 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, thanks to everyone who makes the show possible, including Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, and Reed Fishler. Coming up on DTNS, why has AI pioneer Jeffrey Hinton still talking to the press after a week straight? The imager download caper aims to save images on meme factory something awful, and we try to figure out why streaming TV apps have such awful UI. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 8th, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. Deep in the heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Folks, Twitter says it's going to purge your account if you've been inactive for several years, but we'll let you know if they give out any more specifics on, you know, how long or anything like that. Let's start off today's show, though, with the quick hits. Qualcomm's automotive unit made up a little less than 5% of the company's revenue in Q2, but Qualcomm has big plans for the business. The company announced it acquired the Israeli fabless chip maker Autotox, makers of an auto communication safety tech platform called V2X or Vehicle to Everything. Qualcomm plans to integrate V2X into its Snapdragon digital chassis offerings. Lichtenstein Prime Minister Daniel Riesch told the German newspaper Handelsbot that the company plans to accept Bitcoin as payment for state services. Any coins it receives will be immediately converted to Swiss francs. The country, which, as a reminder, has no debt and runs a surplus every year, also will continue to consider whether to invest its surplus into crypto assets. Although Riesch said it's too risky now, that may change. Lichtencoin. Yeah. Baidu announced its Xiaodu smart home unit will debut its first smartphone next week. Smart phone up until now. Xiaodu has only made smart speakers and smart displays running Baidu's doer OS voice platform. Baidu said the phone will help build out its hardware ecosystem to complement its existing services. One wonders if the absence of Huawei on the scene as much as it used to be might help. This does come as the Chinese smartphone market is contracting. Counterpoint research estimates sales in the country fell 5% on the year in Q1. That is the lowest sales in the quarter since 2014. While we wait for the glorious day, pass keys will replace passwords. Multi-factor authentication still the best way on the books to bolster password security. As it becomes more common, phishing attacks that try to trick you into giving up your second factor have become more sophisticated. They're arising to meet the challenge. So Microsoft is introducing number matching in its authenticator app. How it works when number matching is enabled, the site will show you a code of its own that must be entered into the authenticator app. Then you get the code from the authenticator to enter on the website. That way you're more certain you're entering your second factor on the correct site and not being phished. It's a pretty common vector to get just bring on the pass keys please. Android has a system to kill background apps to save battery and improve performance which is great but manufacturers all set their own parameters so it's not consistent across models and sometimes they get a touch aggressive at killing your contact sync or something. So Google is working with partners to reduce how often background apps are killed and keep things consistent across Android 14 manufacturers. Samsung is putting its hand up to be the first partner committed to implementing the new system with one UI 6.0 coming out later this year. Folks in many ways we're starting to see the normalization of generative AI. It's becoming just a part of the life. Large language models, yeah everybody's talking about them. Look no further than a recent hacker news thread asking why chat GPT cannot build a simple website from scratch. Hey look we found a limit. Another sign is that the security community is making sure this is part of the rigmarole. DEF CON, the security conference, is going to have a collaborative event in its AI village to pit thousands of students and researchers into finding flaws in LLMs. That's what you do at DEF CON. You find flaws in the popular stuff. LLMs have made it. And as you know AI kind of gets normalized and we're talking about it in kind of different avenues the media certainly keep in pace with that. And one person that has come to loom large in that conversation is definitely AI pioneer Jeffrey Hinton. Of course last Monday we talked about I was leaving Google in part to be able to speak more freely about concerns with AI development. That kicked off with a New York Times interview. It's a you know a pretty standard place to start. Granted you expect a few other outlets to get interviews after that but the parade has been fairly consistent. Friday Reuters posted an interview with Hinton and Monday there was a new one up on Wired. He's all over the media. So Justin why do you think Jeffrey Hinton is getting this extended media tour? Quite simply because reporters keep calling him if we want to be super reductive about it. Sure. Why does he keep picking up I guess the next question. If people keep sending you emails and asking you questions or asking to get on the phone and you keep doing it then you're going to keep having articles written about you. I think we often have a little bit more of a managed media perspective on this when quite simply it's usually this kind of answer. Now why are reporters calling them? Why are editors assigning reporters to this kind of story that leads them to Hinton? Quite simply because Hinton has proven himself to be a guy who says the thing. This happens throughout all media but I would say for sports fans and please keep up with me if this is not I'll do my best to explain it. One of the best teams of all time was the Chicago Bulls back in the 90s. They had two great players Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen. Periodically for oftentimes no reason whatsoever Scotty Pippen will be the guy who says the thing. The thing being Michael Jordan wasn't all that good. This player or that player would have been better. This becomes a 24 hour media cycle because blaspheming Michael Jordan is sacrilegious and we move on after everybody gets their under armor ads played next to content that people want to watch. Hinton is similar to that in that right now we are in a very unsettled and explosive time for AI so if there's somebody that has pedigree like Scotty Pippen and will say a thing that is either confirmatory or negating very strongly held priors then it will get traction. Further than that I think Hinton was very much a phase in AI research that was extraordinarily academic and extraordinarily theoretical. Yes he was part of the GPT creation at Google but right now we're in a different meta and the meta is product based because open AI made chat GPT and that's what gave people a handle on all this and that's what causing all the curve up. Yeah that's a good explanation of why the media is interested and a good pointer towards what I'm wondering which is what is Hinton getting out of this because I imagine Scotty Pippen had different motivations for speaking up than Jeffrey Hinton might and I wonder like it doesn't seem like he's got a book that he's going to put up maybe he does. He certainly doesn't need to make a name for himself but he's 75 years old and considered a founding father of AI. I guess everybody could use a little more press but that's what I wonder is is it just that he honestly is stunned by how fast this stuff is turned after spending an entire career watching it move slowly? That could be enough to jar someone into wanting to talk or is there some other motivation there? I don't know. I mean I think it's certainly is listen I have this I have this moment I have this platform you know Justin to your point who knows how long the not just this media tour but like the fact that oh well well you know reporter take his call to get a story out there or something like that you know that that kind of thing he has this platform and he definitely seems to be using it for all of its worth to get out a lot of his concerns and I also think to make nuanced points more than you could in just one times interview where he seems to be genius at that right yeah he's like this is worse than climate change well hold on let me tell you and then if you read the story he's very reasonable about that but he's great at the little nut graph quote that's going to catch your attention. Yeah and the wired things he kind of outlined a little bit more of a lot of the stuff he was alluding to in the New York Times and some of that is just that outlet is a better place to get into nuts and bolts versus a time interview but you know I think it's part of the motivation is realizing like listen I'm gonna have one I probably have one media cycle before you know text to video comes out and everybody's obsessed with that or something else consumes the why does he want to have a media cycle in the first place is my I think that that if you have seen throughout the world of AI research the one thing that has been consistent is that everybody takes this very seriously that they have dedicated the time and effort and research based on the idea that AI can be something extraordinarily dangerous so the idea that Hinton is putting that forward is not shocking to me that that to me seems to have been the baseline throughout all of this and that's why the fact that it had not you know popped off and maybe the way that it has recently was not looked at as the the worst thing because the operative phrase and this is skimming off of you know stuff that's been put out there publicly is better safe than sorry when it comes to AI well guess what it's moving now and there's going to be some people that are you scared I mean I think he might it might just be as simple as he legitimately is concerned. Lionjib video has a has a point he wants to talk until he hears his message spoken correctly. I don't know if it's exactly that so much as he wants to make sure the nuance of his message gets out there so doing multiple interviews as it gives him more shots at that. I will also say this if you look at the media landscape in terms of who is the voice that the media is turning to when it comes to to AI discussions but up until now I would say it would be open AI Sam Altman the CEO you know of there when we're looking for like those those banger quotes that are going to be leading off something like that and he and I think there's a perspective of obviously by far not a disinterested party very much in favor of hey the thing that I'm sure yeah again and and I get why the media wants to talk to him that doesn't that doesn't know so but I'm saying from like it from a perspective of that of being like of a voice that can speak at every level of AI that would have both the scientific and media credibility I I think possibly hidden could be wanting to build that up in terms of so it's not just voices of people that are leading companies telling us why this is not a problem loyal opposition if you something along those lines well image are announced on April 19th that it has new terms of service coming into effect May 15th mark your calendars and it will then remove all nudity pornography and sexually explicit content from its platform as well as old unused and inactive content that is not tied to a user account and that's a lot of content that's linked all over the web could cause a whole bunch of issues and the verges adi robertson profiled how users and owner the users and owner of the long-running comedy site something awful are starting to address that with the uh with the uh imager download caper to preserve these images before they disappear so justin give us the facts how they're doing this I'm glad you asked rich it's a three step process number one scrape something awful and parse out the 100,000 imager links and addresses to divide up the downloading and keep tracking a spreadsheet most of this is done now uh step three however is just beginning three host the images and overwrite previous links to post to the new host this is not a new problem there have been images disappearing from flicker and image shack and projects like archive.org and the rogue archive team continually fight to preserve things like this so Tom is this the best the internet can do yeah apparently because we've gone through this over and over again uh I I'm curious if this will be the time or if we're going to need to do it a few more times before someone really uh gathers the troops together to do some sort of open source uh way of of archiving images whether we can get archive.org to be a little looser on on hosting images they do host images on archive.org but with the with the way back machine they haven't always gone back and archived everything I don't know in this case of imager was was making that more difficult than it needs to be or something but it sounds like they were able to scrape them themselves on something awful but but yeah I'll I'll throughout the world decentralized because I'm sure someone else will but whether it's decentralized or something else it does feel like we are finally moving into a realm where the internet is 20 to 30 years old and that means that if we're not paying attention we are going to lose some of our culture if we don't have better methods for dealing with something like this now granted uh in in previous times like geo cities and other stuff folks have banded together and figured out how to do some preservation but it with varying results I guess the other question is is it important and maybe it's not maybe that's why we don't have anything but a mad scramble every time something like this comes up well and that's definitely like imager's opinion right it's like oh this is this is either unimportant or it's potentially libel inducing content that or you know like we could be facing some legislation I wouldn't say libel but you know could could cost us some money to keep serving this content up they recently changed ownership so I like I could see it from their perspective of even if this is significant for internet culture uh we don't want to foot the bill for that but the I don't think that's why they did it though it seems quite the opposite well I guess imager did it that way I'm sorry something awful seems to be willing to fit the bill is I guess what yeah yeah but but from imager's perspective you're saying you're saying you're saying if it's something we deem to be of value and I'm just saying from imager's perspective I don't necessarily get that for value for them uh again they have to operate their own business but I think this does mark like a transition that we're seeing of sites you know building off of like exclusively linked content now now granted reddit still exists which is you know the the king of all of this and certainly will be impacted by this as well but I I think the solution to this is if you're going to do a site like something awful you you start it with a service level agreement for some sort of image storage and you're not linking out no again something awful is is old in internet time so I'm it's a very enterprising take for a forum like something else I know it's like pay you know I I'm sorry but it's like a site like imager I'm sure in there it said we can delete this content at any time you have no you know like and yes and yes and the promise of imager was literally the thing that they are now deleting and and going back on and yes it's new management but part of the reason why imager became popular online was because you could just upload something without creating a username which meant you could post spicier stuff or stuff just flat out quicker and just get it on the the message board that you wanted message boards evolved to take advantage of this kind of stuff now maybe we look at a new meta of how stuff like this is going forward but this is a change in imager's profile and reputation the same profile and reputation that led them to be an industry standard for stuff like this as for a solution in terms of archiving I'm very glad that they were able to bootstrap it it's something awful but I almost wonder whether or not there should be either colloquially if not mandated for big purges like this just a statement of things that are about to go away so there can be for anybody interested an easier clearinghouse to determine here's what I want I think I think fewer things are leaving imager than than people expect because it's inactive non-account associated so if you had an account it's not going away and it has to have been not accessed by anyone in a long time so I'm curious what's actually going to disappear there well but but that's but that's that's the content that made it famous like like the no user account uploaded stuff yeah but even the actively accessed non-user account stuff is staying it's only the stuff that no one's accessed it and I understand that we don't know what the tragedy is until somebody looks for a thing and it's gone and so like yes your your your point is clear and then somebody's going to look for that one Photoshop Friday thing and it's not going to be there and the world will cry yeah the first cheeseburger is gone into the ether well folks if you are feeling social you might want to follow us on the social medias because if you miss an episode Joe has been working hard to post shorts like some of the best clips out of an episode on our youtube channel youtube.com slash daily tech news show uh zoe has been taking those and putting them up on tiktok uh and instagram as well so get out there and follow us we're at daily tech news show on tiktok we're at dtspix dtspix on instagram uh and you can follow us on twitter and mastodon as well at dtspix show on both of those fast company posted an article monday by Jesus Diaz called from netflix to hbo the terrible design of streaming is ruining tv some of the complaints listed in the article include the terrible landing page that tells you nothing uh that you want to see when you land on an app the hard to find continue watching that's you know down scrolling several pages to get to it uh apple and hulu got called out specifically for that disappointing recommendation algorithms play back button failure scrubbing imprecision where it's harder than as Jesus Diaz said playing tetris with your feet to actually scrub to the point in a video that you want Diaz interviewed some ux experts to get some idea of why these designs are so bad uh he says it appears to be down to the old tension between how a business needs its user to behave which is to watch new stuff and what a user wants to do which is watch the stuff they're interested in hours watched is more important to a company than series completion they don't care if you finish the series they just want you to watch a lot of different things so they make you go past new options to get to the continue watching for example uh it's also hard for the ux to keep up as business strategies change and this has been an extremely fast moving uh business over the past several years justin uh when you think about a streaming service what do you want most to improve your experience as a viewer i want to click continue watching and have it be the new episode and not last week's episode oh my gosh yeah every single time i try to watch succession uh i mean what do i want i want for them to be able to almost seamlessly keep playing the thing that i was last watching on their platform i want to know what my friends are watching or know whether or not the hot show that everybody is talking about is on this platform and i want it to play in the highest resolution possible so the last thing seems to happen fairly regularly what is the problem is i think the television specific user interfaces for these services because mobile i don't think it's all that bad and part of that goes into the mentality psychologically of if i see nine buttons on a touchscreen i don't think oh nine buttons i just press the button i want if i see nine buttons on my uh a television in my living room i'm like scroll scroll oh no it thought that down scroll was sides yeah the remotes are also a problem nine is a lot like that is walking a gauntlet so it feels more onerous there and i i have sympathy for the designers because they got a design for a lot of stuff but still it is ponderous and annoying yeah to build off of that the design challenge here i i don't want to say it's insurmountable i mean because we have good design tech products part of it is the business model of this is something that people are consuming so they have an interest in you like consuming it it's not something you use there's there's a there's a dynamic there between consumption and use i i'm not making this extraordinarily clear but the fact that these designers you have different use modalities right use modalities versus someone sitting on their couch watching it on their phone versus someone sit with a laid-back experience watching on tv they have different hardware requirements where you can have an you know a relatively recent you know apple chip and your apple tv versus your roku that could be you know running six year old low power arm silicon like there's there's there's so many different needles that they need to thread all within the mandate of you know of overall branding with teams that we don't you know odds are these teams are working entirely separately and stuff like that so i have i do have some sympathy for the technical challenges this is not easy so i i don't want to throw designers under the bus because i know design is hard is what you're saying i think that's a totally fair point yeah it is extraordinarily hard uh that being said i mean like tv design has always been feels like something reviled i mean from like thinking back to like the old guide well sure it's stuff like in the old days the cable company didn't have to design for you because you didn't have a choice you were going to watch cable or nothing so what do they care uh we have the opposite problem here where everyone is scrambling to get your eyeballs so the pressures are and this is always true when you're when you're in a resource constrained environment customer satisfaction always gets pressured to suffer a little bit for business propositions there's always a little bite yeah but can we make them do this and with the amount of intense competition and streaming with everybody jumping into the pool at once that's why suddenly you see so much pressure to make you watch things rather than to present to you the easy way to watch the things you want to i think that will get better as consolidation happens over the next couple of years and as things calm down and you you start to see oh these are the businesses that are working they'll start to settle down and focus more on design and stop changing things so often and having having mergers and splits and changes of content and all of that i i i do i do think that there's a reality though to this which is you will stay on a platform when you have watched a thing that you are waiting for the next season of and so they therefore want you to scratch as many of those lottery tickets as possible so you are always waiting for a new thing that you would like to see more content of so that that incentive i think will never change and and the idea that because these are all these all these streaming platforms many of these streaming platforms are powered by exclusive content right so the ui just has to be bad enough that you don't rage quit something and you'll say put up with amazon prime video and and so i can watch the boys or what you know whatever the show may be you'll put up with it as long as it is not like like like beat your head against the wall bad where i think there might actually be a chance for some ui innovation and we probably see this the most in uh like over the top like you know cable replacement services right is uh these these tons of these services where we're seeing free ad supported content you know kind of linear tv style where a lot of like a lot of those are the exact same channels it's like the every time when we do one is announced we have 500 channels they're all exactly the same as almost everything else and so how do you differentiate that you differentiate that with like annoyance of ads or with ui basically or like what platforms are locked into and that kind of stuff so i think that's the part where maybe we will have seen motivation to make ui significantly better yeah and just just not feeling the intense like breakneck rush to succeed i think will help as well all right well earlier this year an update to google assistant added the ability to stop alarms without using its wake word i use this all the time you could just say stop well a user on reddit wondered why they keep missing alarms having them shut off quickly seemed very inconsistent they couldn't figure it out did some research and they were using the classic pixie song where is my mind for their alarm if you're not familiar with it it starts out with lead singer black frances saying stop the band's official account tweeted out sorry about that so at least yeah so so anybody who hasn't heard the pixies here is the very beginning of this song okay so imagine uh the alarm goes off at seven a.m and you get this stop and then your alarm stops yeah of course many people will know this as the song from the end of fight club uh the song that was briefly the theme song for a w wrestler orange cassidy uh very very popular probably the most iconic pixie song of all time but apparently not a good solution if you're trying to get up right and early in the morning well and i'm with you rich you we were talking earlier today and you were like why why don't these uh these these speakers these smart speakers have a system that lets them know when the sound is coming from inside the speaker right yeah just put something way below audible hearing some i they have to have something like that i'm sure they use it for ad tech or other stuff like put it in there to stop the stop there you go yeah i wonder if it was similar like like stop in the name of love or or and no there's gotta be a song with where this is right at the beginning like they actually they tested out a bunch of different songs uh engadget did and they did not find uh that that was the case it was like just because this was there's like really no backing music to it it's just yeah spoken word not sung turned out all right well that's enough talking about this let's okay uh and check out the mailbag indeed uh daemon wrote in regarding the grasp search engine that's the one that lets you pick sites from which to build its search index and we talked about it of course uh on our show on friday and he said over the years we have been talking about getting out of our information bubble but this is the exact tool to reinforce it i made the decision to choose sites that i felt were unbiased and trustworthy however some may choose to only follow and add sites that play loose with the facts and rely heavily on conspiracy theories like any tool it's all in how you use it yeah you're not the first person daemon or i should say that you're not the only person uh to to bring up this idea with with grasp um to which i say sure and that's worse than what we have now by how much percent like i still feel like uh if you're trying to fix all of humanity with grasp no it won't work uh but if you're giving us individuals a tool with which we could you know better manage the information we see then then i think it's it's useful i i don't believe that you can out engineer certain elements of our humanity right right this is this is a tool it is in the way that you use it it comes in a cut yeah well put uh although now you have to stop okay it's on the board now watch out uh shadi from egypt wrote in and said i was listening to dts episode four five oh two when i heard the mention of microsoft tanta uh which is a codename for one of their new surface products then a few seconds later we hear about the luxor surface pro and at this point i felt compelled to pause and write you this email looks like for some weird reason there's an obsession in microsoft to codename projects after egyptian cities tanta is the fifth largest city in egypt and it's a few kilometers north of cairo remember project cairo from microsoft uh yeah what what is that about i think shadi has got a good question here uh it's not unusual to take regions of the world and name things after a mint out that it with rivers and stuff so but yeah i don't know i think yeah especially in terms of gigantic family trees of products and stuff like that there's probably a very uh uh cogent reason why egypt is being used as an inspirational family of uh uh you know a family of products for for for microsoft but much in the same way that apple would name all their os's after various different natural wonders and cornia and stuff like that this is just a way that they can signify internally this is these are all connected we are we are continuing to populate a map as it were of of these products yeah so you would not tell them to stop okay uh no no i would say tanta jump on it uh justin robert young you're the best thank you for being with us as always uh congratulations on bringing world's greatest con in for a landing what an excellent season uh thank you very much tom yeah world's greatest con project alpha are a deep dive into one of the most fascinating stories from the late 70s and early 80s two teenagers flummoxed academics who had four million dollars in today's money worth of funding to try to find actual psychics they fooled the researchers turns out they were just doing magic tricks please listen into the entire series all six episodes they are now available for the first time so if you've been waiting to binge olly olly oxen for a season three of world's greatest con all right want to thank also our brand new bosses it's the best way to start out of monday gets us off on the right foot and we got three new bosses ian jb and stanislaus backing us on patreon truly truly appreciate thank you ian thank you jb and thank you stanislaus hey everybody get over here welcome ian jb and stanislaus and uh it's good to have you all the patrons gather around say hi pat them on the back stick around ian jb and stanislaus good day internet comes to the patrons on a private rss feed we're going to be talking about the glowing review that the verges monica chin gave to the 279 dollar gateway laptop and what a cheap laptop might mean for the slumping pc market stick around remember you can catch the show live monday through friday at 4 p.m eastern 20 hundred utc find out more head on over to daily tech news show dot com slash live we'll be back tomorrow talking spatial audio with patrick norton see you then this show is part of the frog 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