 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Johnny Hernandez, Hi-Tech Oki, and Jim Hart. Coming up on DTNS, ZipLine adds a droid to make its drone delivery better, and I'll explain a long-term plan to end local sports streaming blackouts that might end up with Apple getting baseball broadcasts. Maybe. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, the I.D.s of March, March 15th, 2023, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm your producer, Roger James. Scott. Be Sotted. Made of socks. Johnson. That man. Socks Johnson, yeah. Socks Johnson would be your, like, 1800s-era baseball name. I was going to say, yeah. Stepping the plate, just left fielder, Socks Johnson. Socks Johnson. Wow. You can hear the crowd now. There comes the pitch. Sure has. Popping his stick. All right, let's start with the Quick Kits. Microsoft will hold its annual Build Developer Conference on May 23rd through May 25th, both virtually and in person in Seattle, Washington. Virtual registration is free, with access to live keynotes and interactive experiences, including Q&As. T-Mobile announced it intends to acquire 61% of Kaena Corporation, and therefore get all of mobile virtual network operator Mint Mobile, as well as Ultra Mobile. The deal could be valued up to $1.35 billion, depending on Mint's performance. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said it will retain Mint's $15 a month pricing structure. Not going to change that, if you like that deal. And the acquisition is expected to close later this year. Also looks like Ryan Reynolds might even keep doing Mint Mobile commercials after T-Mobile is buying out his minority stake in the company. Bloomberg sources say that TikTok is discussing divesting itself from its parent company ByteDance as a last resort to address U.S. national security concerns. This could result in either a sale of TikTok or an initial public off-frame. This would only occur if TikTok's existing proposals, like Project Texas, don't pass a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Sources say any divestment would require approval by the Chinese government as well. The South Korean government announced a 550 trillion won investment plan, including manufacturing chips, displays, and batteries. As part of this, Samsung expects to invest 300 trillion won in shipmaking. That's about $230 billion U.S. through 2042. That will include five, five, count them five new chip fabs in South Korea. All right, on to Moongate. We talked on Monday about users showing that Samsung's moon photos seem to create details that weren't exactly there. Now, since Monday, I break photos, which is a Reddit user, tried putting a plain gray square onto a blurry photo of the moon. The plain gray square was then given a moon-like texture by Samsung's image processing. Samsung has responded with an English language explanation of how its scene optimizer feature actually takes photos of the moon. This largely reiterated what Samsung previously said about the feature. This was in Korean using an AI deep learning model to identify the moon, then use multi-frame processing to combine 10 images to enhance clarity, then use AI to enhance the image details even further. The company said it will work to improve scene optimizer to reduce any potential confusion that may occur between the act of taking a picture of the real moon and an image of the moon. Ah, so you're admitting they're different. Of course, they're always different. An image is not the real thing. Okay. That's, thank you, Samsung. Let's talk about chatbots. They're everywhere, Sarah. Why? They are. And we know some of you say, gosh, you're always chatting about chatbots. It's relentless. And it is, but that's because the, you know, platforms keep using them. And we want to talk about it. So yesterday, OpenAI unveiled its new GPT-4 model. We talked about it on the show. Anthropic unveiled a new version of its chatbot called Claude Plus. Today, Cora announced that its chatbot app called Poe will now have a paid tier, $20 per month or $200 per year that will let you as a Cora user ask questions to bots powered by both GPT-4 and Claude Plus, which is for anybody familiar with Claude version 1.2. Although it is limited right now to iOS or a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip at least for now. Poe also caps the queries to 300 GPT-4 queries and 1000 Claude Plus messages per month. The company says after hitting that monthly limit, bot availability or quality may be reduced. Cora launched Poe last December. It was in a closed beta for a while. Then open it up to iOS users last month. Well, now Wednesday, LinkedIn announced GPT-4 will now offer writing suggestions for LinkedIn user profiles. And GPT 3.5 will help recruiters write job descriptions. The tools are available to paying premium users. And PricewaterhouseCoopers, or as they call themselves these days, PWSEA, that's HIPPER, announced a 12 month contract with startup Harvey for a chatbot experiment to help PWC's staff of 4,000 lawyers. Now, Harvey software uses GPT-4, so they don't make their own large language model, but they have a spin on it. And it's designed specifically, the Harvey spin, to help analyze contracts and carry out due diligence. So see, we're getting an industry building up here, right? A open AI providing the large language model, Harvey refining it for a use and then selling it to PWC. PWC says the technology could speed up decision making by answering some questions, which would then be reviewed and added to by staff. It will not provide legal advice or replace actual human lawyers. They're not the only ones doing this. Law firm Allen and Overy already uses Harvey. The firm's Bain and Company and Boston Consulting Group are experimenting with open AI tech as well. Then there's Robin AI, a competitor to Harvey, built on Anthropics technology and used by a law firm called Clifford Chance to review and edit contracts. What we're getting at with all of this is that this doesn't seem to just be hype. This isn't by my NFT. This is a real useful technology that is not only getting a lot of attention in the press, but getting law firms, recruiters, lots of other businesses to integrate it into their products to make their work better. If you're listening to this show, you get to keep on top of that better than a lot of other people because we're here to tell you about it. Scott, how's your temperature on large language models right now? Well, I think it's completely fascinating. What I think is even more fascinating is when all of this new GPT-4-generated content started hitting the web, people kind of lost their minds. I haven't seen this much excitement or this much rumble behind a version change of an emerging technology in a long time. One of them that was demonstrated to me, I watched a 10 or 15 minute video of a guy who went from zero to a perfectly working version of Pong, the video game Pong, and he did it just by telling chap GPT kind of describing what he wanted the game to play like. It created the code, compiled it, and ended up with a finished game. Make code for a game that does this, and then describe the paddles and all that. That sort of thing, really, I mean, there's so much to say around the fringes of that, like what it means, what's the impact, does that change how we program or how we think about programming or whatever. But what that told me was, we're getting to a point real quick. Imagine if you can do that in 10 minutes, the kinds of experiences you might be able to complete or create given 48 hours, or a week, or a year, or whatever it is, we may be looking at pulling all of the restrictions off of things. And by restrictions, I mean, for some people, 10 years of schooling or- Impediments may be more than restrictions. Yeah, yeah. Sure, the things that get around, the people have to get around. And of course, this is scaring a lot of people. But personally, I'm finding myself more and more excited about it. And maybe part of it is this, which we're describing right now, this massive uptake by the rest of the industry. And I don't mean just programmers or writers or whatever, but everyone's saying, how does this fit within our model? And I wouldn't be surprised if you started seeing common medical software or the stuff my dentist uses to integrate some sort of AI chatbot technology in their processes, whatever that may be. Maybe it's only billing and accounting, but maybe it's something more than that. Like, I'm starting to have that feeling of the early internet, which was not so much what's here now, but what the potential is, it's starting to be there. And you're going, oh my gosh, look where all this is headed. You mentioned code. And I think that this feels to me, I know it's not exactly the same thing, but it feels to me like, I don't know, some time ago, some people would care like, ah, you know, how'd you make that platform? Is it C++, Ruby on Rails, Python, you know, like what's the underlying code? Some people really care about that because they either work in the industry or they understand it well enough to care. Most people, as the internet has matured and progressed, don't ask those questions. They just like it when something works well. And I feel like we're in the very beginning stages of platforms that already exist saying, here, we're going to make things better for you as an end user or we're going to make things in LinkedIn's case better for a recruiter who's just trying to do their job and get people hired in a variety of roles. And here's how we're going to do it. And right now, things like open AI technology and Claude Plus and Harvey and Robin AI are also knew that we're like, well, how do they work? And how do they work differently? Because we're all unsure about how this is going to affect us as humans. And I don't think it's going to be that long before we all just get used to it and almost say like, I mean, if you're not using a chatbot, what are you doing? Just like writing stuff down on a pen or paper? It reminds me of there are people who still need to know machine code. They might need to know assembly, but most people use an interpreted language like the ones that Sarah just mentioned. They don't think about that. They don't think it's lazy. Like, oh, you should just be writing this in binary yourself. I think that's where we're headed, where no code is going to be the default. Like, you should understand how coding works. So you can help debug it, as Nick with a C points out. But you won't have to actually do every line of code. It sounds like which is, you know, pretty interesting. And just to finish up a thought on this, I saw a meme today where, since that's how we all communicate the modern era is through memes. There was a meme where there was like an obstacle in front of three or four people. And the first guy did a big flip and his tag was Java. And then a guy behind him did an amazing flip around spin thing. And his name was C++ or something. Yeah, you get the idea. You get two or three of these guys. And then the third or fourth guy just looks at the obstacle, walks around it, and his name was ChatGPT. And I get what they're saying. And I get this idea of leapfrogging over all of this knowledge. But it does feel like we're heading there where no matter how I feel about it, we're going. Hey, it's like the tool exists. You know, it's already there. So let's figure out how it helps rather than hinders. And we'll keep telling you useful uses that it's being put to on the show like we did today. There you go. Well, company called Zipline has been doing drone delivery since way back in 2014. Its latest delivery platform can make a 10 mile delivery in 10 minutes and then place packages on surfaces as small as a patio table or maybe your front porch steps. The platform to drone hovers more than 300 feet above the delivery location and then lowers a small container on a wire to then deliver that package. Well, the key is that the container called a delivery droid. All right, so get all your Star Wars ideas in your head, has some propellers of its own to steer it as it's lowered down. System means loading also can be done more easily without needing special landing pads or drones. Now, Tom, you have not quite frankly been able to shut up about Zipline for years now. Years you've been talking about these guys. Are you happy to see that they're still in the game? Yeah, and I'm happy to see them getting some more headlines because the drum I've been banging since 2014 is, hey, these guys are actually doing it. Amazon gets on 60 minutes without a product, although they finally this last year got a product. But Zipline's been actually delivering things in lots of parts of the world. Irwanda, Ghana, Little Rock, Arkansas. I mean, they're everywhere. So it's nice to see them getting some headlines for this. And it does look to me like they are not just resting on their laurels of like, wow, we have these plain looking drones that deliver blood samples in Irwanda. That's good enough. They're innovating. They're driving things forward, trying to figure out, okay, how do we get deliveries to people's front porch safely? How do we make it so that everybody can load things for delivery without having to set up a bunch of extra platforms? If you heard the story about Wing doing a similar situation in Australia where they're trying to make it more efficient for their drones to do multiple package deliveries without having to charge, that's part of platform two for Zipline as well. I really do feel like Zipline and Wing, they're not the only ones doing this, of course, by far, but they do seem to be the two that are out in front and turning drone delivery into something that might become common soon, even though it's not common now. This has promise. Well, the whole idea of a drone saying, okay, let's look at the schedule. I got four deliveries. I can go from this location to the next location to the next location, and I don't keep having to go back to home base every time, losing time or I don't know if you were getting food, let's say that's hot, that wouldn't be hot when it got delivered type thing. That makes a big difference. Zipline is not the only company doing this. Obviously, Wing is working on this as well, but it seems like we're starting to get to a point where it's like, okay, the drones can do their thing. Now, how do we just make sure that they're more efficient because you have a small sense. How do we get them to you? You don't want to have to build a drone platform for it to land, but you've got a tricky situation because you're out in the woods. I'm out in the woods, I've got a small front porch. It exists. If a drone can see it, come on down. Drop that droid down on a rope. That's right. It's possible. I also think that the more that these sorts of tests become like, okay, sure, we've got blood samples being taken in Ghana and Walmart doing some tests in Arkansas, awesome. Still in the testing phase. I know I sound like a broken record sometimes about this stuff, but it's like, you have people like me going, just let me know when it's available and I'm ready to try it. I think a lot of other people would feel the same way. So we're getting there. That's a scenario. Ask what happens when one of these drones runs out of charge and lands in your yard. Are you required to return it? There's a lot of systems to prevent that from happening. And with all the tests happening, you don't hear of that happening. In fact, the one time it ran into some power lines in Australia once it was big news. So it's not common. Is an interesting question though, like it lands in your yard. It's like, it's, it's in your yard. You didn't ask for it to go there, right? It was flying over your house. I think the right thing to do would be return it. But yeah, I don't know what the law would say. Okay. So, but like, okay, let's, let's, if, uh, if I get a chewy.com order, bunch of dog food, FedEx truck comes up my driveway and the engine falls out of the truck into your yard. Yeah. Well, sure. It's on my property, right? It's like, am I required to do something about that? No, you don't get to keep the engine. That's a good point. We got an issue here. Let's figure it out. I don't know where that possession is nine tenths of the law thing came from, but I don't, I don't think. When those light planes have landed in people's yards, they don't get to keep the plane. No, no. Harrison Ford doesn't. Yes. Harrison Ford didn't lose his plane to someone in Mar Vista. That's a good point. Folks, if you're feeling social, get in touch with us. We love to hear from you. We're, we're on a few different platforms out there. There's so many of them these days, but we are at DTNS show on Twitter, daily tech news show on Tik Tok and DTNS picks with an X, DTNS PI X on Instagram. Tuesday, the company that runs the Bali sports net TV channels filed for bankruptcy. Uh, here's why that might end blackouts of local sports streaming. You may say that's a jump, Tom. Uh, but first some of you may be saying what the heck is Bali sports net and can I catch fish in it? Oh, Bali sports net is a regional sports net. So Tom, no, you can't catch anything in it, but pen and fever. Hey, regional sports network also known as an RSN is TV channels that broadcast games for local teams in a single market. So let's take Detroit for example, you got Tigers baseball, you got Pistons basketball, you got Red Wings hockey. These networks are usually available on the local cable TV system, but they're not always available on streaming TV services, for example, YouTube TV or Fubo. The big sticking point is that it's RSNs that block local games from being used in streaming league packages. A lot of people get confused about this. Like, why wouldn't my local game be offered on this thing that I pay for for example, you might subscribe to MLB TV to get all the games, but you live in Detroit. So you get all the games except for your local Detroit teams that maybe you wanted to watch the whole time for that. You're expected to pay for cable and then watch belly sports net there. However, this all might be ending because of what's happening with belly sports net. Yeah. So let's quickly catch you up on what's been happening with them. The largest collection of regional sports nets or RSNs used to be called Fox Sports Net, but was sold to Sinclair Broadcast Group as part of Fox's sale to Disney. It was a kind of a three part deal there. Sinclair had to pick a new name because they didn't own the name to Fox. So they sold the rights to name it to Bally Casino and called their collection of RSNs Bally Sports Net. You got Bally Sports Net Detroit, Bally Sports Net West, Bally Sports Net West, etc. Sinclair then grouped all those together in a subsidiary called Diamond Sports Group. That's a lot of names that they're at you. Just remember Bally Sports Net channels are owned by Sinclair's Diamond Sports Group. You the viewer probably only noticed that the name changed to Bally and maybe you noticed it disappeared from YouTube TV or Dish or some such service because of fights over carriage fees. What you might not have followed though is that there are some behind the scenes maneuvering happening here. Two people are key to understanding this and they both used to work in RSNs. David Preschlak was once president of Comcast's RSNs. In May of 2022, he joined the Diamond Sports Group's Board of Directors. In September, Diamond looked into a sale, but it kept losing money. Then in December, Diamond Sports Group's Board voted to block Sinclair from having any input into its day to day operations and the company's creditors named Preschlak as CEO. February 1st of this year, former Fox RSN exec Billy Chambers started work as an executive vice president, local media for Major League Baseball, except that MLB doesn't have any local broadcasts. They all come from RSNs. So why did they do that? Yeah, why the high Billy Chambers? Sports Business Journal thinks Chambers' job has been to prepare the way for MLB to get those local rights back. It's a little like Sony having rights to Spider-Man, right? Like they belong to the MLB, but the contract says that Sinclair gets to keep them. So they are part of a long-term plan to move those rights back into the league. In fact, at a February owners meeting before the bankruptcy was filed, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said that MLB would be willing to step in if Bally had trouble to, quote, make games available not only within the traditional cable bundle, but on the digital side as well. And that would be Chambers' job. Now, if your grandma has been saying, how am I going to watch the Tigers? It looks like everything's going to stick around broadcasting. It's Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which is designed to allow you to keep operating. So your shows are probably, your games are not going to disappear. But Tuesday Diamond Sports Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It will further separate itself from Sinclair Broadcast Group to become an independent entity. One way it would be able to make money to pay off its debts is to sell itself away from Sinclair or at least its baseball rights to MLB. If MLB gets those rights from Bally, whether by buying Diamond Sports Group entirely or just the baseball rights, then it would make it easier for MLB to negotiate to get the remaining rights, which are held by a few channels mostly owned by Comcast and Warner Brothers Discovery. If they were able to do all of that, that would let MLB do what Major League Soccer has done, which is stream local games in local markets without Blackouts, which you know could lead to MLB's streaming package being an attractive option for someone like Apple, which has MLS or ESPN, which has NHL. One of you do this, buy this, figure it out, make it so that everyone I know who kind of likes sports when there's an exciting game says, Sarah, help, we don't know how to get the game. Where do we get the game? And I say, it's because you're local. I don't even know how to explain it to you. I pay for MLB, actually don't pay for it. I get it free through T-Mobile actually, but I get MLB.TV, which lets me watch all the Cardinals games unless they're playing the Dodgers or the Angels because then they're in my local market. And so I'm supposed to go watch Bally Sports West or Spectrum Sports Net. Now you may be wondering like, wait, these regional sports nets, they do more than baseball, right? Yes, they do NHL, they do NBA, they do a bunch of other sports too, college sports sometimes. So the reason we focused on baseball is it does seem to be baseball that's engineering this by hiring Billy Chambers, by working with Peshlock. So it looks like it's them that's trying to bring this in. And then the NHL and NBA will get to take their bite afterwards. But the process seems to be driven between Diamond Sports Group and MLB. And I don't think Sinclair Mines. I don't think it's a hostile thing. This is Sinclair saying, well, we don't want to be pulled down by the debt that Bally has accrued because of the increased price of the rights and the lower number of cable subscriptions and therefore the lower number of cable carriage fees and people not wanting to pay the higher carriage fees, just a bad economic business right now. And the sports, they're using that to leverage a way to make everybody happy, pay them all out and get the rights back in house. I mean, it sounds like the complicated structure that we've lined out how it had been going for some time, how it might change and where it might go in the future. Just to streamline this whole thing is the right call. As the eventual viewer, none of this, well, okay, maybe you kind of do care about the inner workings of things like this. Most sports fans absolutely do not. And they also say, it's not even that I don't want to pay and a premium to watch the games I want. I'm just very confused as to how I do that. So let's not do that anymore. The TLDR here will be, everyone is probably in the next two years going to get to stream their local team. And then everyone will complain that they can't figure out what they have to pay to stream their local team because it's going to be all over the place. Yeah, it's a step closer though. We got to get this homogenized, hopefully. Well, let's look at the movie making market because there have been movies about Apple, there have been movies about Microsoft, there have been movies about Facebook. It's about time the Blackberry got a movie, don't you think? Well, good news, everybody. The movie Blackberry premiered at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas just last week. It's based on the 2015 book called Losing the Signal, the Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry. Telling the story of how Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fragan founded Blackberry back in 1984 and hired Jim Belsely to be their CEO. No, you may have heard of Belsely and Lazaridis. They've certainly been in news on previous rundowns on our show. But you might not heard of Fragan. So you can watch the rise and fall of the Blackberry in fictionalized form in theaters May 12th. There's also a trailer that you can watch now if you're hyped. And I got to say it's been a long time since I had a Blackberry of my own. But there was a time where I was, I was pretty, I was rim faithful. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, Glenn Howerton, Dennis from It's Always Sunny, playing Jim Belsely. So that's fun. Yeah, I'm, I was never a Blackberry user, but I'm fascinated by that story. I'm also fascinated by things like, you know, Palm and where they went and the trio and how that came apart. Maybe it could be an extended universe of failed mobile brands. Yeah, why not? Let's do a whole series here. Call it the, call it the trio. Get it. Three of them do three of them call the trio. Anyway, I'm fascinated by those stories. The rise and fall of big business, especially in tech is always interesting. And when it's done right, it's incredibly entertaining. So I'm all for this, but I don't have any like special love for any old phone or whatever. Well, we can't wait to find out what Rob Dunwood thinks of this. So make sure to listen to SMR podcast. Hopefully they talk about it there. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. On our Patreon, George remarked, when covering security keys, I refuse to purchase one that can't be recycled. I found our YubiCo doesn't have a recycling program for their old Yubikis. I was an early adopter. I have a bunch of Yubikis to be recycled, but they're not FIDO2 compliant. So if you know of a hardware based security key where the manufacturer does offer recycling, please post the info here. Thank you. Ah, very, very good. So I, I responded to him saying, I looked around and I really could not find other than just general electronics recycling, anything specific to Yubikis or these kinds of keys. So I throw it out to you folks if you're like, Oh, I know how to recycle old security keys. Obviously reusing them is better. And I saw lots of articles on how to safely do that. But these ones that aren't FIDO2 compliant, you don't want to reuse. You want to, you want to have the latest most secure tech. So anything on how to recycle these old ones, send it to us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also, Douglas wrote in, he is a patron who gets our Patreon merchandise, which goes out every three months to all of the folks at the co, no, associate producer level and up and said on Monday with the temperature in Michigan down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit or 6.6 degrees below zero Celsius for Sarah. I decided to use it this morning for my hike. The DTNS neck gator or Balaklava, however you refer to it, he says, it works well. And given that I'm already the proud owner of a complete set of coffee mugs from last year, two mugs for each resident of the house, I was happy to get something both different and not something I'd have bought for myself. Douglas, I'm glad to hear that. And I'm and you should know if you're signed up as a patron, you won't get the same thing every three months anymore. Patreon has made this so that you can get a new thing every month that all has the Len Peralta art on it. So if you're not signed up already, patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you are signed up, stay signed up so you can get the merch. Well, thanks everybody who gives us feedback, questions, comments, all good. So George and Douglas, keep up the good work. Anybody else who sends us feedback, please keep that coming as well. Also, Scott Johnson, please keep coming back to our show because we love having you. Let folks know what you're doing the rest of the week. Well, you got a deal. Also, I am very, very close, like inches away, well, maybe not inches is the right thing to use or millimeters for those in France. Anyway, I'm about to launch a card game or anywhere in the world that is in Liberia or the United States. Yeah, anyone but us. Nobody knows what the metric system 14 hogs to the horse's head is how I measure things. But anyway, I'm publishing a new card game and that card game can be measured any way you want to be. Hopefully you'll measure it with your fun factor. And it's called Dungeon Murder at DungeonMurder.com. It's a fun little goofy title that it'll make more sense when you play the game, but it's about to hit Kickstarter. I put up a brand new video showing the latest beta deck and some of the changes to the cards. If this interests you at all, please do check it out. I'm super stoked about it. Again, that is over at DungeonMurder.com. We've got a couple brand new Patreon bosses to thank. Jason and Paul just started backing us on Patreon. We want to thank you, Jason, and we want to thank you, Paul and everybody. Yay, Jason and Paul. Part of the Patreon here on DTNS. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Paul. It's good to have folks joining us. The more the better. Please all the rest of you patrons welcome them into the fold. Give them a virtual pat on the back and Jason and Paul stick around because now you get the extended show, which includes Good Day Internet. And we're going to talk about using a data center to heat your local public swimming pool. And this is real. This is a real legit story. Yeah. Just a reminder, you can catch a DTNS live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live and join us live if you can. It's a lot of fun. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Join us to talk more tech. See you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.