 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Michelle Serju, Kirk Stephenson, Ms. Music Teacher, and a Libertarian. On this episode of DTNS, robots are training themselves to be better at tasks, what Tesla's earnings mean for EVs in general. And Molly Wood tells us how to electrify Los Angeles. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, October 20th. My brother's birthday. Happy birthday, Tim. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Ghost Pepper, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, the home of Travis Kelsey, I'm Anne Peralta. From Oakland, California, I'm Molly Wood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I don't know which I'm more curious about. Len's mentioning Travis Kelsey or Studio Ghost Pepper. Oh, I'll tell you all about it. OK. In GDI, but you're going to have to get through some tech news first. Let's get right to it then. Starting with the quick hits. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved petitions by Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta, among other companies, to let them use the six gigahertz band for wireless devices using very low power, sometimes known as VLP operations. For example, an in-car connection or maybe AR glasses. Wi-Fi 6E uses the six gigahertz brand band. Devices can also use higher power levels if they're geofenced to keep from interfering with actual licensed six gigahertz usage. The FCC now moves into taking comments on other ways it can expand six gigahertz spectrum usage by devices of all sorts. Nintendo launched Super Mario Brothers Wonder on Friday to pretty much rave reviews out there. And if you don't already know the Super Mario this time is in 2D, it's a side scroller. Now, the obvious analysis would be to say, oh, it's a play on nostalgia, which it is. The cynical analysis would say it's a way to save cost and development, which it might be, though there's a lot more sophistication in these kinds of 2D games than the ones we are familiar with from the 1980s and 90s. But whatever the reason, it appears to be something gamers enjoy and Nintendo is not alone in taking advantage of it. Sonic Superstars also launched into this week. India's Central Bureau of Investigation, the CBI, rated 76 locations across the country this week as part of Operation Chakra 2. The aim was to dismantle tech support scams that impersonate Microsoft and Amazon in order to fool customers around the world into giving them money. The operation shut down and seized equipment, websites and bank accounts for two such systems. Ex-Chairman Elon Musk posted on X that the platform will launch two paid tiers. Musk wrote, one is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads and the other is more expensive, but has no ads. No other details or official announcements were posted. As we mentioned earlier in the week, X is testing a $1 per year plan for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines in an attempt, it says, to reduce the number of bots on the platform. Meanwhile, Slack became the latest company to retire its customer service account on X. Communications around uptime and other issues will no longer be posted on its Slack status account. Issues will instead be posted at Slack's main status page and through Slack's RSS and Adam feeds. The privacy centric browser Brave has been downloading VPN services to some Windows customers, computers without their consent. All right. So here's the deal since two two thousand twenty two. Installing the Brave browser on Windows includes the company's firewall plus VPN service, which is something you have to pay for but stays dormant unless you specifically subscribe to it. Brave says it plans to change this install process going forward, but didn't offer a timeline as to when that would happen. For now, you can uninstall the apps in question. Brave VPN and Brave Wire Guard are both of those. But updating the browser would likely reinstate them until Brave itself changes things internally. All right, robots are getting smarter. But how, Sarah, tell us. Oh, Tom, I'm glad you asked. Nvidia Eureka, that's powered by GPT for trained robots to do around 30 tasks. You might say, well, don't robots do that anyway? Yeah, but these are kind of special. The training was done by having the robot software simulate the tasks repeatedly. Then the large language model evaluated them and reinforced improvements. This let training that might otherwise take days, take minutes. This includes things like a robot spinning a pen, the way a human might do, you know, through their digits, open drawers, use scissors, catch a ball, stuff that is very specific. Quadruped robots, dexterous hand robots, you know, a variety of other robots that do specific things were all said to have a lot of success with these tasks. Nvidia found the system was 80% more effective than training programs for robots written by humans, and that robot performance improved by 50%. Robots teaching robots apparently is a thing. You can try the Eureka algorithms in Nvidia's physics simulation app, Isaac Jim. Now going along with this, Meta's fundamental artificial intelligence research team or FAIR also updated its robot training simulation environment. First it updated its simulation data set habitat. Habitat 3.0 adds human avatars to help simulate how humans might either get in the way or help with robot tasks. They mentioned cleaning as an example. So you simulate a robot going around cleaning and then you can put a human in there and walk in their way or maybe help scrub down stuff like that. If the robot needs to stay near a human to hear requests that might be another scenario it could use. There's also a new database of more realistic interiors called HSSD 200. That improves the simulation of how interiors actually work. And you can take that into the real world with a robot software stack called Home Robot, which works for open vocabulary, mobile manipulation devices, including Boston Dynamics Spot Robot, and Hello Robots Stretch Robot. Habitat and Home Robot are available under an MIT license at Meta's GitHub pages and HSSD 200 is published under a Creative Commons non-commercial license. So we have better ways to train robots from NVIDIA. We have some better ways to train robots to do stuff from Meta and better ways to get that training into actual robots. Molly, does this sound fun to you? Does it sound useful? I know I'm like, what do you want me to say here? Just so many ways to die? I don't want to go so obvious with it. However, I want a robot to clean my house. So we're in this kind, you know, it's like the automatic response here, especially when I see it spinning the pen like that. I mean, that kind of dexterity is something that researchers have been trying to figure out with robots for decades and decades and decades. So it's like a crazy impressive technological achievement to see that. I have had Roombas for years, be mediocre and mid. And so I like the fact that they always roll this out with like a robot that will clean your house before it kills you. So I look forward to the brief, happy time where the robot cleans my house. Let's be fair, it'll clean after two to cover its tracks. Will it? Why bother? Really? Yeah, at that point, there might not be any enforcement. Now that's a smart robot. That's a smart robot. Yeah. All kidding aside, this is pretty significant. Really impressive. Yeah, my take on this in my Substack newsletter was that these are the kinds of advancements that you just don't feel unless you're working in the space. But if you're watching, like we all are, it's worth realizing like this is a big leap forward. The reason we don't have spot robots roaming around in your neighborhood right now is because they're really hard to train. And so you can train them to do a thing, it's pretty limited and they're kind of expensive because of that. So they're useful, but they're not widely useful. This is the kind of thing if you can speed up training that much. If you can allow the wide variety of training that this can allow and actually move it into actual robots in the real world like the MetaStuff does, suddenly you start to have that explosion of people using it for things that we hadn't really thought about using because you don't have to plan for it. You can just try stuff. We're not quite yet at the it can generate cats level that AI was a few years ago, but we're getting close. We are. I don't think we it is possible. It is not possible to overstate the importance of simulation across the sort of technological universe. You know, this is how we're going to get to materials development, drug discovery, like this is sort of all of the stuff that everybody talks about. And they usually say quantum computing is how we get there. But we're to the point now with NVIDIA's chip sets, which by the way, it designs using simulation on its own chipsets and generative AI, where the just time to market and time to discovery is so sped up that, you know, it's easy to get distracted by the robot flipping a pen, but it's this is major. I mean, this is a this is a loose comparison, but I kind of think about like, OK, so we've got all these robots that apparently are getting smarter and smarter and able to do much more dexterous things than ever achieved before. And I think like, OK, well, humans and robots are not the same breed. But like, let's say you have a bunch of young adults graduate from some, I don't know, you know, associate degree, where we're all supposed to know the same thing. Well, your mileage may vary, right? Because humans are really unpredictable. I feel like with something like this, when it comes to cleaning your house, you know, working in a warehouse, that sort of thing, having more precise knowledge and also being really predictable is why the robots are going to win here. Not saying that, you know, humans will lose as, you know, as part of that. But it it takes a lot of the guessing out of, you know, the personalization of all of this. That's my optimistic way to view the story, I guess. Yeah, yeah. No, that's a really good point. Like it it makes it makes it easier to imagine using it, right? If you don't have to be like, OK, let me adapt to this robot. Like, what's their mood like today? Right. You know, you know, where did they grow up? Home life? We are about to talk about cars. And so I'll get there. But, you know, I will say that despite these advances and the power of these simulations. I will see if it actually gets there once you move out of the simulation into the real world. And the reason I mentioned cars is that self driving cars are a perfect example of like a technology that seemed like it would work great until it encountered snow and pedestrians and buses and Uber, you know, drunk girls getting into Ubers. So like it the robot might in fact get moody once it gets into your house and sees the dog or something. You know, like, right, right. We'll imagine a robot just kind of saying like, you know what, this is not what I signed up for. I asked. Yeah, this is way too dirty. I've got some other calls to make and how do you live like this? Just seriously. Well, as Molly mentioned, we are going to talk about automotive stuff. So here's some good news for Tesla and Toyota and Toyota's luxury brand, Lexus, they're going to adopt the North American charging standard. That's the one that's used by Tesla superchargers. And ACS ports will go into Toyota's cars starting in 2025. So we got a couple of years ahead of us, but we're getting there. And Toyota, well, I guess just a year now and Toyota will offer adapters to existing car owners to make it easier to adopt this as well. Toyota, Jones, BMW, GM, Ford, Hyundai and Honda and adopting the NS NA CS standard. Volkswagen and Stellantis are the last major holdouts in this increasingly interesting market. So that's the good news. Tom, let's talk about earnings. Yes, the rest of the news. Tesla announced its earnings Wednesday. They missed earnings and sales estimates. Elon Musk warned that the cyber truck won't see positive cash flow for more than a year after it launches. It's expected to launch November 30th and remarked and I quote, we dug our own grave with cyber truck. Tesla's CFO mentioned a lot of cost cutting efforts, which was not necessarily music to everyone's ears. Musk said, we have to make our cars more affordable, hinting that more price cuts might be on the way. Definitely something investors did not want to hear. Musk also mentioned the challenge of high interest rates several times. Wedbush security analyst, Dan Ives, who I've seen quotes from Dan Ives over the years. He's not prone to hyperbole called this a mini disaster. Molly, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this and EVs in general. What's your take? I do. I think we've been sort of waiting for the earnings call that came after actual competition in the EV market, right? Like all and you know me, it personally is hard for me to say all credit, 100%, all credit to Tesla for creating a market for electric cars in the United States. And they were in a perfectly privileged position of being basically the game, you know, the only game in town. And it still is kind of like default behavior, I think, for most people when they're about to make that switch to an EV, they're like, well, I guess I'm going to get a Tesla. They don't, you know, I mean, there is a lot of competition on the market, but they're not necessarily thinking about it. But there isn't. But what's interesting about these earnings is that Tesla took all of the margin cushion that they have had as a result of selling these cars at a really high price. Use that margin cushion and the super high stock price to finance massive price cuts on every model and particularly the Model 3. And I had a friend point out to me recently, and this is 100% true, that when you factor in the supercharging network, that's what actually makes a Tesla such a great deal. And yet they still didn't sell as many as they thought they were going to for all of the reasons, right? The interest rates, Elon himself, which of course isn't coming up, but is a real, it's enough of it like when you pile it on to the, you know, when you put that factor on the pile along with all of the other things, you just sort of start to get this like, death by a thousand paper cuts and there's a lot of genuine competition on the road. And what we might be seeing, this is why I think the price conversation about this is so interesting. What we might be seeing is that people are willing to pay a premium. I mean, certainly they are because they're early adopters of EVs, but they might also be willing to pay more to like not have a Tesla for whatever reason, whether it's Elon and his personality and all of the like hate speech that he allows and incites in some cases, or it's just wanting to do something different, right? Like not wanting to look like every other car on the road. I'm in the San Francisco barrier where I've started to associate the Model 3 with like an Uber. It's like a taxi, you know how like for a while every Prius was a taxi or vice versa. It feels like that now. Oh yeah. And then I think, and then the last thing about this, I will say is I think it's really interesting. It's interesting to like the prices of EVs have to come down to popularized EVs, but it's very interesting to see a company like Tesla which has been more like Apple pursue or at least Hintet pursuing what is basically an Android strategy. Like are you gonna make it really inexpensive and low margin so that it's everywhere? And is that a winner? Yeah. And Tesla does have a service revenue model. I'm not sure how good it is, but it's not like they don't have a way to continue to make money off cars later with charging for firmware updates and services and things like that, charging for self-driving features. I know BMW gets a lot of the heat for wanting to, was it BMW that wanted to try to charge for the seat? Oh yes. Yeah, yeah. For everything. BMW was one that rolled back and said, you know what, never mind. I think they're still doing it in some markets, but they rolled back in others. But yeah, Tesla's been doing that. They've been saying you've got a capability in your car that you can only unlock if you pay. My point here, not to get into that whole thorny nest, but to say like they have other revenue sources. So it's not crazy for them to think, well, if we get enough cars on the road, we could actually make revenue off those cars. I do think probably Molly, the best argument you made was that competition. Competition has come for them. First mover advantage doesn't last forever and there's plenty of stories out there of the company who did at first disappearing or being acquired by an incumbent company. I mean, look at all the dot-coms that traditional media gobbled up and turned into their own thing. Disney.com was built on acquiring a bunch of other dot-coms. Everybody forgets that. So, you know, Tesla could be in danger of that if they're not careful. True, absolute true story. Earlier today, someone who knows, I don't know, less about EVs than I do, which is really saying something. I got a text from them and they said, you ever heard of this company Lucid? I said, yeah, I've heard. They go, well, what a cool car. To me, that's what I felt about Tesla's back in the day. And Tesla's still are very cool looking cars. Trust me, I wouldn't say no. But they're, yeah, like you said, Molly, they're ubiquitous. They're everywhere. It's not like a, whoa, that sort of thing that you're still seeing on the highway. And a lot of other companies still are that novelty, like, oh, it's not a Tesla, it's, oh, a very interesting, cool, sleek, probably expensive EV. But yeah, you get more competition and things start changing. And I just still feel like investors, whether retail or institutional, like Wall Street is still gonna, at the end of the day, if it were me as an investor, I would want margin over incremental additional revenue. Because margin you can count on. You don't know, like people are gonna pull back on that extra spending, right? Like relying on, you don't see Apple being like, we make enough on services now that we're gonna lower the price of the phone. No. Because the thing you wanna count on is getting that big, bad margin at the point of purchase. And so I can see why investors are looking at this, being like, wait, are you gonna make this a cheap commodity product? Because that is a big change and they don't like it. And the other thing Tesla was for a long time was the next thing, right? It was an electric sports car. Then it was an electric SUV. Then it was an electric sedan that maybe not affordable, but certainly more affordable than a sports car. The next thing is the Cybertruck, which he just said was a mistake. Was it a dud? He doesn't have the next thing. Yep. Well, and they haven't redesigned those cars in a decade. Yeah. I mean, that like does not happen. By the way, I do wanna add to the list of cars that have announced they're adopting that charging standard, also a Polestar, the one that I have to like my little, my little redheaded stepchild that's always overlooked. Very good. No, that's not overly Polestar. I'm glad you added that. Well, folks, Tom's top five is the, I think third generation. Fourth generation of a top five show that I've done throughout my career. And I'm having a blast doing it. Roger and I put it together every week. This week, the top five failed floppy disk replacements. Roger dug deep to find all those attempts to replace the floppy disk, which eventually replaced itself. It just disappeared. But there were some pretty interesting attempts to try to replace the floppy disk throughout the eighties and nineties. The companies and the technologies they hoped would replace the floppy disk as the new industry standard is the topic of the top five and you can catch it at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. All right, Molly Wood on this week's episode of everybody in the pool. You talked to the president of the Los Angeles CleanTech Incubator, a nonprofit organization that works to help fund clean tech companies. They have an interesting goal for the 2028 Olympics, which are sort of right around the corner at this point and also coming to Los Angeles. We wanna talk about the idea of accelerating this kind of development. So let's start with the goal. What is the goal and why do companies care? Yeah, this is a super interesting, this is just a really interesting organization because it's sort of like spun out of the actual city. I'm a big fan of cities and local action. I think you can like, you know, we always want nations to solve our problems or whatever. And it turns out that a lot of times it happens with like mayors. And so this spun out of a kind of mayoral initiative. But what I like about this story and this conversation is that this is organization, you know, LA won the bid for the Olympics in I think like 2016 or 2017. And they said, okay, as we know, a lot of times when the Olympics come to town, it's like not always great for the city. You know, you end up with a bunch of infrastructure being built at a huge cost and maybe a big carbon cost and greenhouse gas emission cost and then they're stranded. And so you have this sort of like blight and all these various problems. And so the Olympics themselves, the games themselves have been trying to address this. But then Lacey, this organization, Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator said, well, okay, what if we use that 2028 deadline as just a push, a huge catalyst to try to decarbonize Los Angeles? Like electrify the entire grid and get 80% of the cars and trucks on the road to be electric. And it was wild, like it was extremely aggressive, but they kind of brought all these different organizations together and they've actually in the, you know, four or five years since they announced gotten to 25% electric adoption. They've done all this work to roll out specifically light and heavy duty truck electrification and they're modeling how to use renewable energy to generate, they call it a virtual power plant that will generate enough renewable energy to basically equal the footprint of the games themselves. And they're not officially affiliated with the Olympics, but they are talking with the LA 28 committee to sort of try to encourage them. And apparently the Olympics said, yeah, we're not building, LA and the Olympics were like, we're not building any new infrastructure for this. So they want to get a fleet of electric buses and all of these things so that when people come, they can move around in this low carbon way. And it's just kind of a cool twist. So not build a new stadium, you know, obviously LA has a lot of that stuff already. I know I'm getting into maybe some Olympic weeds, but that's pretty unusual. Usually every city who's hosting the Olympics is making, you know, four years in advance, you know, huge, you know, not only stadiums, but I don't know, housing, infrastructure, roads, you know, all that stuff. And you know, to the point where sometimes years later, people go, well, what was all that for? Not really using that anymore. It's kind of a waste. Totally. I mean, they can't do that much about the fact that everybody flies there. So I did some research on the Olympics and their carbon emissions because they do have this like sustainability goal. And they did determine that the Tokyo Olympics in 2022, I guess, were the most sustainable Olympics, mainly because it was during COVID and like 110,000 fewer people flew there. And so many fewer people that they were like, oh, the carbon budget was way better. But it's true though, like a lot of times all of this stuff gets constructed, then gets abandoned, you know, doesn't, isn't always sometimes it's torn up quickly. Maybe repurposed, but maybe not. That's usually not even something that anyone's having a conversation about before. I just loved it. I just thought it was like such an interesting story. And then I thought it was cool for, you know, this organization to basically say, let's use this as a catalyst because that has happened in the past where the Olympics either catalyzed like good economic development for cities, which was the original goal, you know, about moving it around, but also to just sort of say like, let's try to put our best foot forward as a city also when people come here so that it's not a negative outcome for the city or a negative impression in terms of like smog and, you know, gas guzzling diesel trucks up and down corridors, which we know already are polluting like poorer neighborhoods and have all those other negative externalities attached to them. Yeah, and I think it's easy, especially if somebody lives in Los Angeles to look at this and go, while they're not making very good progress, that support of the line isn't looking like it's coming to my neighborhood anytime soon, et cetera, et cetera. But what I'd like about it, the other, you know, if you're not gonna let perfect be the enemy of the good here is that there is a lot of progress that seems to have been made that would not have been made otherwise. Yep, I think that's true. I think they were able to say, you know, and it's just so, I find this kind of like systems level change so interesting. It's like what, again, they're in no way are they affiliated with the games themselves. They just were able to say, this is coming. It's a good reason. It's a good deadline, right? Right, it's a deadline. Like, oh, okay, everybody, let's get on board with this because there's a deadline. Awesome, it's working. Makes a big difference. All right, well, let's, you know what? We weren't gonna do this, but I think we're gonna do it after all. So let's check the log. John in Hot and Sunny, Vietnam was talking about our discussion we had yesterday with Nika Monford about DNA data and that data not always being super, super locked down. John says, hacks happen. It's not data you can change. However, just to argue the case rather for the other side, those providers do allow you to sequence your DNA data, download it to your computer then delete it from their servers. At this point, you have some options. Prometheus, John uses as an example. Here, you can upload your data, get a thorough report of the known research that is relevant given your specific DNA. Are you at increased risk for lung cancer, for example? That might shape where you live or who you date. Yes, you're sharing your DNA, but again, you can delete it after you get what you want from it. The real question becomes how much do you trust that they do what they say they're going to do? And John, I think you're really hitting it on the head on this one. One of Facebook's many scandals was when a security researcher deleted his account then about a year later, after that, there was the data breach and that researcher's data was in that breach. So Facebook, now Metta, seemed to be lying by saying that they deleted the data maybe they just didn't do it right. I for one, tend to see the benefits we can get from knowing more about ourselves as worth the risk. However, I know I'm trusting that some people are actually deleting my data when I tell them to do so. The risks are there, but the benefits are also significant. All right, thank you, John, well written. And thank you, Len Peralta, for illustrating today's show. We gave you lots of things that you could run with. Which one did you use? Robots, you gotta love robots, right? And I love the fact that these robots are doing crazy things like juggling and opening doors and spinning stuff. It's so awesome. However, I think there are some robots that would be a little bit upset that they've been, I mean, think about Robocop here for a second. He has some prime directives and his prime directives are now serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law, and number four, spin pencils like a bleeping clown. So, there you go. That is, by the way, it's my second 80s reference in two weeks, so I'm pretty happy about that. I like it, I like it. Yeah, you can get this right now at my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len, if you go and back at the DTNS lower level, this is yours to have. Or you can go the old fashioned way and get it at my online store, LenPeraltaStore.com, where I am taking orders for those custom drawn Christmas cards, holiday cards. So, go ahead and get your order in today. Awesome. Holiday season. It is coming up. LenPeralta. Also thanks to you, Molly Wood, for being with us. Molly Friday was fun as usual. Let folks know where else they can keep up with your work. Thank you. Oh my God, this show is such a blast. EverybodyInThePool.com is my climate solution podcast, which now is also a website. That's right, we're all, we're growing up. We're growing up over here. And then you can find my sub stack at mollywood.co. I did manage at long last to publish a damn newsletter. I'm still doing it. It's all the rage. Exactly. I am no longer on X for no good reason, except for how much it sucks. So you can finally find me at Molly Wood Pro on Instagram and Mastodon and threads. Well, thank you patrons. That's one of the reasons we're able to have Molly Fridays on the show. And if you are a patron, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. It's time for a round of who am I. Roger has researched great people in history whose work still impacts technology on us today. Come play along with us as we try to guess who it is one clue at a time. And also studio ghost peppers mystery. You can also catch the show live. We do a DTNS Monday through Friday. If you know, you know, but if you don't, 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC is where you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live has some information as well. We hope y'all have a real nice weekend. We'll be back on Monday with Justin Robert Young 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 co-host Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coons, technical producer Anthony Lamos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos. Science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W.S. Goddess One, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, 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 adds support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeal. Contributors for this week's shows included Chris Ashley, Patrick Norton, Scott Johnson, Nika Monford and Molly Wood. And thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.