 This 10th year of Daily Tech news show is made possible by you the listener Thanks to all of you including Steve, I had a roll at Jeffrey Zilx and Tony glass Coming up on DTNS Microsoft raises its AI game the ethics of large language models begin to impact real life And is this the end of electric vehicle range anxiety? This is the Daily Tech news for Thursday March 2nd 2023 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from studio Redbud, I'm Sarah Lane and from that DC area your boy Chris Ashley And I'm the show's producer Roger Jane. Ah, it's good to have everybody in the house. Thanks for joining us We we have got a world of tech news to keep you the smartest person in the room. Let's start with the quick hits Reuters sources say that Microsoft's offer of a 10-year licensing deal to not only Nintendo But also in video and especially to Sony is likely to sway EU regulators to approve its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard the EU is just extended its deadline for its decision to April 25th Microsoft still needs to persuade regulators in the UK and also the US to approve the deal So you're saying there's a chance PCI Express 5.0 is supported by newer motherboards all PCs built around AMD's Ryzen 7000 series chips and some PCs using Intel's 12th or 13th generation CPUs Support graphics cards and SSDs that use PCI Express 5.0 But that's only half the battle you need the devices that support the faster interface to and the first wave of drives are beginning to hit store shelves the PCIe 5.0 SSD gigabyte aorus gen 5 10,000 and microcenter exclusive inland TD 510 Both promise those high speeds peak read speeds of up to 10,000 megabytes per second up from 74 50 per second in 4.0 but Cost is a little bit of a factor Ars Technica says the 2 terabyte versions are more than twice the price of equivalent PCIe 4.0 versions and the drives heatsinks are in Ars Technica's words Ridiculous very large They really didn't say that they did They may not even fit in some installation So you might want to check that the price will come down as will the operating temp Which will make the heatsinks a little smaller, but for now be warned Snapchat rolled out the ability to pause snap streaks where you can send a snap to a friend once every 24 hours All users can restore one snap streak for free But you can also buy more streak restores for 99 cents in the US The company also plans to roll out the feature as part of its snapchat plus subscription. It's not really a streak though It yeah If Antarctica can get attacked together Google and meta may soon have the distinction of being investigated for antitrust on every continent regulators from Kenya Egypt Mauritius Nigeria South Africa Morocco Gambia and Zambia have set up a working group last month and Now plan to investigate those companies and a few others the common markets of eastern and southern Africa or commesa Competition Commission represents 21 other countries and it is also joining this effort members of the group are planning joint investigations in e-commerce aggregator services e-hailing and delivery services digital advertising fintech and app stores, so the usual Garmin just launched its forerunner 265 and forerunner 965 smartwatches with OLED screens the mid-range watches are marketed towards outdoor users who usually want Readability and battery life to things that OLED is not particularly good at the forerunner 25 5s for example got more than 20 days on a charge using a memory in pixel or MIP display OLEDs are easy to read indoors and during cloudy conditions and the Verges Victoria song notes that Garmin Has been moving into more lifestyle features over the past couple of years That's the quick hits all right people been making big say rude stuff So Microsoft restricted it clamped down to get it to stop doing that But that made it refused to answer a lot of innocent questions that that people needed to get answer So Microsoft is dialing back those restrictions But now Microsoft now let you choose what kind of personality you want the bing cha bot to have You can select from three different tones creative balanced and precise the creative tone will include original and imaginative responses the precise tone gives you factual and concise answers and the balanced tone is somewhere in between Yeah, you can think of the precise tone as as me the creative tone is sarah and the balanced tone is chris Microsoft didn't clarify this but it sounds to me like a setting in the large language models called temperature is different for these different tones temperature Changes how the models pick the words. I won't go too far into it But a quick explanation If the model always picks what it thinks the most likely next word is based on its training It can sound very dry. It could sound very precise Whereas making it occasionally pick the second or third most likely word Gives it a more conversational tone, which to me could be that creative setting there. So I What do y'all think of of of bing's triangulation here? I think trying to find the right tone Definitely a smart move. Um, if you want to be able to grab the most amount of people When I when I read this over and I kind of think of two things one is you're basically choosing Which version of data you want you want data with the chip or do you want data without the chip? and then on top of that it's like You know, it's almost like the description of the matrix when they finally revealed it right when it was too perfect Nobody liked it and when it was, you know, not perfect enough. Nobody could accept it It had to have the the variations in between and it sounds like it's really falling along the same lines It's like here pick a different word or a third word as opposed to one that always comes up in that kind of like the idea of it well and something that we're always talking about in the show is like, okay, so If not, everybody gets the same results You know, how does this help what you might be doing for yourself? Maybe I want to uh, uh, you know, write some fiction So temperature actually makes a lot of sense I probably want it to be a little bit more creative if i'm doing something for dTNS I probably want it to be more precise as long as you're using the tools in a way that makes sense to you And you know, we're at you know, the beginning stages of a lot of people trying to do that I don't think any of this is you know, better or worse You know, if you were trying to say something as fact that was a little bit more creative Well, that's where we get into issues. Um, and microsoft As well as other chat bot makers have have learned these hard lessons pretty early on One of the things they're trying to do is stop people from misusing it and making it say rude and unusual things I'm guessing they feel comfortable enough that that creative tone has a better safety net Than it did before but I also think giving people three tones and making the default balanced Let's them make most of the users have a higher safety net And then if you change it to creative they can kind of give you a warning of like Hey, it might have a few more unexpected responses. Just so you know And and and that way when if it does go off the rails a little more It's like hey, we we told you you were using the creative setting if you don't like that Maybe switch back to balanced or precise. Right. It's an interesting way of doing it I wonder if there's any chance of this having the ability to combat like, uh A confirmation bias Just because if we're going to be expanded along those lines So, you know, just the fact that it's not picking what the you know, what the top answer would be but you know, three variations of it You wonder if that can then be expanded into not showing you always information that you want to hear But the information that is It's it's it's more about picking word choice and like synonyms and things than it is facts But that's an interesting thought of whether there's there's some spin off there that they could they could apply that to Yeah, right Speaking of of of microsoft's tech chops, uh, bing is using tech from open ai that microsoft is adapting But microsoft also has its own development of these kinds of smart models Microsoft scientists published a paper about cosmos one a multimodal large language model or mllm Designed to analyze images and answer questions about them so it can tell what it's looking at basically The system writes captions for images reads text from images Can't answer questions about them like I just said scientists say that multimodal systems are a necessity To achieve artificial general intelligence A lot of folks in the field think multimodal is going to be a much bigger deal than large language models are right now Microsoft plans to make cosmos one available to developers, but no details on that yet Uh, is this the next thing to to freak out about is Yes, you know that that that these these models can look at a picture and go like oh, yeah, that's that's a boy carrying a balloon or whatever absolutely Like is it though like does that frighten you? I wouldn't say frighten, but i'm all i'm frightened by all of this to be honest with you. You know, i'm watching another sci-fi but uh But no, I you know I never even thought about this angle until I actually read this article and then after I read it I was like oh, wow. Yeah, that makes perfect sense See the more inputs you have the tighter your responses are the more valid the responses probably can be So really interesting, but you know, I always think about the bad stuff people can do with this But I don't want to think about this in in that regard right now right now It sounds really cool, but it sounds super powerful at that point and the fact that they said, you know, this This model can replace more regular Functions in everyday life is like oh Imagine when you're teaching someone something how often you say look at this And if you can have a model that can do that that understands what what to show you what the image is I think that's yeah, that's fascinating Uh, they the One of the places that chris is pointing us to is the ethics debate around ai right the the idea that It can be used for ill and what are the safeguards we're going to put on it As we let more and more people use it Open ai for example is launching apis So things that developers can use to access open ai technology Not only for chat gpt, but also the whisper speech to text model to get ahead of ethics questions Open ai is clarifying that users of the apis have always and will continue to own the input and output of the models So if the output is to you you own that output not open ai There's a 30 day retention period limit for api users So they they shouldn't be keeping user input from their use of the api could even be shorter depending on the case Open ai says it will not use any data submitted through its api for training or other service improvements Unless the customer or the organization specifically opts in to do so They will they will not use it unless the customer says I would like you to use it for this Yeah, and another example of proactive machine intelligence policy shifts comes from apple It has delayed approval of an update to email app blue mail The blue mail update added an embedded version of chat gpt Trained on contents in the user's email and calendar events The idea is to help draft emails and calendar invites to the user's own style Yeah, so blue mail says apple reviewers told them to either raise the age appropriate designation to 17 or older Or add content filters But blue mail disputes this need saying that it has content filtering set to apply for users four years old and older already Now apple told the wall street journal. It's investigating the issue So, you know, we'll see what comes of that But it's worth noting that apple has had issues with the blue mail app before and It's parent company blix in 2019 You might recall that blue mail was removed from the app store over a security concern related to blix's patent On signing in without giving up personal information that issue took a few months to resolve They did it but now they're kind of back in the news. So what do we think here? Might be a beef might be a long going beef or is apple just doing that thing where they change a policy By applying it to one app first many apps later So I read through this a bit and You know, I love chile just choosing the local guy against the big guy You know, I just want to blame all the big folks But I don't know if blue mail really has a leg to stand on in this one because The the big thing that they pointed out was like look all any it tool or app that has the ability to show minors You know explicit content you got to get the rating And so if you're adding Chat gpt, which you know can potentially start saying an adult content quite easily. Yeah. Yeah, what are you saying? What blue mail saying is we put a filter on to stop it from doing the adult content Yeah But you know how how much can they guarantee that their filter is not going to inadvertently pull something anyway I mean this sounds sort of semantic to me apple saying Put a filter on in this way and blue mail is like well We did just not in the exact way that you were asking us for but we're not doing anything wrong And now apple's like hmm. Let's go back to the well and think about this a little bit I feel like there's more to the story right Either either the app reviewer missed it that there was the the filter on there Because I think apple's just asking simply like put in an acceptable filter Or I just said acceptable filter Maybe blue mail put a filter on that apple's like we know that one doesn't work There are better filters like chris was saying like use use a filter that works better But I don't think we have all the information. No Meanwhile blix is going public with this talking to to everybody like the wall street journal Because they have beef. They definitely have beef with apple. They've had it before Yeah, but You know beef has to go both ways sometimes, you know, they can you know screaming in the wind and apple Yeah, yeah, you know got their hand up with their in their forehead and they're just swinging away And just like and look chris knows about beef. Check out barbecue Beef it goes both ways period But uh, yeah, so I don't know Honestly, I don't know what four-year-old is using email and a calendaring. No, that's just that they're doing it Four years old and up so that so that people will be like a blanket like, you know We're we're filtering so good even a four-year-old should be able to use. They're not saying they want four-year-olds to use I was trying to think my daughter was I have a picture of my daughter on my desk Typing on my keyboard when she was like two, but I don't remember her setting an appointment for her next I didn't get the sense. They were marketing it to four-year-olds. I don't know. I could be wrong though Yeah, I did. Yes. It's quite possible Uh folks, if you know what's going on with the blue mail for real or anything else So you just want to say hi you want to get uh, some beef recipes get in touch with us on the social networks at dts show on twitter at daily tech news show on tiktok or dts picks dts pix on instagram. Oops. That's the wrong one. There we go We have world's most famous ford lightning owner with us chris ashley. Let's talk Electric vehicles shall we we've talked about the ev company vin fast on the show before a vietnamese company headquartered in singapore So worth noting that the company delivered its first cars 45 of the vf8 city edition to customers in california vin fast has 10 us stores In the san diego, los angeles and bay areas, but ours technica has a story In fact, they republished a story from inside climate news that I think we really want chris's opinion about Some research on electric vehicle range scientists at the university of delaware published an article in the journal energies called influence of battery energy charging power and charging locations upon ev's ability to meet trip needs basically How does this stuff really affect range? Like what are people worrying about versus what should they worry about? So they looked at 333 gas powered vehicles over the course of a year in atlanta And then modeled how well an ev would have met those drivers needs if they'd been using that instead of the gas car Yeah, and so they found that an ev with a 100 mile range could meet 100 of the driving needs of at least The driving 25 of the population So 25 of the drivers could have made all their trips with something like a Nissan leaf Also charging wherever they normally parked. Maybe it was at home. Maybe it was at work Maybe it was you know, somewhere else that they knew that they could charge So the other 75 would have needed to make a few changes to their driving habits to find charging stations Most likely during longer trips or to get a car with a bigger battery Even when they looked at larger ev's they found that most drivers would rarely if ever use the upper ends of their ranges One of the contentions of the paper is that financially It would make more sense not to spend an extra $10,000 on a bigger car with a bigger battery But just rent a car when you need to go on a longer trip Chris as a driver of a big impressive ev truck. What do you think of this study? It's amazing Uh, that's a lot of the points that they're making Everyone who listens to this show that has heard me talk about it has heard those same exact points You know, if you go on a trip and you're so concerned with the range go rent a car Um, most of the times you're asking people are asking questions about the capabilities of an ev That they don't even do with their regular car. So, you know, if you drive to work Every day you take one vacation You know per year and you just drive working back and what the heck do you care? How long how long the vehicle goes unless you're driving like some 300 miles away to go to work Which I think, you know, most people don't have to worry about that But it's that one use case where you're like, well, I can't I can't use it for that Yeah, what if you know, what if you know, I run out of battery on, you know, the the open road now, what? Yeah, the only The concern and this is a slight concern that I think people should be aware of right is you You can get into habit of not charging the vehicle at night because by certainly you don't have to charge the vehicle every day um, and then If an emergency pops up where you're like, okay, I need to drive through grandma's house, which is, you know, two hours away Then you could run into the point where it's like, okay. I don't have enough charge currently um, but if you find a fast charger And just go hit the fast charger I mean People aren't realizing that these fast chargers are literally charging these vehicles in like 30 minutes Yeah, you know, we we were talking offline before the show and roger mentioned something that todd net is also mentioning in our chat room Todd net says I have an ev and I don't have range range anxiety have charging anxiety Will the charger I need, you know, when I stop on the highway or park in the parking garage work, will it be full? Uh, is it the compatible one with my car that kind of thing? Yeah, and that's probably a more of an issue right now is even when I went to ocean city over the summer um And even though I had More than enough charge to get to ocean city, maryland and back On one charge honestly um, I wanted to charge before I got into ocean city because I just wanted to be able to drive around and you know it was my first long is the longest trip I had taken to date with the truck And every place I stopped on the way up the chargers were broken every single one of them So I just gave up and I said, I'll just drive into ocean city now on the other side of that when I got to ocean city All the pretty much all the chargers were working and there was thankfully there was one Directly across the street from my hotel So I was able to park the car park park the truck, you know Check our things up and just plug in the truck overnight had a full charge in the morning So, uh, but that that is correct There are a lot of people that are reporting issues with some of these Not even what tesla doesn't have this issue, but for whatever reason folks on the uh electrify america that they get to get their game together because a lot of their chargers are Broken or some people have reported to where the chargers have destroyed their vehicles So those things do exist. I'm not going to pretend like everything is perfect But the the stuff that people are worried about with range and That's that's not the thing you need to be concerned with range anxiety is the thing people who don't have EV's have I the two questions I get every time is How far can you go? How long does it take to charge first first two questions right out of the game and I'm like and I if I'm not busy I'll tease them. It was like, how long does it take to charge yourself on? You don't know, right? you know we had uh At where I live um some friends with an evid come to stay a couple weekends ago and they were like Do you have like do you have a fast charger? And I was like no But I have a you know power Have electricity. Yeah, like how like how often do you need to like come and go and they were like well not often But like It's like I feel like there's sort of like this like ingrained nature of being like well, we need to have the best Chargers so we can be everywhere all the time. But like let's think about what you're actually doing Exactly. It's it's actually the opposite of that. So when I go to the airport Um, they have the super slow charger, right? I mean super slow It doesn't matter. I'm gone for three days. If it takes much three days to charge. Yes. Who cares? Yeah, most of the time people are waking up with a quote-unquote full tank That's a professor kepton pointed to said that to ars technica like you charge overnight you wake up fully charged You know, you'd like to make a difference. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sleeping last question on this Ford told tech crunch. It's starting restarting production of the Ford f-150 lightning on march 13th Because it's reworking a battery issue that it discovered in february. Are you concerned about this at all as a lighting owner? It's not supposed to affect you but i'm just curious. So for me um, I knew That I was buying the first line of the vehicle and I fully expected to be Probably have to go through some growing pains now I haven't had a lot of issues. I did take the truck in for its first issue um that i've experienced, uh, which is a uh a sensor issue on my uh my parking sensor So it's something minor. It's not a big deal. I know how to park a truck um, but you know, so while Yeah, obviously if something goes wrong with my battery, it's a wrap, right for but in the in the end I'm Pretty comfortable with how Ford has been handling updates and been handling Uh service and you know reaching out and when you know, they they gave everybody like free chargers when they were no Sorry, they gave everybody like $250 worth of charging when they couldn't get the uh chargers shipped on time um, so uh so far You know service has been good from Ford and so i'm not overly concerned I'll be bummed out if something happens to my battery, but i'm not overly concerned. Um Yeah, it does seem like the pause was an abundance of caution just because they found a weird result and they're just tracking that down So, yeah, hopefully that's the case Well, um, we like to be as global as possible on the show So let's check in with dan compost for some new tech news coming from cdmx Hello friends of dtns this week in ntx We have a special interview with uh oscar morales co-founder of safety And he's one to tell us a little bit about machine learning and how it can help international trade processes Let's go with you oscar in a nutshell It is about reducing the time to process and merchandise that goes through customs either assigning a risk assessment or Extracting data from a complicated document and then reshape it into what they need to fulfill the customs declaration The idea here is to simplify customs processes for our customers that are customs brokers And perhaps it's customs customs customs, but it is important to know that Everything that goes across the world if you have bought anything From let's say amazon us or aliexpress in china It has gone through a costume. All right If you want to learn more about this and practice your spanish check this week ntx where we have a full interview to Know more about this Anything that speeds up customs I'm into it. I'm into that Yeah, uh, you can find that article at daily tech news show dot com slash n t x Let's check out the mailbag We got a good one from daniel who wrote us on patreon Saying greetings from melbourne australia. Thanks for the info on password managers We talked about this with rod simons a couple days ago daniel says some notes about my Migration from last pass that could be useful to others Some sites won't give you feedback on valid password length Which means you're trialing and resetting passwords until you get one that's valid Other services put strange or outdated limitations like six characters alpha numeric passwords Think about what services you need to access from places that you're not going to be using your password manager before setting up That long password You don't want to be typing 60 plus characters into your playstation for example Use this as an opportunity to close those unused accounts. Oh, these are good tips. Thank you daniel For sending the email keep those emails coming folks feedback at daily tech news show dot com Indeed and thanks you chris ashley. Um, we Always love having you on the show, but let folks know what else you do Well, you can definitely find me on smr podcast and this week's episode features a touching tribute from rod simons to his favorite Podcasters, but he does not get to live that touching moment very well I mean if there was if there was ever a tease That's it. Find out what chris and rob did to rod simmons on the next smr party Uh, and always catch me on barbecuing and tech last week's episode talking about the new, uh Butcher block cutting board and I wasn't able to make that and I wanted people to understand that that image that is a full Cheap pan that is being dwarfed by that cutting board. Wow So that thing is massive. I can't wait to cut my first brisket But yeah, we're talking we're talking all kinds of barbecue and technology we use around it Love it smr podcast dot com barbecue and bbq and tech dot com and big chris ashley on the socials Thanks to our brand new bosses tom we are Four for four. What is it thursday? It's thursday. Yeah, that's four days. Yeah, andrew and john just started backing us on patreon Said thank you andrew. Thank you john. We see you And we're glad to have you today's show is andrew john and every other patron And andrew and john welcome on in get that rss feed because if you stick around for the extended show good day internet We're going to talk about two no longer operational third party twitter clients that are asking their users Not to accept a refund from the apple store very nicely. You don't have to do it. It's an interesting It's an interesting maneuver and we're going to talk about that on good day internet You can catch this show live monday through friday at four p.m. Eastern 2100 utc Of course, we're on demand But we'd love to have you join us if you can live find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live And guess what we're back tomorrow with alison chariden and len pearl to joining us talk to you that This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover