 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Pepper Geesey, Eric Holm, and Carmine Bailey. Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft is promoting things in the start menu. Does it make you mad? YouTube Shorts has come into TV, and does TikTok hypnotize you into a flow stage? Is that how they do it? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 8th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Reddit, I'm Sarah Lane. Also in Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Ah, November 8th, 2022. It'll never come again. We'll only have this one chance at it. I'm feeling good. So let's start with the quickest. Binance said Tuesday it intends to acquire FTX Exchange, that is Binance's largest crypto exchange competitor. You might have been following some social media back and forth. You might have not. If you haven't, Binance founder, Shang-Peng Zhao, said that Binance reached the decision after FTX asked Binance for help, tweeting, quote, to protect users, we've signed a non-binding LOI intending to fully acquire FTX and help cover the liquidity crunch. We will be conducting a full DD in the coming days, end quote. Binance is not only the world's largest crypto exchange, but is also the first investor that backed FTX. The big unanswered question is, will baseball umpires wear a Binance patch instead of an FTX patch on their uniforms next year? Oh, good question. Just have to wait to find out. MediaTek announced its new flagship smartphone system on a chip, the Dimensity 9200. It's the first Android SOC to use ARM's new Cortex X3 Core, which combines a single X3 core with three mid-range Cortex A715 cores and four efficient power-efficient A510 cores. That's good for a claimed 12% increase on a single core, 10% multi-core improvement, and 25% less power over the Dimensity 9000. It uses ARM's Immortalis G715 GPU with support for ray tracing, which offers 32% better performance than the last gen. On the networking side, which I think is grabbing all the headlines, it supports millimeter wave 5G, Wi-Fi 7, so we'll have some products with Wi-Fi 7 capability by the end of this year, and Bluetooth LE. It'll arrive in smartphones by the end of 2022. They're having fun with naming, aren't they? Dimensity Immortalis. Speaking of chips, Nvidia will offer a new A8000 chip for customers in China, designed to meet recent changes in U.S. export controls. Nvidia said it can be used in place of the A100 GPU for high-end applications. Specifications indicate that the A8000 offers about two-thirds of the A100 performance for chip-to-chip communications. Meanwhile, in related China news, COVID cases are now surging in the manufacturing hub of Guangzhou, which is part of the Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau, Greater Bay Area, which may affect supplies. Lockdowns keep spreading in the area where they make your stuff. At its annual ZoomTopia event, Zoom announced new mail and calendar clients in beta for business users. These are the latest additions to Zoom One, which includes other tools like TeamChat, Whiteboard, Phone, and Meetings. In other Zoom news, AMC announced a partnership with the company to use AMC movie theaters as video conferencing spaces for up to 150 people in up to 17 major U.S. markets next year. So, if you're not watching a Netflix movie in a theater, you could also watch a concert or have a video conference. These theaters aren't going to waste. Customers will get a three-hour block, Zoom, and AMC will provide the equipment for a Zoom rooms experience. AMC will also make food and subsequent movie viewings available for an additional cost. Popcorn, anyone? Yeah, after your conference. Get a little popcorn and a... I mean, I gotta say, if you don't have a conference room big enough to get everybody in one place, it's better than we work. In its latest earnings report, Nintendo cut its fiscal year switch sales forecast by 10% to 19 million units. Nintendo also announced it plans to establish a joint venture with DNA in April 2023 to strengthen the digitization of Nintendo's business. The two companies began working together back in 2015, partnering on systems used in Nintendo's mobile apps and also account infrastructure. And that's the quick hits, folks. All right, tell us about this Windows thing, Lamar. Yeah, so usually when you click on the Windows sign-out menu, you see options to change account settings, lock the device, or sign out. But Twitter user Albuquerra posted screenshots that included rotating options at the top of the menu. One said, back up your files and link to OneDrive. Another time, the option said, sign up for a Microsoft account. And another time, it said, complete your profile. Bleeping Computer did not see the messages on their machines, which led them to speculate that this is a test for some users of Windows, insider builds, or a limited set of customers. Now, Microsoft tested similar messages before on File Explorer, Office, and two years ago in WordPad. Oh, I miss WordPad. I haven't used it in a long time. Yep, I use text edit. Well, that's Mac, but yeah. Yeah, same idea. I see a lot of people and a lot of headlines complaining that this is advertising. So I'll give you my reaction upon first seeing this story. I saw a headline that called it Advertising. I was like, wow, Microsoft really trying to monetize Windows. Then I read that it was promotional messages. And I'm like, oh, some people define that as advertising, but that's not as bad as I thought. They're just doing promotional messages. And then I saw the screenshots and I'm like, they're adding menu items for creating a Windows account. I mean, creating a Microsoft account, which they try to get you to do, to log into Windows in the first place anyway. This feels mildly annoying. I'm not seeing the outrage of putting advertising in Windows myself. I mean, yeah, I was trying to figure out, okay, well, I'm not a Windows user, but if I were and I were to see some of the stuff, for example, backup your files and OneDrive being pushed to me. Well, let's say I'm a Dropbox user and I just don't want OneDrive, but maybe I don't have a great backup plan. Like there are people who'd be like, oh, okay. I mean, I like this ecosystem, no problem. It's not necessarily a bad thing for Microsoft to say, hey, just a reminder, we do things that might actually help your workflow a day to day. I mean, it's bad UI to change menu items. That's what I will say. But it kind of reminds me if a browser becomes your default browser without saying, hey, you want this or not? This is Microsoft going somewhere in the middle of that, kind of saying, we'd like to push our own products, which a lot of companies do, but not doing it without your knowledge, which that would really be the problem. Yeah, this isn't the same antitrust as the Internet Explorer had back in the day, but with that issue, like where other people didn't have options. This is, you're already in Windows. You've already got it, whether you bought it or I think it's free, you're in Windows and it's saying, hey, that OneDrive that is already here, you already have the account activated or turned on. I literally, I do not see the issue here. I feel like this is a slow Windows week. Somebody had to come up with an argument here about advertising and Windows. Like I have a Windows machine. I literally, I don't see the issue here about promoting your own products. It's not like they're a big banner ass and a flashing saying, OneDrive, OneDrive, OneDrive every five minutes. Or not allowing you to do basic tasks until you sign up for OneDrive type thing, that would suck. It's still invasive though. It is, it is mild. That's why I call it annoying. It's a little bit annoying that it's not a regular menu item. It's not great UI. But it is far from what I consider egregious. Nick with a C in our chat room says, the word advertising is becoming the new communism. If you don't like a thing, you call it advertising. And I think that's well said. I get the annoyance with it. I'm not trying to undermine somebody who's like, I really don't like this. I'm worried about a slippery slope. If this works, what will they try next? I just always try to only get upset about things that are actually happening, not what might happen. Because some people just tend to jump three steps ahead and say, well, this is town amount to this, which is town amount to that, which is town amount to them just going out and throwing puppies in a lake. And it's like, well, hold on now. We haven't got there yet. They're just putting a menu item in. Let's dial it back a little. And what else is free, right? It isn't it isn't. You kind of pay for it because you have to get it on something. And then once you have it on something, the updates are free. You don't have to pay for the updates anymore. I'll leave it there. Well, Lamar, you might have thoughts on this next story. YouTube product manager Todd Sherman told The Verge that YouTube shorts, which is YouTube's TikTok like feature, had 1.5 billion users per month who watch 30 billion videos per month as of the beginning of this year and reportedly only grown since then. As it works to integrate shorts into the rest of the YouTube experience, YouTube is bringing shorts to its TV apps. Shorts will show up on their own row in the YouTube homepage if you're looking at it on one of your TV apps or on a creator's channel as well. The videos will play vertically in the center of the screen with like buttons and info next to that video. Video is also loop and scroll vertically just like they would if you're looking on a mobile app. There are, though, a lot of questions for YouTube about where to go with this experiment, including whether selections of shorts should be different for the same user if they're watching on a TV instead of a phone. If the vertical video may be taken with an iPhone or some other smartphone, is that right for your TV or should you have some sort of other experience? YouTube will also experiment with moving people from shorts into longer-form videos and vice versa, I guess kind of depending on what works. So I have had this feature. I didn't know it was new for months. I watched YouTube primarily on my TV. So, you know, there's shorts mixed in there with long-form videos. And I got to say, I saw the graphic pop up on a screen. I really liked the subtle border that they put around it and just a very kind of a bland background. But it makes the video really pop out. I have it, you know, I'm bragging. I have an 82-inch TV, so you'd think, oh my gosh, that's a different model. All right, all right. You're so cool. I'm just saying. That's not a really big wall. But I have found no degradation of quality. I've looked at my own videos and they're perfect because I am. And I've looked at other videos. And I've had enjoyable experience with it on the TV. And so I think it is not the exact same as the phone. But the fact that I could use my remote and just flip, I thought that was like really cool. So you kind of get the phone feel that I could just flip from video to video. I can like the video quickly. And then the only thing that's harder to do is comment. But that's just with any TV watching. I feel like if we're talking about as much traction as YouTube claims they have with shorts, why not? Let's see how many people also maybe want to see this on a larger TV experience. Why not? We're talking billions of people here. Well, real quick, I just want to say, I think one of the problems that YouTube is doing, and this is for a longer conversation, is that they're not treating shorts as video and they're using specific language. And I think that starts to confuse because I treat it as video. And I think a lot of the consumers treat it as video is video. However, I get it where there's vertical, where it's horizontal. I just want to watch video. So a vertical video can give me the information I need. I don't know that video. When you say they don't treat it as video, what do you mean? A language wise. They say there's videos and then there's shorts. Is that what you're saying? They just did a channel update where it says on your channel, channel, video, shorts. So they're deliberately supporting them. So shorts aren't included in the things that are called video. Yeah, exactly. So that creates its own confusion, which is a discussion for later. But again, they're searchable. If you're looking for a certain thing, and somebody has a short on it, it'll pop up. And I wonder how much that will happen. I think what you're saying, Sarah, how much would that happen on a TV versus mobile? If you're searching for something, will TV force the review that is longer because you're on a TV? Or will the phone give you the short because it's shorter? I think that'll be interesting to see how they play with that. This also kind of reminds me of two years ago at CES when all the rage was the TVs that could go vertical or horizontal. And it was sort of like... Oh, right, that Samsung TV that turns. Yeah. Okay, maybe there will be so much vertical video that this makes sense, or you could do it in some sort of software way. I feel like we're coming back from that a little bit. Like, okay, we still have the TVs that look like the TVs that we know. How does this play somewhat seamlessly inside of that? Yeah, I'm not sure they've nailed how it should look yet. I know Lamar, you said that works for you. I'm curious to see if they can make it work even better. The part that fascinated me was having a different algorithm. Like, I think that's warranted to say, you will enjoy things differently on your big 82 inch screen than you will on your phone. And you probably will be in a different mindset. We're going to talk about that in a minute. And what different things. So having the algorithm adapt to be like, oh, it's on the TV, let's show you this, which would be slightly different than what we would show you on your phone makes sense to me. Yeah. All right, we solved that. We'll send you the invoice, YouTube. Hey, folks, it's time to get our holiday gift card list in order. Each year, we send every patron who wants one. If you don't want one, don't worry about any of this. But if you want a card, we will send you one. It's a gift card with exclusive art from Len Peralta on it. He outdid himself. It's gorgeous. If you'd like to get that card in the mail and you're a patron, we'll need to know where to send it. So become a patron if you're not already, and go to patreon.com slash pledges and make sure we have your proper mailing address. Do that by November 15th. So you got just about a week to get the exclusive DTNS holiday card mailed right to you from us. On our DTNS subreddit, KV tipped us off to an article on wired called tiktok's greatest asset isn't its algorithm. It's your phone by Leo Kim. It's a wide-ranging and philosophical article, well worth a good long read. You know, get yourself a hot cup of cocoa, curl up and read this. But I wanted to pull out one idea to talk about here. There's a lot of context in this article if you really want to go deep into his points. But for our purposes, he notes that tiktok has never really worked well outside the phone. We were just talking about how YouTube's trying to make it work on a TV. Tiktok hasn't really done that. It takes advantage of your relationship with the phone to create what Kim calls a flow state when you're looking at tiktoks. Kim argues that in part because we think of phones as an extension of ourselves, and in part because of the immersive nature of the video on a full screen, we enter a flow state where we aren't thinking about what we're watching. We're just reacting to it and enjoying it. He writes, When presented in this nonstop succession, the video, a high bandwidth medium that combines text, visuals, music and movement, is amplified, saturating the viewer with a deluge of information. There is no time to think about what you just saw because as soon as the clip ends, you're on to the next one. The spectator is rendered a consummate consumer rather than a viewer tasked with engaging and unpacking the content they're seeing. Chaka writes, this is referring to another writer that he referred to earlier in the article, Chaka writes, You don't have to think only react as the platform has already done the hard work of analysis and selection. It really struck me that it is one of the differences with tiktok in particular, but also reels and shorts to a certain extent when you're on the phone. We think of the phones as extensions of ourselves. We talk about them that way and this is now living sort of inside your mind is what Kim argues and with video, not giving you time to stop and contemplate. You can't stop and look away from the page and read. I mean, you could, you could pause it, but people don't do that. You just get carried along and you don't have time to have a critical view. You're just enjoying it. If you're lucky, you get like like, and maybe maybe you comment on something, but mostly it's a little bit of like, it's that sort of old school sitting back watching the TV type thing. I have a slightly different take on this because I know when I watch tiktoks, and yes, as you flip, you know, you go on, but if you don't flip, and I'm interested in a video and I don't flip, it'll replay the video. Yeah. Now that's the key thing for me because if I was really into it and I want to be really soaking that information again, it's doing that repetition thing that we all learn as kids and we all watch things over and over again. And so that kind of learning is immediately given back to you. Doesn't pause it like Rios does. It immediately plays it back. And I found that fascinating for me because I ended up getting things that I missed or I want to hear again in the tiktok. And so for me, I find that that loop enhances my... It makes me, I honestly want to comment more because now I have fuller context of what I just watched. Well, and that's important data too for tiktok, right? It's like, Lamar, watch this four times. He's pretty into this. Now the algorithm gets stronger. But you didn't watch it as critically as you would if you would stop and clear your mind and think about it. You're absorbing it more by the repetition. And I'm not saying that's bad. I might sound like that's a criticism, but it's not. I'm saying it's a different way of receiving a message. It's a way of learning a message, which can be great if it's like me looking at Korean language tiktok and I'm trying to like, okay, I need to really learn how to say this. That's great. That's actually optimal. If it's, I don't know, a philosophical viewpoint, a political viewpoint, it might not be so great because now you're just accepting it because it's an extension of yourself. It's becoming part of you in a way that you might have been more critical of it before. I also, I know I'm in the minority, but I almost exclusively watch tiktok on my desktop. It doesn't perform exactly the same way, but more or less the same way. And yeah, on my phone, well, because I don't, if I'm home and sort of comfortable in my house, my phone, I don't really need it. I'd rather just be on my laptop. I just have, I feel like I have more control, more options that way. So that's kind of what I do. If I was on the go and maybe in line at the bank or something, sure, I might open up tiktok and absorb it that way. But I also find it a little bit too invasive for me. I also don't really watch stories or reels or any of that stuff because again, there's a little bit too much of like, it's going too fast. There's too many things. And you're going to get a lot in the next five minutes. Are you ready? And often I'm like, no, I'm not. Let me get back home and get comfortable, put on my sweatpants before I get back into tiktok. But I think most people are like, what? Desktop, who would even do that? It really is an extension of your arm experience for a lot of folks. And I don't even think that's a conversation people are having with themselves or having with the younger people in their life, who are really into tiktok too. Yeah. I've tested tiktok on a TV. I was actually at tiktok headquarters testing it out. And I had already used the YouTube one. So but it was still kind of weird because they don't even have a, oh, they do have an iPad app. I'll take that back. But I found it fascinating. Like you, I've tried it on my desktop. Somebody sent me a link. Fine. But if trying to flip, people say this, Sarah. And I don't know if you've seen the difference. I feel like the algorithm is different when you're on your desktop. Like I don't get the same laughing. I don't get the same energy or the same humor that I do when it's in my hand. That's interesting. I never really thought about that. Because it's the same account, right? It's the same account. They know what I've watched and liked on mobile. Yeah. But a lot of people say the same thing. It's like they feel like the algorithm is slightly different or it's not as funny or whatever. And I, it's just, that's really interesting. That's all I see. It's just gotta be on mobile. If you really want to laugh today, you know, you really want the good stuff. Yeah, I don't know. If anybody has any thoughts on whether those two differ and why, that would be good to know. Yeah, I just, I am probably an outlier in this, but I have difficulty using video the way I see a lot of other people using it. Folks will send me a video link as a reference and I will often ignore it because I don't have a chance to sit and evaluate it because you have to play it and your mind accepts that differently than the written word. And when it's important for me to understand something, I'd rather read it. And have video as a supplement to that, right? I'm not saying video is useless in learning, but I don't want it to be my primary source of information. And so I really snapped to what he was saying, what Kim was saying here about when you're on TikTok, it kind of short circuits your ability to be critical because it's just rolling along and not giving you that chance to pause. So unless you have those skills to pause it and think. Right. Unless you take that active moment, yeah, yeah, which most people aren't going to do, but even then you can't review it, right? It's hard to review video. You can scan through a text and be like, well, wait, now what is he saying here again? So I don't know. And that's probably a quirk of me, but that is one of the things that I think about when I look at video versus text. Not that one is worse than the other, but there are different ways of consuming the information. Well, when you're not consuming the text, well, when you're not consuming this kind of information, you might be behind a wheel of some kind. GMC launched the Hummer EV pickup truck. You might remember back in 2021, now the company plans to start selling its SUV model next year in 2023. But that isn't all folks because you might like bikes. And if so, Hummer is also launching its own e-bike. GMC partner Recon Power Bikes says that the Hummer EV all-wheel drive e-bike will go on sale starting in December with all-wheel drive using two electric motors, one powering the front wheel, the other powering the rear. And there are three drive modes to choose from. You've got cruise, which is just rear wheel. You've got traction, which adds front-wheel drive. And adrenaline mode takes advantage of both motors for maximum performance. Top speed is 28 miles per hour. Kind of fast. It's not a motorcycle, but it's up there, yeah. You're getting up there. Pricing starts at 4,000 US dollars. Listen, I was a little disappointed at first that this wasn't a wide-body bicycle that looked like a Hummer. It really, yeah, it looks like an e-bike. Like a Tonka truck version. But once I got over that disappointment, this is actually a pretty nice bike. Like, it's pretty solid for an e-bike. Now, and when we were talking about this earlier, some of you who know more about e-bikes than I do, I was like, 4,000, that's Hummer prices. And everyone said, you know, it's pretty competitive to be honest. Yeah, e-bikes are up there. So it's maybe a little on the higher end, but it's not out of the range, I don't think. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. We got this one from Jonah, who has a tip for listeners regarding our discussion that we had yesterday about Airbnb and the way prices are displayed when browsing and comparing listings. Airbnb is making some changes to try to make it better for folks who are about to run something to know exactly what they're paying for. Jonah says, in Australia, it's a legal requirement that hotel and short-term rentals are listed with an all-inclusive price. All fees and charges are shown up front right there on the listing. To comply with this legal requirement, Airbnb has a separate website at arabianb.com.au, with the difference being it shows cleaning fees and other charges up front and the listing price throughout the interface. The tip is that right now, anybody can head over to that Australian Airbnb website, log in with their existing Airbnb user account and then change the preferred currency to US dollars or whatever you prefer, and then you can continue to use the site and the app as you would normally expect, except that all those fees and charges are now shown up front, making it easier to compare one listing with another. Jonah says, the reservation will then appear on the US.com website and in your Airbnb app as it normally should. It's all one back end, just a different front end that's much better for browsing and comparing prices. Yeah, a minor hoop to jump through to change the currency from Australia to the US, but once you do that, it's a nice little tip. I never would have thought of doing that. Yeah, it's a great tip. Yeah, thank you, Jonah, for that. Don wrote in in response to our discussion of cosmic rays flipping bits in ships yesterday and said, I've worked in the automotive software industry for more than 20 years, including much of that in safety electronics, primarily airbag electronics. In the last 10 years or so, there has been a new standard for safety products and features called ISO 26262. This standard drives requirements for safety critical functions to be able to deal with things like bit flips. Many of the automotive microcontrollers have design features at the silicon level that minimize the likelihood that a single radiation particle will be able to short bits together by physically separating the bits in the design and then using error correction code to detect and likely fix single bit flips so that it doesn't get to the software. Many of these microcontrollers also use lockstep dual core controllers to detect localized errors, allowing the system to react more appropriately than just passing bad data to the software. So we mentioned yesterday that error correction software really keeps this from being a problem more often, but it was really nice of Don to write in and say like, yeah, I have direct experience with one example of that and giving us the details. Thank you, Don. Indeed. Thanks so much to everybody who wrote in. We got a lot of email over the last 24 hours. We're really appreciated. Always can't get to them all on this show, but do keep them coming. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Also, thanks to you, Lamar Wilson, for being with us today and making the show sunnier than ever. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Yeah, you can go to lamarwilson.com and have all my links to all my social things. Upcoming video I'm going to be doing is talking about the Apple Ultra watch. I sprung for it. I'm in love with it. I thought it would be too big and everything. Try it on the store. Oh, my God, it feels like a completely different watch. I can type on it better. It's a great screen. And so look for that coming up soon. And also, somebody tries to kidnap me because I'm beautiful. I can press this button here and it'll let everybody. Yeah, they want to watch your 82-inch TV now, too. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. Yeah, make sure you don't come to my house. Do that. Don't do it. Thank you. Lamar was waiting for y'all. Thanks to our brand new bosses, Carl and Patrick. We always love to give some love to our new patrons. Thank you, Carl. Thank you, Patrick. And by the way, two items to note here. One is Amos was taking me to task because I tripped up and called our holiday card a gift card. It's not a gift. You can't spend it anywhere. It's not a gift card. It's a holiday card. But Carl and Patrick can get one now because they're patrons. So you can get that holiday card. And second, don't forget the puppies can swim. So when they go in the lake, they'll, you know. They're wearing water wings. Come on. Exactly. They're not monsters. Yeah. Patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet, which we call GDI for short. You can catch the show, this here show, Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. And you can find out more on how to do that at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. We'd love to have you join us live if you can. We'll be back tomorrow talking AMDs, just announce RDNA 3, GPU with Scott Johnson and Will Smith. Talk to you then.