 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener right there. I'm in your ear. Hi, it's pretty clean in here. Good job. Thanks to all of you, including Mike Cortez, Erwin Stewart, Ken Hayes, and lifetime supporter Rob Hughes. On this episode of DTNS, Scott Johnson will tell us why he just wants more details on how Square Enix plans to use AI. Chris Ashley shows up to give us his first impressions on an indoor smart smoker, and Facebook has a new way to get you to let them track you. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And suggested in our Discord from Studio 42 on the Sunset Strip. I'm sorry. From Salt Lake City, boring. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm in my home and I'm the show's producer, Roger Che. Oh, can you believe it's already January 3rd? What? So we always say that about every date when it gets to a new month. Practically Christmas. This week is almost over. That's true. That's true. Well, I thought it was Thursday all day. So, you know, yeah, that makes sense. Time is meaningless this week. So we are assured that it is Wednesday. We've double checked. We're very careful with the facts at Daily Tech News show. But it might not be Wednesday for you. It's only Wednesday while we're recording this. So with that cleared away, let's start with the quick hits. Samsung's Unpacked event will happen a little earlier than usual this year on Wednesday, January 17th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time in San Jose, California. The company teased the newest additions to the Galaxy mobile device portfolio and used the tagline, Galaxy AI is coming. A video also showed somebody using pinch to zoom to enlarge an object in a photo. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon series 8 Gen 3 lets the phone run a generative models on device, even if it's offline. Samsung also followed LG's lead announcing new monitors ahead of CES next week, including new 49 inch curved Odyssey OLED G9 and the first flat monitors in the Odyssey line. Flat is the new curve, I guess, the 32 inch G8 and the 27 inch G6. Both the 49 inch and the 32 inch monitors have a 240 Hertz refresh rate, which is pretty good. But that 32 inch because it's smaller and its lower resolution has a 360 Hertz refresh rate rate, 1440p, I think all three have built in smart TV platforms with access to streaming services, Samsung's gaming hub and smart things control without needing to use a connected computer. However, these are going to be shown off at CES and we probably will have to wait till then to get a price or release date. I think if you call monitor a G6, it should be shaped like a jet. Yeah, and take off like one. Yeah, right. Got it. Anyway, who announced new high end TVs, higher end TVs, they already have TVs running its smart TV OS and arriving this spring in a 55 inch, a 65 inch and 75 inch model costing up to $1,500. Roku's current TVs top out at about 999, but the company says the new models will be thinner, easier to mount on a wall and have improved audio. The Roku OS will also be able to automatically adjust picture quality with some machine learning tools in there as well. Tuesday night, SpaceX launched 21 more satellites, including six Starlink satellites that have the direct to sell capability, which is designed to cover cellular services, among whom might be T-Mobile customers in the US, Rogers in Canada, KDDI customers in Japan, Optus in Australia, 1NZ in New Zealand, Salt in Switzerland, Intel in Chile and Peru. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stressed the bandwidth limit is around seven megabytes per beam or megabits per beam, which can't compete with terrestrial cellular networks, but it can serve areas that don't have service at all. So it's better than nothing. Text messaging is set to be available later in 2024 with voice and data service coming sometime in 2025. Calgary based startup MyShell posted on X about an open source voice cloning program called Open Voice developed in partnership with scientists at MIT and Xinhua University in Beijing. MyShell says Open Voice lets you control rhythm, emotional tone, pauses, intonation, and it only needs a few seconds of actual audio to train. A pre-reviewed paper published on archive.org about the program describes a text-to-speech model trained on 30,000 sentences from English, Chinese and Japanese speakers and a tone converter trained on 300,000 samples from more than 20,000 different speakers. Users can try it out from both MyShell and Hugging Face. Well, folks have been wondering what Facebook is going to do with Chrome getting rid of third party cookies. Safari got rid of them a long time ago. Edge is cracking down on similar stuff. Here is what one of the things they're going to do is a globally rolled out feature over the next several weeks called Link History. Here's the Facebook perspective on it. They pitch it as a feature that keeps a list of all the links you click within Facebook's mobile app. So you can review them and find links that you might want to revisit later. Never lose a link again, browser history, but for the Facebook mobile app. Now, this is an opt out feature, but Facebook will show you a pop up notifying you that the feature is active because it's opt out, at which point you can then opt out of it. But why would they do this, you might ask. Now, Facebook is telling users that when you allow Link History, we may use your information to improve your ads across meta technologies. Ding, ding, ding. So if you let that happen and you change your mind later, Facebook says, OK, we'll delete Link History data within 90 days if you do indeed turn it off. Now, being able to pull up a link, it's not really that bad on the surface. There are plenty of times I'm like, what was that place? I don't know. I shouldn't have closed the tab, et cetera, et cetera. But this is also Facebook. So let's all talk about why Facebook might actually be doing this. Well, Tom sort of alluded to it. And I think I agree. It just feels like someone's saying, hey, you know, all that web activity that you do on your own devices. Here's here's another version of that. Although obviously very specific to mobile data in this conversation. And maybe we don't have enough of that. I'm trying to decide whether this is something I want. And to be honest, I'm on the side of let me opt out as soon as I can. Because what's the point? I don't need to give them more data. It's also it's within Facebook's mobile app. I don't use Facebook all that much, really. But I really don't use the mobile app at all. I use Facebook Messenger here and there on my phone. But I am almost never loading the Facebook mobile app. So it's, you know, right away, just a feature that isn't going to help me all that much. But it also doesn't keep Facebook from tracking you. Facebook tracks you on millions of websites all over. But you don't even have to be on Facebook for that to be happening. That's the problem that Facebook is running into, is their way of tracking you on millions of web websites around the world is going away. It's being worded by these changes in Chrome and Safari, etc. And and thwarted by privacy laws that just make some of the things that they've done in the past illegal to share. So they're looking for these kinds of ways to find other data that fits within privacy laws that you consent to give them. I'll be honest, I look at this and I think if if I don't know whether they should have it or not, I would say no. But it's not the end of the world if they have a little link history on you. As long as you know you're giving it to them, you might get better ads because of it and you get the benefit of being able to go back into your link history in an app that you wouldn't otherwise be able to go into. So I don't think this is the end of the world. If you say yes to it, it's actually the way it's supposed to work. You know, you're doing it and what you're getting for it. Yeah, and I guess I'd rather live in a world where they're transparent about stuff. I don't know this is really transparency, but this is them saying, well, we collect your data. You already know we collect your data. So hey, we're going to give you access to that data. Maybe that's helpful to you in some way. I mean, I'm not you have to agree to it, even if it's opt out. Right. Even yes, exactly. So I don't know. I don't know that it's that big of a deal. It's easy to get your bristles up and go. I don't want another social media thing or big corporation tracking me any more than they already do because we already know that they track us a ton. And this just feels like confirmation of that. But I don't know. Somebody might find it useful. This is better than not telling me. And it's a lot better than than making it a thing that, you know, is all behind the scenes that I agreed two years ago and didn't even know it, you know. And it's a sign that they're not tracking you as much as they used to because they have to do this. They wouldn't do this otherwise. If they had sort of a desperation move. Yeah, it's also just confusing. I mean, if you are even slightly interested in what's going on under the hood at Facebook, you might say, well, don't they already offer a tool called off Facebook activity where that I can unbundle from my profile. They do. They also have something called clear history, which is just basically just a fake clearing of history for you. If you don't want to see what you've looked at, but it doesn't actually delete anything. So yeah, yeah, that's what's going on with link history. A little confusing, but hey, we're letting you know it's there and you can opt out if you want. And by the way, it's not really clear who is getting this feature yet. A Facebook help page notes that link history isn't available everywhere, but is rolling out globally over time. GE launched an indoor meat smoker on Indiegogo back in March 2022. They called it Arden at the time, raised about $800,000 for it. So people were excited. It's now coming to widespread US availability and they're going to show it off at CES under the name GE Profile Indoor Smoker. You'll be able to get one this month for a thousand dollars. It's available for preorder right now if you want to get in line. So of course, we had to get Chris Ashley from barbecue and tech to give us his take on it. Now, I know from reading about it, it's a pellet smoker. It has a heating element. It's countertop size, kind of like a mini fridge situation. But Chris, tell me what all that means and who you think this might be good for. So this thing looks incredibly interesting. I mean, I wouldn't mind. I definitely wouldn't mind testing one out and fooling around with it. So the fact that it's a pellet smoker means that it's very entry level as well as, you know, on up. And why I say that is because with the pellets, there is not much to manage. So generally, when you have a smoker that has the pellets, you get a bag of pellets, you can find different flavored pellets and you load that into the smoker. It has an auger, which kind of rotates and pulls the pellets into a flame. Those pellets keep, you know, keep burning and create fuel. And then they also produce a bit of a smoke because those pellets are generally made out of the wood species that they're named on the bag. So that makes it really easy. They're made out of actual wood. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, there's there's a small nuance with pellets where sometimes you can like it'll say it's a hickory, but it's actually like an alder wood with the oil from a hickory tree. So it's not exact and there's, you know, there's reasons why they do that tends to burn longer and you still get some of the flavor. But anyway, that part doesn't really matter as much. But the reality is that this, you know, a lot of entry level people enjoy pellet smokers because it's less work. It's less for them to manage. They just load a bag and set the temperature. And then the device or the smoker itself will keep pulling the pellets as needed and the fan will blow to stoke the flame. So that part is pretty good. Now, the interesting thing that they said about this pellet aspect of it is it also seems to have a heating element in there as well. And so what that means is it's not solely relying on the heat from the pellets, which means that you're going to use less pellets to cook your food. So that part is kind of interesting, but there's also a downside to that, right? And I've had a pellet smoker. I had the Mac two-star general, pretty professional smoker. And the one thing that I can never get out of that pellet smoker is enough smoke for my taste buds on my meat. So I would tell people that are interested in this is make sure you come to terms with how much smoke you like on your food. Cause if you like a nice smoky rib or something like that, pellet smokers are probably not your best option for that. But if you're willing to trade off less work to get some type of smoke flavor, then it's back on the table. So that's the, so with the heating element and using less pellets, I'm wondering if it's going to be even less smoke flavor. That would just be my early thought, at least from that perspective of it. So it might be a trade-off situation where you want the convenience of not having to go outside, not having as big of a smoker knowing like it's not going to be as rich a flavor, but maybe it turns out to be okay. And some people don't, you know, they maybe live in an apartment and they can't put a smoker. I've definitely been in that situation. Or they just don't want to buy a big smoker, you know what I mean? So that's what makes this really interesting. I think they missed, we'll see, there remains to be seen, but just to me looks like they really could have went after a beginner market. And if they, and I, but 9.99 does not spell beginner price, right? You can go get you some pretty nice smokers for that price. So I, you know, if they had priced it in, I think in that 7.99, 6.99 range, I think they could, I think that would have been a much better price point for this, for somebody who's looking into getting into smoking food. And, but doesn't, you know, has been somewhat intimidated about sitting outside, stoking fires and all that, and all that jazz. So this, this, I think they kind of missed the boat, but hopefully they have some success and I'm wrong on that aspect of it. Well, I think they're trying to sell the smart aspect, right? They've got the temperature probe, they've got the temperature holding for 24 hours, which you were telling me is not a bad feature, right? No. So actually that's a very good feature. And so I hack, I kind of have that on my smoker with the controller that I use. So, so essentially what happens is, you know, you'll have your temperature set, the smoker will smoke the food. And then what you can tell it is that when it reaches a certain temperature, go ahead and bring the temper, when the food reaches its final temp that you're cooking to, go ahead and bring the temperature down and hold it. Now that's a good thing because generally anything you smoke, especially like bigger meats, like a brisket or a pulled pork, or, you know, you want to rest it, you need to rest it. Those juices need to re-soak back into the meat because they're radiating from the inside out. So if you can have that automatically done in the smoker, that's a win. Especially if you're, you know, it's just a smart device and you can connect to it remotely running out to the store. Can't tell you how many times I've ran to the store to go get something in my food hit temperature. So being able to automatically tell it to bring the temp down, really, really slick. And I think a lot of folks could benefit from that feature. So really, really cool on that. Yeah, and the other thing, before we wrap up here, we tried to figure out just how big this is, right? Comeback fridge gives me an idea, but we were set a merry chase because when you go to the specs of the actual product page, you get the specs and details section and it didn't have the size. Not even the owner's manual. It tells us it's 55 pounds. It tells us, you know, or the shipping weight is 55 pounds, 45 pounds. We had to go back to the original Indiegogo and then we found that it's 20 inches deep, 16 and a half wide, 16 tall for the Indiegogo version. Now, they may have tweaked that a little, but I'm gonna guess it's pretty close to that, right? Yeah, so going off of these numbers and if it's anywhere within the range, it's actually relatively good size. I was very, a little bit, you know, when they said you could actually do a brisket and inside of this thing, I was like, what is this, a baby brisket? I was like, well, they say they have a brisket preset. They didn't say you could put a brisket inside, but I think we figured it out, right? Yeah, so, but with the depth, 20 inches deep, I think you could get about a half a brisket in there comfortably. You know, even though it's 16 inches wide total, that is not your cooking width. It looks like, from my guess, the cooking width is probably more around that 12 inches, 12 to 13 inches range. So you could definitely get a pork shoulder in there on the smaller side. You can definitely get some chickens and probably I would say a half a brisket would fit in there pretty comfortably, but you'd probably just do the flat or the point you wouldn't put the whole thing in there. But the one thing you just mentioned, which is the preset temps, very, very cool. A lot of temperature, remote thermometers have those in there. I would tell anybody not to 100% go by those temps because the size of the meat and how much fat is in it, if you injected it all, play a role into the final product, but at least it gives you a good, rough starting point to kind of figure out where you want to cook to and what, and even if you followed it like the first two times, then you can kind of deviate as you learn this device. But all in all, pretty cool device. I would definitely mess around with it. I'm gonna see if I can track it down at CES. I know you were toying around with the idea of maybe getting ahold of one yourself and trying it out. So, yeah, if I can find one, yeah. Yeah, keep an ear out on barbecue and tech to hear if that happens, but also just to get great barbecue recipes and tips and technology insights from Chris and Rod. Where can they go to get that? Oh, definitely come check us out on BBQandtech.com. The show is on everything. Apple, Android, Stitcher. Yeah, come check it out. And this year, this next season coming up, big things coming, big things coming. So, very cool. Delicious things coming. Yeah, folks, Android. If you're an Android user, we've got more Android to go into your life. Listen to Android Faithful every week. Android aficionados, Ron Richards, Wen Tui Dao, and Jason Howell bring you the latest Android news and information. Go check that out. You can find it at androidfaithful.com or watch it live right here on The Daily Tech News Show, YouTube and Twitch channels, youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show, Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. In a New Year's letter, Square Enix president, Tekashi Kiryu, announced the company would be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting edge technologies starting with current content development and publishing. Long term, he says he hopes to leverage generative AI to create new forms of content. He added that Square Enix plans on applying AR and VR technologies to create new forms of content that fuse the real and virtual worlds and identified areas of investment, blockchain, entertainment, web 3.0, AI, and also the cloud. A lot of that sounds like a lot of buzzwords, Scott. Is this just aspirational? Does the company have concrete plans to actually develop in these areas, you think? Well, there's one thing we've learned from Square over the last few years and that is when they're excited about something new, whether it was their kind of very public excitement about NFTs or this in the AI space, they tend to come out, make a bunch of noise about it, and then kind of recede into the background without giving any details and not really telling us in what way will these things be implemented? When can we expect to hear something or see something? They just kind of do a poor job at that. And by poor, I mean, these are hot button items, right? AI and NFTs are controversial, whether they should be or shouldn't be in every context or whatever, they just kind of are. So all of the studios on this planet are talking about AI and trying to figure out what its role will be for them, whether it be large language model stuff or something more akin to just how do our characters behave, which has been an AI thing for as long as we've been making video games. So I think that where they made the mistake is they didn't get specific at all. They didn't say anything. It would be nice if they popped up and said, we're gonna improve MPC behavior with this thing. That's our first effort. People can only be left to assume that what they're talking about is replacing artists and voice actors, which are, that's probably the hottest end of two candles here in this whole thing. But they, if I had to guess, or probably have plans to implement something in their MMO in Final Fantasy 14, it's a great place to experiment and mess about and see what fits, what works, whatever. I'm making that up though, because they didn't tell us what they plan to do. But if they don't want people to jump to these conclusions, I just wish that they and other developers, this isn't just a them problem, they're just kind of the loudest about it, that they would just be specific about their plans. And I think players and investors and everybody else in between would be happy to hear what their plans are. What are your concrete goals with this? Are you just jumping on fads? If you're not, then tell us what is the plan? What do you want to do? And I think you'd have less player freakout. Players would feel more invested in the process and like they're being heard. And the studios would walk away with a better PR plan than they currently have now, which is really a bummer because this shouldn't have to backfire on them. If they just came out and said, look, whatever it may be, this is why I have to cherry pick these things as I don't know. But if they came out and said, we're gonna make it so, the fights in Final Fantasy 14, when you do a raid with your friends are gonna be way more dynamic and they're gonna react to the group in a way that they've never done before. The gone or the prescripted events and the movement and the animation and the phases, replacing that with something that is dynamic based on the team. Can't wait for you guys to come test this. We're very excited about it. None of those are controversial. Those aren't problems with AI or some of the potential problems. This is a whole new space that's very exciting and they should be excited to tell us, but maybe tell us. It makes me suspicious, right? Because this feels like, because everything is said to everybody now. This now feels like they weren't actually talking to their customers, they were talking to their investors who wanna know, are you doing AI? And they're like, yes, all the AI, we don't have anything we can share because we don't wanna promise something we can't follow up on. But yes, tons of AI, shovelfuls, make sure you buy our stock. That's what it feels like to me. I think that's a fair point. And also what you see with a lot of other studios is they are open about the fact that they are working with various technologies in the AI field and figuring out what fits and what doesn't. But being very specific about saying, our goals are to never use AI-generated art because that's just too murky right now. Plus we don't, we love our artists, blah, blah, blah. Exactly, it's a great way to do that. But also just sort of lay out the controversial stuff and your stance on it. And then you can be all shut up and saying nothing about cool implementation that you don't wanna have trade secrets shared all over the internet. But you got out in front of it in these other ways and made people, you know, it's waged their concerns a little bit. And I think they could do that. I'm clearly a little biased in this front because I get to do a monthly show with Greg Street and his new studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle, they're making an MMO. And the whole point of this podcast, of that podcast with him and with his team is transparency. It's letting the players on for the ride. And so when hard decisions get made, they're gonna talk about them openly. When they've talked about AI and they've talked about what they're looking at, they've been very open about it. I want that for everybody. I know people are nervous. They don't wanna let stuff out that maybe somebody else will take. I think that can all be navigated. And we live in a world now where everything is just online all the time. I wish the studios would lean into that and get their investors excited by saying the words or the letters AI, get them stoked, but also just work with us about what you're gonna do and how it might affect us. Cause we at the end of the day are the ones paying for all of it. So, you know, just open it up a little bit there, Square. And Square has just had a little recent dabble in this. There may be some cultural stuff because it's all coming out of the Japan office, I should mention. And there's nothing wrong with the Japan office, but they probably go about disseminating information differently than maybe other regions are used to. And I think they could improve on all those fronts. Yeah, I wonder what kinds of things people want from AI. Like, what do you want, Scott? What are you wishing they would not do? And what are the things where you think it would be helpful to use? And when we say AI, I think we're mostly talking about large language models, right? Yeah, I think so. There's also the just behavioral AI in games themselves. That's what makes me most excited because for years we've been told, oh, Halo one is a real leap forward in AI. Did the character or the enemies react in really dynamic ways? So if you're taking cover, they'll take cover. If you shoot too much at them, they'll take cover again and sneak around the back and flank you and all these things. That's exciting to hear because that makes gameplay dynamic and interesting. It's those kinds of things that I want to see go next level because we kind of have hit a ceiling on that for, I don't know, the last 10 years or so. We're kind of just about as good at that as we're gonna get. We've innovated in other areas, but that's one area, especially in a single player game where you need to feel like you're, you know, I don't know, being attacked by an alien who has a brain. It's time to take that stuff to whatever that next level is. And I know a lot of teams are doing that. And if that's what they're doing, just say you're doing that. That'd be great. We get all stoked about that. And then the example I use with the raid, that's what I really want, is that kind of dynamic gameplay stuff. If you're not ready to talk about it, just don't talk about it. Don't talk about it yet. I understand the need to pump up the money and get people stoked and all that, but I still think there's a way to do that and also keep us in mind and not just pretend like returiors. Yeah, it sounds like all it's doing is having people be like, well, in what way? Yeah, that's really it. Yeah, you should say AI all day and it's just gonna scare people unless they realize it's cool. Yeah, I'm so excited about all the AI that we're going to do on DTNS sometime. Yeah, at some point. And I'm gonna go, what are you firing me? And I'm also going to say that to myself. So yeah. Well, folks, what do you want from these kinds of two generative models and stuff in your games? Or do you want them at all? Let us know in our feedback email, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and we might just read it on the show like we're about to do with this email. Indeed, this one comes from Mike and Sunny Dubai. Hi, Mike. Mike says we're guarding our conversation with Nika Montford yesterday about Apple's possible iPad roadmap going forward this year. Mike says he thinks the tablet market in general is misunderstood. Mike says, unlike phones, I've observed tablets are much more durable. You care less about the camera. The tablet might stay in your home or bag more. Little lag on your tablet as you load an ebook or a TV show is a lot less annoying than a lag when you're multitasking in Slack on the road. As Apple extends the support for its devices and we're seeing diminishing improvements on the M series chips, buying a year old iPad isn't nearly as bad a proposition as a year old phone. As a vocal iPad mini fan, see, Mike, I knew you guys were out there somewhere. Mike says, I can't imagine an innovation in the space that would make me want to ditch mine for at least five years. If devices are lasting that long, why would you put out a new one annually? Mike says, I feel like the early 2010s tablet market was bust because everybody had bought a tablet, held onto it for three years or more, leading to poor sales around 2015. And I seem to recall, we were asking if the iPad was dead around that time. Yeah, people were definitely talking about the iPad being dead. Our tablet's over. And there were a few of us who were like, I doubt it. I think people like Mike is saying, just holding on to them. So that is what is going on with Apple not putting out a new model. They figure these are good enough. And I still hold to my theory that there's gonna be a foldable, but that's for new users. I wouldn't even expect that to mean they expect Mike to drop his perfectly good tablet and upgrade. It's more of like, when you're ready to upgrade, we'll have a new form factor. If they do it, that's the way I expect it to be positioned. Well, thanks for the email, Mike. Thanks to everybody who emails us. And thanks to you, Scott Johnson. You email us too, but just for different things. Yeah, like, I'm going to be on the show. When you're not doing that, what are you doing? Well, we're doing all sorts of stuff over at frogpants.com. In particular, the Square Enix stuff has kicked up quite a bit of behind the scenes discussion with me and my host of the show called Core, which I've mentioned on the show before. It's a video game show all about video games, the ones we play, the stuff happening in the industry, and big things like Square Enix putting their foot in their mouth. If you want more coverage of that sort of stuff and you want to get all the grimy details, we do a long show at almost three, three some hours a week sometimes for that show. I think you'll have a really good time with it. Come check us out live as well. You can find all the details at frogpants.com. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We stream it live, but if you're a patron, you get it delivered to you. White glove treatment into your RSS feed. We'll talk about the 13-year-old from Oklahoma who beat Tetris. If you didn't know, yes, you can beat Tetris. Stick around. Just a reminder, we do the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC is when it all goes down. You can find out more at Daily Tech News Show, rather, dot com slash live. We're back tomorrow talking about the legal battle between open AI and the New York Times with Justin Robert Young, because who knows what he's talking about. The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.