 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. We could not do this without you. You are amazing. Thanks to every single one of you. Let's go out a few by name, Brandon Brooks, Hector Bones, Tim Ashman and Colin. On this episode of DTNS, who is Sony's PlayStation portal for exactly is LinkedIn winning its social networks and India joins the exclusive moon landing club. There you go. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and on the show's producer, Roger Jane. We have a cornucopia of technology news for you today, including some AI news. So let's start with the quick hits. IBM launched code assistant for IBM Z or for you Canadians. IBM Zed, a new generative AI code model designed to translate cobalt at that cobalt common business oriented language into Java. So all those old programmers that used to get hired to, you know, fix Y2K do with AI now cobalt's legacy code dates back to 1959. IBM's new tool would help modernize old mainframes. IBM expects it to become generally available in Q4 2023. After entering preview during IBM tech exchange, which is happening in Las Vegas next month, open AI released a new feature for chat GPT 3.5 turbo. This is similar to the custom instructions that chat GPT recently started offering free users to tailor their responses to their use case. Paying customers can use their own data to refine generative AI results in certain languages to specify outputs or to keep a consistent brand voice. If you will find tuning for GPT 3.5 turbo is available now and will be available for GPT for this fall. Meta announced it will turn on end to end encryption by default in the messenger app by the end of this year. Verge reports. Meta also plans to roll out the same features in Instagram DMs. Very nice. Spotify introduced new features for podcasters. Oh, that's us. Like customization tools for podcast showpages, new impressions, analytics preview tools, more automated ad options and a new Spotify audience network performance dashboard for megaphone enterprise publishers. That's currently me. Other tools include auto-generated tags that let listeners jump to the search results for any given creator. And according to new research from antenna, Netflix signed up approximately 2.6 million new users in the US last month, which is more than any other paid streaming service did. However, it's still down 26% from June. So fewer people signed up in July than in June. Also 23% of the new signups went to Netflix's ad supported plan, which is cheaper, but has ads. That's the difference. Hey, let's get it. All right, let's talk a little more about this big old Sony news. Well, back in May, you may remember, maybe not. Sony teased a project queue is what they were calling it. It was a handheld game streaming device and now we have almost all the details, maybe not everything, but most of it. It's called PlayStation portal and it's coming later this year for $199.99 no actual release date yet. We just know sometime this year and we don't know the battery life yet or any of those things, but we know a lot of other stuff. Let's run through what we know. Yeah. So here's what they did announce for the Sony PSP, the PlayStation portable. No, wait, PlayStation portal. They dropped the bull. Yeah, that should be their slogan. We dropped the bull. Yeah, the Sony PlayStation portal. You can stream your PS5 game. So any PS5 game you have installed on your PlayStation, you can stream over Wi-Fi with a minimum five megabit perception per second connection, though they say 15 is probably ideal. So you can do it with five, but if you got 15, you should be fine. If you got more than 15, you're grand. It's over the internet. So your portal needs to be connected to Wi-Fi, but you don't have to be on the same Wi-Fi network as your PS5. It'll go over the internet. You'll be able to play supported games. So maybe not every game is going to work and media, although we don't know if like Netflix is going to work and it can wake the PS5. So you don't have to leave your PS5 fully on. You can have it in sleep or whatever. It does not, however, work with PS plus premium. So you can't cloud stream to the PS5 and then stream back to the portal. I'm guessing that has something to do with lag, although it might have something to do with licensing. I'm not sure. Eight inch LCD screen on the portal device. It's the one with the split controller with the screen in the middle, 1080p 60 frames per second. That split controller is dual sense. So it does almost everything a dual sense controller can do adaptive trigger haptic feedback. Even that little touchpad that you get on the dual sense will show up at the bottom of the screen. So you can do touchpad stuff. The only thing you don't get is the light bar. I don't think anybody's going to miss the light bar that much. There's no Bluetooth on this, but there is a headphone jack 3.5 millimeter jack or PlayStation link. That's right, folks, a brand new proprietary Sony wireless protocol with the ability to connect to special wireless headset and earbuds that also got it out. Scott, tell us more about those headsets. Well, this is all true what you said. And if planner magnetic drivers for high quality sound get you excited, then get excited because that's what you're going to get. They're in two new wireless headsets from Sony that promise lossless audio and low latency. The wireless earbuds are called pulse explorer. These are also previously unnamed but teased. Those are also $199 and 99 cents a little on the pricey side, but there's, you know, other competition in that same price as the portal. Yeah, it's the same price as that other device. Then there's the over the ear wireless headset called the pulse elite. That is $149.99. So it's probably the one I would get. They support PlayStation link, which is the new PlayStation portal. And that's the way you get audio from one to the other. If you're all thinking, Hey, I'm going to just use my Bluetooth devices with this bad news, your Bluetooth headphones and earbuds will not work with this device. It will either have to be link compatible or you'll have to get an adapter to make it work. They support PlayStation link, which is now the PlayStation portal and available on USB dongles sold separately. Like I mentioned, so you can add it to your PS five or your place or your PC other devices. Both headsets also support Bluetooth and can do simultaneous connections to PlayStation link and Bluetooth devices, which is cool because in theory, you could take a call on one and not interrupt your audio on the other. But keep in mind the PlayStation portal, the portable gaming device does not let you use your Bluetooth devices. I just want to make that part clear because it's not the other way around works, but not that direction. So the portal is the only thing that requires PlayStation link to do wireless headphones. Correct. Even even the PlayStation link headphones support Bluetooth. Even even the PlayStation five supports Bluetooth. Yeah. Okay. Just just yeah, good. Thank you for clarifying that. So we get a way to stream your installed PS five games and a new proprietary headphone protocol. Scott, which do you love the most? Well, to be honest, I think it's cool looking. A lot of people don't like the design. It looks like a tablet wedged between a split controller. I have one of them right here, this red one. It literally looks like you took it down on each side and just tore it apart and then added an eight inch device in the middle, which just looks like sort of a tablet screen and they're not wrong. It does look like that, but I kind of like it. That that's maybe my favorite thing is the form factor. And I think keeping it consistent with PlayStation five controls is smart. One thing I do want to make a clarification on we said earlier that you must have games on a PlayStation five that includes PS four games that run on your PS five. So yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, if you're if you have a bunch of PS four games that carried forward or you've bought lately or what for whatever reason they are compatible in the new system and a lot of those with upgrades to frame rate and other reasons why they might play great on your PS five. Those games will also play on this device. They don't have to be quote unquote PS five only. They just have to be on your PS five, not PS five games. Correct. So what I love about it is conceptually I'm kind of in on a device like this. It's coming out of the gate a little bit limited. One of the fine princes. Hey, this doesn't work with PlayStation Plus premiums streamable games, which is a bunch of retro stuff, PlayStation portable games, PS three, PS one, things that can only be streamed. They don't play those off a hard drive. This doesn't currently support that and they and they explicitly say that that doesn't mean they won't or that won't come later. But if you're a premium subscriber of PlayStation Plus currently, you're not going to get those experiences on this device that way. There's also no, you know, for people home rubbing their hands together going, I'll find a way to make this work with Game Pass and GeForce now and five other streaming service platforms. It is not designed to do that. Someone may hack it to do that, but when this thing launches, you're not going to have those those options. My biggest take my biggest problem with this announcement now that we have most of the info is honestly price point. I think 200 bucks is a lot to ask the other peripherals you could give or take and maybe come up with other solutions. But $200 for a device that is nothing but a remote pad for this for your PlayStation 5 and it is cool. You can play it on the road and it is cool. You can wake the system with it. Those are all neat features and I think kind of required features. I just think that's too pricey. I think a hundred to 149, you know, you might have had me and tell this has more functionality or maybe more use case. I'm going to wait. Yeah, at $99, it starts to be close to the price of a game or a controller. So and then if you think about it as like, oh, this is just a cool controller that has the game in it. So, you know, you'd pay 75 bucks for a really good controller if this was 99 bucks and then actually get included the game and you think about it as like a controller. It starts to make sense at $199. It feels more like it's trying to be a headset or a switchlight or something like that, which granted, those are more expensive. So this is, I guess, priced correctly and yet still feels expensive for what you get. Yeah, and you made a good point. You just threw the word switch light out there or even even a dockable switch or even the OLED switch. Isn't that different in price from this? We're talking just a little bit more, another 50 bucks for the for the standard dockable style one. And so maybe you've been a PlayStation gamer for a long time and you're like, well, I could do this, which extends my PlayStation experience or my dabble over there with the Nintendo business for a little bit and I spend about the same amount of money and you get a whole console for that that let you install games on it, take it anywhere you want, plug it into a TV. I think that that this price point is going to just cause some some head rubbing, you know, a little bit of, hmm, should I do this or not? Is this the right time? I may also would wait until we get some hands on from people and kind of see how this thing feels. But yeah, right now, it's just not going to be on a lot of players radar. I'm afraid granted you can do remote play right now with your phone, but the latency won't be as good as this says Sony and the IGN review sort of bore that out like yeah, the latency is crazy good and it can't wake the PlayStation from sleep, which this can do so couple of advantages there. Again, I'm still not sure they're worth the price. I get the attractiveness of you know, when I go on vacation next week and I'm sitting in Seoul in a hotel room, I could just play my PlayStation 5 games that are sitting back here in Los Angeles. That's cool and this will be able to do that, but is it worth $200 from me? Right. And I'll also, you know, as somebody who has a Steam Deck and a PlayStation 5, I'm already doing remote play with my PlayStation on my Steam Deck pretty beautifully now. I've only ever done it over my own Wi-Fi network and obviously me taking it somewhere as a whole different issue you can create. But how much better is this going to be than that what you already have? Probably not that much. It'll be better, technically better, but it'll be probably not so much that it devalues all the other advantages. So I don't know. They have a little bit of an uphill here. We'll have to see how it goes when it comes out. Well, kudos to the Indian Space Research Organization ISRO, which has made India the first country to land a device on the South Pole of the Moon. The Chendrayan-3's Vikram lander touched down safely in its second attempt. And a few days after Russia's Lunar-25 mission failed, it made impact. It did not have a soft landing. The successful voyage of this unmanned spacecraft makes India the fourth country to soft land on the Moon after the United States, Russia and China. The Pragyan rover will now deploy out of the lander and start taking photos and collecting scientific data. Between the rover and the lander, the mission has five instruments to measure things like atmosphere, surface, tectonic activity, and mostly look for water ice. Is it there? How much is there? Because water ice could be used by future missions for, you know, lots of things. Sure, astronauts could drink it possibly, but also to make fuel because you can make hydrogen fuel out of it. And that's a big deal if there's enough of it down there and we think that there is. So this is going to be humanity's first chance to find out just how much there might be there. Yeah, I love that. We used to do a show called Forecast and in it, we had multiple times where somebody came up with the water wars as our future where water becomes very scarce or at least potable, drinkable water. I'm all about let's get the Moon pumped. Let's get out of there whatever we need because we may need it. Aside from that, though, the only thing that bums me out about any of these news drops, India did this, Russia did that, Asia and Europe, everybody's doing their thing. NASA does this other thing. I still wish and I know there's a lot of cooperation. We have the International Space Station. We have a lot of cooperating going on between agencies. I still wish it what didn't feel competitive. I wish it felt more like the one part of humanity where we all aren't trying to rah rah our own team. We could all just have one big interagency cooperation. I know it's it's it's naive of me to even ask for this, but I would love that because it feels like progress is only going to help everybody collectively. And that would be really cool. So I say to them good luck and everybody else who has stuff going on. I just wish it wasn't like a competitive enterprise. Tom's what I'm trying to say. Maybe that helps him. Maybe it helps advance it and I'm being very obtuse here. Yeah, don't be a sore loser. Scott just because the Indians finally wanted something. You know, why does it have to be so competitive? No, I totally get what you're saying, but I think this is the right amount of competitiveness to me. You want a little competition. You want friendly competition where folks are like, Hey, I think I can get there first. You you want both to succeed. You'd rather not have the lunar 25 mission crash, because then if we had two missions down there, we collect even more data. But a little competition, I think does spur you forward to like try to try to make things better. So I'm not against a little bit of friendly competition. I'm with you though. It feels like the competition has been a little less friendly than it used to be. Yeah, I guess that's maybe what it is. And also look at the end of these things cooperate all the way down to the wire when your rover is on its last legs and let's let's put one up there too. Now we got two rovers. They've done their job. They're tired. Now we have rover fight. Then we can get competitive. You know what I'm saying? Get him out in the middle of a crater. I was not where I thought you were going to go with that. Yeah. So you want you want like a battle bots of the of the moon rovers. Yes, you could China puts its rover up there. India's got theirs. Maybe Japan and Israel get one up there. The U.S. gets one up there and then they all have like a battle royale at the south pole of the moon. Yeah. In a heartbeat you you create a basically a replacement for the Olympics kind of you have the most competitive thing ever and it's just the robots getting hurt. You know what I mean? And then you're going to they're just going to go up there and die anyway. So at end of life, Mars rovers, whatever wherever we're at. Yeah, big, big fight on the south pole when you're done. I mean, well, we're getting more folks up there on the moon. Israel expects a follow-up to its bear sheet lander in 2024. Israel's famously crashed. It did not have a soft landing so they don't when you're like there's only four. There's only four soft landings. Israel, Europe and Japan have all crashed things in the moon sometimes by design. Sometimes not, but Israel is expected to have its lander in 2024 and the United Arab Emirates wants to land something in 2024 as well. So we'll be getting more stuff up there. Folks, if you'd like to reach out and talk to us. Well, there's just one place to go. Wait, no, there's 17 places to go on the Internet. DTNS show on X and Mastodon. We're at mstdn.social Daily Tech News Show on TikTok and DTNS picks on Instagram and threads as well as Facebook. We've got a page on Facebook as well. So go check us out in all the places you are and say hi. LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for twenty six point two billion dollars in 2016 doesn't report daily or monthly average users. So we have to look at a few other stats, but the last spring users shared 41 percent more content on LinkedIn according to LinkedIn than they did in the same period in twenty twenty one. So over a two year period rose 41 percent. Revenue has been going up and up and up. The fifteen billion dollars in revenue in twenty twenty two was like triple what it had been five years before. So good for LinkedIn, but also somewhat unusual numbers, right? What is up? What is up with this LinkedIn? We just mentioned all these other social networks that are not apparently doing as well as LinkedIn. Bloomberg cites some folks who seem to have the answers, including social media enthusiast Selena Rizvani, who tells the publication other social media platforms were changing their algorithms or their operating rules on Instagram or TikTok. There's more frustration because what's worked more than a year ago or even six months ago that got success in tons of eyeballs doesn't today. In other words, LinkedIn has been a constant for online folks. And when you combine the fact that during the lockdowns in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, people started to post a few more personal things that became acceptable on LinkedIn. It's become kind of a nice, mature alternative. We actually talked about this a couple of years ago and DTNS how that was shaping up to be that and then Bloomberg's basically following up and saying, yeah, it still does. This article from Bloomberg puts it well, saying TikTok and meta prioritize interests over friends with their algorithms. It's about showing what you're into and being an influencer which isn't necessarily bad, but LinkedIn is more about people and networks and connections. Yeah, I've noticed that. I've noticed a change in my own usership when it comes to I like TikTok. I've used TikTok for a long time. And what I liked about TikTok is it tended to algorithmically wrap around my interests pretty well, pretty quickly and even reset itself. If I spent too long or, you know, got distracted while I hovered on a video for too long and looked at something and then came back and realized, oh, no, the next 20 videos think I want more of that when really I was just being distracted. It would reset itself. Now it is a lot of wanting me to buy stuff through the TikTok online store, which is a big push for them right now. Yeah. And it's really souring lots of money. Yeah, there's a lot of money. It's not working. It's not exactly. It's working for somebody. They're making money out of a fist, but I'm just annoyed by it. I feel like it's just ads on top of other regular ads. And what I what I hope is happening on LinkedIn is just slow and steady wins the race. There's a bit of a tortoise thing and I don't mean win the race, but just like this is all it needs to be. It at least now is good at letting you have conversations that have nothing to do with you looking for jobs or, you know, networking around for finding out if you can get a new job or a promotion or whatever these, you know, use cases have always been with LinkedIn. If it can also just be a place where me and friends and people who might be friends can have conversations and kind of Twitter 2008 a little bit. I feel like that's great and Tom correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost feels like Microsoft who has tried multiple times and failed, along with Apple, I would add to try to be in the social media space and compete with Facebook to compete with Twitter and everything else that's come out. It's almost like this kind of will fall into their lap just by holding steady. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, I don't I don't know that I'm going to fight you, Scott. All right. Fight you on that. Give a name. The times they tried that weren't successful. See, that's a good question. I'll give you one. Yammer. Yeah, I forgot about Yammer. Yeah. They almost bought discord. They didn't buy it. I guess, you know, but did not. Yeah. And if you count, but name when wait, when did they buy LinkedIn? 2016. 2016 is not that recent. Yeah. So 50% of the tries we could name have been incredibly successful from the moment they bought them. Yeah. But I guess I'm throwing into that like mixer and I know that's not a social network, but in a way, it's not a social. They have tried other things. That are social. That's fair. That's fair. I'll give you that. It just feels like an egg that is hard for the big guys to crack. Apple tried it with Ping. Remember Ping. Oh, yeah. That did not work at all. And I would argue that when you when you like when you step back and don't and let's leave gaming out of it, Microsoft has tried social networking really twice. And one of them is proving to be amazingly successful and surprisingly successful. I think that's part of it, too. It's not that it fell into their lap, but I think when they bought LinkedIn, they thought, oh, we're going to get an enterprise level job thing, not the replacement for Twitter. Yeah. No, there's no way at least I don't think so in 2016 or even the lifetime of LinkedIn. I've never looked at that and went an alternative to Facebook and Twitter. I don't think about that way, but suddenly today in light of not only this article, but our discussion about it and and so on and me going over there today and logging in for the first time in years. It looks a lot like Twitter now. It's still LinkedIn though, right? Yeah, still like face. Facebook is the grocery store where you see folks from your neighborhood. I don't know. Mastodon is your is your local board game coffee house. X is a dive bar and and and LinkedIn's like the lunch place in downtown, you know, so where you might get work done as well. Yeah, you'll get some work done. You'll see some friends. Yeah, a nice salad. They've got a creator mode now. I don't know when that was put in, maybe forever. I don't know, but I didn't know about it and I went in there and enabled that today. That's basically a more public facing profile thing and that makes sense for people like us. So them being able to loosen up whatever rules there were about this is all business and make it a little bit easier to build around it. I think is really smart. You know, maybe that was the long the long con here for lack of a word. Just before we move off of this, TikTok is expected to lose 500 million dollars on shopping in the U.S. this year. Well, no wonder they're pushing it so hard. I cannot get three videos in without seeing 10 of those. They're like, I can't lose that much money. I even bought something through that by the way. Oh, you did your part. I did my part, but then they keep telling me to buy that same thing. I bought that doesn't seem so yeah, that's not good. That's not good. Real quickly, here's something you might want to buy. Atari is betting that some of us are still willing to put down cash for another nostalgic reissue of the iconic Atari 2600. The company that currently owns Atari calls itself Atari because they own the name, but they're not the original Atari anyway. It calls this new version a modern day faithful recreation of the pioneering console and it will supposedly play the original cartridges. So that's that's new. You can actually take an old Atari 2600 cartridge put it in this new recreation and it should play in conjunction with European game developer Playon. They created the Atari 2600 plus. It also plays games from the 7800. It's a hundred thirty dollars little smaller than the original 1977 model, but still has power TV type game select and game reset. So feels the same. I have right here in my hand a copy of Pacman game program for the 2600 and I have nowhere to plug this. I have an old dead 2600 that would never work, but the fact that I could take this terrible part of Pacman and put it into that machine and make it play is actually really neat. I think this gloms on to the the retro revolution we're having a little bit of right now. It's hardware based, which aficionados really like. And this is actually honestly more exciting than the Atari VCS, which is sort of tried to do this plus more more recently. It's basically a small PC, but the goal of it was like to have a ton of Atari games on it. And then a bunch of other things. It was sort of Android and Linux based. No one cared. No one bought it. I think this has potential. So I'm pretty excited about it. Sounds great. I don't know how much potential, but this is in more interesting in the sense of game preservation, like in the sense of I can take an actual cartridge that I have a bought at a Goodwill or have kept since the 70s and play it. I think that's good. It's good for history. It's good for preservation. I encourage this sort of thing. I have the Atari 2600 app. Actually, it's just the Atari app on on iOS. It has all the games, but playing them on a phone is not the same. Playing them on a computer, not the same. Playing them on a replica like that with the cartridge. That's pretty cool. I like that. Yeah, I like it. And keep in mind, you know, there's a lot of money to be made in these classic console markets. You know, Nintendo did really well with the NES and Super NES classic reissues and Sega with their mega drive one and two or Genesis one and two, depending on where you were living at the time. And they have all done really well, reasonably priced tons of classic games on there, a legal way to get these games. Like there's a lot for that. And in their case, then letting you use actual cartridges. I mean, I know about 20 people are just going to lose their minds over this because they're real, you know, this is one of those things that people are like, well, if you're not going to let us legally copy the cartridges, give us a way to play the cartridges. Here you go. They did. I like it. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Mike and Dusty Dubai appreciated our chat on foldables yesterday and says he's definitely foldable curious, but is still wondering about one big question. Battery life. He says, I can't imagine that powering three screens is the most battery efficient. I get especially worried about the tensor chips, especially having just switched out my Pixel 7 a for a Samsung S 23 because the battery drained in about eight hours or less. Mike, that's a good point. I almost brought up battery life yesterday, but I didn't and neither did when or Shannon because it is apparently not a concern for us. Good. Trust us. If we thought battery life was a problem, we would have brought it up. But I think all three of us have found that the battery life is is pretty good on the Pixel fold. I've had mine out since I don't know about 7 30 this morning and I'm at 97 percent. So there's enough battery in there and there's enough efficiency that powering those screens ends up not being too much of a drag. However, I haven't pushed it. I haven't really like like pushed it on a hard day yet. So I'm curious when I travel and I'm using it a lot more like how much that battery drain. So I'll report back on that, Mike. Yeah. So far signals are good. If you just sat there and you know, I don't know did like some teenager and just never got off your phone all day. Yeah, no offense. Teenagers. Plenty of you are studying and doing good work. I'm not, you know, being specific here about whoever you may be right now. You're having a bad day and you're on your phone all day. If Tom did that, that would probably tell you. You know, how bad or good that's going to be on battery life. Yeah. Well, I know that you are good on the metaphor of my personal battery life, Scott. You you recharge me. Thank you for being here on the show. I know that the Atari 2600 is is close to your heart in many ways because of your show, Play Retro. That's right. I have a show called Play Retro recorded actually after I do this on Wednesdays. That's the next thing I do. We do it live. But if you want to get the podcast and hear about all kinds of retro gaming topics, check it out. Play Retro wherever you get your podcast or you can go to frogpants.com slash play retro. We're talking about all the old 8-bit and 16-bit baseball games that sort of shaped the early sort of sports video game world. And I still say some of that stuff is as good as it ever got. We kind of peaked there. Amazing stuff. So if you are interested in that or the vast array of things you can talk about in the retro world, check it out. That's Play Retro wherever you get your shows and patrons. We talked about the biggest news out of Gamescom week so far being the Sony PlayStation portal. But there was more and Scott was on it. Stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. Gamescom has begun and Scott's going to tell us some of the things he thinks are also big news out of that conference. Stick around for that. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow. Sarah Lane will be here talking with Charlotte Henry about the end of Netflix's DVD service. And what that means for the future of home video distribution. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.