 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Johnny Hernandez, Hi Tech Oki, and Martin James. Coming up on DTNS, can Twitter be the next WeChat? 3D printing gets fast and high-res, but not furious. It's very happy. And how close is Facebook to becoming Yahoo? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, a Cinco de Octiogre 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. It's just a day filled with glorious, fun news. And also Twitter and Elon Musk. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Overwatch 2 launched on October 4th, with many players reporting inordinately long wait times. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra confirmed that a distributed denial of service attack did hit Overwatch 2 servers, causing connection issues for users trying to play the game. Overwatch 2 or Overwatch No? Reviews are out for Intel's ARC A750 and A770 GPUs. The Verges Tom Warren found the A750 has some pretty good 1080p performance on most games with high settings. The A770 can play some titles at 1440p. And he found Intel's ZSS upscaling tech improved frame rates 9% at 1440p, compared to a 24% increase with Nvidia's DLSS on an RTX 3060 Ti. Pricing wise, both cards offer good values compared to the RTX 36, although Warren noted the cards are optimized for DirectX 12 titles and have some pretty significant driver bugs at launch. Been quite a month for security in Australia. The country's largest telco, Telstra, confirmed it suffered a data breach at a third party organization, which exposed employee data dating back to 2017. It estimates 30,000 people were impacted with names and email addresses leaked. This comes two weeks after another telco in the country, Optus, suffered a big data breach, impacting up to 10 million accounts. That Telstra one's pretty small, but with the Optus one recently, people are like, not another one. Amazon discontinued its kid focused video calling appliance, GLO, which if you don't remember launched last year from the company's grand challenge moonshot lab. It was the one that had a video screen camera and then a projector that would project things down in front of the kid. A lot of kid-oriented apps. Amazon said it will share updates and guidance with existing GLO customers soon. Starting this month, all Tesla Model 3 and Y vehicles built for North America, Europe, the Middle East and Taiwan will replace 12 bumper-mounted ultrasonic proximity sensors, relying instead on cameras and software. This move follows Tesla removing radar from the vehicles last year. It plans to remove these same sensors from Model S and X vehicles next year. Speaking of Tesla and the letter X, let's talk about what's going on with Twitter and Elon Musk. Now, we told you briefly on Tuesday's show that Elon Musk had sent a letter to Twitter offering to buy the company after all. And we now know in the letter were the words provided that the Delaware Chance Recourt enter an immediate stay of action and adjourn the trial and all other proceedings related there to pending such closing or further order of the court. Musk also filed this with the SEC, reaffirming that he's willing to risk securities fraud if he backs out at this point. So it does seem that he's fairly serious about it. However, there's been no move since that filing, meaning the court case is still proceeding. The Delaware Court of Chancery has authorized Twitter to conduct a limited investigation of former Twitter security lead Peter Zacko, aka Mudge. The reason Twitter is investigating Zacko has little to do with his SEC filing or congressional testimony. There's an email found in discovery that was sent to one of the lawyers on Musk's team from Quinn Emanuel. Quinn Emanuel is a law firm. It's from a proton mail account, and it says it is from a quote, former exec at Twitter leading teams directly involving trust and safety slash content moderation. So that could be Zacko. It also could be someone else. It doesn't say and Musk's team denied that it ever responded that it has ever been in contact with Zacko. Zacko has stated under oath that he did not contact Musk or his team, but Twitter wants to subpoena more documents to see if they can find any evidence to the contrary. And the judge is letting them look. That will all be stopped though. If the two sides do agree to settle, which Reuters says could happen at any time. It also couldn't. It may have happened by the time you hear this. In fact, the court case isn't scheduled to begin until October 17th, and Musk is saying things that indicate he really means it for now. He really wants to buy Twitter. He tweeted Tuesday evening that buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app. Now, MarketWatch notes that Musk started an online bank called X.com, just the letter X, back in the 1990s, it eventually merged with another company and that formed PayPal. Musk reacquired the domain name X.com in 2017. The company created the handle, the company was created to handle the acquisition of Twitter for Musk called X Holdings. The Verge reminds us that when Musk met with Twitter employees back in June, he said you basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter will be a great success. I explained this to Scott on the morning stream today. Pending the far from certain given the players in this outcome that by Friday, Twitter has agreed to sell itself to Elon Musk for the aforementioned price and all that. If it were anything else, I'd say that seems very likely. I guess at this point, I would just say 51% chance that it actually happens. It seems more likely than not slightly. But let's say that happens. It does look like what Musk wants to do to me. It looks like what he wants to do is probably follow through on those discussions that he had with Dorsey that came out in the text messages that were part of the court case to make a platform that is independent of Twitter that would provide kind of a free speech area and anybody could build on that platform and Twitter, the social media message sharing part of the company might not be a company might even be a foundation and that what Musk would like to do is take the business of Twitter on that platform, create a WeChat for the United States and he is not the only one who's been trying to do this. Facebook has been trying to do it with WhatsApp for the longest time. They haven't been able to get the momentum to do it. They've actually had more success in India doing something like that, although they have to fight Reliance Geo for that privilege in India. Everybody thinks there could be a super app in the United States. Some people say the United States is too different. It's never going to get a super app. Other people say, nope, you just need to hit the right formula. Sounds to me like Musk wants to try to hit on the right formula. Maybe. I have so many personal issues with this whole entire thing that I will put to the side and not talk about today because I don't think they're relevant. I am like overly curious to see what happens to Twitter if he buys it and how quickly things start to change or be added or removed or created adjacent to or whatever his plans are. But to the larger question of whether or not there can be a super app in the states. I mean, of course anything's possible, but I just feel like if that nut has not been cracked yet, I don't know that it will be. I think we've got too much diversification in how we pay for things, how we communicate, and we like having that diversification. We like saying, well, I'll contact you here, but I'll just email that guy and I'll slack this dude. Oh, I don't like that. I'll interrupt you rudely to disagree. I don't like having to do that. You don't think people like having to? I don't think they like having to, but I know that people don't like having all their eggs in one basket. That I know. That's where I'm kind of headed with this. I'm not saying it's insurmountable. It's probably possible, but I bet you could find, at least in the technology world, cultural reasons why it works in other places and less so here. Why were that way? I don't know, but all those eggs in one basket, I think they make people nervous. It makes me a little nervous. It makes me nervous too, and at the same time, every time someone explains to me how much easier it is to do it this way, WeChat being the most obvious example, but there are others. I go, yeah, that is pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty convenient. Everything in one place. But yes, there's some American way, and it's not just this country that we happen to live in, but there's something about that where people go, no, then it's too much consolidation of power, and it's not fun anymore, and then the company can do whatever they want, and we're all just having to go along with it. And there's a little bit of a, Scott, I know you didn't want to get into it, but there's a little bit of a, well, if we are going to get a Super App, do we want Elon Musk to be the one in charge of it? And that is a question I think, you're going to get some different answers. I don't like the idea of that all that much, and I don't have any real problem with any one of his companies specifically. I wish I had enough money to buy a Tesla, I'd do it tomorrow. But yeah, the idea of the Super App and that being what Twitter is part of, and the fact that he certainly has made good on financial companies and that sort of thing, he might also be the one to do it, I hate to say it, but I don't know who else works. Also, to the point, Americans love to complain about consolidation, but their behavior seems to indicate they prefer to behave with consolidation, like Amazon for all their shipping, like Google for all their searching, right? People may complain all the way to consolidation, but it still seems to be happening in a lot of other areas anyway. And also, if they get big enough, it's hard to turn on them and make a difference, right? You can hate Facebook up and down until the end of your days, and still you're probably going to have to use it because how are you going to talk to grandma? It's so big, it's so there, and maybe that's what's app is in China. Maybe that's why it's so, you know... WeChat. WeChat, sorry. If Facebook wishes. But yeah, maybe that's why, and maybe we get there, but parlay Twitter into that? I don't know, man. All of it feels weird, and that's why I'm kind of weirdly excited to see if any of this can happen. I mean, Facebook is... Well, Meta has tried to be a super app for quite some time, with some success, but it's also so hated by so many folks that it's like, probably not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah, if anybody could do it, though, I almost think that's why. Maybe he can. He's got the money anyway. Let's talk about a big advance that doesn't involve Elon Musk. Indeed. Scientists at Stanford, rather, published an article in Science Advances describing a 3D printing process that is up to 10 times faster, that's a lot, than the fastest high-resolution printer on the market currently. You can also use different types of resin in a single object. It uses continuous liquid interface production, or CLIP. Love that. A technique developed in 2015 by Professor Joseph DeSimon's team. DeSimon is one of the authors of the new paper. CLIP uses a layer of oxygen to stop the resin from curing, so it doesn't harden, keeps it a nice liquid pool, and then it uses ultraviolet images transmitted through the resin to harden it into the proper shape. So the images will, like, basically set the pattern so that the proper parts harden. As the solid protein rises, the liquid resin fills in behind it, following a smooth, continuous printing source. So it just flows on in. One of the downsides, though, to CLIP previously was it relied on passive suction to put the resin where it was needed, and it doesn't work real well if the resin gets too sticky, or it's too viscous, or if the object rises too fast, so it slowed it down. Yeah, this is a known thing to a lot of printer folks who love their resin printers. So for this new process, what's the difference? They put a syringe pumps or syringe pumps on top of the rising platform. This adds extra resin where it might be needed. They call the modified process iClip, a little lowercase i, for injection continuous liquid interface production. This improves the overall reliability of the process, allows for using more viscous resin and adds to the ability to print with different types of resin. You need just that syringe for each type, each type of resin gets its own syringe. Yeah, so you can actually print with different types of resin in the same block. You just need a syringe for whatever types of resin you want. So to test this process, the scientists used three syringes with three different colors of resin, just to demonstrate that they were really bringing them together. They successfully printed a bunch of things, among them a red, white, and blue model of St. Peter's Basilica, a blue and yellow model of St. Sophia Cathedral, and printing proceeded at 50 to 80 millimeters per hour. Yes, for high-res multi-material printing, that's fast. That may not sound fast if you've never done this before, but that's faster than the other stuff. They expect it to be used for more complicated items, maybe if you need a different optical properties, like printing lenses, advanced sensors, energy absorbing, lattices, stuff like that. Well, it seems like the world, the printing world, 3D printing world, has really moved in the direction of resin in general. People like the finish, the resolution, the ease of use that's a little bit more complicated in terms of the production, because you've got a lot of chemicals and curing and all of that, and you need to wear a mask and all that stuff. But I feel like the writing's on the wall, kind of resins where we're headed, no more big rolls of PVC or whatever it is you're using. The big hang-up, though, in the past has always been two-fold. One is, how do we get better resolution and bigger objects and this sort of stuff? But the other has been, how do we get more speed out of this thing? That has been where the rubber has not met the road. It's just been slow going. It's like, think 24 pin dot matrix printers compared to your fast laser today, but even slower than that. This represents a huge jump, potentially, in speed, and that's the big bottleneck right now for a lot of production needs. Like, if you're trying to poop out a bunch of stuff from your printer, one object overnight, no big deal, you're a hobbyist who cares. But if your goal is to really beef up your Etsy store and sell a ton of these things, let's say kyber crystals, although don't tell Disney you're doing it, but let's say you're making them, this means you're going to get them a lot quicker, potentially. Yeah, I think 50 to 80 millimeters per hour certainly is faster, certainly better than overnight printing for a hobbyist. Certainly something, if you were to get several of these together, maybe 20 or 50 of them, they are cranking out at a good clip and it seems like it's great technology. It's still not where I think a lot of people who aren't involved in 3D printing's imagination is, which is press a button and in five minutes, I've got my thing. We're still away from that. The science fiction version of this, which we've all seen in various films or whatever, we're not there yet, but I feel like this is a really important step in that direction. Mark is uptown now. Nobody's had any groundbreaking speed advances. They've had advances in materials used. Yeah, yeah. Multi materials, food, even high, you know, big industrial materials like steel and titanium and all that. Those are all great advancements and I'm sure will benefit the entire world of 3D printing now and down the road. But let's get it out quicker, man. This seems like it's it. What about like a full 3D printed home, like 3D printed coffee? 3D printed chairs. Probably. Probably. The 3D printed homes require like big, large cement printers. And they're basically printing prefab that require a little bit of assembly. But yeah, they're doing that in Austin. It's very cool. I mean, yeah. The more quickly you can do something like that, the more or the less daunting a project could be as long as you have the right material. So, you know what? What was it? 50 to 80 millimeters per hour? It may not sound fast to you, but I bet it resonates with 3D printing. Resonates. It resonates. At a fast clip. If you'd like to complain about these puns, you can get in touch with us on social media. We are at DTNS Show on Twitter and DTNS PIX, DTNS PIX on Instagram. Facebook is adding Show More and Show Less buttons. Sarah, tell us about them. Show More and Less buttons are below posts in a user's news feed. The buttons temporarily affect the ranking of similar content. So, you can also find the buttons in the three-dot menu on individual posts in the feed preference settings and eventually on reels. This is going to join the many ways a user can take it upon themselves to give feedback and have a little bit more control over what they see in their own news feed. You can hide posts. You can have your favorite friends. You can snooze posts from users or groups or pages that you're part of. Or you could just constantly change the view to chronological. Facebook does allow you to do that. Or you could just be like, I don't use Facebook. I like TikTok or Be Real. Facebook seems to be fighting a rearguard battle here to keep users while meta itself buys time to shift to its future bets like VR headsets and whatever the metaverse ends up being. It has a story that political advertisers feel that Facebook offers less return on investment than it used to partly because of limiting ad targeting but also because of a stagnating and aging user base. Scott, you mentioned earlier that Facebook is one of those things that people think of as a way to keep in touch with their grandpa. Is that the way that your kids keep in touch with you? Well, there's actually no. That's what's funny. Oh, interesting. I do keep track of a lot of other relatives that way. And honestly, Facebook and I don't have a very frequent relationship. But when I do check it, I do check in with my mom there. She loves Facebook. She's super into it. But she's 83. I'm not saying everybody's 83 using Facebook. Certainly not. But it's more for my family, even extended family. It's things like Be Real and Instagram, Twitter. To some extent, it's just straight up texting. We do a lot of groups and group texts. And so a lot of iMessage. Occasionally, a green bubble will be in there as well. And that's fine. We don't care. And that's kind of how we do it. In fact, my daughter's had a baby yesterday. A little daughter of her own. Oh, yeah. It was breaking news on the show yesterday. I heard. Yeah. Somebody said it came up on the show. Amos told me. And thanks for all the nice words, everybody. But anyway, she had this baby. And so what's the first way we all get to see the baby? Nobody's in the room with her, except her and her husband. We get to see it in this big, huge family group text. And then we disseminate it from there. I feel like that's a lot of people now. So again, it kind of goes what I was saying earlier about diversified communication methods. There's just so many other ways that people choose to do this stuff. I'm not sure Facebook is the end all be all, even for this kind of thing, even for private groups. So yeah, we, you know, we do it different ways. I'm sure everybody's got their own way. And some people, maybe all they do is Facebook and to them, I say good job. They do seem monolithic and huge. And, you know, when you have billions of users, it's kind of hard for you to crumble. But maybe these are some of the cracks in the late stages. I don't know. I certainly have, I know family members are a good example, but you know, there's people I know, whether it's friends or family or, you know, even an acquaintance that I used to work with type thing that are clearly on Facebook all the time. I mean, they are in my feed constantly. And it's like, even if I'm not seeing half of the posts, because I'm rarely going to someone's actual profile and kind of looking at things that way. I just sort of check in, you know, make sure there's nothing burning down that I have to deal with as far as somebody trying to get a hold of me. And then I just am kind of out of there. I use Facebook Messenger a little bit, but as far as, you know, giving people more options of how their newsfeed is customized and works the best for them as an individual, that's all fine and good. Some of it though, I don't know, in the past, and I hope this makes it better in the past, I would see too much from someone that I don't interact with. You know, I'm not commenting on their posts enough for, and they're, I'm not really interested in the pictures of their family. No offense to them. You know, to the point where I'm like, well, I don't want to like mute them because I, we didn't get in a fight or anything. I can say, see fewer things like this. And that's never really worked very well. In fact, I can think of one person in particular who I will not out who I, you know, I could say see more, see less of this a hundred times and those posts just keep coming up. So maybe this is just designed to work better. Yeah, this just feels like requiring your, your users to do work or possibly just signaling, like, yeah, I'll say you want this. We know you don't really. So we'll give you a button that temporarily works. I don't know. I don't want to have to work that hard. If your algorithm works, it should just work. It should work well. And maybe an up and down button, right? Everybody's got them. That's fine. Let me, let me do that. But so many do you can go into the settings here. You can hide it. You can say, show me less of this. You could use the show more show less buttons. Like it just shows that they're tend to throw things against the wall. And I don't know. I think Scott summarized it great. He's a grandpa. And maybe Facebook is for great grandparents. Maybe I don't know. I feel like the youngest grandpa on the planet. But when I get in there, you know, I just, I can't wait to get out of there. I mean, here's why I think TikTok has such an advantage. And I think this is the reason why everybody's chasing TikTok right now. And they all are, they're all trying to do it. They're all trying to make TikTok, including YouTube, the big boys, they're all doing it. Why? I think the simple answer is they have an algorithm. They, everybody else has a hard time competing with. It's really good at giving you what you think you want. And if you don't want it, it's really good at just flicking past it. I'm done with whatever that is. You don't have to look at it and it's smart enough to go, he didn't stay there very long. So we're not feeding him those things anymore. So now it'll be these other things that he does seem to spend time with. And boy, even looked at that guy's profile and checked out his other videos. That must mean he likes animation more animation, please. I'm not saying that these are equal comparisons because they're not Facebook feeds a very different kind of content than something as simple as these are all videos in a row. So I know that they, you know, it's not the same and they're not comparable, but it's a great algorithm and an okay algorithm. There is a chasm of difference between those two things. Well, Hackaday and ours Technica both passed along pretty fun project from ink box software, which released a graphical operating system, the NES OS for Nintendo's NES console. Yes, it's a real OS. It's a limited one really only has two apps, a word processor and settings and eight, eight 32 byte files. But you've got a pointer. You can move icons around. You can customize some colors. NES OS is tiny 48k in size and the files have to be inside 2k of NVRAM that keeps data when the console isn't on, you know, have to turn it off, keep your data. Graphics memory had to deal with the NES only having two sprite memory grids. So we can only display 64 sprites at a time. So ink box had to combine the sprites into larger shapes to not get some of that flickering that many of us remember. The project is available in a ROM. You can use it through an emulator, but you could also make your own cartridge if you wanted to go a step further. This is so cool. It's so rad. I do a show all about retro gaming called Play Retro and we will absolutely talk about this thing happening. I mean, in some ways it's a little bit of a, you know, it's a kind of a goofy gimmicky. Hey, look what we could do. Kind of like somebody I guess recently built all of Minecraft in a map of Minecraft. In other words, a version of Minecraft is crazy. And I love that kind of stuff. It's not always practical, you know, playing doom on your lawnmower is cool, but who's going to do it all that often? It's a little like that, but man, I love this kind of stuff. I love it. I love it from a preservation standpoint. I love that people are this creative. Like I kind of want to get the ROM and play with it. Well, I will actually get the ROM and play with it. And I'll report back here what I thought, but love it. No, we're not going to see a bunch of apps that are going to have their own developers conference, but I love the idea that you can take this old hardware. You say that now. This could be just the beginning, Scott. Never know. NESOS 2024. Did the NES need an operating system on a cartridge? No. Are we glad it's there? Yes. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Jeff wrote in, Jeff had some fun using character.ai for text adventures. In fact, we were talking with you, Scott, about this last week. Jeff said, I described a scene of waking up on the beach surrounded by a shipwreck. But to see what the AI might do, I said there was the large footprint of our carnivorous dinosaur in the sand. It described the footprint perfectly. Added details about how the dinosaur had circled me and left. After searching the wreckage, I left with a gun. It had five bullets left in it. Fast forward about a dozen interactions, and I'm in a village where the chieftain's daughter, who the AI even gave a name, is translating between me and the village shaman, who's insisting I throw my gun that the AI gave me into the fire so to not anger their god. Also was holding a totem of a dinosaur. Jeff says, I know enough about AI to know that this entire story was created by a bunch of matrix multipliers on a cluster of GPUs somewhere. Just blows my mind. Give me this AI plus dolly or stable diffusion to generate images of the scene, and I may never need to buy another video game again. I'm completely in agreement here. I streamed an hour of one of those bots, specifically the adventure game one, to a bunch of people in my streaming audience, and I was trying to throw stuff at it to throw it curves to really mess with it. By the time that thing was done, I was the Hulk. No, I'm sorry. I was half Hulk, half Batman, and I was fighting the Gorn. Kirk helped me fight the Gorn, but then Kirk turned on me, and we had to fight Kirk. Oh, no. It just showed up. I didn't even tell it to you. It just showed up. I summoned four lights to try to stop Picard. It was all a big thing. Anyway, there's a total blast, and I came away from that going, yeah, it's a little weird. And yes, you know, there aren't exactly the kind of progression type things we think of in video games, especially RPGs in this. They easily could be added, though, and you've got a very unique experience. You add in image generation to this. Suddenly I'm all on board on AI image generation, because that sounds like a wonderful application for that sort of thing. So I couldn't agree with this email more, and I had the same experience. I recommend people go check this character.ai thing out and just mess about. Let your imagination roll, and you'll be surprised what comes out of it. It was awesome. The only limit is your imagination. It's like ZomboCom. The only limit is yourself. Yeah. Like what you throw at it, it will then play on. It's so fascinating. That was the issue I had, what I had to get over last week when I was like, Sarah Lane, you know, and tell me more about me, you know, and it'd be like, you have three kids, and I'd, no, no. I don't. You're not scraping the internet properly. And then I realized that is not the point. I already know what I am. This is the other Sarah in the fun world doing other things. Yeah. Just the idea that you can come. It apparently works at Addiction Recovery Center. The fact that they have nothing, turns nothing into something. It just felt like new frontier to me. And maybe I'm just being tricked by the tricks of AI, but it felt immersive and emergent in a way that I haven't felt in a while. It was awesome. Now, if you're at that point in your dog walk right now, you're like, there was a loud truck going by. What was that thing? Character.ai. Go check it out. Also, we made an offhand comment about finding cheap gas on the show with Rod Simmons. And Todd, helpfully recommended gasbuddy.com. Gasbuddy.com slash USA will help you find the cheapest gas near you. Thank you, Todd. Thanks, Todd. If only there was cheap gas near me. But hey, it's got to be somewhere around here. Thanks to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us today. And congratulations on the granddaughter. Very exciting for the fam. Let folks know what you've been up to lately. Well, other than feeling like I've aged two decades in one day. Other than that, I've been really busy working on a show called core. We have this show that we do every week on Thursdays. It's all about the video game business industry and the games that we're all playing. And if you're like, man, some of the stuff I hear you guys talk about on DTNS, I'd love to hear maybe broader discussion on some of those topics. That's exactly what we do. And I think you're going to like it. So check it out. It's over at frogpants.com slash core or just search for core wherever you get your podcast. Yes. Very cool. Special thanks to Dan Colbeck. Dan, you already know this, but for everybody else, Dan is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. We thank you so much, Dan, for all the years of support. Yeah, thank you to Dan and everybody. There's all kinds of benefits you can get by becoming a patron, not the least of which is an ad free feed. Don't let that go to waste. If you're a patron, go get it. patreon.com slash DTNS. Patrons, stick around for the extended show. Good day, Internet. We roll right into it when DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, you can catch DTNS live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back again tomorrow talking the Chips Act and Google's Pixel announcements with Jennifer Briney and Rob Dunwood joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Timing Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.