 This tenth year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Martin James, Jim Hart, David Mosher, and our new patrons helping get us to our goal, Peter, Caleb, Mild Coffee, and John. On this episode of DTNS, goodbye, Stitcher. Will podcasters miss you? Google kills its AR headset, but it may be making a smarter move, and baseball's hottest new scout is AI. That kid has a great arm. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 28th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from studio, I don't even know where. I'm Sarah Lane. Yes, south of the Great Salt Lake. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Jay. Oh, my friends, if you're not a patron, you're going to want to be a patron for the extended show today. We got lots of cool stuff to talk about, but let's start with the quick hits. Open AI updated its chat GPT apps to add a new browsing feature for chat GPT plus subscribers. The feature lets chat GPT search Bing for answers. And since chat GPT's training data cuts off in 2021, this lets the chat bot deliver current information. A couple of notable governmental developments in the European Union. The European Commission published plans for legislation regarding a central bank digital currency. The old CBDC haven't heard about that in a minute. The legislation would smooth the way for the European Central Bank, the ECB, to develop a digital euro. Also Tuesday, the European Parliament and the European Council agreed on the final form of the data act. That's the act that will govern how companies handle European consumer data, including safeguards against non-EU countries accessing it. Among other things, the act makes it easier to switch providers of data storage. So if you wanted to switch from Apple iCloud to Google Cloud Services, the act now needs formal approval by the council and the parliament, which is expected to happen pretty soon. And then it will go into effect 20 months after passage. So you're not going to hear about it again anytime soon. Talk to you in 20 months. Proton released Proton Pass, its end-to-end encrypted password manager announced back in April. Proton Pass is available as a browser extension, also as an app on Android and iOS. The company plans to open source it so independent researchers can audit its code. A basic version with multi-device support is available for free, while subscribers get two-factor authentication support and also unlimited email aliases. Joby Aviation received a special airworthiness certificate. That's what it's called, the special airworthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S. for its production prototype electric vehicle takeoff landing vehicle, an eVTAL. This vehicle will be deployed at Edwards Air Force Base in 2024, although it still needs to secure military airworthiness certification. It's special, but it's not military yet. The latest certification helps Joby make progress in the FAA's type certification process and it's on track to be able to deliver its first eVTAL aircraft to a customer by 2024 and commercialize air taxi service by 2025. DoorDash added the ability for couriers to opt into an earn by time feature, which would offer a guaranteed hourly minimum rate for making deliveries. The option won't be available on all deliveries and couriers still can receive tips from customers. Other updates for couriers include a feature to share real-time location with up to five contacts and a dash along the way feature where couriers can pick up orders on the way to a destination. Oh, I love these Silicon Valley companies innovating with payments. So you pay by hour. Wow. Re-eventing the wheel. SeriousXM, the satellite radio service that is also available online, but usually comes free with that expensive car you bought, acquired the podcasting app maker Stitcher back in 2020. Y'all know Stitcher? They've been around forever since like 2008. But now SeriousXM is shutting down Stitcher. That's right. You have until August 29th, if you use Stitcher, to move to a new podcast listening platform. SeriousXM is incorporating podcasting into its main service. So they're kind of hoping you'll just head over to SeriousXM and use that, get all the radio stuff, get the podcast, etc. Stitcher Studios and Eer Wolf Comedy Network are going to continue producing shows. So they're not shutting down that part of the operation, just the app. Stitcher also had some shows you had to pay for in a premium service. And each of those shows will decide where they're going to end up on their own. They're not moving to SeriousXM necessarily. It feels like Stitcher's been with us forever. It's been 15 years. Scott, are you going to miss it? Sir? No, I will not miss Stitcher. Look, you ask a bunch of, you ask a room full of podcasters how they feel about Stitcher and you're probably going to get a different variety of answers. But I was always a little bit hung up on the way that they did business. I love podcasting when it's embraced as the open form that it is. I just liked that there's RSS feeds. And if you have a cool player, then people will gravitate to it because the player's cool and you can earn their trust that way. I never really liked their way of trying to get podcasts to opt into their program and never really trusted the fine print. So to be honest, they were never much of a force for me in creation and they were never able to get me to use it as even just a listener experience. It just never worked for me. My biggest problem though is the quality of the audio would always take a hit. You may post your show at 128KPBS or something, but it would show up in Stitcher way less than that and had issues like that. But all of that being said, it's a name that was recognizable and that we all remember from those days. And so a little piece of me is sad that it's not there anymore, but I didn't ever like it in the first place. Well, and you know, and maybe that's, you know, us coming from the podcast production standpoint, I know a lot of podcast listeners who preferred Stitcher over all other options, not necessarily because they tried 100 different options, but I have set up many a podcast feed over the years as we all have. And anytime Stitcher was either neglected or just left out entirely, I would get angry messages from people being like, well, what about Stitcher? I use Stitcher. And I, you know, okay, we'll set up that feed. That was never like a huge problem for me to do, but Stitcher has a lot of fans. I had a templated response for that because Stitcher wanted you as a podcast to agree to their terms to carry you. And one of those terms in there was that you would put Stitcher promotions in your show. And I was like, no, it's a freely available RSS. You just carry it. So it would always be delayed for them to pick up my shows because I would never agree to those terms of service. So I would get those same things of like, why aren't you on Stitcher? And I would say, I don't know, ask Stitcher. They can add me whenever they want. Yeah. And they usually did after, um, yeah, they would, I did similar things. And they would, they would eventually get you in there because the fan demand was there. But I got to say in the last few years, I, those requests went away like Sarah's right. There was a time that everybody took over. I think they, they, they cleaned up the operation and made it a little more typical. That also kind of coincided with, with Spotify's rise as the new popular kid on the block in terms of listenership. And so I think maybe some of that just shifted. And even Spotify just accepted RSS feeds, right? Yeah, still does. Spotify also is going through a little bit of its own restructuring where Spotify originals, um, not that they're not working, um, but they're not working across the board. Um, and it sounds like Stitcher has been having some of those same issues, uh, not necessarily getting the traction by, you know, robbing people of other options, you know, to get the podcast. This is also, Tommy mentioned serious XM, uh, a thing that you get when you buy an expensive car. I, I had, yeah, like two years or something, something crazy when I had leased my now current car. And I was like, this is great. I will totally pay for this once it runs out. Did not happen because I pay for Apple music and, you know, podcast, whatever. I, you know, I'm busy, but, uh, but I feel like the serious play of saying Stitcher is going away. If you want some of the stuff, you know, take another look at us, they're, they're going to get some signups. I don't know how many, um, but that's kind of their business model, right? Yeah, we're, we're in the, the weird down cycle of the podcast booms that, that happened over and over and over again that we've all been through multiple times. And it is interesting to see serious XM just shut down a platform instead of modify it and say, you know what? We've got podcast in the serious XM app come there. Uh, this, this is a fairly abrupt, I mean, they're giving you a month or so, but it's a couple of months, fairly abrupt way of doing it. And it doesn't feel like they're saying, we will transition you to serious XM. They're saying you, you have until then to pick whatever podcast platform you want. So it's not, it's not a hard sell. And I think that's because they don't see podcasting as urgent to their, to their strategy, but complimentary to their strategy. I originally saw the acquisition as them buying a user base and that would just immediately pump up their chance of doing something. But what makes me question that assumption is that the, because this is so abrupt and so sudden, and they're not automatically transitioning, transitioning people, that to me feels like maybe they, maybe they did intend to bring over a big user base. It just didn't pan out and they want to get out from under it. They've got their own plans. Like who knows, I don't know anyone who's going serious XM and podcasts. Sign me up. Like no one, no one's jazzed about that. But if you're a serious XM user and you're already in the ecosystem, why not? It's like the podcast in the audible app. People are like, oh, I didn't know those were there. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Or YouTube. They do the same thing. Well, you might have forgotten about Google Glass, but never Google Glass. Arguably the first victim of being before it's augmented reality time. However, Google didn't really stop innovating when that particular product failed. We may have a new setback though. Business Insider reports that the company recently killed an augmented reality project internally known as Iris after several years in part due to waves of layoffs and company reshuffles over the past few months. So Google is not alone in that whole let's figure out how the company is going forward tech thing. But there's also been talk of internal lack of direction on Iris, which might be why Clay Babore, the company's former chief of augmented and virtual reality also just left Google to work on a startup with Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor. So Tom, what's a little more context here? Yeah. So you may remember the Verge reporting about Iris more than a year ago saying Google was going to launch it in 2024. That's not going to happen now. The Iris AR glasses were supposed to look like a pair of glasses in conspicuous. Just you're wearing them like I'm wearing glasses right now. And there was definitely work being done. You probably, if you remember anything about them at all, remember that they demoed them at IO last year in a video showing real time translation. So there was a woman speaking Mandarin and another woman listening and then the glasses were translating the Mandarin into English in real time. So that's not going to happen. That is put that on your next top five vaporware from IO list, Tom, because we're not getting these. What is going to happen now? It may be shutting down the hardware development, but Google has been working on an Android for AR platform and it's going to ramp that up faster. It's building Android XR already for Samsung's extended reality wearable devices. And Insider says a new platform called Micro XR for glasses probably was being made for Iris is now just going to be made for everybody. And I don't know, Scott, that feels like the right thing for Google to do now. Yeah, it's hard to call it a pivot because they were, like you said, they were already in mid development or working on this stuff anyway. It seems very Google, though, to say, all right, look, we made an attempt or a stab at our being the focus of hardware. Maybe we do the Android way, which is sure we've got our own phones, but we're mostly putting this out there so that other devices and the licenses can happen under our, you know, under our leadership. And we're going to maintain this and make it awesome and keep updating it and all of that. That's one place where you could argue nobody in the market is that yet. Most everybody is like, well, we want the headset and the experience, whether you're talking VR AR or some combination of both for them to say, well, what if we really made a platform that was world class and then anybody who wants to make an AR hardware approach, they have the platform already, we've done half the way. It's just like phones. It's the same process. So I think this just fits into their, into their MO. Why wouldn't they do this? I'm a little surprised they didn't throw all their guts at it already, to be honest. Yeah. I mean, you know, for anyone who's like, well, you know, Google does make hardware. Indeed, they do. You know, look at the Pixel phone line, very beloved by those who use it. But, you know, the Android ecosystem largely has thrived on everybody else and Google saying, go forth young men and women and everybody in between and, you know, and make stuff. And we're going to, you know, we're going to be at the core of this. I think that the whole glasses thing, I keep wanting it to happen. You know, look at Snap. I mean, it's not like, oh, Google just can't do glasses. This is a really tough market. We're still trying to figure out what the, you know, the special sauces that make people say, I have to have these rather than it's invasive or they're weird or they don't look normal or, you know, all, all of those questions. And for Google to kind of go, you know, we've got some internal stuff going on. Let's just provide the guts to make you figure it out. And then we win anyway. That makes that that is very Google. That's what works for Google, right? They came up with Android and the Nexus. How many Nexus's have you used lately? Not many. No, you have it because they replaced it with the Pixel. And now they've got the Pixel Fold, which, you know, is a nice phone. It's a good phone. Oh, look at Tom holding a Pixel Fold. Well, the audio people can't hear that. But yes, if you're on video, you can see that that I'm holding a Pixel phone. Sorry, audio people. We didn't make me to make you feel left out. But the my point is that Pixel is something that is always seen as kind of a second run, right? It's a thing that's, you know, like, well, they're pretty good. They're great. They're great in certain ways. They're not better than the Galaxy. Same thing with the Pixel Fold. That's what the reviews have been with the Pixel Fold. So I feel like it's smart for Google to do what it's good at and make the Android platform. Yep. Yep. I agree. And again, this is like what they do. It makes me worry less about the Google cancel fears that we all get sometimes Google cancel stuff sometimes. And often they're software products. But when they make platforms, search platforms, phone platforms, and now an AR platform, typically they stick that stuff out and I have more trust in it. So that's the other reason I'm happy about it. Yeah. And if you're not a patron, stick around a good day and we're going to talk about that Pixel Fold a little more. Folks, we need more patrons to reach our goal of getting Molly Wood on the show every month. We're going to have her on this Friday. We've got enough of you already to make that happen. But can we keep having her on? We need all of you who aren't already patrons to sign up right now just at the minimum amount. Just try it out for a month. Go to patreon.com slash DTNS. Well, Major League Baseball partnered with the biomechanics company Uplift Labs on a system to evaluate new prospects, prospects being players that somebody might want to have on their team. So Uplift Labs use two phones, iPhones, and an AI model in conjunction replacing complicated setups with wires like an EKG. So it demonstrated it at the MLB draft combine in Arizona this month happens every year. And metrics include things like kinematic sequence or stride length or ball contact timing, all things that are very important and very precise, especially when it comes to baseball because baseball loves a good stat that could be used to identify a flaw that a player might have. Maybe they're great, but they've got, you know, there's like this one thing that they need to work on or maybe as a deal breaker injury risk based on, you know, how a player is performing. It also forecasts potential. So all right, what do we think here? A lot of people say, Oh man, you know, what's, you know, aren't umpires good at this? Isn't that what, you know, you know, a scouts are for? We accept designated hitters in the National League. American League got this some time ago. We have a pitch clock now. But is this a ball too far, Tom Merritt? Is it insanity or just kind of smarter recruiting? Yeah, we went from money ball 20 years ago to, uh, to metrics, uh, like, uh, exit velocity and spin rate. Uh, and now we're taking all of that. The deal with money ball 20 years ago was, what if we looked at the stats and used that to inform instead of just eyeballing things? And then all of this exit velocity and spin rate was, well, let's collect more useful stats, things that tell us more than just, you know, whether someone stole a base or not. Uh, so when we have these large language models, when we have these deep learning models that can take large amounts of data that have now been collected on folks and, and start to recognize things that we can't, that's, that's what these tools are good at is looking at large amounts of data and saying, well, you would never notice this, but I've noticed that this is true and apply it to young players to be able to get an idea, not necessarily of like, are you going to be the next Shohei Otani? Are you going to be the next major league star? But what are you good at? What are you likely to be best at? Especially when these, these folks are young and a lot of times somebody starts as a pitcher, then they get moved to a catcher or maybe to third base. Uh, this could get them on that road faster and say like, ah, with the arm strength of this person and the way their body moves, they would be optimized in an outfield position. Uh, so let's start training them there. Uh, you can also really protect their health by saying, you know, there's a hitch in their delivery. You might want to work on that or they're going to end up having to get Tommy John surgery on their elbow in a couple of months. Uh, so, so I, I think this is all for the good as long as it's used for the good, right? That's always where the question ends up. So, um, this doesn't change some things. Like for example, if a player, uh, through all this deep learning, they see him as just all prime draft candidate. We're getting this guy. He's going to play for us this year. He's bringing him up to the farm leagues, whatever they're doing to get him and they get him and then he just sinks, just doesn't, doesn't work out terrible on, uh, on with pressure or whatever reason he gets on the mound and major league baseball and just craps out and they got to fulfill the contract. They moved him somewhere else, whatever, whatever. But then another guy can come into the league who's kind of average and they don't really have anything special to say, but you put him in the limelight, suddenly that dude explodes and just everyone goes, what, where did he come from? You hear these stories all the time in all the major sports. This doesn't eliminate those possibilities, right? This just helps narrow the field. So you can have a better chance at the high performers and less chance of the Lord. Someone's like, I choked. I mean, this is not going to help. You're not going to know that ahead of time. There's so many things that go on inside all of our heads that, you know, have, have really nothing to do with what we're capable of physically, but I struggle to find anything that like weirds me out about this. Maybe a different sport. Maybe that would be different. Baseball is, uh, you know, it is a series of, uh, you know, precision stats. It really, uh, you know, anybody who loves baseball, you know, either says like, well, I think it should, you know, just be, you know, yeah, you know, call a strike and maybe the ump is wrong and that's the way it is. Okay. Well, that's an old school way of doing things. Um, but we're kind of in a new era and I feel like, yeah, as far as, uh, potential injuries to players, um, where there could be something that, uh, wasn't seen beforehand, um, this, this could help, uh, and minimize those injuries. Um, or, you know, yeah, otherwise just having somebody kind of bounced around, you know, in playing the wrong position, uh, I, I would think as a player, uh, even if you don't necessarily like what you hear, um, more information about what you're actually good at and where you should play is best for everybody. Well, then it can be, right? But the danger, what I was alluding to earlier is what Sinarik just said in the chat room, what happens when they find a major issue with the AI and someone misses out on a contract? Um, I, I don't think it'll be a major issue with the AI. I think people exaggerate like, oh, they say this AI is good and it's not, but what happens when someone, uh, is screened by the AI and gets drafted later? Uh, you know, those, those are things that are already an issue with pre-draft physicals. Right now, if a player submits to a pre-draft physical, he's insured to receive at least 75% of the slot value as a signing bonus. So there's some protection for that to say, look, you know, we don't want someone using this against you. There needs to be some protections for this too to say this should be used for health. It should be used for proper coaching and development. It should not be used as a way to drive down what you pay people. Well, composer Ryoichi Sakamoto passed away in March, but the Grammy and Oscar winners, a final performance as a pianist, is available through a Magic Leap 2 headset, but there's a little bit more to it. So in a 45 minute performance, Sakamoto plays 10 of his own compositions. At the end of every piece, people clap. But those people weren't actually there because this didn't actually take place, at least not in the way that you see it through the Magic Leap. This is a mixed reality show. It's making the rounds global rounds in museums and festivals, getting a lot of accolades. The show starts with 80 people sitting in a circle around nothing until they put on that Magic Leap 2 headset at which point Sakamoto appears in the center of the circle and starts to play. Now Kagami, the Japanese word for mirror, was designed by Tin Drum. That's a production studio which created a 3D model of Sakamoto in November of 2020. That was in Tokyo and that was during a very, very locked down time in the world, particularly in Japan. So at the time, it was one of only two cities in the world that the production studio felt had the setup necessary to capture Sakamoto in 3D and generate a virtual model of him using volumetric and motion capture tech. Three days and 48 cameras later, Sakamoto's final performance was captured and if you happen to be in a city or an area where this is coming through, people are raving about it. Sounds pretty cool. Yeah, this is so cool. I just became familiar with Sakamoto because he collaborated with August D on a song on D-Day which is an album that just came out a couple months ago and it was one of the last things he did was to play on that and then I started learning about his career which is incredibly impressive and his foresight to be willing to do this because he had a terminal disease. He knew he didn't have long to be like, let's make it so that my music can continue with me playing it for people after the fact. This is so cool. Sorry, I was going to say if you never heard the soundtrack to the Revenant, 2015's The Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the most amazing soundtracks ever. He did that one, one Oscars for it and stuff at the time, but if you've never heard it on its own even without the film, amazing breathtaking. So good. Yeah, if anyone has either experienced this or plans to, we would love to hear about it. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. In fact, let's check the old mailbag right now. Well, let's do it. In response to our conversation yesterday about who exactly the Mac Pro is still for when Apple has robust and cheaper options, TJ wrote in and said video production. TJ says the Mac Pro is ideal for people involved in video or audio production. The internal PC, PCIe slots allow the user to add deck link video playback cards or Dante sound cards and keep everything in one chassis without needing a separate external enclosure for each card. This allows for a much smaller physical footprint that is more robust. It also frees up the Thunderbolt ports for other peripherals. There are a lot of people associated with Alex Lindsey's office hours show that are very excited about the Mac Pro and its possibilities. It's good to hear from a Mac Pro fan. Thank you, TJ, for writing in. Monica Shin should have talked to y'all is my response because she mentions several video editors that she talked to and they were all fine with a Mac book or with a Windows machine in some cases because of the flexibility and because they're still mad about what Apple did to Final Cut years ago. So it's good to know there's some folks out there that are still very excited. Thanks for writing in, TJ. Indeed. And thanks to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us today. Let folks know where is your latest? Well, if you like video game coverage and you like more than just, hey, video games are cool, right? You want to hear about the industry, what's going on in this, these hearings with Microsoft and Sony at this very moment and what those mean to their acquisition of Activision Blizzard, those kinds of heavy issues and that video games are cool. You can check us out on the show called Core. That happens every Thursday night and goes up as a podcast right after. Check out all the details for live show and more at frogpants.com slash core. All right, patrons, stick around for the extended show. Good day, internet. We've got my report on the Amazon Astro robot that has been rolling around my house frightening my dog for the past 12 hours. We have my first impressions of the pixel fold. I just unboxed it before the show and we're going to play that frustrating password game that is taken the internet by storm. That's all on good day. Internet patrons, stick around. Just a reminder, you can catch this show live Monday through Friday at four PM Eastern twenty hundred UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. Yeah, we're live every day. We'll be back tomorrow with Dr. Nikki talking about black hole detection through the observation of gravity. Let's talk to you then. This show is part of the frogpants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.