 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you right there listening right now You might be Paul Teeson or Ali Sanjabi or Andrew Bradley We thank you whoever you are coming up on DTNS why AI automation may make more work for you Not less how the mini playday game console survived a year and duck duck goes Sensible approach to generative AI and search finally somebody did it This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday March 8th 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane and Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the shows producer Roger But who am I when I'm not in Los Angeles Tom the talking cat is mine. That's right. That's exactly right He's from my space. Who's that Tom? I'm your friend And as your friend I recommend we start with the quick hits Got a bit of Google news today the company announced it will hold its annual IO developer conference as an in-person event on May 10th At the shoreline amphitheater, which is near its headquarters in California Keynotes and technical sessions will be available live-streamed and also on demand with free virtual registration now open Google's VPN product is rolling out to all Google one subscribers as well That includes the $2 a month basic plan subscribers before now It was only available to members on the premium 2 terabyte plan So all the Google one subscribers get it you can share that VPN with up to five people if they are on your Google one plan Google also added a dark web report that looks for your personal information and data breaches and let you know if it finds it along with guidance about what to do about it and Google is rolling out spatial audio with head tracking to its pixel buds Pro wireless headphones Google rolled out static spatial audio support to the pixel phones in January Spotify is redesigning that the home screen of its app to favor vertical scrolling while discovering new content beyond just music like Podcasts audio books live audio and more Spotify announced this at its stream-on event on Wednesday Among the announcements is more personalized AI in the smart shuffle feature, which temporarily adds tracks to your existing Playlists DJ the AI spinning records and hosting your own personal radio show Tom Merritt Thank you, Sarah Lane and now more August D Ring launch the $180 battery doorbell plus its first new doorbell since 2021 it offers a square 15 36p 150 by 150 degree view Let's users see a visitor's entire body from head to toe As well as any packages that might be like sitting on the porch uses the same battery as the ring doorbells 3 and 4 But also offers some software tweaks to improve battery life compared to those of models available for pre-order now ship in April 5th And a reminder ring did move a couple of features into the subscription plan So before you buy it make sure that that is still cool with you We previously told you about project Texas a plan to separate US user data on Tiktok from the rest of the company with Oracle in charge of the data processing now Europe's got their own version of sorts tiktok revealed a new set of security measures for Europe called project Clover Which we'll see a third-party security company audit its data control and Practices and set up security gateways that determine which employees can access European user data The company also announced plans for two new data centers in Ireland along with one that was previously announced in Norway Tiktok will migrate European user data to these servers aiming for completion in 2024 one of these other data centers needs to be called Crimson So you can have a crimson and project Clover like that over over and over. Yeah All right guys inflation has come for the play date you say play date what but I haven't even been to a Jungle gym recently for those unfamiliar the play date that we're talking about here is a yellow mini game console They came out last April for $179 its games are controlled by a crank. It's also made by a company called Panic They're based in Portland, Oregon best known for a lot of Mac software such as the FTP client transmit They've been doing it for a long time as well as for untitled goose game, which is a lot of fun I suppose I've never played it, but sadly the play date price is rising to $199 on April 7th, but not for no reason Anything ordered before we'll get the old price including existing pre-orders and there are quite a few of them So let's talk about why the price is going up. Yeah, Panic CEO Cable Nasser said and I'm gonna quote him here Our factory recently gave us the inevitable news that in 2023 the price of building a single play date is going up Our margins are already surprisingly slim So although we've absorbed a lot of weird price increases on this weird journey This is the one we couldn't avoid and we are truly sorry So that makes sense prices are going up everywhere price the play dates gonna do that too However, the latest software update does include a game store So whether you're paying $179 or $199 you're gonna get more on that device The catalog as they call their game store lets you buy and download games from the device instead of having to side load There are 15 titles at launch two of which are free. The rest are either $1 to $15 and you pay by credit card and don't worry if you like side loading to the play date You can still do that too. They're not taking that away They're just adding the catalog to make some things easier Scott are you surprised that it's a year later almost and we're still talking about the play date a little bit It's a such a strange device from conception on forward a lot of people really like the things this company does I do they've made some really cool games in the past as well and Sarah mentioned one or two of them So I knew I knew when this thing launched that they had a real passion project on their hands And I thought the price seemed okay at the time, but boy was their timing bad I mean it was right before you know things got so hard with trying to get logistics working in the rest of the world during the pandemic and they were hit by that and Lays and pre-orders were a lot more than they expected and as far as I know I don't I don't even think the first round has been fully fulfilled yet they're doing pre-orders for the next round and One would presume these pre-orders outside of ones that are already done are gonna have this new price I Would just say this I guess I would say to gamers if this was something that jumped out at you and you sort of thought Well, this is interesting Keep in mind a couple of things. It's aimed at a very nostalgic sort of nerve That's what they're aiming for it. They're saying look, how do you feel about a monochromatic screen like the old days? What if we put a weird crank on the side and what if it otherwise only had the controls that an original Game Boy did? those limitations are part of the fun and The games are all gonna be these strange little indie titles many of which they're making And letting other people make if all of that sounds like your jam Then I think the extra price is probably going to be fine And they've already sold enough of these that I don't think they're worried about a big enough player base to take advantage of this quote-unquote store Or or catalog as they're calling it So to answer your question And it's not that I'm surprised that it's still kicking. I think the demand was there I guess I'm surprised that that they still that they're still at that demand level Like I just can't believe that they never caught up Yeah, that they never truly caught up Like the way the steam deck did even cars did so some of that stuff is a little surprising And I I hope they get caught up because it'd be nice to just go there and buy one You know, you're still pre-ordered, right? I'm on a pre-ordered list of some sort that's supposed to let me know when I'm in the the payment queue And then I get to make a decision at that points a little it's the kind of the same thing steam did They just had a much smaller window of delay For the for the steam deck and you know Val's a giant company with Maybe a bigger reach or whatever, but hey don't get too comfortable with that price either because my prediction is next year We're gonna be paying more for steam decks as well. I guess You know not having played around with the play date, but understanding that you know, this is a cool novelty Game console of sorts, you know, if you like Panic or you know, even if you don't know or care about the company Otherwise, you know, this is a fun thing that I think all you know, a lot of gamers are like, yeah, why not? $20 price increase does not seem that significant to me Especially when you have other companies increasing prices by much more or certainly slashing prices by much more You know in the event that they're trying to you know, get rid of some Some some some hardware merch, you know in in the event that there's an updated version on the horizon type stuff I wonder, you know, how how much would How much would it have to be to say well, I really wanted this and now I'm out Well, I see I already worry that now we're at 200. That's pushing up against other Gaming solutions if that's what you're out there for see the thing is I don't think there are too many people Gamers included that are in the market for this device because they're choosing it over something else That's not the kind of platform. This is this is more like I really like video games I'm nostalgic for the handholds of yesterday This looks like a real stab in that direction and it's new content and that sounds like fun But this is not going to be anybody's main gaming platform Even over mobile for that matter So it's already a novelty you use the right word It is a novelty in a lot of ways and the higher that price goes the closer it gets to Less, you know, other things that aren't quite as novel like a switch Light a switch light is not that far off from this. I think it's 50 bucks more than this now And so when you take that 20 bucks doesn't seem like much, but that's actually a pretty big jump towards something like a switch which is you know, I'm much more versatile and and Diverse platform. So I think they have to be careful with that. I don't think this thing can go much more than 200 especially for what it is But I but I think you know, they've done they've done okay so far And I think in the immediate interim time here before other things start going up in price People who want this are still gonna get it and I think, you know, it's not worth Ignoring that they they treat their customers. Well, they came out and explained. Hey, we don't want to raise the price But we have to here's why and we're gonna give you a month You know, we're gonna give you plenty of notice that it's gonna go up and we'll still honor the old price until that point Not all of you're gonna be able to order it because of the shortage But you know, I I think treating your audience with respect goes a long way to Continuing to have the demand because people like the company. They're more likely to like the product Yeah, they've always done that too. I remember buying transmit for the first time It's the FTP client for Mac. Yeah, and that's that's them who made it and they have always been Ridiculously over the top helpful when I've had questions problems code issues, whatever So this just feels like this is who they are Which is why they made it in the first place It's just kind of this is their passion and you know good on them But it is a little unfortunate. We're gonna have to pay a little bit more all right a lot of folks out there are Excited that new generative AI tools are gonna save them time And I'm gonna let them let them do work faster A lot of folks are worried that these generative AI tools are gonna replace them that there there won't be any work left for them to do well Barbara Ribeiro an associate professor in innovation management and policy at the University of Manchester wrote a paper in the journal research policy earlier this year called The digitalization paradox of every today scientific labor How mundane knowledge work is amplified and diversified in the biosciences And if you didn't follow that journalistic title in other words automating some work in a lab Increased the work humans had to do and in fact it increased the boring the mundane work humans had to do Here's why yeah So Ribeiro studied labs that work in synthetic biology also known as sin bio It can be dangerous as tom will discuss in detail in an upcoming episode of a word with tom merit But it can also be used for non dangerous things like growing lab meat a war figuring out better ways of creating fertilizers drug discovery And sin bio experiments rely on advanced robotic platforms moving large numbers of samples and machine learning Analyzing those results. This is supposed to save scientist time Yeah, they can do a lot more experiments because they've got all this automation But what professor Ribeiro found was that lab managers used that extra time To do more experiments But not every part of an experiment is automated You've got to train the robots on each new experiment if you do 10 times as many experiments You got to train them 10 times as many times you have to check for errors 10 times as many times You have to standardize the results and share the results 10 times as many times Not to mention troubleshooting cleaning and maintenance now is 10 times as many times Ribeiro calls this the digitalization paradox if you don't automate every part of a task Automation can amplify and multiply the amount of non automated tasks associated with the automated one In a way that ends up not saving time for everyone but increasing overall work Now call me crazy, but doesn't this sound like a temporary More mundane work for a human rather than something that is you know, just is a part of life You know, if you're training the robot to do the right thing Well, maybe it's not doing it the right way at first, but you get there and then you kind of go Okay, well, I don't have to do that every Tuesday So sure well, but you have to train the robot for every new experiment True. Yeah, the smarter they get the more you work I guess the and you have to clean up for every new experiment and I guess where you could go with this I'm guessing where you're going to go is like sure But then you can automate the cleaning up and you can automate the troubleshooting and at some point You can automate all these things that the humans are doing the question is how long is that going to take? Right because this isn't like oh tomorrow We can automate it all or they would have automated all of that already These are the parts like error correction particularly where a human looks over things and like okay. Yes, it did it right That's that's going to be a long time before we trust that to automation And I know I know this comes up a lot on the show and I bring it up a lot But you know when we ended up a spreadsheet software in the late 80s early 90s Everybody was afraid it was going to take these jobs away instead It provided a ton more to do because the mundane is being done by these systems And now everybody can work on other stuff that gets us more money and it became a boom for them Rather than a dip. I think that's probably going to be true in this case And I think I agree with this argument The real world down On the dirt example that I experienced here recently was being in a grocery store And reminding myself that these self-checkout machines That have gotten really good at weighing stuff scanning stuff being really good at knowing what's in the bag and what you didn't put in yet And they're they're really smart They still require This store anyway requires three people to be kind of like walking around making sure everything's working Checking your receipt. Oh, this lady didn't do a thing right? I'll come fix it for you. I'll reset it troubleshooting whatever And we've been doing those for a long time and as far as I can tell no robots are just running the store The way that we all maybe thought was going to happen and we were going to eliminate the need for For baggers and checkers and everybody else. So I just feel like this is the same kind of thing But but even more so you're talking about exponentially Being able to expand how much you can do with say these experiments So that you can then focus on other stuff and you'll still have the jobs to maintain these The needs that these these machines these robots whatever need to get the experiments done in the first place Yeah, I think I think it's easy to to to get Mixed up on the there's different effects of automation, right? What you're talking about with grocery store is the automation didn't eliminate jobs. It just reduced them So what might have been six checkers is still three what this is saying is it actually in some cases increases the work So if it was the grocery store, it would mean like we automated things and now we need 10 checkers because We because these other parts of it are now so big The you know the the like the fact that we have 10 times as many experiments means we need 10 times as much cleaning Which means we need 10 times as much troubleshooting which means people are working 10 times as hard at those jobs Yeah, it's saved the experiment part of the job But in some cases and it won't be all cases It actually increases things and your point sarah. Yeah at some point We'll be able to automate all that other stuff and then it really will be a huge time saver But at what point but how long is that going to take some of that stuff won't be automated for decades You know or even in my lifetime Well, and we're talking about a tool You know for lack of a better word that gets smarter and smarter and does more over time You have to continually train that tool to do that So yeah, I mean if in a grocery store scenario, it's like, okay Can we just get to the point where the customers aren't always messing things up at the self checkout Where uh, you know the store employee has to come over and like help them and reset and you know Zero out, you know, whatever balance they racked up type thing Well, then then yeah, then it is kind of plug-and-play and that's great. You know, that's that's the idea Um, you know make everybody working at the grocery store do the stuff that you know, they're better at doing anyway But so much of what we're talking about are tasks, um That are being defined Yeah, so we have an experiment that used to take uh a month and now that experiment takes a day because we've automated the experiment But in every one of those experiments, uh, you have to Run a training data set and that takes an hour And you have to clean up after it and that takes an hour And so it used to be an hour at the beginning of the month an hour at the end of the month Now you can do one every day It's an hour at the beginning of the day an hour at the end of the day Now you're doing adding 60 hours of work that used to be two hours Because you can do so many things The thing it reminds me the most of is adding lanes to a highway It seems like oh, we have too much traffic add a lane to the highway so we can accommodate more traffic And what happens in real life is when you add a lane to a highway more cars show up and start using it Yeah, it's the same kind of thing Well folks, so what what do you think about this or any of the things we talk about on daily tech news show? Let us know in the social networks You can find us on twitter at dtns show you can find us on tiktok at daily tech news show and on instagram dtns picks That's dtns pix Duck duck go is bringing some ai to its search But in a different way from bing the privacy focus search company is using a combination of open ai's Da Vinci language model That's actually one that that helps do conversations And anthropic a different company actually run by a former open ai guy anthropics clod Model which is a chat model similar to chat gpt It's combining those models from two different companies to deliver a limited set of responses The product is called duck assist And it can only deliver answers from a limited set of sources And in fact duck duck goes founder gabe weinberg told tech crunch that for now more than 99 percent of the answers are coming from wikipedia He said encyclopedia botanica's in there a little bit handful of other sources So it's not going to show up for everything you search on on duck duck go Well, however, if you search for something that duck assist thinks it can answer A magic wand icon will show up at the top Of these search results asking if you want to look at a wikipedia Entry for the answers and if you do want to look at wikipedia for those you tap the ask button Don't tell jves Anyway, although if another duck duck go user has already searched for the same question The duck assist answer will automatically show up so you won't get different answers for the exact same question So right now duck assist is available on browser extensions and also apps and will roll out to all searches in the coming weeks Duck duck go also helps to expand the number of sources. It uses overtime As well, I actually just got finally early access to the new bing chat Feature that I've been waiting for for a while, you know play to run with it You know over the last few days and I'm trying to figure out. Okay. Well, what which one of these Makes more sense to me Again, we're talking early days But I like the I like duck duck goes You know the way that it's like listen, we're kind of limited right now, but If we have something that might be available to you magic wand click it. Maybe you get something out of it Well, you don't really have to magic wand shows up. You will get something out of it If it doesn't show up, then you don't have to worry about it. That's exactly yeah But you you don't necessarily have to be like, hmm What's my query gonna be if I want to use, you know, right the chat functionality You kind of just do your thing and then maybe you get a bonus And there's no gaming the system where you're like, let me trick bing into saying something horrible It's just it's just there if it's there. That's the other part of this If someone has asked the same question and got a an ai answer before and you ask that question It'll just show you that answer. It's not going to rerun the query It's because it's limited. It's saying we just trained it to look at wikipedia and summarize it So it's better than just taking a quote Because sometimes your question would require like three different parts of a wikipedia article and search engines are good at that But this is this can look at that and go like, oh, it's these three parts And let me rephrase that in a more sensible way. I think this is a sensible is the word I think sense this is a sensible way to include Some of that large language model magic in a useful way that like you said sarah Doesn't make you think doesn't make you go like, oh, should I use the big chat just time or just the regular search? Right, right. Yeah, I also like that it is starting from an information base that's reliable But containable this is kind of hard to explain. So I'll try to explain it They use wikipedia as the base of operations for this initial push That doesn't mean like they said they even use a little Britannica here and there It doesn't mean that they can't expand past that and use other sources of information To answer some of these questions But starting there, I think it's just a really strong move like that's a place with a lot of really great curated Or not curated but moderated information. It's my favorite resource on the web I was asked the other day if there's one thing I could cut out or the one thing I would not want to cut out of my internet life I think it's wikipedia because it just is the go-to when I need info on something And as much as we all, you know, think of it as ubiquitous or we like to make fun of while sometimes people go on and hack pages Like it's it's fun to go all those directions but if we're really honest about it wikipedia has been one of the like Tent polls of reliable information on the internet in a centralized place or in a place I just know where to go to get it and I think starting there is strong. I like that. They're they're beginning there It's not perfect, but it's a known error quantity, right, right Right, good way, and you know for anyone who's like, yeah, but I mean, what do they really do? They're just bundling wikipedia into certain like, you know, you could just go there and do all of that Also true Go there do it You can still you you you you don't have to, you know, choose one or the other and I think that Anything that involves I mean, I can't tell you how much time I spend on wikipedia Just looking for like Little factoids that may or may not, you know Have anything to do with my life or my work type stuff for it to just be referenced And easily brought up in in other ways Instead of going somewhere searching for something, you know, if I want to find something on wikipedia right now I have a very specific way of doing so. Yeah, I think I think many of us would say, yeah, I mean, you know It takes five seconds. Sure. But what if we do it a different way? Yeah, and that's you know, that's the fun of this, I think Well, and the the other thing is if I ask like, what is the population of daegu south korea? Uh, if I get just regular search engine, I will find a link Maybe it'll be in the summary if I'm lucky. I'll probably have to click through and then search to find it If it's a quote I'll probably have a good chance of a quote pulled out of a wikipedia article that says the population of daegu south korea Is 2.4 million people or whatever it is, right? But those don't always work Sometimes it gets cut off or sometimes it says the population was in 1990 and then in 2000, you know Because it's quoting the wrong part what this tool does is says, oh, we understand what you're What you're asking and we will give you exactly the answer the population is this right at the top You don't have to click through you don't have to search around for it. And I think that's I think that's useful Yeah, and per usual Not having you be logged in for any of this. You just use it No data associated with you is being pushed. It's not using your questions to train or anything It's not storing any of that and that to me is just as important in the in their case because their entire identity is Armored in those concepts and those precepts and if they didn't do that stuff I don't think it would be duck duck go anymore. So I for one am happy about that as a regular user of the service And i'm excited to see how this pans out over time Yeah, me too Well, if any of us are planning on traveling for an extended period of time and we want a secure way to get our Mail snail mail, you know something that would go to your mailbox or maybe a post office without paying for an expensive service chris christensen has an answer This is chris christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute If you're doing long-term travel, some people will sign up for a mail delivery system where all their mail gets sent to some place It gets open and scanned and sent to them electronically, which is a useful system But it can be expensive If you want the poor man's version of that and you've got a friend who's picking up your mail If you live in the u.s. You can sign up for free for informed Delivery an informed delivery will send you an email of the outside of any email or packages that are coming to you So you can tell your friend to send those over or maybe just open them for you And the name of that free service again is informed delivery. This is chris christensen from amateur traveler Oh, I use this I I have this and it's it's it's great to be able to say like oh, yeah that thing I wanted is coming today. Oh, I'm getting a letter from the irs. Now. I'm nervous all day, you know I've been using that too All right, let's check out the mail bag This one comes in from andy. So we briefly mentioned just watch It's an app on the show yesterday under our discussion of streaming services and what your options are if you're trying to figure out What to watch and where just watch is manually created We mentioned that so it's not always 100 up to date, but andy loves it He says this is great for telling you which of your services has a show or movie that you're looking for Or where you can rent or subscribe from other services If you have time you can train it by telling it what shows or movies you like or dislike for example Happy valley season one episode two available on the cbc, but season One episode three not available yet. So i'm not going to waste my time looking for it It will notify me when it's available Yeah, we had a lot of people on twitter masted on Saying similar things of like oh, this is why I like to use Chromecast fire tv rogu like like you named all the platforms different ones of you because I can search in it Well, tell me what service has the thing we so so i'm sorry if we were not clear yesterday We weren't saying that that feature didn't exist. We said it's not very good. Like it's not comprehensive It's not the same across platforms. Some platforms have some things indexed some other platforms don't Some like netflix actively work to stop themselves from being indexed So sometimes it's just wrong. It'll tell you something is there and it's not And that's what we were talking about is like these features exist. They're just not Reliable yet and we want them to be reliable. And so andy pointing out that just watch is great for stuff I'm glad he did because I agree. I use just watch all the time But even just watch sometimes is wrong Sometimes it says the thing isn't available. That is sometimes it has it on the wrong service You know, we're at 90 percent. We're just saying we'd like to get it to 100 percent Or at least as close as possible And there are some competing services obviously that do this sort of thing that dust brush does They're all they all fall short in the same way. They all have fail states. Yeah, that's real bummer But I I will say just watch way more often right than not for me Well, you know who's always right is scott johnson being on this here show Makes it better. Uh, scott let folks know where you can find more of your work Okay, well, I can tell you an exact place to go for that frog pants.com We'll get you all the different podcasts. You like gaming into that you like morning shows. Do you like uh film stuff? We got something for everybody. So go check it out. That's film sack or sorry That is frog pants.com and uh, of course as always you can find me on the twitters at scott johnson We also have brand new bosses to thank this is a very exciting day for us because we love to thank new bosses Pete and techno mensch aka mark just started backing us on patreon. So big thanks to you Pete and big thanks to you techno mensch if I can call you that you are you you are a mensch both of you And uh, we appreciate you supporting us Please welcome them into the patreon fold all of you other patrons give them a good hearty handshake slap on the back You know good to see you uh because they are going to be able to get the extended show good day internet right now Just like everybody else stick around. We're going to talk about swearing YouTube is easing its monetization restrictions on swearing in videos. Do we like that heck? Yeah, or maybe heck no We're going to talk about that But just a reminder you can catch this show dts is live. I wonder if you friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 utc find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live tell a friend We'll be back tomorrow with justin robber young joining us. Thanks for listening talk to you soon This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frogpants.com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program