 Welcome to the second bi-monthly or thereabouts edition of the DTNS Mailbag. This is the show where we take a lot of the feedback that we get from you over, let's say a month, and try to dissect it and get a little bit deeper into it. Joining me today, of course, is DTNS host Tom Merritt, but also former co-host of both of ours, IAZ Actor. Hey guys. Hey everybody. Looks out of here. Welcome IAZ. It's good to have you. Welcome to being here too. I'm welcome here. We're all welcoming each other. It's fine. That's great. It's like we never did this for several years. IAZ, I was asking you right before we started the broadcast how life was in New York. Sounds cold, little slushy, but spring is on the way. It is crazy inconsistent with the weather here. I mean, it's not as bad as New England was back when I lived there, but it makes me miss NorCal a little bit, just a tiny bit. Come back, come back. Working on it. Come back, come back. Well, I know IAZ is pressed for time because it is a Friday after all, and he's a very busy man. He's also three hours ahead. So we're gonna go ahead and jump into the first email that we got from James. This is referencing, this is probably one of the most popular email responses I've ever seen since I joined the show back in October. The uses for an old Raspberry Pi. New Raspberry Pi, pretty cheap, but hey, if you have an old one, what are you gonna do with it if you're not using it? James says, just thought I'd chime in and let you know, most likely others have already said this already, that the fine people over at Humble Bundle have a DIY electronics bundle of eBooks from Wiley. Six of those 14 are about the Raspberry Pi. The others are on Arduino, Beaglebone, General Electronics, and so on. Lot of great stuff in this bundle though, I'd suggest if somebody is going to pick it up, they do so for the $15 plus option, as they exploring Raspberry Pi or exploring Beaglebone books, both by Derek Malloy, both basically the same book, are beginner to deep dive in working with embedded Linux. He goes on to give us some links, I as knowing what I know from you because you're a tinkerer Raspberry Pi fan, also a person who puts together things from scratch and likes the hardware idea, has anything struck you as the best use of a Raspberry Pi that might be a paperweight otherwise? It's funny because Raspberry Pi's used to be great for like media streamers, Barokus, and Apple TVs, and fire TVs have gotten so advanced that you don't necessarily need anything like this as a media streamer anymore. I keep looking at it as a main machine, and there's questionable legality as to the ROMs. So if you're going to play a lot of video games like the NES Classic, those little devices or the SNES Classic, that's probably what I'd be using mine for. On top of that, there's something from MakePad. They let you build a tablet using a Raspberry Pi. It's meant for children to understand that they can build their own stuff. And for me, I've got a seven year old, and I want them to be aware that, you know, these things just don't show up magically all assembled. You could build this yourself. I really love the idea of using it as a learning tool, but otherwise it's more of a hobbyist device because so many devices can do so much of what the Raspberry Pi was meant to do. And it's kind of, I wanna say it's almost redundant, but it's really great as a learning tool. Yeah, I'm hoping that of all of these, and we even have some more to get to here, that all of these emails that may not only inspire Scott to do something with his Raspberry Pi, but maybe will help inspire other people to do cool stuff like that. I mean, having your kid make a tablet out of a Raspberry Pi, the whole conversation about screen time in your kids becomes so different if they've made the tablet themselves, right? Yeah, it's like, okay, so did you earn that time? Well, yeah, dad, I built it. It's like, all right, that's cool. What am I doing? I'm debugging, dad. All right, cool. Then you go in and disassemble it and be like, all right, got built again. Well, I mean, you know, the whole hobbyist aspect of it is like, if it's $35 or thereabouts, right? Then you have a little bit more room to play around with something than you would if you're not necessarily gonna ask your child to take apart an iPad. We'll get to that later. But this is not cost prohibitive for people who actually like trying things out. It's crazy cheap to do so many different things. I mean, look, it's a computer that costs a couple bucks. That's, I mean, years ago, that's unfathomable. And now it is easily done, like saying unfathomable. Speaking of Raspberry Pi has got another email from Bill. We got a lot of emails, can't get to them all, but thank you for everybody who wrote in with really, really good, really good tips for people who want to update their Raspberry Pi's or do something with Raspberry Pi's that are sitting around. Bill is from Huntsville, Alabama and says, recently a reference was made about Raspberry Pi computers and what to do. I bought my first one in 2015. Used that one to set up a J-Bod NAS. I have five USB drives connected to an 18 terabyte capacity that I use for backup. I keep that system in my basement. My second project was to make a digital clock. I have a third connected to a seven inch screen, keyboard, mouse and speakers kind of speaks to the whole tablet idea. The Raspberry Pi has a few limitations. There are no competitors that address some of those limitations. They include that it only has USB two ports and a 100 megabyte ethernet port. I just received delivery of an SBC called the Rock64, which I paid 48 for. That includes a power adapter, case and shipping. One month between the order and delivery from China, the Rock64 has gigabit ethernet, both USB two and USB three ports, but no built-in wifi. So it sounds like there are a lot of really fun solutions that people are coming up with, but there are also limitations based on the price. Plus just a shout out to Bill Burlingame. He's been a listener of DTNS from the beginning. He's been a techie for decades. I love his stories because he'll tell me things, he'll write in and tell us things about, when he was first working in the 60s or 70s and how things worked, or even I think before, I don't mean to date you, Bill. And then we get emails like this, like, oh, well, I've got three Raspberry Pies and this is what I'm doing. I mean, it just shows like age ain't nothing but a number when it comes to technology. I'm looking at the specs on Rock64. I actually output 4K 60p video. I don't know what the newest Raspberry Pi does. I'll say that. So that sounds pretty interesting. I don't know what you'd want to drive with this. You can do a lot, just see a giant widget machine which is really old and silly to think about. Yeah, and just fun stuff to tool around with. These are some great ideas for projects right here. Got another email from Cameron. He lives in Adelaide, Australia. And this is regarding our discussion that spanned a few days this week about the idea of social networks employing humans to basically make sense of what AI cannot and that includes disturbing content. So content that should be banned, that maybe has been flagged by a machine but a human needs to say, yes, yes, this is bad. And the sort of traumatic implications of being employed in a job like that as a contractor, as a staff member, whatever. So Cameron says, few things stand out to me. Number one, hopefully this is just the busy part with these tech companies to skirt significantly the content creation to a more manageable level. You often talk about podcasting. Other noble content is having the cycle but I don't think we've considered the effect in this kind of disturbing content. Number two, although there are many jobs with this kind of exposure, I guess it's new for a big tech company. Also a little bit of an odd mix when you're talking about white collar, batch work, load desktop type work, certainly you could imagine how much more horrible YouTube could be viewed in eight hours. The whole story from the other day was that they were going to make the cap on any contractor who is doing this at four hours a day, right? Eight hours, twice as bad as four. Cameron says also maybe a little isolating as compared to say the police or a dictator and his colleagues. All right, we'll end there. Number three, seems like the maturity of the internet to me. Now they need content to be policed. We're learning how that was all going to work between humans and AI. Ayaz, have you been following the story and what's your gut tell ya? If I understand the story correctly, I was thinking about when YouTube had all those disturbing videos for children. Is that what we're talking about? Is it something similar? Well basically what they're saying is they're limiting the amount of time that the moderators they're hiring to search or to review for disturbing images have to spend because they're spending a lot of time looking at disturbing images. So they're saying only four hours at a time on that job. Well that sounds like a safe policy idea then because you don't want people getting mentally disturbed at your workplace because who knows what they're going to do. This is a real problem because look, algorithms can't suss this stuff out yet. It's really hard to tell between like a medical procedure that's being viewed or a scientific explanation of something versus something that is completely just vile. There's a huge difference as to what defines these particular kinds of content. So to protect the employees who are viewing these images, that's definitely smart. And I'm sure that engineers are hard to work figuring out a way that they can automate this because the hope is one day it's going to be automated and no one's got to worry about this but there's always going to be flags brought up. Well, and that's one of the most fascinating things that I find about this is AI is not perfect, right? It's doing a lot of stuff that it didn't used to do before and taking humans out of the equation but with mixed results and lots of room for improvement. So when I hear from Facebook, it's like, well, we're trying to make the news feed more relevant to give you stories that you might like or that sort of thing. It's like, okay, that's fine but if there's actual humans that have to look at disturbing content to the point where they could be put in a PTSD situation that's extremely harmful, perhaps for the rest of their life, that's what I want AI to figure out. I don't care about all this other BS. Like that's actually what we should be figuring out so that people don't have to do this. Well, yeah, there's a couple of further thoughts, evolving thoughts on this matter. One is, four hours sounds like a lot to me if it's four hours of disturbing images. You have to remember that they're reviewing images, not every one of them is gonna be disturbing. So maybe that four hours isn't as bad as I thought because it's not constant, right? They're reviewing things and some of the things they'll look at and say, oh, that's not that bad. I don't mean to minimize it. I'm just saying, well, at first I was like, wow, four hours is still a lot. Second, people wanna say, AI will never get good at this. Other people say, AI can do all of this. And the fact is we're slowly seeing computers get better at this. Algorithm is not a bad word. Machine learning is not a hoax, but it's not perfect. I mean, I compare it to voice recognition. For a long time, we had voice recognition that just wasn't that good. I was using voice recognition on my Windows 3.1 machine in 1994 and it was very basic and people laughed at it and said, well, that'll never be able to do X, Y, and Z. Well, here we are with Amazon Echoes and Google Homes and they're really good at recognition. Now our complaint is, well, they don't understand the semantics of what I say. And that's what we're talking about, like seeing these things get better and better to the point where, yes, I think what you're hoping for, Sarah, will one day be possible where 99.9% of the things we don't want to show up can be identified, it's a matter of time and I don't know how much time that's gonna take. Yeah, I know, it's, the complications of all of this are vast and I won't pretend to. We've gotten quite a few emails, especially from people who've served in the military, our law enforcement and been exposed to a lot of this stuff and they have much better ideas of what kind of content we're even talking about. For me, I'm like, well, I can imagine what it is and it seems really bad, but if I was being exposed to that for four hours a day, I don't know. I don't know if I could handle it and I'm not sure that a lot of the people who might take a job because they need money are equipped to handle that as well. And this is sort of lifetime trauma stuff that should not be minimized. We actually got another email from Brian about the same subject, not to be too much of a downer here, but hey, we got a lot of emails about this. Says, when I heard the story about human operators being exposed to abjectional content on YouTube, I thought of radiation jumpers, if you don't know what that is, generally unskilled laborers who do the least desirable jobs in the nuclear industry in the most extreme cases, they enter disaster areas. Fukushima, for example, to perform emergency tasks under heavy radiation for up to an hour at a time. So again, this is sort of a quantitative thing that somebody is putting a cap on here. Once they near what's considered unacceptable cumulative dose of radiation, then they have to get out of there. They shouldn't work anymore where they're exposed to radiation. The problem is that an acceptable dose is subject to interpretation. And that also workers in less dramatic positions, for example, in the trekking industry would meet their lifetime exposure in one location and then move on to another. This sounds horrifying. That's sorry, I just got really silent on it. Something like, this is a terrible thing. And there are people who need to, like you were saying, people need to pay their bills. And sometimes people need to take whatever jobs are out there and they have to view, and if they are qualified to view abjectional content, which is a weird thing to say, I don't know how to think about it. There's probably gonna be a lot of psychological evaluations of these people on a regular basis because not thinking like a lawyer. If you're going to have a giant corporation that's worth billions of dollars, they don't wanna be associated with anybody who is permanently traumatized or does something awful or evil or something close to what they've watched at their job site. They don't want that kind of thing going out. So hopefully the companies or corporations are being responsible enough to keep tabs on these viewers of content. Yeah, YouTube is a victim of their own success here. You know, you don't see a platform like WordPress deal with this because WordPress, although it's vastly popular, never made themselves responsible for the content. They let you have their product for free. They let you use your own domain name. They stay out of it. YouTube wanted to be more involved. They wanted to sell the ads. They wanna, you know, and so because of that, they became attractive for people who wanted to game that system sometimes with evil intent. You know, I probably am closer to this than I was a few months ago just because I just went through picking new health insurance, you know, and it's sort of like physical, mental. What is all, you know, deductible, the whole thing. But I do feel like this is a very good case. And, you know, again, this is in very general terms, but a very good case for understanding, hey, if somebody's at a nuclear site and they get exposed to too much radiation and we've all determined that, like, after a certain point, that's really bad. And, you know, nobody should, that's, you know, we're better than that, right? Mental health can and should be treated more increasingly in the same way. Yeah. No, that's a really good point. There should be better metrics to understand when someone is at risk of a major problem, right? And the ability to evaluate that. All right. Let's move on to something a little bit more lighthearted. This comes from Robert. He said he sent this from his Commodore VIC-20. I don't think he was sending this from a VIC-20. Come on. I had to look that up, so. Oh, it's called a VIC-20. Oh, yeah. No, I had a Commodore 64. The VIC-20 was the predecessor of the Commodore 64, circa 1980. Why would he say that in email signature? It's for kicks. Just for fun? Unless he's actually hacked his VIC-20 to access the internet. I don't want to undersell you, Robert. Maybe you did it. All right, Robert, if you actually have a VIC-20, as I know it's now called, please send a photo, a proof of life, holding a piece of paper. And that way we'll know that you're for real. But this is actually just sort of a silly thing we were talking about the other day. We were talking about the metric system versus the imperial system that we use in the US and also that. I was advocating for Pi Day. I was saying 314 is acceptable because the month should come before the day. I don't like that the year is at the end. The year should be first in the month of the day. That's reverse order. But depending on where you are in the world, I, most of the time, there's day, month, year, because that actually makes more sense, right? No. A smallest, no. You want to tell us the European Union, how you feel about it? Yes, this is one of the times that that was what that whole conversation was about. It's like, yeah, I'm way into the metric system, Europe, but you got your dates all messed up. It should be year, then month, then day, because it's in descending order and then it sorts really nicely. I, as I know you do a lot of podcasts, is this something that you think about in your daily metadata life? You know, I actually, I write it this way. I actually did the year, then the month, then the date, because when I need to sort it for files, that's a lot easier because the date created thing changes for some reason. I'm like, that shouldn't be happening. Last updated could mean nothing. So for file name, I actually do use this. It's weird because I'll end up writing it on things like checks, which doesn't make any sense, at least in the US. Anyway, we should read Robert's email because it supports my point. Well, but Robert says, year, year, month, month, day, day is also known as a DOD date. I assume he means Department of Defense and in the service, we use that almost exclusively. Thank you. Thank you. Exactly. Fine, fine. When lives are on the line, you use year, month, date. When our boys need it. Thanks, Robert. Always good to hear that I'm doing things wrong. We got another email from Yaru who comes from Malaysia and this is in regards to another very lively topic we had on DTNS, which is right to repair. Meaning that several US states, more than several, 18, if my numbers are correct, have introduced bills to force companies to allow civilians, consumers, to at least have access to how to repair something themselves if they can get those parts themselves. So for, you know, you could use Apple as an example. You know, if my screen is shattered, well, I mean, it's expensive for Apple to fix that for me, but that's kind of my only option, right? So one would think that companies that make a lot of money on repairs would not want this bill to go through, but again, going back to, you know, the tinkers of the world and people who say like, hey, if I can do it myself and I can not brick my phone, I would like to do that as well. And this doesn't even apply just exclusively to smartphones. Maybe, you know, let's, you know, let's have some new laws. Anyway, Yaru says, I have an iPhone 7 Plus. Battery works fine for the most part, but it's been more than a year. I was thinking I didn't change. Take advantage of Apple's new official discounted price for batteries due to their recent battery gate scandal. But Apple told me it would take five to seven days to get that new battery. And no, that doesn't include shipping to location that involves me actually going to the center, dropping the phone off, picking it up after that period of time. By contrast, a third-party repair shop that's in my vicinity, I assume, can get it done in 30 minutes, maybe an hour. I know this because I've done so with my previous phone, and that was an iPhone 6 Plus just last year. They told me they could do it for a cheaper price. Phone still works well as being used by a family member at the moment. Modern smartphones have more complex battery systems, but nothing that would justify that length of downtime. He goes on to explain a little bit more about his point, but yeah, I agree. You know, I think for a lot of folks, it's sort of like, yeah, the convenience of just not having to open up a computer, whatever that computer is, whether it's a mobile device or something larger, for a lot of people, myself included, and it's worth it probably. But the time spent waiting for something, especially if you're going through the proper channels, that's the prohibitive part. Yeah, it's not just cost, it's speed, absolutely. It also sounds like since Apple has tons and tons of phones that it sold, and is probably dealing with lots and lots of phones, they have just an increased volume, and the time is just a function of amount. So just because some third-party shop that's on the corner, they get, let's say, 50 iPhones a day, sure they can run and do this quickly. Versus Apple, they're probably getting more than that. There's a good chance, and this is just wild speculation on numbers there. So I know with my iPhone 6, I got its battery replaced, it took about six hours, and that was weird, because I'm like, well, you're right here, how long is this gonna take? And I understand the feeling of not having a phone and that interim, that seems like, if it's five to seven days, I almost feel like they should give you a loaner. Here's a loaner, and take as case possible, like when you leave your car somewhere, and it feels like they get you a loaner. Cool rental car for a few days. Something that at least you can use, and it's insured like crazy. So when you break it, it's fine. But I just think it's a volume issue right now, especially since Apple was discounting heavily. I think it's $39.99 or $29.99, $29.99. That price is so much cheaper that even though my phone could survive another year, I'm like, I'll just take it in now, and take this for $30. Well, I think that the sort of underlying issue that a company that wants you to pay a higher fee so that they do it themselves, is a lot like an auto manufacturer, right? Like my car, if I go to a shop that's confirmed, is like a Mercedes shop. It's like many, many times more than what it would be if I went to a mom and pop shop, and they can get away with that because they're like, well, you know, you can't trust those little guys, they'll just screw everything up. But that's really in an attempt to get as much money out of people as possible. So if you are a company who is forced to give people the blueprint to put their own battery into a phone that they know how to do, not everybody's gonna know how to do that. Some people are gonna get it wrong, but to sort of make it seem like, oh, as the official manufacturer and company that gave you this phone in the first place, and I keep using phone as an example, we're the only people who can fix it is, well, that's just not true. Yeah, it's, we, I feel like there's lots of arguments that have been solved in previous industries going on around this. A lot of the arguments have to do with like, well, how can you trust third parties? And I certainly can't repair a phone. Why should I have the right? And if you look at washing machines, refrigerators, we have a pretty settled system about what a manufacturer is required to make available schematics-wise and parts-wise, and what it's not, and that system seems to work fairly well. There are 30-party repair places and there are warranty repairs and there's even like warranty services, like American Home Repair and stuff like that. Maybe that part needs some work sometimes, but there doesn't seem to be any controversy over the right to repair your refrigerator or the right to repair your car. So I feel like, yes, Apple, Samsung, HTC, they should have the right to decide what they do with the things they sell, but we have some really settled ways of going about it with other appliances. Maybe we should just apply that to these. And these companies can also probably game the system. Let's say that every state decides to pass these right to repair things. I'm sure Apple or Samsung could be like, hey, look, if you see certified by Apple or certified by Samsung to meet our standards or that there's a union of some kind that says, hey, these are the standards that they make it to, that could give you the option of, which ones are more trustworthy? Like if you go to your mechanics, are you ASA certified or are you not? So like I could see that becoming the new reality. There are already Apple certified shops, right? Like that's already a program that exists. It wouldn't be hard to extend it. And arguably Apple would love to lose the volume of crap they have to hold in their stores. So like, there you go. Also, I mean, if you can pair it to a car, it's like, eh, things happen with cars all the time, but like, compare it to a dishwasher. I mean, I actually just had to have my dishwasher replaced, but it was like a million years old in my apartment. These are not sort of like the yearly cycles that a lot of electronics companies are pushing. And that's another added factor into this, right? It's like, if you buy a dishwasher for 20 years and one thing goes wrong, 10 years into it, a lot of things happen. But if you're a company that's pushing people to upgrade, especially if there's something wrong with their device that they kind of like, ugh, you know, can't afford to fix or don't know how to fix, then there's that, there lies the rub. I think designed obsolescence is well over exaggerated to conspiracy theory proportions. But what is true is that these companies essentially see the market and that we, maybe we're taking three years to replace a phone instead of two years now, but it's fast. And they don't want to have to deal with third-party repairs because it would change the system. Some of that change might mean slower sales and they wouldn't like that, but that's not the only reason. They've got a whole system based on the fact that people just naturally want to upgrade these things faster. And if they can control, especially somebody like Apple, if they can control that repair cycle, they like it better. I has anything to add before we wrap up this second bi-monthly, whatever we're calling it, mailbag episode. Far from the clunky title? No, I think I'm good. What, you're good? No? I'm good. I think I'll say what I wanted to say. Well, thank you very much for being here before we let you go, because I know you've got a world Friday ahead of you. You get a lot of feedback from your fans as well for a lot of the work that you do at CNET and personally. Is there anything that has kind of resonated with you recently as, wow, this is a really hot topic that a lot of people in the tech community want to talk about and hear more about? I am completely unprepared for that question, so I'm just not until I remember anything that has happened recently. No, I'm just like, when it comes to tech stuff, I end up getting so much more feedback on geeky news. So like the Avengers movie trailer just dropped today, and so that's more about what people are excited about and the fact that there was like an announcement yesterday for a trailer. Well, that fits. It's strange that there's essentially a news release for a trailer, which is an ad for a movie. It's like, when does it stop? I assume we're gonna get a pre-notice about a notice, about a notice. So that's just a weird aside right there. Good, Avengers. Keep writing to Aya's about your thoughts on the new adventures trailer. I'm psyched for it. Speaking of, where can folks learn more about what you do? And if you like, where can they talk to you about their feedback? Twitter's always the best place. If you write to me, I will write back. It might not be right away, but I will reply you back. Twitter.com slash I-Y-A-Z, that's me. And no, that's me part, but at Aya's. That is your name. It's my name still. So the rapper is at Aya's live. He is a very cool dude, but I don't sing. That's the only thing I gotta tell you there. Oh, there is a person who raps named Aya's who's at Aya's live. He's at Aya's live. I'm just at Aya's. Gosh, I forgot about Aya's live. He's still there and I keep getting like, Oh yeah, yeah, no. TVT's all the time and I'm like, yeah, I don't remember singing that. Anyway, go to CNET.com as well. You'll see my videos constantly because they're there and I'm there. And they, for some reason, keep promoting my material. So that's a great place to get a hold of me and topics to discuss. Well, again, thank you for being part of this show. It's always nice to hang out. We're missing Jason Howell, but otherwise gang's all back together. Tom Merritt, thank you as well. Anything that has resonated with you in the mailbag that we might tackle in the next episode. You know, that's a great question. This right to repair stuff was awesome. And I have really enjoyed going through those emails. I've been forwarding them to Scott Johnson. I'm talking to Scott about what he wants to do with all these emails. Maybe we'll get Scott on the show, on the main show to talk about if any of them have inspired him. Little Raspberry Pi, how to? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Raspberry Pi meal. Sure. Well, again, the idea behind mailbag is that as DTNS grows and our community grows and our feedback grows as well, it is excellent. We don't have time to put everything into every show as everyone knows. But this is going to be an idea of, let's put all this feedback together and talk about stuff on packet a little bit more. Especially the kinds of emails that we get from people where we go, okay, this definitely struck a nerve. Let's give this a little bit more time as bonus content that we don't do on the regular show. One of the things I would love is if people want to write in specifically for the mailbag a question that they'd like others in the audience to answer. I mean, the website says helping each other understand and this is one of the venues for that. So send us a question where you're like, I need to help with this. We'll pitch it out to the smartest audience in the world and see if we can help you out. Exactly. All right, well, lots of stuff to think about this weekend. Again, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is the easiest way to get a hold of us. You have other options, but hey, that is the mailbag itself. Thank you to everybody for being with us and please let us know what you'd like to see the mailbag evolve into. We are, you know, it's a blank slate for the most part. So feedback is the way that this evolves and becomes greater. Have a wonderful weekend.