 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Scott Hepburn, Bjorn Andre, and Jeff Wilkes. Coming up on DTNS, does Microsoft Game Pass lose money? Maybe it does. Disney will turn a live hockey game into animation on the fly, and who should be the most embarrassed about their generative AI? We'll tell you. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 14th, St. Valentine's Day to those who celebrate. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Drafileno. From the modern rogue world headquarters outside of Austin, Texas, I'm Brian Brushwood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shea. And a happy Saints Day to all of you. I was just thinking about Saints. It's a very religious day, St. Valentine's Day. Right? Yeah. Well, let's not sully it by sticking around talking about things that we shouldn't. Let's start with the quick hits. Microsoft officially retired Internet Explorer in June last year, but Wednesday, it put it to rest for good. Disabling the browser through a Microsoft Edge update on most versions of Windows 10. Now, there's still a few survivors out there. Exceptions include Microsoft's long-term servicing channel for Windows 10 and versions like the Windows 10 China government edition. But most of them are gone. Microsoft's MS, HTML and Trident engines will still be supported, though. And the company says it will support IE mode in Edge through at least 2029. That's not all, though. Microsoft also laid to rest its Yammer enterprise social network. It will slowly be changed into Viva Engage anywhere that it hasn't been renamed already. And I'm shocked. Shocked news. Twitter has delayed the launch of its new paid API by a few more days. The company had previously announced that the new API would be launching on February 9. Then it subsequently delayed that to the 13th, what we call today as yesterday. And it's now been postponed for a few more days. With no specific date this time, seemingly they've learned their lesson. The paid API will allow developers to access premium features including more data and higher access limits for a fee. Twitter said the delay was part of our efforts to create an optimal experience for the developer community. Good luck with that. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told the Financial Times that the company is hopeful it can decide on a physical retail format this year that it will then quote go big on. Now, this is interesting considering Amazon has been kind of retreating from retail. It closed most of its bookstores, all of its four-star shops and its pop-up shops. And it took a $720 million loss last quarter due to slowing grocery sales. While it figures out a successful format for retail this year, though, it is already making advances in autonomous cars. Amazon's Zoox carried passengers in its fully autonomous electric vehicle on public roads for the first time on a one-mile stretch between the company's two main buildings in Foster City, California. Zoox's vehicles have no controls or pedals and can carry up to four passengers at a time. As of March 16th, Instagram creators will no longer be able to tag products during live stream. This marks a continued retreat from Meta from live shopping. It shut down the same capability on Facebook back in October. While live shopping remains extremely popular in Asian markets using apps like WeChat, Taobao Live, and Doyin, it's been a tough nut to crack in the U.S. And it's not just Meta. Back in July, TikTok abandoned plans to expand its live shopping to the U.S. and to Europe. Electric vertical takeoff and landing or EVTOL aircraft company Joby Aviation said it began final assembly of its prototype and expects to begin test flights of it by mid-year. Last week, Joby received full FAA Part 23 certification that the aircraft's design conforms to safety requirements and standards set by the U.S. FAA. That allows it to test the prototype. The next step is to get production certification so it can mass produce them. The company hopes to begin commercial operations in 2025. All right. Let's start off with this groundbreaking revelatory revelation. It's a revelatory revelation, Rich. What is it? Yes. Well, last week, the U.K.'s competition and markets authority released a report of its provisional findings related to Microsoft's proposed acquisition of, say, with me now, Activision Blizzard. One of the main concerns is that if Microsoft gets Activision, then it gets Call of Duty, and if it gets Call of Duty, that could be used to hurt Sony. Of course, Microsoft has sworn up and down that it will not restrict Call of Duty from PlayStation. They said it'll give it to anybody that wants it. But some folks have pointed out that if Microsoft includes Call of Duty games on day one on its Game Pass subscription, it could hurt PlayStation sales. Although back in 2018, Xbox Head Phil Schiller said releasing a game on Game Pass increased sales. So, Tom, what's changed? Yeah. A lot of things. COVID, for example. Oh, yeah. But also it's been five years and they've gathered more data on Game Pass. So the game community got a little excited when GamesIndustry.biz found this little passage deep within the 277-page U.K. report. It said, Microsoft also submitted that its internal analysis shows a redacted percentage decline in base game sales 12 months following their edition on Game Pass. We don't know what that percentage is, but it's a decline. The report also notes that Activision historically opposed including games in its subscription services, or in other subscription services, because it severely cannibalizes sales of games. Kotaku notes that it has seen internal documents from Xbox that said that adding games to Game Pass would lead to cannibalization of digital sales. Well, all of this clearly looks bad for one aspect of Microsoft's argument for why it should be allowed to buy Activision Blizzard. In other words, it might actually hurt game sales. More of the rhetoric out there that I've seen seems to be people talking about Game Pass being a money loser somehow. Brian, what do you think? Is Xbox Game Pass a money loser? Is that bad? There's two things to chime in on, one of which is when it comes to monopoly concerns, keep in mind that the number one platform on the entire planet is Steam. It's not Xbox. It's not PlayStation. But beyond that, keep in mind that in the old days, I think everybody on the panel remembers the days of piracy. We also remember the days where people tried to have it both ways. HBO tried to have it both ways where they would brag about the fact that Game of Thrones was the most pirated content on the internet, and yet also did not offer a legitimate way to get it. So Game Pass, number one, it's slow, it's awkward, it's fumbly, if you stream it, you've got some soupy lag to it and all that. It seems to me like it's white hat piracy. Basically, a way to, even if it does lose money, what it does is it keeps people in our ever evolving theory of convenience, just trumping fidelities, it's so convenient that people won't bother to actually pirate things. Yeah, why mess with torrents when you can just pay this low, low fee and get everything easily. And get an equally crappy version of the experience. Yeah, but all at one place. I don't know, Rich, what do you think of that? I definitely think, I mean, convenience beating free piracy is kind of a proven model for the most part. I mean, definitely, we're willing to accept a lower bit right song in exchange for the supreme convenience of having it anywhere. And game streaming is new enough that we're still kind of figuring out, okay, what's the minimum level of bad that we need that we can put this out here. What's sticking to my mind looking at this is the idea we now, you know, this statement that internal analysis shows percentage decline in base game sales 12 months. That's like all I'm assuming that means all games in aggregate that. Yeah, we don't know how it breaks down, right? That's a good point. So what stands out to me is Schiller's argument with why Xbox or Game Pass increases game sales is that it leads to more visibility on platforms like Twitch hilariously mentioned mixer at the time. So like the I still think that's a valid argument when you're talking about smaller games that need to get visibility out there if that's free and game or free if it's included in the game pass subscription. Probably a lot more people will play it and you'll see more people playing it on stream and stuff like that call of duty doesn't need that every call of duty does not need discoverability when there's a new release out there. So I think that this is probably a more nuanced conversation of Schiller said this or he said that. I am really not interested in going back to Schiller's five year old statement and talking about whether he meant it or not. I bet if you could get Phil Schiller on the record he would say like yeah it was true in 2018 it's not anymore. I think it's as simple as that. I do think that Microsoft's response to this was telling where they just talked about yeah we want to we want to make developers money. They did not deny anything out of this because you can make more money with a subscription service even while reducing sales because you've got guaranteed monthly revenue. Somebody spends $70 on one game they may or may not buy another game for a while if you're getting $10 a month out of them that's guaranteed revenue. So it may make more sense for Microsoft to say like yeah it might reduce game sales but in the end it's going to make us more money. And even though you get discounted DLC in Game Pass you still have to pay that so if everyone is doing apps and stuff like that. You know there are revenue streams for for developers and for Microsoft of course that exists you know kind of within that Game Pass subscription. This is a little bit like the success mirage and I don't mean that in mean way when I talk about the SB 500 where the SB 500 statistically I don't know 10 12% year over year adjusted for inflation forever and ever and ever. But part of the reason it's able to achieve that is because it drops the losers and picks up new possible winners and it could be that Game Pass has the same kind of thing going. Yeah yeah no that's a good point too I I really do think in the end this little passage is not good for Microsoft's argument to acquire Activision Blizzard. It's not deadly they've got other arguments that they can use it's already looking unlikely for other reasons but I don't think it means that Game Pass is somehow a bad business idea for Microsoft for lots of the reasons that we've mentioned here. Alright old folks like us typically first engaged with pro sports maybe on television or even the radio but younger viewers like you out there listening more often use TikTok or Instagram to check out what happened in a game. So the NHL is going to use its analytics tech to try to get younger viewers interested in watching a full game. Yeah the NHL will animate a live game on March 14 between the Washington Capitals and the New York Rangers called the NHL Big City Greens Classic. The game will feature characters from the TV show Big City Greens alongside animated versions of actual hockey players using the NHL Edge system to track the players and the puck. It'll also feature commentators reacting to some of the action from those animated characters from Big City Greens. While the unaltered game will broadcast on ESPN so you know if that's how you want it it's available you can watch the animated version on Disney Channel Disney XD and Disney Plus. The NHL's SVP of business development David Lahasky said this is just a test but that data from NHL Edge could make it possible to do things like customized game broadcasts in Roblox or Minecraft. Yeah Friday 19 and our chat is already going so like NFL Slime Time on Paramount people you might think of them the manning alternate commentary like there's there's examples of people doing this already. Brian it seems like this is a cool aspect of having infinite channels versus the old days when you only had three or four that you it makes more sense to try out something and try to garner a new audience. Yes and it's also a moment to take a moment and take stock of your own values. Do you value like the quote unquote real story or do you value the myths and legends that we project on to our various sports teams etc etc etc. Because ultimately all sports is a random number generator but one that that is especially with like a big city greens which is an excellent show I will vouch for is a good way for preteens to eventually care about the random noise generator and then eventually at the age of 1718 they're going to figure out oh wait that was the Eagles the whole time. Yeah yeah I'm an Eagles fan. I was I did an interview with Derek Gould he's the baseball writer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch it'll be on a word with Tom Merritt next week. And in that interview he talked about how his son engages with baseball in an entirely different way than we did growing up which is what we were talking about at the beginning is using Tik Tok. He just looks at highlights and and so finding a way to attract folks to watch sports may not be important to society but it's certainly important to sports and sports franchises and people like sports. So this is a really interesting attempt and I don't think this is the end of it I can't wait to see what other takes people are going to have on sports. You may turn up your nose and say ah this is this is silly I just want to watch the game great you can ESPN is going to give you just the game you don't have to watch the big city greens version of it. Any more than you have to listen to the manning commentary on Monday Night Football or anything else I I want to see more of this I want to see some some full on like sci-fi visualization creations turn turn a football game into Quidditch. I don't know the mind boggles there's there's part of me that wonders whether or not it's already happening for example my 18 year old daughter is really into baseball which is a complete nonsense engine. All of the names of the teams are nonsense the commissioners nonsense everything's nonsense and it's all random number generator. But what if baseball were to recreate let's say 1947 World Series number for number and then reveal. Oh yeah by the way the St. Louis tacos were actually taking on you know we're actually the the white socks are what have you. Yeah yeah or or the St. Louis brown socks. Is that a thing. It was in the 1800s. All right folks what do you want to hear us talk about on the show we get a lot of our best story ideas from you and one way to let us know is our subreddit submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. Well technologies that lumped under the very general term AI are making news a lot these days just in the last 24 hours. Here's just a quick rundown of some of the news that's out there. Automatic voice transcription company Otter AI launched Otter pilot that automates meeting notes. DARPA announced Monday that its air combat evolution team has developed software that is successfully flown in F 16 multiple times with a human on board for safety and for planetary peace. Our Google chairman and founding member of the US government's Defense Innovation Board Eric Schmidt told wired about is starry a machine learning system to virtually assemble and test military equipment like tanks and on a lighter note Buzzfeed originally officially launched its infinity quizzes that use open AI's API to create a personal narrative base on just a few questions you just answer a few questions it comes up with something totally distinct every time. The first round of these quizzes include create your own romcom and date your celebrity crush Tom which one of these stood out to you create your own romcom. I think oh sorry. Of all the AI stories. Yeah. Interesting to see the F 16 thing. It definitely had a human pilot on board and the idea is to make a more capable autopilot. So that the pilot the human pilot can can focus on intelligence gathering targeting things like that. So that's fascinating. And the Buzzfeed thing all kidding aside the infinity quizzes I can't wait to try these out. If you're a good day internet listener if you're a patron stick around we're going to try a couple of these out collaboratively with the crew after Daily Tech News show is over. What about you Rich. The other pilot I already use other AI for like show notes for it's a thing or transcripts for there. And so like all of this is doing is taking what is already a very reliable transcription product. I mean I don't want to say all it's doing. I give it some credit but it's taking that and doing a lot more real time stuff it's giving you real time notes and making it easier for people that are either dipping in and out of meetings or not in meetings like as someone who wants to avoid meetings as much as possible any way that you can have a way to passively absorb that information while I'm ignoring a meeting is always welcome. So I'm super interested in stuff like that. All right. But the main thrust of the A.I. related news is the search engine race still and at a conference Monday Alphabet chairman John Hennessey. You were like wait a minute Alphabet chairman's name is John Hennessey. Yeah chairman of the board of directors generally sticks to strictly financial takes you don't hear him talking about the business a lot. But this time he did he got on the record and he made some headlines saying he thinks generative A.I. is still a year or two away from being truly useful. He said quote I think Google was hesitant to productize this because it didn't think it was really ready for a product yet. But I think as a demonstration vehicle it's a great piece of technology. That's all fine. He's reacting to the fact that Google took a lot of heat when it tweeted a gift with results from the Bard generative A.I. that they are adding to Google that had an incorrect fact related to which telescope discovered the first exoplanet. I gave him a lot of heat for that not because the A.I. got it wrong but because they didn't catch it and they tweeted it out as an example just just a bad human move. Monday search engine researcher Dimitri Bremerton pointed out that Bing also displayed factual errors during Microsoft's demonstration last week. For example it gave a measurement for the cord length for a cordless vacuum that you know cordless didn't have a cord. And when asked questions about a financial document it made a bunch of errors including incorrectly referring to unadjusted growth gross margin is gross margin as well as incorrectly calculating operating margin things that I would do probably. But you if you're relying on this thing you wouldn't want it to do. So what's the takeaway here Brian is Bing just as bad as Google when it comes to generative A.I. or is it as simple as just none of these tools are good yet. No it's not as good and it doesn't have to be as good that's the beauty of being Pepsi Pepsi to somebody else's Coke. So it's like it's on Google as somebody who appears to have been asleep at the wheel to verify this like oh no we know all about this work here for it. Unfortunately it was a human disaster that they published the wrong fact on on their socially promoted GIF on there. Meanwhile Bing is in the unique position where it's like can anybody expect less from Bing. As a result they get to do whatever and they get get to be as wrong as you want. All I know is that Bing is doing something and Google is messing up. That's that's all I read as a consumer. Yeah yeah that's that that's the rhetoric out there you're absolutely right. Yes kind of this a challenger brand or whatever you want to call you know I'm thinking of the Pepsi Coke comparison specifically. But look at what the products that Microsoft launched this with right. Things that are in no way key to their revenue. It's part of the like the benefit of them having a very diversified sources of revenue for the company right they can afford to take a risk on Bing. They can afford to take a risk on Edge which is you know a second or third place browser depending on what graphs you're looking at what market share you're looking at. So it's it's not they don't have the number one browser they don't have the number one search and so they can be super aggressive with this and say. You know what we can gather some data if nothing else we can get a ton of data to make this better so that as we start rolling it in they're already starting to roll it into word stuff more visibly. Rolling it into office and some of the stuff where they have a lot more productivity stakes a lot more I guess to lose in a lot of ways that they can make sure that their products which is usually a strategy that Google makes right when Google wants to disrupt something. I'm thinking of something like Google Docs like yeah we'll roll out the bad thing first and you can use it for free and who cares it's free and it's something you didn't have before. And yeah we're going to make it a lot better. It's a very different situation where Google is in the driver's seat with search and the driver's seat with Chrome things they don't want to screw up because they're very good for their business that is not very diversified. And all of a sudden they can you know that they find that they're having to play catch up potential or definitely with Microsoft. Well and the canonical parallels that we would make is Hertz number one driving rental car company or whatever. Avis being in number two they say we're number two we try harder. In the case of Google where Google in the case of Bing it's like Bing we're trying things like that's powerful. And I think a lot of people are on board for it. I know that's a great answer. Dimitri Bremerton in his article which was was well done was like why is everybody giving Bing a pass. I think Brian just answered the question that that's why everyone is or not everyone but a lot of people are giving Bing a pass. I used open AIS chat GPT to write a bunch of the quick hits today. I never let the text stand as it was I had to I had to use I had to modify it multiple times every time it put a date it was wrong. It said that the the Twitter API had been delayed to the 14th it was the 13th. It said that Jobe was going to do its commercial operations in 2024 was 2025. So yeah I had to go back and look at these and go like wait is everything in here right. Nope it's not but it was still faster. It still laid the scaffolding for me it saved me time. And they're they're also despite the fact that they're claiming that this is not ready for primetime what I have you. But but like there are realtors that are using it to create flowery flowery language for various you know cottages and so on. It's it's being used. It's going to get better. It's just it's not good at everything right now. The thing that gets me is is these analysts who always say there's dozens of them and I respect every single one of them. But they always say like the problem with jet GPT is it confidently states things are wrong. There's nothing confident about it. It just spits out words one after the other. You're reading in the confidence. You shouldn't have the confidence in it. You should be skeptical about it. And then it won't seem confident. It'll just seem like a helpful tool. I definitely asked a chat GPT. I asked what's wrong with Brian brushwood. And it refused to answer which I respect. Not not for me to tell you said GPT. Yeah. All right. Well James Brown a graphics engineer at Weta Workshop formally made news by upgrading tiny Lego computers with screens that can display wire frame targeting animations and scrolling text basic stuff. It's still impressive. Now his computers have built-in USB C ports some even have touch controls and Brown now even cast his own resin Lego bricks. But what is hardware really if it can't play doom Brown successfully demonstrated running the game on one of his Lego power bricks for a few months ago. They draw power from a USB connection on a disconnected Lego power brick with a nine volt battery inside Brown recently converted the electronics inside the bricks into a wearable self contained ring running the Rp 20 40 version of doom with custom code optimizing it for a great scale display. You can't actually control the action on screen while wearing the ring but Brown says he may build a new version with flexible materials. So the ring is more durable wearable doom. Truly this I forget chat GPT. Now the future. We live perfect Valentine's Day gift. Slightly pedantic take here. There's a difference between displaying doom being played and actually playing doom. I didn't see any controls in any of that fair enough. This is this is just a circuit board. It has 16 K flash memory 16 K flash memory and 4 K of RAM. So it's not going to run doom but it's an impressive monitor. Don't when you say. Yeah. Oh. That's my dream display right there. All right. Folks. We appreciate you being with us and we would like you to thank Brian brushwood go to Twitter. Atchwood say thank you Brian for being on Daily Tech news show. Brian where else should people go? You know what? I'll do you one better. Why don't you head on over to greatest con podcast dot com and listen to the first two seasons of world's greatest con because season three is coming. We're talking about weeks days like like like 40 something days until it comes out to give or take a big secret what it is. It's very very good. Get get caught up. I will say only this about it. Brian gave me a sneak peek. I listened to the first episode thinking like, you know what? I'm sure it's good. But for my buddy Brian, I'm going to make sure I set aside a little bit of time to listen to as much as I can. And I finished the whole GD series. I could not stop myself. You're going to love it. Even if you read the description, you're like, I don't know. It sounds interesting, but just start because you'll want to you'll want to gobble up the whole thing. All right. Well, thanks also to our brand new boss, Chris, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Chris. Chris, Chris, you made our day. Chris, Chris made this show possible along with all the other patrons, all the other patrons. Welcome Chris to the club at patreon.com slash DTNS. And folks, you could be the next Chris. Go go join up patreon.com slash DTNS where if if you are already a patron stick around. You can get the commercial free version of the show, including good day internet starting right now with a BuzzFeed quiz. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young on a Wednesday. Oh my gosh, talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Time and club hopes you have enjoyed this program.