 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, and Ms. Music Teacher. Coming up on DTS, Dr. Nicky's here to talk about the effects of birds on solar power, not the other way around, and give her thoughts on the Haiku Box Bird Tracker. Plus, Instagram's founders have a plan for news, and the U.S. has a plan to crush Huawei. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 31st. There's no more January after today, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm from Alabama. I'm Dr. Nicky. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. Are you done with January, Nicky? It's been the longest January in the history of man for me. You know, somebody told me that yesterday. It's been a long month for many. Well, it's over now for most of the people listening who listen the next day. So congratulations. You made it to February. All right, let's start with the quick hits. IGN sources say that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo will not attend E3 2023 or have any presence at the show. Now, last week, Microsoft's Xbox team said it would hold its annual summer showcase in Los Angeles, the same city as E3, but didn't say if it would be at the show. E3 last held an in-person show in 2019. Everybody's freaking out about this, but isn't this usually what has been the last several years when they actually had the show? Like Microsoft has an announcement near, Sony has an announcement near, but neither one of them are at the show. I guess people thought it would all, everybody would come back. It would bring them all back together. Come on, people now. OpenAI is launching a tool to detect AI written text. This is something they have been saying to educators they wanted to develop. Now, OpenAI says the developed tool will work as a good classifier and can inform mitigation for false claims that AI generated text was written by a human. But it also admits in its posting that the tool has a ways to go. It can properly identify AI written text 26% of the time. So not most of the time. Room for improvement. And on top of that, it incorrectly identifies human written text as AI generated 9% of the time. So some false positives. Bloomberg sources say that Sony cut projections for launch shipments on the PSVR2 by 50%. It now reportedly expects to ship 1 million units in its launch quarter. The PSVR2 opened for pre-order in November and ships on February 22nd. Samsung posted record revenue, but its operating profit was down from a year ago. Chip demand and chip prices dropped, causing Q4 to be particularly bleak for Samsung. The bright spot was the Samsung Foundry business, which increased its profits as customers are diversifying suppliers. Sales of smartphones fell too, and the company expects that demand to weaken even more this year. However, Samsung does think seven conductor demand may bounce back in the second half of the year. Speaking of earnings, Spotify reported its monthly users grew 20% on the year to 489 million monthly active users, in part due to particularly strong growth in India and Indonesia. Pay-in subscribers grew 14% to 205 million. Spotify also lost money to the tune of 270 million euros. That's a big jump over its loss of 309 million euros for the same quarter last year, but still beat expectations. Spotify also announced that its chief content and advertising business officer, Don Ostruf, will leave the company. Yeah, down from 39 million. That was written wrong there. Ah, yes. It seems like the math is a little backwards there. Yeah, they lost a lot more, is the point, this time the last time. Alright, that's a look at the court case. Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left Facebook back in 2018. You might remember that they were acquired for a cool $1 billion in 2012. It was a big deal at the time. Woo, my goodness. Now, platformers Casey Newton reports that the duo have a new venture focused on next-gen social apps starting with something called Artifact, described as a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to serve you content and let you share it with others. Content being news in this case. The app opened up a waiting list to the public today and will be available on both Android and iOS. Newton likens Artifact to TikTok, but for text or even a mobile focused Google reader. I've applied to be invited in. I can't wait to see it. Unfortunately, people off the wait list are only going to see the news content, which won't answer my question about how the sharing works. The beta people apparently can do postings and see postings from other people, because on the one hand, one of the things that I think is really interesting about this is they're curating the publishers. So that's going to cut down the amount of misinformation, disinformation struggles that they'll have to deal with. If you post though, can I post any link or can I only post links to the curated list of publishers? I'm very curious how they're handling that part of it. But I like this idea of read news that learns what you like to read. Not because you click on it, but because you read it the way that TikTok learns what you like to view. Again, not just because you looked at it, but because of how long you looked at it and did you favorite it and all that sort of stuff. And these guys, Sisterman Krieger are good at this stuff. They also have some other former Instagram folks on the seven person team that they've got going on there. So I think this is an interesting attempt. It's way too early for me to say whether I think it's going to work or not. But it is the kind of thing that Sisterman Krieger said to Newton, like we kind of looked around and we're like, why isn't anybody else doing this? Facebook and Twitter are still focused on followers instead of what you actually like to interact with. Yeah, there's a lot of people who work in media and who write things that might be part of artifact going forward or sort of saying like, first of all, this has been done before and it never worked. Second of all, this is taking the control out of the publisher's hands because Sarah, if she's an artifact user who likes a certain story based on her circle of friends and what she's liked in the past, may get something that is not like actually the best story of the day, which is something that is put together in other senses. You might say something like Google Reader or Tech Mean, for example, this does not seem unlike either of those things. This seems like, okay, we've got let's say a big top story of the day. Lots of people are sharing it. Lots of people are talking about it. If the algorithm that artifact is using, and I'm on the waitlist too, so I have not used this personally, if that works well, me as somebody who I consume quite a bit of news every day, this is an awesome option for me to figure out what is in fact the best news of the day. This is one tool that I would use among others. I think what people are getting a little hung up on is, well now there's this algorithm that's going to tell you what the top news is, whether or not it's the top news, and I think that's sort of beside the point. Well, it's really easy to just put the top news across the top, fixed. Now the top news is up there and the rest of it is personalized to you. And as to people having done this before, systems wanted to wait for the tech to get good enough and Google's invention of Transformer, which by the way is the T in OpenAI's GPT stands for Transformer, is the thing that made these language models work instead of being kind of clunky. So I feel like this is the right time for the thing that never worked before, the Microsoft tablet to become the thing that works, the iPad. You know, we always have those kinds of examples in tech history. I'm curious, Nikki, whether you think of this as a consumer. I'm actually, yeah, addressing this from the consumer point of view. I'm excited if this is like the TikTok algorithm and there are pros and cons. I would argue that, yeah, you put a banner with whatever the top news is, if you want to look at it. And then I would argue that my top news is going to be super different from someone else's top news if there's a breakthrough in birdwatching. I want to be the first to know it, but maybe nobody else cares about it. So I'm a big TikTok user in that sense, and I like it for that. But the cons would obviously be, are we going to get push towards extremes, which is kind of what's happening on TikTok? This goes back to what kind of standard of quality are they going to use, which they say they are. We don't really know how that's going to be implicated, but I'm excited to see what it brings because this would lead me to sort of tend towards reading the news a little bit more for stuff that I like and avoid stuff that I don't really want to hear about, even though it's the important news. Well, I think the social aspect of this is supposed to solve this problem. I'm going to say, for example, you, Nikki, are like, well, you know, I really like these kinds of science-based stories, but gosh, it seems like that's all I'm getting now. Am I really getting the full picture? And I, as your contact on Artifact, might say, well, here's some stuff that you actually would be interested in because, you know, I'm your friend, I'm your contact, and I think this is important. And that is supposed to make the algorithm not be so niche, you know, in the way that some people argue that TikTok is, where you kind of go like, okay, all I have now is like form animal TikTok because I like too many of these. There's sort of a back channel going on that's supposed to greater inform what you're getting going forward. Yeah, widen out what you hear. fingers crossed you have a diversified friend group then. That too. Yeah. All right, let's move on to talk about Huawei. Back in July 2019, let's refresh some memories here. The United States added Huawei, which is a Chinese tech company. They're known for phones, but they make networking equipment. Huawei got added to what's commonly referred to as an entity list. Entities on that list are believed by the United States government to pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interest of the United States. I think it's important to note that it's not that they are, it's that they're in a position where they could easily become. And so the US doesn't want to give them the tools that could fall into hands that risk national security. That's the principle behind the entity list. In practice, in this case, Huawei's case, it means that any US company that wants to sell to Huawei needs to get a license. It's not a ban. It's always described as a ban, but it's really licensing. That applies to non-US companies that are using US companies intellectual property or equipment, as well as to US companies themselves. So to put it another way, if you don't get approval, you can't sell to Huawei or sell to a company that will use your property to sell to Huawei. So let's talk about the exceptions. It's not a ban. Sarah, what kind of licenses are we talking about here? Yeah, so the US has mostly denied licenses for tech related to building out 5G networks, which was the heart of Huawei's business back in 2019. But the US has been granting licenses to companies like Intel and Qualcomm to sell non-5G stuff to Huawei. So for example, Qualcomm can make some money selling 4G tech, but Huawei can't get their parts to build 5G phones or networking equipment. So you might ask what effect has this had on Huawei? Yeah, it has almost eliminated Huawei's phone and network equipment worldwide sales. They still sell in China, but even there, they're not selling a lot. Huawei phones have dropped out of the top five in China. They spun out the Honor phone company, which had been part of Huawei. They spun it out so it would be a separate company and not subject to the restrictions. It also has encouraged Huawei and the Chinese government to accelerate plans to develop chips domestically. That's going to take years though, so that's not proving to be anything they can use immediately. And in the short term, Huawei has retooled to provide more enterprise and cloud services. The company believes it is out of crisis mode finally after a few years here, four years to be exact, and will be back to business as usual according to their CEO. So Huawei finally dug out from under the restrictions your move, United States. Well, this is potentially bad news for Huawei because it looks like the restrictions will increase. Now, depending on who you ask, the Financial Times says that the U.S. has decided to stop issuing licenses to sell to Huawei. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal sources say that such a move is being considered but hasn't been made yet. Reuters sources say the department is drafting new policies that would restrict products related to 4G, Wi-Fi 6 and 7, AI, as well as cloud and high-performance computing. The Wall Street Journal also says the department might widen the restrictions on parts suppliers to Huawei as well. That would open it up somewhat. All of that would be designed to send Huawei back into crisis mode. Yeah, so now we're talking almost ban. Like at the point where you can't sell 4G and Wi-Fi 6, I mean, I guess you could sell 3G stuff to them. Shadow ban. Yeah, but this is getting closer to an effective ban on selling. I think this is personal at this point. The United States has not put as severe restrictions, even on ZTE, which they also put on the entity list, and then loosened up around. There is something about Huawei where the United States is not easing up. It's tightening the screws. Any other thoughts on Huawei before we move on? I mean, I guess my only thoughts are, yeah, like how bad is this going to be for Huawei? It seems... It's going to be pretty bad. I'd be worried if I was them. Yeah. Well, because they moved into cloud stuff and now they're like, don't sell them cloud stuff. Like it won't stop them from being able to do cloud altogether, but it's going to affect it. It's going to slow it down, make it harder. Yeah. I guess Huawei sort of has the scarlet letter where it's like the company is like, okay, well, let's see what we can do. And the US was like, not that either. Yeah. And what we know, there's allegations that Huawei is involved closer with the Communist Party and the army than other companies in China are. There is definite proof that they were selling to Iran in a way that skirted rules that should have prevented them from selling to Iran if they wanted to do business in the United States. I feel like it's that. There's something involved in what they gave to Iran that caused the US government to say, unforgivable, we're going to crush you because that looks like what they're trying to do. Folks, if you're feeling social, you can't get in touch with us on the social media, DTNS Show on Twitter. That's DTNS Show with two Ss. Twitter is, I'm sorry. TikTok is Daily Tech News Show. Just like it sounds, Daily Tech News Show. And DTNS Picks with an X, DTNS PIX on Instagram. The Energy Innovation Think Tank published a study estimating that the cost of wind and solar is coming down below other kinds of power plants. UK Think Tank, Ember reports solar and wind power passed natural gas in the EU last year. As far as, I know it passed gas. Sorry. I get it. Yeah. As a percentage of the energy used, the solar part of this, not the gas part, is likely to attract more investors in solar panels. But it turns out that solar panels themselves are likely to attract birds because of the warmth given off by the panels. They provide shelter for nests. Bird droppings and drop debris from their presence, however, as you can imagine, can reduce the efficiency of a solar panel and even damage them leading to higher ownership costs. Lots of methods have been tried to ward off birds from nesting there, but the only effective one is the use of elevated grids of wires called goal wires on poles. However, I have an idea because I've seen Star Wars. Nicky, could we use lasers? Funny that you say that Solar Power World has reported that some companies have decided they are going to use lasers to ward off birds from their crop fields, food production facilities, but also solar panels. So this sounds a little bit sci-fi, but apparently it's being used. So there's like the security camera style poles with lasers at the top of them. And it identifies the birds as a solid object and it points towards them. And according to this story, the system reduces unwanted bird populations up to 90%. And it's less expensive than the traditional wires. I'm sure you can imagine how pigeons get everywhere and on everything and gulls do too. I would be annoyed if they were on my solar panel. And I would take great pleasure in lasering them down even though I like birds. It sounds really fun. We should be clear. The lasers do not explode or roast the birds. They just say somewhere else birds. They bother them. Like it gets in their eyes and they just fly off. Well, as luck would have it today, this is not the only bird tech that we have on this episode of DTNS. Nikki, you recently gave a full Live With It report, which we did together on the Haiku box bird call identifier. So for anybody who hasn't listened to that, if you're a patron, the episode is in full and it's available to you. But let's just give folks who aren't familiar a little background on what the Haiku box is. Yeah, did I lobby DTNS to make an only bird episode today? I don't know. You tell me. Successfully. Yeah, so actually DTNS sent me a Haiku box and I was able to test it in my home in New York and my home here in Alabama to have sort of different scientific comparative contexts. But basically it's a smart device that is powered by artificial intelligence and it continuously records sound outside of your house and it automatically identifies birds, songs and calls. So I'm a bird watcher. I was very excited to test this because basically the idea is that you can pick up bird calls that you wouldn't normally hear because you're not sitting outside the entire day, at least I'm not. And things like owls that come out at night. And it has some pros and cons. I lived with it. Sarah and I teamed up to talk about it. But if I sort of distill that down to the main points, my main pro would be that I believe for now this is one of if not the only product on the market that does continuous identification. It's just sitting out there recording on its own for you. Right, because you can do apps, right? But then the apps are in your phone. Yeah, the apps are like, you know, you have to hold it up for... The apps are very good, the Merlin app I really like. And that kind of ties into the con here. I don't think this is as good as the Merlin app. I don't think they have a good enough network or data set or something in their AI that's not computing as well. But to finish up the pros, I think this has a huge potential for the scientific community. They need to improve what they have right now. It feels like a beta, but it has potential. Imagine, you know, you're a natural park and you want to record rare birds that show up. This is what this would be for. However, unfortunately, I don't think it's accurate enough. I got a lot of misidentifications in the city. It was a ridiculous amount. It was almost like 80% misidentifications. Because in the countryside it was more like 30%, but still enough to kind of annoy me personally. And so that makes it for the price, which is around $400, not as sellable or that I would want. And the novelty of it does wear off after a while. I was very, very excited in the beginning. Now about three, four months afterwards, I don't check my app that often anymore. Well, especially if you've got that much misrepresentation that's going on. In your Live With It segment, which you talk about in much more detail where you were and why it was misidentifying birds, sure. I mean, if you've got a lot of loud noises in a city, this is just going to happen. And if you've got an app that works well but isn't really allowing you passive recording that you can look at later where you have to hold a phone up near what you think is a woodpecker, making a cool sound, that's fine as long as you're able to do that. But that's not really what the Haiku Box is for, right? The Haiku Box is like, I'm doing all your work for you. And if you care about this, you get all the data later and then say, ooh, look at all these birds that it identified. But if it's not identifying even 50% of birds accurately, then, yeah, $400 is like, hmm, maybe like a first gen of something that could be a lot better. Yeah, and my point is the hardware is there. They just need to improve their neural network or their machine learning or their dataset to include like city sounds, which I don't think they did, honestly. Yeah, it sounds like it's really designed for quieter areas, not really designed for the city, which is fair. And it sounds like something that can be improved. I wouldn't be shocked if we revisited this in three or four years. If this is incredibly accurate, if they get enough data, if they get enough people using it in the real world, that they can learn what was an actual garbage truck and what was not. I'm really optimistic for that. They're really, really small company. They're NSF funded, so I'm excited for them. And they're really responsive. I emailed them and they changed stuff in the app for me. So I'm like, I'm very excited for these guys. They need to up their game. I understand with four people on their team. It's like harder than you think, but I'm rooting for them. I'd like to cover them again in the future. Yeah, I feel like if you're a birder who's techie and are okay with spending $400, you should jump in on this and help them, right? But it's kind of an enthusiast thing at this point. Well, and as you said, Nikki, that you had contacted them and they were like, interesting feedback. Thank you. We will implement that. That's the kind of team you want to talk to, even if they're small and nimble. It's like, wow, okay, I can actually help make this product better based on my enthusiasm for it. Well, just a reminder, if you are a Patreon subscriber, you can catch Dr. Nikki's full review of the Haiku box on the latest episode of Live With It, which we released this past weekend. Yeah, if you're a patron, it's already there in your feed. Maybe you listened to it. Some of you did. And we got field feedback. Let's check out the mailbag. Feedback. Yeah, so Tim, the DBA who says, I'm a listener since the Buzz Out Loud days did listen to the Live With It segment and said, Dear Dr. Ackerman, thank you for sharing your experience with the Haiku box on Live With It. I am the least birdie of a family of birders. Like you, I use the Merlin Bird app on my phone. I find it quite error-free in the various environments around me, picks up birds that are just on the edge of my range of hearing. The more avid birder members of my family find it quite suitable. If I wanted to improve its sound recognition, I suppose I could purchase an external mic for my phone. And if I wanted to leave it on overnight, I suppose I could buy an external flash drive. No pricey extra hardware, no subscription. So I fail to see the draw of the Haiku box. From your Live With It, it seems like you do too. And then Ulrike commented on the Live With It post on Patreon. On the topic of peregrine falcons in New York City, Ulrike says there are actually a lot of them. Skyscrapers mimic the falcons natural cliff habitat and scientists have been encouraging peregrines to call cities home for decades. True, not as many as the Haiku box thought, which was definitely the garbage truck. And not like two times a morning right in front of my apartment on Second Avenue. But there are quite a few, but like you're happy if you see one. And then as to Tim's point, what do you think of the idea of like, yeah, just put a battery pack and a phone and a flash drive. And then you could just keep a way of doing exactly what they did. If you want to do that, I think you would get the same result. I don't know how long Merlin were actually run for. I've run it for about 30 minutes. I haven't tried doing it longer. And I had to like keep pressing on it. Yeah, if you have the cash. Stoic Squirrel says, for some reason, there are a lot of peregrine falcons in Manhattan, but fewer in the other boroughs. Is that because of less skyscrapers? High rents and yeah. Yeah, the commute. They have expensive pallets. Yeah. Well, let's keep the bird theme running. Shall we? Let's do it. The flightless Dodo bird, which you probably have not come in contact with because it's been extinct since 1662, but once lived on the island of Mauritius. Now US biotech company Colossal Biosciences, based in Austin, Texas, wants to bring the Dodo back through de-extinction and large-scale genome engineering, which also hopes to morph some modern elephants back into woolly mammoths and resurrect the Tasmanian tiger. MIT Technology Review published an interview with Colossal CEO Ben Lam, who describes including sequencing of ancient DNA and also cloning even artificial wombs to achieve this particular goal. So where did they get where they need to do this? Ben Shapiro, a specialist in ancient DNA at the University... Beth Shapiro. Beth Shapiro. Thank you, Nikki. Not Ben. She's Beth. Ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says that she and co-workers were able to recover detailed DNA information from 500-year-old Dodos, which is currently held at a museum in Denmark. Now Colossal plans to try to modify the bird's closest living relative, the Nicobar pigeon, turning it step-by-step into a Dodo and possibly rewilding the animal in its native habitat. Nikki, this sounds very difficult. Is it possible? I have strong opinions. I'm glad you guys brought this up so that I can shoot it down. First of all, Beth Shapiro, great geneticist. I don't know her personally, but I know her work. She's a consultant, so we don't have to smash down on her. Really cool that they're getting into the Dodo genome. We are very, very far away from cloning extinct animals. Ethically, terrible idea. Rewilding ethically, also terrible idea. I have a lot to say about this. I honestly think this company is just getting people's money and they're not going to deliver on their promises. If you wanted to, and you can see that because they're going from mammoth to Tasmanian tiger, down to Dodo is getting smaller and smaller over the years. And they haven't done any of them, right? No, they're not even, we're nowhere close to this. And just saying like, oh yeah, they're closest relative is the Nicarbar pigeon. I don't know how, if people realize like, that's not close. Like they're not the same species. There's a lot of huge gaps in DNA that you just need to fill. And it's not Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park already shows us problems. I am very passionate about this topic. I don't know if I know myself down, but if you took even this as an example, like the whole, the Dodo first of all is like six or seven times bigger than Nicarbar pigeon. They, their eggs are probably completely different. Like we are nowhere near this kind of technology. It's cool that we know things more about their DNA, but the artificial wombs, like we are not there with that. You know, cloning, no, just they're taking people's money for fancy speeches and they're doing, I don't know what they're doing with it, but they're not cloning stuff yet. What was interesting in this article is they pointed out that an egg, a bird egg is essentially a big cell. The nucleus that you would usually use to clone is the yolk of the egg. So cloning doesn't work with a bird egg. You have to get into the gonads and try to use that to modify the genes, which they apparently can do with chickens, but they haven't been able to work, I'd make it work outside of chickens. So it sounds like, yeah, this is not, this is very far away from being something they could do. And if you even wanted to think about the mammoth, one of the many, many blockades is like, you know, in order to produce a mammoth, you would have to put a baby cloned woolly mammoth in a adult mammoth and have it give birth that way. But sorry, an adult elephant, but we're already in zoos not able to have like healthy births from elephants. It's very, very hard and a lot of them die in the process. So ethically, you'd need about 80 elephants to even try to make this work and just like assume that we're going to have them die. Like this is going nowhere. Sorry, I'm like, I love Jurassic Park, but it's not going to happen. The one technical thing I'll do before we move off of this. Colossal spun out a bioinformatics company called FormBio, which is selling its software to help manage lab results. I feel like that's what this company is going to end up being known for. It's the AWS effect. The tools it makes along the way to whatever they end up doing or not doing will probably end up being the profitable part of this company. Yeah, maybe the big advertisement poll is just to fund that kind of stuff in the end. But this is frustrating to scientists because it's pseudoscience and people are believing it and then... Yeah. Yeah, we're not getting dodos or mammoths or Tasmania tigers. And not that I wouldn't be the first person on the plane if we did. Ethically, I'm not happy about it. I would still go visit them. Well, this is why we had you on the show, Dr. Nicky. I mean, this is exactly why, because when I saw the story this morning, I was like, wow, sounds pretty cool. I'd love to see a dodo in the wild. Turns out there are ethical issues, even if that were to be possible, which it doesn't seem like it will be for some time. So thank you for shedding a little bit of scientific light on that and let folks know where they can keep up with what else you do. Yes. Thank you for having me. I love coming on this show. I'm at Ackerman's Nicole on Twitter and nickolackermans.com is my website. Come and check out what I do. And my brand new lab is up and running at the University of Alabama. Roll tide. Very cool. We want to extend a special thanks to Britt Thomas, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. And we'd like to shout out some of you here and there. Today's your day, Britt. Thank you for all the years of support. Yeah. We can have Nicky on to talk about all this stuff. Thanks to people like Britt. Thank you, Britt. Indeed. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show. Good day internet. We call it GDI and it rolls right in after DTNS wraps up. Good day internet tide. Whatever that is. You can also catch this show that we're doing right here live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. We'd love to have you join us live. If you can daily tech news show. Com slash live is where to find out more about that. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. Talking to Samsung Galaxy unpacked. It's a big event with Scott Johnson and Rob Dunmond joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.