 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including John Atwood, Pat, Mike Cortez, a shout out sponsored by Matt Zaglin for Grover T. Muldoon, plus two new patrons, Jamie and Joe Catskill. On this episode of DTNS, I think ARC solved AI and search. Am I right? Plus, why are robot vacuums still not that good? And Chris Ashley gets the conversation started on electric battery generators. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 29th, twenty twenty four in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and rocking down too close to your nation's capital. I'm your boy, Chris Ashley. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. You are our representative to the nation's capital from Daily Tech. You should. That's right. I take it all. Bring it to me. Exactly. All right. Let's get right into the Monday News with the Quick Kits. We talked last week about efforts to stop people from posting or at least being able to find some lewd, deep faked videos of Taylor Swift on X. We mentioned that the Deep Fakes originated in a telegram group that made videos like this regularly using Microsoft Designer. Now, we didn't talk about the fact that Microsoft doesn't make that easy. It blocks a lot of these kinds of creations, but members of these groups have figured out workarounds, alternate spellings, keyword hacks, things like that to get around those safeguards. 404 Media reports that Designer now stops users from creating any kind of celebrity face. You put Ariana Grande or Chris Ashley in there. It's just not going to come up with anything. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is also going to appear on NBC Nightly News in the United States on Tuesday to discuss what else Microsoft is doing to combat deep fakes like this. Interesting. Well, Watchmaker Fossil announced it will stop making Wear OS watches altogether. Yeah, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Boyer told The Verge we have made the strategic decision to exit the smartwatch business. That makes the 2021 Gen 6 the last Fossil smartwatch. Fossil says it will keep the existing watches updated for the next few years. So translation, get new watches. Wearables is still growing, though. So is this a more about Fossil than it does about smartwatches? I would think so. I think just Amazon and, I mean, sorry, Android and Apple are just killing it. Last week, we reported that the George Carlin estate is suing the makers of Doodzy over that YouTube special, the hour long YouTube special that was hosted by an AI version of George Carlin. One of the contentions in the lawsuit is that copyright was infringed when Doodzy or the makers of Doodzy trained the model on George Carlin's copyrighted works. So the best defense against that accusation, if you're the Doodzy folks, would be to admit there was no training, right? Well, a spokeswoman for the Doodzy folks told The New York Times, quote, the YouTube video I'm glad I'm dead was completely written by Chad Kultgen. Chad's one of the co-hosts of the podcast that has Doodzy on it. That's pretty unequivocal. That's that's not a lot of weasel words there. They said it was completely written by Chad Kultgen. That will now have to be proven in a court of law, because it's actually in the Carlin estate's best interest to prove that the special was not entirely written by a human, but in fact, generated by a machine that was trained on Carlin's works. Unless they prove that Chad studied Carlin's lines and used that as their basis, then they could probably say unless they can prove that Chad was an AI. You get good point. Another tactic. Good news, though. Remember, we told you about Japan's slim, a.k.a. smart lander of investigating the moon, which landed upside down so its solar panels weren't pointed at the sun. Well, the sun's position in the lunar sky has got to the point that it's hitting the solar panels and charged battery. Slim lives. Science operations have started and they have the first photo from slim itself of a nearby rock that looks like a toy poodle. If you squint really hard anyway. The two probes, Lev one and Lev two that successfully were launched from slim on landing have the Ginn investigations as have begun their investigations as well. That's good. That's good. All right. I've been rooting for slim. I was sad that it it actually technically struck a precision landing. It just did it upside down, which that's a higher difficulty level. I feel right as a handstand. Yeah. Finally, Therat is one of the few outlets that notice something positive tucked in a way in all of Apple's announcements about changes to its developer policies last week. We are guilty of that of everyone in focusing most of our attention on the third party app stores and direct downloads and Apple requiring you to still share revenue, even if you don't go through the app store and all that, but also changed. Apple now says and here we'll quote the developer guidelines. Developers can now submit a single app with the capability to stream all of the games offered in their catalog. Apps will also be able to provide enhanced discovery opportunities for streaming games and that change is worldwide. That's not just an EU change in slightly related news. Apple News Bloomberg's Mark German says iOS 18, the next version of iOS, is quote seen within the company as one of the biggest iOS updates, if not the biggest in the company's history. So it looks like it'll be a fun WWDC this June, Chris. How cool. And one side note, one of my favorite tech pictures of all time, Mr. Therat himself getting ready to plant one on my cheek. That's a good picture. Make that happen again. You can't recreate that easily anyway. Also, big news today, Amazon will not acquire Roomba Maker iRobot after it became clear they weren't going to get approval from the EU. The European Commission found that the acquisition was likely to restrict competition from iRobots rivals as Amazon controls such a dominant section of retail sales. And there just wasn't anything Amazon could do to say, well, what if we agreed to this? What if we agreed to that? The EC was just like, no, you're too motivated to not abide by those. So we're just not going to approve the deal. iRobot as a result will engage in another round of layoffs, not its first one in the past year. This time they will be letting go 350 people, including CEO and chair Colin Engel. Executive Vice President Glenn Weinstein is going to take over as temporary CEO. The company will also pause work on all of its non-floor care products. So they have vacuums and they also have some scrubbers and things, but they've been developing air purifiers and a lawnmower. So they're going to end that. They're just going to stick the vacuums and scrubbers to reduce costs. Amazon is going to pay iRobot a $94 million termination fee. But in a company that size, that's that's not enough to cover all of its cost cutting and it's not an ongoing payment. It's just the one time fee. Tech crunches, Brian Heater asked a pertinent question in his article about all this is the future of the home robot in jeopardy. I Chris, I think that's a great question because what this means is that iRobot saw being acquired by Amazon as a way to protect its profitability and allow it to continue to develop things. And without that shield, it doesn't see itself as profitable enough to continue to do research and development and expand into new arenas, which then made me think how much has the Roomba even changed in the past 20 years? It's been around for 20 years now, and it's not all that much different than it was 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, we were using iPods like we didn't even have iPhones yet. So there there are a lot of products that have made bigger advances than the than the robot vacuum. Yeah, I'm starting to wonder if this is one of those cases where we just got out of head and got lazy because, you know, if you think about the one major thing that changed is the price went up and up and up in this. I've been watching these things for a long time. This is one of like those guilty pleasure gifts that I want to get for myself and just never pull the trigger because, you know, if I hire my cleaning lady, she comes out for one hundred and twenty five bucks. This thing is ridiculously expensive. And I think that is the major problem because you would think if you want to drive adoption, you need to get it into more households and to get it into more households, you need to drive the price down, not up. Yeah. So, you know, how they have not done this is crazy to me. Yeah. And I think the capability has been slow to come, although we are with all of these generative models at the point. And we saw a lot of people pitching this at CES where the robots can be smarter that can do a lot of things that the Roomba couldn't do before. So right as they're hitting these skids, we are getting the kinds of tools that could at least make them better than they have been at avoiding obstacles and figuring out where the dirt is and mapping your layouts and all that. Yeah. But that's not going to bring the price down necessarily. If anything, it might bring the price up if you have to go to the cloud to use it. So I think you're right. I think it's just we're waiting on that innovation that makes this more efficient and therefore able to be sold for cheap. Yeah, I'm looking at their website right now. Some of these, I mean, 799, 899 and 1399. And I know that even shark jumped out there a little bit with the, you know, I think they have the somewhat lower price point, but not that much because Samsung's got one out there too. And you can find cheaper robot vacuums, but then they aren't reviewed. They're reviewed at the level of spending a couple hundred dollars versus several hundred dollars, right? Yeah, for sure. And yeah, and I'm wondering what other innovation they would put into flooring. You know, it's not going to strip and relax the floors. Or maybe it should. There's some waxing actually that I have seen. But yeah, I don't think they the stripping for you. The Ufi Robovac is the choice of wire cutter and that's two hundred fifty dollars. See, see that that right there is all you need to see why these guys might be looking to get bought out. And, you know, Amazon, I'm sure was not buying it because they want to help people clean their clean their houses. All right. Simply, there's got to be some more personal data available that you know, with the mapping of the households and stuff like that. I think we talked about this when they first made this announcement. So I'm actually shocked that it didn't go through because I was starting to think that none of these deals get blocked anymore. I feel the opposite. I feel like we're seeing more deals get blocked than we used to. I mean, Microsoft didn't get blocked, but it had to work. It was hard at it. And this is one where in the past, I would have expected Amazon to be able to say, like, OK, we'll agree not to preference iRobots products in our Amazon search for 10 years. And the EU would have been like, OK, great, we'll be auditing that. And that would have been that. But instead, EC just put a hard line of like, even if you agree to that, you're you're you're not going to be motivated to do it. We just think it's a bad precedent. So I feel like the the line is starting to get harder. I hope so. I hope so. Because, you know, the other option is the Amazon basics. Vacuum robot. Yeah. Robo rock is another one. It's like four to seven hundred. So it's still in the price here. But it's not quite serious here. But yeah, I don't see why there can't be a $99 version of this bad boy that literally just bounces off your walls. It's got super rubberized outside. So yeah, it's not going to be as smart as the other ones, but it's not going to destroy your your toes and your furniture either. Just bounce around, do your thing and go park. While we wait for someone to to find the big innovation in robot vacuums or robotics in general, I mean, we didn't even get into the fact that like we've had Astro from Amazon and all these other attempts to bring you a home robot. None of those have caught on either again, super expensive things. Here's something that does seem to have finally solved something that was promising, but nobody had delivered on. The browser company has a new iOS app out called Arc Search. Now it's called Arc Search right now because search is its big main feature. They say that eventually it'll just be called the Arc app. It is the Arc browser on iOS. It can do a straight Google search for you and it can also just browse to a website for you. But if you are typing in a search and instead of pressing return, you choose the browse for me button. A machine model will then look for relevant websites, interpret the info on those websites and create a page of information for you to satisfy your query. So I did a search for when is the Super Bowl? That's going to be the top search term in a week. I get a splash page from Arc Search that shows me what web sources it was looking at. And then after several seconds, so this isn't as fast as a search. I get a page that says when is the Super Bowl? 2024 tells me the date February 11th, 2024. The time 3 30 p.m. Pacific because it knows I'm in Pacific time, so it gives me Pacific first. It tells me where it is in Las Vegas. It tells me the teams based on yesterday's games. It tells me the halftime performer is usher. It then shows me some links to top search results followed by more details on those initial pieces of information. If I want to find out a little more like, you know, when is pregame start versus when did the game start? It tells me where it sourced all this stuff from. And I also did other searches. And in those other searches, I got a dive deeper section with links to more stories. So I was set, Chris, to go into this thing and say, you know, the Arc browser, it's like the modern day opera. Like it's very cool. It has its vertical tabs on the side, but it's kind of a hipster thing. Not everybody's going to love it, even if it is technically superior. I looked at this mobile app and I was like, this works. This this thing, it may not be perfect. It's not, but it works way better than I expected. Oh, I'm definitely about to be using this thing a lot. And my initial reaction was it was extremely intuitive, which is which is a big plus, right? Because if you're looking at it, you're not exactly sure what you're doing. But, you know, the button, I wish they made the browse for me button a little bit more obvious. But, you know, when you hit it and you just get this array of information, it's like, whoa, this, this is doing like 30 searches in one that I would normally have to do. It gave me a great summary because I actually search for a generator generator inverters and it gave me like the top generator inverter. That's the top ranked generator inverter. It gave me why people liked it. It said it gave me like a typical price range, even though the price range was a bit vast, but it did give me a price range of what I could expect to spend. And it just gave me an array of information that at the very least would get me well, probably like, you know, an hour or two into searching for this type of information, a jumpstart, you know what I mean? So I really like that aspect of it. And then as I looked at it more, I realized that these guys have an opportunity to save our social interactions, I think, big time. And it's something that they're wrestling with, but for me, it's pretty simple. If these guys keep the information strictly off a search and keep the personalization out of it, I think they have a chance to eliminate one of our big problems in our search engines today, which is this confirmation bias that keeps showing up. Because it's not personalized. Instead of showing you what you want to see, it just shows you a more, quote, unquote, objective result. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. It's looking for, you give it a search term and say, here's the top results of information that I was able to find. Here you go. We don't care what you looked at before. I don't care what you think is the information right here. And I look at that as a huge opportunity because I like, I like the position that they're in, right? They're like, hey, we're going to combine all these different type of searches for you, we're going to aggregate this information for you and present it to you right up front. And if people can get on board with that and be like, you know what? This search engine is not giving me their hocus pocus on it. They just give me the raw information, which I think a lot of people do enjoy having the ability to have their information presented to them without a bunch of fluff. So I think you've got to have an opportunity to wade through a bunch of SEO game to links, right? Right. And that that overlaps with what you're talking about, because some of the bubble stuff that you're talking about isn't even just because of personalization. It's also because people are like, when people are searching for this term, they believe this. So let's let's throw them like a, you know, a clickbait headline. And this circumvets that and says, well, that's clickbait headline. We're not going to bother with that, but we're going to show you reasonable sources that are reliable. And the question is, can it do it well? And I've only been using it this morning, but so far it does it really well. I've tried it with some niche searches of my own that usually end up failing on Google and it handled them really well. Yeah, it was able to say like, oh, yeah, these are the niche sources that are reliable. I recognize them all instead of me having to wade through a hundred results on Google and go, OK, there's the one I'm looking for. There's the one I'm looking for. This found them for me. Well, I had the same experience because I've been, you know, doing generator searches for like the last three weeks. And the information that it presented was pretty much the conclusion I came to over that time frame. So I felt like it was pretty accurate as far as I was able to corroborate what it was telling me. So I thought that aspect of it was really, really cool. Now, there's some UI things I hope they add to because I feel like each result should be actionable as opposed to going all the way to the bottom for to find the more information. But, you know, because I was like mashing each each section. I was like, give me more, give me more. And, you know, I was like, oh, it's at the bottom. But, you know, that's just a UI thing that they can do pretty easily. But it's pretty new. So that's, yeah, yeah. But I am going to start using this really heavily because I just I love the simple presentation. I love no extra ads and fluff and puff. Just give me data so I can run with it and do whatever I want. And then I like the ability to kind of drill down a little further. And because it's a browser, the searches stay in their own page. It's basically creating a web page for you for your search results. So you can go back and refer to them. You can keep them around if it's a topic you're following and reload them and refresh them. The biggest things they're going to have to deal with are the cost of running this. So if they're they're running a machine model in the cloud, that that can rack up costs if it gets popular. And then, of course, once you rack up cost, you need to make money. So how are they going to make money off of this? What's the what's the business plan for it? Do you get people really excited about it? Catch on and then try to make them pay for it. Browser company doesn't seem to be interested in selling ads or monetizing you as a product. So they're limited in what they can do. And then finally, over the long term, you're going to run into the same thing if you get popular enough that Google and Facebook run into, which is news publishers are not too happy about somebody getting in between them and their information. So what about the publishers that are creating all this information that you're scraping and creating this web page? You know, how do you compensate them? How do you bring them in and keep them involved and not cut off their revenue source as well? Because then they'll go out of business and you won't have any information to aggregate anymore. Yeah, those are definitely all legit challenges. These guys are going to have to overcome. I, you know, I'm I always get torn whether pay now or pay later type of innovations because, you know, they clearly both work. But sometimes you get into the point where it starts out free and then all of a sudden you're forced to attempt to keep it free. For me, I would absolutely pay for a what I consider to be a premium search experience. And I think others probably will as well. The problem is, you know, are you locking out the people who need this type of search experience the most? Yeah, you're going to your scale is going to go down real fast if you make people pay for search without some special something coming along. But but people are used to getting that for free. So or maybe they go to Wikipedia model, right? Pay if you want to. Yeah, yeah, maybe they will as I would be something like that or pay for power users. You know, if you want to do more than X number of searches per day or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I love this though. Yeah, I whatever they end up doing to try to figure that out will be interesting. But right now I give them a win on day one. This is this is a useful app for me today, which is not usually what I'm saying. All right, we think we have a useful new show for you today. Apple has lots of power users, has lots of hipster users. But what about the rest of us? Sarah Lane and Eileen Rivera have put together an Apple podcast called Apple Vision Show to talk about whether Apple's vision matches what you want, what they want. Get subscribed right now. Don't miss it. It's getting off the ground today in beta and launches officially next week. So you want to be in there on the ground floor and say, yeah, I was there on the Apple Vision Show from the beginning. Go check it out. AppleVisionShow.com. Interest in home generators as a backup source for electricity has increased not only as climate change has caused power outages to get more frequent, but also just all kinds of reasons that power outages have become more frequent, but also because the prices have come down and they're easier to maintain as they become electric batteries instead of gasoline powered motors or petrol powered motors of various kinds. This year, CES saw a lot of new solar generators and power stations from lots of manufacturers. And we're not setting ourselves up as the experts here, but we are both enthusiastic about this space. So we're going to kind of share our enthusiasm with you. And of course, if you are an expert out in the audience, please let us know feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Chris, you have bought the Anker Solex F3800 portable power station so far. How's it going? And what would you tell people who are like, OK, I'm interested, but what do you find it out so far? OK, so I did grab this thing. And, you know, I was looking to have like some. I've been obsessed with backup power since I was doing I was smoking a couple of briskets and I've gotten to the point where I'm pretty comfortable going to bed and waking up and, you know, taking the meat off and wrapping it or whatever. And I had a power outage and I didn't hook up my backup battery by my small battery to the to my devices. And, yeah, in the first time in a long time, I actually, you know, messed up a brisket. It was salvageable, but I was a super annoyed that, you know, that the power had won out and it didn't alarm when it was time to wrap. So I had started looking at backup capabilities and I started going down this path. And then I saw and on a side note, I'd always been interested in a backup for the house because now that my mother's here and she's older and we're taking care of where a caregiver for her, I want to make sure that we're able to handle any scenario that cops up with that. And then finally running out of power on my truck on my trip to Tennessee back kind of was like, dad, what if I had a back generator that was with me? I could just plug in to him. So all of these things together really got me kind of searching and searching. And I came across the the anchor Solix and then realized that, wow, they're about to drop the F3 800, which is like a full on battery powered generator. And so and then the the EcoFlow had one as well. But I was just kind of a little bit more with anchor. They seem to be on par with each other, but I just went with the anchor. So I would tell people first and foremost, it's it's expensive. So if you're going to go this route, just be prepared to drop some coin. It is definitely expensive initially. But the cool thing is they they're often like a pretty massive discount. And I'm not here to stump for them at all. I'm just telling you what I came across. And so and they give you kind of give you different options of how you apply it. So whether you get the generator itself and then the or you get the generator plus an extra backup battery or you get the generator plus a solar panel. And that's the good really cool thing that I liked about these two options. The EcoFlow and the anchor is that they both support solar panels and in a pretty big array. So the the anchor one supports up to like 2400 watts, which is like, I think, eight panels, which is crazy to recharge in. And if you can actually plug it in and recharge with the solar panel and off the off the grid at the same time, which is cool, too. So when I when I've realized that the potential here and then I'm like, oh, wow, they have a panel where I can, you know, extend my house breakers and now I can use it as a whole home system. So now the possibilities, even though I bought it just for, you know, regular outdoor use, not necessarily outdoor use, but use with my smoking and, you know, maybe more portable. Yeah, stuff. I was like, man, this is pretty cool and it's quiet. You know what I mean? I've done tailgating with generators before and you have to put them like in another parking lot away from you because they're so loud. They're burning, they're burning fuel and, and, and right. And smoke and making that motor sound as they burn. And you feel bad pointing it at somebody else. But yeah, man, we got to eat. So yeah. So, you know, there there's you're supposed to be making. They're making those a little bit quieter, too. But I love the fact that this thing has no noise. You turn it on. It's got Wi-Fi capabilities. You can see how long it's going to last. And that just got me thinking. It's like, man, are other people starting to look into this? You've seen all the power outages going on in Texas. Even this year already, they've had a little bit of that already with the weather and stuff. So it's like, man, this is, you know, who are people really starting to go down this path because it's been a big hit. Even though it's underreported, I think last year they made a big splash both of these companies, EcoFall and Anchor. And, you know, this year they did a little bit, too, with what they got. And you have one that you have the ego. Yeah, about five years ago, right after we got our solar installed, I was thinking about getting a whole home, like a power wall from Tesla or something. And the solar folks actually talked to me out of it. They're like, the amount of times it'll come in handy versus how much it costs at that time was not. They're like, it's not worth it. If you have a bigger house or you're in a neighborhood where the power outages are unusually frequent than maybe, he's like, but you're not in that situation. So I didn't go with that. I got an EcoFlow Delta, which is, you know, one of those little portable ones that, you know, is like the size of a small cooler. And I've used it twice during power outages. I did not ever have to be in the situation where I thought, you know what, I need to plug my fridge in, but I could have. Like it was big enough to do that. I just used it to like, you know, charge up phones and keep the light, keep some lights on and stuff like that. It was good. I also have a solar charger for it so that if it needed to be recharged over a long period of time, it could, but that was five years ago. And these things are so much more powerful and so much more versatile. And like you say, can do things like, you know, charge your breakers and act as whole home backups now and modular. I'm starting to wonder if maybe that should just become, you know, the outdoor power source somehow. And I should look into getting one of these for for the whole home backup so that it can take advantage of that solar power I'm generating. Well, one of the biggest convincing factors, too, that I needed to take this more seriously as well, aside from the stuff that I mentioned is that Tom was doing the show with you and my lost power. And, but, you know, aside from not having a screen because I couldn't power my screen, but everything else stayed on internet computers, everything because I had to regular battery backups. And so I was like, man, you know, just having a another system to switch into would would have been even better. And then I would have I could have powered the screen screen to stay down. Yeah. And this thing is massive. So, you know, the thing I would caution people as well is even though they do have like a kind of a luggage style pull handle. They're extremely heavy. I think just one alone is like one hundred and sixty pounds. And I'm not a, you know, I'm not a small guy. I can lift it. No problem. I can throw it on the back of my truck if I need to. But it is heavy. I would caution people that, you know, the rolling it is super simple. You can lean it over and roll it. But if you've got steps and, you know, putting it on a truck and in and out. Yeah, get ready. It's pretty darn heavy. Yes, that said, it's not as it's that semi portable. Yeah, but I was messing around with it over the weekend and I plugged in a a hotspot to it. I have a separate AT&T hotspot for devices and I plugged that into it. And it literally said it would run that little thing for like twenty two days. That's impressive. Yeah, it was crazy. So I thought that was pretty cool. I did plug in a 50 amp plug into it and I was able to run like a refrigerator off of it. No problem. And the refrigerators actually don't use as much power. You know, things like heaters and tend to take up more. And it kind of put my truck in perspective because I can also plug stuff into my truck. Sure. And of course, you know, the one thing that these guys are starting to use as well is the same type of batteries that are in vehicles so they last longer, they can charge up more. The other innovation that I'm seeing that these guys are doing is multiple ways to charge it. So you can buy an adapter cable for both both the eco flow and the anchor and you can plug it in at like Tesla chargers or at CCS chargers. You know, they have adapters for that now. So you can charge them, rapid charge them, but they're also powerful enough to charge your vehicle. Now, they don't hold enough power, you know, and individually to give you anything massive. But it might give you, in my case, I needed seven miles. You know what I mean? And I could probably just get just about get that out of my charge. So I don't know. The same as that spare, you know, gallon jug. Exactly. Right. Exactly. So I just thought it was interesting. Yeah, folks, like I said, you know, this this is that we're both interested in and exploring. So if you've got thoughts about on this as well, feedback at Daily Tech News Show dot com Chris Ashley, before we get out of here, where can folks find more of your brilliance? Normally, I send you to eat. But this week, come check us out on SMR podcast, me, Rob Rod, and we had the great Alison Sheridan on last week with a really fun debate going on in that one. And that was a lot of fun. We're still doing our thing over there, still kicking it. So come check us out on SMR podcast. Indeed, patrons, stick around. There's more show if you're supporting the show directly. We thank you by giving you an extended show called Good Day Internet. We're going to talk a little bit about how Zoom is going to work on the Apple Vision Pro spoiler. You get to be a 3D avatar and turn other people into virtual people as well. Doesn't that sound fun? You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. You can find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow. Talking about whether Netflix will finally kill regular TV with Charlotte Henry. Talk to you then.