 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to every single one of you, including Tim Ashman, Johnny Hernandez, Hi Tech Oki and our new patron, Risa. On this episode of DTNS, the Pixel Fold reviews are in. Why pros prefer MacBooks to the Mac Pro and how AI is killing the old web. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 27th, twenty twenty three in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Taco in motion. I'm Sarah Lane. Taco in motion. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Sorry, Roger, that was just too good. Yes, welcome, my friends. We have lots of good technology news for you. That's why you're here. That's why we're here. So let's start with the quick hits. Meta rolled out messenger supervision controls in its family center in the US, the UK and also Canada. This lets parents enroll teens using the standard messenger app. Also make changes to contacts and privacy and safety settings and limit time within the app overall. Instagram also rolled out its quiet mode globally. This feature pauses notifications and Ottawa applies to DMs that users are taking a break. Meta also expanded Instagram's take a break notifications to Facebook. Ah, the Google Pixel Fold is shipping. Here's an overview of what tech reviewers are saying about it. The Pixel Fold has a landscape first orientation when you open it and unlike Samsung and gadget like that, the verge didn't. Everybody praised how flat the device folds as well as the big usable exterior display, the cameras and the battery life. On the negative side, it's 1,800 bucks and it's a little heavy. The verge didn't like the software calling it a gated experience compared to Samsung and their durability questions. The phone warns you to avoid contact with sand, crumbs, fingernails or sharp objects. And in fact, something worked its way into the gap on the edge of the screen and punctured the OLED screen of ours Technica's review unit after four days it died. The good news, though, is that repair parts for the Pixel Fold will be available through iFixit, including batteries and both the inner and outer screens. Overall, reviewers seem to feel it's a worthy competitor in the foldable space. But as Android Police said, it's an $1,800 rough draft. Oh, man, the sand part. Yeah, enjoy doing that. Don't take it to the beach. Mm hmm. Or if you do enjoy, enjoy your iFixit capabilities. Speaking to investors, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said that the company plans to use Nintendo accounts to smooth the transition from the switch over to a next gen console. Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS consoles used Nintendo and network IDs that didn't automatically transfer to Nintendo accounts. Furukawa also said there are now more than 290 million Nintendo accounts across consoles and also mobile. Time to update you on the latest revelations from the FTC versus Microsoft case. Looks like Microsoft considered acquiring both Sega and Bungie at various points. Sega was thought to be able to help game pass if they'd gotten it. And Bungie was going to be valued for its IP, of course, like Destiny. Sony now owns Bungie, if you haven't kept track of that. There was also an email where Xbox Game Studios chief Matt Booty said Microsoft could spend Sony out of business, which doesn't look good in the court case. But Microsoft says it was just a thing they said it was never pursued as a strategy. A February 2022 email from Bethesda, senior VP of global marketing, regarding Microsoft statements that it would keep Call of Duty non-exclusive if it got Activision Blizzard said, I'm confused. Is this Call of Duty policy not the opposite of what we were just asked and told to do with our own titles? What's the difference? So that doesn't look good either. Finally, a state of the business presentation in the court filings from June 2022 talks about a cloud version of Windows for consumers as a long term strategy. Microsoft offers cloud versions of Windows for business. So they might be bringing it to you, Sarah. And the rest of all, I, yes, I look forward to that. For your design nerd person in your life, we should alert you that Android is changing its brand identity for the first time since 2019. Now, hold on to your butts. It's not that crazy. The robot head is staying. But it's getting a 3D look with some shadows and light reflection. And you might want to sit down for those. The A and Android is now capitalized. I know, Tom, I know, I know. People are very normal. This is our new normal. And, you know, if you have feelings, please email us. Feedback at DailyTechNewShout.com. The cats, dogs, redesigning their Android logos. A is capitalized. I guess capitalizing it A. It's a good time to rebrand things. That have Android in the name. All right, that's a look at the quick gets. Let's talk about this verge article. Yeah, so at this year's WWDC, just earlier this month, Apple touted its latest Mac Pro, among many other things. But the Mac Pro as the machine for power users. That's what it's always been, right? Audio engineering, color grading, video transcoding. All part of the specs that Apple knows that power users want and need. Apple's product page further mentions the Apple Pro. Good for code compiling, animation, compositing up to 8K scenes, 3D rendering, analyzing enormous data sets. Sounds great, right? Except that some of the numbers aren't really adding up for people in the pro market. Apple announced the new Mac Pro the same day. It also announced a smaller and very much more affordable M2 Ultra Mac Studio that has the same processor, the same RAM and storage as the Mac Pro, at least, you know, in base models. The Verges, Monica Chin, spoke to quite a few prosumers who more or less said there's not a great reason to buy a Mac Pro at this point when Apple's own laptops have gotten as good as they have. Out of more than 20 people, only one enthusiastically said Mac Pro. No, that's not because the Mac Pro is bad, but because Apple's other computers, namely its laptops with Apple Silicon chips, you know, M1 and above, have just gotten good enough that you don't necessarily need it. So, Roger, you wrote a column on this for the patron just a couple of weeks ago. Why do you think Apple continues the Mac Pro line at this point? So, one of the things that I looked at was the actual specs of the machine. And if you compare them, they're very close to the actual, to the Mac Studio Ultra. The only thing it really offers over that, that that product line are the PCIe slots, the expansion slots. Now, the expansion slots, as you just mentioned, don't support GPUs. They don't even support Apple's own afterburner Mac Pro accessory that was sold with the last gen Intel Mac Pro machines. So really, it limits it to storage and high speed networking devices, cards that go into them. You theoretically have 128 gigabytes of per second of bandwidth across that entire bus. So working through it, you have a machine that works exactly like a Mac Studio, lots of bandwidth. What would you use that for? And the only thing I could reasonably come up with is as a dev station for the Visor or Vision Pro. Oh, yeah, no, that makes sense. So I've always wondered why Apple even flirts with this kind of stuff because they made the decision when they annoyed the entire industry by gutting final cut to say, look, we're focused on consumers, we're not after businesses, we're not after the enterprise. We will provide minimal tools because we want people to have iPhones, we want people to have Macs, but we are not focused on business use cases, industry use cases. So that makes me wonder why bother with developing a Mac Pro. And I think you nailed it, Roger, which is you have developers. So even if you're not going to make rack servers, you probably do need to still have something for your developers. The laptops are that in most cases. But yeah, I could see if you want people desperately to create apps for your headset in advance of its launch, you're going to need to give them a tool to do that. I mean, you have to remember that the Vision Pro has multiple sets of cameras. You have audio, but you also have very high resolution displays for your eye. If you're going to develop anything, it's going to have to be at least 4K. And so you're dealing with whether it's static images, video, whatever it is, you're going to be half, you're going to have to shuffle around a lot of data. And that's where high speed NVMe PCIe expansion based storage really makes sense because now you need somewhere to shuttle all this to. And if you're connected to a sand, you would you definitely need a PCIe slot in order to deal with the amount of data that you're developing for. And because it's so expensive, it's seven thousand dollars to start off with. I mean, once you really max it out, it's well over twelve thousand and it's eight hundred bucks for the wheels that go on it. You don't develop something like that as kind of like an oversight. Like, oh, I totally missed that we spent a lot of money developing. Yeah, it's not a throwaway. Yeah, there's definitely a purpose behind it. And, you know, this speaks to the to the way that I think Apple now sees the kind of segmentation of its user base where you have the light users, which are MacBook, iMac, and then, of course, you have your more professional developers on the Mac Pro MacBook Pros and then the Mac Studio. And this is like, hey, you're going to work for us, but not for us because you're going to be working for your own. I wonder how long and I don't know, maybe never. But how long until Apple goes, OK, we get it. Everybody who, you know, can afford this but can afford something that does what they want to do for well under 50 percent the price. At what point do we say this is the vision pro companion? If you're really a developer and you really want to make something cool, this is the computer that you need to buy. So the Mac Pro can do a lot more. I mean, it does come in a in a rack mount case that kind of makes it a horizontal. But, you know, you don't want to necessarily just kind of sell it as only the vision pro because you could definitely cut off whatever foreseeable sales you have. But for people of legacy devices, whether it's a broadcast network or a VFX house, but, you know, it's it's definitely there, I think, to support that particular product that Apple has. Because from by all accounts, VFX and other visual artists are using Windows. The cost is cheaper. The flexibility is there. So Mac Pro is just kind of it's a niche. It's a niche product. And I think I think you've identified the niche Apple would like to target when they when they made it. Let's talk about an advance that might get us past the death of Moore's law. University of Arizona physics professor Mohamed Hassan wrote an article for the conversation about optical electronics as the future of computers. Yeah. So years ago, we reached the speed limit of how fast electrons could move through silicon based semiconductors. But you can keep increasing speed by making those circuits smaller. That's why you hit here. Chip companies talking about how many nanometers their chip processes. You might say, I don't know. Does that make my life better? Well, maybe yes or no. But the smaller, the faster. But we're getting close to a physical limit of how small a transistor can be before it just isn't possible anymore to keep chips getting faster. We need to switch to optical electronics. So says Hassan and colleagues who published a paper in Science Advances in February on a laser based system that uses photons instead of voltage. So you all know computers use ones and zeros to create your data binary numbers, right? Right now, voltage sends electrons through a system to indicate a one. And then no electrons indicates a zero. The optical system that Hassan's team developed uses a laser to control whether a piece of glass is transparent or reflective. And then another laser shooting through that glass either passes through the glass for one, or if it is made reflective, bounces off the glass and that's a zero. And you may say, OK, does that make it fast? Yeah, it does. The maximum speed for an electron is a nanosecond that is one billionth of a second. The optical switch could then send data and million times faster at a few hundred attoseconds where existing systems max out in the gigahertz range. These systems could potentially reach terahertz or even petahertz speeds. It can also send data over longer distances. So, you know, for real life stuff, that makes a lot of sense. There's been a lot of talk about optical electronics over the years, and it's never really been able to be fast enough or controlled enough or practical enough. The fact that this paper not only published, you know, peer reviewed, which a lot of these have been, but that the conversation, which is very selective about what it puts out on its platform, said, you know what? This is worth paying attention to. I think gives me a little put gives me a little more reason to pay attention to this one and say, OK, but I'm not ready, as I don't think anybody else is, and probably including Hasan, to say like, this is it. This will solve it. We'll get past Moore's law. But this has a lot of potential to it. Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of, well, you know, Moore's law was eventually, you know, just going to stop because humans can't make things that small. Well, and that is true that there is still a finite situation when it comes to making things that are really small. But there are other avenues to explore. And that's that's what I think that Hasan and his team have have come up with, at least to, you know, give us something to think about. Yeah. Every time we think Moore's law is about to end, something new comes up to let us get around it. And it used to be physical density. Well, you just can't put more transistors on there. And then it was the electron speed limit. Like, well, you can't make electrons go any faster, but then they figured out how to make it shorter. And then it was, well, you can't make it any shorter. And now it might be optical electronics that gives us the route to get around it. So we'll see, as they say, well, I won't see. You'll need a microscope to see because it's very, very small still. I guess the other thing is that this can go longer distances, right? The thing with electrons is like, well, you can make it shorter to make them faster. But also that means you can only do compact things. This can send fast data and has been used. Optical electronics have been used to send fast data to the Hubble telescope and back. So you can there's all kinds of things you can do with it that aren't inside of the chip as well. All right, folks, we are 388 patrons away from our goal. We got 41 people who have increased their amount. So that brings it down to below 340. We want to have 4,000 paid patrons or increased patrons by this Thursday. And then if we do, we can have Molly Wood on the show, not only the very next day on Friday, but once a month on Friday from now on. So if you'd like to help us make Molly Fridays happen, you got a couple of days, folks, this is it. Your chance, get in there. Patreon.com slash D T N S go do it now. MIT Technology Reviews Policy Newsletter discusses the first wave of spam sites taking advantage of large language models. Sarah, we knew it was coming, right? The malicious folks, we're going to take advantage of this. So what they're doing is probably what you would expect using a text generator to create junk websites that get high search rankings and then add programmatic ads to rake in the money. So you can tell the large language model generate stories that would get a high SEO on Google and then you throw the display ads on there. A report from NewsGuard found 140 major brands advertising on these unreliable, automatically generated sites. But keep in mind, that's not because they decided to be placed there. These are automatic placements. Even so, using Google's ad service on automatically generated low value content is a violation of Google policy. But the speed with which these sites can be generated just outpaces enforcement right now. Yeah, so that is just the latest example of AI's effect on the web. The Verges James Vincent wrote an article called AI is killing the old web and the new web struggles to be born. Now, let's oversimplify this a tiny bit. The problem is that AI generates low quality information, but it's so easy to do it and that threatens to rob high quality info of eyeballs and thus the incentive to create higher quality and lower quality and hope that somebody finds one or the other. Yeah, so maybe not the disincentive to create high quality content, but maybe the fact that you're going to get flooded with low quality content could be a good thing. Let me explain. Vincent writes, if Google consistently gives you garbage results in search, you might be more inclined to pay for sources you trust and visit them directly. The changes are happening, but the outcome is unclear. Or as Vincent writes, the new web is struggling to be born and the decisions we make now will shape how it goes. So, Sarah, what he's saying is it's not guaranteed that this will come out well, but there is a path forward. We can do things that will not let us just turn the web into a wasteland, but we've got to pay attention to this stuff. Well, OK, so a few things. I've been thinking about the whole idea of how do we keep the web from being a wasteland? First of all, it already is one. How many times have you seen the exact same article about like, this is why Hollywood won't cast so and so anymore or, you know, so and so stuns at the Met Gala or, you know, you know, 49 serial killers you never heard of before. You know, it's like this is this is all auto generated stuff. There is not a human, you know, meticulously typing up the all these articles one by one, it's all the same cut and paste type stuff. So if AI is able to generate that and, I don't know, give some poor person behind a computer something better to do with their time. OK, I don't really have a problem with that. If it if it if it makes the volume of everything that we're seeing and we kind of have to, you know, figure out, you know, what is right and wrong and what was I looking for anyway and, you know, what is garbage and what is what is actual content, that would be an issue. But honestly, I don't really see how this changes things all that much. I do. I really do. I think it's an exaggeration. I think it's an exaggeration to say that the web is a wasteland right now. And I think I think saying that you're not uncommon. But I think we all sort of have some of the strifes not certainly. That's my point. Some of the web is exactly what you described. But probably not even most of it. What's going on right now is you do a search and you're like, the good result is in there. I just had to look for it a little. What could happen is that the good result won't be there at all. Or even worse, you're not even ending up going to the result. Because another scenario that Vincent points out is that Google's future seems to be to summarize things using AI. So to say, OK, we're not going to make you dip down into all these links. We'll just tell you the answer. Except if you do that, then you're not sending traffic to the good generation of content, which then robs them of revenue and eyeballs, which then disincentives, vises them in a different way to make the good content, which then means there's no good content for Google to summarize. So there's there's, you know, there's a dead end going forward there. And that could create like an actual wasteland. Yeah. Yeah. Wasteland. Perhaps that was the wrong term. But I do think I mean, there is a big old web wasteland going on. You know, you can avoid it if you want to. If you're smart and I know our audiences, you can largely avoid that kind of stuff. I wonder, I wonder, and, you know, I would say five years from now. But I think this is all moving quickly enough to say one to two years from now. You know, is this all going to be something that, you know, is sort of like, oh, that's, you know, the AI's are doing the AI stuff. You know, language models are getting there. They're they're they're they're gaining knowledge. Just ignore them. They're over in the corner. And then they come back and perhaps inform real news in a way that we're not quite ready for yet, or at least, you know, some people have said we've had success with and many people say, no, this is not this is not right. These these models are not smart enough. They're not they're not human enough. They make mistakes. Humans make mistakes as well, of course. But but yeah, you know, as far as junk on the Internet, we are not in a new territory here. But we are. I will keep pushing back on that. Like it's not a zero sum game. Yes, there's junk on the Internet right now. That isn't new. But the scale we're about to see is brand new. And I think that's the difference here. And it will be difficult for you to even get past it. If certain things hold true, I don't think they will hold true, though. I think what will happen is as the effects of us adapting to this occur, a new Google will come along. Because remember, there was there were so many web pages in 1998 that you couldn't find the good ones. It was just impossible. Like I remember having to use six different search engines to really try to find things. Google came along with PageRank and made it useful. Google has been in a fight against search engine optimization, you know, gaming and barely keeping it at bay, which is why it's tempting to say, oh, there's so much junk out there because there is a lot of junk. But they've been fighting the good fight. The problem is we're about to see them lose that fight because they just can't fight against it in the same way anymore. It's the spam problem. We never fixed spam. It's when you make it low cost to game the system, it becomes impossible to fight at scale. And so we're going to have to see someone come up with the equivalent of PageRank to say, I can tell when something is generated and I will be able to to get through it. Maybe it'll be Google that does it. My guess it'll be somebody else. And then Google. And, you know, I can't, you know, tell you how many times even over the last, let's call it six months, you know, where someone goes like, well, you know, Google search, but then also, you know, I search within subreddits. You know, that sort of thing. Like, yeah, yeah. People have gotten smart about making Google search work for them because if they don't, it doesn't work that well anymore. There's too much garbage. And that is something that, you know, I mean, Google allows that. I mean, that's that's part of the, you know, Google just pushed Google just pushed a feature today specifically to address the adding reddit to the end of a search. They're like, you're not going to have to do that with our perspective search. But it is the kind of thing that does a lot of like pulling the link away by doing summarization. And so exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're feeling like, boy, searches are not what they used to be. There is a concept that might appeal to you. It's a Japanese concept called Shinrin Yoku, a.k.a. forest bathing. It's popular for its benefits for mental health. Yet go bathe in the forest. You might have cognitive performance increases, reduction in blood pressure, maybe a reduction in depression and anxiety. All sorts of reasons that people say, we like it. But a lot of people don't live in a forest or don't have access to one. So enter virtual reality. Scientists at the Czech University of Life scientists, sciences, rather, tested the hypothesis by taking a group of 15 people into a nature reserve near Prague for 30 minute bathing sessions. They then scanned those humans to create a virtual twin in the same area of forest, including audio. So 20 participants, including 10 who first visited the real forest and then spent 30 minutes in the virtual forest. The results, which were published in November in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, show that the VR experience provided the same health results as the real thing. Martin Hula, the forestry researcher leading the project, explained, quote, I was aware that the forest was not real. However, the experience was immersive and it was easy for me to forget that I was in an experimental room. Yeah. And I can't hasten to add real real fast for those only paying partial attention while they're driving. This is not water. You're not taking a bath in a tub in the forest. Yes, more of a bit like an experience. It's just the idea that the forest, the sounds and the visuals and the sense are bathing your senses. And so let me try to guess the range of reactions we will have amongst you to this story, Sarah. On the one hand, there will be the people who are like, this is an outrage. You can't replace the forest with virtual reality. It's an affront to nature to try. This is awful. And then on the other end are the people who are like, this is amazing. This is going to give people a chance to get peace in a play in situations where they would otherwise have no access to a peaceful forest. I think this is wonderful. Well, I am, you know, again, I've only read about this research, but I am with the latter crew. You know, I talk about VR all the time. It's not real life. I know the difference. But boy, does it make you feel like you're there sometimes. Yeah. And I'm going to say if I had, if I can choose between the real forest and the VR, I will choose the real forest. Sure. But I'm also just weird enough to be like comes to your time. I was going to say sit on down. I'm just weird enough to want to try using the VR headset bathing in the forest. Just to like double. Oh, yeah. Kind of an inception thing. Yeah. All right. See what that's the next test. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Martin who said listening to the discussion about Amazon using small businesses for that last mile of bringing packages to people. And as you were trying to think of the way it would be implemented, I think you hit the nail on the head of the benefit for Amazon. Employees can use their own cars to drop off packages. Most small businesses don't know how to properly and fairly calculate gas. Wear and tear on the car. Remain, I don't even think about it, but to Amazon, that is thousands of gallons of fuel saved oil changes, wear and tear on their fleet that they probably are not accounting on what they pay for the small businesses. I think it's part of the reason to offer this to businesses who don't do transportation as the main part of the business and won't know to account for this. I don't know, Barton. I think there's probably more businesses who know how to account for this than maybe you're giving them credit for. I'm sure some of them don't, though you're not you're not wrong. I do think your point is still well made, which is the benefit for Amazon here is offloading a lot of that to say we'll pay a flat rate and then that will allow us to fill in some gaps in the logistics network. DJ Sakane in our discord is a professional driver and he was saying, I don't understand how this is cheaper for Amazon than the independent contractors they use with Amazon Flex. It's literally the same thing. And I know those flux drivers would happily take on extra business instead of burdening flower shops with all those packages. But I imagine there are cases where the flex roots and the way flex works leave gaps and that this would plug those gaps, especially when you're talking about the small area of space of like we have a lot of deliveries happening in this small area near the flat. Let's use the flower shop and having flux drivers come in, pick up pick up packages and then drive to that location isn't as efficient as driving all the packages to the flower shop and having the flower shop people bring it. So in an ideal world, it saves Amazon money and it pays the flower shop more than they would spend in order to do it. Because if it doesn't, none of the small businesses are going to do it. And if it didn't save Amazon money, they wouldn't do it in the first place. Right. Yeah. I think your point is well made that there are a lot of small businesses that they understand for tax purposes, what, you know, all these things cost. This just would be, you know, that they come out ahead more than they would otherwise. And it's not like small businesses are helpless. They'll be able to do the math. So I don't think it's it's irrational to say, hey, small businesses should be careful. A lot of them might be taken advantage of. I think I think that's fair. But I think there's plenty of them that know what they're doing. So I don't know that this will, you know, be an abusive program necessarily. Let us know if Amazon works for you. Exactly. Well, folks, we have reached 20,000 subscribers on YouTube. YouTube dot com slash Daily Tech News show. Shout out to everyone supporting the show. And that includes the patrons. Patrons stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to talk about that Wall Street Journal story about how all the tech executives in Silicon Valley are high on LSD or mushrooms or ketamine and more. That's all coming up. Oh, boy. If there was ever a time to listen to GDI today is the day. But just a reminder, DTNS is live and you can catch our show live. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC and you can find out more. Tell a friend, Daily Tech News show dot com slash live. Join us live if you can. We'd love to have you. We will be back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.