 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. And that's you right now. If you can hear me, you're listening and you're a listener, thanks to all of you, including Norm Physicus, Chris Allen, Chris Smith, and Mountain Sloth. On this episode of DTNSX, test charging a dollar a year to post. YouTube wants to make you watch better news. And what are those Activision Blizzard King games going to show up on Game Pass already? It's almost been a week. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio QuesoDev. I'm Sarah Lane. Oh, well, this is no good. I'm just in Salt Lake City, and I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. All my friends, there is. You can all have QuesoDev. I mean, can we? I think you are able to. Can we ask my doctor? Yeah, I'll ask my doctor if QuesoDev is right for me. I only want a couple and then I'm done. So listen, folks, there is no one else like us on the Internet. We are funded by you. Nobody else. When you accuse us of being a beholden to corporate interests, you're just wrong. We're beholden to you. That's it. That's all we got. So thank you for supporting us. Let's start with the quick hits. Foxconn will partner with NVIDIA to build data centers, specializing in data processing for autonomous cars and robots. Foxconn calls these data centers AI factories. They'll be built using NVIDIA's GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. Tesla has also been developing similar data centers that it calls Tesla Dojo, which uses NVIDIA's GPUs as well. Although Tesla has developed its own chips, it plans to use in Dojo in the future. Foxconn has been moving into the autonomous car market for some time now, making control units and other parts and contracting to build EVs for company Fisker. Tuesday, we mentioned the new U.S. restrictions on exports of chips to China. One of the things that happened in those new rules is NVIDIA's chips that they developed specifically to sell to China without violating the previous rules became restricted. Well, deep in the 400 pages of new rules, there are provisions that might help NVIDIA, as well as other chip makers like Intel and AMD, so they could continue to sell some AI chips into China and be able to keep that revenue stream. The U.S. has asked for input on a tamper-proof way to prevent chips from being chained together to make a supercomputer while allowing AI use at smaller scales. If satisfied on these mitigations, then the U.S. might grant licenses so that NVIDIA and others could continue to sell some of their chips to China. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is expanding the use of robotics in its warehouses. Project Sequoia includes updating sorting machines, robotic arms, and mover bots to speed up delivery fulfillment by 25% without replacing human workers. That is an interesting note. The first installation was launched this week in Houston, Texas, and Amazon Pharmacy has begun using Prime Air, Amazon's drone delivery service to deliver medicines within 60 minutes of order in College Station, Texas, as well. Aggies. Open AI has rolled out Browse with Bing to all the paying users, plus an enterprise subscribers, meaning those paying users of chat GPT may now benefit from current information found on the web. Previously, chat GPT was limited to information from before September 2021. Open AI also moved its image generator, Dolly 3, the latest version of Dolly, into beta on the web and mobile. Dolly 3 integrates with chat GPT. It's all multimodal. Well, Roblox may one day be the virtual world worthy of the term Metaverse, but we're not exactly there quite yet. Its workers aren't going to work virtually as much anymore as well. Roblox's CEO wrote an email to workers on Tuesday saying the company is transitioning away from remote work. Staffers have until January 16th to decide if they want to stay with the company as it moves to a hybrid model of three days a week in the office or not. Employees who want to stay will be offered relocation pay if necessary, workers who don't want to stay can continue to work until April 15th, at which time they will be offered severance packages. We have X news today, but it's not as bad as you think. X, which if you're like, wait, what is X again? Go to Twitter.com and you'll find yourself at X. Yeah. X has begun testing a dollar per year charge. It's referred to as not a bot for new users. So if you're an existing user, you don't have to pay, but new users and they're only testing it in New Zealand and the Philippines. So this is, let's try it out in a couple of smaller markets. See what we learned from it before we decide whether we're going to roll it out everywhere else. Those users can view posts, follow accounts for free. So you don't have to pay to look, but if you want to do anything else like post, repost the old retweet reply, bookmark, do a quote post. You got to pay the dollar a year subscription fee. Of course, you can also pay the $8 a month premium plan. That'll get you all of those rights as well, but you don't have to X says the plan is meant to reduce spam manipulation of our platform and bot activity. So you might have some questions. Uh, some of the most popular questions from the overall community of X include. Okay. Why is the $1 subscription per year only on the web, not the mobile app? That happens. Why is not a bot only being rolled out in two countries, New Zealand and the Philippines? Also that kind of happens, but then some other questions like, is this some sort of easy way to get people's financial info? And another popular question, is this legit spam, legit spam deterrent or more of like a pay a very small amount to be a bot? All right, let me run through these. Uh, why is it a dollar for new users? Uh, that's just good policy. When you, when you add in a charge, uh, you, you tend to grandfather in people beforehand. At least for a while, uh, might not always be that way. We'll see how this test goes. But that, that's typical because you're already, the other people aren't going to be dissuaded as much if they're already in the system, if they've already evaded the other anti-bot system. So it makes sense to apply it to new users. I get that. Uh, why only two countries? Cause you're testing it. You want to pick two different countries. That's very common. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty common. New Zealand and Philippines are different demographics. So you get different kinds of information, uh, from the two, is it an easy way to get people's financial info? Well, yeah. So it's paying anybody anywhere, anybody who charges you gets your financial info. So, uh, I don't think X is particularly nefarious in charging people. They already charged people for stuff. So, uh, I'm not, not too worried about that. The big one is, is this a legitimate spam deterrent. Um, as I said on TMS, when we, when I talked to Scott, Scott earlier today, if you're wondering, will this stop every bot from appearing on X? The answer will be no. There's, there's plenty of bots that will pay the fee. We'll figure out how to create different credit card numbers, get around financial restrictions and all that situation. It will happen. Will it reduce the number of bots and spam on, on X? Yes, it will, because there will be lots of them who won't want to go through that or are operating at such massive levels that it would be prohibitively expensive for them to do it. So, uh, it, it is to me, I don't know. Scott, what do you think it feels like a reasonable if you take the personalities out of it, uh, way to test bot, uh, combating. Yeah. I mean, all my, all my biases left at the door for a minute, it seems like I was trying to go through this in my head earlier. Like if you have, uh, somebody who's used to spamming the system with new signups at the rate of let's say a thousand an hour, I don't even know what you could do. You could do more than that, I'm sure, but let's say you're doing that. Well, a lot of those get caught right away. Some of those, uh, get caught later, but a percentage of those get through and those thrive as bots or misinformation accounts or whatever they are intended to be. Those are just out there in the wild and that is the goal. It's a percentage game just like spam and other, you know, forms of that sort of thing. They're just trying to get as many through the gate as they can. And if, uh, you get a few, then you're happy. Well, this makes it so those people would have to spend $1,000 an hour, you know, in theory to pump that much in there or whatever, whatever wallet is they have to go over. My point is like, that will slow them down. I mean, not only entirely, but they're not going to, you know, this isn't going to be at the same rate it used to be if you're one of those big, heavy number spammer accounts. And it's not the only thing they're doing. Uh, in fact, the director of engineering, Eric Ferraro, uh, said they're exploring using phone verification, ID verification, and there are other strategies, uh, heuristics and models to detect fake accounts and all that. So the bigger question is charging somebody for something that used to be free, usually drives people away from that platform. You can overcome it if you're a very popular and compelling platform. Is X still that? Well, that is a big question, right? Yeah, that is a big one. That's where I have to go back to the door and pick up my bias bag that I set over there and pull out. Biases, but I think that it is riskier now. I don't think that's even a crazy thing to say. I got so many things in my bias bag. Sarah, I couldn't even begin to start, but it, but it feels like if you, if you, if you're a normal thinking person, whatever that even means, don't ask me to define it. But if you're watching what's happening over on X slash Twitter, it's impossible to see it as going great. And so therefore it does seem more risky to do this at a time where people are already kind of on the edge of leaving. I know a lot of people say they're going to, but they don't. So, you know, maybe they're planning on that being the bigger part of this than people just won't leave. But to me, it seems like a way to weaken the platform during a time where it's already a little bit weak. Yeah. And honestly, that's why you do a test in smaller markets to test that effect. So this is, this is the company acting like a reasonable company to try something out. And I pointed out a lot of people pointed this out to WhatsApp used to charge 99 cents to become a WhatsApp user. So it's not like this hasn't even been done before WhatsApp doesn't do that anymore. Did they find that it wasn't effective or is it just because Meta owns WhatsApp now and wanted to have other ways of, of doing it? I don't know. Yeah. Well, moving on to YouTube, which Scott, I know you, you have a lot of, you, you've been hanging out on YouTube more than you had in the past. It announced changes to its interface and creator tools that will roll out over the next few weeks. Some of those include the watch page. Now recommending more news videos that YouTube considers credible creators now being able to add timestamps to their videos when they show products that will surface shopping buttons. For example, to buy those products in the video, you know, maybe putting news aside for a second, Scott, you're using YouTube more than ever. Is are these changes going to make you better connect with your own community? Well, I think it's possible like a lot of the changes are ad based changes and I think they're good ones. For example, a lot of creators on YouTube will do special arrangements with advertisers and say, you know, this episode or whatever was brought to you by Squarespace or something. And then they go on for a while and talk about Squarespace. They throw up some graphics, normal ad behavior on a, on a, on a show or a video like that. What one of the things are going to allow them to do moving forward is to timestamp that stuff specifically and add interactivity to it. So for example, instead of you just saying, hey, go to Squarespace and use a code and whatever. And it's all very superfluous. They will throw up a timestamped actual interactable button that will let people go right then to the place they need to go to activate whatever code needs to be activated or whatever URL they're trying to go to. It will be part of, you know, the video. It's integrated into the video at the time you want it to be integrated in there. That's a pretty massive thing for people that are, that are doing promotional deals even outside of the normal YouTube ad system. But then you can also do a lot of that with the built-in ad system. Some of this is only going to be relevant to people with, you know, big audiences currently. But I could see that being a really big deal to creators. With that will come some better visibility, more usability, and some of this stuff is going to be available via the app itself. They also talked a lot about how shorts are sort of exploding over there as part of their news thing as well. Yeah, they're paying people to create new shorts. Sadly, not a lot of people like 40 organizations around the world. Maybe even less maybe. Yeah, it's small. Small, but what they're, I think it does say, or it does go to what they're saying, which is we're trying to create some curation around these because to be honest, you can go to YouTube right now, do a simple search across the site which includes shorts and regular long form videos and you are going to get a lot of come back on the search of stuff you've never heard of from everybody from a dude in his basement all the way up to CNN or somebody of note. And it's just kind of a mess. And at a time where X and even meta are hesitant to do too much to promote news, quote, unquote news, which often has politics surrounding it, it's interesting to see YouTube or see YouTube say, well, what if we did, what if we leaned into it? People are there searching for it anyway. Why don't we make kind of almost like a Google News solution in video? Google News is great at this. It's like, here's the headline you looked for or clicked on. Also, everybody, everybody gets paid in this situation. I'm like, right, right. That's the other point. Like you are, people are getting paid, but the curation is nice because it's like, all right, here's the main article. Here are four other versions of it of reputable sources and then below that or a bunch more and then below that or maybe some extras or some video or whatever. This is them saying, all right, Google News and video format and the side note is, you know, some people are going to get paid for this. I think on paper, this sounds great. As a creator, I hate it because I'm not one of the limited number of credible sources. But as a user, I understand that you want to set that barrier way inside the fences to make sure you're not accidentally putting your stamp of approval on something bad. So maybe it's, maybe it's good in that respect. Yeah, I'm excited to see how it goes. Well, folks, yeah, you got to have thought about this. I bet you do. Don't just keep it to yourself. Share it with us. Email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com Xbox and head of Microsoft Gaming at CEO Phil Spencer confirmed Wednesday in an official Xbox post that Activision Blizzard games won't be coming to Xbox Game Pass until at least 2024. Yeah, if this sounds familiar to you, Activision Blizzard did post on X before Microsoft closed its deal that Modern Warfare 3, Diablo 4 would not come to Xbox Game Pass this year. Sort of implied that most of their stuff probably wouldn't come this year, but left the door open if you're hopeful that maybe some of the older titles might. So Spencer added, this acquisition is definitely long term. So the fact that we're not hitting day one with a bunch of games dropping into Game Pass is a little bit of a downer, but I'm very excited about the future. And I just want to be straight with people that that that is where we are. He also blamed regulatory. He was like the regulatory process was so complicated. It just didn't give us a chance to do the work to bring them into Game Pass and we're starting that work now. Scott, do you buy it? I do. I think there's a lot involved with that. I also think unlike their acquisition of Bethesda where Bethesda had their own launcher but it was still sort of fresh and nobody was using it. It was kind of a failed attempt which a lot of launchers are to be honest. The only real successful launcher on PCs are to the greater degree steam and then you could say Blizzard's own battle and that maybe gets in a close second given the quality of their titles but for the most part launchers for EA and Ubisoft and everybody else in their dog has not been a great experience. So that was an easier shutdown and move everything over kind of experience I think for them. But I think what got people asking the question now and why they're feeling disappointed that the answer isn't this year is they seem to be hurrying up in some other ways. They put out that video. The video indicates a ton of Blizzard content and Activision content are coming to Game Pass. That's the promise of the video and that includes the titles we've talked about plus more they didn't even show the World Warcraft which tells me that things come into Game Pass and what form or how you pay for it. I don't know yet. But the point is they've said as much there and then they also kind of rushed. I wouldn't say rushed. They surprised everybody yesterday with Diablo 4 showing up on Steam and Steam is just another place to pay for it and buy it. But the fact that that happens so quickly I think a lot of people are like, oh, is this mean we're moving? Are we shaking? And then they started asking them all these questions and he's like, yeah, that's still kind of an issue. And I understand why it is the movement of this stuff to Game Pass is going to be tricky. You're talking about a lot of cross saves already out in the cloud. They're going to have some integration plans like are you going to let Diablo 4 people on battle net rather be able to migrate their saves and their accounts and their profiles. All that stuff is going to be a simple process over to Game Pass. Are you even going to allow that? Like there's a lot of questions. And with the streaming stuff being complicated where Ubisoft has the rights outside of Europe and Microsoft just has to provide fair terms within Europe that complicates a lot of back-end stuff. I'm sure. Yeah, I don't think any of this is as easy as people want to make it seem. You know that even that video of them celebrating that they got the deal through that sat on somebody's hard drive for probably months and because they didn't know when this thing was going to finally get done, but they wanted to be ready. So some of what you're seeing is them going ta-da. We were not the video of them like cheering in their office. You mean the video they cut together of all the games. Correct. That very curated video was awesome. I really liked it. But it was obvious to me that they've been holding on that and getting ready to pull that trigger for as long as they've been trying to finish out the deal. Now that the deal's over, they can pull the trigger on that. They pull the trigger on getting Steam and Diablo 4 happening. Prior to this, they already got Overwatch 2 over there to a lot of chagrin, but it's there. So these are now two Blizzard mainstream tiles. Yeah, I am. And they're also the two newest Blizzard games I should mention. Whether or not, you mentioned older games. So whether or not Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft for that matter, and even some of their older games than that, whether those get over sooner, it's arguable. They could probably easily move Blizzard Arcade over there, which is a collection of classic games from the Super Nintendo and Arcade when Blizzard was a very young company. Those exist and those are on BattleNet. Very easy to move that stuff over there. But some of this bigger stuff, it's going to take a little time. And the other Activision stuff we haven't mentioned too. There's a huge catalog there that's not Blizzard even. Oh, gigantic. Yeah, I'm focusing so much on Blizzard here, but there's a huge bunch of what's happening over on the Activision side, including titles people think are dead and Microsoft's interested in bringing back. You keep hearing Phil Spencer bring up the fact that Hexen is one of his favorite video games ever. It was originally built on Doom engines, old as dirt, but he loved it. I loved it. So I'm all for this idea. He keeps wearing t-shirts at events that say Hexen. I think it's clear Microsoft's going to make a new Hexen game, but we want it all now and it's going to take time. So next year is not that crazy. Yeah. And the Steam stuff was already in the hopper, right? That was independent of Microsoft acquiring them. Yeah, I just end up feeling. Yeah. I just had kind of a not in our opportune timing, but time interesting time. Yeah. And and honestly, we on our show on core, we didn't know what would be next. We have a whole back going about which games would make it to Steam first or to a game pass next or all that. I think my co-host John wins because he said Steam and Diablo 4, which happened way sooner than we expected. So I do think it does do them a favor though by showing hustle after the fact. And even if some of it was already in the hopper, it feels like, all right, we're on it. Boom, boom, boom. And that's what I think that's what gamers want to hear so they can have this kind of confidence in this in this transaction that they know these games are being taken care of. They're very quickly being shuttled in front of them. Like there's a lot of this, I think that can be taken positively, at least by the Microsoft crowd. Yeah, slightly related. Boom, boom, boom is one of the lines in Eve Psyche and the Bluebeard's wife by Lacerifim, who are going to be performing at BlizzCon November 4th after the community event. So I decided I'm going to go to BlizzCon to see Lacerifim and it doesn't seem like anyone else is going. I have to keep asking like, hey, are you going to be at BlizzCon? People are like, oh, I wish I could. I'm not going to be there. So I'm both concerned and I'm excited for you because on the one hand, you got tickets. On the other hand, you shouldn't be able to still get tickets. Yeah, I know that was a lot. And I got them on the secondary market for lower than face value. Yeah, yeah. Well, y'all, if you if you experience leaf blowing in your life and think, wow, it's really loud. I wish this didn't happen. I've got good news. The early morning calm is going to come back in style. If you get it, you get it. Whisper Technologies announced the Whisper drive and add on for leaf blowers that reduces noise. Whisper claims it makes leaf blowers up to 40 times quieter at 50 feet away. The company also plans to partner with existing leaf blowers to makers to integrate its device and hopes to have partnerships by the end of the year and leaf blowers on the market using its technology by 2025, if not sooner. Yeah, this is an aerospace company. They're they're making like military products. They're making drones. They're making consumer product drones as well. And this particular brief blower technology came from a drone fan that they realized was really quiet and pushed enough air to move leaves around. So they're like, maybe we just make a leaf blow everybody wants quieter leaf blower and and and they have and I I want this and if if and when it comes out, if it's, you know, reasonably priced, I may buy it because because, man, do I hate the sound of a leaf blower? But I do like to get the leaves out. My dogs want me to get this. My dogs would like to request that I buy this. Yeah, they hate our leaf blower. Hate it. Yeah. For anybody who's like leaf blowers. What's what's the deal? You know, if you're in a suburban atmosphere where, you know, you got to do something with your leaves. Leaf blowers are, you know, part of life. If you're in a rural area, they also might be, but maybe aren't, you know, right outside your bedroom window type thing. So yes. Royal Hozer asks a very pertinent question. Does it make the engine on the leaf blower quieter? Yes, it's electric. It's not a gas blower. That's right. So it's a very, it's a, it's a very quiet engine as well. The whole thing is like, like you said, 40 times quieter at 50, 50 feet away. Nice. Yeah. We ended up with a electric, you know, yeah, a chargeable electric leaf blower with replaceable batteries. And I am telling you now, even though it's still loud, that is the greatest innovation ever. I can't wait till everything is just, I can plug it in. Yeah, it's resin. I meant motor, whatever. Yeah. Tom always means motor. Just assume it. Yeah. Even when I said BlizzCon earlier, I meant motor. He meant motor. Yeah. Think about it. I'm currently hanging out in a, in a lifestyle with a wireless vacuum cleaner. Oh. Boy, boy, has that changed some things. So this is, I feel like it's just, you know, let's just get to the next version of what we all need to do that is, you know, the least horrific version of that. I'll buy this for people on my block just to keep them from making noise. Right. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. This one comes from Colin on Apple lock-in and the whole green bubble issue. Colin says, it isn't just about RCS support. Apple has made or allowed a series of decisions that may communicate with the Android from iOS and convenient and makes leaving iOS painful. Somehow after four years on Android, I'll still meet new iPhone users who can't text me because the first message gets sent to me as an iMessage gets, goes into a black hole. My phone number has been unregistered from iMessage for years. I've spent hours on the phone with Apple support, but the attitude is, oh, that's weird. Oh, well, from Apple. Between making iPhones unable to text former users reliably, preventing adding SMS numbers to existing iMessage groups, not changing existing threads from iMessage to SMS when the number is removed from iMessage, and not supporting RCS, they really make it difficult for iOS users to communicate with the Android users. I don't think Colin's experience is widespread, but I understand if that's going on that it's particularly frustrating. So we feel for you, Colin. We do. And thanks, Retnan. Anybody who has thoughts and thoughts and prayers for our shows, do send them to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Scott Johnson, always a pleasure to have you here. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Well, just as it so happens, the news that Microsoft finally got the deal through, which would have been huge news for us in our show called CORE at frogpants.com slash core would have been a really great thing to happen last Thursday. Sadly, it happened early Friday and we missed the window. So we are expecting to talk a lot about what that means, what it is right now, what it could be by next year, and so forth. So if you would like to hear our breakdown and rundown of all of that, plus all the great games that are coming out, we got Spider-Man this week, a brand new Mario game that is getting like rave reviews. It's a really good show for that stuff. So check it out. That's frogpants.com slash core or find core wherever you get your podcasts anywhere around the world. Indeed, indeed, indeed. And by around the world, Scott means motor. Patrons, stick around for the extended show. Good day, Internet. Today we are tackling the subject of freedom on the Internet. Actually, it's a really, really good column on technology review about whether it's possible to vibe shift social networks. If you enjoyed our conversation about Mark Andreessen's manifesto yesterday, this is a very different point of view from a very different person. So stick around patrons for that. Just a reminder, we do the show live and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Nika Montford joining us. Talk to you then.