 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Chris Allen, Chris Smith, and Mark Gibson. Coming up on DTNS, AI is making sweet music or at least music or something that's kind of like music. Also the makers of the big dog robots swear to never give it a gun and Robert Herron is here to help us tell what's hype and what's real if you're in the market for a new TV. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, October 7th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. I'm drawing the top tech stories from the home of the Cleveland Guardians. I'm Len Peralta, the freshly off having won Cleveland. Yes. I'm the show's producer, Roger Che. And Robert Herron, cohost of A.V. Excel is with us. Welcome back, Robert. Hey, thank you so much. You know, every time Robert comes on the show, a TV gets bought. I hope so. There's a lot of plenty of good options out there. We're going to talk about that. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The quick hits. Valve announced Thursday, the Steam Deck no longer requires a reservation. If you want to buy one in the U.S. or Canada, Valve plans to fulfill the remaining reservations by the end of 2022 and new orders will be filled within a few weeks. In other Steam Deck news, the previously delayed official dock, the Steam Deck docking station, easy to say, is now available to order for 89 bucks. This is one of those stories that you might not care much about today, but likely will come up later and you'll be glad you know. The president of the U.S. signed an executive order implementing the latest attempt at a framework to reconcile data privacy laws between the U.S. and Europe so that companies can move data between the two markets easily and legally. A safe harbor agreement put in place in 2000 was challenged in 2013. And since then, every attempt to replace it has been struck down in court the last time in 2020. We have talked about them in the past on the show. This latest attempt called Privacy Shield 2.0 creates a data protection review court that EU citizens can appeal to. We'll see if this one holds up. Fingers crossed, folks. The U.S. Commerce Department issued new rules that go into effect October 21st, restricting export to China of any technology that can be used in advanced computing and artificial intelligence applications. This applies to U.S. companies and non U.S. companies that use U.S. technology or software. This applies to 14 nanometer technology as well as 128 layer flash storage and 18 nanometer DRAM. So they're digging back. They already banned all the earlier stuff. This is technology that's been around for 10 years. Reuters sources said Samsung and SK Heinecks, both Korean companies, might get licenses to avoid the restrictions for their Chinese operations. This happens during an apparent slump in the chip market as well. AMD forecasted Q3 revenue to be one point one billion dollars below its previous forecast because of a weaker than expected PC market. And Samsung estimated Q3 profit for it would be down 32 percent on the year due to a slowdown in purchases. The Verge saw internal memos from Meta's VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, that said the team working on the VR app Horizon Worlds is in a quality lockdown for the rest of 2022. Hope they can get out. The goal is to fix quality gaps and performance issues before launching a web based version of Horizon Worlds. Shah wrote, for an experience to become delightful and retentive, it must first be usable and well crafted. Specific issues include a confusing onboarding experience and initial discovery of top-notch worlds for first time users being a bit of a challenge. Shah wants more internal use, saying Meta would hold managers accountable for having teams use it at least once a week. Got to eat that dog food. We'll hear more about Horizon Worlds and Avatar graphics at Meta's Connect conference on October 11th. If there's anything that improves the product, it's making people use it against their will. Delo, our chance to record Judd's Chancellor Kathleen McCormick ordered a stay in the trial between Elon Musk and Twitter while they work on details of Musk's latest offer. Twitter objected to the stay, arguing that the trial should continue until the actual deal is closed, as it's unclear to them if Musk has the financing. And they're like, he's done it before, where he backed out. Let's make him make it the deal first. Musk's lawyers argued that Twitter can't take yes for an answer. They had more in it. But that was kind of the fun poll quote. The judge did side with Musk and gave the parties until five p.m. Eastern time, October 28th to resolve the transaction. If no deal is reached by then, the trial will be scheduled to resume in November. The Verge's Elizabeth Lopato has an excellent breakdown of all the sourced insider info on what may actually be going on behind the scenes. If you're interested in that sort of thing, we have a link in the show notes. All right, let's talk a little more about something else. You may be confused about who owns Robotics Company Boston Dynamics since it has changed hands a few times since 2020. It's been owned by Hyundai. Before that it was owned by SoftBank and Alphabet. That's important to know so that you know who is behind the company that is pushing an open letter to the robotics industry titled General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized. What's in the letter, Rich? Well, it states that companies who signed it, quote, do not support the weaponization of our advanced mobility general purpose robots. So it kind of says what it says on the tin. The letter cites a concern based on, quote, a small number of people who have visibly publicized their makeshift efforts to weaponize commercially available robots. That might refer to bombs being strapped to DJI drones or a gun mounted on the back of a unitary dog bot. And there was also that time an art collective mounted a paintball gun on spot and caused a big kerfuffle. Yeah, so the letter gets everyone on board to pledge not to weaponize. And I'm going to quote from the letter here. Advanced mobility general purpose robots or the software we developed that enables advanced robotics. And they say we're not even going to support anybody else who does that sort of thing. So if you're weaponizing those kinds of robots, we're against it. They also pledged to develop technologies to reduce the risks of weaponized robots. And they called on others to make similar pledges saying, hey, come on, everybody, join on. If you're not on this letter, make your own. They also asked for governments to develop policies for the safe use of robots. So who signed this thing? Yeah, aside from Boston Dynamics, other company logos at the bottom of the letter include Agility Robotics, Any Robotics, Clear Path Robotics, Open Robotics and Unitry, the one company who apparently feels the word robotics isn't necessary. Letter also states that we are not taking issue with existing technologies that nations and their government agencies use to defend themselves and uphold their laws. Boston Dynamics has marked its robots to law enforcement and military but for non weaponized uses. The French Army is, for example, tested using a Boston Robotics spot robot for reconnaissance. You point out the key issue here is, please, we would still like to sell things to governments. We just don't want to risk them putting a weapon on it and then we look bad. The Verge points out that the letter does not include Ghost Robotics and one of those logos down at the bottom, Ghost Robotics markets directly to the military and Ghost Robotics robots are being tested by the US Air Force and the Department of Homeland Security for patrols. They're not sticking guns on them, but they are using them for patrols. One of its robots, however, was once shown at a trade show with a remote controlled sniper rifle mounted on it. So the optics have been there that this company's robots could be used for that. Ghost Robotics CEO, Siren Parikh, told TechCrunch back at the time that that trade show thing happened. We're not going to dictate to our government customers how they use the robots. He did say the company restricts where it sells the robots, saying he only sells to the US and its allies, even when so far as to say he's not even going to sell to an enterprise customer if they're operating in a country that's not the US or its allies. But yeah, I think this really is a dividing line in the robotics industry and Boston Dynamics leading the way of we need to start a conversation. We need to draw a line in the sand. We need to push back against the idea that our robots could be used for weaponized situations. Robert, what does this make you feel? It sounds like it's coming down to like a terms of service for a particular device. I feel that if you have a robotics platform that is better than any other platform currently out there in terms of cost and effectiveness and longevity for mounting a weapon system to it will be taken advantage of in that respect. There's no doubt about that. We see it already with consumer grade robotic devices, as we mentioned previously. But I don't see how you can prevent it from happening, especially if you have something to say that your robotics platform has better agility and longevity in the field than, say, a gas powered device or another similar device that would be used in a similar way that might not be a quote unquote robot. I kind of see this akin to some of the debates we've seen around facial recognition technology, especially the moves Microsoft has made over the last couple of years kind of being ahead of, hey, here's here's how we think this can be useful. But please, like we're asking to be regulated so we can stay on the right side of this, we also want to set out the terms of that regulation and putting out a big open letter like this that very specifically is going to be addressing government contracts. I think, one, certainly it's out of ethical concerns, but also kind of so that these companies aren't at a market disadvantage for taking this stance if they can get regulation passed and say the rules of the road now apply to everybody, you know, regardless of who you are. So, you know, Ghost doesn't again get those fat government contracts. Yeah, there's going to be multiple motivations. There's going to be selfish motivations that are profit oriented and there's going to be legitimate engineers and scientists within these companies that have legitimate ethical motivations that push for this as well. I don't think it's as simple as one or the other. It's combination. And I do think that it is important to push back and try to get the norm as far as possible. Robert, you're not you're absolutely right. You're not going to stop people from putting weapons on these things. But you can make it more difficult. You can make you can design your robot so that it's it's not easy to add something that it's less reliable when you add something and make it so that if someone does add weapons to them, they there's pressure against them versus it being the norm. And I think that's what Boston Dynamics is pushing most for in this letter is let's make the norm that it's not OK to do this. That won't stop every single instance of it happening. But at least it could reduce the number of instances and and maybe that's enough of a win. I also find it kind of fuzzy in terms of the differentiation between like, OK, I have a robotics platform that's just simply a remote controlled vehicle versus something that has, quote unquote, more intelligence to it and is self guided or something along those lines. That's where things get, I think, even more confusing and tricky in terms of the discussion. But yeah, yeah, where you draw that line is important. That doesn't mean you can't draw a line, but where you draw it is important because remote controlled weapon systems currently exist. They are deployed widely. So is this just simply making it a little more environmentally friendly in terms of operating it on a day to day basis? Or I, you know, you could you could go down that whole quite a long way. Well, let's let's move on to something a little lighter. Music back with a vengeance. You may have noticed late this summer, the number of albums floating back on the charts felt like a lot. We had Bad Bunny, BTS, Beyonce, Blackpink, even folks whose names don't begin with B Hell, J Hope of BTS put out a solo album. Turns out it felt like a lot because it is. Music Business Worldwide reported that more than 100,000 songs are being uploaded to digital music services every day. That's up from 60,000 in February 2021 and 40,000 in April 2019. So it's not just me that can't keep up, which makes us wonder if we even need the following. Stability AI, the folks behind the stable diffusion text to image generator are backing Harman I. Yes, that's harmony, but spelled with AI instead of a Y and somewhat confusing to read out loud. Harman I just released a dance diffusion at the end of September. It can be trained on hundreds of hours of music to generate clips of original songs. Tech Arts reports that the latest interation iteration of dance diffusion can only generate clips that are a few seconds long. So this is limited right now. This isn't the same as like you just write something and it'll make it, but it is not the only one of its kind out there. Open AI's jukebox lets you just put in the genre, artist and a bit of lyrics and it can generate a complete song with vocals, quote unquote. I mean, the vocals aren't necessarily legible, but it doesn't incorporate a larger structure like a repeating chorus either. So it can do more, but it's still not perfect. Earlier this week, Google demonstrated its closed source audio LM. That's one that can take like a short bit of piano playing and then extrapolate a longer work. But again, you're limited by the input there. Yeah, so dance diffusion has a long way to go, but its advantage is the way that it trains. As the name implies, it uses a diffusion model for training operating largely the same way stable diffusion does. This works with a given training set of music, anything from collection of piano samples like we were talking about or like an artist's discography, which then learns to destroy and recover, improving these tasks as it works through the data set. The end goal is for the model to be able to take noise and then turn it into sounds that are similar to the training set. With music, it can be trained to generate things like new audio, regenerate existing audio or interpolate between two tracks, which they put out a couple of samples of a couple of examples like they can do style transfers. So you can have smash mouth vocals on the Tetris theme, something I would describe conservatively as haunting or the Pirates of the Caribbean theme on a flute, which let's face it, vaguely delightful. The downside of this, though, is that it's less general purpose, train an algorithm on Billy Joel and it can only do Billy Joel. Though you can take two models and style transfer between them, like Rich was just describing. So far, the lyrics always end up as gibberish, no matter what you do. In that way, it's similar to stable diffusion images, which really can't render readable text either. But lyrics are a little more essential to music than they are to images. Of course, the same conversation about copyright and fair use that we're having around text to image applies to music generators. For now, though, Dance Diffusion isn't modeling Billy Joel. It's only in the research stage and it's training on public domain and creative commons licensed data. But it is good enough to be used as a tool. TechCrunch highlighted several examples of using Dance Diffusion to create basic elements like a Senegalese drumbeat or kick snares or a male choir singing in the key of D. Just things that on their own aren't a song, but then you could work them into a song. And I think like the kind of because this isn't putting out finished songs like kind of like we're seeing with stable diffusion, where we're immediately seeing like, you know, show me a panda riding the zebra or something and they'll put out something that's eerily close to that. I see that like the tool aspect of this, I see like immediately I can see the application where an artist can use this to to spur further creativity as opposed to like just automating like an entire process, you know, in a weird way, because it is feels less complete right now. I could totally see something like the uncanny valley of this technology approaching sooner than later in terms of it being able to create not necessarily incredibly compelling content, at least not right away, but something good enough for maybe a general purpose use or like they mentioned for things like royalty free artwork or music and to be able to do that yourself and just punch it out there. As long as we have some differentiation, I think, because I always want to know if that content was or was not generated by, you know, an AI or machine trained system. I want to know if it was a human that made that content. And I would like to keep those distinct and just not to not to flood the market, so to speak, and put a bunch of artists out of work. Not that I think that's going to happen anytime soon, but just to so people aren't passing off, say work that literally took a couple keystrokes with the right software package being passed off as, you know, legit creativity outside of, well, when will robots have rights or become, you know, people? So I think our fears about that are always ahead of the possibility are ahead and by the time things get possible, we get comfortable being able to tell where the line is because what we're talking about right now, at least with these, is I'm in garage band and I don't like any of the drum beats that are in there, but I don't have time to create a whole drum beat myself. So I can get that dance diffusion model to do exactly the drum beat I want. It can do the Senegalese drumming. That's what I'm playing right now. So, you know, it's it's it may not be to your taste, but but it can do stuff like that, right? And it may open up new venues or new areas or genres of this type of content, whereas you've seen with the best chess programs out there right now through Google services and the way it performs within actual games against people. It's it's doing moves that really hadn't been seen before or or systems of play that hadn't been tried or seen before. And it will be just interesting to see what becomes of that and how the human artists are actually taking either cues from that or reinforcing the fact that, you know what, there's something quite special about our own quote unquote created content. All right. Well, last week, the Mexican government revealed that the Department of National Defense or Sedena was the target of a major data breach. And NTX's Dan Campos tells us some more. Hello, friends of DTNS. Here I come with some Noticias de Tecnología Express. The hacktivist group known as Guacamaya revealed they infiltrated and obtained more than six terabytes of information from the Department of National Defense, Sedena, obtaining documents related to internal security, special operatives against Narcos and even the health of the president. The group made these documents available to journalists and Carlos Loret from Latinos, reveal his first findings last week with a special report about a failed operative to capture Obidio Guzman, son of El Chapo, who was captured and released within hours by the Army in 2019. Guacamaya has penetrated other military institutions in Chile, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, and most recently in Mexico. For more information about this, check the latest episodes of Noticias de Tecnología Express. Back to you, amigos. Gracias, Dan. Thank you for that. Go check out NTX, wherever fine podcasts are pervade. In fact, if you want to talk a little more about it, Dan's always in our discord. You might ask him about it. You can join that discord by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. The holidays are coming and with them sales and with the sales temptations and with the temptations, you end up with a new TV sometimes like smartphones and smartwatches, though, TVs get updated with new features all the time, but some of them are marketing gimmicks and some of them are must haves. Robert's going to help us tell the difference. Let's start with quantum dot color, Robert, worthwhile or hype? Worth well, completely. It is a microscopic technology uses small crystals that are uniformly sized to effectively convert a higher energy wavelength of light into something that is effectively a different color. They take usually a blue light because that represents the highest energy wavelengths and that can be converted down to pretty much any other visible color that we see and it can do it very efficiently. And it provides extreme color saturation and that purity of color that really benefits the image. And we're seeing that technology now integrated. Well, we've seen it integrated into LCD TVs through layers of filtering that can take the backlight and change it into other colors. Now we're seeing it incorporated into organic light emitting displays or OLEDs from the makers of, say, Samsung display. And now Sony is actually they both unveiled new TVs that incorporate this technology. And the key characteristic of both of those, especially with the QD OLED technology is that color purity. They are no longer on those particular panels using that white subpixel to boost brightness. They are just doing pure red, blue, green, and the color that comes out of these displays is fantastic. It's the first generation. We're going to see a new generation come up for 2023. And we'll be keeping an eye on that at CES coming up in January. But it is probably one of the more exciting display technology I've seen recently. And if I were buying either an LCD or an OLED and I really cared about color quality, especially when it comes into the new streaming formats we have, like HDR 10 and Dolby Vision, which can take advantage of a wider color palette. That's where I want something like quantum dot color to really make my eyes very pleased and to see all the colors that we can see in real life, make it more realistic. That kind of control that they that they have is impressive. What about apps? Did all these TVs have operating systems and apps? What do I need to pay attention to there? Totally. Just keep in mind that a lot of people are looking for a quote unquote dumb TV that has nothing built into it. They prefer something more like a monitor and that's fine. And I understand that. But that's not realistic for shopping nowadays. Almost every TV you're going to come across will have built in apps because that's one of the primary money makers for anyone building TVs nowadays. Keep in mind that you do not have to use anything built into that TV. And in general, over the years, you will find that those apps generally aren't as updated as you will find with standalone devices. Your favorite streaming sticks out there, be it something like an Apple TV or a Roku streaming stick, those are going to give you in the long term, better performance, more consistency, more updates. And it can and if I have just one tip for that in general, it's always consider buying a 4K streaming product even if you don't have a 4K TV. It will give you that extra bit of performance when it comes to what the integrated chipsets are in that. And even if you are looking at a 4K streaming product on, say, a 1080p TV over the years, you're just going to experience a more seamless experience in terms of that performance as app updates and OS updates take place, you're just going to enjoy it for longer and to be hopefully able to take advantage of all the features your TV has right now and even in the future. But it's more for just the day to day use and performance. Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting point. I have thought about that as future proof in case I moved to a new TV. But the fact that it will benefit my current TV because of the processor I hadn't even thought about that. That's that's really good. Also, if you're like an Apple user in particular, having an Apple TV product in the home compared to any other integrated streaming service or product is the way to go because you have devices that are just going to tie into that so much easier and more consistently. Now, I hear that most TV speakers are crap. What do we need to know about soundbars to do? Do you need a soundbar? And if so, what do you need to know about? I almost all TVs benefit directly from a good soundbar upgrade. I would say just generally speaking, every TV deserves a good soundbar minimum. If you're not willing to go down the route, say of an AVR with separate speakers and components, soundbars are an easy upgrade. They can be relatively affordable. Recently, I have been playing around with just adding a subwoofer to an existing sub soundbar system and the improvements you can achieve with just adding a soundbar, adding a subwoofer to a soundbar system is can be pretty dramatic. I was honestly shocked. I guess I shouldn't be. I'm in home theater enough, but the small speakers used in soundbar products really cannot reproduce the low frequencies that a larger speaker can actually deliver from the content we're receiving today. And when you're talking about great content like either Dolby Digital or Dolby Atmos or some other streaming source or disk source that incorporates really high quality audio or music for that matter, there is there is a whole section of it not being reproduced properly by tiny speakers, and that's for something like a subwoofer being added to your existing system. Or if you're shopping for a soundbar product, go ahead and consider adding a subwoofer to it just to have that full featured response. I own and currently have the sub mini right now that is a new product from Sonos, and that is their most affordable subwoofer right now. And I'm a bit of a Sonos shell, you could say. I love their products. I find them very effective. But I was shocked at kind of what I was missing without having that incorporated into the system, especially for music, anything with a decent bass track and for movies, especially action or just anything with intense sequences, there are lower frequency sounds that just simply are being lost with the tiny speakers that you'll see in most soundbars out there. I'll back that up. I have one of those vizios that's the the front facing soundbar and the subwoofer behind you and every once in a while, HDMI just decides to switch to the TV's internal speaker for whatever reason. And it's just it's like, how did I live like that? Like just the difference would you even things that aren't surround sound when you just lose that bass, you lose that fullness, right? Totally. If you looked at like a frequency response, generally speaking, once you dip below 100 Hertz, there's less and less there. And by the time you hit 50 Hertz or so, there's effectively most soundbars can't reproduce anything. That's that's noticeable. So having a larger speaker or a relatively easy to integrate speaker like a subwoofer is something that just adds to the experience. And subwoofers are easy to set up in the sense that they're not as critical in terms of placement. It's good to put them in the right spot, but it's not like a speaker set where you have to have the speakers in front of you. There's a little flexibility in terms of where you can put a subwoofer within the room and still have a good experience with it. And being able to properly tune that is a whole different discussion. And it's good to actually have some sort of room correction feature for your soundbar or speaker product. That's always nice to have, be it a be it an AVR setup or a soundbar setup. And that's something else that might be worth considering when you're shopping as well. Is there a way to easily optimize that sound quality for a given room environment? Well, folks, we're going to talk to Robert some more about this in Good Day Internets. If you're a patron, just just hold on. I imagine we got more questions, but let's check out the mailbag real quick. Got a great email from that Charlie dude, who's a college professor teaching tech who said, I can tell that we're not quite there yet with e-text books. We were talking about this earlier this week with I think with Rod, at least in our tech classes, I can't speak about the other departments, but I'm guessing it's the same. There are e-text books, but they aren't the same as the e-books we download to devices like our Kindles and iPads. If there's an e-book for your subject and that's a big if it's usually tied to a proprietary app only available through a web portal or bundled with online assignments, labs and exercises to create an online learning environment. For e-text books, they can rent them, rent them for three months to a year, I think like an annual subscription. And they can check out anywhere between three to six e-books at a time, but they can only read them online through the proprietary app. He talks about a movement among instructors that that goes back to when Kinkos was trying to stop people from xeroxing stuff where they're writing their own materials or finding free resources. There's some vendors out there offering learning environments that they can use for their classes and we'll have those details in the show notes. That Charlie dude says, I could go on and on about student resources in higher ed. It's something that instructors think a lot about, but I've already written too much. No, no, it's great, Charlie. Thank you so much for what you do. I find so much value from your work. You rock that could have been me saying that back to Charlie. Thank you for that. I really appreciate it. It's very shocking, though, that textbooks could find a way to be kluji and remain expensive. That's it's e-text books sound like a dream for the textbook market. They're like, wait, you mean we could just keep charging a lot, but we don't even have to print them and we could just keep charging them on an ongoing basis? Like, yeah, it's kind of kind of crazy. Well, an actual instructor himself, Len Peralta, has been illustrating today's show. Professor Len, what have you drawn for us today? Well, thank you so much for bringing that up in so much great information in this week's show. I decided to go ahead and I found the pledge, the robot pledge, to be the most interesting, obviously. Strange, this is my take on what the future of those robots may look like. You know, they may be giving you candy with happy faces and stuff and and then be able to tell you, hey, I pledge not to weaponize myself and kill you in your sleep, I promise not to do it. So yeah, that's unsettling. That's the only thing you know, that's what that's what's going to have to happen. But the robots are taking the pledge. Everything's OK, guys. Yeah, it doesn't need a weapon. Is that what it's saying? I won't kill you in your sleep and I promise not to weaponize myself. So trust me, if you're interested in that print that's available right now. If you're a Patreon subscriber, patreon.com forward slash Len, you can get it right there. It's there for your taking or you can go the old fashioned way. Go to my online store and purchase it. Len, for all the store dot com. I'm also selling my custom drawn Christmas cards, holiday cards. So keep keep that as we approach the holidays. So there you go. Beatmaster says in the chat room, why did you have to make it weird robot? I made it weird. So there you go. All right, well, thank you also to Robert Herron for always dropping the AV knowledge on us. Robert, where can people find more of your great stuff if they're so inclined? We have a weekly podcast, I should say it myself and Patrick Norton, both do the AV Excel podcast. And if you're looking for me specifically for either calibration information or services, you can hit me up at Herron Fidelity dot com. Thank you so much. And thank you to our brand new boss, Martin, who just started backing us on a Patreon. Thank you, Martin. Yeah, Martin took the pledge not to weaponize himself. Actually, I don't know about that, but he took the pledge to support us on Patreon, which meant he became, you know, the producer of today's show, along with all of our other producers out there. So so thank you, Martin. We appreciate it. Could be you next time. Go to patreon.com slash D T N S speaking of Patreons, stick around for that extended show. We're going to be talking more with Robert. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern twenty hundred UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech news show dot com slash live. We're off on Monday for the U.S. holiday, but we're back on Tuesday with Annaline Newitz telling us how folks use ocean waves to generate energy. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host, producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host, producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Strothelino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Kuntz, technical producer, Anthony Lamos, Spanish language, host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter, science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottis, one bio cow, Captain Kipper, Steve Godorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, modded video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Way, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show included Rod Simmons, Scott Johnson, Rob Dunwood and Chris Christensen. Guests this week were Andrea Jones-Roy, Jennifer Briney and Robert Herron. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.