeReal can do anything else without getting its user base upset, because it's very much about being in the moment, being real, and not having influencers, et cetera, involved. It's a cool idea, but it feels kind of antithetical to what makes social media popular. There's so much of that that is sort of this voyeurism and exhibitionism of being like, oh, let me show you my best side. That said, though, BeReal has had a huge uptick in its user base over a very short period of time to the point where a lot of folks ask me, Sarah, have you heard of BeReal? I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's IK. It's definitely reaching my non-technical friends at this point. It's easy. It's easy to do. My wife, she continues to use it, but she complains every time. She's like, ah, don't have anything good to take a picture of right now. It's kind of the point, you know. It's kind of the point because it's real life. I think we've seen an interesting sort of rise of these kind of page a day calendar apps. Like Wordle is very much like that. I play Framed, which is like the movie version of Wordle. And it's great. It shows like a screen cap of a movie and you have to guess what it is. It's really fun. But I mean, it's that little daily routine thing. And I think there's something much more digestible about like, let me snap a photo of whatever it is I'm doing. The whole emphasis is on it not being staged and like perfectly manicured. It's kind of like, let me just get this out of the way and then move on with my day. I think that's a good way to put it. It's like I am a participant in this fun thing that a lot of other people are participating in, but no one's better than anybody else. You can't really try harder. You just participate. And it's low, it's a low ask. Just do it once, then you're done. You don't have to keep doing it. You get pulled in like the TikTok algorithm or Twitter, et cetera. All right, let's talk hard drives. Let's do it. BackBlaze is one of the biggest cloud backup providers for folks in the world. And because of that, the company is very concerned with reliability, especially storage reliability. Regularly publishing findings from its data center on which hard drives last the longest, which hard drives perform the best. And the latest report compares rather solid straight drives to spinning hard drives. So let's call them SSDs and HDDs. BackBlaze now has five years of data on both. They have more than that on HDDs. But unfortunately, BackBlaze doesn't have data on a lot of brands. They haven't used many Western Digital or SanDisk SSDs. They haven't used any Samsung SSDs or at least reported little or no data on those. The bulk of their data is coming from Crucial and Micron, Seagate, a lot of Seagate models and Dell. Meaning it's a good comparison overall of SSD and HDD, but less useful at telling us which manufacturers make the most reliable of those drives, which is something it's very useful for on HDDs. However, it's worth pointing out the Dell Boss VD Solid State Drive has zero fails and 161,508 drive days. That means it has enough data to give BackBlaze some confidence that that particular stat is meaningful. Everything else is either not doing as well or doesn't have enough stats to have a high confidence interval. Yeah, since BackBlaze only uses SSDs as boot drives, it only compared them to HDDs that it uses as boot drives as well. So, you know, not exactly the same going on here, but these boot drives, they're not boot, they're boot. Read, write and delete data including temp files and log files, among others. So, they don't just boot up and then sit idly. Also, keep in mind that BackBlaze has eight years of HDD data after which presumably they retire a drive. Just, you know, it goes on the back burner, but only five years max of SSDs at this point. HDDs and SSDs track pretty closely in their data through the first three years. The HDDs have a slightly higher failure percentage, about two-thirds of a percentage point higher. It's not much. Year four starts to see a wider gap. SSD failures jump 0.26% while HDDs rise 0.48%. So, that's almost double the rate of failure in year four. It's still a small amount of failure. Year five is where the difference really appears, and this is the first year that they can compare year five. SSD failures fall slightly from 1.05% to 0.92%. Statistically, you can call that even though. It's pretty close. While HDDs rise from 1.83% to 3.55%. So, hard drives really start to have a failure rate in year five, whereas SSDs don't. The failure rate rises steeply for HDDs, 5.23% in year six, 6.26% in year seven. The question now is what will we see next year? Will the SSDs stay on their almost flat curve, or are they finally going to hit the wall and fail at higher rates? If it doesn't happen next year, which year might that happen? But this is good data to show that solid state drives very solid, at least through five years of use. And these are consumer drives being put to use in a data center situation. Max, does this change your hard drive buying behavior at all? I don't buy a ton of hard drives. This is definitely, I guess, this is stupid, but realizing that the cloud is still as hard drives. I know that in the back of my head in the same way that there are no grownups. There's that optimism of like, it's fine, it's up there, it's safe, it's in the cloud. But hopefully, by the time the SSDs I have kicking around are on their last legs, there's some new and exciting, much sturdier, more reliable option out there. Yeah, like the cloud, wait. That's a good point though. I mean, I think somebody might have listened to the story and been like, well, I don't know. My hard drive was just built into the last laptop that I bought. What does this mean to me? What can I do about it? And turns out, various types of hard drives power lots of things that we store things in, we pay money for, and we all will benefit from them working as well as possible. Yeah, like real clouds are made up of drops of water. The internet's cloud is made up of other people's hard drives. So keep that in mind. It stands through the hour class. Back up. Roger wanted us to remind everyone, as always, back up your data, because if your hard drive fails, you want a copy of it. I learned a valuable lesson about hard drives in high school. I had a Creative Labs Zen Nomad Extra MP3 player, which I loved because it was like an iPod, except it had a removable battery so you could, replace the battery once it ran out. But that didn't affect it if somebody jumped on your back and you dropped it and fried the hard drive and lost all of your music. And then, I don't know, from that point forward, I feel like I've had this just very ephemeral approach to data and just been like, it's all going to go away someday. Nothing lasts. It doesn't matter. Put it in the cloud. Never fall in love. With your data. Folks, if you have a thought about a backup plan for Max or anybody else, send us an email. The email address here is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Now, we may not have had an E3 again this year, but there was plenty of gaming news this summer. Gamescom happened in Germany. Sony and Nintendo just had announcements. The Tokyo Game Show is starting right now. Max, help us get caught up on the biggest news. What do we got? Sure. So like you said, E3 didn't happen, but Gamescom did, which is a big huge triumphant return. I got to go out there and cover it live myself out in Cologne, Germany. A bunch of the major kind of players actually skipped it. Sony and Nintendo and Activision and EA, none of them showed up, but Xbox was there. There were a bunch of kind of, I don't want to say smaller outlets, but not like those big huge monolithic publishers. It was kind of nice because I think we're just now sort of seeing the effects of COVID on development and a lot of things have been pushed so next year is going to be phenomenal for games. This fall is like a little bit weird because a bunch of the sort of, the big huge things that people were looking forward to got delayed. And so it's this kind of, I don't know, it's the best of the rest coming out this fall. And I think as such, we've got a lot of, like you said, Sony just did sort of their fall look ahead showing off God of War Ragnarok, which is their big fall release. Nintendo gave us a release date for the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2, which is officially called Tears of the Kingdom, which is exciting, but yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of gaming stuff to talk about. I would say the biggest sort of surprise that came out of Gamescom was Dead Island 2, which was, I think, announced in, I want to say 2014. This is the follow up to the sort of open world first person RPG Dead Island, which I got a couple, it got like a spin-off or two, and it sort of got usurped a little bit by, what's it called, kind of totally drawing a blank in the name, but God, it's like a parkour living dead game. But anyway, basically this game was, people thought it was completely canceled and done for, and then it kind of, you know, appropriately rose from the grave, and it's in playable shape, people previewed it, people checked it out, and it's coming out next year, which is kind of wild. But yeah, there's, as far as the other big surprises, the team that did Friday the 13th, the sort of asymmetrical multiplayer horror game is taking their talents and applying them to killer clowns from outer space. The campy old, I think, 1988 horror movie, which never took itself seriously, and I think it's like really ripe for a video game. So three people play as clowns, and four people play as teenagers, and the teenagers have to like, steal stereos and, you know, loot stuff and pick up collectibles or whatever, and the clowns have to kill them with, you know, acidic cotton candy or what have you. And then, what else we got? There's a Dune game on the way. This one feels like it's a long ways off. This is Dune Awakening. We just got a big huge, sort of, you know, pre-rendered CG trailer for it, and it's clearly, it's taking the kind of the branding from the Dennis Villeneuve movie, but it's going to be kind of its own thing. And that's from the team that did Conan Exiles. So they have some experience turning, you know, turning beloved ancient hard, lore fiction into survival MMORPG material. But I think, you know, kind of wait and see on that one. And then, where Winsmeat was a total surprise, which is from a Chinese studio, and it looks very much inspired by Ghost of Tsushima, but with a little bit more supernatural stuff going on. It's really just like a huge, sprawling, really, really impressive looking demo, the kind that I'm kind of like, I'll wait and see. I'll believe it when I'm playing it. But it's, you know, it's kind of cool that it came out of nowhere. For the Nintendo stuff, if you are a Breath of the Wild fan, do you feel like Tears of the Kingdom is going to be a must when it comes out? I think I'm an outlier in this. I think a lot of people are extremely excited about this. There's no question in their mind, because it looks very much like more of the same in the best way possible. I, for one, kind of love it when Zelda comes out and has a totally new aesthetic and a new style and sort of throws out the formula, but that's also totally kind of antithetical to what smart, iterative game design is these days. If you make a massive 100-hour RPG open world, like maybe keep some of the systems around, yeah, it looks like it's going to be sort of a more of an aerial approach. You're going to be on floating islands above Hyrule, and there will probably be some new physics systems to mess around with. People got a lot of mileage out of that last one, so I think there'll be a lot more to play with with this one. I know people who played it day one and are still playing it now. Yeah, no, it's one of those games. It's easily like a top five all-time Desert Island game if you have to pick one. Anything else from the Nintendo announcement? Yeah, Pikmin 4 is apparently happening. The last we heard about this was in 2017, I believe, or that's when it was announced, and Miyamoto came out and said great news. It's almost done, whatever that means, but it's more Pikmin. Pikmin 3.9, it's almost... Yeah, but this should be huge because the Switch install base at this point is just massive and huge, and I think Nintendo has come out with sort of entries in its flagship series that maybe didn't necessarily make a huge splash before, and because of how many people are on Switch, it's completely blown up. Animal Crossing's New Horizons was just... they kind of just struck old with that, and it also was the perfect timing for it, and I've never gotten into Pikmin, so I'm curious about this. I have a Switch, I might mess around with it. It's a small vermin that you're... are your friends, I guess. Probably easy to pick up, right? Anything else from the Nintendo there? Not on the Nintendo front so much. There is some other stuff coming out of TGS. The big thing at Sony's big presentation the other day was Tekken 8 got a big official thing shown off, and it's more Tekken. It looks really impressive. They're clearly just really pushing hard with next-gen graphics and all that, and the other big thing is the Yakuza series, which I'm a big fan of. They announced that they are localizing slash remastering this fan... not a fan favorite, it's one of the fans that they're recommending. It's set in Samurai times, and so they're going through and doing a whole full HD up-res and all that. It's the thing that you go to any... Yakuza interview and the comments are like, when's Isshin coming out? When is this coming out so the devs can finally stop answering that question because they're putting it out, along with two other games that they also announced. So those guys keep pretty busy, but yeah, a lot of games look forward to. Yeah, before we move on, there's a lot of stuff including these Sony and Nintendo announcements kind of in advance of it. Anything you're looking forward to over the last few days of it? I mean, Hideo Kojima was tweeting weird images, which is pretty par for the course with him. I'm always excited to see what that guy is up to. I would love to see Konami do something with the Metal Gear franchise or Castlevania or Silent Hill or anything like that, but I'm not really holding my breath on that front. Yeah, I mean, three Yakuza games is pretty much more than TGS. That is pretty good. Like, and before day one for that matter. So yeah, nice. Well, just a reminder, when we roll into GDI after DTNS wraps up, if any of y'all have thoughts about stuff that you're looking forward to or games that you already like that the rest of us should know about, do weigh in, and we'll kick that around a little bit. But first, we're going to kick around something the Wall Street Journal calls in search of a silent leaf blower. You might say, you mean those kind of leaf blowers? Yes. That's exactly what they're talking about. It will strike at the heart of lots of homeowners or people who live close to homeowners. Mark Huco is a mechanical engineer in Ann Arbor, Michigan who ditched his gas powered leaf blower for a handheld blower with a rechargeable 40 volt battery from a company called Ryobi's Whisper Series. Huco's Ryobi can outpower many new gas fuel backpack models and his Ryobi clocks in at 57 decibels. You might say, how loud is that? Well, it's a lot less than what most people hate most about leaf blowers. They clock in closer to 74. Quite a bit quieter. As for limitation, there are some. Both of the two 40 volt batteries that came with the blower can only power the tool up to 60 minutes at its lowest speed. The Ryobi 40 volt HP Brushless 650 CFM Whisper Series Blower Kit includes a 6 amp power battery that can run for 80 minutes at the lowest speed for $279. So this is not totally cost prohibitive. It definitely depending on what you got to blow and how many leaves are falling around your property. It may make more sense for some rather than others. But Max, does this strike at the heart of things that you hate most? I'm actually sort of a leaf blower apologist. I had I think the model down from the Ryobi 40 showed off there until somebody stole it off my porch. I don't have a lot of trees or a lot of leaves but for grass clippings and getting dirt off my porch and stuff, it was handy. But I told my mom that I had a leaf blower and she was like, oh no, I've signed a petition to get those banned at Sonoma. They're so loud. Your mom is perhaps my neighbor. People aren't wild about these things but I don't know. I'm all for just less, I guess, gas powered household devices in general. I think like a battery powered thing. If it's not ear-splittingly loud, that's fine. But also wouldn't hurt to rake some leaves either. Yeah. In my day we had a leaf blower. It was called a rake. It was quiet. And it was good for you. Get off my leaf filled lawn. Come hang out on my property sometime. There's plenty of raking going on and it's just it's a mess. It's noisy. It's also stinky. I hate leaf blowers. I understand that they do a good job and when they're done, I'm happy they were here. But anything, even if it's a little bit more limited based on battery usage and that sort of thing anything that can just make your neighbors hate you less, I feel like is not the worst thing. I'm all for a lot less noise. I'm all for power efficiency. Still, I hold a grudge against leaf blowers. Not even just for the noise and the gas use. But for the fact that they are misused often to blow away things that you paid to be there. Like, you know, mulch and pebbles and things. I've run into that where I've like oh, why did you do that? Why did you blow over there? Like, I don't want that to be blown away. I want that to stay there. So I don't know. I'm looking forward to the teleporter day where you can just have an AI scan your lawn for leaves and then tell it like teleport those leaves to the compost area. The drone leaf blower. Drone comes down, drone does its thing, drone leaves. Just picks the leaves, right? Yeah. Just take the leaves. Just the leaves that we want gone. Just pick some up and just chop, lift some elsewhere. It takes a while. Yeah, very small drones. But, but very precise. Yeah. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Paul. This is in response to our conversation yesterday about folks who use cell phones versus folks who use computers, desktop computers and how they might lie differently. Paul says, my opinion on the cause of the difference in cell phones versus computers has to do with the cell phone being a more intimate device versus the computer. Cell phone is held in your hand. Computer sits on a table dispassionately waiting for you to type on it. So that the person you're talking to on the computer is that much less of a human. Yeah, the study we talked about yesterday said that people who communicated through laptops in the study tended to lie a lot more than people who use cell phones. And I like this, I like this idea the cell phone feeling because it's in your hand not sitting on a table feeling more intimate. Could be something to that. Maybe there's a feeling of just paranoia that comes with that because a cell phone is constantly with you. There's a big brother aspect to it. Aside from the more wholesome intimacy side of it. Whereas a laptop you can shut it and that's almost like you're shutting your window. You're like, I can't see me now. I mean, even something like on iOS, I have a certain amount of people who are on Find My Friends and I trust them it's fine that they know where I am at all times but they do know where I am at all times. Not on the laptop though. So there's, you know, there's just that much of a, you know, oh, the cell phone you can't get away with it. Even if the study is using someone else's cell phone which I assume they are. You're probably not using your own cell phone and if you're participating in this study it's just the familiarity, right? It's the association to that. I think there's something to that. Finally, Adam said I have an iPhone 13 Pro that I got earlier this year. It was a big improvement from my iPhone 8 but I never felt like it was as snappy as it should be. I installed iOS 16 when it was released this week and my phone feels light years faster. It opens quicker with Face ID and it connects much better with my HomePod minis. I don't know if anyone else has noticed this but I wanted to share my experience. Adam, that's great. I have not found that to be true with my iPhone 12 but it also isn't slower so I don't know. I went from a 10 Pro 10S Max 10S Max to the 13 Pro Max and Adam, I have to say I felt like battery life was a little lackluster. If I'm charging it regularly I'm not really running out but it wasn't lasting a whole lot longer than the phone I had in the past that was a little long in the tooth. However, I only did install iOS 16 yesterday so I'll take a look at that over the next week. Thanks so much to you Max Scoville for being with us today. I know you've had a very busy week so we really appreciate your time. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Just head over to IGN.com YouTube.com slash IGN, the various IGN platforms. You can also find me on Twitter or Instagram as Max Scoville. We do all sorts of video game stuff all sorts of entertainment stuff in general so keep an eye out. Go to Max's stories on IGN and reload them so he gets good stats. Tell him on Twitter. I get paid per view. Help Max eat. And thank him on Twitter for being on the show. Max Scoville at Twitter. Indeed. Also thanks to our brand new boss. That brand new boss's name is Albert. Albert just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you Albert. Welcome. We are so glad to have you. Speaking of patrons, please do stick around for our extended show Good Day Internet. We talk about all the things. A lot of it has to do with the show in an expanded way. You can catch this show though. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow talking Ford Mustangs. And is there a future for auto shows? With Tim Stevens. If anyone would know, he would. Get more at frogpants.com The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.