 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you for supporting us. Coming up on DTNS, we find out which 2023 prediction came true, and the rest of them that fell flat. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 28th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio New. I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. This is the show where we look at our prediction show from last year. Nobody else does this. We look at our actual predictions from last year, and we decide how wrong we were, except in a couple of cases where people are actually right, braving the ability to do this and coming back to us from last year's prediction show. Andrea Jones-Roy, data scientist, comedian, circus performer, and host of majoring in everything podcast. Welcome back, Andrea, and thank you. Thank you for having me back. I'm looking forward to confirming that I am indeed an oracle of our time. Oh, I can't wait for that as well. Also an oracle of our time, Will Smith, co-host of Brad and Will made a tech pod. Hey, thanks for having me, Tom. I'm ready to hang my head in shame as we talk about what I said last year. And not an oracle of his time, but a sun microsystems of his time. I as Aktar, mobile analyst at PCMag. That's true. I really love design, the sun logo was fantastic. I love that. Well, of course, one of the great privileges of being a host of this show is you get to do your predictions first and get it out of the way. So Sarah Lane, shall we start with you? What was your first prediction from 2023? First prediction was that mastodon, an ex-competitor, certainly kind of the front runner a year ago, I said, mastodon ain't gonna stick. By June 2023, I said mastodon will no longer be a thing, or at least it will be more of a niche thing that it was at the beginning. Okay, so I was very wrong. Very wrong here. And the reason that I'm wrong is because ActivityPub, when you go through Metta and Metta's, well, okay, so gosh, where do we start? Well, you've got threads, threads using ActivityPub, which I think is what you're about to say. Yeah, yeah. And then you've got Tumblr starting integration, Flipboard just fully integrated with the Fediverse. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, all of that. I sound very excited when I say that, that is what you predicted, but I know it's actually the opposite. So I mean, so here's the thing, I'm wrong but I'm happy that I'm wrong. I'm happy that ActivityPub has new life, okay? There are people who are always going to say like, well, Metta's not gonna do the right thing with ActivityPub and MasterDawn people are, they live in a different bubble. That's all true. And I don't really know how this is gonna all play out, but what I will say is that the ex-competitors are not dead. They are thriving. We are figuring out as users of those services, how they're thriving, but I'm feeling pretty bullish. Yeah, it feels like when you made this prediction, everyone was banking on MasterDawn replacing Twitter. Right, yeah. Right, and that did not happen. So if you'd stopped halfway maybe, you would have got this one right. Well, I mean, it was the kind of time, when we recorded the show last year, it was kind of that moment where we weren't sure, like we knew Twitter was probably gonna go bad, but we didn't really appreciate how bad it was gonna go how quickly. And, you know, I could see how you could look at that and we didn't know about, Threads wasn't a thing yet. Blue Sky was, you know, there were like 100,000 people on Blue Sky or something like that. And now we're what, almost 10 million people on MasterDawn and a couple million people on Blue Sky and like there's the kind of conversations that were happening in the early days of Twitter, kind of growing up all over the place. And then every brand alive is on Threads doing brand engagement things that I, I mean, I don't know, whatever. But I think this was a reasonable prediction, Sarah. Yeah, I don't think you were out over your skis too far. I think she was technically. No, I thought this was actually the most likely to be correct. So I believe your prediction much more than my own, for example. At the time, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was like, oh, that was a good one, yeah. Well, and you know, all things, you know, as we are moving forward today, I also don't really think that MasterDawn is going to be a thing. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but it's like, I feel like Threads is the thing. MasterDawn is, you know, an activity pub offering of the thing, but yeah, I stand. I stand by my prediction. I think Sarah's kind of got it though. Is it a thing? Do regular people outside of us know that MasterDawn is behind some of this stuff or this decentralized system? Because people are still calling Tweets Tweets, even though they're technically posts. It might be Twitter.com. It's still called X and nobody's calling it that because that's just silly. When will there be, let's say, in the share menus of everything? And it says, it'll say X, Threads, and then MasterDawn. That hasn't really happened yet. Could you imagine if like when they introduced iOS 17, they were like, and now when you have the share menu shows, MasterDawn. Everyone would have been like, okay, cool, super. So I think Sarah might technically be right. I like the spin. All right. Twitter became X. It technically did replace Twitter because Twitter is no longer Twitter, right? So mathematically, it's been replaced. If you look at my home screen, I have MasterDawn, Threads, and X in a folder called Twitter. Nice. It A will be and B equals C something, something. Yeah. All right, Sarah, what was your other prediction? Second prediction, Alexa going to have a tough time, not advancing from where Alexa is right now. Sorry to everybody who had their Amazon assistants come to life. Yeah, so I think I'm right. Yeah, yeah. You nailed this one. 100%. I also feel like this was a little bit of a pointy in on my part where I'm like, it's okay to think it's not. It just isn't gonna be like all that great. And everyone's like, well, yeah, it isn't. So here's the deal. We, the smart assistant universe has some work to do. In fact, we talked about that on a previous and off a previous version of DTNS. Just nine days ago, we talked about that very thing. Exactly. It, the whole sort of like, here's how you make things happen versus here's how you would just talk to this, talk to your assistant in natural language. We are just now getting to the point where it's like, oh wow, we're doing like a natural language thing. In the past year, I mean, one year ago, we were not talking about this. So that's where I think this is pretty exciting. Well, but it's, I mean, it's kind of different because last year we were using our voice assistants and we were talking to them and asking questions and they were answering those questions across a knowledge graph that was like known, confirmed, correct information. And now we asked chat GPT something and it just makes up an answer that sounds plausible, but you know, mayor may not actually be factually correct. I like your question better, even if it's not able to properly answer it. Yeah, so you're gonna double down on this one? Or do you think Amazon turns it around this year? Are you asking me, Tom? Yes, I am. I think that we've been hearing little whispers of like, oh, you know, the Amazon assistant, Google Home assistant, you know, Siri, they're all like, they're like version one of all of this. You know, like what happens next? I don't know what happens next, but I think that these companies have been, they thought they were at the forefront of all of this. And I think that they feel like they were caught in a way. I think that, you know, the open AIs and the chat GPTs and the, you know, I mean, even the, you know, the bar and everything, that has changed the landscape to the point where having something like Amazon's assistant to, you know, give you, you know, add something to your shopping list. It's like, it still works, but it's not really what we're going for in the future. So. All right. Well, let's get Andrea's predictions from 2023 and see how you did, Andrea, what was your first prediction? So my first prediction was uncharacteristically optimistic if you share the normative beliefs that I do, which is that I predicted that actually the rise of chat GPT and all the other generative AI models would cause an increase in enrollment in the humanities and the social sciences and that it would actually bring STEM and the humanities closer together. And to be more concrete, I specifically said enrollment in the humanities and declared humanities majors in undergraduate institutions in the United States would increase. That is what I said. Best I can tell, whoops, my internet connection. Best I can tell that has not happened. That said, I think I can buy a pass of some sort because the data from 2023 is not in. There are numbers coming out of 2022. There's a ton of much more thorough research looking back the last 10 years or so, but of the numbers I could find from 21 and 22, humanities enrollment was plummeting, but I don't know about 2023. The latest I could find was an article in June saying things were still not good and I could see individual colleges reporting their spring 23 semester information, but fall 23 and those sorts of things, those are not out. So I could back out of it, but I think I'm wrong, A, because I have eyes and ears and I'm paying attention to the world and B, I think the lack of news that all of a sudden we're seeing a ton more interest in the humanities, I think that demonstrates that I haven't called it correctly. I think the other thing is- But technically, we don't have the data. Technically, we don't have it. Sure, sure. And the data might vary you out, but even if it doesn't, I often make the mistake of these predictions of making a prediction for something that's gonna take five years to happen instead of the next year. Exactly. So you could end up being right several years down the road. Maybe you were just ahead of your time. So I don't know if you wanna send me a calendar invite now to turn it in, you know, 2030, this prediction. Roger, note that down, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'll be on the lookout. So, but from what I can tell, no, not yet. All right, what was your second prediction? So my second prediction, you know, I've learned a hard but important lesson about being optimistic. I also was optimistic. Again, if you share my values on this, I was optimistic as well with my second prediction, which was that Musk's takeover of Twitter, still called it Twitter, would be good for algorithmic transparency and accountability that we were all very worked up about him taking over. We were very unimpressed at the time with what he was doing overall. Obviously, there were people who were into it. And I argued that, you know, yes, it's bad and yes, it seems bad for Twitter, but I do think that this is gonna start to usher in more attention to the importance of algorithmic transparency. How are our algorithms working? Why are we getting the things that we're getting? How do we make sure that, you know, these biases are not sending us to say extreme views and promoting hate speech and all those sorts of things. And to be very concrete with my prediction, I said that the Algorithmic Accountability Act, which was introduced into Congress in 2022, would be signed into law. And I took the liberty of looking this up and it made nary a move from February 2022. Not even looked at as far as I could tell. So dead wrong on that front. And, you know, the best I can say is, the most generous I can say is that I, you know, there were a handful of really thoughtful articles that came out in places like the Atlantic and so on about, you know, people wanting, people starting to demand control over their algorithms. So why is Instagram feeding me this? Why is YouTube feeding me these things? Can I get in there and twist the knobs in any sort of way? And so there are murmurs to advocate, kind of like the consumer, you know, data ownership, data privacy, like I should be able to toggle on what I'm sharing and what I'm not. There are conversations starting to take place around, you know, the algorithms that drive what we see and read and hear and are exposed to every single day. But nothing in terms of formal law, like I said, and certainly I don't know that Twitter or Musk per se was the impetus for that. I don't think it was unrelated, but I, you know, I think it was decided to say that that was it because of TikTok and a million other things that are going on. If anything, the fragmenting of the microblog space took some of the heat off of algorithms in effect, in some ways. Yeah, so just dead wrong, I'm sorry to say. Oh wait, give yourself some credit. I mean, at least if you just take a more general sense of accountability, the amount of companies that pulled advertising from X because their leader, not even their leader, their owner went kind of like, I don't know, you guys have been paying attention for the past year. The owner decided to say some crazy stuff over the time and endorse things to the point that Disney and Netflix were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. We might not be able to fund you to the point where Musk is like, well then you will kill us and it'll be your fault. It's like, okay, so there is some more accountability because how often do we see major advertisers pull away from a pretty big platform without backdoor dealings and discussing like, okay, we gotta fix this. So you're saying if we just take the word algorithmic out, then we're good. Yeah, exactly. I'm just saying there's something here because now we're actually paying, I think more people are paying attention because I don't think these major companies were like, yeah, this is what people care about. They're like, wait a second, algorithm or not. We don't want our stuff associated with whatever's flowing through. So one with the other. I think that's right. I think it's- Tiny a spit. I actually overestimated the sophistication of the problem and it was actually not about the algorithm. The algorithm is flawed as well. And at the time people were commenting, at this time last year, people were saying that their feeds were getting all mangled and they were getting all kinds of weird things that they don't normally get and they weren't seeing people they were following. So it was starting, but yeah, you're right. It was actually just one dude. The algorithm is a problem but we didn't even need to wait for that. It was just some good old fashioned hate speech from a guy. And TikTok has shown that the algorithm, not that TikTok doesn't have this controversy around the algorithm, but the algorithm is its special sauce. Like you don't have TikTok as popular as it is without its special algorithm that it's going to great lengths to protect people from being able to see what it does. All right. Well, let's see how Will did. What was your first prediction, Will? My first prediction was that a renewed and wider spread focus on privacy was going to drive interest and adoption of open source software. I think I could maybe make an argument that I was half right on this, that we would, because we cared more about who's making money on our free labor on sites like X, sorry, I'm just gonna say 10, or what happens to our Creative Cloud accounts when we decide we wanna stop paying for Creative Cloud, we've stored all this data there. They're suddenly using it to generate machine learning, to do machine learning training on stuff like that. I think people are actually more aware of privacy. I don't think I'm right, I don't think I hit this at all, because I mean, open source adoption has continued at the same rate that it always has forever and ever. It seems like outside of the usual spikes. But I do, I mean, very anecdotally, we get a lot more privacy-focused questions to the podcast, we get a lot more, I see a lot more mainstream news places talking about privacy these days than they were. Yeah, yeah, that part is true. Last year or the year before even. So a renewed and wider spread focus on privacy, you got that part right. And who's to say that interest and adoption of open source software wouldn't have declined otherwise? You know, what I will take, I will take that it wasn't gonna be the year of the Linux desktop, nail that one, 100%. What about 2024, do we put our money on that? Look, Andrea, I got some bad news for you. We're not quite there yet, but you know, we're making good progress, okay? I have been holding my breath for a long time. I'm using Chrome OS on a laptop. That's litics on the desktop. I like that argument. I use a Steam Deck every day. There you go, yeah. You know, all kidding aside, we have seen a rise in open source software with the proliferation of Activity Pub and Blue Skies at Protocol. We've seen Meta drive a lot more open source, large language model and generative model stuff that you might have expected. So, I don't know. Anybody else willing to give Will partial credit on this one? Because it's called to me? I didn't get partial credit. Okay, well, Audrey says that, so let's go with that. Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, I talked to a lot of game studios because of my day job, and I am seeing game developers set up their new projects with Blender as the endpoint for their animation pipeline rather than using Maya or something like that, just because it's way, young people are coming in trained in Blender instead of Maya and if you don't have to buy a Maya license for everyone, it's, Blender is free. You can, everybody can have a Blender license, not buying a Maya license for everyone. It saves you two grand a person per year, which is a substantial cost in the pipeline. So, there are inroads happening. It's just the normal spikes here and there rather than like a general overhead trend, I think. All right. What about your second prediction? Oh, my second one, I was way wrong. I made some, I went out on the limb here. I, my prediction was that there are new markets that can add compute to them in the same way the smartphones have added compute to cameras and made something that's way better than a phone camera has any right to be. And I think the category I picked was that someone would do that with home audio and take those little dinky $99 speakers that are in Alexa and Google homes and the home pods and all those things and build a little app that you run on your iPhone, you map the room from an audio perspective and you get some incredible high quality sound out of a 545 of these little $99 speakers. Nobody's done that yet and I'm sad. Yet, yet maybe you're just out of your time too. I think you're way out of your time. I also just moved and have been arguing with sound and I wish really on a very personal selfish level that you were correct because that would be very nice. And I would hope with the matter standard with that being an everything at some point somebody will be able to make an app to do exactly what Will is talking about because matter is supposed to make everything interoperate. Now, will the speakers work together to the point where they can act as a solid unit? You have to talk to Sonos about that because I know Google tried it and they kind of ran afoul as some patents. So I don't know whether the consortium behind matter has any way to access those patents but that would be, it seems like it's a matter of time because that seems doable. And it would actually sell more of these freaking speakers that people are like, I don't wanna talk to Alexa or whatever, like at least I could hear good audio. Yeah. Well, that brings us to the halfway point and Sarah, you have one prediction correct. Will, you have partial credit on one prediction. So that's where we stand partway through the review. Want to remind folks that we are not live until January 2nd again, but you can still send us emails if you've got thoughts or things you'd like to show up in the new show after the first of the year, we're getting close, send us emails feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. All right, let's carry on with our review of our predictions for 2023. We made these in 2022, for 2023. Now that 2023 is just about over, we're looking back to see how we did. I, as Aktar, what was your first prediction? Well, I was completely in a different scale as my other two guests here, I mean, you guys had brilliant ideas and I'm like, Mac OS is gonna run on an iPad. And, you know, it didn't. It didn't, I said probably the pro because Mac OS was getting like spacing on the menu bar, there's universal control to getting closer and closer. The same systems on a chip are running these Macs and iPads and iPad flows. So like it's getting closer, but we didn't even get a new iPad this year. So I couldn't be, I'm so wrong that there's not even a device for this to run on because yeah, we got a new iMac, which is like, okay, look, an iMac, if you could add touch to it, that thing's a freaking iPad. But I will not, I completely got this wrong because you can't do this, you can't do it in any official way. I know some hackers work on this, but it's not there. So I'm taking a big fat goose egg. I don't know if I even want Mac OS on an iPad, but I think- You're so bad you don't even want it anymore. Well, I just, I think it should at some point. It didn't happen, now maybe I don't want it. I'm taking it myself personally. I don't know if anybody else wants that, but like I just want options, but that's a zero for me. My transparent in accountability act salutes you. I mean, Apple didn't even put it, they did this despite you. They're like, we're not even putting out an iPad. I is, iPad, no way. The show's market mover, let's go. All right, what about your second prediction? Any better luck there? I might have, we'll get a Google foldable and my hand is a Google Pixel Fold. So I think I got that one because Google and Samsung were buddies I wrote last year and Samsung being the foldable expert, Google got back into the tablet space last year. Wow, that's weird to say now. The Google Pixel tablet, which I've reviewed and it's all right, but the Pixel Fold does exist. It's out there, it's ridiculously expensive. I know they were doing deals during Black Friday and things. I still think the Galaxy Fold is better, but this does exist, so that's a solid win for me, I think, unless somebody can read what I wrote and find a way out of it. No, I as, I think you got it right. I'm Pixel Fold. Pixel Fold, hello Pixel Fold, I'm Pixel Old. Yeah, yeah. No, you nailed this one. This is, this is the, no room for, no wiggle room. Like, how did you know by astronomers? Well, I will say that the amount of effort that Google put into Android 12 L and the buddy buddying up with Samsung to get usable software. This is how bad Google's gotten at software. They're like, okay, Samsung, can you fix Wear OS? Can you teach us how to do multitasking? Because the stuff I used to complain about years ago, like, oh, Samsung adds too much stuff to Android. To the point where they've added enough stuff where it's better than stock Android, things got better. So I thought, at some point, this foldable market, if Google doesn't at least kind of pull a Microsoft kind of thing of like, look, we're gonna make one. So you got, it was not really competition. There's the fold from Samsung, there's the OnePlus that's coming out. There's all these devices that are gonna, these book style devices. And if Google doesn't even bother to put their money with their mouth is, nobody's, I think the other companies will be like, well, you're not making one, we're not making one either. So I think for Google's future, they needed to make a fold. Hope the next one's better. Well, you nailed that one. You and Sarah are now neck and neck. Sarah, how do you feel? I feel fine. Haya's did some good projections. Yeah, yeah, you can't deny it. It's right there. Neck and neck. Well, good news, the only one left to look at are my predictions. And I will not be challenging either one of you. All right, let's hear it. My first prediction for 2023 was that Twitter would have new ownership by the end of the year. Not only is that not true, but it's not even called Twitter. I didn't even, I was wrong in calling it Twitter by the end of the year. I did think that Elon Musk would retain a stake and my best bet for a new owner was Salesforce. There was a lot of talk that Salesforce was interested in buying Twitter from Musk, that it was not reliable, scuttle that, or if it was, it didn't end up being true anyway. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. I have no idea. The deal could happen. It's three days to go. Still time. Come on, Salesforce. The dream's still alive, Tom. Yeah, do we know anyone at Salesforce? Who can we call? I felt like because Musk had been very clear that he didn't really want to buy it after all, like he tried to back out, that he would do his best to kind of rearrange the deck, bring down the costs, right, which he had already started to do by this time last year, and then polish it up for a sale and get rid of it, which would have been a sensible thing to do. I still feel like, but not in fact. Look, I still think there's an outside chance that it's a Brewster's billion situation where he has a bet with another billionaire where he has to lose $100 billion as fast as possible in order to win a trillion dollars. Yeah. That's the most compelling explanation for everything that's gone on over there. Yeah, over the course of the year, that has been, that has risen to be one of the more credible explanations. My second prediction was that floppy disks would make a nostalgia comeback. Do you mean the save icon, Tom? Yes, for the younger people in the audience. I mean the save icon. No, I was thinking like, okay, we've had all these nostalgia comebacks around cassettes and LPs and older computer stuff that maybe floppy disks would start to have some nostalgia around them. I've seen some evidence of this. But it's not solid enough for me to claim that I got it right, but maybe I was just too- You didn't say a huge comeback. You said- No, no, I didn't. So like if you keep this vague enough and get a lawyer just talking, and it'll be like, yeah, it's close. The people who use them, I'm sure they were nostalgic about it. They were like, what's this new 1.44 megabyte thing? They probably knew what it was because they had to buy a drive for it too. Because what are you gonna do with it? I, Wired ran an article in March of this year called Why the Floppy Disk Just Won't Die, but I don't think that's the same as it making a nostalgic connection. That's so much. Yeah, good. Oh, I just was thinking that there had to be a Kickstarter or something that gave Floppy Disk as a reward for like a high tier kind of, hey, back art game, you'll get the game on Floppy. No, I couldn't find anything. I'm sorry, Tom. I feel like it's still cooking. Like it still might happen. But all the news stories about Floppy Discs are about like, can you believe Chuck E. Cheese still uses Floppy Discs and sort of that kind of thing. So I think I'm over on the predictions this year. Which puts me with Andrea. Hey, I just want you all to know that my prediction for next year is that the QWERTY keyboard will continue to dominate and social media is not going away. You can write those down. Write them down, folks. Yeah, that's it. I gotta go way safer. I'm gonna predict that the internet will maintain above 50% penetration. I don't know, that's probably not what I'm gonna predict. I'll predict something ridiculous. Tune in tomorrow to find out. But that's it, we did it, we reviewed. I love that we do this and I wanna thank you all for being willing to go back and look at these like this. I think it's helpful. I think it's good at kind of setting our perspectives a little bit. Indeed, and thank you to our panel starting with you, Andrea. Where can folks find your work? You can find me on all the social medias that I predict are not going anywhere. Now Instagram's gonna crash, because I said that. But you can find me at Jonesroy, J-O-N-E-S-R-O-O-Y on all the things and on YouTube. And I'm posting a whole bunch of data science tutorials in the new year, so you can check that out. Excellent. What about you, Will Smith? Well, you can find me on the tech pod with Brad, Brad Will made a tech pod every Sunday at techpod.content.town Where we talk about, well, usually it's a single topic. Sometimes it's what's happening in the news. Sometimes it's a project that we've been working on. But always something topical, always something interesting. And we hope you learn something new every week. Well, we're so happy to have you with us today. I, as actor, where can people find out your latest? Go to PCMag.com, where we actually, well, in our offices, we do have floppy disks, but nobody cares. I'm reviewing mobile phones and tablets there all the time. And so if you want to know what's good about the Galaxy Fold 5, I'll let you know. If you want to know what's good about the Pixel Fold, I'll let you know. Just check that out at PCMag.com and social media. Yeah, I'm at IAS, but I'm not really hanging out there anymore because it's just, you know, you know how it's been. Because social media is going away now that Andrea Prenector wants to go away. Yeah, we're all just kind of like quietly read books. I'm going to make my own world. I'm going to send you all a letter next year and tell you what I'm talking about. Gary, Patrons for all. Yeah. Thank you, patrons, for supporting us and making it possible for us to do this show. I know I say it, but I don't think I can say it enough. There would be no show without you. You get value from the show, give a little value back, and that just makes the whole thing work. So thank you for supporting us at patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Don't forget, no live shows this holiday week while you're normally live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will be live again January 2nd, but don't worry. We're still going to bring you a show tomorrow, our tech predictions for 2024. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.