 Coming up on DTNs Twitter's app store for algorithms sales force declares nine to five dead. Sorry, Dolly and a Hyundai robot with wheels that walks. This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday, February 10 2021 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 Roger Chang. The show is pretty sweet. We were just talking a little bit about anosmia and spam modern days of dealing with it on good day internet. Become a member get that wider conversation patreon.com slash DTNs. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nikkei sources say that Apple partnered with the chip maker TSMC to develop micro OLED displays with displays built directly onto chip wafers for use in a future headset. The displays under development are less than one inch in size with mass production estimated several years away. The beta for iOS 14.5 adds accident hazard and speed check reporting to Apple Maps. A new report button is available in the bottom tray of maps to report incidents and voice support for Siri is available as well. An analysis by Cambridge Anniversary University, although they probably have universities also estimates that Bitcoin mining consumes roughly 121.36 terawatt hours of electricity per year, which would make a top 30 energy consumer if it were used by country. However, for context, the researchers noted that electricity consumed in the US by always on but inactive home devices could power the Bitcoin network for a year. Yeah, I like that comparison there. It's like, yeah, that sounds bad. But then also that following its launch in Australia, Google News Showcase launched in Argentina and the United Kingdom offering now includes free and paywalled articles for more than 120 UK and 40 Argentinian outlets bringing its total to 450 publications. Twitter announced monetizable daily active users increased 27% on the year in its Q4 to 192 million, but missed analyst expectations of 193.5 million with growth slowing for the third consecutive quarter. Twitter also said Wednesday it suspended more than 500 accounts and reduced certain hashtag visibility in India to comply with several orders from the Indian government amidst farmers protest on agricultural reforms in the country. The Twitter accounts are only being blocked in India and don't include news media entities, journalists, activists or politicians who have Twitter accounts. And Twitter CFO Ned Siegel said on CNBC Wednesday that people removed from its platform are not allowed to come back. And that applies to President Donald Trump, even if he ran for office again. All right, let's talk a little bit more about what Twitter is planning. Jack Dorsey has been talking a lot about decentralization over the past couple of months. What did he say this time, Scott? Yeah, it feels like every time I'm on the show, there's something new about his little idea. But on this same call with investors on Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained how its internet project or internal project rather called blue sky. And this is something he first announced way back in December of 2019, could create a decentralized social network to give people more choice over their Twitter, Twitter experience. Dorsey said Twitter might create multiple algorithms for you to choose from and offer them alongside those made by others in a sort of marketplace. Not a lot of detail beyond that. But Dorsey feels choice like this would quote, not only help out business, but drive more people into participating in social media in the first place. Decentralization could also help Twitter address concerns about moderation, neutrality, all that kind of stuff. Pretty fascinating idea. I still hope he does it with partners and not just a Twitter store with algorithm skins. Well, I mean, it sounds like it's a combination of both the way Twitter sees it happening. The company itself would say, All right, you might want this experience, we have enough user feedback to know that some users are frustrated with the kind of stock Twitter experience and using hashtags and maybe filtering out certain keywords or searching for users or topics isn't enough for you. You want Twitter built a certain way and we can do that for you. But then the company saying, also third party developers might have some really great ideas. And we would welcome those algorithms as well as long as you know, people wanted that. Could this be something that people would potentially pay for in the future? I would think yes. Yeah, although I mean, his focus on decentralization implies that this would be something out in the wild, right? For a long time, Twitter has been talking about maybe we'll partner up with an existing decentralized solution, which there are a few out there like Mastodon. And I think that's a really, really interesting way to approach this to say, What if we decentralize Twitter and differentiated Twitter is just one of the better ways to talk with folks. But like you said, Scott, he thinks that would help drive more people into participating if there was a federation, so to speak, that Mastodon is that right now, but Twitter isn't part of Mastodon. So you don't have enough people using it so it doesn't get that, you know, momentum that it needs. If Twitter gets behind something like that, whether it's Mastodon or something else, then suddenly it's got momentum. And if you could say like, Well, what I would like is a more environmental spin on this, or I want a more libertarian spin. I wanted to promote things that are more about molecular biology, you know, and promote scientists or I want I want to have spiritual issues and Christianity promoted more. You could have that. And still everybody be participating in the same network. And to his point about moderation neutrality, if you're the one picking the algorithm, then you might have issues with how that particular algorithm works. But there would be less burden on Twitter or any other participant to be the person in charge of deciding what gets promoted and what doesn't because you'd have a lot of different approaches to it. Especially when there's content that is questionable, you know, and or, you know, would get somebody in legal trouble. That's potentially pretty advantageous for Twitter as well. I really love the idea of being able to have like you said, it's got like a certain skin, not just what it looks like or color schemes, but something where it's like, I'm going to dive into environmental Twitter for a while. I can kind of do that if I curate my own list. Or if I have identified all the people in that space that I think are authorities on the subject. But what if you're trying to do some research from a starting point, having something that is helping bring voices to you that you're not going to find on your own, or you or was going to take you out ton of research to be able to build something even partially like that. I love that idea. And especially being able to go back to, you know, regular Twitter when you want to, if you want to. Right, right, right. Exactly. That kind of control will be crucial. But there's a subtext here that I think is important not to miss. And that is this is him also talking to investors saying, look at all these multiple quarters of no growth. The general feeling that social media has maybe peaked out a little bit and there isn't much growth. Maybe we could find growth through these other avenues. And I think it accomplishes that goal potentially in his mind anyway, and his other goals that he may have a little more high minded about how social media can be better or whatever. He can maybe do those two things at once. And that's that's kind of what I'm reading under the under the carpet there. The Wall Street Journal sources say that the US plans to have ByteDance divest ticktoxes North American operations to a group, including Oracle and Walmart. Remember that we've talked about it quite a bit on the show have been indefinitely suspended. Wide House spokespeople have said that the administration is developing a comprehensive approach to risks posed by Chinese apps. A formal response to ticktox court challenge against the executive order against it is due on February 18th. A separate order restricting transactions with eight Chinese companies, including Alipay, is set to take effect next week as well. So look for clarification from the administration on its approach to China, not just ByteDance or TikTok then. Yeah, this makes sense to me. I was never convinced that TikTok was our priority. And so I wasn't quite certain why we went after TikTok first, other than it was really popular. It didn't seem to be the most likely vector for a threat. I wonder about WeChat. There are more questions there, but it seemed more punitive than than it did strategic. So I will be very interested to see what the administration comes up with here to say, all right, we want to have a more comprehensive strategy that really assesses things based on how likely they are to cause a problem and go after those. My guess is they might still pursue something with TikTok. The Wall Street Journal article mentioned saying, OK, your data is required to be stored in the US if it's collected from the US, which would be an unsettling precedent. But if they can make a case of only in this case because of these reasons, I could see something like that continuing rather than saying you have to sell TikTok, especially because China has said they will not allow ByteDance to sell off TikTok. That's not a solution that that they'll go along with. Whereas because China requires companies to store data in China, I'm guessing they'll have a harder time justifying not going along with some plan like that. Yeah, I also was just thinking the other day like TikTok, not I felt like you did at the time that TikTok wasn't the threat that maybe everybody wanted us to think it was or, you know, whatever your stance on that stuff was. But I'm also not that surprised that China wants to hold tightly to that algorithm. That's the thing that makes TikTok work. And it's the reason I use the service, despite all of its quote unquote real or not real security concerns. It knows what I want to see. And it feeds that to me in a way that other services just plain don't do a very good job of. So if I were them, I wouldn't want to give that up either. And that part doesn't surprise me. Got an email from Chris to feedback at Daily Tech news show dot com. Chris said, I wanted to ask about Starlink. They opened up pre orders and living in rural Arkansas. I put down my 99 bucks. However, we pay more than that monthly for really crappy wireless service. But do you guys have a feeling as to whether or not I screwed up or not? He was like, it sounds like he got excited, put down the 99 bucks and then said, wait a minute, what have I done? This is a bad idea. I basically told him, like, well, it's a refundable deposit. You're probably okay. It'll be interesting to see if it actually comes to your area. And then when it does, is it any good? But I don't think he screwed up. I think that's a rational thing to do. Here's the rest of the deal. SpaceX's Starlink is now in public beta. It has opened up to pre orders for potential customers of its internet service, which is delivered by satellite. $99 deposit, like Chris said, lets you get a target date for coverage. Now depending on where you are, that target date could either be 2021 or 2022. You also have the option to link to your credit card so that it can charge you your $99 and refund it that way. The Starlink kit itself, which includes a Wi-Fi router and a dish is $499. Starlink says pre orders for that are fully refundable and may take six months to fulfill. Placing a deposit does not guarantee you service. Starlink's public beta started last year in Canada, the UK and the US has more than 10,000 customers on board getting service from more than 1,000 satellites now in orbit. Keep that number in mind, 1,000 satellites. Starlink has also been provisionally approved to get $885.51 million dollars out of a total $9.2 billion dollars that's being split among 180 different entities. Starlink is just one of them. They're getting $885.51 million in US federal funds over 10 years to provide broadband to underserved areas. However, the Fiber Broadband Association and the NCTA Rural Broadband Association have both filed an objection with the FCC claiming Starlink will fall short of required capacity in 2028 and that the funding should not be finalized. Starlink will need to provide in order to meet the requirements of the funding 100 megabits per second download and 20 megabits per second upload to 642,925 underserved locations by 2028. The opposing ISPs hired a consulting firm called Cartesian to determine that based on public information, it believes Starlink users would not get their full bandwidth by that point because of congestion. Cartesian based its estimates on an average peak usage by 2028 of 15 to 20 megabits per second because of things like 4K streaming becoming popular. Cartesian modeled that usage across SpaceX's 12,000 satellites. It's got a thousand now needs to have 12,000 by 2028. So if they don't get all 12,000 launched, that would be another impact. The FCC is currently evaluating Starlink's technical claims before finalizing approval of funding. So a lot of things going on here. Starlink needs to get enough people to put down deposits that it can say, okay, we've got a decent user base and it needs to get that federal funding so that it can say, all right, and we can like push out into these rural areas, which will be one of our big selling points. Yeah, this is a lot of moving parts that need to fall in the right places for people not to be really upset at the end of this right? You need the funding to get 12,000 satellites up there. You got 1000. I mean, you got to get a lot more than 1000 per year to reach 12,000 by 2028. But if there's a congestion issue and imagine what kind of internet usage we're going to be talking about in 2028, you know, the ISPs might not be wrong here. And at that point, the money has been spent and who loses the people like Chris with rural internet who say, well, shoot, this didn't work. Yeah, although that's one one less than one billion out of 9.2 billion with the rest being split around 180 entities. That's probably those other 179 entities that are complaining. They're part of that association. It's like we don't want that money going to SpaceX. That's a lot going to one company. Right. I was just reading that thing about securities laws and how they work with people putting money down for a thing that isn't out yet. And that's more complicated than I thought. I don't know how that works in this particular scenario. But then when I was I was watching was about a car where they a little bit like Tesla where they promised a car, you put a certain amount down and then they have to deliver that car with that money has to go into escrow basically and not be used for day to day operations. I'm sure they have that all taken care of because this is a big deal and a lot of people involved. So my guess is you're safe with your 99 box. And like Tom said, if it's starting to look grim, just yank it out. Hey, folks, if you want to talk about Starlink or anything else, get in our discord. Charlotte just joined. Charlotte's in there about to drive a bus. But talking to some other folks in the DTNS audience, you can join Charlotte and everybody else by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNs. Scott, tell us what Facebook's up to these days. Sorry, I was on mute and didn't know it. Hey, let's talk about Facebook is Facebook's in the news again. Big shocker everybody. Facebook's announced it will test or will test reducing the distribution of political content in its news feeds. A small percentage of people who experience the test in Brazil, Canada, Indonesia and thankfully the US Facebook will try several ways of ranking political content and monitor what effect the different approaches have COVID-19 content and content from official government agencies will not be affected by these changes. Pew Research Center study they just did shows that 33% of people in the US get their news from Facebook. Facebook says political content is about 6% of what people in the US see. I don't know if I trust that number. I mean, I'm trying not to go, ah, that's not true. We're we're very honest. Sarah and I were talking about this in Discord earlier. And and we we convinced ourselves Justin was on today because hashtag portal to hell hashtag hell portal is the only thing that applies to this story. Like I I get that a lot of political content seems to be linked to making people more radical. And there's a few numbers out there that show that. But there hasn't been a lot that's really convincing that, oh, if you let the company in charge decide which political information should be downgraded, that will make things better. I this this feels more like something Facebook would do because it gets them good headlines than something that we know will solve the problem. I don't know. Maybe it will. You know, you can you can throw things at a wall and hope to hit the dartboard and maybe maybe you will. I don't know if this means Facebook's good at darts. Yeah, it's also I don't know. I mean, the idea that a lot of people get their news primarily from Facebook is just it's somewhat mind boggling. But hey, that's that's just the way it is because some news is intentionally misleading, not all news. And I'm not singling anybody out, but some of it is one would think, OK, well, Facebook is one of the platforms or the platform that you as a misinformation news person is trying to share with the largest amount of people. You're going to get pretty creative about the way that you share that kind of thing. Facebook saying, yeah, we don't. We need less political content on our platform. Is it necessarily going to mean that it just goes away because Facebook decided to change an algorithm that isn't going to catch how people might get smart about it in the future? But yeah, I don't know. It's kind of Facebook saying, well, this doesn't work, so we're just going to make it go away, and that's not very good solution either. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe take a page out of what Twitter is talking about that we mentioned earlier. Right. Yeah. Give us an app store for our Facebook experiences. So many skins. Well, good news from Salesforce, everybody, we don't have to work anymore. Oh, really? Yeah, it's only partially true. Salesforce posted to its blog Tuesday, a headline that got a lot of attention titled The 9 to 5 Workday is Dead. Salesforce is going to give employees three categories to choose from for their work schedule while still being employees at Salesforce. They don't just get to kick up their feet. They still have to work. But Flex, one of the options, would see employees coming in one to three days per week into the office. Salesforce has a huge, huge headquarters in San Francisco, but they have employees all over the world. The other two categories are fully remote. You don't go anywhere at all. You just work remotely and office-based. Office-based is expected to be the smallest category with employees like building maintenance or other roles that just require them to be in the office five days a week. So that part makes sense. Sometimes you just can't be remote. But Salesforce is saying the majority of our people can and have and we don't want to change it back. Yeah, we were wondering all last year, like after the COVID is over, how much of this work from home will stick? And this isn't necessarily the typical response, but we have a response from a very large company saying what we're going to do is let a lot of people stay home. I know some companies have already made work from home permanent, but Salesforce is interesting saying we are going to let you pick the category. I imagine you have to pick it with your boss. Obviously, if you're in the maintenance department, they're not going to let you work from home. You have to come in and do that job. But yeah, they're going to have these multiple categories and it shows that this great experiment we were all forced into has certainly had effects that you now realize, oh, working from home isn't trying to shirk your duties. Working from home can absolutely work in various roles. But also we may have some roles that really do need to be in the office a couple of days a week. And that's what I think is kind of interesting about this from Salesforce is they didn't say it's fully remote or in the office. They said there's also this category of like, man, you need to be around sometimes to mix with each other and do some face to face brainstorming or whatever. But there are some roles that only need to do that a couple of weeks, a couple of days a week. And if you only need to do a couple of days a week, well, then we don't need as much office space for you. So stay at home the rest of the time. There's been some some shifts in the video game business. I'm trying to remember the massive company that really did it the biggest. And then I can't find it. I was trying to find it before you finish. But basically you're starting to see in that environment some permanent policies in place for work at home plans, whether we're in the pandemic, post pandemic and beyond. And I think that's a really interesting shift, especially for a business where collaboration and sort of constant feedback and bouncing ideas around an office is kind of the norm to see some of these companies shift that way has been really interesting. And I mean, Salesforce is is monstrously big. So this is it's a it's a big thing. I mean, whether or not we this is all positive or things don't get reversed down the road. Who knows? Like we don't know. It's just too soon to say we're still learning from this. We're still trying to figure out what's what. But it seems like they're striking a decent balance for the time we're in. I know the the cynical reaction is well, they just want you to work all the time. That's why they're saying nine to five is dead. But Salesforce did say a lot of the right things, which is with home childcare, with daily appointments, doctors appointments, you know, working from home gives you flexibility. So it's not all necessarily like we just want to work you to death. It's all it can be we actually want to take account the fact that between nine and five, you sometimes need to do things that aren't work. And what we care about is you get your work done. Yeah. And for anybody who's never seen the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, it's massive. It's literally the largest building in the entire city. And there's some large buildings. It is big. Now, Salesforce isn't the only tenant of the entire building, but there are there's that building. You think, oh, wow, you know, it houses a lot of office workers, you know, on any given day. Okay, we'll cut that by a third or a quarter, right? You know, even conservatively, you have some space that is not being used on a pretty regular basis. I know this applies to a lot of cities and just buildings in general all over the world. Some of them will kind of go back to the old way of doing things. As you mentioned, Scott, I mean, some will, it depends on the business. But for those that don't, what can we do with that space? Considering a lot of housing shortages and a lot of different places, I think some some some government officials should get creative. Yeah, condo, that stuff. Yeah, money to be made and I don't know, maybe some good to be done. Some very large living room you have, Sarah. Yeah, it used to be a conference room. It used to be a conference room. Yeah, I like that. Really the main one. Hyundai unveiled the Transforming Intelligent Ground Excursion Robot Experiment Tiger X one for short on Tuesday. The concept builds off of Hyundai's previous elevate walking vehicle. You might have remembered it showed it off at CES back in 2019 can transition from electric four wheel drive operation to four legged walking for more uneven or inaccessible terrain. Each leg has six points of articulation between the male and the chastis with more omnidirectional design that can rotate and move in any direction. So forward, backwards side to side. The X one has 28 motors and 28 position sensors, including on its wheels, unmanned scientific exploration, payload delivery for remote locations, emergency services like delivering medicine or equipment to the side of a natural disaster, all potential use cases. Yeah, it seems cool. I was looking at this video earlier and thinking, these are the ones I want. These are the robots I want. I don't need bipedal creepy human ones. I want like stuff that can get worked on. Yeah, exactly. I want one I can send out. I don't know on some hard job somewhere and know that it's weird tires are going to move around in ways that will make it survive and get this horrible job done and come back and park itself. And that's all I have to deal with it. I don't have to talk to it. I don't have to try to reckon, you know, wrestle with this idea that it sort of looks like me. And that's weird and have all those disconnects. Let's just go forward where our robots are all misshapen and just look like stuff we already have. They're just really smart to get what they need to get done and not great at being human like. I don't want anymore. I've seen this compared to the size of a cat and the size of a roller board luggage. I don't know who has very large cats or very small roller board luggage. But it does seem a little closer to the luggage that it does to the cat size, but it's not huge. It's not car size. And so this could be carried by by a large drone and dropped off again. Another more search and rescue applications to this because again, it could be placement of a monolith in the Utah desert. Yeah, see, place the bottle if roll out do some walking to get across the uneven terrain. Yeah, I love it. All right, let's check out the mail bag. This one comes from Josh who says, Hi, team. What is your view on the big three? Apple, Google, Amazon struggling to get into the gaming space. Amazon their crucible was unreleased and put back in beta. No plan right now. Yes, they launched Luna, but it's been under the radar for the last couple months for Google. I'm sure the death watch for Stadia has started and with the various changes happening, the model of subscription plus purchase coming into question for Apple. Apple Arcade launched been pretty much known news since then. Is it a problem of this being a different industry or too many big studios already available? This is so interesting. It's such a really great question because you know, Microsoft is already obviously 20 plus years now heavily invested in the Xbox side. Certainly the PC gaming side was already part of that. But but don't forget Microsoft struggled for years to make PC gaming their own thing despite the fact that Windows is the platform the games are being written on. So while they fumbled about with that, you know, people like Valve and others would come by and have extreme success on PC despite the fact that the owners of the operating system couldn't seem to do it themselves. So I guess what I'm trying to say with that is these companies aren't necessarily suited to do this very well. Gamers are also notoriously. What's the word suspicious of somebody kind of sneaking into that industry and saying, hey, we can do this to check out our cool thing. Stadia is a good example of this. Like they tried to play like we know what gamers want. And this is what they want. And it turns out we kind of don't want what they say we want. And we also don't like being told that we want what we want. It's a it's a weird. Unique thing, I think to that other businesses to but that business in particular is very, very skeptical of anybody who wants to swoop in and be the new leader in the space. Amazon, I think, has the best chance here. Amazon's doing OK with Luna. It's still not even in full release yet, so we'll see. And I think they have a good model for Luna. Luna is a little closer to what people want, a Netflix style subscription service to a bunch of video games of some nice add-ons. Crucible is a mess. Absolutely. They've got their MMO people are excited about, but they're not shutting that stuff down. The way that Stadia just shut down all their internal development without releasing a game. I think I think Amazon may not know what they're doing entirely yet. I think they have a lot of money and when they commit to a thing, they seem to stick it stick it out until they're 100 percent sure it's not going to work out. And I can't say that for Google. In Apple's case, they've always just been weird. It's like dip their toe in with Pippin all those years ago, and it was terrible, but they did it. And then this whole talk of metal with Max and you're going to be able to render out stuff better on Max a few years ago. And it kind of worked, but it wasn't that big a deal. External GPUs, all this stuff. M1, they're making new claims about gaming performance, that sort of stuff. They, unless they really, really wanted to put their heart in it, I don't think anything comes of that either in terms of leadership, but in Apple's case and in somewhat Google's case, they kind of don't care because where the biggest money is being made in gaming right now is in mobile and they already own the platforms where that's happening. They already have the stores and they get their percentages and they're already multi billion dollar revenue generators just by being the phones you're using. So in a way, they're already leading this thing. We it's just not on the consoles or the PCs that this this emailer might be thinking of. So I don't know that these any of these two will ever be your core gamer brands that you look at and go, oh man, can't wait to get the new Apple killer box 2.0 whatever. That's I just don't see that ever happening. And the same goes for Amazon and Google. However, that's OK, because they're providing stuff on another end of it. If anything, it's Amazon is playing catch up here because they don't have that mobile footprint, right? They don't have that platform. And so until they have something closer to that, closer to what they have with the Echo, not with gaming, but you know, kind of that ubiquity, then maybe they'll do better. So so, Josh, I'm just what I'm saying is don't sweat it too much. These guys are all going to do fine. And in a lot of ways, they're already top of that game. Apple and Google kind of snuck in and stole it in a weird way. If you want to look at it that way. I want to add one one quick thing, Josh. Also, keep in mind, there's a bias to the coverage you're seeing. If this looks like a service is going to fail, you're going to see that headline everywhere. If it looks like the service is doing exceptionally well, you might see that headline everywhere. But if the service is just doing okay, you're not going to hear anything about it. So no news probably means things are going all right. If you have questions like Josh did, you're going to get great answers from people like Scott Johnson. So keep them coming. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to shout out patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels. Today, they include Tim Deputy, Lynelle Lane and Dr. X 17. Scott Johnson always a pleasure. My man tell folks where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Well, sure, if you like gaming content and other stuff like that, go no further than frogpants.com. 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