 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, your Steve Aderola, Jeffrey Zilx, Michael Bollack, and maybe one of our brand new bosses like Max, Nathan, Eric, Kwotli, Janine, or Harm. All of you, thanks for backing us on Patreon. On this episode of DTNS, Shannon Morse tells us why Apple's new Vision Pro headset might be great news for Android users, how Netflix's password crackdown boosted its subscriber numbers, and Mercedes is leading the way with level three autonomous cars you can buy and not have to drive because of level three. This is the Daily Tech News show for Friday, June 9th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado is Not Real, I'm Shannon Morse. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. I don't know which is which is more intriguing. The fact that Shannon made up all of Colorado just to hide her real location or or Len's great new voice. Oh, yes. A little bit of folk. Yeah, very. Yeah. I like this, I think. Yeah, no, I like it. Can you say let's start with the quick hits? Yes, let's start with the quick hits. All right, let's do it. Google added new capabilities to its barred chat bot. So if barred answers a question with a table, you can export that table to Google Sheets. Kind of handy. Barred also now uses a technique called implicit code execution, which can detect if a prompt involves computation. If so, the chat bot creates code in the background to generate a more accurate response. Google found this technique improved its accuracy with math problems by 30%. In case you missed it, Thursday morning, OpenAI updated its chat GPTIOS app to add support for Siri, shortcuts, and dragging messages from chat GPT into other apps. It also added a full iPad OS version of the app if you use that. Some meta news today. The company showed employees a preview of a standalone app based on Instagram that would support the Activity Pub protocol. The company framed it as its response to Twitter. Internal documents seen by the Verge show its public name could be called Threads. Meta's project chief, Chris Cox, said several celebrities are committed to using the app, as well as are in discussions with Oprah and the Dalai Lama. And Meta began internally testing viewing Reels content on its Quest headsets. A video from Mark Zuckerberg shows Reels appearing in a window with a virtual background. No word on when or how this would be rolled out to users, however. It's all over now, baby blue. Logitech plans to consolidate its microphone brands, Blue and Astro, under the Logitech G brand. The company will continue to use its premium Astro brand in the G lineup, but the Blue brand will just be branded to technology inside the product. So it'll be like the Blue audio processing, stuff like that. Logitech will continue selling the Blue products like the Yeti and other mics after this rebrand. Imagine if it was just Logitech rebrands its mics to Microsoft. That one, yes. We'll go over well, but just imagine. That's the secret story that I let slip out by accident. Sorry about that. Spotify CEO Daniel X showed off a screenshot of a new feature called Your Offline Mix, which automatically saves a mix of recently played songs on a device. X showed a three and a half hour playlist while announcing the feature. So we don't have word on when it might roll out, but some people seem kind of excited about it. You have to be a Spotify user, of course. Spotify already offers offline listening for premium subscribers, but users must proactively select songs to download. So this would make that just a little bit easier. On May 23rd, you probably remember, you probably had it marked on your calendar because people were so upset about it. Netflix announced the details of its new account sharing policy enforcement, AKA the big Netflix password crackdown. Started rolling it out in more than 100 countries, including the United States. So Independent Streaming Analytics company Antenna was understandably excited to publish the results of its measurements. So how did it affect those subscribers? All you people who are saying I'm gonna cancel, Antenna estimates Netflix acquired more new subscribers between May 25th and May 28th than in any other four day period since it began tracking streaming subscriptions back in 2019. With so many people so angry, or at least saying they were angry, and saying they were gonna cancel, Shannon, does this surprise you? Kind of, yeah. I was a little bit surprised that so many people decided to subscribe, but at the same time, I feel like there's going to be this huge part of the population who doesn't pay as much attention to tech news as we do, and they probably didn't even know that this was coming. So they probably just assumed like, oh, well, I guess I have to subscribe now. They didn't know to be upset. Yeah, they didn't know to be upset, and they heard about this back in May, and they were like, oh, okay. Well, I guess it's time. You know, that's a really good point. We've talked about this imminent change and how many people will be turned off by it that are current subscribers, how many people who are freeloading would not become subscribers, and who would be somewhere in between saying, oh, okay, I wonder how many Netflix subscribers just sort of said, we'll just say, I don't know what happened, friend of mine that has been using my Netflix account for a long time, and that person goes, well, wait a second, I really like this content. Okay, all right, it's time. I think that probably accounts for quite a lot of this. I always suspected there were more people complaining than would actually act than a lot of people who said, ah, I'll cancel if this happens when it came down to it. We're like, well, I don't really want to lose the thing because I'm in the middle of a show, and I also think there was an echo chamber. There were a lot of people who were telling each other that everyone was upset. Well, like you said, Chad, and the majority of people just didn't know, you know, and so they hit upon it for the first time, and like you said, Sarah, they're like, well, I don't want to lose my access, I guess I'll sign up. Yeah, and at the same time, I can understand where Netflix is coming from in a sense, like they do want people to use these in households, et cetera, et cetera, so in a business perspective, okay, like this is fine. This does affect me too though, like my sister-in-law, maybe I shouldn't mention it. Actually, I don't have an account, just kidding. So my sister-in-law, she was definitely using a pre-account, so hypothetically, she probably signed up for a new one, so that her children could continue to watch Netflix, and she's fine with that, but I can understand why a few people might be mad, but apparently it's not as big a number as we were expecting it to be. I mean, listen, the idea of pirating content, or, you know, siphoning content from somebody else's account is like, you know, if you want to do it, there are ways to do it. I think most people, especially if that has been something that you have enjoyed for a short period of time, you don't think you deserve it. It's not something that's supposed to last forever. If it goes away, you say, well, you know, that was fun while it lasted, and I think a lot of, not everybody, you know, people will find ways around this, but I think a majority of Netflix, you know, potential subscribers who just didn't have to deal with it before say, all right, eight bucks, I can do that. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I'm gonna look at it very optimistically and say that I hope this boost in subscribers from making this policy change increases the production and content quality that we get out of Netflix in the future. And hopefully we get some more high quality shows on Netflix in the near future. That would be really nice. I would be very much looking forward to that. And hopefully, you know, hopefully it's a good change for the business in itself because I grew up in the time of like pirating with Napster, not saying that I ever did that, but it was definitely, oh no. I mean, none of us was there. There were people around you too. That was part of my generation. I heard about it, yeah. But if a company makes a product available to purchase, it makes it easily accessible, then I am more likely to purchase that thing as opposed to going down a piracy way of getting the product. So make it accessible and I'm more likely to buy it. Now, I like this positive spin, Shannon. Let's see if you can put a positive spin on all of the Apple Vision Pro coverage because I know there's been a lot this week. I was lucky enough to be asked to officiate your wedding. And one of the things you asked me to do was wear Google Glass, which was new at the time. Yes. As someone who's like been involved and they were Shannon's pair of Google Glass here, you've been involved in this sort of headset revolution for a while now and you're an Android user. What do you think of the Apple Vision Pro news? I'm glad you asked. And yeah, I've been so interested in using AR and VR headsets for almost a decade now. Ever since Google Glass came out, that was my first introduction to the idea of augmented reality and using heads-up displays and things like that. So for me, looking at what Apple is creating now, I am quite optimistic about this as well. I'm feeling very happy today. It's a good Friday. And I'm hoping that with Apple's Vision Pro, it brings the idea of normalizing these kind of displays to a much wider audience. And hopefully it makes it more popular. I feel like if that happens, we will see more competition in the space, obviously, that's usually what happens, but Apple has this history of creating these really beautiful products. They may not be the first to the market, but they always spur some kind of creativity in the genre. So I'm hoping that we're going to see the same thing here. Yeah, Apple multi-touch was a revelation on the iPhone. We forget that because it's in everything now, but it popularized multi-touch and now all smartphones are multi-touch. So I see where you're going with that. Yeah, now it's like a totally normalized thing to use multi-touch. If you use a device that does not have it, that's weird. That's weird. And now we're so naturally... Where is it? Yeah, now we don't understand how to use a device if it doesn't have multi-touch. And hopefully I would like to see the same thing happen here with the Vision Pro and with Augmented Reality where you have these heads-up displays and you have these wearable devices, but they come to a much more mass market. Obviously, this first generation is going to be way too expensive for most people, but I think that's where they usually start. Like, I couldn't afford the first iPhone when it first came out. There was no way. But we've seen that we've kind of caught up and gotten like a lot better competition in that field and maybe we'll see the same thing here too. Now we mentioned very briefly on the show yesterday that meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps you've heard of him, was less than impressed with Apple's vision of the future of VR or AR or XR or at least wanted people to think that way. Here's some more information to unpack this a little bit. In a company-wide meeting where he made these statements, Zuckerberg told employees that Apple's Vision Pro headset, quote, showcases the difference in the values and the vision with Meta's Quest products. Zuckerberg also said that Meta designs products to be accessible and affordable to everyone as possible. He's obviously, you know, making a dig at the price on the Vision Pro. Also made an emphasis on people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. He also said, and this one kind of stuck with me, of Apple's keynote itself, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like it's not the one that I want. Now, first of all, people want to dunk on Mark Zuckerberg for a lot of reasons. People also want to dunk on the idea of, you know, Meta's vision for VR now being dead in the water because of what Apple's vision for a AR headset is going to be. They are two different things. And I don't think Zuck is wrong here. I also, and I mentioned this when Nika and Terrence from the Snobocast were on the show with us on Monday when we were just, you know, just kind of unpacking the keynote, which was quite long and finished right before we started the show. I was like, this does feel a little dystopian. You know, it's very Apple-esque, right? But there was something about it that felt sort of strange and stale to me. And I don't really know what that is. So I'm not saying that, you know, me and Zuckerberg are in cahoots with each other, but I think there is something to this. How long have you been in cahoots with Zuckerberg? I know. When did I stop, you know, having a weekly meeting with Mark Zuckerberg? No, I think that, I think there is something to what the MetaQuest, you know, you know, Metaverse, right, is supposed to be. I don't think it's catching on the way that Meta would like it to. But I think that there is something, he has a point. He has a point about, you know, this is a fun connectivity thing rather than a, all right, let me sit in my like fancy apartment and put this thing on and like do work. The weird thing about that point though, is demos aside, and he's not wrong about how Apple presented it, the Vision Pro is the one that would allow you to walk around because you can see through it, apparently, and see the real world in high resolution. Whereas the Quest is the one where like, I mean, yeah, I can show you the world around you, but it's kind of like through a screen door, and really weird, plus people can't see your eyes. It's supposed to be immersive. Yeah, exactly. So I don't think of the Quest as the thing that lets me interact with other people in real life. I assume what he means is horizon worlds and social and all that stuff. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That's kind of why you, Oh, sorry, go ahead, Sarah. Okay, that's kind of why I use the term HUD or like Head Up Display, Head's Up Display, whenever I'm talking about the Apple Vision Pro is because you still see the world around you. So like, we might not have these clean apartments, we might have like a dog trying to get your attention, or your kids trying to tell you to pay attention to their school homework or whatever, and you can still see the world around you. And that's why I think that Apple's introduction of this, their version of this technology might be the thing that starts to convert people into wanting it as a part of their life, as opposed to being something that's very, very niche. And the expense, by the way, I mean, you're the product with the Quest, you're not the product with the Apple. Yeah, true. There's also that. It's worth noting. There is that. Well, if you're in the market for a new vehicle and maybe you're thinking you might wanna go EV, the F-150 Lightning has a lot of interest from truck owners, but one of the most common questions from enthusiasts is about towing. Well, one of the main points that Chris Ashley and I talk about in our latest episode of Live With It is Chris's experience and advice regarding towing specifically with an EV truck. Here's a little bit of our combo. When it comes to towing things, I haven't had to tow anything yet, but I tell people, because I have this conversation a lot with folks around me. And isn't that one of the things that gets thrown around is like, well, if you're towing a boat, I mean, say goodbye to the range. Now you gotta range anxiety. So, and I tell people, I was like, well, do you own a boat? Like, no, but I was like, then why are you asking me about towing a boat if you don't own a boat? Now that was with half the people. The other people was like, yeah, I got this boat, you know, my fishing boat I towed with. And I was like, okay, do you tow it with the vehicle you're right there, you're driving with? No, I have this, you know, F-250. I'm like, what's the difference then? You have a second vehicle for towing that big thing. Now for the third, the smaller few who was like, no, this is my daily vehicle and the vehicle I towed my stuff with. I tell them straight up, it was like, you have to determine what you're willing to deal with because yes, you will definitely lose range when you start towing. It's inevitable, you lose gas mileage when you pull stuff, you will lose range. You know, it's not one-to-one because you definitely lose a lot more range than gas mileage, but it's just part of an EV. They're not there yet where it can just tow these massive amounts of things and it's not that hard on the battery, it is. So I tell people, A, if you tow stuff periodically, keep your towing vehicle and, you know, get this for your daily and your other stuff and when it's time to tow, use your towing vehicle. B, rent a vehicle for towing, you know, because why buy gas all year around and, you know, you have this big F-250 which probably has like 11 miles to gallon, you know what I mean? And you're like, well, I need this when I tow once a year. Doesn't make a lot of sense. And so the point I'm trying to make is people can get through this part rationally, you know what I mean? What fits your lifestyle? Don't worry about losing miles is not losing miles because who cares if like my total range with the extended battery fully charges, 340 miles. Now let's say I lose 100 miles when I'm towing something which is not that far fetched. So I have 240 miles on the first leg and then after that maybe 200. If I'm willing to stop to recharge, then it doesn't matter, right? Yeah. Because that's just part of the trip and that's the thing that I think I learned the fastest was when you get an electric vehicle or when you're considering an electric vehicle, you must change your mindset. The days of I'm jumping in my car, I'm putting on my diaper and I'm driving for the next six hours until I get to my destination. That's not how you treat an EV, right? Treating an EV. There's a little bit more pre-planning that goes on. There's a little bit more pre-planning and a little bit more light stretching and which honestly benefits you. Now, if this interests you and you wanna hear the full episode or live with it on the Ford F-150 Lightning, check out patreon.com slash DTNS. It's a really good one. Chris actually knows his ish. That episode is now available to the free Patreon tier as of today. Enjoy. And in fact, speaking of patrons, Molly Wood is the single most frequently mentioned guest in our surveys. So we're doing a little Patreon push to convince her to be on the show more often. We finally listened to you. We got Molly to agree to come on Daily Tech News show for Molly Fridays once a month. I'm sure she'll bring her rant. She'll bring her amazing tech perspective and participate in our Friday quizzes. But to make this happen, we need a few more patrons. So we need to get to 4,000 paid patrons by June 29th. And if we do, we'll start the next day, June 30th. And that will be the first Molly Friday. So if you've been thinking about becoming a patron, you're not a patron yet. If you're already a patron, you're doing your part. But if you're not, sign up now and make Molly Fridays happen. Go to patreon.com slash DTNS. The California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a permit for Mercedes-Benz's drive pilot, driver assistance system. It is the first automaker with permission to sell a vehicle with level three autonomous systems in the state. Now, Mercedes got similar certification for Nevada in January and has deployed this already in Germany back in May, 2022. But level three is significant, especially in California because it is one up from what Tesla offers in its full self-driving. Yeah, so at level three, the driver can take their eyes off the road. They can take their hands off the wheel, but they have to be ready to resume control when necessary so you can't go into the backseat and take a nap, that type of thing. The Mercedes system is limited to high traffic situations. It's also limited to daylight while moving slower than 40 miles per hour. And you'd have to take over in a few other situations. If there was an emergency vehicle nearby, for example, you know, you got to pull over because the ambulance is coming type thing. Or if it's stormy weather, where the car might have more visibility issues. So Shannon, we're getting to the point where it's autonomous, but still somewhat, you know, as a human, you can't totally check out. Does this delight you? Does this surprise you? How do you feel about it? Yeah, Sarah, it delights me. I'm very excited about this. So I've only had a little bit of experience being in like a friend's Tesla and or in a self-driving autonomous vehicle like a Waymo. However, with the Waymo vehicles, those obviously are not available to consumers. They're just being used to kind of like an Uber type of thing in places like, oh gosh, where is it? Arizona? Phoenix, yeah. Yeah, Phoenix, Arizona. And they're so cool. Like it's so nice being in those vehicles and being able to just kind of relax and let the vehicle do its own thing. And I never felt scared or anything of the vehicle, understanding what it was supposed to do. And oftentimes it saw motion or things on the road that it should be cautious around. And it was more cautious than I would be as a human driver. And sometimes it saw these things before I ever would have seen them with my reaction and response time, which is pretty decent, because I play video games, okay? Okay, so I'm excited. I want this to happen in my lifetime, where we start seeing these self-driving vehicles on the road. I do have a bit of a concern. And this is just because I don't live in California anymore. What if you move? Like can you take your car with you and you're not allowed to use the self-driving anymore? I think I can answer that. Mercedes is applying for permission in every state in the United States, whether they even need it or not. Some states don't require it, but they're like, I'm just making sure. So the system won't kick on if it's not in a state where it has approval, but hopefully they'll get approval in Colorado. Well, that's cool. Yeah, I like that, because then you aren't necessarily limited to one place and you could take this with you on road trips and things of that nature. So that would be cool. But the limitations, like under 40 miles per hour, only being able to use it in daylight, that does make sense. I'm sure that they're being extremely cautious with what they are allowed to do with the level three vehicles. But hopefully they get to the point where you can use them on the highway or you can use them at nighttime, like if you're coming home from work super late at night or in the wintertime, like it gets dark in the wintertime. So I would like to see more functionality, but I guess we're just, we gotta take some time with that safety and all. I mean, this whole thing is, so in my current Volvo, which is in the shop, actually, but whatever. So I am certainly not at level three. What I can do is the car can drive itself in most situations. However, every 30 seconds, if I don't have my hands on the wheel, it either like the steering wheel shakes or it beeps at me or both or it just turns off entirely. So it actually is more annoying to use it than to not for me in most cases, just because I'm so concerned that, oh, if I'm not gonna read a book over in the corner, I can't do that. This, I guess, would be the point where you can start being able to feel comfortable doing those things with more vehicles on the road. And that could be cool. I worry a little bit about all the situations that are going to come up, especially weather conditions, because they are. But otherwise, I'm with you, Shannon. I'm into it, bring it on. And Mercedes is responsible for accidents that happened if drive pilot is in control and you're following the rules, right? You weren't taking a nap in the back seat or anything, but I thought that was interesting as part of this rollout. Mercedes is like, we take on the liability when drive pilot is cruising. So I absolutely could use this on the 405 in Los Angeles when you're bumping it along at 10 miles or less of an hour and you just would rather watch TikTok than pay attention because it's dead simple to just be like the doop, doop, doop, doop, doop, right? Oh, but Tom, you're still supposed to pay attention. But with level three, I wouldn't have to. You would only have to if you have to. Yeah, only have to if you have to. Yeah, I mean, it'll tell me when I need to pay attention. I guess that's the thing is like, don't get so involved in your book that you miss the alert when it's time to take control again. Yeah, exactly. Well, speaking of doing some travel, how many world heritage sites have you visited in your life? Some of you say, I don't know, none, or what are they even? Maybe even more importantly, you know what they are, but you don't realize that a lot more exist that you've never even knew about. Chris Christensen, AKA the amateur traveler has some intel for you, if so. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. One type of site that I'm very interested in seeing when I'm traveling are world heritage sites. These are sites that the UN through UNESCO has named as significant sites worth preserving. There are currently at time of this recording 1,157 different sites in the world that have this designation and many of which you've heard of and many of which you haven't. I've been to a little over an eighth of those sites, but I like to keep track of them. If my website off my about page, I have a list of the places I've been to, but there is also an app that a friend introduced me to recently just called World Heritage and it lets you know what World Heritage sites are near you and helps you keep track of which ones you've seen. The app again is World Heritage and this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. I've been to more than I thought. I started looking through this. Me too. I've been, although there were a few where I was like, huh, did not realize that. Same here. That's a bucket list item, yeah. The first World Heritage site I ever visited was Cahokia Mounds. World, I had no idea that was a World Heritage site. Wow. Well, busily illustrating today's show, probably not drawing the Cahokia Mounds, but I'd be like incredibly impressed with his prescience if he had. Len Peralta, what have you drawn for us today? Well, you know the top story of the week, I'm always on here talking about the top story of the week. Of course, it was Vision Pro. I don't see myself becoming a user of it until probably I become rich or whatever. But one of the things I thought was interesting was the eye camera that lets you see the person's eyes kind of. And that's what this one is all about. Vision Pro is they're definitely sleeping, right? They gotta be sleeping. Just like Homer Simpson in that one episode of the, you know, they're wearing the glasses. Yeah. That, you know, I think that's basically a 3,500 Homer Simpson joke that's waiting to happen. So yeah, you know, I find myself having a hard time trying to stay up and this will just, you know, this will make conversations so much easier because people will not be able to see, will be able to see my eyes. Anyway. Your drag of that person's eyes is kind of exactly how I think of it too. It's kind of weird. That's so funny. It's a little bit strange. But yeah, that's the first thing I thought of was that Simpson gag. In any event, if you are a fan, or even if you're not a fan of the Vision Pro, you can pick this up right now at my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len, at the DTNS Lover level, or you can just go the old-fashioned route, go to my store, pick up this print, and maybe even commission me for something. I'm open for that, so let's talk. So there you go. Shannon Morse. Thank you, Len. It is fantastic, Len, thank you. Shannon Morse, always fantastic to have you as well. It's been a, you know, big week in tech. We know you're always busy, so where do people keep up with your latest? YouTube.com slash Shannon Morse. I just posted like half an hour ago, my unboxing of my Silver Play button finally got it in the mail, so you can check that out over on my YouTube. And if you want something that's more tech savvy, you can check out my Google Authenticator 2FA video that I just posted about a week ago. All right, patrons, you are already doing your part to get Molly Wood Fridays to happen. Stick around for the extended show. Good day, internet. We're gonna test your knowledge of video game music. Some of the biggest names in music have contributed to your favorite video games over the years, so come play along with us, patrons. Join us. Just a reminder, we are live on DTNS Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We hope y'all have a great weekend. We're back on Monday with Aya's actor joining us. 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 Strafilino. Video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Coontz. Technical producer, Anthony Lemos. Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos. Science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermanns. Social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottis I, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Grotterama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. 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. Contributors for this week's show included Nika Manfred, Terence Gaines, Allison Sheridan, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young, Shannon Morse, Chris Ashley, and Chris Christensen. 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. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Hehehehe.