 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Rodrigo Smith Zapata, John and Becky Johnston, and Chris Benito. Coming up on DTNS, why is Dyson so popular? Why you should turn off your notifications and how streaming tech is changing how artists make music. Is it bad? Sometimes bad is. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 8th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Austin Texas. I'm Justin Robert. Yeah. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Che. Oh, folks, we've got bad news for Microsoft. You know, the poor little plucky upstart. Let's hear about it with the quick hits. Yeah, Tom, as you mentioned, it was worth a try. Despite Microsoft signing a 10-year call of duty deal with Nintendo and also Valve, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit to prevent Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The FTC believes allowing the acquisition would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud gaming business. In other words, it's about what Microsoft would become capable of. And it's also about cloud gaming. Guys, I feel like somebody said that exact thing on the show. Yeah, it does feel familiar. You know, and that person was so humble. He is. He's so humble, he won't even acknowledge him by name. He'll just heavily imply it was him, whoever he is. May he continue to give us pearls. The Wall Street Journal sources say Google will merge Waze into the Google Geo division. That's the division in charge of Google Maps, Earth, and Street View, which you may have be like, wait, it wasn't in there already? No, it wasn't, but it's gonna be. Google reportedly will continue to offer Waze as a separate navigation app. However, Waze CEO, Neha Parikh, is expected to leave the company as a result. The European Union published the text of its new rules requiring manufacturers to support USB-C charging in devices, including phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, and handheld video game consoles. This means that the clock starts ticking on the deadline to comply with this rule. The short version is that by December 28th, 2024, new phones shipped for sale in the EU must have USB-C for charging, that includes iPhones. Laptops will not be required to comply until April of 2026. So a little bit different, depending on what kind of device you're talking about, and devices may offer wireless charging alone if companies wish. So the new iPhone that comes out in 2025 will be wireless only, got it. In 2019, the US awarded a contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, to Microsoft. But Amazon sued over the selection process. After a review and additional objections from Oracle, the Pentagon announced it was gonna stick with Microsoft. But then in 2021, the Pentagon changed its approach. And now what is being called the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability Effort, or JWCC, has been awarded to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle jointly. You get government money, and you get government money. Google announced two new settings for the Chrome browser. Memory saver will put active tabs to sleep and reduce Chrome's memory usage by 30%. That sounds good to me. Tabs will have to wake up when you need them again. An energy saver will limit background activity for sites with animations and videos when laptop batteries drop below 20%. The features are available now in Chrome 108 for Windows, Mac OS, and Chrome OS arriving in the coming weeks. All right, Dyson has a new product. Indeed it does. I have a Dyson vacuum cleaner that I like very much, but Dyson does more than that. In fact, the company announced that it's noise-canceling wireless headphones with a built-in air purifier that covers the mouth will go on sale in the U.S. in March for $949 U.S. dollars. Now, you can apply or make an appointment to make a pre-order at the Dyson website or in a Dyson store if there's one near you. The company says that the headphones will ship with an electrostatic carbon filter rated to last up to a year. You might say, okay, well, okay, let's get the obvious comments out of the way. First, why would you want an air purifier also as part of your headphones? Why would you pay almost $1,000 for that? Dyson is the most over-high product maker since Apple. Some people feel that way. There are things that people say recording Dyson and why Dyson can get away with something like this, but at the same time, maybe it's a good product. People swear by their vacuums. I am one of them. The Dyson fans, also very popular. The company made six billion Euro, British pounds in 2021, raised profits 16% to 1.5 billion pounds. So in a pandemic world, in a sort of post-pandemic world, supply chain messes, we got chip shortages. Why is Dyson the company to give us this? Well, the brand that Dyson has is the ability to buy it once and never again. And that's what they did with their vacuums, that's how they continue to be a leader in that field. What I think here is if you are in a position where you are regularly masking outside, and I don't want to put any kind of aspersions and beyond that, because there are certainly people for many, many reasons, even before COVID that really wanted to do stuff like that. Then spending $1,000 on something that you're going to trust with your life is not all that crazy. And for people that have a lot of anxiety, specifically around traveling, then having headphones on them is also very, very important. And if they are more effective than a mask, because it is an actual air purifier, then look, I would like to see some of the studies on how well it filters things out, but I trust Dyson as a brand to offer stuff like that. I mean, but why? Why do we trust Dyson as a brand to offer stuff like that at such a price? That's the thing that gets me. That's the thing that gets me too. They have a great track record. I'm not going to deny that. I have a Dyson vacuum cleaner. It's our second one. The first one did break, but we did get a second one and it still works. We've had it since. What did you do to it? The first one that broke, I don't even remember. Blaming you. Your brand is worse than Dyson's in my mind. But my brand as a user of devices is probably worse than Dyson. I'll concede that. Because the second one, we got in 2006, 2007, and we've had it ever since. Yeah, that's about the same time I got my Dyson. Eileen has one of their fans, the Bladeless fan that she uses during the summer. These are good products. And they do work as advertised. They are never nearly as revolutionary as they are billed, not just by Dyson, but by their proponents. OK, it's a Bladeless fan. It works like a fan. It's nice. To me, it's that, yes, these are good products. You're not going to have to return them in most cases. And then there's the design. And then there's the Steve Jobs-like Freeman Dyson. And Freeman Dyson is the wrong Dyson. The Dyson spiel on top of that. That is the only thing that explains the price premium you pay for these to make. I mean, it sort of reminds me. I know it's not exactly the same argument, but the conversation we were having with Scott Johnson yesterday about super apps. It's like, what can Dyson do for you want a part with the better part of $1,000 to get like a really cool product? It's like, do you really want noise canceling headphones and also an air purifier all in the same product? Maybe you do. And if so, great. It does seem like they're sort of throwing spaghetti at the wall a little bit. Dyson's brand is utilities, right? There's a fan because some people don't have central air conditioning. And especially during the summer, you want air pushed on you. You've dropped stuff on the floor. You need to suck it up. These are utilities, right? What Dyson is betting on here are that people for whom have travel anxiety around COVID are willing to buy a sturdy $1,000 solution to that problem, a utility for that problem. Whether or not they are right, who knows? But I don't think it's an insane play. No, I actually, the product itself makes sense. The most interesting thing about the headphones itself is that they're headphones, is that Dyson is stepping into a more consumer electronics rather than a home product thing. I absolutely get the filter thing. It looks funny to me. But also because it's Dyson, while it looks funny, it also looks really cool. Like they designed this as well as anyone could possibly be expected. To me, it's just the $949 price tag on it. And that is not unusual for Dyson. To look at a price tag and go, nobody's going to pay that. And then everyone pays it. And then not everyone would do it. I mean, I'm not going to. And I liked Dyson. I've got some brand loyalty. But I'm like, for wireless? No, no. You could buy those two things separately for much, much less. So let's keep that in consideration. Speaking of keeping things in consideration, the conversation has an article up from Sharon Harwood, a senior lecturer of psychology at Deakin University. And it's called Ping. Your pizza is on its way. Ping, please rate the driver. Yes, constant notifications really do tax your brain. That's the name of the article. Harwood notes in the article in PLS-1, PLOS-1, found that the average person checks their phone once every 15 minutes or so, or around 85 times per day. Findings vary. Obviously depends on who you are and what you're doing. But pretty much everybody agrees. It takes at least a couple of minutes, if not more, to fully regain concentration after an interruption like that ping from a notification. Yeah, you're probably like, oh, doesn't affect me? My pings are silent. I turned off notification sounds. Still has an effect. This is because we train ourselves to know there are unread notifications on that phone. Because when you pick it up, you see them. And our attention involuntarily drifts towards it because we want to check and see if those notifications are there. In fact, there may be more of an urge to do that if you have the notification sound off, simply because you're not hearing it. And you're like, well, there might be some notifications. And it really happens if those notifications stimulate the reward center as so many do, especially replies to your social media post where you made a great joke about stiff bizkit and you want to see who liked it. As somebody who has all sound notifications turned off because I can't deal, this does speak to me. It's not like I'm not being pinged every five seconds I am. So multiple studies found that notifications can decrease productivity, degrade concentration, and increase distraction, not super surprising. A 2016 study published in Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience Forum found that self-described heavy phone users were more sensitive to the effects of notifications, taking longer to recover concentration after an interruption, for example. Other studies found that frequent notifications can increase stress because of an urge to respond and stop what you're doing, whatever you're doing, and increased fear of missing out. All right, so what should we do? You know, Willie Scott is like, is it better to have the sound turned on than not necessarily? Harwood has some ideas in that article on the conversation. So I thought we'd look at these first and see what we think of them. This one just seems uncontroversial, right? Turn off all pure non-essential notifications. You know, limit what's gonna show up in the first place. Nobody's got a problem with that, right? All right. And I would add on to that. Make yourself a little quarterly review for these things or semi-regular review of exactly what you have and whether or not it is time to maybe turn some stuff off. Or like for me, I'm gonna do this right after the show. I've got three weather apps that tell me the weather every day. I don't need three weather apps. No. I need to pick one. And I have, some people don't like this, but I talked about it on It's a Thing two weeks ago. I say no to notifications by default unless I can make a very good case that I have to get those notifications. Maybe it's a medical app or something. But I say no and I only go turn notifications on if I feel like, gosh, I really would like to get notifications if I feel like I'm missing them. Second one here, charge your phone in a different room from where you sleep. Okay. All right, Harry. Yeah. Well, what if I sleep in the same room as the only place my charger is? Yeah. Charge it downstairs. I get this though. I actually think that this is pretty helpful. You know, bringing your phone to bed with you type thing, you know, when it's time to go to sleep, you go to sleep, you do something else, you deal with the social stuff tomorrow in the next room. I get that. I think in practice, this is harder for people than, you know, just being like, oh, yeah, just, you know, just don't, you know, look at your phone too much because then you won't be able to sleep as well. That's easy to say. It's not as easy to do in practice depending on who you are. Look, put it in a box or something, but let's not put it in a little phone coffin. I feel like you don't need another room. You don't need a full charging room. That's not your bedroom. You don't have to clear out the room just to charge it in another room. Well, this is, I mean, where does it stop, Tom? Where does it stop? The slippery slope. Well, the whole point is just to not have the phone. Yeah, I feel like, you know, doing that to you all night where you're, you know, you're too close to it. No, no, put it in, in sleep mode. No, no, no. I think this is a cost-benefit analysis, right? Because people in the chat are bringing up like, hey, what if you use your phone as your alarm? You know, stuff like that. So you have to wait, like, is it a big enough problem that I'm like, you know what? I need to put this thing in another room for a while. Like maybe you're there. I don't know if this one is for everyone. Third one, when you catch yourself reaching for the phone, just stop and ask yourself, like, why am I reaching? Is it an important reason? Do I need to make a phone call? Do I need to check something important? Or is it like a mindless habit? And then if it's a mindless habit, then you can decide to stop yourself. Do I have a problem? Am I hurting my friends and family? Yeah, right. That's a very, very minor version of that exact thing. And the final one is the Pomodoro method, break your work up into chunks and then reward yourself with looking at the phone. So, you know, you say, I am gonna keep the phone out of reach for 25 minutes while I focus on something. And then at the end, the reward will be, I get to pick it up and look at all the Weverse notifications. Now, I'm just gonna say this of that last point because I've had many bosses over the years be like, well, you know what you should do, Sarah, is just give yourself one hour per day to look at email. And that's when you do email and then you just do your work the rest of the time. And that's how you are more productive. And I was like, middle finger up to you because that's not how most people work. No. So, I really don't like, I don't really subscribe to the whole like, only do social sometimes and then make sure that you don't do it the rest of the time because life happens. Well, but again, this is not like ignore important notifications. If you've got an SMS from your doctor, this is set yourself 20 minutes to say I'm gonna work for 20 minutes. Set yourself up for success. And then I'll look. And then I'll go back and work another 25 minutes, 20 minutes. Then y'all look rather than just having it there and you're constantly like interrupting yourself, picking it up. I think that's what's important. I'm very much on the train of, when it comes to a certain point in the night, nothing on my phone is gonna be helpful. All it's gonna do is keep me from sleeping. So I get that. It is good to turn it off. I just feel like when people kind of, kind of give me a recipe for like, here's how your life is going to be better. Just using your phone like very minimally. I'm like, that's not how most people work. I will find a word on this, say that there is a societal impact here that the expectation that we have, not only with work, but also with personal relationships to get back to somebody faster, if not immediately, has increased beyond the days of like, if you called your friend five times on the phone, there's no guarantee that they would get it, right? That they would even check their answering machine. So I would like to blame society. Yeah, I think we all shall. Good job, society. Where to go? Yeah, where to go? Speaking of getting a notification on your phone, hopefully you are not turning off notifications from all of our social networks because they're incredibly important. They are, they're really good. When you finished your 25 minutes of focused working in the Pomodoro method, pick up that phone and look at DTNS show on Twitter, Daily Tech News show on TikTok, or DTNS pics with an X, DTNS PIX on Instagram. Wired has an article up about Grime musician Stormzy and how he has built up his own empire, largely on the backs of the hashtag murky, hashtag M-E-R-K-Y. It's a very interesting story. I go read it, we'll have a link to the show notes, talks about how Stormzy started this at a time when social media was different and discusses whether it's replicable in the current world that has changed very much since Stormzy first started in the mid-teens. In that discussion of how things have changed, the article notes some of the best practices that artists follow to go viral today and get a hit song. You know, songwriters try to create tracks with a 10 to 20 second hook that can easily be used for TikTok dances. Artists also follow a formula for title tracks that has a five second musical intro before singing begins. The first chorus is at 45 seconds, three verses and then stops at three minutes and 20 seconds. That's exactly the pattern that Taylor Swift's anti-hero follows. It's meant to optimize streaming lessons so they stay interested and play the song to the end, therefore rewarding it in the algorithm. Okay, so that's not the only approach. Sometimes choruses hit at the beginning of the song and three minutes is starting to look long as more and more songs are around two minutes. Heck, Post Malone put the chorus of Rockstar on loop for three minutes and got 41 million views, helping it hit number one on Billboard. Well, that's Post Malone, what a hit maker. But of course, the opposite tactic is to make a long album that feels more like a playlist, something that Drake has used to become the most streamed artist on Spotify for several years. The rise of chill hop and chill hit centers around something that lets you play in the background for as long as possible. And most recently, if your song sounds good and died, you still have a great chance of going viral on TikTok. In fact, Thundercats Them Changes came out in 2015, but hit Billboard's R&B chart in October after it caught on with a sped up version in September on the talk. It's going to be tempting to say that this is somehow ruining music, but it is not new. The size of vinyl discs, limited song length a long time ago, do we have an increased problem, however, when it comes to streaming behavior? I don't. So the thing that people would say, Sarah, is, oh, these are formulas and they're not making music for music's sake anymore. They're just, they're hitting this post and all the songs are gonna sound the same. Okay, that's, okay, sure. I think the whole sort of like pop song formula we're more in tune with now because we have robots to help us with this, but this has been going on for quite some time. The better part of a century, in fact. So yeah, I don't know. I don't feel like this is like a bad thing. You can either say, oh, I like that hit. How catchy. What an earworm can't get it out of my head or say it's not my thing. I don't know, it's, I don't, nobody's being, their feet held to the fire on this. Technology has defined music since we realized that sound waves bounce off certain surfaces, curved or otherwise, more than they do something else, right? The crooning phase of Bing Crosby specifically, but also Frank Sinatra was a revolution because microphone technology got good enough that you didn't have to yell. You could just get really close and sing songs like this. That's something that happened because mics got better. That is part of the reason why that sounded fresh and new for a lot of people. You mentioned that albums, a press vinyl album not only defined the length to this day of what we think an album should be. If it comes in shorter than that, we say it's a short album. It comes in longer than that, than we think that it is long or bloated, but also radio hits. The idea that every song should be around two minutes long. If anything, these new trends make people have more of an attention span than they used to back in the radio era when songs were around a minute and a half, two and change. There is, I think, a legitimate concern or question, maybe. Maybe not even a concern about, like, all right, but if you make a track that's four minutes and 20 seconds long, you are going to be pressured by your agency, by your label to shorten it because if it's four minutes and 20 seconds long, it's going to get half the streams of a song that's two minutes and 10 seconds long, just because it's longer, right? It's going to take longer. And you may say, like, oh, but is that really the way it works? Kind of does. The reason that all of these US artists are targeting two minutes and that almost like three minutes and 20 seconds from Taylor Swift is almost considered bloated is because they've done the math and they're like, yeah, the shorter that song is, the more streams we get and the more streams we get, the more money we generate and the more playlists we fit on. So there is a pressure to be like, okay, maybe artistically that song should be longer, but can you make it shorter anyway? Yeah, it's the formulaic sense that people go, oh man, it's, you know, taken away from the artistry of it all, but I don't know, as podcasters, we all understand this as well. It's like, you know, you, yeah, like any artist is sort of like, okay, what's the sweet spot here? And music is just, I think the most obvious example of that. Artists need to get in front of audience. And this has been true from storytelling back in the ancient campfires to Stormzy. You need to do what you need to do to get your art out in front of people. This is nothing new. And if anything, I think it is more welcoming and more ever shifting than the meta we had before, which was effectively radio and MTV. Yeah, there was a bigger gatekeeper on what could even make it onto a 45. The 45 itself limited how long you could go. You just couldn't fit a song above a certain amount of time on there. So you've got, well, more freedom now. The pressures are more social and commercial, which were also always there as well. So yeah, I think I'm with you, Justin. In summary, you know, it's still, it's better for artistic freedom than it's ever been. And I don't think you would ever have commercial music without having commercial pressures on that music. That's just a fact of the way it works. Well, language learning app Duolingo picks one of the phrases that is found on its courses as a phrase of the year each year. Been doing it for a few years now. From its English for Spanish speakers course, the most 2022 phrase is drum roll, please. Please don't cancel my plans. Duolingo, if you're like, why, why, why, why would it be that? Duolingo said it chose that somewhat sad phrase because 2022 saw record number of flight cancellations, natural disasters at vacation spots, and high travel costs this year that made people have to cancel their travel plans and be kind of upset about it. For example, you might recall back in August, almost 1,500 flights from Texas to various parts of the East Coast were canceled in a single day. Duolingo also released its third annual global language report including data that more than 1.3 million people started learning Ukrainian in 2022, partly in response to the Russian war in Ukraine, but also that there were fewer people overall learning a new language for travel reasons in 2022 overall in part because people were vacationing closer to home. As for most studied languages, English took the number one spot, Spanish was in second place, and French took third. I am not surprised on English, Spanish, and French that those are languages you'll find in a lot of places. I am trying to find some of my favorite Duolingo phrases that I have screen-shotted over the past year because they generally involve monsters or tigers attacking villages. What? It is. Really? Yeah, really. This is learning what language? Korean. Okay, attracts. Yeah, yeah, it happens a lot. Okay, here. Why is there a floor made from bones here? Was I sent? And then there's, let's see if I could, I will probably butcher the pronunciation, but Amani... Amani nunmul is mother's tears, you know, an important phrase to be able to bandy about. Or the monster does not have a body. I feel like your Duolingo experience is very different than mine. I'm just sort of like, I want to see the church. Yes. Yeah. The baby's body is small, but its head is big. Dude, Koreans live. Yeah, this is great. This is on another level. I can't wait to use all of these the next time I visit. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Vladimir, who was chiming in on our conversation with John C. to work the other day on driverless trucks and technology in general. Vladimir says, on the driverless trucks and vandalism tip, the first scene that comes to mind is the one from the Fast and Furious, where the drivers are defending from the cars hijacked by shotguns. Vladimir says, I wonder how this would work with driverless trucks. He also says, my few cents on the subscription model for vehicles. Well, I hate paying for unlocking something that's already there. If all these locked features reduce the original purchase price of the vehicle, and then you pay extra for unlocking these, you're going along versus the full price of the vehicles that we pay now. It might be something to consider. Okay. I agree with you there. I feel like subscription models will eventually get more money out of the consumer than the alternative, but it does give you some options. What's that I hear John C. DeVorek yelling, they'll never lower the price. Never. Yeah. Yeah. It's a scam. But maybe, but maybe. If you could show that, I don't think it's impossible that some car company could actually, you know, make a go of saying, like, yeah, these cars are cheaper. And then you could jailbreak that car that you paid very little for and get all the features. Indeed. Well, thanks to everybody who writes in. Please do keep that feedback coming. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send the email. If you think about anything we've talked about on the show or might talk about on our future show. Justin, Robert Young, we want you to be on all of our future shows. So let us know what, how we can keep up with you in the meantime. Well, you can listen to the program for which I host with Andrew Heaton and Jen Briney. It's called We're Not Wrong. The most recent episode that went live today is all about the Twitter files. What it means culturally, politically, and more along with all of the disturbance that happened from one post on another rival social media application where the former president of the United States made mention that possibly we should suspend the Constitution because of the Twitter files. Listen to all and bask in our opinions. We're not wrong. We're talking about. Indeed. Good stuff there. Also good stuff is Bex Fortin. Bex Fortin is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. So you know what Bex? We wanted to give you a little shout out today and thank you for all of your support. Yeah, man, Bex knows where it's at. You could be like Bex, patreon.com slash DTNS. I spilled the tea today on the editor's desk, but only patrons get it. I talked about numbers and revenue and jobs and all that sort of stuff. You got to get that by becoming a patron, patreon.com slash DTNS. Kimono was open. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of patrons, we do have an extended show for patrons. It's called Good Day Internet and Boy Is It Fun. You can catch it as soon as DTNS wraps up, but just a reminder, we do the show live. We're live right now. You might be watching or listening after the fact, but you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Shannon Morse and Len Perl to join us. Don't miss it. Talk to you then. 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