 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Jim Hart, Logan Larson and Mike Akin's coming up on DTS Tech to get plastic out of water, has actual captured Gen Z and Tim Stephens is here to tell us about driving the world's fastest electric vehicle and why he now has a light bruise on his chest. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 21st, 2023 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Albany, New York, I'm Tim Stephens. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chin. We're gonna talk to you quite a bit about the car later on, Tim, but two million dollar car, how is, how, how are you not like just a melting pool of anxiety after driving that? Yeah, you really got to kind of put that aside and, you know, you got to drive it like a normal car because you got to report on what it's like to drive. And if you're just tiptoeing around, you don't get to feel. Yeah. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Microsoft's head gaming head Phil Spencer and Sony PlayStation head Jim Ryan are taking part in a closed door hearing in Brussels Tuesday to make their case why Microsoft should or should not be allowed to acquire Activision Blizzard. Representatives from Google, Nvidia, Valve, Electronic Arts and the European Games Developer Federation are also there. Earlier in the day, Microsoft President Brad Smith announced a binding 10 year contract with Nintendo to provide games specifically Call of Duty to Nintendo the same day that they launch on Xbox with full feature and content parody. Microsoft offered Sony a similar deal, but Sony has not accepted it as of yet. Dot dot dot yet. I don't know. I don't know. It's not looking good for this deal, but Microsoft's about to make its good play. So we'll see. The latest release of the Linux kernel version 6.2 adds upstream support for Apple's M one pro Max and ultra chips. That's right. You can run Linux on Apple Silicon. Thanks in part to the work of a Sahi Linux developer, Alyssa Rosensweig and team, which made the graphics support possible. Ubuntu will make Linux kernel 6.2 the default kernel in its 23.04 release, and it will also be included in Fedora 38, both of those expected in April. Tiktok continue to try everything it can think of to avoid getting shut down in the US the way it's been shut down in India. Tiktok announced it will let researchers at US based nonprofit universities access public anonymized data through its API. This will include comments, likes and favorites on video as well as search results. Researchers can apply to Tiktok's US data security team to get that API access. The company is also introducing something called the creativity program in the US, which will expand monetization from the current creator fund. Details pretty scarce right now, but participants with enough followers and view counts who post high quality original content can potentially make some money. It was just about eight days ago on February 13th when we talked about the upcoming US Supreme Court cases testing the Safe Harbor Law known as section 230. We'll have a link to that show in the show notes if you want to hear the detailed breakdown about those cases. But here's the reminder, they're happening Tuesday, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in Gonzalez versus Google. That's the one that tests whether algorithmic recommendations on YouTube are either a kind of moderation and thus protected by section 230 or not and not protected by section 230. On Wednesday, the court will hear Twitter versus Tomna. That one rests mostly on whether Twitter violated anti terrorism laws somehow when they failed to take down specific tweets in a timely manner. There are exceptions to section 230's protection regarding criminal speech. So that case is going to rest a little bit on where that line is drawn. We are getting the hearing. We are not going to get a decision until later this year. As people in large numbers use Bing's chatbot, don't call it Sydney. They have uncovered some of this. Let's call them less desirable quirks. You can debate whether beta testing in public is a good idea or not, but it might be the only way to get the kind of massive usage that can uncover these types of things and make them better going forward. In response to the fact that Bing tends to get a little bit more unusual the longer you talk to it, Microsoft is now limiting users to five chat turns per session and 50 chat turns per day. That seems to be enough for most users to get the answers that they're looking for. Also context will be cleared at the end of sessions to prevent the model from getting confused. Search Engine Journal reports that 71% of Bing's chatbot users have been giving it a thumbs up. They don't think it's that crazy. They actually think it's pretty helpful or cool or at least different. Microsoft will also start testing another option that lets users choose the tone of chat with options for precise that would be shorter, more focused answers, creative, which are longer and more chatty answers or balanced for a bit of both. Too bad they didn't give unbalanced as one of the yeah, unhinged. Alright, that is a look at the quick hits. Let's talk about Gen Z. The Financial Times reports that according to ad tech platform attain folks born after 1996 aka Generation Z make up 34% of all US iPhone users. By comparison, Samsung has 10% of Gen Z's age group. Research from counterpoint shows that iPhone grew its overall US market share of actual phone usage from 35% in 2019 to 50% in 2022, which has a lot to do with the Gen Z crowd pouring into the iPhone market. Older users in the US on the other hand tend to be more evenly split between iOS and Android. Yeah, so that's US but outside of the US iPhone usage among young adults, a little bit less pronounced, but research from Cantalus that looked at Western Europe found 83% of iPhone users that are under the age of 25 did not plan to switch to another platform. Now, if you compare that to Android users, less than half of those users in the same age group plan to stay on Android. Cantalus research also shows that globally for every 100 iPhone shipped, Apple will sell 26 iPads, 17 Apple watches and 35 pairs of AirPods. If you compare that to Samsung, 100 smartphone shipments leads to fewer than 11 tablets, six smartwatches and six wireless earbuds. Aha. So Apple's way to keep you in the garden. The ecosystem is working seems to work. Yeah. I've noticed my nieces who are in their 20s and in the Gen Z cohort tend to use iPhones as well. Financial Times story is titled how Apple captured Gen Z in the US and changed their social circles. But Mac rumors put it more confrontationally. They titled their story. Apple's popularity with Gen Z poses challenges for Android. Tim Stevens, is this a passing fad? Or do you think Apple may have captured the youth and assured its own future? I do think they've done a remarkable job of capturing the youth. But I think what this really comes down to is I message. I mean, I think if there was any doubt about why Apple has been so reluctant to open up iMessage to get rid of, you know, green bubbles. Now we know why this is this is proving to be a remarkable effective marketing tool for them. It shows that peer pressure is still alive and well in Gen Z. People don't want to have people in their groups who are not on the iOS platform. And you know, if you look at other markets, like in Europe or in Asia, where other options are more popular, things we chat that kind of thing. The numbers are different. So it really shows that people just don't want to have Android people in their circle of friends. And people want to be the circle of friends. So they're buying iPhones. And that's a little bit sad, but it's proving to be very effective for Apple as we can see. I mean, as far as the younger set goes, not just say that older people like myself aren't impressionable. But I was more impressionable when I was in my early 20s. I actually had this iMessage thing happen recently. This is a bunch of people who are my age. So nobody is in the Gen Z category, but we were all at a wedding. It was a destination wedding. Everybody's trying to coordinate. Where are you? Let's go to dinner, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. There may be 12 of us on this iMessage group. I say iMessage, because one person out of the group had an Android phone. And I mean, they didn't do anything wrong. But the whole chat was everything was wonky. Attachments weren't loading correctly. You'd get somebody liking someone's post without saying something, but it would render strange. You know, and finally, we were like, we have to move to what's up. This is unusable. It really actually it wasn't really anybody trying to shame the Android user. It was it was, you can't really follow the chat, at least in the context we were using it for. So that is a real thing. And that is something that Apple is well aware of. And, you know, I don't think blue and green text message bubbles are the entire reason that younger folks don't want iPhone or do want iPhones rather rather than Android. You also, I don't know, back in the day, I guess I might have thought, oh, you know, if you're using an Android phone, maybe you paid less for it. Now that could still be true. But I mean, that's not what Android means anymore. I mean, there are Android phones that are, you know, much pricier than the last iPhone that I bought. So it's not about like financial status so much as just, I guess, going with the flow. Yeah, that's interesting, because iPhones definitely are still at the higher end of the market. And when I was in my 20s, I don't think I would have been able to afford an equivalent iPhone, granted it was in the 90s before that was even a thing. But, but, but you're right. It's not like having an Android phone immediately is cheap. So maybe that that I don't know, I think there's a lot more going on here, because as your story pointed out, Sarah, if Apple's not careful, they're going to force people onto other platforms because their people get tired of the I message thing. I really think Apple should support RCS for that reason. And then the red bubble, blue bubble thing still going to work to its advantage. But breaking chat is going to push people off. And I agree with you that it's not the only reason that that I think there's just the Apple has done a good job of marking itself as a hip young brand. And Samsung does a fairly good job. But you know, the evidence points that maybe they're not doing as good of a job. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of talk right now about plastics, not this isn't like from the graduate. We're talking about people being concerned about plastic showing up in your food or your drink. I don't know how many times over the past couple of weeks, I've heard someone say, do you know you you eat an entire rubber ducks worth of plastic or some made up statistics. But there are real statistics out there. The World Health Organization notes that nine studies have found micro plastics in drinking water, not just fresh water, but actual drinking water in a range anywhere between zero and 10,000 particles per liter. There hasn't been enough work done to say just how much of a danger this is. But if you just rather not drink plastic in your water, there are people working on filters. Yeah. So current carbon based filtering systems, they work slowly and require a decent amount of energy. So one promising take comes from scientist at Daegu Gwang Book Institute of Science and Technology or DGIST led by Professor Park Chi Young. Yeah, they created a porous polymer called a covalent triazine framework, but you could just call it CTF for short, created from an inexpensive precursor material. So not expensive to make. That's a big advantage right there. And they exposed it to some mild oxidation so that it attracts water and has some microscopic pits and holes that can capture pollutants as the water goes through. Reportedly more than 99.9% of the pollutants can be removed within 10 seconds. This thing's cheap to make. It works fast and you don't need to power it. The CTF filter can be reused multiple times as well. It's not one and done. So it's cheap, works well and it can be reused. Yeah, they also built a solar powered version that uses heat to remove volatile organic compounds. Those are found in things like paints, solvents, other indoor materials that you don't want to drink. They have a prototype that combines this one with the microplastics one to remove 99.9% of both types of pollutants. Their findings were published as the cover paper for the 50th edition of Advanced Materials in September. They obviously know people are interested in learning more. I am as well. I'm not totally sure how much microplastic drinking I'm doing and if I am doing it, how much that is potentially harming me, but not knowing is enough for me to be really interested in knowing how to get them out just in case they do end up being harmful in the future. Yeah, Tim. How are you feeling about drinking plastic these days? Yeah, I mean it is truly to tell but obviously you know these things are so microscopic that it is easy to see how they can become embedded in your organs and that's not a good thing. I'm lucky to be out in the woods. My water comes out of the ground and goes back into the ground so I'm relatively comfortable that my water is on the lower end of the scale. But certainly this is definitely a major concern I think for a lot of people and it's good to see some manufacturers or some brands starting to become more aware of this as well, especially on the clothing side because a lot of these particles come from synthetic fabrics that are washed and then these microfibers come off of there. So Patagonia for example, I think you can get a filter that you can put in your washing machine that will help to reduce the amount of plastics that you're putting out into the environment which is great. It'd be great to see more brands kind of getting ahead of this as well rather than waiting for the scientific research and waiting for these solutions which are proving to be a little bit slow to come I think. Yeah, I'm going to guess this is getting a second because this paper came out in September. I'm guessing this is getting a second wind partly because of the buzz around plastics that I was talking about earlier but they're probably looking for funding for some kind of spin-off startup that happens at MIT all the time. I can't imagine it wouldn't happen at DGIST as well. The thing that makes me positive about this is I'm not willing to go to great expense to filter my water for plastics yet until I know more but if it's cheap if I can spend 10 bucks and put a filter on my water and this thing just works and I have to replace the filter once a month or something I would absolutely go for that just to keep the water clean so this does sound promising. I know there's a lot of other water filter technologies out there in fact if you know them or you're working on them in the audience please email us feedback at dailytechnews.com we'd love to hear about it but this one does sound pretty promising to me. You know a lot of this too is this reminds me of thankfully knock on wood everybody there hasn't been a huge fire issue in my neck of the woods in northern California but we've had some pretty crazy seasons and that has affected all of California and many other places in the world as well and so many of my friends especially who have young kids and didn't always you know have invested in all sorts of air purifying filters and you know figuring out how to say stay as safe as possible now obviously smoke inhalation is different than drinking microplastics but this feels like hey if we can if we can prove that you can you can be healthier even if you're not necessarily going to be sick right but if you can just avoid the potential of becoming sick going down the road you know we're having something that can that can be traced back to the water that you're drinking not being as clean and filtered as possible they're just going to sell lots of this stuff because yeah you know even if it's preventative it's like why not I hope it really works as well as the paper makes it sound because the paper makes it makes it sound like it works works really well I can't wait to hear from the person who has therapeutic uses for eating plastic though you know there's always another side to every argument folks are you that person what would you like to hear us talk about on this show one way to let us know is our subreddit submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com when people talk about EVs the names that invariably come up are Tesla of course maybe Rivian BYD Kia Ford Volkswagen but the industry is filled with specialty makers as well who target specific niches like performance one of these is Croatia's Remach Automobili in 2013 Remach and introduced the concept one EV supercar you may have heard of that it claimed to be the fastest accelerating EV in the world well Tim Stevens wrote an article for The Verge called bending physics inside Remach's plan to make the fastest EV on the planet I highly recommend you read that full article to get the full flavor of his experience but for now Tim tell us about your trip to Croatia to drive the Navara a $2 million $1,914 horsepower all electric car yeah the numbers are pretty astonishing this is the world's fastest EV they just said that record a couple of months ago 258 miles an hour on a close track which makes it yeah the fastest EV in the world and acceleration acceleration from 0 to 16 in 1.8 seconds which is honestly uncomfortable that is not a pleasant experience to be going to accelerate from 0 to 60 that quickly I opened in my piece we were going through the different drive modes and I was in the passenger seat to kind of get a feel for the car before I got to drive and the test driver was in cruise mode which is the second slowest mode and he said okay I'm going to put my foot on the floor to see him get a sense for acceleration and I was taking notes of my phone and the phone flew out of my hand and smacked me in the chest so hard it left to bruise because it was just that brutal and we weren't even in the faster modes of the car yet so remarkably quick and you know these cars are large they're wide they're hard to drive but this thing was just honestly quite pleasant to drive suspension was reasonably comfortable and even you know with that much horsepower it was pretty easy to dawdle around through some neural roads and the outskirts of Zagreb and Croatia there but yeah when you got into the throttle a little bit deeper it was pretty remarkable to say the least yeah EVs have are known for having pretty good acceleration because of continuous variable transmission and stuff like that how much do we know about how they are super charging that acceleration with this one yeah most EVs they have really good torque off the line but they kind of peter out when you get a high speed because they run out of torque pretty quickly this thing though yeah obviously has a lot of torque all the way through and one interesting thing that that makes this EV pretty different compared to your average Tesla that kind of thing is that there are four electric motors one for each wheel and that not only gives obviously a lot of power but it also gives a lot of control one of the things that I drove over was I was accelerating hard over an overpass which had these kind of diagonal metal separators on the road and I could feel each motor scaling back as I went over these metal dividers because the grip was lower than on the asphalt and as soon as that tire got over the metal back on the asphalt that motor then powered up again to give me full thrust and that's really remarkable it's checking I think every 100 times a second each grip at each corner of the car and it can scale back power at each wheel individually which is which is pretty remarkable what to be clear if you had done that speed in a car that wasn't checking 100 times a second and it had just powered through you would have skidded out right yeah the test driver who's in passenger seat at that point said that if the car hadn't been actively looking and throttling back power the car would have speared into the wall more quickly than any really any human could react realistically because that much power going down it would have spun up the wheels on the metal part immediately and it would have just ended in tears basically and this has autonomous systems as well because now that you say that I kind of want an autonomous system to help that error correct for me it does not it does have certainly you know driver assistance systems where it's going to be you know cruise control and that kind of thing but also stability and traction control as well to make sure that you don't go spinning into the wall as it helped me in that situation but Remak is working on autonomous shuttles as well that's another part of their business that they're working to develop fully driverless vehicles for use in Croatia and elsewhere in the world but this car no this is one that you get to drive for yourself yeah so what's the point of this I mean obviously they might sell a few two million dollar cars to a couple of billionaires around the world but is this calling attention to the rest of the business what about the rest of us who say great car if it was more like you know 50 grand yeah this is basically a halo car for the brand so they're basically showing this is what we can do when the sky is the limit but they are making a lot of money through engineering partnerships with other manufacturers and those manufacturers do tend to be prestige manufacturers like Aston Martin but they're doing hybrid systems for other brands and basically working to bring that technology to more attainable cars cars that are still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars unfortunately but certainly it's beginning to create and show the level of advancement of simple technology that can trickle down which is great and they want to be partnering with other manufacturers Porsche is a major investor of theirs so I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that at some point we might see some rematch technology instead of a Porsche and we're still talking about expensive cars but you know not two million dollars expensive at least yeah I think it is was interesting and you go into detail in the article about the fact that this company shouldn't really be in Croatia it's only in Croatia because Remak himself just really wanted it to stay in Croatia yeah the company grew out of a rematch basically blowing up the motor on his BMW and deciding to make it into an EV and then getting funding despite all odds you know no investors no startups wanted to work with him in Croatia but he was very stubborn about that and he was quite quite honest about the struggles of that when I spoke with him he said that he had some regrets but ultimately he was very proud they've got over 2,000 employees there now and it is considered to be among the best if not the best employer in the entirety of Croatia yeah and making parts you know chassis big technology I probably parts is the wrong word but but making things for a lot of other car manufacturers like you said so it's not it's not putting all its eggs in one basket right and and now Remak Group which is kind of the parent company there it now is in control of Bugatti which is one of the most historic sports car manufacturers and one of the most prestigious sports car manufacturers in the world and now Remak is in control of Bugatti as well so that shows you know the amount of respect that he's been able to earn in a short about a time largely again based on that engineering skill that he has and that all of his employees there is a greb have as well very cool thank you well indeed cool also cool let's know this one a team of scientists at Columbia University Medical Center led by a dermatology and tissue engineering doctor Albert Papallardo successfully nurtured a cluster of skin cells designed to adhere to a mouse's hind leg and be accepted as its own tissue in under 10 minutes the procedure was over and Papallardo says it was a perfect fit now this is significant not just because it worked on a mouse but because it could help people with burns or really any animal that has a large wound to cover irregular shapes with real and functional skin the lab-grown material is known as a skin construct a sheet of human cells that could be implanted on a wound that's otherwise too big for a graft from another body part Papallardo's team published their success in Science Advances on January 27th describing a three-dimensional or edgeless graft shape to fit a body part without having to create seams which in the past have led to strange shapes and you know not great mobility and you know things that just don't really look like what they're supposed to look like a 3D printer made the scaffold that let skin cells grow into the desired shape then Papallardo seeded those human cells in layers around the scaffold letting the cells build themselves a network of structural molecules Now if you haven't watched the video of this already trigger warning for those who get freaked out by small disembodied hands because they show a very compelling demo of growing skin for a hand on the small hand scaffold that's incredibly impressive but also just unusual looking Yeah Just a tiny glove Tom just tell yourself that It's a tiny skin glove Yeah Yeah and an incredible technology for treating so many things like burns and that sort of stuff Yeah This is amazing Yeah I mean there's obviously clinical trials if you say I know somebody who could benefit from this where do I sign or who do I call we're certainly a ways out from there yet but it sounds like the researchers were beyond impressed with not only the fact that this worked but it worked in a really short amount of time you know this was not like a nine hour surgery or something that took months to kind of grow in a lab type thing it worked as advertised You know Skin graft surgery can be really long right from what I understand so Yes long and with not necessarily the greatest of results maybe better than what you were working with before but Yeah but yeah this is it's very promising All right let's check out the mail bag Yeah so we had a conversation last week about the mill which is a device that helps you separate compostable materials from inorganic materials and just kind of make a composting a more finest sand in the house basically just makes the whole process a little bit easier but for a price Thor wrote in Thor lives in Sweden and said the mill composter sounds awesome I'd love to have a bin that reduces smell and results in something we could use for our plants hopefully they'll also sell it as a standalone product at some point because as Thor is pointing out there is a subscription service Thor said although my food waste doesn't go entirely to waste now either when I live in Tonsburg the buses ran on biodiesel that was created from municipal food waste now Thor and Anthony and Chris I don't think you all know each other but Anthony and Chris have some promising products besides the mill Anthony said we found a great product called Lomi that's L-O-M-I it's a bit pricey it's $499 but we love it it takes all our food waste paper towels napkins plastic wear anything compostable and converts it to loam it drastically reduces the volume of the compost and eliminates the odor no need to send back to the company you just dump it in your normal compost bucket there are consumables involved but it costs us $42 per quarter which is much more reasonable than $33 per month Chris also wrote in and said I've been using the Food Cycler by Vitamex for a couple of years does the same thing as the mill it grinds and dehydrates food waste our family accumulates the food waste into a large planter pot over the winter and in the spring it gets mixed into our planter bets well first of all thank you to Chris and Anthony for sending in the links to those we'll have those in our show notes because I know a bunch of you out there were wondering like hey could I just buy the mill well not from mill but you can buy something just like it from other places so thanks for that one of the keys about the mill was that you didn't keep the sand you didn't keep the powder that it made you mailed it to them and they disposed of it and I think Anthony and Chris were like well why would I do that I can just compost it myself but that left me thinking well I guess the one thing mills still would appeal to is somebody who doesn't have anywhere to compost or doesn't want to deal with the compost maybe doesn't live in a city that collects the compost and so this would be a solution for an apartment dweller in that situation we're like I don't want to have a bunch of powder and have to deal with it great for those of you who garden but I don't garden the mill might still be useful for them but still pricey at $33 a month to do that so I think building it into a municipal collection is probably the way to go for that but yeah very much for non gardeners or people without any kind of land in their living situation flower haters unite we've got the product for you but it's not free yeah the flower lovers though Anthony and Chris have got you hooked up with some standalone solutions you got some options something for everybody yeah if you if you if you if you ever talk about something on the show and you say I've got feedback I've got a product I've got something to say feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send us that email thank you in advance also thanks to you Tim Stevens for being with us today besides driving and pretty cool fancy cars let folks know where they can keep up with your work thanks Sarah yeah you can find me at Timstevens.substack.com if you want to get a couple emails from me every now and again or I'm Tim underscore Stevens on the Twitter if you're still hanging on over there many people are and thanks for being with us today also thanks to our brand new bosses we've got Craig we've got Aaron we've got Malcolm and we've got Sam who all just started backing us on Patreon since we saw you last thanks to all of you Craig Aaron Malcolm Sam big round of applause from here nice long three-day weekend but four new bosses all right all of that Craig Aaron Malcolm Sam the fantastic four welcome them other patrons and all of you Craig Aaron Malcolm Sam and all of you patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet we're going to talk about Twitter deciding to charge people extra to secure their accounts with SMS while leaving unpaid users the more secure options I think I have a way to make some sense of that so patrons stick around you can also catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 2100 UTC you can join us live we'd love to have you you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com prime and club hopes you have enjoyed this program