 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, and special thanks to Hi Tech Oki, Jim Hart, and Logan Larson. Coming up today on DTNS, Discord's making some username changes. You might like them, you might not. Shopify is dropping logistics because logistics are hard. And let's go in-flight. Mach 9, maybe someday. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May the 4th, 2023, in a studio redwood far, far away. I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm rocking Rich Strafilino. That's No Moon. It's me, Justin Robert Young from Austin, Texas. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, come on, Roger, after all that. Oh, okay. I get to remake this movie two times, and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Love it. Yep. Well, if you're a fourth fan, you know what he means. Without further ado, let's get into some tech stories starting with the quick heads. Anyone who uses the Bing browser with a Microsoft account can now use its chat bot powered by a GPT-4. Bing Chat launched in private preview back in February. Some of us have played around with it, but everybody can now. Starting today, you can also pull image and video results, persistent chat history, and plugin support. One example would be making a dinner reservation with OpenTable. Browser plugin, Bing Chat can say, okay, I'm completing your booking. We can expect more announcements during Microsoft's Build Conference, which starts on May 23rd. Mozilla announced a private beta for Mozilla.Social, its mastodon instance, although there is a waitlist to join right now, so you can sign up if you'd like to. In the announcement, Chief Product Officer Steve Toshera said the instance will use content moderation based on its Mozilla manifesto. This emphasizes things like human dignity, inclusion, security, individual expression, and collaboration, saying that it's not trying to build a quote neutral platform. Toshera also said areas like onboarding, discovery, identity, and monetization are ripe for experimentation on mastodon. Of course, this isn't the first go-around for an instance from a browser company, Vivaldi Social, launched back in November. If you're into GitHub's co-pilot but you don't want a part with the monthly fee or even in the annual fee, hugging face and ServiceNow research are offering up an alternative. StarCoder is a code-generating system available on a free OpenRailM license. StarCoder was trained on more than 80 programming languages and integrates with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code code editor. Well, Waymo's been operating in the Phoenix area for some time now, and now it's doubling the size of its autonomous taxi service area in the city to around 180 square miles. And it's also adding a backup, excuse me, a pickup spot at the airport. Waymo also expanded its San Francisco service area to cover the entire city 24 hours, seven days a week for service. Yeah. If anybody has tried either of these out and have thoughts, we welcome your feedback. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Germany's Infineon now officially operates a chip manufacturing plant in Dresden six months after it announced that the project would begin. Infineon expects production to start in 2026, so there's a bit of a ramp up period. But that's what they're doing. US-based Wolfspeed also plans to build plants in Germany. The plants are part of the EU CHIPS Act. That aims to increase manufacturing capacity inside Europe overall. Those are the quick hits. Now let's talk about one of the big stories today that has either ruffled your feathers or you're kind of saying, what's the big deal? So Discord is changing how it assigns usernames, meaning that all existing users will have to get a new usernames. This isn't happening today, but it's happening in a rollout situation depending on when you signed up for Discord. If you're an early adopter, you probably get this opportunity first. Now the company previously let you choose a name, for example, Minus Aralane, then it added a four-digit number to the end. That way multiple people could have that same handle. Maybe there are a lot of Saralanes. Those numbers keep the accounts unique. So, Rich, I'm Saralane1234. That's not exactly what it is, but you get the idea. There's a four-numerical-digit thing after my name, but that's been okay for me so far, so what's changing? Yeah, here's the skinny. Your current name will be replaced with an at symbol, followed by whatever username you end up choosing. No four-digit number added to it. That also means your preferred username may not be available when they finally get around to ask you to change it. Discord will notify users when they can choose their new username, starting with users who have been on the platform the longest, so the OGs get their due. The old username with the four-digit number will, though, still work as an alias, so you're not totally out in the cold if you're really wedded to your four-digit number at the end there. But Justin, lots of people are having lots of feels about this. I'm curious, does this fire you up? It does not particularly fire me up, although it might, if I'm not able to get Justin our young, my preferred screen name on all platforms. What I would say about this is, number one, there is an immutable law of life that is particularly acute on the internet, and that is the longer people stay in a thing, the less they like it to change, and this is going to change. And in some places, there's a very real possibility that with more common nicknames, you won't be able to get the name for which you already have. The one thing that I think people should understand about this is that on Discord, yes, you had your username, and that was the four-digit code. That was how people would find you, but in each Discord, you were able to change your display name. So that would be something that led to more memeable opportunities. The reality of it is Discord is prioritizing future users over current users, and the least popular that decision will ever be is right now, when very few future users and exclusively past you. Yeah, I saw it sort of trying to figure out, because on the surface when I read the story this morning, I was like, all right, Discord SIDS, it wants to just play a little bit more friendly with people who don't understand the username concept as it stands right now on various Discord servers, helping the normies a little bit more. Okay, a lot of people saying, you know what this is about? This is about security and privacy. You've had a lot of people who are intimidating, imitating other users with similar usernames based on the fact that nobody was really paying attention to those four digits after. Sarah Lane, five, six, seven, eight, might say, I'm Sarah Lane, one, two, three, four, and somebody could be duped. That's very possible. I'm not totally sure how this new policy helps us. It may crack down on that specific issue, but if I can't be Sarah Lane anymore, but I could still use my Sarah Lane, one, two, three, four, alias with whatever username I end up being, with everybody that has become my community thus far on Discord, with new people, I guess it wouldn't matter, right? Because you just know what you know. But for everybody else, I can see where people are saying, why do this? Because at the end of the day, Discord is not a mass broadcast platform. Yes, there are Discords that have thousands of people in them, and I'm sure that Discord is planning for a reality where there are Discords with millions of people in them. But they are moderated based on how their communities are. I could change my alias right now in my own Discord and say that I'm Abe Lincoln that does not mean that everybody will believe that I am Abe Lincoln, who obviously needs his own territory. That would just be an alias. As long as you understand that we can say whatever, that's not unlike what people do on Twitter. The reality here is that they want to give agency and permanence to these usernames. And right now, they don't really have them. And I think that they were planning on scaling up this service in a way that that would matter less. Well, guess what? It matters a lot. And they are probably facing issues with verification and showing that certain people are certain people. They are growing beyond what they were before. So I get it as a decision. I also understand why people are really cheesed off, as I will be if I don't get Justin Artie, anybody who works at Discord, please be aware. I will be mad and I have a once a week platform. By speaking of all of this, we ended up wanting to get a lot of thoughts from you, many of our DTNS audience, that is active in Discord. How do you feel? I want to read something, and I'm not going to say the username, because I want them to get that username if that is possible, but got a lot of feedback. Rich and I were looking through this earlier, but someone said, if I can't get my handle as my username, I'll feel incomplete in Discord. Sounds kind of petty, but this is actually a reason why I rarely use Twitch and Twitter. I don't like my user names on those platforms. Every time I log in, it's a constant reminder. Now, sure, you could say that's silly, just get used to it, but I'm with you, person I will not name, because I want you to get your username. I'm Sarah Lane on almost everything, but every so often, especially over the last couple of years, somebody beats me to it. So then I've got my second choice, third choice. It is not the end of the world, but it's just one thing that adds a slight complication to things. And I feel like, yeah, if you've been around Discord for a while, especially if you're paying for Nitro and somebody scoops up your name, and you're kind of like, okay, why am I paying exactly? I can see where this could, you're going to get a lot of loyal people who aren't thrilled about the change. As was said on the wire, my name is my name, and I do think that that is a non-trivial issue on the internet, where we are able to create lives, relationships, cultures, cloud. The fact that we can't track it to the name that we want is frustrating. The other thing that was really interesting to me in this whole announcement was Discord kind of being upfront about why the system kind of came about at all. And as someone who's just kind of a user of Discord fairly recently, just this whole idea, like their whole friend system was kind of added on after they had established these individual servers. And this is kind of like a technical debt conversation where they just wanted to speed onboarding to servers at first and be like, we don't even care because it's going to be you and, I don't know, 20 or 100 people. So probably user name, repeating user names isn't that much of an issue. And then when they did the friend system, they had to be like, there's 50,000 John Smiths or whatever. So we need to come out with a way to do that. And it's very rare, I feel like, to get a company, one rolling out like a giant change like this in terms of everybody just has to pick new user names, but acknowledging a technical debt and saying like, hey, we need to kind of hit a reset button here for everybody so that we can kind of get beyond this. And maybe we have some other plans down the road with how we're going to scale this platform just to your point, really push the size of a certain Discord service and stuff. Well, moving on to science, because science and tech, they overlap every day. And we love the story. So we wanted to share it with you because many of you are science-focused and tell us every day that you like science stories on the show. So thanks for that feedback. Scientists can't currently replicate what you or I see by just scanning our brands. Wouldn't that be nice? Well, it depends on the scientist, but they're a step closer to being able to send impulses to our brains that could replicate visual stimulus. So, Jerry, let's talk about the study. I'd love to, Sarah. Scientists recorded electrical impulses from neurons in the visual cortex in 50 mice while they watched a 30-second video clip nine times. They then trained a machine model called Cebra that is pronounced Zebra, but it looks like Cebra because it starts with a C. to link the neural data to that video clip. When the mice watched the movie for the 10th time, the machine tried to predict the order of the frames in the clip that the mouse was seeing. It was able to predict the right frame within one second, 95% of the time. This does not let them recreate the clip by scanning the brain. However, it could reveal links that might allow visual sensations to be sent to the visual cortex of somebody with visual impairments. That's what got me, Rich, was, okay, interesting study of mice. How does this help people looking ahead to anybody who has visual impairments who might benefit from this? That's where it kind of excited me. Yeah, definitely. And what's also exciting is when you get into this paper, this paper was published in the journal Nature, and it gets into a lot more of the use cases. This is obviously the one that is, it's the easiest to see, right? They can show the video of what Zebra predicted that the, you know, what predicted based on their neurological reading, what they were seeing. And it looks remarkably similar. It's a little glitched out a little bit, like frame jumps a little bit, but you completely get the picture. You can completely see that they are accurately predicting what this movie looks like. But what's exciting about this is this whole system is much more general use. It's not just for this one application. It's designed to kind of uncover structures and systems using behavioral and neural data. So they also had use cases for determining position of a body in space and stuff like that based on neurological readout, which is like a really hard problem. And the other really encouraging thing, like just from a application for this, is a lot of times we're talking about computer brain interfaces, right? When you're having, like, trying to have someone's brain control, like an artificial limb or something like that, that usually requires an individual training to get that all working. And you can't just take aggregate data from everyone else and plug that in there. What this system found, though, was that aggregating the data from those 50 mice improved. They got that 95% because they used 50 mice. When they only used one mouse, it was only about 50 or 75%. So this could potentially- It's too personal. But this could potentially allow us to, like, speed training down the road. Like, obviously, that's very far afield, but the idea that we can generalize this type of training is very exciting and makes a lot of these systems a lot more immediately accessible potentially. Well, if you've got thoughts on this or anything that we talk about the show and you say, you know what? I wish I had their email address so I could share my thoughts. Now's your time. You can email us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and make your voice heard on anything we've talked about in a past show or might talk about it on a future show. Thank you in advance. Well, you've definitely heard about the Ottawa-based e-commerce platform Shopify and they announced that, turns out they're pretty good at making money, at least according to their quarterly earnings. In Q1, they made $1.51 billion- I'm sorry. They generated revenue of $1.51 billion. That beat analyst expectations and gross merchandise volume was $49.6 billion, also beating projection. So everything looking good there. However, the company is making some changes. First, doing job cuts. No big news here in the tech sector cutting 2,000 jobs. That comes 10 months after the previous round of 1,000 layoffs. So it's another significant chunk there. Arguably though, the bigger news, it's selling the majority of its logistics business to the supply chain management company Flexport. CEO Toby Lutke announced the layoffs in a memo to staff adding that Shopify's numbers simply weren't healthy and reflect a trend in the tech industry overall. Kind of a big shift though for Shopify, right, Sarah? Yeah, it is. It is. And Lutke did not mince word, said this is the way it goes. Some of you will not be employed at Shopify as of today. But here is why. It's an about phase for Shopify, which acquired shipping startup Deliver. That's Deliver with two Rs. Last year for $2.1 billion, we talked about it on the show, to better compete with a little logistics unicorn called Amazon, you've heard of it. There are other companies, but Amazon's the one to beat, right? Amazon is the logistics company where everyone's trying to say, okay, how can we also do something, even at a smaller scale, but do it as nimbly and make money from it? Justin, sounds like logistics, didn't end up adding up for Shopify, which does e-commerce very well and has for some time. What do you think about a brighter future for Flexport? If Shopify says, we're just going back to e-commerce, that's what we do. Logistics too hard. Flexport does logistics only. Maybe it's better to have two companies doing one thing well and work together in the future. 100%. Number one, you cannot compare your web store to Amazon, especially when it comes to logistics. Amazon has spent the last 20 years building warehouses in strategic different places for which they can get things to you at a shocking speed. They are the greatest story of optimization and logistics of all time, and they are a beneficiary of their own work in that regard. The question for Shopify is, do you want to have your logistics done by them? And does Shopify want to operate and make efficient, a ruthlessly efficient game in selling logistics to the people that are on their platform? Right now, they do a great job of creating easy web forms, a reliable system, and a backend with data that allows you with confidence to sell wares online. But there is a gigantic community of people that are competing for your business to fulfill those sales, including Amazon, by the way. You can have your stuff shipped from an Amazon warehouse, even if it's not sold on Amazon. That is a service for which they also provide. It makes sense, especially if we're moving into a tech winter, for Shopify to hoard their nuts and wait to see what happens going forward. Yeah, I mean, on the surface, this all makes a lot of sense to me. It's Shopify said in pandemic times, online shopping went through the roof, people were finding alternative ways to buy things. It's great. Let's hire and hire. This is not something that Shopify did on its own. This is an overall tech trend that's happening for a variety of reasons, as the global economy self-corrects. There's all sorts of consumer spending that's down overall, whether it's in person or online. I mean, that also factors into this. But Rich, I know you got kind of fascinated with the story as you started digging into the logistics business. Because every headline you're seeing about this in the tech press is, this is a Shopify story. This is Shopify retreating from this very big 2.1 billion acquisition, their biggest acquisition ever. They're selling that off as part of this business. But what got me fascinated is looking at this. This is a big deal for Flexport, which is, if you've never heard of them, I didn't before today. That's because I'm not in logistics, but they provide like backend freight and trade services. So if you're a company and you need to know what ship your stuff's on, or if it's going through customs or something like that, they have the backend for that. But you know who their CEO is? Former Amazon Worldwide Commerce Chief Dave Clark, AKA the guy that's been running their transport and logistics services for the last several years, right? He helped build these up to the mammoth that they are. And the fact that they're buying at part, deliver as well as Shopify is things. Deliver is a much more closer to consumer service. So to me, it's not, yes, it's definitely as Shopify has said, this is us about finding our main quest as opposed to our side quest, very, very cutesy language that they are using there. But this to me feels like a much more significant expansion for Flexport led by someone who definitely knows what they are doing. Obviously they're not a new company, but that to me was what got me fascinated by this story of them getting closer to kind of not, maybe not to consumers, but to smaller businesses and expanding out from this very backend freight stuff that they've been doing for the past, for almost a decade now. Just to give everybody a sense, when I was selling card games, and we were selling them through Amazon, it's a fascinating process. So you get a bunch of card games printed, they get them sent to your office, you then put them on pallets and Amazon tells you, here are the three random warehouses that you are going to send them to. There is no rhyme, there is no reason. You have no idea why or how. You just send it to those warehouses and then those warehouses send it to other warehouses. So it is always two days away from anybody who is going to buy it. Their logistics are insane, have always been insane, and it's the reason why they've been able to, with very small margins, make money. And that is a service that is dumb enough a caveman can use it, right? I could figure it out when we were selling our stupid card games. Here's the other thing that just to think about, what does Shopify lose in terms of what they can offer to customers with this, right? Obviously they lose that kind of end-to-end thing, but the Shopify fulfillment network is still available to customers. Flexport is still going to operate the shop promise, their own two-day shipping or next-day shipping guarantee. So like from a consumer perspective, you are not losing anything as a Shopify user by doing this. And Shopify also owns, they are saying, high teens now percentage of Flexport. So Flexport does really well, and they're very focused on logistics, turns out Shopify is going to make money on that too. So like to me, this is, it feels more like a repositioning. I don't even want to say a withdrawal, just a, I guess a refocusing. I think it's also just them getting the money. Extract the money now, wait, go ahead to the Winchester and wait for this to all blow. All of this is about in tech right now. Well, speaking of tech, if you'd like to fly at a hypersonic speed and said, how do I do that? By the way, hypersonic speed is defined as five times the speed of sound. So it's pretty fast. Houston Bakes based aviation company, Venus Aerospace hopes to give you your answer. The company has been building a hypersonic aircraft concept, code word concept, very key here, called the Stargazer since back in 2020, that takes that hypersonic speed even further. They're planning to carry about 12 passengers traveling at Mach 9, which is nine times the speed of sound. The Stargazer measures 100 feet long by 100 feet wide is designed to travel 6,905 miles per hour at an altitude of 170,000 feet. This could make flying between, let's say New York and Tokyo, which is actually something that Venus Aerospace uses as an example, a hour long flight rather than, I don't know, 16 to 20 hours, depending on where you have to refuel and change planes. Now, if Venus Aerospace is successful, it blows away the last commercial supersonic jet that was the Concorde, which could travel at Mach 2 or about 1,535 miles per hour. You might also recall that Lockheed's SR-71 Blackbird traveled at Mach 3.2, 2,455 miles per hour. So this would be way faster, but still a concept at this point. I really regret that we're not going to be able to live to see a succession episode that is filmed in real time for the hour that the siblings take off from Tokyo and landing yet. A lot of things happen in an airplane. Just saying. Go ahead, Roger. This is an amazing concept. I would have never guessed that no one in the history of aviation has thought of doing something similar in the past 30, 35 years. This is the thing. The technology in this, the rotating pulse detonation engine, is a thing. And it's something that the military, specifically the Navy's been looking into, as in a more efficient way to power surface vessels. They say they get all the technology worked out. The biggest limiting factor, and this is why supersonic travel has been so limited and specifically to the Concorde, is it's really expensive. And to make a business case out of it, you got to charge people a lot of money, or you charge people a lot less a lot of money, but carry more of them at a time. And until you can do that, you're just going to be hemorrhaging money out. It's one thing to build this into a missile that blows up a big target. It's a different thing if you want to repeatedly send people from one end of the planet to the other in that one hour and still say like have your budget in the black at the end of it. I am more bullish on some of the concepts of using rocket technology to get people from New York to Tokyo in some ridiculously vanishingly small amount of time, mostly because we know all the tech there. It's literally just a matter of getting it cheaper. All right, Rich, let's check out the mailbag. Who's in it today? Well, we have a very exciting anonymous email, not the hacktivist group, just someone who didn't want to use their name. They wrote in about our ongoing conversation about using AI tools inside a company that doesn't want you to use them. They wrote in and said, many orgs have extensive data loss protection or DLP tools that may detect if you try to move data to your personal device to then use AI language models. Please don't risk your job trying to use a tool your company has banned by sneaking data off to your personal device. They say, I'd hate to see someone lose a job over this. They said, our org has also temporarily banned AI language models and regularly detects insider accidental or malicious movement of confidential information. It's not fun for anyone involved. I know all the insider threat stuff is one of the giant realms within every company's cybersecurity. So yeah, it's a good chance they'll find out if you're trying to do this. Just listen to them. Just follow the rules. Look, right now the lead dog in AI is chat GPT with open AI. Open AI is not a secure platform in the way that you would want for something with personal data. Anything that you would not be fine appearing on the internet, be careful with it. And that is not a slag on open AI. They are upfront about the fact that this is not personal to you. I think we can all wait a little bit until there are more secure solutions for which your company can feel comfortable that they are burning their data through. And if anybody's catching up late to the story and saying, what is this some reference to? It started with a conversation we had a couple of days ago about Samsung saying, we do not want you to use these tools. We had another mailbag folk write in and say, well, there are some workarounds. And I see those workarounds happening all the time. Now, this latest one from Anon is like, yeah, but depending on where you work, that company might be putting a lot of effort into monitoring how you might use those workarounds. So just be careful. Not necessarily one size fits all solution, but just be careful. Don't go traipsing around chat GPT in this economy. Well, in this economy, we really do want Justin Barber Young to continue with us because we couldn't do without you, Jerry. So let folks know what else you're up to. Our final episode of season three of World's Greatest Con comes out this weekend. And we are going to answer all the questions that we've gotten in over the course of the season. And we have a big update, something that actually came to light to us over the last week. It's a bit of a summer one, but you can tune in to the finale. And now that means that the rest of the season is bingeable episodes one through five, telling the tale of Project Alpha, two teenagers totally ended the world of rampant parapsychology research by pretending to be psychics, only to reveal that they were frauds on national television. It's an amazing story from the first person perspective of the boys. See you there, World's Greatest Con, everywhere you get podcasts. Can't wait to check that out. And thanks to our brand new bosses, just like the Sith, they come in twos. We have Rodney and Abdullah, both joining us on Patreon. Thank you so much, Rodney. Thank you, Abdullah. Indeed, we are so happy every day that we get a new patron. If we get more than one, we're even happier yet. Speaking of patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day, Internet. We are going to be talking about how Google chose to honor May the 4th today. The answer may surprise you. But you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1-800-UTC. DTNS, you can find out more about our live show options at DailyTechNewShow.com. We are back tomorrow with Shannon Morse, who just passed a YouTube milestone and is going to be bringing the knowledge to us to talk to you about.