 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you right now listening to us. Thank you for doing just just listening supports the show. Maybe you're Jake or Mike Acons or Norm Physicus or Anthony Shaler, whoever you are, welcome on this episode of DTNS is the New York Times, a game company to everything's a game company. Suddenly Yahoo buys an AI news startup and while your eyes may not see high frame rates well, but that may not matter to anything, but your eSports career or lack of it. This is the Daily Tech News for April 2nd, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and back at Studio Animal House. I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer at your chain. Sarah, did you have a good April Fool's Day? How did you spend your holiday? I spent it, you know, trying to not, you know, get I don't know, news, landmine, dumb things. It wasn't too bad, actually. No, in fact, I sort of like midday went looking for it a little bit. Oh, yeah. I was like, maybe we're not doing this anymore. I like a few jokes here and there. CERN said they were going to rename themselves and the acronym would have been nerd. Ah, cute. Yeah, cute. All right. Yeah, we get it. That's enough of that. Let's get to the quick. The verges sources say that Microsoft is testing a new AI powered chatbot that can automate Xbox support tasks, such as responding to questions and issuing game refunds. The Xbox AI chatbot is currently connected to Microsoft's support documents for the Xbox network and ecosystem. But in recent days, the company expanded the testing tool for its Xbox chatbot more broadly, suggesting that this prototype, currently known as Xbox support and virtual agent that love the naming there, may start to handle support queries for all Xbox customers. That's a very Microsoft name, isn't it? Starting now in select markets and slowly rolling out to the whole wide world, you can use open AI's chat GPT without needing an account. So you just go to the page, you get the same model that non paying logged in users get if you pay, you get a more advanced model. But I think it's three point five right now that you get for free. You will not be able to save or share your chats or use custom instructions. You'd need an account for that. It will also have more restrictions on what kind of prompts it will respond to to prevent abuse and for safety reasons. And even if you're anonymous, you can choose not to let your prompts and responses be used in training chat GPT's models, but you'll need to opt out every time you use it because you don't have an account for them to save that preference to. Amazon wants to attract more startup customers to Amazon Web Services, often known as AWS. As part of that effort, Amazon has expanded its free credits program to cover the cost of using major AI models like Anthropik, Meta, Mistral AI and Cohere. Howard Wright, who is the VP and Global Head of Startups at AWS, said of the move, quote, this is another gift that we're making back to the startup ecosystem. In exchange for what we hope is startups continuing to choose AWS as their first stop. Pray they don't alter the deal further. The drumbeat of Apple AI research publication continues. Apple scientists published a paper Friday about a system called Realm. That's capital R lowercase e capital ALM. It stands for reference resolution as language modeling. It's good at understanding context, including sort of vague references to something that's on a screen, as well as conversational context. Realm works by converting visual elements into a textual format than fine tuning the language model. And they say it could outperform GPT for at these kinds of tasks. In practice, it could mean you could use pronouns and refer to things on a screen. So if Apple had a smart display, you could say, oh, there's a picture of a baseball player on the screen and just say, who is he? And it would know you meant the thing on the screen and it would look at the screen and be able to tell what the person was. The assistant would know you mean that image of that person. It could also be used to help drivers navigate infotainment systems or assist users with disabilities. Discord is adding some ads sort of starting this week. The company will let video game makers advertise to their users with something called sponsored quests. Sponsored quests offer PC gamers in-game rewards for getting their friends to watch a stream of them playing through Discord. The goal is for video games to get more exposure to more gamers. That's why they would care about this. And then Discord will target ads depending on users age, geographic location data and also gameplay. Users can opt out of personalized promotions for quests if they so desire that are based on activity or data shared with the platform. Yeah, so the slope is not slippery yet, but that's what people are worried about. Like, OK, this is fine. But what next? For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that news was a loss leader for a newspaper while advertising, particularly classified advertising, made the money. You needed the news to get people to pick up the paper. You needed the classifies to make the money to pay the newswriters. Another piece of conventional wisdom is the Craigslist, eBay, later Facebook Marketplace destroyed the classified market and put newspapers in peril. It's one of the pressures causing them to pick fights with Google and stuff like that. But for the New York Times, games like Wordle and Connections seem to have become their new classified. A chart included in a recent SEC filing by the Times shows that users spend more time on games than they do on news and far more on games than they do on cooking or sports via the athletic. Time spent on gaming has slowly increased over the years relative to news consumption since January 2020. That's when that chart began. The acquisition of Wordle in January 2022 is certainly significance to maintaining that momentum. But if you look at the chart, it doesn't really seem to have caused a big spike. It was a gradual climb. Unlike classifieds, it's not a given that other news outlets could mimic this method of getting users in the door. I think New York Times has created a special brand kind of building on the crossword and then Wordle and Connections and things like that. But, Sarah, I know you and I play connections. I know you still play Wordle. Do you pay for it, though? I don't. I don't. And I don't have to. I say it acts a little weird, depending on what browser I'm using. So sometimes I'm like, it's weird and chrome. I'll go to Firefox. I've never paid for an NYT subscription, but I can still play the games and I can still share my results with my friends. And, you know, that is something, especially for Wordle and Connections, I do every single morning. It's the first thing I do. Well, I mean, first thing I do is get out of bed and then I do this. I love it. Now, there have been many times where I'm like, you know, I should probably just, you know, pay for a sub because then, you know, there are other games that they also offer, but those games will cut you off because, you know, you're you're not logged in. You're not paying. And and I would assume that for the people who kind of like casual games, and that's what these are, you know, kind of wordsmith games, you know, people who like crosswords. It's, you know, they're fun, but they they're they're casual. They're casual games. I would assume that the, you know, publications, you know, and not even the New York Times, but, you know, any publication will get a lot of runway out of this because people like it. And then, you know, if you also give them news that they're interested in, great. I don't know. I don't know if anybody could replicate this because I think the New York Times is in a specific a specific advantage by having crosswords. By being known as the place with the crosswords. Well, yeah, you know, if the Washington Post started charging for games, people would say, why? Why are you good at games? Like, I almost feel like New York Times got to it first. And now the other publications need to figure out, well, what do we have that we're known for that that we could turn into a business that would replace that income? It does imply that, you know, historically, people don't pay for just the news. They they pay for something else and the news kind of brings them in. But I don't know what that would be. I mean, I would say the exact opposite. I would say that, you know, at this point, again, you know, as somebody is like, six a.m., let's do wordal note. You know, I have like a my mother and a couple of my friends will send me their, you know, results because maybe they get up before I do type thing. Oh, yeah. We don't actually share that full results. We only share the stats. Yeah. Exactly. You know, but that I mean, I that is I mean, that will get me to the New York Times way faster than somebody sending an article like you got to read this where I'd be like, yeah, I will, I will. And I'll bookmark it and for sure get back to that later. The the the, you know, it's kind of the gambling aspect, right? Of of the gaming stuff just that's that's how you retain people. I think it is I'm developing a theory that businesses are now built around fandoms. It's, you know, something we saw rise with the rise of comic cons and and the the splitting of those those big conferences into specific conferences that are about specific fandoms. We saw the tech companies kind of turn their fandoms into conferences that they don't need to go to bigger conferences for, I think, political candidates. If you look at them as fandoms, you will suddenly understand better why some candidates do better than others in ways that don't make sense. Otherwise. And I think the New York Times has a fandom here. They they latched on to two. One was their own. The New York Times crossword has always had a fandom and Wirtle had a huge fandom kind of came out of nowhere and they merged them together. So I wonder if the key is what is the Washington Post's fandom? Like, how do you cultivate it? Do you do vlogs? Is it some kind of political history thing? But I think there is a deeper lesson here that the New York Times may have stumbled upon, not by design, but yeah, could be instructive for other like, you know, people go like, I don't want to play games all day. But it's like the gamification of, you know, trivia, facts, information, you know, there is a lot to that. And that is that's where some of these on the surface games that seem, you know, pretty silly have stuck. They've stuck with folks, myself included. Yeah. Well, one another way to get news improved is to buy somebody's company, right? Yeah, exactly. So so Yahoo and Artifact jointly announced on Tuesday that Yahoo will buy Artifact, which is an AI generated news aggregation and recommendation app, which launched in 2023 by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Artifact announced in January, if you've been following the news, it was going to be winding down operations, not not right at that moment, but said, you know, we're just going to be, you know, getting rid of some stuff, you know, community moderated stuff through the end of February. And that was about a year after they launched, although it did keep its core news reading capability going quite a bit longer until April. And some people were sort of like, why are they doing that? Well, now we know it's because they were waiting for the acquisition announcement from Yahoo. Now, Systrom and Krieger said that the biggest reason to shut down Artifact was in order to focus on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. Kind of, you know, if you're reading the tea leaves, Artifact just didn't reach all that many people. Systrom tells the Verges, David Pierce, that he had around 10 conversations with other companies besides Yahoo that were also interested in Artifact's technology. After Artifact announced, it was shutting down. So you might say, okay, so Artifact coming to Yahoo. How does that benefit Yahoo? How does that benefit Artifact? Well, Yahoo says 185 million people come to Yahoo News every month. That puts Artifact's personalization and recommendation tech in front of a widely bigger set of people than it would have done on its own as an app that was sort of struggling to get traction. Artifact will no longer exist as a standalone app. Some people are bummed about that. It did have some loyal fans, but it will categorize, curate and personalize content within Yahoo News. So says Yahoo. And then eventually other Yahoo platforms, which haven't really been laid out as of yet. So Jester Woot was the first to say the thing that I expected. Yahoo still exists. Yeah, 185 million people use Yahoo. Don't sleep on Yahoo. I actually use Yahoo News quite regularly because it's a way to read pay-walled articles from other sources like Reuters, for example. And Yahoo News has a decent journalistic crew. It also owns TechCrunch. So there's a fine journalistic stable that's behind Yahoo. And with 185 million people, you can't sneeze at that. It's not as big as Yahoo was back in the day, certainly. But but it's decent. And I think the current Yahoo is focusing on being an information provider, being a news provider. I think Artifact was a great idea. When I tried it, I had to remind myself to use it. And it felt like work. I don't know if you experienced this, Sarah, but it was like, oh, right. I have to train my Artifact. I should force myself to read some articles so it knows what I like. And that just was never going to make me use it. Whereas if it's in something I use already, which I don't use the Yahoo News app, but plenty of people do, then those people are going to start to benefit from it and it's going to start to work better. And then that might cause people to go, well, man, Yahoo News has gotten really good lately. Have you tried it? And then maybe they start to grow their audience. Yeah, I was not a regular user of Artifact either. And not because I didn't think it was a good product, but kind of the same as you, Tom. I would be like, well, I sort of have my ways of, you know, getting my news, which is probably a little different than the other person anyway. Yeah, it didn't have a compelling reason for you to change your way. Right. But if, you know, if you're hitting Yahoo News and many people have Yahoo News as their homepage when they go online in the morning, you know, and I'm not, you know, I'm not, you know, going to say it's all about, you know, the older set, but I think people who are maybe my mom's age do that and have done that and have always done that type thing. You get a lot of people who are still interested in news and Yahoo is just, you know, that's, that's where you go first. So to have a more curated, I don't want to say TikTok because that implies that it's going to be like frivolous news. But that sort of for you page, I think that's what they're going for here. And if it works well and it knows you and you get the news that you're interested in, you know, and that you want to engage with, you know, and further share with your friends, that's something that I think any news organization is like, yeah, we want that. Yeah, I think a lot more people use Yahoo News as an app. I certainly stumble across it just in going through the internet and looking at Google News and tech meme and things and doing searches. So it's probably you've probably read a Yahoo News article more recently than you thought and just didn't really think about the fact that it was Yahoo News. And I think you're right, Sarah. I think I think it will improve the experience for those people that use it. I'm not saying, oh, Yahoo News is going to be the next big thing. But I think it is what Artifact needed because there just wasn't that compelling reason to open Artifact. There you had to work to get to the point where it became useful. And that I think is why it stuck at a low conversion rate. Whereas Yahoo News already has people. Yeah, I think a lot of the sort of like, let's reimagine news. Apps get buried the same way that Artifact did. Couple of notes just that Yahoo and Artifact did not say how much the acquisition price was, but Krueger and Systrom will be special advisors to Yahoo, meaning they're not going to work there. Yahoo did not acquire the team. The team was actually pretty small. As far as I understand, it was like eight people total at any point. But if you're saying, that's crazy for Yahoo. Remember back about, I think it was 11 years ago now, Yahoo bought Summly, which was a little bit different than Archive, but was doing the same sort of using AI to summarize news. Summly shut down, became part of Yahoo. The team that was acquired at the time just got sort of absorbed into the company. So Yahoo is not new to this, has been doing this for some time. Well, folks, if you have a thought about something we talk about on the show, but you don't know our email address, here it is. Email us feedback at DailyTechnewshow.com. Scientists from Trinity College Dublin published a paper in the journal PLOS ONE that found that some people perceive more images per second than others. They tested perception by adjusting the flickering of a light source, something called the critical flicker fusion threshold. So each of us have a different threshold, above which if it flickers faster, we don't see it as flickering. So let's say I can see 40 flickers per second. If you set that light to 50 flickers per second, I'm just going to see a steady light. I won't see the flickering anymore. So they use that to test people's threshold. And they found that generally perception ranged from 35 times a second up to 60 times per second and even some people above 60 times per second. They believe that the level of temporal resolution, as they call it, stays pretty stable throughout one's life. And even throughout the day, there's some evidence that female subjects may have experienced slight changes more often than male subjects. But generally, if you're a 40, you're a 40 and you're going to stick around 40 for most of your life. Sarah, I saw a lot of people using the headline, this will stop you from becoming an eSports player or whether to determine whether you can have an eSports career. Obviously, there's more to it than just the flickering. Did you see these? Well, yes, because I knew we were going to talk about this today, but I think my first question is like, how would one test for something like this? Well, the way I described, you changed the flicker rate of the light source, and as soon as you see it as steady, you know, okay, that's the threshold. Well, sure, but yeah, I mean, but nobody in the medical profession is being like, you are a 40 rather than a 60 Hertz. Well, they could, though. They could, yeah. So that's kind of where I'm going with this is like, I don't really know what I am, and I don't think I really care. I feel like, you know, I got a good monitor in front of me right now. It's 60 Hertz, but I'm also like really, really bad at baseball. So, you know, how much does this really kind of affect like various facets of your life? Yeah, the Hertz question is another one that comes up immediately like, aha, so most people can't see more than 60 Hertz, they don't need a frame rate above 60 Hertz, they don't need a refresh rate of 120 Hertz, it's a waste, and maybe you could get tested and find out what your display should be, maybe you only need a 40 Hertz display. The fact is that is not how it works. Even if you have a lower critical flicker fusion threshold, let's say it's 35, let's say it's right there at the bottom, you will still notice improvements with higher refresh rates, because light source is not the only thing that makes the quality of a display. Movement is the other thing. There's a few other things, but to oversimplify movement is another main thing. And so the ability for you to have smooth movement without having to simulate motion blur will mean that even if you don't see the frame rate high, the higher refresh rate will look better to you. You will experience more intensity of that image and it will look more real if you've got that higher refresh rate, even though you can't see the frame rate. Does that make sense? It does. It does. You know, at the same time, I wonder how companies can, because they will, you know, bank on this, you know, could a company be like, you know, if you're a 60 Hertz person, you know, and, and you're in the elite category, you know, we've got the display for you type thing. Yeah, I don't get the sense that we'll see anybody do that because because it would be used against you so quickly, like, oh, well, nobody's above the 60 Hertz and they want to sell you 120 Hertz. What they might do, though, is say, look, we know that, you know, most people don't have more than 60 Hertz, but you want to see smooth motion, check out 120 Hertz. And frankly, as a consumer, the thing to keep in mind is that the refresh rate isn't the be all end all of whether a display looks good or not to you. It's whether the display looks good or not to you, right? Like you may have a low flicker fusion threshold, but 120 Hertz display might look really good. And if it does, then you then it might be worth paying for. It's not going to improve your eSports career. You're not going to become a better gamer because you're using 120 Hertz. I think I think that's the thing to realize is you are not going to improve your gaming with a higher refresh rate the way some companies promise that you will, because you're probably not going to benefit from the higher refresh rate in the timing aspect of it. You're going to benefit in the intensity and the look of it. Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like, you know, I've got these readers, you know, that I wear when I have to, you know, wear them, you know, they're very specific to me. We're, we don't all have the same eyes, you know, some of us are lumping along a little bit more than others. But, but just to know that, yeah, there are refresh rates that just simply won't be seen by certain people. That that's interesting. Yeah. I think it's also interesting for other things beyond technology. Obviously, hand-eye coordination is involved in real-world sports, you know, baseball, cricket, stuff like that. And there was a zoologist on this study who is very interested in understanding it from the predator-prey relationship, from the ability to to track, you know, and see the either side of the equation. So yeah, I think it's a it's a really interesting study. We will have the direct link to it in the show notes. So check it out, dailytechnewshow.com. All right, let's get to the mailbag. R.W. Nash, who writes us pretty much every day. Hello, R.W. I said, thank you so much for no April Fools jokes in your Monday show. Yeah. You're welcome. At one point, we were protesting too much, but, but yes, I think we have finally arrived in the world where you can have an April Fools joke and it doesn't bug me because it's not taking over the day. You've got a little much there for a while. So yeah, like if it's sort of like, ha, ha, cute, yeah, great. If it's sort of like, oh, I was confused for a couple of hours and now I'm kind of mad at you, that's not cool. Or Google News is useless today because it's all filled with pranks. Right. Yeah. Like, like if, if, if you know the prank has come in, it's not funny. Yeah. Last week, we talked about the foam darts that police are using in a few places around the country to track a car without having to chase the car. David wrote in and said, I feel like we got a little in the weeds on this topic. If you are speeding and not yielding to lawful authority, lights and sirens of a police car, I believe it's beyond contestation that you are breaking the law and more than likely the police cruiser has video of you doing it. Why you are speeding or not yielding, I'd say, are irrelevant under almost all circumstances. Love the Batman darts solution. Go nerf. I think drones would be another super easy way to resolve this at a fraction of what a police helicopter would cost. But I'm sure GPS darts are super cheap too. Awesome solution. Love the show. And as an aside, any time you guys want to have intervention or Kickstarter to prompt slash force Tom to learn how to touch type, I'm on board. Thank you, David. I responded to David. I was like, yeah, man, I've tried. I just it doesn't work for me. Mock me all you want. But I will. I mean, you are touch typing. You're making fun of the fact that I look at the keys as you're not only Del Conti is to make fun of me for that, too. It's just, you know, I just I try to make fun of you. I, you know, I, you know, everybody's different. Maybe I have a low keyboard threshold. Right. It's like our conversation. Like, you know, like what can Tom handle? 40 Hertz, 60 Hertz touch typing. We don't know, you know, actually, it's not touch typing. I've I've tried so many times. Yeah. Maybe someday. Who knows? I can do chopsticks, though, and Clinton can't do those. So there you go. It's the conservation of skills. There you go. Anyway, that's what Clinton was saying in the chat. Patrons, stick around for the extended show. Good day. Internet Alaska is putting robots to work guarding airports from birds. And so we got our producer Amos to join us because he is in Alaska and he has worked with aircraft in the Air Force before. And I'm sure he is going to have a perspective on this. Stick around. Just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at four p.m. Eastern twenty hundred UTC. And you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. With Scott Johnson joining us talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.