 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks. That's you. That's you listening right now. Maybe you're Dale Mulcahy or Matt Zaglin or Kelly Cook or our brand new patron, Ari, whoever you are. Thank you and welcome on this episode of DTNS. So, uh, where are y'all getting your social media news these days? Is this the year of VR or is it still early days? And Google uses some AI to shorten your wait time at a stoplight? Finally, a good news. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October the 10th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Accidental Pecan Milk. It's a long story. I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Uh, patrons, stick around. We'll try to get the story of the Accidental Pecan Milk. Oh, I'm ready to tell it. Yeah. Uh, meanwhile, let's start with the quick hits. That's the wrong one. There. At its annual conference called Max, Adobe announced the Firefly Image 2 model meant to be better at rendering humans like facial features, skin, body, and the previously dreaded AI hands that always end up looking real weird. Adobe said that Firefly has now generated three billion images since launching earlier this year with one billion generated in September alone. So a lot of uptake and usage. 90% of Firefly users are apparently also new to Adobe in general, likely why the company decided to convert a demo site for Firefly into its own creative cloud service. Sony announced a new PS5 will begin shipping in November. And it's an interesting configuration. There is a detachable disk drive. If you want the Blu-ray drive, it's detachable. You also get a terabyte of internal storage, and it's the traditional slim form factor, weighs 24% less than the existing model, takes up 30% less space. It also has two USB-C ports on the front instead of the USB-A and one USB-C. You can get it in the US starting in November for 500 bucks with the disk drive or because it's removable, you can buy a version without the disk drive. That'll cost you $450. So you save 50 bucks. And if you change your mind later, you can actually buy the disk drive for $80 and slide it in. The PS5 is the new version of the PS5 will roll out worldwide over the following months. Somebody should make a song called detachable disk drive. They will now. Just in case, you know, you wake up one morning and your disk drive is missing. Okay. Google has announced that it is making pass keys that's a phishing resistant alternative to passwords that allow users to sign into accounts using the same biometrics or pins that they use to unlock their devices. The default sign-in method for all Google account holders. Quote, this means next time you sign into your Google account, you'll start seeing prompts to create and use pass keys, simplifying your future sign-ins. That was Google Product Manager Christian Brand and Serum Cara explaining how it works. Our goal is the same as always been, giving you technology that is secured by default so that you have the strongest security, but without the burden. Here we go. Passwordless future, still future. Bring it on. By this Friday, the UK Competition and Markets Authority is expected to conclude its collection of feedback on its provisional approval of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, at which point the deal is expected to close. Now, who knows, right? With this thing, but it's like 98% certain that the deal is finally going to close this Friday. And yes, the US FTC is still pursuing a case against the acquisition, but that's not going to be what gets in its way. US courts ruled against the FTC being able to block the merger in anticipation of the end of this long-running Sega. Activision Blizzard posted that Activision Blizzard Games will not come to Microsoft's Game Pass subscription service until next year. Everybody's settled down because some folks are like, so I'll be able to play Diablo on Game Pass on Saturday, right? And Blizzard's like, no, it doesn't work like that. We hope to have a bunch of stuff coming, but not until 2024. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to announce that it is developing its own AI chip when it does its developers conference. That would put them right alongside Apple, Google and Amazon. Well, Unity CEO John Ricatello has resigned following the company's pricing, let's call it a kerfuffle, that angered many game developers and that is putting it lightly. In a press release, Unity said James M. Whitehurst has been appointed interim CEO and president of the company. Unity also said its previous guidance for its fiscal third quarter financial results will stand. Those are going to be reported on November 9th. So at least at this point, Unity is feeling pretty confident financially. If you can't take the heat, Ricatello, you resigned. Okay, never mind. Let's talk about VR. Let's do it. Yes, I love VR. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports his sources say that Apple's working on a lighter version of the Vision Pro. Now, a lot of people haven't tried it out, but supposedly the coming first version, which weighs one pound, has gotten reports by some testers as heavy enough to cause some next train, not very comfy. The next-gen Vision Pro might also build prescription lenses into manufacturing. The first-gen Vision Pro hardware has been ready to go for months again reportedly, but Apple is not launching it until next year because it's hoping to perfect some of the software around it. Yeah, get developers to make apps and all that. Meanwhile, Tech Crunch's Brian Heater reviewed the MetaQuest 3 out now, October 10th. It's shipping for $500, which is still a bargain next to Apple's $3,500 Vision Pro, I guess. Meta also dominating the market already, even before the new Quest 3 came out. 50.2% of the market share. That's what the aging Quest 2, so that's probably going to go back up now. PSVR 2 from Sony holds the rest of it, 27.2%. So you've got a somewhat casual, but very mobile headset with a lot of games in the Quest. You have a more sophisticated gaming headset, but tethered with the PSVR 2. And then shortly after the first of the year, we're going to have a fully mobile headset better at AR than the other two, carrying the Apple Mystique, but also the Apple price tag. Heater suggests in his review of the Quest 3 that all of this is the makings of 2023 being the year of VR, or at least maybe setting it up for next year to be the year of VR. Sarah, are the early days finally over? Gosh, I don't know. I mean, I would like to say that I really, really care if everyone else gets into VR because that just means that there will be more apps for me as a VR enthusiast. But there was a time, not that long ago, that VR was something that we covered on DTNS and TND before that. I mean, we've been covering it for years and I was sort of like, eh, I don't care. And then once I tried it, and I got that killer app for me, Supernatural Exercise app, I was like, oh, this is fun. This is awesome. I can't do this another way anywhere else I'm in. And from there, I still feel like I can count all the apps that I ever launched in VR on one hand, but it's worth it for me. It's worth it. Even if you're, I don't know, paying more money for a subscription service, which I do for Supernatural, for example, which Meta now owns. But yeah, I feel like the Apple Vision Pro stuff is going to change the landscape a lot. You're going to get enough development that there are going to be even, again, can them on one hand, a few apps that just, you know, cream of the crop, rise to the top. And people go, oh, oh, okay, I get it now. Because I cannot tell you how many people in my life, friends, and these are tech people who are just like, I'm just not into it. I'm not interested. You know, I don't need you to convince me that VR is cool. I just, I don't want to do it. And I get that. But I also feel like I was that person at one point, and I can see where it really does change the landscape. And mixed reality is a conversation that I actually don't really have a lot of experience with. I kind of understand how it works. I'm still into VR itself. Like, let's just go away and have some fun for a little while. But yeah, I think with the Vision Pro, the Quest 3 being the, I guess, consumer-wise, the best option that you have, Quest-wise, they have gotten better with each iteration. You know, why not? And even the tethered people, the tethered people who say, I'm not jumping around on wearing a VR headset. Like being tethered doesn't matter to me. I want better quality. That's also an option and has been for a long time. Yeah, I think that is a fairly specialist case where you're in the Sony universe and you want really high quality gaming. And I think it'll always have its place and probably won't always be tethered. But I think where Quest 3 is going, even with its weird mixed reality thing that's still a little low res, even if it's got better colors than the Quest 2, and Apple, with its very good, apparently, mixed reality where you can see the world around you very clearly. I think next year's make or break. Apple's either going to, with all of its developer work that it's doing right now, find a couple of those apps like you're talking about that just make this sing and make everybody go, well, I don't want it for $3,500, but for a cheaper version or a lighter weight and cheaper version, I'll do that. Then we're on the road. That's what Apple does. They have very expensive first gen stuff that doesn't do all the things, but it makes people want the next version. If that happens, then we're on the road and VR will take off the way tablets and phones and everything else has. But if it doesn't, if people are like, yeah, I still don't see it. I still don't see what I'd want it for at any price, even if it was cheaper. I don't see that coming out of the Quest 3. Then we're still waiting for somebody to come in and do that. I think a lot of people are just banking that Apple's going to do that. They certainly have a good track record of that sort of thing, but nothing's guaranteed. It's all so much. As much as I say like, oh, VR is so cool. You just have to find your killer app and then you'll never want to take the thing off, which is true. That was true for me. There's also a lot of junk. There's a lot of social like, oh, let's all sit in the theater and talk to each other as avatar stuff that, I don't know. Some people might get a lot out of it. It's never made a lot of sense for me. If you're not a big gamer, a lot of fun games that are a little bit more full body than city in front of a monitor, that offers you, but I don't really play a lot of that stuff either. I found my niche and I feel like it is a game changer for me. It's not going to be for everybody, but I, but yeah, I really, I want to have this conversation in six months when some vision pro stuff starts coming out because you know, Apple is already working with certain developers very, very closely about making something that's going to wow the rest of us. We just haven't heard about it yet. Two weeks after the vision pro ships, two weeks after people get their, them on their heads, almost said in their hands, but they'll be on their heads. We'll know. We'll know, we'll know whether that thing is in existence and what it is. Yeah. On their heads, but in their hearts. We'll find out. That's free. Just doing some marketing stuff for everybody. All right. Let's talk about something that Google's doing. Google launched something called Project Greenlight two years ago. The idea was to reduce the amount of time that cars were stuck waiting at red lights. So stoplight stuff, green light. In theory, this would also help reduce emissions because the cars would be idling less often unless they're EVs of course, which is a whole other thing. Google trains machine learning models on traffic data from its maps product. Then the model can make recommendations of changes to traffic like timing to reduce the time spent waiting at those lights. It's been tested in a dozen cities worldwide. And on Tuesday, Google felt pretty confident announcing results and expansions of the project. Google VP of Geo sustainability, Yale, McGuire said early numbers indicate a potential for us to see a 30% reduction in stops in the city of Manchester, England specifically. It saw air quality improved by as much as 18% says Google. So they're all signs pointing that this is a good thing. Yeah. So if you're wondering exactly how this works, participating city gets access to a dashboard, to a website interface. And the Google Maps data will be trained with a little bot. And the bot will then tell the city manager, hey, if you adjust the timing at the corner of first and main to be this pattern, so maybe it's equal during commute times, but it's longer for main street during the 7am to 8am period, et cetera, et cetera. They change the timing, which cities can already do. They don't have to put in any new infrastructure to use this. They just need to use the data. Then supposedly if they follow that traffic flows better and you'll get to a stoplight and not be sitting there going, why is this red when there's nobody coming? At least that's the idea, right? And it's working on the same principle as Waze to say the machine knows what the patterns of traffic are. And in this case, instead of telling you what route to go, it's telling the stoplights, oh, you should be green more this direction than that direction right now to keep traffic flowing. Yeah. I was just thinking about this over the weekend. There is some construction going on in my area. Basically, if you drive in any direction, you're going to get stuck in it on some level. And for that reason, the stoplights have been kind of weird, but they're trying to route us the best they can. And I've often wondered, am I just not close enough to the crosswalk and the light to know that I'm there? I've been sitting here for a while. Is something wrong? We've all been in that situation. Sometimes there is something wrong, but often it's just traffic pattern stuff that was programmed way before you ever got to that intersection. Anything that can make this make more sense I'm down for. I have to assume that the lights themselves, because there are sensors at a variety of intersections, they probably have a lot of this information anyway, but Google, for example, and other companies too, but Google especially has so much more information of how many cars aren't there yet, but will be there soon enough. And maybe. And historical patterns too, particularly like, oh, every day at 8 PM, it backs up at this light, et cetera, that kind of right. Or like for, for whatever reason today at 8 AM, it's not backing up. Is there an accident, you know, somewhere else where we can then, you know, help the information with everybody. And honestly, I don't know how adaptable the system is, because this is saying, we will train the machine to tell you like, oh, this is what your optimal timing is, but it's not real time as far as I can tell. It's not responding to patterns in real time. It's only telling you what timing is optimal versus what you based on typical patterns. And that's, that's a question I have, which is, and this would require infrastructure. I get why they want to do it this way, because this means I don't have to put anything new into my system, because they're, they already can program the lights, right? But isn't it, wouldn't it be even better if you had real time sensors combined with real time data, which like you just said, Google has to say, oh, there's nobody coming that direction for a long time, even whether it's the traffic pattern or not, let's make it green this way, because there's a car coming, like just, just have them adapt in real time. I feel like that would be ultimately the way to go. And this is a step on that direction, I guess. Hey, for those of us who spent a lot of time in traffic, I'm actually, when I said those of us, like, it's not really me, I work from home, you know, I'm pretty lucky. But, but yeah, I, I think, depending on where you are, what metro area or even suburban area that you might be in with something like this, companies are trying to help your commute be that much less of a headache. I'm well, if you are a Google Maps user on Android, in particular, you're going to want to check out Android Faithful. If you haven't already, host Ron Richards and Huantui Dao bring you all of the Android news and information. And they've got flow. If you know flow from previous Android shows, she'll be joining them this week as well. Android Faithful is a podcast devoted exclusively to Android. Catch it Tuesdays at 8 p.m. East Coast, 5 p.m. Pacific Live, or subscribe to it right now at at www dot, you know, the www part Android Faithful dot com. Casey Newton's latest issue of his platformer newsletter discussed how the war in Israel has highlighted how news has moved off of Twitter now X but hasn't really found a permanent new platform. The short version is when it was Twitter during breaking news events like the outbreak of a war, for instance, you would find verified users in affected areas, posting reports, videos, images, etc. Sometimes they would be journalists. Sometimes they'd just be people on the ground, but they were verified so you knew their reports were reliable. However, with X having a reduced safety team and a change in how they verified users, it's made it harder to sift through some of the false posts. Verified users are paid, so it's difficult to tell if someone is a legitimate or not. Not so much because of the paid ones, but because a lot of people who were verified before are not now, and they choose not to pay to be verified. So it's a different landscape of who's verified and who isn't. Fewer people are also posting on X than used to. So there's just not the concentration of folks posting. I've run into that with less significant news events in my area where I'm like, oh, I'll go to X and I'll look it up and nobody's posting about it. Whereas a year ago there would have been at least a dozen in my neighborhood. Casey Newton notes that a lot of people were posting on threads this weekend about the events in Israel, and he discussed meta slash Instagram's unwillingness to embrace threads as a news platform. Instagram's head Adam Osseri has described threads as particularly focused on creators and sort of not saying never put news here, but saying we're really not trying to cater to that. Newton describes it as TikTok, but for text, which is interesting since Bloomberg has an article with the headline, TikTok footage becomes world's window into Israel conflict, and the BBC covered this too, which is all about people posting their videos of what's actually happening on the ground to TikTok. And of course, TikTok and Instagram have pretty big trust and safety teams. Doesn't mean stuff doesn't slip through, but they are on it and trying to remove it as fast as possible. Sarah, I'm curious. I know you followed the news this weekend. Where were you going to find out this sort of instant on the ground from people involved kind of reporting? Well, it kind of reminds me the landscape has changed. Well, I mean, gosh, that's almost a strange comment in light of this. But this reminds me of a conversation that we had, I believe, with Justin Robert Young when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out. And we all kind of talked about, okay, where do we feel like reliability is? Where's the best place for that? And I had said, you know, I'm reverting to cable news. Now cable news, depending on the channel that you might be watching, whether you're watching it to either agree or disagree with the information that you're getting, in general, I feel is, okay, the network itself, and I'm talking about legacy networks, obviously, you know, believes in its reporting. And there are a variety of journalists that I very much trust and, you know, want to, you know, encourage to give me good news. And that is sort of, I found myself for the first time kind of going, you know, I'm going to turn on the news and just kind of watch it for a while or watch a special that I know is coming on later type thing, because the internet is a little bit too much of a landmine. Now this was like still very much Twitter days, but it started to already feel a little crumbly to me where it was like, I felt like I was spending too much time either trying to figure out if a piece of information was correct or not on my own or try to school people that were not doing that for themselves that I thought should know better. And both of those things fell not worth my time. I feel that a thousandfold after this weekend X, we'll call it X, I still, you know, muscle memory, that's still the place I go first, like what's going on, you know, breaking news, I still do that when there's, you know, an Apple iPhone event, you know, like, you know, again, totally different piece of news, but it's like, that's where I used to go for a long time for, for kind of just like, finger on the pulse, you know, you're still going to have to make sure that you weed out some bad actors, but finger on the pulse. And over the weekend, I couldn't find anything of value. And I'm talking people I follow who mostly just complained that the social network sucks now. Trending topics that was just a landmine of misinformation, you know, and everything in between threads. I'm still, I feel like you still have a lot of people on threads being like, see, this is better. Why isn't everyone here yet? And I, I'd love to get past that. So it just becomes better instead of talking about it being better. And, you know, and to compare extra threads is just, you know, it's the meta Twitter thing. There are other options, obviously, quite a few of them. But, but yeah, that's, that's kind of where I am. Yeah, I think you don't even need cable to get the experience of live news. CBS news is available for free, ABC news available for free. I think NBC news is still available for free, but also a version in Peacock. Max just launched a version of CNN's 24 seven coverage called CNN max. So if you have max, you've already got access to that. But the difference was always that on Twitter, you could get the things that those slower moving news organizations didn't get to the person who was actually there video making video that those cable news networks would then take and put on the air for them when they verified that person. And they were still doing that with acts. It was still happening. But it's just not happening as much as it used to. And yeah, I feel like threads was the place that a lot of people wanted to turn to for that. But because threads isn't really encouraging that, then a lot of people feel that threads is failing. But the fact of the matter is there's just, there's just, there's just not a place that everyone has agreed to go to the way they had agreed to go to Twitter in the past. I also, I mean, listen, say what you will about Facebook, but I can kind of see, you know, some people high up at medicine, let's not get into that big old news thing on threads. Let's make this a fun creator thing. It's Instagram and it's easier. Yeah, controversial way easier. You know, just make it like a good place. Canada passing a law against you. Right. Right. So, so there's that. That's what's going on. And yeah, you're right. When I say cable news, I think I use the word cable now to say like non streaming modern stuff. So yes, it doesn't have to be actual cable news, but and you know, a lot of, a lot of these outlets will let you stream, you know, directly from their website, maybe not all day, but you know, at least a short period of time. You can do CBS news and ABC news all day 24 seven for free. They'll have ads, but you can do it from the website. So there's plenty of that kind of news, but I know what you're saying. Like that's, that's TV news. That's slower moving. It's going to be more reliable, but it doesn't give you that up to the minute like, Oh, this is a person actually there right this second. That's what it used to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It simply isn't the same. And for anybody who's sort of like, I never use Twitter for news anyway. Maybe you don't see a big difference. There is one though. There really is. And that says a lot about the people that you follow and the people that you interact with. So, you know, nobody's going to have the exact same experience. I think threads should step up and I do too and work with the, the actual news platforms to provide this, because that would then encourage the people who are involved to be like, Oh, that's where the news is. On the other hand, maybe I don't want them to maybe I don't want that to be Metta's choice. Maybe it would be better if Mastodon was the place, which is what BBC has chose as their primary place to share news. Maybe it doesn't have to be anybody. Maybe maybe we can just see where people go and end up. Let us know your thoughts. Where do you think this should happen? Again, not news publishing, not big cable TV style news. But, but when someone is involved and says, I need to tell the world this, I don't know, they used to be able to go to Twitter. Where should they go now? Well, Tom, when's the last time you flipped a coin to see who had to take the dog out? Yeah, certainly, I just take the dog out so that there's no coin flipping there. But, but yes, I, I don't know. It's probably it feels like if we don't have a better idea, this is at least a 50 50 way to do this, right? Yeah, right. Flip a coin heads or tails. It's random. You pick one. You hope you're right. And, you know, you have a 50% chance of being right. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam say, Oh, not so fast, everybody. They said after flipping coins, over 350,000 times in the largest study of its kind, they found coins have the ever so slight tendency to land on the same side that they started on. So if I'm holding heads up and I do a flip, I have 51% chance of landing back on heads than tails, almost 50 50, but not exactly. The researchers used coins of 46 different currencies. So it wasn't just a penny, wasn't just a quarter, which were flipped by hand, caught in the palms of 48 student participants, and they videotape all of this for proof. The same side bias has previously been predicted by scientist Percy Deaconis. The theory being that the physics of coin flipping with the wobbling in motion of the coin makes it slightly more likely to land on the same side that it started on. So heads to heads, tails to tails. So if you're like, I already knew this, great. Good for you. I didn't. Now it's been proven by another study. So that's, that is interesting. And if you want to try to bias the results in a coin flip, now you know it's only 51%. It's not like it's going to be guaranteed every time. If you want to guarantee it every time, see Brian Brushwood's Modern Rogue. He did a video once to show you how to, how to, well, it's cheating a little bit, but how to make sure your coin flip lands the way you want every time. I've also also been like, if someone's a card counter, like, why are they penalized? They're good at this. They should win. When you're paying, you probably would feel I know there's more to it, but you know, okay, you know, now, you know, coin flip, you have a slight edge. Yeah. All right, patrons, stick around. We have got the mystery of the almond milk. Also, Samsung joining Google and shaming Apple over the RCS messaging protocol. I don't know that this is helping anybody, but we're going to talk about why they're doing it and whether they think they should stop. We certainly are. Just a reminder, DTNS is live Monday through Friday. We were off for a U.S. holiday yesterday, but Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC is when we record the show live and we'd love to have you join us if you can. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.