 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to all of you, including Brandon Brooks, Alexander Nisev, Hector Bones, and new patrons getting a start on our goal, Richard, Elizabeth, and JC. On this episode of DTNS, we think we know what happened to Stadia. Amazon wants to help small businesses by making them deliver its packages and how automation affected jobs the last time we had an AI revolution. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 26th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Trevolino. From deep in the heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. It's good to be back on a Monday. Let's get right to the quick hits. Hey, remember all that back and forth about 5G and airports last year? U.S. telcos want to offer 5G service and something called the C-Band, which helps them increase coverage, but some older airplane equipment, particularly radults, radar altimeters used to detect the ground in low visibility conditions, operate in nearby frequencies. I mean, I guess they detect the ground all the time, but you rely on them in low visibility conditions. Anyway, to avoid 5G service near airports interfering with a pilot knowing how close their plane is to the ground, the aircraft need to update the equipment so there's no chance for interference. The telcos have therefore delayed their C-Band rollout near airports. They delayed it from January 2022 to July 2022 and again to July 1st, 2023. And that's coming up. They will not be delaying again. Once the new 5G signals are turned on, planes without updated equipment won't be cleared to land in low visibility conditions. And right now that's about 20% of the U.S. domestic fleet and about 35% of international aircraft that fly into the U.S. U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says that may disrupt air travel this summer, and it could continue to disrupt things because all aircraft are required to update their equipment by February 2024. So hopefully after that it all gets solved. Well, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a previously dismissed lawsuit from Genius Media Group against Google. Genius alleged that Google violated its terms of service by scraping its song lyrics without any attribution. Terms of service are generally backed by state law. However, federal law preempts lawsuits over issues that are similar to copyright. So that was the basis that the lower court dismissed the case. And Skoda said no thanks. Genius first sued Google in 2019. Netflix removed its ad-free 720p basic tier in Canada. So if you're a new subscriber or you're rejoining, you can't get that tier anymore. If you're a current subscriber on that tier, you can keep it as long as you stay a subscriber. It had cost or still cost existing subscribers $9.99 Canadian a month. Now Netflix tiers in Canada start at $5.99 for the ad supported tier. And then the first and now cheapest in Canada ad-free tier is the $16.99 standard plan. No word in whether Netflix plans to phase out similar tiers in other markets. MetaQuest Plus is available now on the Quest 2 and Quest Pro, and it will be coming to the Quest 3. Google began rolling out its new perspectives feature, a search tab to highlight different perspectives on search queries drawn from content shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites, social media platforms, etc. So you'll see links to things like TikTok videos, Reddit posts, if there are reddits that are still operating that discuss your stuff. Google announced the feature at Google I.O., and it is now rolling out. Hey real quickly, before we get into the first block, Larry and Atlanta pointed out, this is your pilot speaking. We can't land into the fog clears, so sit back and relax and hope we have enough fuel. Just to be clear, that's not how that works. They will either not let you take off or they'll land you at a different airport if the weather is in a condition where your radar wouldn't work. But you won't just have to circle and hope, at least that's what I've been told. Alright, according to an email to employees seen by the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal saw the memo, not the employees. YouTube began internally testing a service to play games on its web and mobile apps. YouTube called these games playables. Right now, there are only details in the Wall Street Journal story about one, an arcade game called Stack Bounce, but apparently there's more being tested internally. In a statement, YouTube's Alex McQuiston said, we're always experimenting with new features, but we have nothing to announce right now, so YouTube's not commenting on this. Of course, Google has tried to leverage YouTube for gaming before it was one of the big pushes with Google Stadia, the idea that you could be watching something like a demo or a playthrough on YouTube and then press a button and start playing the game on Stadia. But of course, as many of you know, Google pulled the plug on Stadia back in January. So this feels like maybe they're using Stadia because the description is of being able to play these playables immediately from within the YouTube experience. Justin, could this help Google crack back into the cloud gaming area? I have been a long-term skeptic of cloud gaming in general. To me, I see this less as a Stadia play and more as trying to break into the mobile gaming world, not to say that it would only be exclusively mobile gaming, but something a little bit more lightweight than what they think they were going for with Stadia. What's fascinating to me is the idea that they want this to be in-app because I'm fascinated by where our modern world is in terms of jamming a bunch of things into an app or using the leverage of there being a brand by saying they're separate apps. And YouTube both does and doesn't do this. Shorts, that's in the main YouTube app. But YouTube kids, separate app. Live television, separate app. So now, games is going to be something else that looks like they're going to put in here. I don't know. This is something that is continually fascinating to me, especially as a company like Facebook, which has never found a feature it doesn't want to rip off and just so on to the main Facebook interface, they seem likely to launch their Twitter clone as a separate standalone product, which I find fascinating. Well, and I think that speaks to, you know, I think, well, I don't know everybody, but I was certainly skeptical when they launched Shorts and putting that in the main app. But it showed that, hey, we can throw this in a super popular app that people want to consume stuff on and we can brute force our way to billions of views that we can crow about at Google I.O. and all that stuff. So I mean, I definitely speaks to the intent here, right? Something that they could potentially either serve ads against. They could roll into, you know, their Google payment structure. I don't know how much of an advantage that is given they have the Play Store on Android phones. And the big question I have is, how does this fit into Apple's app store rules? Because isn't this what every cloud gaming company wants to do? And Apple's like, no, you have to approve all of these individually? Like, how is that even going to work? You don't pay for YouTube. That's the only way they get around it, right? Is that you can't run your own app store because you're charging for the Microsoft cloud gaming, you're charging for Nvidia GeForce now. But YouTube, should they continue to choose not to charge for these games would probably be okay. But of course, at some point, they might want to start charging like they do for movies. You can watch movies that you've bought through the YouTube app, but you can't buy them through the YouTube iOS app, right? So that's an interesting thing to keep an eye on in this. It does feel like this is using the Stadia technology to make it easy to give someone a game. And it's doing arcade stuff. It's not trying to do like a huge first person shooters at least not yet. But it is more about what else can we give people to keep them in the YouTube app? What else can we do to become that, that everything app? So, so yeah, but worth a shot. They've got the infrastructure already sunk the cost into it. Might as well try it and integrate it into YouTube and see what happens, right? Yeah, I've just never thought of YouTube as that everything up. But the more I think about it, you know, they kind of have their their social feed going on there. They have the shorts content. They have the long form stuff on there already integrating games. I mean, like, right, the next step is like some half baked messaging thing, right? And they're like, that's like that has to be the they would love to be. They would love to be. And that was and that was part of the reason why they folded so much Google plus tech into it when they shut down plus was because they wanted to add more of that. The question is exactly what does the audience want on YouTube? And you're right. For sure. It's especially on mobile. It is something for which they've actually found a pretty, pretty good way to give the audience something that they like on TikTok. I don't know if they've done the best job with it on desktop. But still, it is possible to add a new thing and make it popular, especially when you control the algorithm as tightly as YouTube does. Yeah. This may or may not work. I don't know. But I think it's I think it makes sense for them to try it as weird as it is to think about games inside of YouTube. Because like you said, with shorts, it could be a thing that you're like, Oh, wow, it turns out people really like that. We didn't know. Yeah. Well, Axios reports, Amazon is recruiting small businesses in 23 US states for something it calls Amazon hub delivery service and attempt to expand its last mile delivery network. Amazon will recruit businesses in 20 dense cities in the US Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, among them. Here's how it would work. Amazon delivery service partner drivers would drop off 20 to 50 packages headed to a customer at a local business that's agreed to be a hub. Those businesses would then deliver those packages to their final destination. It's pitching this as a way to supplement business income. You can take on this extra business. Hey, you get a nice chunk of change. It's open to partner with 2,500 small businesses in the US by the end of the year. So Justin, this help Amazon maintain its logistics supremacy. You know what? Maybe Amazon is something that is continually experimented with a million different things. The one thing that they that you know they are good at is logistics. They not only pioneered getting you your product in two days, but really the harder thing, which is where they are going to put all of the products because they know statistically it is more likely that you are going to order something close to that node. The way that they do that is truly genius and it is something that is the envy of all other logistics companies. But chalk this up to the same thing as the little lockers and exploring buying a shipping company like FedEx or UPS or DHL, building their own. They will do anything they can to maintain their advantage in logistics because I think rightly they understand that's what differentiates them from everybody in that space. Oh, you know what? Another thing that Amazon would like, small businesses to not hate them. So if they can combine logistics with giving small businesses money, which is the other pitch here, right? Amazon is like, we are going to help small businesses make extra money that they wouldn't be able to get otherwise. And then have them in your thrall when you get them addicted to that extra money and following your rules and then starting to say, well, you could also sell your own things on Amazon. Just follow these rules. I mean, this feels like Amazon 2018 to me. We're getting back to that feeling. Tom, to your point, can I ask the question? I was trying to think about this. What type of business are they thinking has the capacity to do up to 50 packages a day, seven days a week consistently? Because I was thinking Uber deliveries, right? It's opportunistic. It is gig-based. You are accepting a delivery and you're doing it because you have some spare time. And whether you work for a small business or you're just a solo contractor and that's your full-time thing with Uber, that's great. You can go ahead and do that. I'm just trying to think of companies that stand by employees all the time that aren't going to need to be that they can commit to doing 50 packages even within, let's say literally it's last mile, a one mile radius around you. That is a not inconsiderable amount of time to be away from a business. I see Jahandar in the chat is saying a pizza place, maybe something like that. I guess that maybe that's the model. Any place that already has delivery built into their business model, which many more do than used to, is certainly something to think about. But I had a similar thought, which is, yeah, this is great. You got a little extra space. You can handle some packages. You've got employees already that are covered by insurance and workmen's comp and all that. They've got cars. You can send them out in their car to deliver some packages. But then they're not working for you. They're delivering the packages. So what business has the extra man hours to do this as well is another question. Well, but also it's to, I don't know, it will depend on how this rolls out. But I would imagine that the radius is that they will have for stuff like this will be much less than a mile. If they're putting them in densities, then, you know, Amazon will figure out the scale to say, yes, this bodega and this pizza place, they might be two blocks away, but they'll cover the other blocks on the other side. And so if you make this short enough, then, yeah, there's a lot of people that are, you know, at jobs where you have to be there, but you're not always doing a lot that maybe if it makes, you know, more money, then you have them run a package, you know, two blocks up the street. I mean, I guess if it pays enough, then you can staff up, right? And say like, oh, well, we'll be able to carry three employees instead of two, because we're making enough money off the delivery. And then that covers the time of delivery 20 to 50 is just a lot. That's a lot of packages up to 50. Like that is a, like I said, not inconsiderable. And Axios, now Axios was thrown around these numbers. I did not see this on any of the Amazon logistics, like FAQ stuff. They were thrown around like an average of 30. And they were saying like about like 250 a package for delivery too. So I mean, again, that's 20. That's definitely worth someone's time. If it's a short, just to your point, that really, you know, put it in your bodega in, you know, Manhattan or whatever, and they can hit a bunch of spots fairly quickly. That might be worth their time. But Amazon knows how to thread that needle to your point. Like that is their secret. I will say I'm not bullish on the idea in concept, mostly because anytime that you are trusting somebody who is not only not an employee of Amazon, but an employee of somebody who's an employee of Amazon, a damaged or not delivered package, the risk of that goes up. All right. Well, we have 389 patrons to go to reach our goal. And I believe it in my heart. We can do it. We want to have 4,000 paid patrons by next Thursday. If you're wondering what that total was all about. And if we do it, we'll have Molly Wood on the show the very next day. And once a month on a Friday, from then on, we're calling it Molly Fridays. You can help make them happen at patreon.com slash DTNS. Wired highlighted some findings from a working paper from some economists that was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the U.S. They wanted to see what effect the first wave or maybe not the first wave, but a recent wave of machine automation had on jobs between 2011 and 2019. So we're all talking about generative AI, large language models and all of that. But back the last decade, everybody was talking about deep learning. And there was a lot of automation of speech transcription, image analysis, recommendation engines like specifically the recommendation engines and websites and social media and all that sort of thing. And those also came with conversations about whether this was going to replace people. If it was going to take people who did transcription, who did that kind of categorization of images, who who selected content, if you were going to get rid of those people. So they compared the tasks done by people to see how similar they were to the tasks done by algorithms. And then when they found matches, they're like, Okay, these are the kind of jobs where people were doing things that algorithms started doing in that decade. They cross referenced that with European Union survey data on which jobs people were leaving or taking to see, Hey, are we losing a lot of these kinds of jobs because of this deep learning? All right, let's talk about what they found. White color office jobs, right? Those are the ones you always hear about talked of like your your there's a threat to you. White color office jobs that worked with data rose 5% during this period. There was no effect showed for less skilled jobs. This supports a theory called the biased technological change theory, the skill biased technological change theory that says technology replaces routine work, but it increases demand for more skilled jobs. And that's what they saw on the data. Of course, generative models, chat, GPT and such are different. So this isn't going to predict what will happen with those. But we could still make an educated guess based on this. Justin, what do you think? I am sympathetic to the idea that we oftentimes demonize technology because it will disrupt our status quo and whatever we have known, we assume the future is just kind of a two to three X version of what we wind up finding out is that the future is something different because we live in a technologically advancing age and so things that we thought we, you know, we make mistaken assumptions on where tomorrow will go with that being said, I am interested to see whether or not that will hold this time with some of the large language models, but you can't argue with the numbers, the numbers and the numbers. I think it's really interesting that this first boom focused very much. These are like high level business needs, right? Like, like, I mean, I speak transcription, a lot of people can use and stuff like image analysis, recommendation engines, those started as more like enterprise kind of level business needs and where I think a lot of the consternation or the concern that we're seeing with these large language models that we've seen in the last year or so is around, certainly around creative pursuits, not just in how they're put together. So, like, it is definitely encouraging to see that this actually was, hey, this was good for skilled jobs in these fields, but I think that feels different than, you know, we can tell that this image is a flower versus I had ChatGPT make me a painting of a flower or something like that. The principle of this theory, though, is you don't know what the technological change is going to make happen, but it always makes things possible that weren't possible before. And so it gets rid of the thing it's replacing. And that is considered routine stuff. Well, if a machine can do it, it's not that hard. And then we start doing things that only humans can do. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that feels like until we get machine automation that can replicate everything a human does and thinks, we will always have the ability to build new things on top of it that we couldn't otherwise. The person who spends 40 hours a week categorizing images now has the ability to do something on top of categorizing images because they don't have to categorize the image anymore. Usually that the negative perspective is like, yeah, but that person's out of work. Now they won't get paid for something. But the reality tends to be companies and organizations use the efficiency and the cost savings of the new technology to create new opportunities and make even more money, make even more products, and therefore can employ more people to do them. Doesn't mean they'll employ them at high wages necessarily. That's a whole separate thing, but it doesn't eliminate jobs. On the whole, right? In total, in total. Yes. That's a very good point. That's a very good point. Because whenever we talk about disruption, it's all great from a 10,000 foot view perspective, but it's not as great if you're the person for whatever reason who used to have a job checking to see what was a flower and what was a piece of dirt. And now all of a sudden, that your role for whatever reason is no longer there because there's other people. Now, that doesn't mean that they're not going to hire five kids right out of college who now know are better skilled at the new thing on top of that that's going to be really good. But disruption is scary. And I do want to be sympathetic to that even if when you look at these numbers, you're like, oh, OK, well, in general, there's more jobs. And that seems to be something that happens pretty frequently. Well, the other thing I'll throw in there is every technological disruption disrupts in a different way. Deep learning looks like it was almost invisible in its disruption. It just created more jobs. And there wasn't a lot of people who were left without the ability to find one. The Industrial Revolution and the steam engine, it disrupted people to the point that they were throwing their wooden shoes into the steamworks to stop the factories. So, you know, your mileage may vary. Exactly. Much out for you. Ten toes down. All right. Well, Tom, Justin, I have a question for you. What were you folks doing in December 1996, Justin? I was probably watching WCW Monday Nitro while being the coolest kid in school in freshman year of high school. December 1996. I remember very well. I was sitting in a studio apartment on 21st Street in Austin, Texas, creating my very first website, Subbrilliant.com, where I would write parody news back in a time when fake news had a very different meaning than it does today. Well, I was dreading Ms. Voris' sixth grade end of semester exams. But what you might have been doing is playing this brand-fangled new graphical multi-user dungeon game called The Realm on your Windows 95 PC. Is that ringing any bells for you, Tom? Yeah, yeah. No, I'd never played it. But I remember people talking about how it was like crazy. You could play against other people all over the world. It's an open world. It's amazing. Yeah. It may not have been as popular as some of the MMOs that have come after it, but The Realm Online has stayed online for the last 27 years. However, that journey is seemingly coming to an end with its server set to shut down on June 30th. It seems that the game's developers, Realm World's LLC, couldn't come to an agreement with its publisher, Norseman Games, to acquire its IP, something that they say is needed to continue given the title's declining revenue. They kind of want to aggregate all that revenue in-house to focus on development. And they are there at an impasse, so they are shutting down. But a noble end of the era. This feels like the story we're going to get in two days is some crazy billionaire who loves The Realm is just going to step in and finance the rest of that acquisition. Right? Yeah. Sometimes you have to have this moment to make that. Oh, you need this moment. So the weird billionaire comes diving out of the sky like Hawkman and just throws money. Listen, weird billionaires. We know you're listening. Help save The Realm. All right. Let's check out the movie. All right. Well, we talked last week about Domino's new point delivery feature drop pin. Get that pizza. Well, a Donis wrote in to let us know that that sounded pretty familiar to him. He said, just heard about the Domino's delivery thing to pin location. Reminded me of an individual location I was doing outside of Fort Lewis Army Base back in 2000. He says the Army had a GPS device called the Plugger PLGR that we used for navigation. Those same units made their way into the hands of delivery drivers. And we knew this. They were using them to deliver pizza to locations with no addresses. And on one occasion, someone gave Domino's a coordinate to deliver. So we were out doing, you know, your typical army stuff when we noticed that a driver was there waiting. When a little bird, a chopper arrived, landed, picked up the pizza and took off. Those of us who witnessed it were dumbfounded at what just happened. That's amazing. Salute. I also imagine you give that delivery driver like the ultimate, like if he was not expected, or that person was not expecting that. That was the best delivery that delivery driver as a former pizza delivery driver myself. I could say that with some confidence that that must have been their best delivery. Well, thank you, Justin, Robert Young for hanging out with us as always. What you got going on, my friend? Well, it's funny. You should ask Tom because you know darn well what we got going on. We are working on Know a Little More, the show that is produced by Dog and Pony Show Audio. And of course, stars Tom Merritt, Amos, who is on this show is also a huge producer for us. And we're in the lab on the second season, but you can catch up by listening to the first season that was produced by Dog and Pony Show, which came out over the last few months. Enjoy it because we got some really cool stuff coming up for you in sooner than you might think. Why is the best thing about Know a Little More? Is the topics are still relevant? It's not like, oh, you know, I listened to the Taiwan episode and now Taiwan's over. No, it turns out Taiwan's still the news. So you can go listen to that episode, all the other RSS had a great episode about RSS. Yeah, thank you. But I think what I think is the best thing about Know a Little More is that it is equally great for people who listen to everything on this show and know everything and know every bit of terminology. And for folks who listen to the show, and don't worry, I won't tell anybody, sometimes have a few words and jargon fly over their head, but they care about tech and they want to know more about it. This is great for both because either you're going to listen to Tom talk and you're going to judge whether or not he got everything right. That's the Know it All side. Or it's something that you want to know more about, but it's hard to find somebody as compelling as Tom explaining it. We're there for you there too. Indeed, indeed. Go check that out, folks. And also, if you're a patron, thank you for getting us close to Molly Wood this week. This week we'll have Molly Wood on Friday. We just need to get to that goal. So become a patron and then stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet, where we'll be talking about the Verge's recent poll about who is actually using these new AI tools, what they use it for, and what kind of freaks them out about that. Stick around. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. To find out more, just navigate to dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.