 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Andrew Bradley, Dale Mulcahy and Matt Zaglin. Coming up on DTNS is the age of brain computer interfaces upon us, plus Google cracks down on productivity, and Nika Monford highlights how bees helped one entrepreneur build a better supercomputer. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, August 1st, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from Just Outside of Atlanta, Georgia, I'm Nika Monford. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. We have bees to get to, as well as brains, but no brain surgery, at least in one case. Let's start with a few tech things you should know, not that one, that one. Apple added Apple Pay Web support for third-party browsers in the latest iOS 16 beta. Developers confirmed Apple Pay works in Chrome, Edge and Firefox browsers on iOS. The register points out that this may be a response to draft legislation in the EU's Upcoming Digital Markets Act. Last week, Elon Musk filed a confidential countersuit against Twitter in the Delaware Court of Chancery. That's where Twitter is suing Elon Musk. The countersuit is not public, but a version could be published with the sensitive details redacted. Also, Twitter investor Luigi Crispo filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Musk for alleged breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty to Twitter's shareholders. Twitter's lawsuit against Musk over the deal is scheduled to begin October 17th. So not at all messy, as expected. Tim Hortons reached a proposed settlement and four class action lawsuits in Canada over accusations that it used its mobile app to frequently collect sensitive location data on users. The fast food chain would offer impacted users a free hot beverage and baked goods worth roughly nine Canadian dollars, as well as permanently deleting the data. The settlement still needs court approval. Also won't be messy. Nobody's gonna mind, right? Nope. The Economic Times of India's sources say that the Indian Food Delivery Service Zomato, a name that I have to say I really like, plans to rebrand itself as eternal. The rebranded company would include its subsidiaries Blinkett, HyperPure, and Feeding India. Those would act as peers under a single organization under CEO Depender Goyal. Let's hope it remains eternal, or that's a terrible name. Twitter began testing a way to get more app usage from people who say, eh, am I really ready to sign up for Twitter? This will let people use the service without an account with a feature called Try Twitter. It's offering limited functionality to some users on iOS, which lets them read tweets, follow up to 50 users, and also get notifications. So it's limited usage, but still Twitter usage. Product manager Laura Berkhouser said that the idea is to allow users to get the Twitter time on experience without the extra step of account creation. Genius and about 10 years too late. Like, you know, if Twitter is a place where people follow stuff, make the following easy. I know, right? Yeah. Let's limit your usage so you get used to us. All right. Let's talk a little more about the brain. Let's do it. So Wired's Grace Brown has an article up called, the age of brain computer interfaces is on the horizon. Brain computer interfaces or BCI generally means a device that read signals from the brain and then uses those signals to trigger actions like moving a robotic arm or controlling a cursor on a screen. The devices don't read minds as much as they're detecting unique single signals and then learning how to interpret them. So the person gets the thing they want to get done done takes training on the algorithmic side and also the patient side. So Tom, what is the new news here? On July 6th, the company called Synchron successfully implanted its BCI in a patient in New York. It's the company's first implementation in the United States. Synchron is one of two BCI devices approved in the U.S. for implantation. The other is the Utah Array from BlackRock Neurotech. That one requires brain surgery. They open up your head and stick electrodes into the brain material itself. Synchron's device is less invasive. It's a mesh about the size of a AAA battery. So pretty small. You implant that through the veins. So you go in through the jugular and up into the brain's veins, requiring no cutting into the skull. The mesh then nests in the wall of the blood vessels in the brain where it can receive the signals. Now, that sounds complicated, I know. But it's still less risky than opening up the skull and doing actual brain surgery. Synchron surgery will let you go home the same day as implantation. I guess it's implementation of the implantation. Synchron's devices implanted in four patients in Australia over the past year and indicated prolonged use was safe. You might have heard Tom's description and saying, this doesn't sound safe at all. Well, indications are that it is. The implantation in New York is the beginning of safety and feasibility studies to see how well this can work with different people. Synchron hopes to have it implanted in 15 people by the end of this year. They also want to find out if it improves a patient's life. If it does, the company can apply for FDA approval to make it available under Medicare. The next step after that might be wider commercial availability for non-medically necessary reasons. And with that comes quite a few ethical considerations. For example, who owns the data on your brain? If it's collected, where does it go? If a company goes out of business or gets bought or just ends support for some sort of device that you have used or you may use in the future, it might be in your brain. So who pays to get it removed or updated? Yeah, these are starting to become practical questions, not just academic questions, because if you noticed, we said it was Synchron's first U.S. implantation, not the first U.S. implantation at all, not Synchron's first implantation. Sarah just mentioned, they did four in Australia. So there are other folks with other BCIs implanted. One of those people is Ian Burkhart, paralyzed from the chest down, who uses a BCI to control muscle stimulation to restore finger and wrist movements. He leads the BCI Pioneers Coalition of BCI users sharing their experiences and advocating for safe development. So they're trying to say, we need these, we need them to be done safely, and if they're done safely, then we can get more of them and get more advances on them. The group wants to establish, quote, best practices for future patients, clinicians, and commercial entities engaging with BCI research. Because I imagine there's more than one of you that shuddered a bit at one part or another of this story, and yet it's life-changing for the people who have it. Nika, what do you make of this? That's exactly what I was thinking. For me, I would probably not want to get this, because, again, tons of ethical issues, health issues, but for people like Ian, this is a life-altering type of technology. So I would probably say for extreme cases or cases where improvement and quality of life is significant, then this is probably something that people in those situations will be probably more open to you than just someone who has functioning limbs and body parts and are just not encumbered by any type of health issues. I mean, as somebody who's had some brain issues in the past, I've never had really limited mobility, but definitely brain-triggering unwanted actions in the rest of my body, I feel like if I was a candidate for something like this and I felt confident enough that my life could be improved on the other side of it, I'd be really interested. But yes, this whole kind of the ethics of who has the data, what could the data mean for anything that I could do in the future if I got put into some sort of category with other people who had enough of the same, I don't know, neuron activity that I did, whether or not that was known to me or something that could negatively impact me in the future, all very important questions that I just don't think we have the answers to yet. Yeah, and I could see a tech backlash against this reducing the usefulness of it, putting too many restrictions on it that make it harder for the people who do need it to get it. That's why I was fascinated to find out that BCI pioneers existed and is a very small number of people, but very organized and active to say, let's do the right thing with this technology from the beginning. I think that that is unusual to see that level of organization around something. And that could lead to a safer implementation of the implantation later on down the road that lets us have less medically necessary things that are also less invasive than even the Synchron one that we were talking about that could provide some enhancement to life that is not as problematic, both on the, you know, like having to be surgery, maybe it could be on the outside. We have examples of that where it can just, you know, skull caps that's on the brain. But more importantly, having pioneered the ethics from the beginning, I mean, that'll be the biggest legacy of BCI pioneers, I think. For sure. And starting on the health end rather than on the vanity end, I think is also a huge benefit as well. Well, folks, if you hear a decades old song all of a sudden appearing on the billboard charts, it usually means one of two things. Either a new season of Stranger Things has dropped, congratulations, Kate Bush, or the song blew up on TikTok, or possibly both. By design, TikTok is already very much a music discovery platform. It was built partly on the bones of Musically. But it looks like, Sarah, it might be trying to expand that role a little more. And indeed, Insider reports that ByteDance filed a trademark application for TikTok music in Australia followed by an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office on May 9th, listing a service that would let users, quote, purchase, play, share, download music, songs, album lyrics, live stream audio and video, edit and upload photographs as the cover of playlists and comment on music, songs, and albums. Now, a lot of this is already done on TikTok, but not in much of an official sense. Other use cases include live stream audio and video interactive media programming in the field of entertainment, fashion, sports, and current events. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, wait a minute, I think I live in India and I know ByteDance is a big giant company that already owns a music streaming app here and you're right that those of you who thought that, it launched a music streaming app, Reso, in 2020 that's spelled R-E-S-S-O. It's available not only in India, but in Brazil and Indonesia as well. It's not clear if TikTok music would be built on Reso's platform or not. They might, they might not. But if you look at the implementation of Reso in Brazil, TikTok redirects users to full songs on Reso if they want to find out more about them. That certainly seems like a likely integration for TikTok music. Reso has licensing deals with Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Merlin, and Beggar's Group. It does not have a deal with UMG, Universal Music, at least not yet. Now TikTok does. They just couldn't get it for Reso. So I look at this and I think a few things. One is I used to use Shazam with Google Music before Apple owned Shazam and it was always difficult to get the song I recognized in Shazam to open up in Google Music. But I could do it. It was easier once I switched to Apple Music even before Apple owned Shazam to get something to open up in Apple Music. They implemented it better. I could see TikTok being able to take advantage of that and say, hey, wouldn't you like to have this TikTok music service? The key is it's going to have to be really easy to use. You should already get a version of it, a free version of it with your TikTok account. And it should be a really good music service if you want to get people to pay extra for it. Nika, what do you think? You're going to jump on TikTok music? Probably not because I rarely use TikTok itself. I see TikTok when it comes over to Twitter. But I think it's very useful in the fact that, again, these songs go viral and it's only these short clips and it's like, what's this song? What's this song? It sounds familiar, but I don't know exactly what it is. So the ease of being able to get to the song, that's the song of the moment from TikTok straight to a music source, I think that is probably a bit of a game changer. But what I do wonder is, does this TikTok music, is it going to take away from sort of the organic nature that things happen on TikTok? Now, putting some structure around it, is that going to change people's, I guess, perspective or engagement with it being quote unquote official rather than just something that organically happens on the app? I kind of thought the same thing, Nika, is TikTok is obviously banking on the fact that enough people are going to want and already do want the service. I mean, I'm one of those people. I hear songs on TikTok all the time where it's like, oh, I hear it more than several times to some dog video. And I'm like, who's the song? Oh, it's Harry Styles. Okay, I didn't know that song already. Got it. You know, I'm an old, so I don't always know Harry Styles from the radio. But what's radio anymore? I think at the same time, it making it easier for TikTok users to make the most of popular songs maybe makes this whole thing feel a little less special. I'm not trying to be a naysayer here. I mean, TikTok is so wildly popular. It's like they don't need me to, you know, champion them too much. But I wonder how much this kind of just becomes a, eh, everybody can do it. It's old hat at this point. Yeah, I think it's interesting too that they're doing live streaming as part of that trademark. Now that may just be because they want to make sure they integrate it tightly with TikTok, which already does live streaming, but if they made it like the really easy way to do a DJ set on TikTok music, something they already can kind of do on TikTok, but full songs aren't as licensed as the clips. I don't know. There's some interesting stuff they could do there. It's like a versus thing for sure. Well, it's time again for teching while black. This is a segment where Nika shines the light on a technology leader. You might not have heard of yet, but it's very important and you'll be glad she told you all about. So Nika, who are we highlighting in this episode? So this individual is quite interesting. He is Philip Ime Aguali. He is a mathematician, engineer, and computer scientist. So before we get to kind of where we are now, you have to go back a little bit to kind of get the overall picture. Dubbed the name calculus by his schoolmates at 14 because he had mastered the subject of calculus that early. Nice. Even so much so that he out calculated his teachers. So he kind of got that nickname. So you have this young kid who's super smart, can pick up math without a whole lot of effort, but on the other side of that, due to war conflict in his home country of Nigeria, his parents had eight of the children, and they just couldn't afford to continue to pay for his education because in most African countries, to get primary elementary, high school education, you have to pay for that. He had to ultimately drop out at around that same age. He got dubbed the calculus, but he was able to continue self study, which ultimately led him to immigrate to the U.S. at 17 on a scholarship to Oregon State University. So he gets to the States at 17. He ultimately earned not only a BS in mathematics, but he goes on to earn two additional masters and a PhD. So, you know, out of that initial, you know, struggle, he goes on to get all of this additional education. Now, there are a couple of things that he is most noted for, and is primarily in the supercomputing space. He's most known for his invention that is based on the study of bees. Now, you may think, how is bees going to relate to your supercomputing? I usually run away from bees. This guy figured out how to make a supercomputer off of them. That's amazing. Right. It's really, it's really fascinating. And that's the thing that really kind of drew me to this story is that he saw how inherently efficient the ways bees construct, you know, their hives and how it works with the honeycomb. And he was able to determine just from seeing how bees naturally work, he was able to determine a way that computers could emulate that process and could be, you know, more efficient in computing. So in 1989, by using what he'd learned from emulating bees, the bees' honeycomb construction, he designed and programmed the, he designed the program and formula with the connection machine to use 65,000 processors to run the world's fastest computation, which ultimately performed 3.1 billion calculations per second. Now, I don't know how the mind works to get from bee construction to designing and formulating a program that runs the world's fastest computation. But ultimately, what he was able to design, the systems that he was able to design from this as a part of parallel computing is basically used in all search engines, Yahoo, for example. So it's one of those things where it's like, wow, that's, how do we get here from there? So that's one thing that was pretty fascinating to me on that front. But that's not all. He was also able to use his, this what is called a hyperball computer that he designed. And this allows for the forecasting of long-term global compatibility. So we go from supercomputing with bees over to forecasting global warming patterns. So the mind is a very interesting thing. And the way he was able to take, you know, just real world things that you see and parlay this into something that we all use, you know, on a daily basis is pretty fascinating. So to kind of wrap it up, in addition to this work that I've kind of laid out that he did, this has earned him undoubtedly, you know, awards at Triple E's Gordon Bell Prize, Nesb, which is the National Society of Black Engineers, their Distinguished Scientist Award. And there's one other thing I think on there that he was able to get from that that I cannot see. The National Technical Association's Computer Sciences to the Year, is it that one? Yes, that's the one. So yeah, so that is... It's fun when you have so many accolades that you've been listening to all of them. You're like, and there was another really cool one. There was another really good one. And those are just kind of the top three. But of course, obviously with, you know, his skills in his background, there are other awards, but those are kind of like the big three. But yeah, bees. All right. Thanks to the bees for inspiring Dr. Emi Aguali. And thank you, Dr. Emi Aguali. That's awesome. Thank you. And thank you, Nika, for telling us about it. Folks, if you haven't thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address, let me solve that feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Given the last quarter of tech earnings, it's not surprising to hear a lot of talk about belt tightening across the tech sector. Most companies aren't announcing layoffs, but they are announcing slowdown and hiring for open positions. Microsoft calls this a strategic realignment. Apple said it's being more deliberate with its hiring, and Meta is being more deliberate in recruitment. Yeah. So for the first two quarters of 2022 this year, Alphabet hasn't been exactly what you'd call cautious with hiring. In fact, 2022 has been its biggest hiring ever, at least in terms of years, increasing its headcount 21% on the year in Q2 to over 174,000 employees. That is a not insignificant city. But after lackluster earnings, the company announced, as some other companies have, it would slow down hiring through 2023. CEO Sundar Pichai is now asking employees to become more productive. Yeah, last Wednesday at one of those employee meetings, all hands meetings, Pichai told employees, quote, there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have. He added that employees could help, quote, create a culture that is more mission focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity. So Pichai did what any good engineer might do to solve a problem. He launched a sprint. He called it the simplicity sprint. It runs through August 15th, asking employees for their ideas. Example questions include what would help you work with greater clarity and efficiency to serve our users and customers? Where should we remove speed bumps to get better results faster? How do we eliminate waste and stay entrepreneurial and focused as we grow? Mika, I know you have familiarity with sprints. Yes. So in my work, I have mentioned before, I am an engineer, and the work that we do on the software side, in conjunction with the hardware side, we run sprints. For our work, we do two-week sprints. We have an overall kind of plan that's longer, maybe eight to nine weeks, and then you kind of chop up that bigger chunk into two-week increments. So you can incrementally improve and get work done. That's worked for us. You have to refine and tweak things as necessary. Some things take a little bit longer, some things take a little bit shorter. So as it suggests a sprint, you run a short distance, and then you kind of see what happens, and you run another short distance and kind of see how you get from there. So one of those things, this is a very interesting concept that he has, and I'm a little surprised that they don't already run that type of, I guess, program is not the right word, but I'm surprised that they don't run sprints already over there unless they do. I'm sure they run them on individual projects, but it doesn't sound like they've done a lot on productivity and efficiency, at least not company-wide anyway. Right, and that's a very interesting concept, how you can have it kind of at the micro level, but not have it at the broader level. So that's interesting, especially for a company that large and has been that large for quite a while. Yeah, what struck me as, I don't want to say poor timing on Google's part because Google could not have predicted a pandemic where a bunch of people were working from home for the first time, maybe ever having worked for the company. Obviously with almost 200,000 employees, Google has some remote working that has been done for a long time, quite a bit more over the last couple of years. So with an economic downturn that's hitting large tech firms and small, but certainly large tech firms have to deal with it as well. For the person at the top saying, hey, we just want to know what you think could be better about the company. Probably questions that should have been asked a long time ago. You're probably getting a lot of people saying, well, I hate my boss, so you can do something about my boss because that person sucks. But I think it's so many folks are trying to get back into the new normal and what's the new rhythm. And maybe on being optimistic here, maybe you start getting some thinking outside the box stuff that people might not have been comfortable bringing up in the past. Yeah, you have to remember, at least this is the way I look at it, Google is a money printing machine. It has been a money printing machine since the mid 2000s. When your company doesn't have to work as hard to make the money, which Google has not, you don't focus on things. You can do things like 20% time. You can spend money on chefs in the house. You can be a little lavish. You don't have to count every penny. When the ad market starts to dry up, when you get more competition from other companies, when there's inflation, when there's a war, when there's COVID, when that profit margin starts to be attacked, it focuses the mind. And so, yeah, I agree with both of you. Like Google should have been looking at this a long time ago, but they didn't have to till now. And now is the point when they're like, oh, you know what, we should probably milk a little more productivity out of each hour in these 174,000 people we have. Yeah. Now they're on the more of the reactive in rather than proactive and you would think if you have that much, you know, room ahead, you would kind of start to think about, you know what, this gravy train is probably not going to last forever. Even though we've had a good run, we should probably start to think about what could happen. And we've seen how long the pandemic has gone on. So you would think maybe kind of upfront, they would say, hey, let's, we don't know where this is going to go. If we do, you know, try and get a little bit leaner, try and get a little bit smoother upfront, then we can kind of head things off. And if it, you know, after the pandemic, we didn't know how long it was going to last. And it's like, oh, it's been on the last three months. Then hey, we've given ourselves even more runway to kind of run. So I'm surprised that they didn't, you know, give it a little bit more forethought in how they were going to make this work. Well, let's move on to, well, back to music. In fact, we talked about it earlier in the show, K-pop stars, Blackpink, very, very popular. If you don't know them, where are you been? I didn't know them until Tom and Eileen told me about them. But if you're a fan, well, you're going to find out, Nika, if you're a fan, you might call yourself a blink because Blackpink, get it? It's kind of cute. You're probably pretty pumped about the world tour, which starts in October, but Blackpink has also recently collaborated with pub, pub G mobile, which featured the group's first ever in game concert, including a new video for a song called ready for love that takes place inside of the game's world, performed by virtual avatars of the band in a post-apocalyptic landscape, riding motorcycles across abandoned highways. Looks fun. You might say, well, hold on. Didn't Fortnite do this with some success? Travis Scott had a concert. Ariana Grande had a concert. And yeah, you're right. Riot also tried multiple virtual music projects inside the League of Legends, with a K-pop group KDA, also the hip hop group True Damage, virtual influencer Mikaela also debuted a music video at Lollapalooza, and pub G's parent company Kraften is working on a virtual human of their own, a pop star named Anna. Blackpink's in-game concert called the virtual ran over the two past weekends on pub G mobile. Tom feels very Coachella to me. Did you tune in? Yeah, I did. I am a blink and I jumped in there and I took a look. It was short. It was kind of fun. I think we're more excited about an actual album release date and an actual tour than this, but it was interesting to see, you know, the avatar representation. I think you're going to see that more often. And I think it was interesting to see pub G try to get in on it too, saying Fortnight's been getting all the attention. Let's partner with arguably the second biggest K-pop group on the planet, Blackpink, and get some attention on us. Well, thanks to everybody who writes in with lots of suggestions on what we should talk about. As Tom mentioned, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. Thank you in advance. And also thank you to Nika Monford for being with us today and, you know, bringing all the knowledge as usual. Nika, what's been going on in your world and where can people keep up? People can find me over on Twitter at techsavideva. You can also, that's my handle pretty much everywhere on social media, but you can also check me out on Snob Westcast, my podcast with Terrence Gaines where we talk all things Apple and then some. So you can catch us on Wednesdays for our live recordings and Friday for our public show. Excellent. We also have some brand new bosses to thank. It's Monday. We had a good weekend. Andy, Jack, John and Jeff all just started backing us on Patreon. So a big thanks to you, Andy, you, Jack, you, John and you, Jeff. The new fab four. Thank you. Yeah, Andy and the Jays. Andy and the Jays. Speaking of page. Yeah, I play. Get it all together, guys. We'd like to see you dance by next week at the earliest. Patrons, stick around for our extended show Good Day Internet. Just a reminder, you can catch this show live. We do it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we're back to it all again tomorrow to talk risk five with John C. to work. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.