 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito and Steve Ayerderola. Coming up on DTNS, why meta, taking almost 50% of Horizon World sales, is a good deal. Plastic batteries could help move solar forward and should you fear foundation models for machine learning, we'll ask Scott. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 13th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Sarah Lane is having technical issues, she may be joining us shortly, but in the meantime, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google released its Switch to Android app for iOS Monday. The app helps users transfer contacts, photos, video and other data from an iPhone to an Android phone. It can also migrate photo and video libraries from iCloud and includes instructions on turning off Apple messages so techs properly show up on Android. It does not move the apps though. Google has not announced the new app or link to it from its website as of our recording, but the app is there, so if you have the direct link we'll put in the show notes, you can get to it. Apple has had a move to iOS app for Android since 2015, so now it goes both ways. Razer teamed up with machine learning company Lambda on a laptop called the Tensorbook that runs Lambda software stack on Ubuntu, including PyTorch, TensorFlow, CUDA and more. Lambda sells access to cloud GPUs for machine learning development. The Tensorbook comes with its own RTX 2080 Max-Q starting at $3,499.99 and then 99 cents. Sarah Lane, is that you? It is, it is. And boy do I have some news. Twitter shareholder Mark Bain-Rosella filed a class action suit against Elon Musk, claiming he took too long to disclose his investment in Twitter, allowing Musk to purchase shares at a lower rate than if his ongoing investments had been properly disclosed. The SEC requires investors to file paperwork within 10 days of their stake, reaching 5%. Musk took 21 days to file. The European Union has finally turned its anti-strust lens on Microsoft over some changes it made to its enterprise terms of business. Back in 2019, in October of 2019 specifically, Microsoft changed its terms to require additional fees if you ran products like Office on competing cloud services like AWS or Alibaba, or even on its own Azure service. If it was in the cloud, you paid an extra fee, although Azure customers apparently got a nice stiff discount. The EU will also look at bundling, for example, Microsoft's highest security service is only available to the highest paid customers of Microsoft 365 in a product called E5, which bundles in a bunch of other services as well. Smartwatch maker Polar announced two new watches with GPS aimed at runners, the $199 Pacer and $299 Pacer Pro. Both feature upgraded processors and 5 megabytes rather of RAM, offer up to 35 hours of battery life with GPS on, that's good, battery life, and include Polar's precision prime heart rate monitoring. The pro level adds a barometer to better measure our runner's intensity level and the pro is also available now. The standard Pacer is up for pre-order shipping in May. Alright, let's talk a little more about the metaverse, except it's not the metaverse, but it is for meta. Sarah, what are we talking about here? Okay, so yesterday we mentioned that meta would let select creators sell digital assets on its Horizon Worlds VR platform. CNBC has since confirmed that meta plans to take 47.5% cuts of those sales. That might sound like an odd number to you. It comes from the fact that it's two cuts of each sale, so a 30% hardware platform fee is charged for sales made through the meta quest store. That goes for anything on the quest platform. Then there's an additional 25% fee for things sold through Horizon Worlds. So the quest store leaves you 70% of what you charged, and Horizon Worlds takes 25% of that 70%, which is 17.5% of the original amount, leaving meta taking 47.5% of your sale. The Veksharma, Meta's VP of Horizon told The Verge, we think it's a pretty competitive rate in this market. We believe that other platforms are being able to have their share, believe in. Meta also plans to bring Horizon Worlds to mobile phones later this year and hopes to bring it to game consoles as well, so that's why there are two fees. One for the platform, which someday would include Google Play, Apple's App Store, maybe PlayStation, maybe Xbox. Meta won't get the 30% on those platforms. They'll always get the 25% of whatever's left after the various app stores take their cut first. This has made some NFT fans very angry as they hold examples like OpenSea that takes its own 2.5% cut. However, Horizon Worlds won't include NFTs in this regardless their skins or special items or even VIP access to sections of the world, none of which are actually NFTs. It's more like Roblox than it is OpenSea. So if you want to compare it to Roblox, Roblox takes 30% of if you created an item and sold it in your own experience, meaning it only works in the section of the world that you created. However, Roblox takes 70% if you create an item and then sell it in the Roblox marketplace. But also Roblox does everything within its game currency of Roblox, which can be Roblox rather, which can be cashed out or spent in game. So I guess the question at this point is, is this worse than OpenSea? It's not really NFTs, but maybe it's better than Roblox. What are we all thinking? Well, I mean the comparison to OpenSea, I think is, I'm glad we brought it up because that seems to upset the ire of that segment of people, but I don't think it's comparable. If Meta had said, hey, we're integrating NFT technology into this moving forward, then I can see why this might be important to those folks. But as it stands, I just don't think they're comparable things. They are comparable to Roblox though. And I think in a way comparable to other platforms that let users create content and then make a little scratch on that content via their platform, Steam is not all that different with what they sell in both individual games as well as the workshop that's part of Steam. Hats and certain games are worth a whole lot of money out on the street. And that's generally a 70-30 split. Same thing goes for Apple's App Store. Same thing goes for most of how consoles work and what it costs to use their store to sell your product. Having spent enough time or a lot of time in Horizon Worlds in the last year, I can tell you I think the potential there is actually really great. But this number really put me off today and made me think this is an opportunity for you to really blow up your burgeoning little creative space there. And you don't need to double-dip to do it. I think that they could have easily... It's not like these are two different companies. Horizon Worlds, unless they plan to spin that off, is directly a meta product. And right now it's a free product, but if you really want to get the ire of creators up, it's double-dipping on their potential revenue. And that's exactly what they're doing. So if it were me and I were meta, I would reverse this. And I would make it so that you can still be competitive and do your 3070. It's kind of the standard. Everybody does it whether you like it or not, including meta who complains that Apple does it and others do it. But forgetting all of that, if they just did that and didn't double-dip, I think creators might... Well, Roblox double-dips. Roblox charge you 30% for the platform and then an extra 40% if you sell through the marketplace. That's true, but the difference there is... It thinks of it as double-dipping because it's just both called Roblox. Whereas with Horizon Worlds, it's called Quest and Horizon Worlds. And I totally get why meta is doing this because they're like, well, Xbox is going to take 30%. iOS is going to take 30%. Google Play is going to take 30%. So if you're an NFT fan, first of all, this isn't about NFTs. Stop jumping to conclusions. Maybe they'll do this with NFTs, but I'm going to guess they actually won't. So it's not about NFTs. Just to hold your horses till we get to talking about NFTs. If you're complaining about the percentage, then it's like, well, it really is better than Roblox. However, I totally think Scott's right that it would have been in meta's best interest to realize that people aren't going to rationally compare us to Roblox, so we should have probably done it before. Well, and even if they did, Roblox has got this, albeit a little weird distinction, which is if you sell it in our marketplace, we're going to charge you more. If you sell it in the place you built on our platform, we will not charge you the extra money. At least there's a division there. At least there is a way to not get charged both. Exactly. Whereas the meta situation is like, no, if you have to have a quest to play it, at least right now, you have to have a quest to play it. And to play it, you got to be in our world. And to be in our world, you got to sell stuff there and do that. You got to do it twice. Although you don't, in the future, very soon, you won't have to go through the quest store. You could go through the iOS store, but then they're going to take 30% too. Yeah, which is a whole other question I have about that's a non VR space. And they've said before a long time ago that the Horizon Rules was intended to be a virtual space for people, whether or not they had headsets. They started with the headsets, but they're going to make it a 2D screen experience as well, which I am all for and I think that's great. The quicker they get there, the better, because then this won't be as big of a problem. But as long as it's in this VR space and that's the only access, creators aren't going to be motivated to go lose that kind of cash on their time. Hey, Sarah, did we know anything about when to expect headsets? I'm glad you asked, Tom, because The Verge also has an article with anonymous sources familiar with Meta's roadmap about their VR and AR headset plans. There's a pass through VR system that lets you do AR expected later this year. That is one of the rumors. More versions of the Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses that Meta put out are coming, still focused on photos and videos. A cheaper pair of glasses called Hypernova pairs with a smartphone is meant for notifications, not AR really, it's just more of an extension of what you can do with your smartphone. That's expected in 2024. And the first generation of a wearable AR headset codenamed Project Nazare is planned for 2024 as well. Right now, they're a stationary demo, not actually wearable out and about, but you could kind of think of them as like Clark Kent glasses weighing around 100 grams, with eye tracking, custom waveguides, micro LED screens, and also stereo audio. That field of view is probably going to be less than 70 degrees though. The first gen will require a separate wireless phone size control device to be somewhere on your person. Meta is also developing a wrist device that measures EMG, also known as electric pulses in your arm for control. So no motion required, really, just thinking. Meta was building on Google Fuchsia OS but has switched to Android for the first version to speed up developments. Yeah, they're spending a lot of time and a lot of money and Zuck is apparently way into this. I'll be interested to see what it looks like when it actually comes out. Although using EMG to let you do control, apparently they might put that in a watch at some point too. Meta's apparently working on some watches. That could be pretty fascinating. That could be compelling. I want to see what they do. Let's move over to MIT Technology Review. They've done a write up on something called electrically conductive polymer batteries from a company called PolyJewel. This is really interesting. Polymer batteries are essentially made of plastic instead of lithium and lead, which is the most common now. The upside of plastic batteries as they are cheap to make and the materials are easy to get, as you might imagine. Polymers can also charge up quickly and hold their charge for a really long time. They're also efficient, which means they store a good percentage of electricity that you would use to charge them. Plastic also holds handles and handles well the swelling and contracting that can happen in batteries. That's also common. Oh, I opened a controller the other day and it was a mess. We won't get into that. Anyway, it doesn't need active temperature control. Those are the things companies spend a lot of time managing for lithium ion batteries in your phones and devices and things. So you were waiting for the downside, right? Well, here it is. Polymer batteries are huge. They're big. They are two to five times larger than the equivalent lithium ion systems. So just imagine whatever that is and then go two to five times larger. So you're not going to see these in your phone, probably not even your car. They're more systems level type stuff. But you know, they might be a good one. Space is not an issue or a consideration like power grid storage, for example. That's a good one. Batteries are a key part of wind and solar power as well. Polyjewel thinks it can get the cost down to about 65 bucks per kilowatt hour of storage. That's a lot. That's a lot. It's a great amount, but polymer batteries last longer and are cheaper to maintain. So Polyjewel hopes industrial customers might go for it. And personally, I hope it just means finally we get some traction on some new battery tech. Maybe these get smaller and someone comes up with a hybrid idea. And before you know it, we're actually, I don't know, getting some movement on batteries has been a while. Yeah. And remember that $65, that's the cost of buying the thing and what storage you're getting. It's not an overtime. It's not like Polyjewel has a service contract. But according to this conversation article, or this technology review article, I'd rather, $20 is about the sweet spot for making it really profitable to build a storage grid. So $65 is pretty far up there, but that's why Polyjewel is like, yeah, but maintenance is a cost over time. And you're not going to have to do as much maintenance with these. So there's some advantages there. It's a fool's errand to predict that any particular battery tech is going to be the one that finally solves something, anything. But this looks promising, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think a lot of, myself included, a lot of people kind of forget that something like, I don't know, running a power grid will require various amounts of batteries. And if those batteries can be more efficient, if they can explode less often, and if, sure, it seems to be a little bit of a sticker shock going on right now, but it's something that will last longer and have the need for less, I don't know, swapping out of batteries over time, then this is actually really cool technology. Sure, your smartphone isn't going to get these batteries because it's too big and we're all so used to it being as small and efficient as possible. But if the technology gets to a point where it could be in small consumer devices, then we have another conversation. Yeah. The biggest advantage here is for when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing, having that wind and solar power not just get lost because you couldn't use it all when it was blowing and shining. So batteries are the key to that. They're the key to saying like, oh, we can store that up overnight. We can store it when the winds are calm and be able to use it. So that could be the advantage here. Man, if this was even close to $20 per kilowatt hour, I feel like it'd be a slam dunk. They'll get there. Well, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. Do you find that cool story out there? Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. You may have heard recently of Dahl E2, D-A-L-L-E2, the latest version of a machine learning system that can create art just based on you typing a description. Like literally you can type teddy bears shopping for groceries in ancient Egypt and it will generate two photo realistic teddy bears dressed in some kind of canvas wrap carrying a wicker basket. And granted, they look more like they're in a museum exhibit about Egypt rather than in Egypt, but still pretty darn impressive. The Tech John had a good conversation about Dahl E2 on their show this week. If you want to hear that, go to hear it because one of Stephanie Humphrey's questions on that show, we're going to ask Scott Johnson in a second. We talked about the original Dahl E right here. We've also talked about GPT2. You can create written works for you based on a prompt. Tell us a story about Tom Merritt and Sarah Lane. We actually did that with Andrew Mayne on the show. There's also Google's Palm, which outperforms humans in some language and reasoning tests. These are all part of a class called Foundation Models. And as with many things AI, they engender a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Questions like, why do we need that? Is this a good idea? I welcome our AI overlords, stuff like that. Well, Aaron Jay Snoswell and Dan Hunter have a great ride up on the conversation about things you would know about Foundation Models. I highly recommend you read it, but here's the short version. One big difference is that Foundation Models don't train for a specific thing. The algorithm that could make pictures of cats, remember that? It would create, these cats don't exist. There was also these people don't exist. It was trained specifically on cat pictures, the cat one. The human one was trained on pictures of people. But either each one was just trained on one type of thing. Foundation Models are trained on general data for a wider task and sometimes have more capabilities than you might have expected. Dolly 2, for example, was trained to match pictures with captions. That led to it being able to generate pictures from a caption and even able to edit an image based on a written instruction. Take the bears out of the hallway. Google's POM can explain metaphors and jokes, something it wasn't specifically trained to do, but they found it could do it. Foundation Models run on deep neural networks. Those are networks that work the way the human works by strengthening connection. But the models are gargantuan. POM has 540 billion parameters. GPT-3 costs around $5 million to train it up. Yeah, so these companies limit who can access these systems. You can get very limited access to them. But they will eventually get smaller and easier to run. That's just how tech goes. And when that happens, those questions of who owns a work generated by an algorithm, we were talking about that not that long ago. They're going to get very interesting when these things can work at scale and just constantly generate stuff. As will the question of what human creative work remains valuable. Scott, you're an artist. Do you feel threatened by this? Not threatened. I think I said last time we talked about the ones. We had one specific story on the show some many months ago that talked about generating faces for RPG games. Basically, it looked like little oil paintings of here's an archer and here's an axe wielder and here's whatever. And what would that mean to game development specifically? I often think of that example still. Even with this, this actually represents a massive step forward. When it's affordable and available to everyone right now, these are very expensive experiments. But one day some small indie team is going to be like, we're going to make a really cool turn-based RPG. But art for this is outrageous because we have so much story to tell. So many characters to create. So many options to show. So much gear to look at that we don't have the capability to do it. So we're either going to have to go really stylized and kind of cheap looking and everyone will know we're an indie game and they're never going to give us a second look. But if we really want to compete, we got to make this look really nice. And I'm excited for this kind of technology to be that for them. For them to be able to say, we need to make 30 swords stat and an AI is smart enough to make 30 very different looking swords and weapons. And have them go great. These are perfect. Plug them in and we're going. That's huge from a production standpoint and just get the thing done standpoint. I don't think that this actually takes away from artists ability to make art and even make a living with their art. And the reason I think that is sure the people that are cranking out that stuff maybe not so much. But when you go to somebody because you want their style, you want their take, you want their creation. I don't think that ever goes away and people have been telling me my entire life. Oh, digital is going to destroy art. Photoshop will destroy artists. You guys are, you know, hoes. This is going to be like, well, like Lotus 123 was for number crunchers back in the day, even though that turned out different. But in a lot of ways, I think this is similar to that. We're going to find our avenues and this is going to, for some of us will supplement what we're already doing. We're going to find out what our production needs and other things. So I think we're actually going to get more done and get more creative as a result of this. I am not doom and gloom on it. Yeah, I was imagining using this when I'm like making a presentation or putting together, you know, something where I'm like, I need a picture of a dog running through a field. Right now I have to go to Google images, find one that's creative commons. Imagine if I could just tell my desktop thing, like make one for me and I would be able to do that. I would be able to do that. I would be able to do that. I would be able to do that again. It's also great for assistive tech. People who only have their voice to work with could dictate like art and then modify it like, oh, make that green, make this person taller, put a moon and then they're making art, but they're making it with the assistance of the AI. Right. The way you've described it, I think the AI that will come close to that, even if they get technically close, people know it's not Alex Ross and there's a difference there. And I think that will always matter. It's the same with music. It's the same with anything. It's fun to think of AI generated bands and fake, you know, VR music and that sort of thing. I think it's really interesting what's happening in Japan with that, but it doesn't replace the idea that you have Foo Fighters playing this weekend at some club or, you know, those things are still and I think we get a little freaked out for no reason. I often think of it as the comparison of handcrafted furniture versus mass-produced furniture. Mass-produced furniture can be very solid and very look really good, but people still find a value for handcrafted. No, that's a really great way of explaining it. I really do think that in the end we will benefit more than we're not going to, even as artists, and I understand why people get nervous. I get it, but embrace this stuff. I think it's going to define what the next 100 years of art looks like. Give it a big deep learning hug. Well, in the next 100 years, your trip to a major league baseball stadium might seem a little different than it does today. Amazon announced its cashier free technology, Just Walk Out is coming to two stores at Minute Maid Park at where the Houston Astros play. Two stores, 19th Hole and also Market. Their beverage stands, they have food too at the stadium. We'll get Just Walk Out where customers insert their credit cards into the gates, they enter the store, they pick up their items, they leave without having to wait in line for a cashier if you've been to a baseball stadium anytime in your entire life. You know that sometimes these lines can be pretty crappy. Attendance will be on side at the stores. They want to make sure people know what's going on and also customers have to show ID to an attendant if they're buying alcohol. Also a thing that happens at stadiums quite often. Oh, and attendant, got it not attendants like attendants at the park. Oh, yes and attendant, a person. I don't know, could be a dog at some point, but here's for now. Amazon started licensing, it's Just Walk Out technology to third party retailers back in 2020 been kind of interested to see how this is rolling out. It's since been licensed by UK grocery store chain Sainsbury's and is using some report shops further rolling out last year. Some Whole Foods and Starbucks locations started using Just Walk Out and Amazon recently announced within the last week it opened another fresh grocery store in Greater Washington DC that also uses Just Walk Out technology following locations in Moor Park, California Naperville, Illinois Naperville and Seattle, Washington. Yeah, and don't forget back in October we talked about the forum in Los Angeles or actually in Englewood was putting a Just Walk Out test in there. I think there's going to be a line going in. That's how this is going to happen. That's what's going to happen because there's going to be so many people wanting to use this and the convenience of it will be compelling but they'll have to limit the capacity going into it. Yeah, that's a good question of like how many people is too many for the technology to be able to to deal with. But if they have more of these that could help it certainly will speed up the throughput of the store. Yeah, which is to me this is a perfect place to do it. That's the place you want to hurry up and get your hot dog get back your seat or whatever you're trying to do grab swag and be done. And that stuff gets pretty clogged. Yeah, all the things. Get a hat. I think places where queue lines queues or lines do get a little out of control pretty easily. I mean, I'm not going to be going to a lot of concerts sporting events. I mean, this is perfect. Now, if it is something that if you're nearby one of these grocery stores that is also using the just walk out technology, awesome. I wish I were. I'm not right now. I'm excited to look into it. But yeah, I think I think Amazon is smart to say, all right, let's let's try this in places where people are in other ways because there's just there's just too much bottlenecking going on. And that's how we get more companies to license our technology. All right, I would say let's check out the mailbag at this point. But we we didn't get a relevant email meant for the show in the past 24 hours. So folks you got thoughts. Don't don't hesitate. I had a couple people over the weekend. I was at Brian Brushwood's Founders Day picnic event say like, you know, sometimes I think about writing the show and then I'm like, nah, like, don't don't hesitate. Said is that email feedback at daily tech news show dot com. So I put this in here. I didn't want to spring it on you, Sarah. So I'll read it. It's a conversation I saw in the Linux channel of our discord about what browser they use just another pilot was like, Hey, what browser is everybody using on Linux these days? He said he misses Chrome but he doesn't miss the Chrome ram suck and he's on Firefox. Jerry said Firefox was his daily doobie aga said links if I'm sshed winky face Jerry responded curl if I'm at a Klee whistle added been using Firefox for a while now every once in a while Chrome does something interesting to speed up but Firefox eventually leapfrogs them as time goes by it's all a game and I'm on the freedom slash privacy side and doobie aga said camping Firefox really when it comes to resource management. I loaded up gallium on a Chromebook which came with chromium hands down Firefox is more performant. So the consensus seems to be Firefox for Linux what do you think jump in our discord and let us know. Can I just ask I'm sorry Jerry what is curl on a Klee these are if you're not using Linux it'll take us longer than we have left in the explain understood. Alright Linux talk love it I'm a Firefox user as well it sometimes doesn't work the way that Chrome Safari you know et cetera et cetera would but yeah good stuff. Curls basically a command line utility for transferring data okay I was more wondering what the Klee was but that's we can talk about this another time. Scott Johnson when we see you next I would like to hear all about your Klee adventures command line interface there you go command line interface I will do full reporting of my command line interface experience in the meantime though people are like well what are we doing until then well you can go listen to a whole bunch of podcasts look at a whole bunch of art some of that digital art I talked about on display on my website frogpants.com just click around see what you like there's got to be a show you're gonna like or maybe there's some art you like I don't know I'll get some brand new stuff in the store always a good time check it out frogpants.com and if you're trying to find me online and ask me real questions I'll answer them at twitter.com slash Scott Johnson well always good to have you on the show also always good to have brand new bosses and we get some since we saw you last thank you to our brand new bosses Brian and the buffalo of muffins both just started backing us on patreon thank you Brian thank you buffalo can I call you buffalo it took us a second to get command line interface it took me a second to realize he didn't mean the city of buffalo I was like the buffalo muffins what does that mean is it cold and industrial he means a animal just to be clear I understand what a command line is I just never heard it called a cleave before it's kind of cute reminder everybody there's a longer version of the show called good day internet it rolls right along after we finish up with DTNS available at patreon.com slash ETNS please join us if you can for our extended show we are live on this show though Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern twenty hundred UTC you can find out more at dillitechnucho.com slash live and we are back doing it all again tomorrow with just Marv Young and Len Brawl to joining us talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program