 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you the listener thanks to all of you including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power and Rodrigo Smith Zapata. Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft's building an AI chip. Amazon wants to make it easier to hear dialogue in TV shows and Annalie Newitz explains why Mastodon feels like home. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 18th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. And joining us, Annalie Newitz, author of the novel The Terraformers and host of Our Opinions, our correct podcast. Welcome back, Annalie. Yeah, it's always great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being with us. Apple opened its first retail store in India today. Here are the rest of the quick hits. Adobe Lightroom now offers new AI masking categories for its select people tool with three additional adaptive presets for portraits. One is darkened beard, which darkens someone's existing beard. Polished portrait will smooth skin and improve lighting. And enhanced clothing helps an outfit pop with contrast, saturation and texture. Lightroom already offers options to automatically whiten teeth, darken eyebrows, adjust hair texture. So this is just more of the same but kind of fun stuff. The AI mask categories are rolling out across Mac, Windows Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw. And the adaptive presets are available on iOS, Android and Lightroom on the web. We got good news and bad news for China's tech sector. Let's start with the bad news. China's National Bureau of Statistics reported that in Q1, seven conductor output fell almost 15% on the air. Smartphone production fell 13.8%. People are moving production out of China. Now some good news for China. The government shows more signs of easing its crackdown on tech companies. Reuters reports regulators are expected to reduce the fine against Ant Group from the equivalent of more than a billion dollars to somewhere more in the $700 million range. Back to bad news, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission published a report identifying Chinese fast fashion companies Xi'en and Temu as risks to trade, product safety and intellectual property rights, among other concerns, kind of making them the next target after TikTok for U.S. scrutiny. And we finished with some good news for China. With the auto show beginning in Shanghai, Reuters notes that sales of electric vehicles from China's BYD are up 69% on the air. They are now past Volkswagen and Toyota in the Chinese market. Netflix continues to show science it is serious about gaming. Joseph Staten, co-creator of Halo and Destiny, is now creative director for a AAA multi-platform original game at Netflix. The company previously said it had 16 titles in development in-house and around 70 in development with third parties. That may be Netflix's future, but if part of its past is ending, Netflix announced its DVD by mail service, which, yes, still existed, will end September 29th of this year. I want to be the person who gets the last DVD from them. And what would it be? And then never return it. Yeah, just steal it. Yeah, what are they going to do? Shut down the library. Find me. Cancel my subscription. Reddit says it plans to start charging companies for access to its API, though it hasn't announced any pricing yet. It will be a premium price point for, according to Reddit's post, third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights. This is pretty much targeted at folks using Reddit to train their AIs. Smaller developers will still have open access for reasonable and appropriate use cases. Founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times that the company doesn't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free. Reddit conversations are helpful for training large language models, but also this data could be used to create some competitors to Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005 and is said to be mulling an IPO later this year. Might bring in some revenue. Sonos announced a new service aimed at businesses called Sonos Pro. This supports all S2 compatible hardware, including its Ikea symphonisk line, and provides a web portal to remotely control what content is playing at different locations, as well as basic troubleshooting like rebooting. It also includes Sonos backgrounds, which features royalty-free music that's cleared for playing in commercial settings. Sonos Pro costs $35 per business location. Yeah, great for all locations of a Panera. Thank you. You know, it's one mind sometimes. Exactly what I was going to say. All right, that's a look at the quick heads. The increase in use of the many flavors of AI from machine learning to large language models is great news for NVIDIA. They sell a ton of cards that are used for this business. Trend Force suggests that open AI needs more than 30,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs for chat GPT. And the Verge notes that an NVIDIA H100 is selling for $40,000 on eBay. So there's demand. Google, Meta and Apple have all taken to designing their own AI chips for their own use. Amazon even makes some of theirs available in AWS right alongside NVIDIA chips. So it shouldn't be a huge surprise that the information sources say Microsoft is speeding up its plans to build its own AI chips itself. Called Project Athena, the idea is to make its chips available to folks inside Microsoft and to its partner OpenAI as early as next year. At the very least, it will save Microsoft some money and it's possible, though not assured, that it could offer access to the chips in Microsoft Azure. Its cloud service would make sense. To be clear, Azure does offer access to AI models. Right now, they just all run on NVIDIA chips. So I'm curious, Annalie, do you think Microsoft or any of these other companies should start going head to head with NVIDIA and sell these chips out to the rest of the business community or just keep them to themselves? I mean, it doesn't seem like that makes sense as a business model for them because all of these companies, they're basically selling cloud services. And so what customers really want is to come in and to have access to those chips along with all of the models that are maybe going to be available, all the other bells and whistles that they get with their cloud provider. So it seems like it's kind of an apples and oranges thing. Like, why would you go into selling chips when you can sell the chips as part of your service? So I don't see this becoming like a separate business revenue stream for them. And where is Intel in this is another question that I have as all of these companies are designing their own chips. A lot of times they're using ARM designs. There's talk of Microsoft using an ARM design to make a consumer chip. So it feels like somebody like Intel who wants to be a fab and also wants to get back into the race, they should be going and designing their own thing. Maybe they are and we just haven't heard about it. But yeah, that makes sense to me, Annalie, that you would see these companies just use these for their cloud services and not want to give their designs to anyone else, which is probably good news for NVIDIA because for the customers that are building their own data centers, the NVIDIA will continue to not have a lot of competition there. Although, I guess that means they sell fewer cards to the cloud service providers. Well, and that's why an H100 is selling for $40,000 on eBay. You don't have a lot of competition. The NVIDIA is like, this is a great place to be. Cool. We can just make sure that you buy the GPUs that you need to run these models. It seems like, let's say Microsoft, for example, if Microsoft says, listen, we're going to figure out our own solution here and let's say the company has a way to do that, well, it brings down prices for everybody eventually, maybe not tomorrow. But I can see where that would make a lot of sense for not just Microsoft, but a variety of companies that work with both NVIDIA and Microsoft, Intel, anybody. Yeah, there was also this interesting development the other day where Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, said, actually, large language models are dead because they're so expensive and he's kind of referring to the cost of this kind of hardware. And so it may be that this is going to be moot in a few years because these chips are no longer going to be as much a part of AI offerings. So take it with a grain of salt. This is a guy who's often made a lot of wild claims for OpenAI's business. But still, so that might be another wrinkle. Yeah. That's a really interesting point because he was like, yeah, we're not even started working on GPT-5 because we haven't explored all the possibilities of GPT-4. I guess it could also, it could mean though that it's not like GPT-4 couldn't run more efficiently on better chips. So maybe the chips would be, maybe new chips would be necessary. Certainly power efficient chips would be nice to have, right? Yeah. Because we're using a lot of energy. I know. That's actually one of the huge drawbacks of a lot of these AI models is that they just have incredible overhead in terms of using energy and using equipment. It reminds me of the heady days of Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies where it was like, how many machines have you chewed through that shows how strong your company is? Right. Well, it can be hard to understand voices and dialogue in TV shows and movies. For a lot of people, I am one of them. You can turn on captions, you crank up the volume, but depending on what you're watching, cranking up the volume, you might have to ride that volume level. And sometimes people don't like captions or it's just not appropriate for what they're watching. Some folks have settings in their speakers that can help, but Amazon wants to help in a way that gives its Prime Video Service a competitive advantage. You can now turn on dialogue boost in select English language versions of Prime Originals. So, you know, it's kind of a test for now. It's not the whole library, but it's some of them. Amazon has used some algorithms, probably some machine learning, they just say AI, to identify parts of shows where the dialogue might be hard to hear, and then adapts the playback to make talking easier to hear. This is more precise than applying the same filter to a whole show or a movie like a speaker would have to do. So, let's talk about this. Is this the best way to make audio more accessible? Kind of bringing it out of the hardware and giving you more options in software. Yeah. Have you guys heard this? Like, how does it sound? Is it just sound really natural? Yeah. I haven't got a chance to try it yet. I've tried similar things with my speakers, where it will do dialogue enhancement. Those are very subtle. They don't sound weird. They just kind of make the audio a little or the dialogue a little clearer. The idea with this because it's more precise is that it would work better. But yeah, I haven't had a chance to hear if it does any weird processing to it or anything like that. I love the idea of it, where you can leave the parts that don't have dialogue untouched, so you're not making a compromise in the overall sound like a speaker would have to, because a speaker doesn't know what it's playing, so it just has to do it to the whole thing. Well, unless you have some 5.1 where you've got a nice center speaker. Yeah, but even then, a speaker only knows, like, okay, I need to filter everything, because what Amazon's doing here is going, oh, these are the parts that have dialogue. Let's only apply the filter to those parts, because it's using the machine learning to identify that. Something that sounds very similar. I haven't tried Amazon's version of this yet either, but it's within Plex. Plex is a media server. Lots of people use it, and for certain, me too. We use Plex every day of my life. For certain shows and movies, not all of them, some of them don't bother me, but especially when there's a lot of heavy action, so you're getting explosions or car chases or things that are designed to be loud, the dialogue ends up getting muffled to me, to my ears, and Plex can boost stuff for dialogue. How well it does, I don't know how to compare that to anything else, because it's the only place I've ever tried it, but it does help. I've had people over who go, whoa, that really is better. The more options we have for stuff like this, it's good to be able to customize your listening experience. Absolutely. I feel like the classic TV show that was a problem in this way was the Witcher. We were all at home watching the Witcher, and it's like the dialogue is just like and then like, oh, I'm slaying bunch of monsters, and it's a great show. Love it. I wanted to hear the dialogue. There's a lot of great zingers, and I just, I am all about subtitles and closed captions, and I feel like now that's the norm for me. So like you said, it would be great to have an option to not have to have closed captions and just try to hear it the way sort of intended to be heard. I don't know. Maybe the Witcher is intended to be mumbly. I have human-ing experience. I make that argument of like, no, no, I didn't want you to hear what they're saying there. It's supposed to be like, oh, it's so loud, you can't hear what anyone's saying kind of effect. I whispered the secret. Yeah, but we're all like, but I still want to know, and then when you turn on subtitles or captions, you find out what they said, right? I know, and I love that. Like I find like in the Mandalorian, there's always like some people like talking in the corner or something, and they're just saying something completely in name, which you absolutely were not intended to hear. And they'll even put in the character names sometimes of like random characters, and it's like, you know, bartender one says, you know, do you want some more of that blue milk? You're like, oh, I got, I got a little special secret. I'm going to have to charge you extra for that. Yeah, I like that this is also just an option in the drop down menu. So it's right next to subtitles and captions. And you can choose medium or high. So it's not a lot of customization, but you can sort of say, oh, maybe that was too much boosted. I want the background to be a little more forward. You could you've got a couple of options there. I hope this works well. And then I hope that other services like Disney plus Apple TV, Netflix, etc, can come up with something similar because I would like it to be standard. Because like you say, the ones on Plex, the ones that are built in the speakers, they work okay. If it could work even better and give you some control over it, then that would that would be the best. I also, you know, obviously close captioning, you know, whether it's, you know, subtitles of a language you can't read or an accessibility option, you know, obviously great to have. Emily, you're not the only person I know who says, I just have them turned on often. Just, you know, maybe you're maybe you're kind of looking at your computer while you're watching a show, and there's a little bit more retention going on. Maybe you're tired. At first, I was, you know, the first time a friend of mine was like, oh, yeah, I just I turned it on for everything. I was like, you do? Doesn't that take you out of the scene? And she's like, no, it makes me understand it better. Like my brain has to work less in one capacity, because I'm better at reading. Yeah. And you know, so it's like, I can, I can kind of, I can kind of have, you know, one foot over in some other activity, and it's a better listening experience. Yeah, I find that I miss it. Like I went to see John Wick in the theaters, which admittedly has not very much dialogue at all. I guess somebody decided that they would count how many words that John Wick said, and it was only like 50 words in the whole movie. And they kind of, yeah, a lot of them are just like, yeah. But I missed it. I was like, I actually, I would love subtitles because I need to understand more about the bizarre lore behind the John Wick universe. And you can get those in the theaters. There are accessibility options in theaters where you get this little device that you carry with you, whether whether that, you know, it's worth going to that trouble. And there's a limited number of them. So if you really don't need it, maybe you don't want to take it. Yeah, reserve it for someone who's actually hearing impaired instead of just like sort of mentally impaired like myself. It's like more like a dialogue impairment. If you are somebody who did who needs that and you didn't realize that that is an option that you can get. Yeah, that's good. Good to know. And I like I look at this Amazon thing as another accessibility option. Our producer Amos is in our chat room saying like the audio engineers could just make it so you don't have to do this. Sometimes I think he's right. I sometimes I think that's true. But there are situations where the audio is just fine. It's my ears that are the problem. So being able to adjust to that is good too. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you are feeling social, you can get in touch with the DTNs folks on social networks where DTNs show on Twitter and mastodon that's DTNs S H O W. We're on the MSTDN dot social mastodon server. We're also a daily tech news show on TikTok and DTNs picks on Instagram P I X. A lot of folks are looking for new homes for their social media these days. We've talked recently about be real and sub stack notes and more. The Verge has a great article up right now from Ellis Hamburger who worked at Snapchat until last year. I'm going to oversimplify what is an excellent read that you should pick up. But one of the things Hamburger points out is that when a social network adds digital advertising priorities change and a lot of the problems in social media stem from that one company hoping to avoid that pitfall is Blue Sky. We've talked about them before. It's a decentralized social protocol company that was begun in Twitter, but is now fully independent of it. The Verge is Alex Heath sat down with Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber and he said they're not even thinking about business models at this point. They've only led in around 20,000 users so far. So that's something that's still in development. One of the most prominent alternatives of course is mastodon, which recently passed an average of a billion posts a month and growing. Annalie wrote a column for new scientists called how I found a new home online at Mastodon after giving up on Twitter. Annalie White, what makes Mastodon feel like home? You know, it's a lot of things. One is that it's a very familiar format for me. It's microblogging, which is just to say posting short pieces of information, posting pictures, sharing, talking to people. But the other thing was that it reminded me of what I liked about Twitter when I first joined, which was getting a chance to just chat with people and have conversations with folks who I really admired but hadn't ever met before. And there wasn't that sort of mob mentality or that kind of that sense that we needed immediately to go right to an argument. So there was a sense of kind of coming home psychologically like, oh, this is actually a community. It's not a place where people yell at each other or try to have a hot take. We're really just chatting. But the other thing that I really like about Mastodon is that it's part of a larger project, which is often called the Fediverse, which is to say it's part of a group of different websites and applications that run on top of a protocol, which is called Activity Pub. And the idea behind it is that it would allow you to turn a social post into something like email that can be sent anywhere. So theoretically, if say Facebook joined the Fediverse, which it absolutely will not, I would be able to make a post in Mastodon and have it show up on Facebook because it just travels seamlessly between websites. And this is becoming a reality for some well-known social networks like Tumblr, which is planning to take up residence in the Fediverse and run Activity Pub as a protocol. And that means that if I post on Mastodon, it's going to show up over on Tumblr, which is fantastic. Medium has also set up an instance on Mastodon, I'm sorry, on the Fediverse using Activity Pub. And so that means that Medium and Mastodon can be interoperable with each other in terms of posts. And I'm just really excited about this new venture where we're going to take social posts away from being inside of a walled garden and make them into something that travels between lots of different social networks. So I just like that sense of freedom. Yeah. Go ahead, Tom. No, no, go ahead, sir. Well, when you were explaining how Activity Pub could allow me, let's say I post something where I'm like, I'd like to reach as many people as possible at their place of choice. Tumblr could be an option, as would others. I know it wasn't that long ago that if you were trying to build a presence, you wanted to maximize your presence at that place. You choose the place and you want everybody to go there or you want to go where everyone already is. And that's where you're going to get the most eyeballs. You're going to get the most engagement. I wonder if we're now kind of going back to the, you know, we don't care so much about where somebody's coming from. We just want to reach them where they are. Yeah. I interviewed Evan Prodromu, who is the creator of Activity Pub along with a number of other developers. And he was saying that he compares this to kind of the moment when email became widely adopted. And it's not like you join Gmail, right? You don't sort of join Gmail and then only email with other people on Gmail. You join Gmail and then your email goes to wherever you want. And he imagines a future where social media is like that, where it's, you have socials, you have social posts, but it doesn't matter if you're on Mastodon, if you're on Facebook, if you're on Tumblr, if you're on, you know, Wibbidi-Bibbidi or Wampy Wamp or whatever the next. It could be forwarded to, you know, kind of wherever. Wibbidi-Bibbidi is like the next big thing. Somebody got that URL. Yeah. So the idea is like, yeah, you would just post something and then you would say like, yeah, I want this to go to all these other places too. So that, like you said, people can see them wherever they live. And I think we're starting to realize that social networks, in order for us to feel free on them, in order for us to feel like we have some control over what we're saying, we'd actually like to not be stuck in just one. You know, we don't want that walled garden anymore after what's happened with Twitter and all the transformations it's gone through. I think people are feeling kind of like, actually I want my socials to be mine and then they can show up in lots of places, but I don't want to be like a denizen of Twitter or a denizen of another place. I just want to be me posting on a bunch of places. I don't think any of us identify as a g-mailer, like I said, but you know, did identify as like, you know, citizens of Twitter. Imagine if you had, and messaging is just as bad, right? Where it's like, imagine if you had to be like, oh, I want to send you emails. Can you create a g-mail account, right? Instead of like, what's your email? Messaging and short messaging, blogging services should be that easy. What I'm curious on your take, Annaly, is how you feel about Blue Sky doing AT protocol where they're sort of playing Adam to activity pubs RSS, where they're like, we think we can improve on it. They looked at activity pub and said, well, we want to create our own. There's also a couple others out there, I think Nostar uses its own protocol. How do you feel about that? Do you think that the Fediverse has the momentum and we should all get behind that? Or is it good to kind of try these different ones and eventually we'll all aggregate to the standard? I mean, I think we're at a point right now where people are trying a lot of stuff. You know, it remains to be seen which thing is going to be the Betamax and which is going to be the VHS of this universe. I'm putting my eggs in the Fediverse basket partly because I just like the fact that it's all open. It's open source. It's designed to be used by anyone to be interoperable with any kind of site that you want to create. So I like that idea. I like the openness of it, but I can imagine that any number of things might happen between now and five years from now. The AT protocol is open too. It's just you can't put your eggs in their basket because they've got a lid on their basket. Yeah. I mean, it's still closed. You know, it's not intent behind it is not we want to invite lots of friends over to join us in this space. I feel like they're trying to dominate the space. They're being kind of cagey about, well, we don't have a business model and, you know, we'll see. Whereas like activity pup definitely has no business model. Their business model is make your own business model, use our protocol, feel free. And I really, I like that. And as I said, I mean, just as a purely anecdotal personal experience on mastodon, I have found it to be much more friendly and less hostile. It's easier to pick and choose what you see. And it's just a it's a nice experience. It's a lot like discord in that you join a server and that's your local community. But then unlike discord, you can follow people on all the other servers that are part of mastodon. So you can have an expansive follow list. You can have an expansive list of people you are being followed by. But you kind of live in one local server. And my local server is very nice. It's full of science fiction writers and open source developers. And they're all quite sweet and have cute cats. Very important part of a social network. No, it's like it's like friends in real life. The protocol that has the cats is going to win. But you know this about the internet. I think yeah. Folks, if you're not already subscribed to the know a little more podcast, you might want to go follow that because we have an episode coming this Thursday about mastodon. So if you'd like to know a little more about mastodon, head to know a little more dot com. Well, and if Annalie and I and other cat lovers want to get together, some of us might have to get on a flight to do that as part of a three year project to modernize airport check ins. Alaska Airlines is removing something the check in kiosk. The airline wants you to check in at home or on your smartphone. And in fact, it says, according to data, most of our customers are already doing this. So we don't think that many people are going to be affected. So in place of the kiosk is a single function iPad based bag tag station. So if you got to check a bag, that's all it really does. Everything else should already have been done before you get to the airport or on your smartphone when you're there as a flyer. You scan your boarding pass for that bag tag and automatic bag drops used by a metric data to authenticate travelers. Alaska Air started this test in Palm Springs. Company says it's not ready for a wider rollout. And for those of you saying that's crazy, what if I left my phone in the cab on the way to the airport or what if I don't have a smartphone or what if my parents don't have a smartphone? Alaska Airlines says agents will still be available on site for assistance. Yeah, they're just trying to make everything a little bit smoother. They're just replacing those kiosks that run on Windows 98 with an iPad. That's probably a good thing. You know, a spokesperson for the company said most of the folks who fly Alaska will not be affected by this at all because you're already using modern ways of checking in before you get to the airport. So we want your airport experience to be as seamless as possible. We know not everybody wants this, so you're not left out in the cold. We still want you to fly our airline. But, you know, it wouldn't impact me much because I'm a smart phone checker-inner before I get there as well. Yeah. Now, if you don't use your phone to get your boarding pass, nothing is going to change for you. You're going to walk up and they're going to direct you somewhere and you're going to be able to get a boarding pass. But that's so few people. Most people are not even going to notice. They're just going to think, oh, these kiosks are nicer looking because it's a big iPad embedded in a pedestal. And they're going to get their bag tag and move on. So it's probably cheaper to maintain. They'll probably break down less. At least that would be the hope. So yeah, I think it's a good thing. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Thor. Thor writes, if it's of interest, I'd like to share why I am enjoying Be Real. You might recall a couple days ago we talked about whether or not Be Real was long for this world. Thor says, I moved away from my hometown several years ago and I haven't kept in contact with my childhood friends, although I suddenly found that they were posting on Be Real. It's been lovely seeing how the respective farms are going. It's such a contrast to my daily work as a software dev in Oslo. I love this perspective and I hope Be Real can figure out how to stick around simply so Thor could keep a touch with his hometown. It's great. Yeah. I love how Thor is like, I don't want anything fancy and fun. I just want to know what's up because I have been away from the farm for a while. Well, thanks to you, Annalie Newitz, for being with us today. We know you have a lot of stuff cooking, so let folks know where they can keep up with your work. So I have a new novel out called The Terraformers, which I hope you'll check out. It just came out a couple months ago. Also on my podcast, our opinions are correct. My co-host and I are doing a mini series called Silicon Valley versus Science Fiction, where we talk about the ways that Silicon Valley companies appropriate science fiction tropes really badly. So join us there. That's catnip for our audience. I think they're going to want to check that out. It's been really fun. Yeah. Well, we want to extend a special thanks to Colin. Colin, you know who you are, but now we want to shout you out to everybody else. You're one of our top lifetime supporters from DTNS. We see you. We hear you. We thank you for all the years of support. Yes. Thank you, Colin. And Colin and all the other patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We're going to talk a little bit about the Apple leak that maybe some iPad apps are going to come to that mixed reality headset. But more to the point, there's Google Pixel leaks. There's Samsung leaks. Should we pay all this attention to leaks? Why do you all want to hear leaks? Some of you say you don't. We're going to talk about all that and more on Good Day Internet. Stick around. You can also catch our show live Monday through Friday. DTNS is live at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We're going to do it again tomorrow because it's every weekday. Tomorrow, Scott Johnson is joining us. Don't miss it. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.