 Coming up on DTNS GM takes on Tesla with new electric vehicle battery tech Twitter joins the ephemeral messaging trend Is it still a trend at this point? Also, what makes a good coder spoiler? This is the Daily Tech news for Wednesday March 4th 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane In Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang We were just talking about not touching your face and the heroic diary of Elizabeth Lappato at the verge That was all a good day internet. If you want to get that conversation to more you got to become a patron and patreon.com DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know Hulu's live TV service is now available on Sony's PlayStation joining YouTube TV as options to replace the now closed PlayStation view streaming TV service Hulu's existing PlayStation app will be updated to give access to live TV features In other news Amazon Studios join Twitter and Facebook and cancelling plans to attend South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas Starting March 13th Amazon had planned two screenings some panels and a marketing event. I cannot tell you how itchy my face is right now Microsoft is offering free six-month trials to the premium version of Microsoft Teams The premium version has more calling and meeting features than the free version But Microsoft is also updating the free version of teams to let users schedule meetings for video calling starting March 10 This is all to help people who have to work remotely because of COVID-19 concerns Tesla has been using an older slower processor for its autopilot functions for cars made in China since January 7th Because of a lack of chips up by yes, the ripples are felt by many Tesla says it will upgrade the chip free of charge when supplies become available the newer chips prices images 21 times faster than the previous generation All right, let's talk a little bit more about this trend that Twitter is on Well, Twitter is feeling quite on fleet today. They announced they will test a new sharing format called fleets This is starting in Brazil. So we're gonna gonna see that happen first fleets Cannot receive likes public replies or retweets and disappear after 24 hours if it sounds a lot like a story Well, you wouldn't be crazy fleets show up in a rounded profile icon at the top of the timeline From people who follow each other fleets do not show up in search or moments and cannot be embedded on external websites First of all fleets is just a great word. I mean it's because it's because it's a fleeting tweet get it Yeah, I was I was thrilled when I saw this this morning. Yeah, that's you that too. This is interesting because Twitter the one thing about Twitter that does has never worked for me is if I am involved in Watching some live events and there's I don't know like maybe ten other people who are gonna Understand what I'm talking about or whoever happens to be on Twitter right that moment and we're all doing the same thing You know like maybe if I'm watching the Super Bowl and my team is about to lose and I write like no And there's no context or anything. Well, I always without fail a few days later We'll get someone being like are you okay? Look at the timestamp like whatever it was is over now But this would be really good for moments like that the one thing about it is is Twitter seems to be making it Pretty limiting so that there's no conversation to be had whatever I'm saying is not only ephemeral But kind of thrown out into the ether without any context. You can respond by DM. That's it But sure that gets shuttled over into DMs. That's not a conversation. That's part of the general fleet Ecosystem the fleet ecosystem it all it also assumes that you have your DMs on which I assume They're gonna have some sort of reminder to tell people if they get replies They're not gonna be able to get these are people who follow each other. Oh So you tend to have technically that's true. Yeah, you can lock them out But technically that's true. The one thing we haven't said at all is that the term will be Twitter fleets Which is a weird thing to say out loud I don't know if I'm gonna call them that Twitter fleets like what are you doing? Oh, we'll go check out my Twitter fleets because if you just say go check out my fleets It's gonna take a while to anybody knows what the crap you're talking about and this is the first new way of communicating on Twitter Since the DM right they've they've taken tweets and made different things out of them like moments and trending topics But those are still just tweets these are pieces of communication that will not show up in your timeline They're accessed in a different way. They don't show up in any timeline You have to go up and click on a thing to say I want to see that fleet from Scott or Sarah Which is a whole different way of experiencing Twitter people are used to the sort of the river of Twitter things just kind of hitting their timeline So this this is an interesting idea But I'm not sure if it actually solves the problem for Twitter because I think people just end up not using it But I guess that's why they're testing it in Brazil just to find out. Well, if you only have let's say I follow 200 people They have to follow me back for me to see theirs and for them to see mine You suddenly have just whittled the whole thing down to an audience of 200. I don't know if that's Interesting the idea is this is your friends This is like I just want to tell my friends the people I actually follow But then that's also not how Twitter works because so many people game the system by automatically following back anybody who follows them, right? Right, right. So all that stuff gets real messy plus the whole idea of stories on other apps has always been This is another way to reach the people following me and there's no caveat that I have to follow them back I think this might be a goof because if somebody let's just I don't know Pat Noswalt wants to do something funny on a fleet That would probably be cool for all of us fans of his that follow him to see it Instead he's got to follow us for it to matter and I don't know that it ever will So why would him and a bunch of his comedian friends? Just like if you're a regular user, I think you get two minutes of video on a fleet But specially approved people can get 10 minutes I bet some people's fleets will be able to be broadly available without having to have follow-up Yeah, I I think it it'll probably become a setting that the user can choose I also feel like okay, this isn't exactly the same thing as a DM But let's say the scenario that you described Scott What if I really did want to reach those 200 people not everybody following me But you know people that I consider a little bit closer to well, I don't want to DM them all separately I don't want to put them all on a big old group DM. So this is a way to sort of half blast out something Yeah, that's a good way doesn't really need to be there the next day They still need to hurry up and do it in 24 hours, but yeah, it's that's an interesting way I would do it for let's say announcing our live stream But I won't because it's only gonna go in the fleet section right so there you go General Motors announced a new battery called ultium that uses pouch style cells instead of cylindrical cells And that means they can be stacked vertically or horizontally So you get a little more versatility in how you design the car around this electric vehicle battery The ultium's 50 to 200 kilowatt hour range can get up to 400 miles on a charge depending on how it's configured GM added aluminum to reduce the cobalt content to seven by 70 percent That helps bring down the cost ultium's cost should be below a hundred dollars per kilowatt hour So vehicles that use ultium potentially would be more affordable GM plans to have 20 electric Name plates. They're not models anymore. They're name plates because whatever, but they're gonna have 20 of those by 2023 with the first three coming in the next few months It's plant GM's plant in Hamtrammack, Michigan will be retrofitted to produce autonomous and electric vehicles and Battery cells will be made at a factory run by a joint venture of General Motors and LG Chem in Lordstown, Ohio So the batteries made in Lordstown shipped up to Hamtrammack, but in the vehicle and then they've rolled off the assembly line Silly name aside. I think ultium sounds like there's nothing wrong with Hamtrammack. Oh, you meant ultium Hamtrammack you guys are awesome. Don't don't go changing, but I Always wondered I always wondered if big battery and or a big battery advancement would finally come from what we're doing with automobiles With with batteries and I'm not saying that this immediately translates to batteries in general or storage in general Yeah, it may not right. Yeah, but I like I'd like to hear when there's battery innovation because you hear this all the time Batteries haven't budged for 20 years. They haven't moved. We've just gotten smarter devices. They know how to take advantage of them Well, maybe in cars because we have a very mission critical, you know mission happening here We can finally see some real innovation. So great Yeah, and cobalt mining is problematic price aside. So all of this sounds Great, I'd love to see this in more cars if it ends up being the way of the future Well, you're gonna get 20 name plates by 2023 and We'll probably sell these batteries to other automakers. They they're already in partnership with Honda on one of their EVs So I'm sure it'll go in there a Feature Google showed it. I'm still laughing at name plate a feature Google showed at CES back in January that reads web pages Allowed is rolling out worldwide to Android users users tell Google Assistant to read it or read this page And then the page will be read aloud and a highlight words as they are read if you want to follow along You can tap the screen to move to a particular section if you like You can also adjust the speed of the reading to be slower or faster kind of how you do with a podcast if you like it to Draw all out a little bit more or be a little bit snappier the feature also translates between 42 languages So this is this is pretty cool pretty nifty for for a lot of folks. I I don't know when I looked at the the the way that it it worked in a in a video that Google had Had shared with the world. I was like, it's still kind of robotic But Google Assistant's voice is one of the least annoying of all assistance to me It's it's not that bad and you probably get used to it and I love the idea of maybe For the show, I mean, I don't have an Android device so I can't use it yet but for the show if I Can't sit in front of my computer, but I really need to read the story about GM's new batteries I could have it read to me so that I see it coming in handy even if it's not an accessibility feature Which of course there's that too Yeah, I Was thinking about this and the more I think about it the features that matter to me the most here are the speed settings Is where does that sounds? There's a lot of things will read stuff to me now either manually or other apps or otherwise so none of that none of that sounds hugely innovative the innovation here will be Kind of devil in the detail stuff like adjusting that speed I know people who would love to have this speed reading to them in a car And I know others would much rather have that slow way down And sort of everything in between forgetting about you know great accessibility Leaps forward with this so I'm into it and I do like that voice I also hope there's other voice options that'd be cool just to shake things up Well, yeah, I mean this is just a feature of Google Assistant We can have all kinds of wishes about what Google Assistant could become and that'll be be part of it But yeah, I think it's a nifty nifty thing All right, well, let's take a look at the folded puzzle game talked about this on TMS briefly this morning This crowd sources research into protein folding in a game format and has added the COVID-19 virus or corona viruses It's most mostly known as And it's a related puzzle to that the hope is to develop a protein that binds to COVID-19 to block interaction with human cells and halt infection Human players are often better than computers at finding certain solutions good at recognizing patterns that sort of thing However, the folding at home project is also researching the virus folding at home Uses spare computer cycles to power a computer model people have certainly heard of that before but I went download this today I haven't played it yet, but there is a Mac a PC and a Linux version people can download and try Yeah, so the idea is there's a spike on the COVID-19 virus that it uses to bond to human cells and that's how it's able to inject its genetic code and Replicate and that's how viruses infect you right they just keep replicating and replicating and replicating So if they can create a protein that would sort of lock on to that spike and stop it from being able to connect to anything That would stop the virus from replicating and that would be a very effective treatment This is an attempt to figure out what protein might be worth trying to block that And and if you're like well, why can't you just look at it and figure it out a fold it around it It's not that simple when you're talking about how proteins fold Hence the projects both the fold it puzzle game and folding at home are more than 10 years old They've been trying to find different kinds of proteins for lots of different diseases Through this folding at home uses a brute force method of just saying let's use the extra cycles on your computer to power an algorithm That'll just try every possible combination it can it can do And then fold it is saying yeah But sometimes humans are intuitive and they can just make logical jumps that computers can't And so that might get us to something faster But if we pitch it as a puzzle game then people are more likely to want to take part and try this out So either one of these or both is a great way to help contribute to a potential cure to the coronavirus Well, I think we should all as well as not touching our faces be playing these games Get get to the puzzle everybody. Let's find a solution humans You said it right when you said that I went like this like an idiot. I don't know why I didn't notice and now I'm doing it again Yes, it's it's that yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to it's the reverse psychology. I don't know of some kind but wash your hands Don't touch your face Play fold it fold it. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, I it's All kidding aside. It's it's pretty amazing that the humans and mass could could could actually be the solution that we're looking for it just takes more and more of Human interaction for it to be stronger. That's super cool. It's not guaranteed, right, right? But it's worth trying and you'll have a fun puzzle game if nothing else India's Supreme Court has sided with cryptocurrency exchanges that were banned in April 2018 by India's central bank That barred banks from offering services that supported digital currency So they didn't outlaw the digital currencies They said that they can regulate banks and therefore they're gonna tell banks they can't support digital currencies Which basically undermine digital currencies in India the court struck down the RBI's curbs Which would let virtual currency investors and businesses in India push against stricter rules being planned by the government and participate in projects Maybe if Libra ever happens something like that The Supreme Court is separately hearing another case which will decide on regulations for digital currencies itself The Indian central bank has been exploring creating a sovereign bank digital currency of its own and said private coins like Bitcoin Increase the potential for money laundering and other illegal activities. Basically, the court said That yes the central bank can regulate banks But it can't stop them from doing this that it needed to have a better reason for stopping banks from supporting digital currencies Then just the fact that they're digital currencies So it's not impossible That the RBI Comes up with a better reason and is able to put this back in place and get it tested by the court But for now it means that cryptocurrency exchanges have got a second win I don't think India is going to give up on this though because anti laundering anti fraud is a huge Priority and a huge effort of the Modi government So I would expect them to try another way to at least curb this if not bring it down Besides just the regulations that are also being disputed in court as well Well, I get being super nervous about not super nervous That's a bad way to describe how government feels about banking regulation But I understand the worries that they might have about corruption or this not working right or whatever But this does seem like a step in the right direction if you Think that cryptocurrency is a part of our banking future and you want worldwide banks to be able to To play in that playground And considering the size of India and yeah, like it's a big deal, right? So I mean, it's hard to say whether this is truly a step forward or just a temporary Stopgap until it's in I don't know But I hope I don't know it feels like the future like even though I barely understand it and Tom explains it every 10 days And then I tried to understand it better and all that I still Something in me knows the blockchain and cryptocurrency and everything around all this stuff is the future. So get on board India Yeah, hey folks Well, I mean, I think what this does is it takes an overcorrection and brings it back toward the center And we'll see if it swings the other way or keeps that, you know, banging around in the middle to get all the tech Headlines each day in about five minutes. Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com Chantel Prott an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington is the lead author on a study published in Nature's scientific reports looking at what Is a quality that helps people to learn programming languages fast They looked at three dozen thirty six adults who as part of this study agreed to learn Python During the learning process while they were learning to program with Python they were tested for things like problem-solving memory language skills numerical skills resting state brain activity etc etc to kind of assess What are these people's natural talents and how do those correlate to how well they're doing at learning the programming because some As with everything some people learn faster than others The study found and again, this is 36 adults right now So this is a pilot study there needs to be like wider studies done on this But you do this kind of study to find out if it's worth doing those bigger studies And this one found that the participants who learned Python the fastest had strong language Working memory and reasoning abilities They didn't have strong math skills. In fact having a stronger math skill Barely correlated So it was your language skills your memory working memory particularly and your ability to reason That correlated with being able to learn the programming language fast math engineering types of skills that aren't related to reasoning Weren't not important in how well you were able to program Python So they're concluding that it seems like Learning a programming language may be more like learning an actual spoken language like Korean or Spanish Then it is like learning math and that the idea that we're putting Development coding and programming in the math sciences department May be doing a lot of people who would be great programmers a disservice because well, I'm crappy at calculus I guess I'll never be a coder doesn't appear to be true And so many of computer science degrees are set up with a very strong math Foundation, I mean I was a math major briefly I like math I've I've always found math fun But it was something where I was under the I was under the understanding That I would have to go really far in math if I wanted to you know get into a CS type of field and I just ended up going in a different direction But I know so many other people who are like, oh, I would just be completely You know priced out of something like this because I'm not so good with numbers and it turns out that The more programming languages have evolved over the years the more they are language based rather than just being able to You know think of everything in terms of numbers Which is a good thing doesn't mean you don't still need math skills But I love the idea that it's a lot like learning a foreign language because it's what it is It's it's a foreign language that you yeah, you You won't necessarily just be good at it if you're bilingual already But it's something where it's like I want to figure out how to convey this thought How do I do it and that makes a lot of sense to me today is today even more so it's more of a Language and less of a math language The languages are object oriented They don't have the same kind of reliance on one's math skills that they may have used to Had and so I can speak from my own experience There was a time where I was heavily involved in making php web pages What interested me was not the math. It's never been my strong suit always hated math And when I had to use it, I would but what really Stuck with me and what really made it a great fun endeavor for me Was the communication side of it of if I do this then this happens If somebody enters this Then look at all the cool things that can happen as a result when they hit that submit key Like to me that was magic. I felt like I was like working in a I don't know like a whole new medium that was different than math That was different than even just communication It was a way to like bring data from one place to another because someone made You know did something and what i'm saying is probably Very rudimentary to most programmers and where what got them into it when they were 10 or 11 years old But even as an adult that really appealed to me and I think that This this has actually helped kind of confirm for me. What I was what I was jiving on was this feeling of well This isn't just math. This isn't just algebra. This is it's some of those things and I need to buff up on those things And that's great and never hurts, but really what is this is about execution. It's about planning. It's about Result what result do I want and therefore what underpinnings need to exist for the result to happen? That's very different than just You know knowing the end of an equation Yeah, a lot of people have been saying logic In the twitch chat while we're doing this show and it's not exactly logic Depending on what you mean by it logic is sort of a loosely used term But logic in the mathematical sense doesn't seem to be what they're talking about if by logic You don't really mean logic, but you mean reasoning then yeah Just being able to problem solve and sort of intuitively understand like well if this is true and this is true Then this is probably also true. That seems to be part of this I'll tell you man when I was in college. I was a very mixed up person But you know, I did great at linear algebra I hated business calculus later. I found out that's because I took business calculus and not just calculus And I was I was all turned around but I thought well if I want to do computer science I have to do those classes And I don't want to keep doing those classes and I love journalism and I love language So I look at this like a lot of other people in our chat and y'all And say well shoot if if the standards had been you need to be good at reasoning working memory and link and language I probably would have like dived right in and done whatever math I don't think we're saying you don't need any math. We're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water here But I would have done the math that I needed to do to understand the programming languages without worrying like Oh, I have to be really really good at it, right? Yeah, I agree. I think that's I think I would have done more of that in college And I would have been less like no, I'm an artist type. I can't do that and they shouldn't come over here either Staying you're laying guys like I would have looked at it very differently. It was a weird assumption back then And there's also, you know, there's the obvious gender gap with coders and engineers and it doesn't mean oh That's because men are better at math than women and that's why they're all coders now But I think that there there was sort of this Assumption that well, it's so male dominated because that's just sort of the way that it's set up It's a little bit more intimidating and this kind of study Makes me hope that it would be less intimidating because it opens up a lot more skill sets of people who are like Oh, yeah, that sounds exactly like me. This sounds fun. Yeah, and uh, you know still scroll pointed out You don't really need a degree to become a coder anymore So there is, you know an escape valve here where if you're if you've been thinking gosh programming sounds fun But it's probably got a lot of math You just go get a udemy course or or something like that and start programming There's there's no reason to wait around which is one of the beauties of Sort of the advancement in technology and the internet Has made available but but you should even then even if you're not going to go the college route You should know like oh, it's the it's these kinds of skills that might Make programming Easier for you to learn than you thought again. This is only 36 adults. There needs to be a wider study But it does kind of make some sense. I wish I was part of the study. It sounds like just a cool study Maybe you can be part of the next explore my mind. Tell me if i'm good at coding Yeah, thanks everybody who participates in our sub reddit You could submit stories and vote on others at daily tech news show reddit.com You can also join the conversation in our discord Which you can join by linking to a patreon account at patreon.com Slash d t n s All right, let's check in. What's the latest on text message this week where Nate linkson is tackling food and royalty Hey, let me ask you all a question Would you eat food you ordered from someone on facebook marketplace? Even if you didn't know them it's been happening a lot in the uk and our equivalent of the us fda is getting involved Also in england We have a lot of prehistoric buildings and castles and relics of villages built hundreds of years ago And metal detectors have got so affordable and good that archaeologists are worried that people who buy them don't realize That if they find treasure it belongs to the queen You can learn more about facebook food and what the queen doesn't want you digging up on text message at uk tech show dot com They talked about an ad on facebook for a single onion two kilometers away from nate Wow, who would I guess if you live next door, right? Not everybody's two kilometers away If you live next door and you need an onion real bad, but you'd go to facebook to find that I don't know. I don't know if that's the way the world works. But yes any treasure you find belongs to the queen as it should All right, let's check out the mailbag nick writes in about our conversation about uh, apple maybe going mini led Nick says i'm actually excited to see reports that apple is going to go down the mini led route with their coming products according to ming chi kuo I have zero apple hardware in my life But I have a super high-end pc The highest end gaming pc monitors are getting new revisions later this year with mini led backlights And the new backlight is expected to add a large amount to the price of these new revisions With apple ordering mini led backlights from suppliers first That will hopefully mean the orders would be high enough to bring down mini led prices in general Right now there's a premium charge for mini led and anything that brings down the price is nothing but good news to me As these displays are amazing to gaze upon That's a cool way of looking at this nick, which is like, you know, I don't not going to buy an apple product But man if if they start making the price of mini leds Scale high enough that that it brings down prices for other people that that could be cool I love that we should all get stoked when you hear samtung is going to do a thing And they're going to be worldwide because then it makes apple fans They should go oh well that means that stuff's going to come down Maybe we'll see something similar or it'll be cheaper when it hits same thing goes the other way like this is This is the reason why this particular part of Technology competition is good and I say, you know, hooray for that. I'm all ready for mini pixel. Let's go Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including steve iadarola mark gibson and dr. Carmine m bailey Scott johnson. I hope you haven't been touching your face Just once but even if you have what else has been going on over the last week Well, and i'm not when i'm not trying to not touch my face I'm busy making content and you can find all of it over at frogpants.com if comics are your liking There's a bunch of links there if you'd rather listen to a bunch of podcasts that have been around forever You can listen to those lots of projects lots of cool stuff always available at your fingertips at frogpants.com And for everything else you can poke me on twitter And maybe you'll see my fleets when they happen over at twitter.com slash scott johnson Well, I can't wait to make my first fleet. Yeah, maybe I'll travel to brazil just so I can do it Hey, uh, you know what day it is What? It's three months since we started the counter on people getting a sticker poster mugger t-shirt with the special six year anniversary Dts logo on it. Oh I just got the email from patreon That the first batch is headed to the factory to get printed and mailed out to 174 patrons who are at the right level kept their pledge for three months and will be getting their Stuff you can join them folks get some cool stuff and insider perks on top of it All the details are at patreon.com slash dts slash merch Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com You got something to say something on your mind We'd love to hear it we're live money through friday at 4 30 p.m eastern 21 30 utc find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with justin robber young talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this brover