 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Ken Hayes, Phillip Shane, and Paul Boyer. Coming up on DTNS, social media is exhausting. Well, you knew that, but did you know that that's why you end up buying 35 water bottles you didn't need? Also, Chevy will stop making its most popular EV ever, and Dead Zones for Calls are over, maybe, soon, thanks to Settlements. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 25th, 2023, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redbud, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. We are back, that's the Royal Wii, me, I'm back. Thanks again to everyone who made Las Vegas DTNS possible at TMS Vegas, and a big thanks to all of the folks who showed up and cheered us on, and we're watching. It was really, really fun and went really well. Let's start today's show with the Quick Hits. What do you think? I think so. AMD also want something to go really well. It announced the Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme chips aimed at the emerging handheld gaming PC market. AMD says at launch, these chips will be temporarily exclusive to ASUS, used in its upcoming ROG Ally handheld PC, which ASUS will fully detail at a May 11th launch event. Europe's Digital Services Act has strict rules for audits and transparency around content moderation that only apply to platforms that meet a certain criteria. We've covered this multiple times on Daily Tech News Show, but you always wondered, who's it going to be? Who qualifies? A lot of people have said, well, it's going to be Metta, it's going to be Google, but who else? Well, we found out. EU Commissioner for Internal Market Terry Bretton named the 19 platforms deemed systematically relevant. Not surprisingly, it includes Metta's Facebook and Instagram, Google's Search, Maps, Shopping and YouTube. However, other winners of regulation in Europe include Microsoft's Bing, LinkedIn, Amazon, AliExpress, Apple's App Store, TikTok and Snapchat. And that list isn't done yet. Bretton said a decision on four or five other companies to be included under DSA regulations will be determined in the next few weeks. I can't say any of those names surprised me. No, there wasn't a shocker in there was. I guess Bing maybe, but it's actually gotten bigger lately. Bing went from sort of like zero to hero, a short amount of time. WhatsApp updated its multi-device feature so that you can use the messaging app on multiple phones if you're running iOS or Android. You might say, well, didn't WhatsApp already do this? Yeah, previously it allowed additional access on Android tablets, browsers or computers, but not phones. But it's not as simple as just logging in on a different phone. You have to add a second phone by launching the app, choosing link to an existing account. That generates a QR code, your primary phone scans to link up and say, yes, it's really you. Okay, you're good. WhatsApp says this could be helpful for a business, for example, with multiple employees wanting to send and receive messages from the same business number, but using different phones or maybe you just have more than one phone. NVIDIA released Nemo Guardrails, an open source toolkit to help make models like GPT for accurate, appropriate, on topic and secure, just like me. Guardrails sits between the user and the language model and can be scripted to prevent certain topics. You know, just kind of look for things and say, hey, send that back to the model. We don't want that in front of the user or can even double check answers for accuracy by asking another large language model. And if the answers don't match, send that one back. It works with models that follow instructions and use the LangChain framework. Any company can implement Guardrails or NVIDIA is hoping maybe some of the companies will want to pay for the Nemo hosted version that NVIDIA sells you. I also misread this this morning, Tom, and I thought it was called LangChain, which was going to make me very happy. That's your cryptocurrency startup name right there. Might as well be. Yeah, somebody start that and, you know, let me know how it goes. DJI announced its latest consumer drone, the Mavic 3 Pro, which has a three camera setup and also adds a 70 millimeter telecamera designed for powerful subject framing. Telephoto, basically. It promises 43 minutes of flight time on a charge. That's three minutes less than the standard Mavic 3, but it has quite a few other upgrades. That is without object avoidance on or shooting video. The Mavic 3 Pro Cine model for cinema has Apple Pro Res encoding and one terabyte of storage. The regular Mavic 3 Pro starts at $2,199, has a variety of add-on options, which will change the price. And it goes all the way up to $4,799 for the top of the line Cine Mavic 3 Pro model, available to order now and shipping in May. All right. Let's talk cars. GM chair and CEO Mary Barra said Tuesday that the company will stop making the Chevy Bolt EV. The plant in Michigan that makes them will be transitioned to make electric trucks by 2024. Bolt is suffering the fate of many EV brands before it, as companies switched to making EV versions of all their brands, instead of having EV specific brands. The old Honda Insight, was that what it was called? It's no longer, you just get EV Civics and stuff like that. I still see them around, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, but they don't make them anymore. Like that, like they used to. So GM is launching EV versions of the Hummer, Cadillac Lyric and more built on the Ultium architecture. It really doesn't mean that GM is going to stop making electric sedans. It does mean that they're expanding into electric trucks more, which is smart because you make a lot of money off the trucks. But it does kind of feel like getting rid of the bolts the end of an era, doesn't it? It does. Yeah. And when I originally read the story this morning, I was like, isn't the Volt already done and has been for a while? Yes, because Volt and Bolt are two Chevy EV models that are different. The Volt seized operations back in 2019, at least manufacturing operations. You can still get one around. But yeah, the Bolt was sort of the, okay, we learned a lot of lessons from the Volt as far as a hybrid car goes. But the Volt was essentially built on the Chevy Cruze, which coincidentally is also seized operations in 2019. So it used a lot of the same parts. The Bolt was the, here's what we've learned, here's why it's better. And by all accounts, I've never ridden in one. I know a few people who had bolts and certainly on the internet, people loved them. So I think some of this news is a little surprising to people saying, why, like why, why, you know, if it was such a, you know, a beloved model sold a lot, why would Chevy not want to make them anymore? Old platform is one of the reasons they weren't using the new platform and they want to make everything on that Altium platform. But the other reason is while there are Bolt fans, I suspect that Chevy has run the numbers and realized that if you're going to get the masses to buy your Chevy's, you don't want to introduce them to a new name. You want to say, oh, the Chevy Equinox, yeah, we got that as an EV. Oh, the Cadillac, yeah, we got that as an EV. The Blazer, yeah, we got that. I mean, look at the F-150 Lightning. I know that's Ford, but I mean, what a great example of a car of the like was like way sold out before I even shipped one single model. Yeah. So I get why these brands are usually introduced as a way to distinguish things to get that early adopters, ooh, something new. And then when they start to go mainstream, that works against it because mainstream shoppers are like, ooh, I don't know Bolt. That's a new brand. I'm not familiar with that. You know, can I have... I want something tried and true. Yeah, a Mustang or whatever it is. Obviously not from Chevy, but you get my point. So I feel like that's why they're doing this. And it's... If it weren't for the new platform, I would suspect that they're just going to sell the Bolt under a different name, but they won't because it's a new platform, but they will have plenty of sedans that are EVs that you can choose. If you come in saying, gosh, I really wanted a Bolt, but you don't make them anymore. A Chevy salesperson will have a sedan that will be like, this is better than the Bolt. Here you go. Well, and you know, looking kind of closer into this and saying, okay, well, here's what GM is going for here. You know, I do not have a General Motors vehicle, but I do have a Volvo and my... The 2019 model of the XC60 that I drive now has a hybrid version. You know, Volvo has come out with more EV friendly versions of the same model. Like basically saying like, hey, Sarah, if you care about this and you maybe can part with either a little bit more money or be able to, you know, deal with mileage being a little bit of a different conversation, here's the car that you already love and we're just going to give you another version of it. I think that's the play here and GM knows it. And really, if you have a limited number of manufacturing plants that we're working on, the Bolts, for example, well, I mean, unless you open a new plant, it just makes sense to send it over to the models that people know and love and might buy more of. No, that makes perfect sense. You're not going to shut down a plant when you can make other things in it. And you're going to convert that plant to the Altium architecture. You're going to make multiple things in it. Bad things in our chat room say, and Bolts only fast charged at 50 kilowatts, so they were hard to road trip and they still had a bad rep from the battery fires. But they also, they had a lot of fans. So I'm not even sure how much that... I'm not disputing that. I'm just not sure how much of an effect that really had versus car companies just saying, we're going to take all the brands that we have and make them EVs. That is the plan. So we don't need to have a separate brand for an EV. That's kind of old school thinking. And I feel like that's what this tells us is we have crossed that bridge. Interesting that I feel like the Prius has become a brand in and of itself and will survive this transition. I wonder if there will be full EV Priuses that aren't hybrids, which would not be a Prius, but the brand is so strong I could see them doing it. I mean, to this day, I know many folks who, when I start the conversation, they say, oh, electric like a Prius. Yeah. Yeah, even though it's a hybrid. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, the brand, strong brand. Yeah. Good on you, Toyota. A few other pieces of news coming out of GM. Samsung and GM announced a joint venture to build EV batteries in the US starting in 2026, a few years from now. Also, Chevy's cruise, that's C-R-U-I-S-E, not C-R-U-Z-E. Don't get it twisted. Autonomous vehicle service in San Francisco now has permission to operate during daylight hours when traffic is greater. The service has 242 vehicles operating 1,000 driverless trips per day currently. The cruise origin, which has no steering wheel, doesn't have pedals either, will replace the Chevy bolts because we're not going to make them anymore. That cruise has been using starting in Austin later this year. Oh, I might have to try one of those when I go visit the folks in Austin. That'd be fun. Well, Starlink gets a lot of press as one of the companies that will help deliver internet from the sky. But there are others. One of them, I think we've mentioned once or twice, AST SpaceMobile, plans to offer cell phone calls by satellite. So not the internet part. The mobile part is what they've been testing. In fact, it just finished its first successful test with AT&T. A call was placed from an unmodified Samsung Galaxy S22. So this wasn't special equipment that you needed. Stock Samsung Galaxy S22 placed a call from Midland, Texas, where AT&T was operating, to Rockington, the carrier in Japan. That in itself is not that special. We've been carrying calls over satellites for decades, but usually cell phone calls start by connecting to a local cell tower, then get into the network and maybe get sent up by satellite to Japan. This one didn't. It was connected to Rockington in Japan using the AST SpaceMobile Blue Walker 3 satellite. The idea of this particular venture is to cover the dead zones for calls since a satellite can provide broad coverage without having to put cells on poles and buildings. And Sarah, we've talked multiple times about the fact that you live in one of those dead zones. Indeed I do. At first I was like, how often would I be without service and I would need to make a phone call but not need to access the internet? Well, funny. The things that we bury in our minds because especially during fire season, which is a big deal in the area of California that I live in, there have been times where the power gets cut and I have to drive 10 to 15 miles just to make a phone call because I have no cell service. I use Verizon, but that would apply to AT&T and T-Mobile and we've tried them all. And in those, I guess, I don't know, like SOS moments, this is absolutely a thing that I would need. I don't need it on a daily basis but I guess it depends on where you live and what your coverage is like and what your internet usage also is like or if you care. Yeah, the thing I got hung up on and I'm sure somebody in the audience who works in the telco industry could probably explain this to me but if you have internet, like a Starlink or a OneWeb, you can use that to place calls. In fact, there's even things like VoiceOver LTE where you can place an actual call using the internet that's not even VoIP necessarily or at least it's not like using Skype, right? So I was looking at this and I'm wondering, why is AES T-Space Mobile putting cell towers in space? Wouldn't it be better to just provide data and everything becomes data at some point? I'm not exactly sure why other than the telco system. Yeah, maybe it's cheaper to do, but it's not cheaper to build a whole satellite system that carries cell phone calls. So yeah. Yeah, it's a little, I don't know, I was a little confuddled by this as well. I have to assume that for a limited base of people saying, no, this is exactly what I want. What AES T-Space Mobile can do is say, okay, let's offer that to you, this very specific customer for a lower management cost than we would have if we just offered some sort of a broader data plan. You know what? There's something to that given that we haven't replaced cell towers with data. We use the cell towers to carry data. I'm not saying AES T-Space Mobile isn't going to do data, but I can see a cost savings of, hey, you can get subscribers in areas, rural areas, smaller subscribers that you wouldn't get. Also, you don't have to spend as much money trying to provide coverage in these edge areas where the maintenance is more expensive because you have to send people farther. Maybe it does make sense on paper to pay somebody like AES T-Space Mobile for space cell phone service. Maybe the cost that AES T-Space Mobile can charge comes down because they can offer it to multiple telcos. Or maybe they assume that you think that the cost has come down for the company when in fact they're offering the bare minimum for the cost of being able to provide more. I look forward to getting the person who knows what they're talking about. That tells us why this is. Thank you. Join in our conversation. In fact, you can do the explanation in our Discord. You don't even have to email us. You can join our Discord by linking to a Patreon account. Just get a Patreon account at patreon.com. Well, social media tires you out and also makes you more likely to buy unnecessary things. You might say, I know, Sarah, Captain Obvious. What else? Well, Assistant Professor of Advertising at the University of Tennessee, Matthew Pittman, wrote a research brief for the conversation called Social Media Scatters Your Brain and Then You Buy Stuff You Don't Need. Professor Pittman and his colleague, Eric Haley, studied how social media affects behavior and then published their results in the Journal of Interactive Advertising. Okay, so I think probably the first question is how do you study such a thing? Yeah, and how they studied it is going to answer a lot of people's questions about this and kind of indicate, you know, a little more of what actually goes on. So each study used three groups. There was a control group, as there should be. All they did was look at an ad. Same ad as the other two groups, but they didn't get any instructions on what to do or anything. They just said look at the ad and then answer some questions. A second group had to memorize a nine-digit number and then look at the ad. So that's giving you some cognitive load, making you do something, do some work to see if like, oh, is it just thinking about stuff that causes this? Yeah. And then the third group scrolled through an Instagram feed for 30 seconds, just 30 seconds before looking at an ad. Within each group, the number of likes on the ad was varied randomly. So you had lots of people in each one of these three groups and each person in the group was seeing a different number of likes to see like, oh, is the high-like number going to make them more respond to the ad than the low-like number? Finally, each group was asked to rate how likely they would be to buy the item in the ad and how much effort they estimated they put into thinking about the info. So, you know, how hard was it to think? The Instagram group was most likely to buy a product with lots of likes and also reported to have the most mental effort. They also had a harder time explaining why they wanted to buy a product. The other two groups would make kind of rational like, oh, I like the way the information was presented or oh, it was such a compelling visual. The Instagram group would say things like food. Just one word answer. The study, therefore, supports the theory that using social media puts you into cognitive overload. You think, well, yeah, I know it stresses me out because there's people saying things online. All of the outrage, it's them. No, it's just the act of doing it. You're constantly evaluating info in multiple formats, text, photo, video, some from friends and family, some from celebrities. All of those have different signals in your brain. It tires you out. And when you're tired out, you're less likely to have an inhibition to doing something and more likely to want to do something that you think might make you feel better. Oh, I mean, hey, you know, shopping is therapy. One of my Achilles heels for some time. I definitely feel like I'm on top of this ad manipulation thing. I see stuff in Instagram and I know the way that they describe the coolest sports bra that just came back onto the market, that the internet can't stop talking about all that stuff. I feel like it's, I'm beyond that. I'm above it, right? We all do. We all think that. Exactly. I mean, that's why advertising works, at least to some extent. What was interesting in the conversation piece was the comparison to, for example, they said, all right, you know, so your brain being on overload, let's say when you're scrolling Instagram, liken that to a situation where two roommates, you know, one roommate says to the other, hey, you want to get a pizza tonight? And the other roommate might say, do I, well, you know, do I have the money? Do I have the time? Am I hungry? All these sorts of, you know, variables that, yeah, that would rationally make you either say yes or no. But what if the other roommate, you know, is going through like a mental health crisis with a family member and, you know, like they're, you know, they stepped in dog poop five minutes ago, you know, so they're like, I have to deal with that, you know, and then maybe like somebody sent them a weird text and, you know, there are all sorts of reasons why that second roommate might say, yeah, yeah, whatever. Just sure. Yes. Pizza sounds fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't, I can't do this right now. How many times have we all said that? Yeah, about pizza, right? Like I'm so stressed today. I've had so bugged by things. Let's just have pizza, even though it's not a thing that's good for me. Yeah, like I just needed this to go away because I don't have the capacity to deal with this. So when you think about something like an ad being served to you on a network, not just Instagram, but, you know, any network where you're supposed to be enjoying your experience, right? But it's also designed to kind of throw you off, you know, you got filters, you got, you know, FOMO and, you know, all sorts of things that we all experience to some extent on a variety of social networks. Then it's like, do you want to buy these sheets? They're the best sheets you'll ever live in. I'm like, okay, yes, I do. And I've been there. I've done that. No, it's interesting too. History and knowledge helped even the cognitive overload users. So even the folks doing the Instagram feed cut through the fog. They found, because they did three different ads. So they did the study three different times. They did it once with a meal prep service, once for ice cream, once for coffee beans. And that was a way of teasing out like, oh, is the type of ad effect this? So let's do different types of ads with a whole new group every time, all broken up into the three groups. And the coffee bean lovers, self-described coffee bean lovers, didn't suffer the effects as much as the other two ad, or the non-coffee bean lovers, because they knew about it. Like they were able to focus a little more because they brought in their pre-existing knowledge. So it wasn't as hard to be critical and evaluate things as it was. So, yes, you may say, well, you know, I'm an Instagram user and I have not fallen for these ads. I see them all the time and I think, you know, that's just trying to get me. It's probably because that is a category that you are aware of. But if you've ever fallen for any of them, it's because it wasn't a category you are aware of. And I think the key here is not like stop using Instagram. The key is be aware that that's happening and put the phone down before you make any moves, you know, just give yourself a break. Give your brain a chance to recover. I mean, I always, I tell this to myself because, you know, my bank account is a very sad, limited situation. But I'm always like, you know what? If you still want this in the morning, sleep on it. Yeah. Sleep on it. And, you know, that has nothing to do with social media. That just kind of like impulsifying. It's a good policy, but yeah. It's just good policy. Yeah. I mean, unless you really need something or you already know that you want it and you don't have to have that conversation with yourself. But yeah, I thought that this was surprising because surprisingly, it surprised me how much it made sense. And I was, I had to admit that yes, I am definitely one of these people who, you know, it runs a foul of, you know, my own good thinking when it comes to ads being served to me because I am overloaded and that's by design. Yeah. And it's one thing to be like, oh, I could have told you that. It's another thing to have a study that when you're talking to somebody else about it, maybe somebody who's getting stressed out on their social networks and you're like, you know, you may not be stressed out by what they're saying. You may just be stressed out by the fact that you're doing that. You can point to this is like, here, let me, let me show you. It's not you. It's just how the human brain works. Right. That could be helpful. Well, Tom, we have a little bit of potentially sad space news. It's sad for now, although I don't know. We have some time, but a commercial lunar lander is presumed lost after its moon landing attempt just a few hours before this recording. Let me tell you a little bit more about it. Japanese company iSpace had hoped to become the first private company to land an object on the lunar surface. The Hakuto R-M1 carried the United Arab Emirates Rashid rover meant to analyze lunar soil and atmosphere as well as the Sora Q mini rover, which is a kind of tennis ball shaped robot made by the toy company, Tomi, T-O-M-Y, designed to roll across the moon's surface. However, the team lost communications with the lander right around the scheduled landing time, and after about 25 minutes, they announced on the live stream that they couldn't confirm that it landed successfully after all. Which is disappointing because what you wanted to happen was it to be successful and then open up all the people who are like, well, I'm gonna sign up with iSpace and get on those SpaceX rockets and start sending things to the moon because that's how you start to build moon colonies and get private enterprise to help build those things. This isn't gonna stop all that stuff. It just means like, oh, we got a few more things to learn before we can guarantee delivery, basically. You might, and I was a little confused about this as the story seemed to be gaining attraction. When I woke up this morning, I was like, hey, no, there's something wrong with the story. It launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in December. So I'm obviously looking at like an old story. No, it actually took five months to get to the moon because the load was designed on purpose with a less powerful propulsion system because it wanted to save on fuel and reduce overall costs and that was supposed to be a concept if it was successful for other commercial space payloads to go to the moon, especially if, let's say, humans were living there full-time. Yeah, it's like when you pay for ground shipping instead of express. Right, yeah. It pay a little more. I live on the moon after all. Ground shipping always saves you a little bit of money because it takes a lot longer to get there. Yeah, so again, this could turn itself around. There were a couple of photos that were sent back before communication was severed. So, you know, maybe all is not lost. Maybe it'll wake up. Maybe either way, they're going to learn something about this and they'll try it again. Good thing they saved money on the fuel. All right, let's check out the mail bag. This comes in from Ted. Ted wrote after our conversation about gamers older than 50. Ted meaning our conversation. Ted says, I am currently 61 and I play about 10 hours of video games per week. I'm currently playing Valheim on my Steam Deck. Before that, it was Witcher 3. During the pandemic lockdown, I was addicted to cyberpunk on the Xbox and I completed it three times. Ted says, I'm a 70s child and I remember when one of my friends got pong. I was disappointed it was not like the arcade and pinball games at the mall. I dreamed of a day when I could play cool games at home. I think the future has been great. That's a nice story. Thank you, Ted for writing it. It's another positive old person video game. I say old person including myself in that. I imagine Ted probably appeared older than me. Also 61 is the new 41. Ted. Yeah, seriously. You are spry. I also know that feeling. I remember getting Pac-Man on the Atari. I didn't get it, but my friend Jonathan did and we were so excited and we turned it on and were like, doesn't look like Pac-Man because they had to make some compromises for the Atari 2600. I remember that feeling. Well, we also remember on a daily basis the fact that we have the best patrons in the world and we'd like to thank a couple of our brand new bosses. Chase and Amanda just started back in us on Patreon. Thank you, Chase. And thank you, Amanda. Chase and Amanda, you're the best. You make this show possible. All the other patrons, you are also the best. Please welcome in your new best friends, Chase and Amanda, into Patreon family where you all can stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. I got into Project Blue Sky. Thank you for inviting me, the person who invited me. I don't know if you want me to credit you, but thank you very much for inviting me. It was very nice of you to share your invite. So we're going to talk about whether this in fact is the much discussed quote unquote next Twitter. But in the meantime, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That is 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back again tomorrow talking about the newer scientific reasons why people might be afraid of machines becoming sentient with Nate Langston joining us. Talk to you then. Thank you.