 Coming up on DTNS, Al Salvador wants to take you down to the Bitcoin City powered by a volcano. Did Adele get Spotify to turn off shuffle? No. We'll tell you what actually happened. Plus, Robert Herron is here to help you navigate buying a new television. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 22, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us co-host of AVXL, Robert Herron. Welcome back. Hey, thank you so much. It's good to see you guys. We were just chatting about the fact that we almost forgot it was Thanksgiving this week here in the United States. That's all part of Good Day Internet. Get that at patreon.com slash DTNS. Also big thanks to our top patrons, including Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, and Hector Bones. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Ford CEO Jim Farley announced the automaker will no longer work with Rivian to jointly develop Ford branded EVs. The company still plans to produce 600,000 EVs per year by the end of 2023. Farley cited the complexities of machine hardware and software between the two as part of the reason to end development. Ford invested $500 million in Rivian back in 2019. Meta's head of safety, Antigone Davis, said the company doesn't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023. Now, Meta had previously said the encryption rollout could happen as early as 2022, could, but it's not. Meta's WhatsApp already uses end-to-end encryption, as do voice and video calls on Messenger, but they were going to bring it to Instagram and stuff like that. Android users texting with iPhone owners know that Google Messages doesn't support iMessage reactions, like displaying a separate message that somebody liked an image, for example. Google is really not an update to this, too, Google Messages, and will now show iMessage reactions the same way that it handles emoji reactions sent by RCS. So, when someone using iOS sends a heart tap back in reply to your Android message, for example, you won't just get the text, Sarah responded with a heart emoji in plain text. You'll actually see the heart emoji, so we're making progress. Yeah, just adopt RCS, Apple, come on. UK Health Secretary Sajid Javed announced a review of all medical devices for racial and gender bias, saying that these may have contributed to the overall higher death rates in black and south Asian people in the United Kingdom during COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, University of Michigan researchers found that pulse oximeters are more likely to miss low levels of oxygen in black patients than white patients. Medical algorithms were not specifically named in this review, but they could be included. Javed also said he's working with counterparts in the United States and other nations to develop international standards for medical devices. XDA developer sources say that Qualcomm has an exclusivity deal for windows on arm that is set to expire soon. Microsoft has said publicly anybody who wants to can build a windows on arm chip, so company may be expiring sooner than later. However, the deal might also explain why Apple's M1 chip won't run windows either. Yeah, maybe when that deal expires that will. They could bring Bootcamp to M1. That'd be kind of crazy. All right, let's talk about the Bitcoin city, which I'm just going to say upfront. This is a clever way to raise money if you're a small country like El Salvador. El Salvador's president Naib Boukele announced the country plans to build the first Bitcoin city in the eastern region of La Union. It's a Bitcoin city in more than one way, too. First, the building of the city itself will be funded by issuing Bitcoin backed bonds, but that's not all. It also plans to use geothermal power from the nearby Conchagua volcano to generate power for the city, which of course would be used for sustainable Bitcoin mining and to encourage people to actually live in the city after they build it. The only tax in the city will be value added tax, no income tax, no payroll, no capital gains, no property tax. And of course, the layout of the city will be coin shaped, which frankly just means it's going to be a circle, which lots of cities are, but feeds into the whole thing. There's no timeline for the actual creation of the city, but there is one for the raising of the money for the issuing of the bonds. $1 billion US in bonds will be issued with half of that used for building power and mining infrastructure, which to me, that's what this is for. This is a way to build power and mining infrastructure, and the city is a way to get people to talk about it. The rest of the money, half for power and mining, the rest of the money will be used to buy Bitcoin, buy digital currency, and the bonds will pay 6.5% initially, and after five years, the country is going to sell the crypto holdings it bought and then issue dividends to bondholders, the expectation being those will appreciate it a lot. They're talking crazy, like above 100% return for bondholders, but who knows? The bond will be developed by Blockstream on the Liquid Network and Bitfinex Securities is expected to get the license to actually issue the bonds themselves. But there's some reality to this, not a lot, a lot of it's marketing, a lot of it might or might not become reality. I don't know about y'all, but to me, Sarah, the most interesting thing about this is the geothermal power. If they actually build that, I think that will be kind of the coolest thing about it. Oh, it's not the fact that the layout of the city will be coin-shaped. Coin-shaped? Yeah, I know. Yeah, as you mentioned, certainly a way to drum up money, this particular administration has not shied away from the idea of crypto being part of the way that the future looks. And it, I don't know, could be a model for other cities in the future. There are certainly a lot of people who say this particular administration is not the proper one to do this sort of thing. And I'm, we'll keep that conversation out of this for now, but I do think that you got to hand it to El Salvador for saying, we're going to try something. And we want our citizens to benefit from this directly, whether or not they're going to get the returns that are promised very questionable. But returns on some level still could be worth it. Robert, what do you think? I like the idea of, you know, El Salvador is effectively going all in. And if they can actually pull off some power production from this project, funding it with bitcoins the risk. Yeah. If it all plummets to zero, then, you know, how is that going to be paid for? And otherwise, damn, it's just, it's neat. And I agree with your comments regarding how just getting more people talking about it, more people using it, more people getting comfortable with it. We'll see how it goes as far as a government backs. Basically, they're using that coin for everything now. And the country seems to be adopting it. And I just, I would love to hear more about people on the ground in their day-to-day life in terms of how this affects them, in terms of usage, being able to send money to one another or pay for goods and services. If it's all going great, it's great as long as the coin maintains value or goes up, it's going to be win-win. But if it doesn't, then it becomes kind of questionable about how suddenly, maybe you've socked the country with a power production system that can't be paid for and you're then suddenly throwing everything into debt. Well, the good news is, as long as they get people willing to buy the bonds, they get money to build the power plant. The person, the people who get built is the people buying the bonds that the cryptocurrency does not appreciate in value over the five years. Or if the company, if the country can't pay the 6.5% that they promised because the cryptocurrency has died. Well, I mean, you know, Bitcoin is only one example of a cryptocurrency that is highly volatile. And to say like, listen, in five years it's going to appreciate and we're all going to be better off is a great way to look at this. But I would be extremely wary if I was directly affected by this proposition. Yeah. I mean, most people won't be directly affected unless they buy a bond. But maybe that's a good reason not to buy one of the bonds, but I bet they'll get enough bonds. I bet they'll get enough people diving in. Cryptocurrency has got enough fans out there. And it sounds like then they will build a geothermal power plant and they will build some mines. And so whoever runs those will benefit and get those, whether they end up building the city around it or not. It's a whole different question. But yeah, it's as if Elon Musk ran a country is kind of what it looks what it seems like to me. All right. It may Twitter rolled out a new warning screen. You may you may have run across this. You may not. If it detects that English language users, you write something in English and you're about to send something the system considers might be harmful or offensive or inconsiderate. It'll give you a warning. It won't block you from replying, but it'll ask you to reconsider it. And Twitter's testing of that feature ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, it found that 34% of users edited or deleted the reply with 11% less likely to tweet something that would trigger the system going forward. That we already knew. That was last year's news. Twitter still has this in place. Scientists at New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, however, wanted to find out what if you're telling people don't be mean outside of when they're actually composing the tweet. So they published a study examining the effectiveness of warnings given at other times, not at the time of posting. The study focused on users who had been suspended, had more than 50 followers, and at least seven followers who had also used hateful language and posts. They ended up with a list of 27 users that fit that definition, but they didn't target the messages at them. They studied the 4,327 people who followed those 27 users. The researchers divided those users into six groups and one control. They then sent messages from Twitter accounts with names like hate suspension and expert on hate. They created three types of messages to send to those six groups. One that emphasized what could be lost by using hateful speech, hey, if you do this kind of stuff, this is what could happen. One that emphasized legitimacy and respectfulness was like, hey, we respect you, but you know what? Maybe this is going to make you less believed. And then there was one that positioned the sender as an expert. Like, I'm an expert on hate stuff, and here's why you shouldn't do it. Those messages were then varied into high and low intensity wording. So you had three messages, three with high, three with low. You had six messages, went to the six groups, and then you had the control group that didn't receive any of these messages. The study found that a single message reduced hate speech the following week by 10%. All six, just one message would reduce hate speech by 10% within the following week. The politely worded message, the legitimacy message, the one that said, hey, people, you know, I'm being polite here and being respectful, but people may not believe you anymore. That was the most effective, resulting in a 15 to 20% reduction a week later. The researchers didn't see users responding with even more hateful language. In other words, they didn't get the message and be like, I'll show you. But they acknowledged that this is an outsider message. They don't know if it would have the same effectiveness or not if it came officially from Twitter when you talk about whether you would implement this policy or not. And Twitter said it's reviewing the findings of the study to see if there's anything that they want to implement from it. That's pretty cool. A reminder, yeah. Respecting other people's opinions and not simply throwing kerosene on a conversation that could easily go sideways are good things to follow. And I really hope Twitter will pull out some of the useful information from the study simply to take a look at not only what they're doing currently by looking at a potential message that could be flagged or become inflammatory, so to speak, but also just providing people with a tool that says, hey, you know what, I don't know if this would work per se, but if you could just remind someone that if you could word this a slightly different way, get a different response from it and either for good or bad, I mean, people could twist this right around and say, oh, what's the most inflammatory thing I could say, but generally, though, it's like why waste your time like that when, you know, a couple of well-chosen words will get the point right across. And that is a very, you know, you're walking the tightrope, right, where you're saying, hey, person X, I know what you want to say. I think you're not going to get the reaction that you're looking for. Perhaps lighten it up a little bit. That is, that's a tricky thing. And Twitter, having done this research, I think is on the road to becoming, to understand more, okay, how do we get healthy discourse to just be less hateful and upset everybody? You know, so that we all have conversations on shows like this talking about like, oh, it's a cesspool, you know, Twitter's the worst. I think that, I think Twitter is doing all the right things. I think that trying to, to your point, Robert, trying to convince somebody, hey, you're going to get a better reaction. You're going to get more likes. You're going to get more retweets. You're going to get, you know, more quote tweets, all of that stuff. If you act right is something that people on Twitter aren't really used to right now. They're almost used to the opposite. Yeah, that's the key here. And to be clear, Twitter didn't do this research. New York University scientists did. But Twitter's looking at the research. And I think maybe Twitter doesn't need to use this research, except to maybe provide guidance to others to say, hey, if somebody's out there being hateful, don't attack them. That just makes them angry. Don't ignore them. That lets them think what they're doing is okay. What you want to do is say, hey, that user account you followed was suspended. And I suspect that was because of hateful language. Your tweets bother me. You should stop using hate speech to avoid suspension. That's an example of the legitimacy, low intensity message that they sent. Like that kind of stuff may seem a little forceful, but it's like being respectful and saying, hey, you might not want to do that sort of thing. And if I don't know if it's up to all of us to do, but if there was an organization that could, you know, assemble and maybe a nonprofit, Rich Travolino who helped produce today's show suggested that, that could just go out and say like, hey folks, there's a better way of doing things. That's that bystander saying something polite, respectful, but kind of helping nudge people towards not doing something that is going to ultimately hurt them too. Totally. I think also just providing a second chance or a second set of eyes just to quickly review something. I do that for myself with my email client. I send a message and it's got about, I have about 30 seconds to hit an undo button. And that sometimes is enough for myself, but for social media and for people who may not think about these things all the time, I have no problem with it occasionally popping up, questioning me about my usage of this service and potential harm that could be caused. Well, if you're a Spotify user, you might already be familiar with the fact that Spotify used to show you a shuffle icon inside the play button. If you wanted to play some music by default on albums. So basically shuffle was the default. You weren't necessarily going to listen to an album front to back, had to work a little harder at it. You had to choose to play an album in the release track order if you wanted to do that exact thing. Spotify has changed that, however. Now a play button is the default from premium users, premium users, different than for users. You can still shuffle album tracks. You just have to make a conscious choice to do so by toggling shuffle on when you're viewing an individual track on the album. Now you might say, huh, why the about face? Spotify has been doing this for years. Artist Adele, you may have heard of her, thanked Spotify for the change. She tweeted, this was the only request I had in our ever changing industry. We don't create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our story should be listened to as we intended. Thank you, Spotify, for listening. Spotify replied, anything for you. Adele's new album 30 dropped on streaming services, including Spotify on November 19th. Her first single, Easy on Me, broke the Spotify record for the most global listens in a single day. So one would think Adele's thoughts carry some weight here, but I am not a Spotify user. I'm an Apple Music user. I always kind of say they're the same, right? You just choose to give your $10 to one company or the other. Did not realize this was a thing that people were dealing with. Yeah, and this is getting reported as Adele gets Spotify to turn off shuffle on albums. And the fact is, no, she got Spotify to change the behavior of the play button on an album, which frankly, we had a really hard time finding someone who had played an album recently on Spotify. Intentionally to get the album. Most people just play songs or they make playlists or they go to playlists. Nobody really listens to albums. I'm sorry to say that, Adele. I totally disagree. Again, I use Apple Music, but when a new, I don't know, an artist that I like a lot, drops a new album. I listen to it front to back. I don't want that crap shuffled. Oh, sure. I don't think you disagree that we had a hard time finding people who listened to albums on Spotify. We did. We were going around. There are people who listened to albums. I'm not trying to dispute that they don't exist. I'm just saying it was not something that I think people noticed, frankly. Well, I think, and I was pulling some of my Spotify friend users all the same way. And the Spotify premium people were like, I don't even know what you're talking about. And the Spotify free people were like, well, I don't know, I just, it's free. You know, we're just used to it that way. And free is still shuffle because everything free is shuffle, at least except on the web. My free web account was playing the album in track order. But, but yeah, it's, it's something which I think Spotify probably realized like, oh, most people aren't playing albums and the people who are would probably prefer to hear them in track order as well. You know, because if you're choosing to listen to an album, why would you want to shuffle it? I've just, I've never, and again, maybe I'm a little out of the loop because I haven't used Spotify rather than, yeah, I have an account, but you know, I use it just kind of for testing purposes for the purposes of the show. But why anybody would play songs on shuffle when they're trying to listen to an album. It's just super counterintuitive. It surprises me that another artist hadn't, hadn't made a stink before, now, or maybe they had, but you know, it wasn't reported on. Yeah. My guess is Spotify just had shuffle on when they engineered it for everything and didn't want to, and hadn't bothered to change the code to be like, oh, we should make, we should change that on, on the album view because probably people enjoy shuffle in lots of other places and they just hadn't, and got to it yet. I'm curious about one thing though, even with an album, like say Adele's album, for example, if you played it back on Spotify Service right now, aren't you just playing back a series of independent tracks? Yeah. And is it anything even close to like, say a gapless audio track system where it is the album playback experience where maybe two songs bump right up against each other or maybe there is a 30 second pause that you normally wouldn't even hear anyway. It's like, can you even get an original album experience from a streaming service? Sure. That's an interesting question. Do they respect that kind of stuff? Like the true album aficionados know like, oh yeah, those tracks run right into each other on the vinyl, right? And those have a longer, you know, track time between them. Tim in our Discord points out Moody Blues albums would be a mess in shuffle mode. Absolutely true. And would enter a mess if you don't respect the track separation as well. Hey, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? You can let us know in our subreddit. We love getting those ideas and incorporating them into the episodes. Submit your stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, even with the supply chain issues out there, people, they're still going to buy TVs. They're still looking for a 4K television during those Black Friday sales in the US and Europe and just in advance of the holidays, asking for, hoping to get, buying themselves a TV as a gift. Absolutely. Robert Herron has a lot of great shopping tips and recommendations when you hunt for your next TV. There are way too many models out there, Robert. So how do you narrow down what you're looking for? I would say, number one, start with the actual size of the screen it is that will work best for you. Literally get some painter's tape or even cut out a piece of cardboard in the size of a TV model you're actually thinking of. It's easy enough if you have a specific set in mind to look up its characteristics for its actual physical size and get a good idea if that's something that will work for you. Often I find people undersizing their TVs, whereas they're looking for something well under, say, 50 inches, when what they really would be best off with is something, say, the 55 to 65 inch range. Either way, though, that is one place to start right there. All right, figure out how much TV you can fit and will work for you. Makes sense. Totally. And if 55 and 65 inch screen sizes are what you would consider large, realize that today they're quickly moving and transitioning towards 70 and 80 inch screen sizes, becoming the new normal plus size you could say for that. Regardless, though, if you can come up with the specific model you have in mind, do some price research. Immediately go out and check out and find out what the sales price is today. So if you're out shopping either online or in person and you come across that product at a price that says, you know what? That's a good price. You can jump on those deals easier that way. For specific brands, I still am a big fan of TCL for value and performance. They're six series or above, if you can swing it, really deliver some of the most impactful picture quality and color and feature performance. That said, if you absolutely have to get a smaller size screen, TCL has three and four series TVs that can fit those characteristics quite well. However, it is just about all but impossible to find a TV out there today that isn't at least say 55 inches big that will give you an impressive and eye-pleasing HDR experience or Dolby Vision experience. Those TVs require to pump out some pretty good light in addition to just beautifully saturated color and that's where you'll see the value TVs suffer compared to the more premium models out there. But if you want 55 inch or more if you want the best HDR, is that right? Generally speaking, it doesn't matter if you're going with LCD or OLED. Now OLED does make screen sizes down to 48 inches currently. They've also mentioned a 42 inch screen. That is going to be an eye-pleasing piece of candy. But if you're looking for something big like say above 70 inches, Samsung and Sony LCDs are generally going to be your good values there. LCD televisions will produce far more light than an OLED television can. Not all LCDs but your premium ones do significantly greater light output and usually better screen material surfaces to help mitigate things like room light reflections and things like that. So if you are dealing with a bright room consider something like a high performance LCD to help make that a more pleasing viewing experience. However, if you do have good light controlled environments or maybe you're a gamer OLEDs are some of the best right now and I'll just point out the LG C1 series that gives you every feature built right into it that you would want including 4K 120 with Dolby Vision for the gamers in addition to the feature support built right in for those formats like HDR Dolby Vision etc. And you get that perfect black level infinite contrast in a picture where you also have a much wider viewing area in terms of who can enjoy that picture and get the pristine image quality out of it. It's absolutely one of my favorites of all time when it comes to display technologies and coming up at CES we'll hopefully see some good competition regarding that as well but also for just short sweet tips I would point to Sony. Any of Sony's OLEDs or their premium LCD televisions are really perfect for cine files or video files if you are into just seeing things as accurately as possible without a lot of fuss Sony makes that fantastic and they also have generally above average audio. You do pay a premium I think for some of their premium models of course but it's a fantastic piece of kit if you can swing it. Oh and as I mentioned TCL is one of my favorite value performance brands. If you can't find that at the particular price point you're looking at look at their license and their U8 G and their U7G I believe they are. The U8G in particular is that perfect balance between like holy cow I see TVs costing two or three times as much doing the equivalent and the price points are great. The feature performance is there in terms of oh I want to make sure I have good light output saturated color gaming support Dolby Vision HDR10 it's all built right in and if a new TV is just not in the books maybe you're happy with what you have consider doing a little upgrade maybe a soundbar or an other audio upgrade for the living room or the bedroom or whatever you're thinking or if your TV is getting a little long in the performance wise with the built in apps that you're still using consider adding a 4k streaming product that is one of the best ways to put a kick in the pants so to speak to an older TV that otherwise works just fine maybe the apps aren't being updated anymore an outdated platform or the performance of those apps within that platform just you know it was never great to begin with that's where I love having a standalone product be it an Apple TV or a Roku or whatever your preferred streaming device of choices that really doesn't matter and then a final just quick tip for the holidays there's usually a lot of family and kids around TV safety if you can't actually wall mount your TV and get it out of the way and secure it to a wall at least spend the 10 or $15 for a kit that will allow you to fix that TV to a wall or the say dresser or whatever furniture it's on the last thing you ever want to do is see one of these flip off or let alone catching the the toddler climbing up the front of a cabinet and the whole thing starting to go that's a nightmare scenario that's easily preventable Robert I had for for years now especially over many courses of your time with us here on DTNS I I'm still yet to pull the trigger on menu TV I have the 55 inch Samsung circa 2012 it's old but it works fine you know it could be a lot better you know but but I try to I try to keep up on what the latest is because at some point I am going to get a new TV whatever size is you know I want it to be the best possible is there any sort of marketing mumbo jumbo that that that gets you when you know researching all of these where you kind of go like this is the thing to stay away from when you're trying to figure out what TV to buy number one it would be managing expectations if you're buying the most value screen out there or like I said if it's not at least about the image quality with HDR content and Dolby vision in particular is simply not going to be as compelling and impressive as you might want it to be typically with the lower cost TVs the first thing they'll cut is the absolute light output how bright that TV can even get and I'll be honest with you there's a lot of 4k HDR Dolby vision TVs out there that really are no brighter than probably your 2012 circa 2012 TV and that's the one thing if you're going to do the upgrade one either go for some sick contrast performance be it with an extremely bright screen or one that can make black look inky and dark and the color should be a no brainer you need a wider color valid for HDR and Dolby vision so that's where I kind of draw the line it's like if you're going to go value small just stick with that and go for a good value where you can then spend your money on other gifts but you are going for something that's just eye candy that's where you really want to pay attention to those features check out reviews all the TVs I've mentioned I would recommend in a heartbeat for anyone looking to do an upgrade at just about any price point that high sense U8G I mentioned I believe it's like under $800 for a 65 inch screen that competes with what I said was like TVs two or three times the cost I will always go back to like an OLED for my absolute favorite in terms of just picture performance being able to have that perfect black and all the features built in but those are premium displays and there are some less expensive OLED options appearing now that's one place you might want to be careful with if you are focused on specific features like I need a TV that can accept 4k 120 input for gaming or I want the TV that has a minimum of a certain refresh rate or color palette that's where you really want to stick with something that's kind of known and well reviewed and well respected and for that it's just a there's so many good options out there and literally at prices anybody can swing so to speak well thank you so much Rob that is always good information especially going into the holidays you know you got some black Friday deals you got to go in with all the information that you can possibly have to get the best television or home theater product that's right for you if you have ideas on maybe maybe you bought a television recently want to tell everybody about it if you have feedback on anything that we talk about on this show please do send it our way feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we also want to thank a brand new boss and that brand new boss's name is Gary Moon Gary just started backing us on Patreon thank you Gary oh yeah sorry Gary almost got it Thomas was so struck by how excited he was you're our moon Gary you really are you are you are our moon our sun and stars thanks also to Robert Aaron also our moon sun and stars let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work hey you can catch our weekly podcast called AVXL at AVXL.com I'm also on twitter at Robert Aaron or you can visit me at heronfidelity.com if you'd like to look at more of my doings on the side so to speak and or calibration information well you do good work so thanks for being with us on the show today come back soon reminders of folks we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. eastern 21 30 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with our guest Nika Monfort 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