 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Pepper Geesey, Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, and our lifetime supporter, Eklundofhockeybuzz.com. On this episode of DTNS, Apple can let you play Windows games now, WordPress has a chatbot built in, and a robot learns to cook by watching videos. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 7th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From a studio that's currently still messy, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I thought you meant Lionel Messi at first, who's going to play in the N-Major League Soccer. I thought maybe people might think that Messi and I are kind of friends, and he's in my studio somewhere. Naming rights. He might be. Yeah, who's to say? Can't prove who's not. Well, while you try to figure that out, let's start with the quick hits. Couple Apple notes to start us off. First, it was not a mistake. Apple meant to make developer betas of iOS, macOS, and watchOS available to everyone. It's part of a new free version of Apple's developer program, which also gives you access to Xcode, support materials, app testing, and more for no charge. You still have to pay if you want more advanced support and to submit apps to the app stores, however. One other thing of Apple note is for Android users. Now, Apple announced that in iOS 17, group chats with Android users will retain text editing and threaded replies and full photo quality and better video compression for iOS users. Android users won't see those edits or the better image quality and threaded replies will work differently. But hey, iOS people won't be as mad at you as they were just several days ago. Yeah, yeah, just bringing up that green bubble level. Samsung's going to hold its next unpacked event at the coax convention center in the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul, South Korea is made famous in size Gangnam style. This is the first time that Samsung has done one of its unpacked events from its home country. Now they didn't give us the exact date, but they said it'll be in late July and it will be about foldables. Samsung Gangnam style. Autonomous trucking company Too Simple, that's TU Simple, has begun testing its level four trucks in Japan. The autonomous trucks are operating on the Tomei Expressway, which runs through Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. The government hopes to open an autonomous trucking lane on the expressway by next year and allow full operation in it by 2026. Japan is facing a shortage of truck drivers. Bode from the kilowatt podcast wanted to make sure we let you all know about the Volvo SUV, the EX30, Volvo's all electric SUV. It is the smallest SUV in Volvo's lineup, but also the fastest going from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.4 seconds, has a 12.3 inch portrait touchscreen and a Harman Kardon sound bar that spans the entire width of the dash right up where it meets the windshield. It runs Google's info system. It does not run Android Auto though. It does support wireless Apple CarPlay. It can charge from 10 to 80% in less than 30 minutes and the range starts at 213 miles with a max of 298. Starting price for the EX30 is 33,795 pounds if you're in the UK and $34,950 in the US. It's available in Europe right now and US and UK deliveries will start in the first quarter of 2024. Google India head Sanjay Gupta announced that the company developed language models able to handle more than 100 Indian languages for speech and text processing. Android has around 94% of the market share in India, quite a share where there are more than 600 million mobile users. Big market. Good for Google. Alright, let's talk about this. What do you got? What do you got? Automatic automatic. The WordPress parent company launched an AI assistant for WordPress which integrates easily with all Jetpack powered sites. Jetpack users get better security and performance and growth tools for WordPress sites. If you're a WordPress.com user, you already have Jetpack, but if you're running your own domain, it's something that isn't add on. Now, when you're writing a post now using this AI assistant, you can choose to add an AI assistant block like you would for an image or something like that. The block works like any chatbot tends to do these days. You write a prompt, it'll start generating text for you, including lists and tables. It can also change the tone of a post to things like I'm skeptical or I'm being humorous or I'm feeling confident, for example. It can also create a summary and suggest titles as well. The AI assistant supports 12 languages at launch with support for translation between those 12. After letting new Jetpack users send 20 requests as a free trial just to see if it's right for you, it's going to cost $10 per month. It's also available free to WordPress.com users for a limited time. Now, there are going to be rumblings of AI generated content being low quality, being inaccurate, because that has been an issue. We are in early days, but Scott, what do you think? This is automatic after all. They're a pretty well received company as of late. Do you think that they can tackle this? I do. I'm always on the hunt in these conversations we have here on DTS and outside of it for practicality and application of AI technology. And this feels like a very practical use case. And I can tell you that even just recently, I've had to summarize some things and was kind of struggling to find the right length and the right grammar to use during the length. So it was clear what I was trying to say without having to have the people read many paragraphs that I was sending them to first. And it was kind of a pain. I had to go to chat GPT, tried that a little bit, sort of worked, sort of didn't. This idea, if it works well, I think will be helpful for a lot of people who are trying to get thoughts across when sometimes they hit a snag. It will be easy for some to jump and say, well, clearly, as Sarah stated, clearly, this is a problem because it's writing everything for you. And I don't see it that way. I think this is going to act as an assistant and will end up being a practical, helpful thing for people who are trying to author content. And I like it. Yeah, it doesn't automatically create posts. I'm sure there's a way you could make it do that because WordPress is very modifiable. But that's not how it's set up. So if you're jumping to the conclusion of like spammers and everything. Yes, spammers could already do this in lots of 100 million ways. This this is not the vector for that. This is the vector for helping people create better posts. I mean, just tables alone, I look at and I'm like, yeah, I could use that. If you can make a table by just saying here, turn this into a table. That's saving me a lot of time. Yeah, 100%. I thought the same thing. If I haven't done this recently, but let's say I was talking about, I don't know, some currency conversion rates. And it's like, I can do that all manually and look it up and make sure I have it all right. Something like this in a table would be great. Now, am I writing posts, blog posts like that on WordPress? No, not very often. I also like to think that, you know, my particular style of writing and or humor is very specific to me, right? So I don't necessarily think that if a chatbot is going to be humorous, it's going to be in my particular style. But it doesn't hurt. It doesn't strip away my voice or somehow put me out of a job if you think that I'm a good writer. It's a good starting point and perhaps there isn't a super personal voice type of post that you have to make. It's just kind of an update to something, you know, on DTNS, you know, sometimes we're personal about stuff, various columns that we publish. And sometimes it's just sort of like a little update, you know, and a link here and there. Yeah, it's utilitarian or something. Exactly. And so it's like, yeah, cool. I like it. This does not scare me. It doesn't scare me at all. I think there's just a feeling out there that this stuff is going to trick everybody, or it's going to fool people into thinking you wrote something you didn't write. And my experience with it so far is you still have to write stuff. Like I can go in there and say, make me a paragraph that sort of summarizes this one idea. But I don't know anybody who's making a living out of, you know, pooping out various paragraphs based on that process. I have never been able to make it right. To my own standards, sufficient Daily Tech News Show or Daily Tech Headlines post. Now, it could summarize them really well. So it's all in how you use it. I think that's the key. Let's talk of robots. Scientists at the University of Cambridge used a publicly available neural network to generate a model that used computer vision to analyze cooking videos and then control a robot and recreate the dishes. The neural network model was able to identify objects, including fruits and vegetables. The scientists used eight simple salad recipes using the kinds of fruits and vegetables that the model could recognize. So we've got some limits here. It can't just do anything. They had to kind of tailor it to the model they were using. Then they recorded the multiple videos of them making each recipe. The model processed 16 videos and managed to identify the correct recipe 93% of the time. It recognized variations in the recipes between demonstrators and even was able to create its own new ninth recipe based on what it learned from the other eight. If you want to find out a little more about this, the paper is available on IEEE Early Access. Scott, it's a first step to a robot chef that you can show a TikTok to and it will cook what you want. What do you think? I'm in. Here's why I'm in. First of all, I'm a terrible cook, but let's put that aside for a second. Let's say I'm actually a good cook. Let's say I'm great at this and everyone always raves about my magical recipes. The idea that I could take this TikTok video, show this model, and then have it make the food that I saw is a little bit akin to copy and paste for me. Let me explain. When I see a video like this, it's almost impossible for me to translate that. I have to remember it. I got to pause it. I got to rewind it. I got to wait. Did he say add salt then? There's not really a great transcript of what I've just seen. Even if there was, I'd still have to parse that. This is a little bit like how it used to be. If I wanted to move text from one place to another, I had to recreate it manually and retype it. There would be errors and problems. Copy and paste came into our lives. I don't remember anybody complaining about that. To me, this is a bit like that. It's like, here's the thing. Now make the thing. I want to see this in action. I would like to see the results of a robot trying to make something good, and it would actually make these videos far more useful to me than they currently are. Because right now, it's kind of, oh, that looks good, but I'll never make it because I'm already past it and on my way to something else. Well, why not, you know, give it to JoJo, the robot over there, and let him make it? Yeah, and it could be useful in restaurants. We've already seen a few solid-oriented robots out there, you know, putting together meals in certain kinds of restaurants. So being able to train it up on new recipes faster by just making a video and then running it through the system. I mean, we tend to anthropomorphize these things. It showed them the video. It really just fed it in, and the thing did frame by frame computer vision recognition. But whatever, you're able to make the video and then turn it into a salad recipe. Obviously, a long way to go before we could make these more complicated and do things that are more than just fruits and vegetables. But this is proof of the concept sort of study. I think what happens is this world continues to bring a physicality to it. This AI future we're looking at brings a physicality to our lives that we're used to having with digital things and we don't even think twice about it. You know, if we want to scan a document so that I can then sign it, that's a no-brainer now. You just do that and it's done. Yeah, yeah. And we forget that that process used to be a whole lot more involved. I think it's going to be good for our brains to start understanding that like 3D printing is a good example. We're going the other direction. The digital, instead of bringing everything to digital and that's now digital, we're going, let's move some of that to our physical world and part of that is interacting in this way and it won't all be cooking obviously and it won't all be certain other applications of AI. We don't know what they all will be yet, but in this particular case, I could just see people being very happy about having less inconvenience in their lives when it comes to taking in content and then having results from it. And I think it would be a boon to content creators who are already doing real well with things like recipes and here's how I make a thing on TikTok or YouTube or whatever. Yeah. This just means quicker feedback and people have the food right away. Love it. Yeah. And you know, instead of just being like, wow, it's taking all the creativity out of making your own stuff, it's like, no, this lets me be more creative, potentially. The way that I felt like my June oven let me be more creative potentially because I can kind of go, all right, I'm going to give you some stuff and then you do the thing that I don't really know how to do that well or maybe that you just do better than I do. Great. Awesome. Then, then, you know, let's go nuts with salads. Let's start there. It's salad spectacular. And then we can, you know, we can think about what else we want to make that might have been too daunting to satisfy this. Now, the whistle is saying here, and does the salad robot know to avoid toxic combinations or poisons simply because it was fed a video that claimed to use that? Yeah, don't do that. Don't show it that. I mean, yes, it would be good if there's some safeties built into that, but we also have to take some responsibility for training it. If we create the tool that does this, we should know that whatever we teach it to make, it's going to make. So it should also make tasty things, not things that are disgusting. I think that's on us. Yeah, we're going to have to be smarter about that stuff. And also, I like all of these things. The more we think about them, the more we can think about how it's going to break or fail. I'm famous for this. I'm trying not to do this as much, especially with AI, because the first inclination is to go, it knows everything about you now, or it's going to create poison and kill you, or we jump to these conclusions so quickly. And I think that's good that humans have a little bit of that skepticism about a thing we don't know or trust yet. But a lot of that just comes with time and the robots get smart and they tell you, hey, don't put this salad dressing with that kind of mayonnaise. You're going to blow the house up or whatever it might be. Yeah. And that's not the tool's fault in this particular case, right? Right. I mean, honestly, you could do the same exact mistake if there was no AI involved. It's just you making a thing and the guy tricked you and you ate bad something. And everyone loses, you know? See, that's the, you know what? Yeah, it's human error. Let's get human error out of this situation. It's like, ah, no, no, no, no, no, no. Those things don't go together. That's beyond the mission of this. Well, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. One of the tools that Apple briefly mentioned at WWDC in their announcement, keynote announcement on Monday, is called the game porting tool, using code from the open source platform Wine to translate Windows API calls to Unix-based environments like Linux and Mac OS. Now, this is similar to what Valve does with its proton tool to run Windows games on the Steam Deck. So what do we need to know, Tom, to better understand this? Yeah, Microsoft's Windows API for games is called DirectX. I'm going to oversimplify a lot of stuff here. So if you really know this stuff, please forgive me for leaving out a few things, but I want to make it easy for everybody to understand. Windows API for games on Windows is DirectX. Apple has its own for the graphics portion of that called Metal. So if a game developer wrote a game for Windows and wanted it to bring it to Mac OS, they'd have to change the code from referencing DirectX to referencing Metal, specifically for graphics shading. Apple's game porting tool does the translation for you automatically in real time. So it goes from Microsoft DirectX 12 into Metal 3 automatically, and also translates input audio network file and other systems calls that Metal doesn't handle. Now, there are more things that need to be tweaked if you want to port a game perfectly from Windows to Mac OS, but this tool is meant to help a developer see how the game runs with the API translation so then they can work on fine-tuning it before they port it fully to Mac OS. But it seems to work really well. So to sum up, the game porting tool, which again, you have to be a developer and a paid developer, not one of the free developers, lets you run unmodified Windows games on Mac OS. Anybody who has the tool can do that. You don't have to know any code. If you get a developer account and you get the tool, you can be like Isaac on Twitter and run Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on an M1 MacBook Pro with 16 gigabytes of RAM, or there's a Reddit post showing someone running Diablo 4 on a Mac. Scott, are these novelties or is this a game changer? Well, to those of us who have recently, at least me anyway in the last year or so, have been steeped in how Proton works and why the Steam Deck has done what it's done. Proton, of course, you know, Valve has been working on that for years. It's not just a Steam Deck product, but it's acted as this layer so that you can run in this Linux environment. You can run Windows-based games and run them really well. And even that, which is open to the public, is not 100% there for every single game you may try to load up into that thing. So it's got its own tweaks and issues and other stuff and people strive to better match what it needs so the game runs well on there. But having been steeped in all of that, I always go back to like, well, the Mac is so capable, especially these Silicon Macs. And I'm just always annoyed that Apple hasn't taken the idea more seriously that they could create a translation layer. Yes, wine exists. Yes, other stuff like parallel. Cross-over. And they're not great. They're okay for business stuff and, you know, work environments, but they're terrible for games or at least traditionally have been bad. Well, Cross-over just did a DirectX 12. In effect, they're trying to be nice about it and say, good job, Apple, we use wine, so you're kind of using our code there. In a way, Apple's finally doing a thing everyone's been begging them for natively but didn't make a big deal out of. And of course, like you said, not everybody has access to it unless you're a paid developer. So there's a lot of hitches to this right now, but it's exciting because I swear every day I have Mac gamers come to me and go, listen to your show, I'd love to be playing Diablo 4. I loved 3. I played it on my Mac. I can't play 4 on the Mac. I can't play Overwatch. I can't play these very specific games. And they're always like, why? And I'm like, well, obviously I don't see the value in terms of monetary when it comes to Blizzard or other companies. There's a lot of reasons that, you know, you can only play certain games on the Mac store, this sort of thing. This changes that potentially in a very meaningful and sort of at the root cause way. So I personally, this got me really excited when I heard about it because it means I might be able to point people to something soon. Whoever it may come from, either it's going to be crossover, it's going to be, you know, Apple directly, but somebody's going to make a way that we can have a true quality translation layer, at least on Silicon Macs that will give you that AAA experience. And we haven't been able to say that maybe in 20 years, 30 years, since like really early Mac games. So for me as a Mac user and a PC user and a gamer in general, I think this is really great news across the board. Now the P squared has the question, how well is this going to run the games? Because again, this is meant for developers to be able to, you know, get a jumpstart on porting. That's why Apple didn't release it to everyone the way Valve released it on Steam Deck. They don't want you to use this to just run your own games. They want developers to use this to speed up the process of porting the game over and make it easier to translate those API calls and then just work on the fixes to make it run really well. And native games are always going to run really well than emulated or ported games that are doing these direct translations. Sure. But it does look like, again, we've only had this thing for a day, it does look like this tool does a pretty darn good job. It does. And one of the things I remember about Proton and Steam Deck is you can get away with a lot of having it look really good without killing the hardware because you're on a seven inch screen, right? You HDMI that up to your 4K TV, you're going to have different results. The Steam Deck isn't going to give you state-of-the-art 4K graphics out of that device. But it is a really good job on that small end. So you say, well, what does that mean for a larger screen Mac environment? And my guess is you are going to, you are going to at least in these earlier stages, you're going to have some trouble with not being able to do certain things at maximum. Some games just aren't going to be optimized for it. And it's just not going to work in that environment. Because at the end of the day, like you just said, this is a translation layer. This is a, it's an emulator is what it is. And a good one and a really powerful one. And so is Proton, but they're not perfect. And it would be better if it was all native, but gaming and Macs have not always been the best of friends. So I don't know that you're ever going to get that kind of native support that we're asking for across the board that we already have on Windows, but I think we can get closer. So I'm all for this. And I hope the reaction is such that Apple sees the reaction and goes, oh, maybe we're on to a cool thing here that we ought to make it a big deal in our next or second to next, or, you know, whenever they do the next iOS or MacOS release. And if you're already a developer or you're willing to pay $99 a year just to get this tool, well, you know, that's something you can use to run some Windows games. Sure. See how it works. Well, California based startup, aquatic, like a aquatic, but with an E is working to combat climate change by taking carbon dioxide out of the ocean and also the air while creating hydrogen as an alternative fuel in a deal with Boeing. Boeing plans to buy 2100 metric tons of hydrogen from aquatic. It can then use in sustainable aviation fuel or SAF plus 62,000 metric tons worth of carbon removal to offset some of its own climate pollution. All right, so if you're saying, okay, what is happening here exactly? Hydrogen is an alternative to oil and gas. It's being pushed by certain governments to be more climate friendly. Aquatic is a relatively new company that just came out of stealth. It spun out of a research initiative that started at UCLA down in Southern California. Already has two small pilot plants, both in Los Angeles and one in Singapore that run electric currents through the ocean water. Then by doing that, you can split water molecules separating hydrogen for aquatic to then sell as fuel. Now you might say, okay, well, isn't it expensive to do this? Yes, it is. Yes, it is for aquatic to scale up. It's going to need to bring the price way down in order for this to be actually something that is helping climate change not contributing to it in some other way. Aquatic says it's aiming for $100 per ton by 2028. So there's a lot of research yet to do here, but it's promising stuff. Yeah, I think it's exciting. It seems like $100 for a ton. Doesn't seem so bad until you realize how little a ton of that is, right? Yeah, water is heavy. I also know some objections people are probably thinking of is if it takes more carbon emitting power to operate this plant then it removes carbon, then it's not helpful. There's a lot of questions about how these things are going to be powered. They're not necessarily powered by solar or wind even. So maybe they could be powered by the hydrogen, but then you better be making more hydrogen than you're using to power it. Those are all fair questions to have. And there's some question about the water that it puts out after it does the electrolysis. Now, Aquatic says that that water will not in any way harm wildlife. The temperature is going to be brought back to normal. But that's something to check to make sure that they're not harming the environment in which they operate. Yeah, important parameters. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. I've been doing in Port Angeles, Washington, who said, I liked your composting combo yesterday and I've tried multiple times to get one going with marginal success until I heard about the Vitamix FC50. I think FC stands for Food Cycler. It's a bit of an investment upfront, but it works fantastically. In a couple of hours it turns your kitchen scraps into dry compost. We use ours almost daily and I recommend getting a second bucket so you can have one together, kitchen scraps, while the other is in process. That way you can also put the composter somewhere else if you don't want to give up that kitchen counter space, which I know, I mean, at least for me, has always been a barrier to entry with a lot of this stuff. Just to note that this might sound familiar to you and yeah, we talked about the mill service earlier this year. I think it was back in February and we got a lot of responses. A lot of people saying, sounds good, but here's what I also do. Yeah, it was the February 21st episode. Chris also recommended the Food Cycler by Vitamix as well. Yeah, so we'll have a link to that episode if you want to hear some of those other recommendations and thanks, Dewey, for bringing this back up. I'm glad it's working for you, Dewey. That was something we had with Allison and Good Day Internet, but I feel like these are all interesting things that folks want to know about, so thanks for sending that in. Now, regarding buying hard drives that have been refurbished, Milton in Boulder, Colorado had a cautionary tale. He bought a hard drive on Amazon that seemed suspicious. The indication that something was wrong, writes Milton, was that the drive was shipped in some kind of sled used in storage arrays and when I plugged the drive in and looked at the smart data, I discovered that the drive had been used continuously for three years. Like your story said, it must have been some drive that had been recycled from an enterprise storage array after the warranty expired. Maybe, maybe Milton, or maybe someone stole it because here's the rest of Milton's story. He said, it was sold to me as new for $270. Maybe the drive could have run for several more years, but I wasn't going to pay that kind of money for it, so I returned the drive and got my money back. No doubt the retailer just resold it to some other unsuspecting person. Technically, the retailer did not make any false claims. They just omitted certain details. Important details. I don't think it's, this means that you shouldn't recycle data center hard drives, but Milton is right that when you're out there buying hard drives from people you don't know, you might want to make sure that they're on the up and up. Now, these refurbished hard drives at Seagate Cells that we were talking about yesterday, they are very clear that they are refurbished. So there's no problem there. It's, yeah, like with anything, there's always going to be some bad actors, no matter what you're doing. I don't think that means you shouldn't recycle the hard drives, but it's important for us to keep in mind when we're shopping for anything, right? Absolutely. Well, thanks everybody who writes in feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that feedback and do keep it coming because you make our show better every day. Also making our show better whenever he's with us is Scott Johnson. Scott Johnson, let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Well, today I'd just like to remind people that I have been doing since 2009 a show called Film Sack where me and my co-hosts, two brines and a Randy and myself all sit around and talk about big movies from a long time ago. Sometimes they're new. Sometimes they're in the middle somewhere. But it's a film podcast that's been around long enough that I think we finally figured out what we're doing. So check it out. Film Sack.com is the website. We really, really like making that show and we got a lot of wonderful fans that would love to have you in the family. So come check it out. Film Sack.com. Now, if you're a patron of Daily Tech News Show, you're cool. 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