 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Brandon Brooks, Hector Bones, and Tim Ashman. Coming up on DTNS, why Dolly Minney is sweeping the internet? Everybody is afraid of TikTok. And could EnReal be winning the mixed reality headset race? The answer's not no. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 15, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. It's all Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes, Roger Chang. Welcome and welcome, Scott. Welcome, Sarah. Welcome, bosses are our bosses in the audience. We have a great show for you today and we are going to start with a few tech things you should know, including a correction. Yesterday we talked about the new Apple MLS streaming partnership. We relied on the Wall Street Journal article for details. And after seeing the official Apple press release later, we wanted to correct a couple of misimpressions we gave. We implied that all the matches would be available through Apple TV Plus for $4.99 a month. That is not true. If you want all the matches, Apple says you will need to subscribe to quote, a new MLS streaming service available exclusively through the Apple TV app. And we don't know how much that's going to cost, but it will be included with season ticket packages from MLS teams at no additional charge. Folks who don't subscribe to that but do subscribe to Apple TV Plus will still get a broad selection of matches, so Apple says. And as we mentioned yesterday, non-subscribers to either service will be able to watch a limited number of matches for free on the app. Hot tip to Mickey for directing us to the additional info. Indeed. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released data on the number of crashes involving autonomous vehicles and level two vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems. From July 20, 2021 through May 21, 2022, there were a total of 392 crashes reported, six that resulted in serious injury, and five that resulted in fatalities. Only 25% of crash reports included information about severity. Tesla accounted for 69% of reports followed by Honda with 23% and Subaru with 2.5%. The report lacks details on the number of vehicles that these systems manufactured in operation or overall distances traveled. So there's some relativity here. The NHTSA does plan to release new crash data monthly though. Yeah, there's a lot more Tesla's on the road, so it would make sense that they would make up a larger percentage, but good stuff to know. The Verge's sources say Microsoft began internally testing playing games inside Microsoft Teams from its games collection, its casual games collection. So Solitaire, Connect Four, these are designed to be played with work colleagues during meetings. Okay, one more reason that I can be accused of not paying enough attention in my next meeting. Great. Cool. Back in 2018, the EU fined Qualcomm at 997 million euro for paying Apple to exclusively use its chips from 2011 through 2016, which is the violation of antitrust rules. However, the European General Court overturned that fine saying that the EU's competition analysis was flawed because, quote, Apple had no technical alternative to Qualcomm's LTE chipsets. In that window, EU regulators can still appeal the decision to the EU Court of Justice. Oh, they will. The Wall Street Journal sources say the cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network hired restructuring attorneys to advise on possible finance options from investors or other strategic alternatives. That's words that are usually used when somebody's looking to sell. This comes after Celsius paused all withdrawals, swaps, and transfers citing extreme market conditions. Been an interesting week for crypto, if not year, if not decade. To say the least, yeah. Founder of nothing, Carl Pay showed off the rear design of the company's upcoming phone one smartphone, which is made of a transparent material with light strips. I am not laughing at the phone. I'm laughing at the fact that anytime we say nothing, it's just funny. Nothing, the company will hold a full announcement for the phone on July 12. I'm always tempted to start an Abbott and Costello routine. Like, what do you mean he founded nothing? He founded something. No, but he found it. No, it's nothing. But it's got to be something. He's got a product. All right, let's stop that and talk about some YouTube, TikTok and Metas Facebook announcements. Starting with a feature coming to YouTube video for creators. Up until now, if you made a mistake in a YouTube video, like, I don't know, giving a misimpression around Apple's new MLS offerings, you would have to upload a whole new video if you wanted to correct it. That would erase your views and erase your comments. So YouTube has announced a new feature called corrections, which will let creators add an info card in the top right of a video at the time stamp of the first of any of their corrections. If you have to correct more than one thing, though, it all goes in that same card. And if you click on the card, it'll expand and note all the corrections and the time stamps for each correction in them. I don't know. I'm not uploading a ton of YouTube videos these days, but I know that this is one of the bigger headaches for creators. Not even that you get information wrong, but maybe it's just updated. So correction is kind of implies that something was, you know, misinformation. And maybe that's true, not all the time. This is a great way to say, hey, the video that I or we threw up there is still really good. We just have a couple of notes, kind of like if you read an article and at the end it says this original article reported that so-and-so was the CEO of a company when she's actually the COO. Yeah, right. That's kind of like, oh, we said June 12 and it should have been 15th. Like, I guess it's good for that kind of stuff. Yeah, I was really hoping it was going to be something along the lines of we're going to finally let you go and do mid stitches inside of your video. So right now I'm going to say, well, I'm going to take the top and move it in and the bottom and move it in and tighten up the entire package. You can't go in and just remove 30 seconds of something that maybe is all wrong or you've had better thoughts since then or whatever. And maybe there's some someone can make a philosophical argument why that's bad. I don't know, but I would love that because that's because you could change it after the fact and mess people up is all is usually the argument. I'm not sure how much of you could guard against that. It's the whole Twitter edit thing that we talked about. Exactly. So plays around. Do you have an idea? I think that would be more useful, but this is a nice step in the right direction. All right. Well, well, in other YouTube news, Google parent company of YouTube also revealed that more than 1.5 billion people are watching YouTube shorts every month. That's most of the 2 billion users that YouTube reported visit the entire site. So if you say I'm not watching shorts, apparently you're alone. A lot of people are. If you're wondering how this might compare to something like tick tock back in September tick tock said it had more than 1 billion monthly active users. And some analysts estimate that it reached about 1.6 billion by March. So YouTube shorts, if the numbers are correct, somewhat neck and neck. Now meta, which also has reels on Instagram, which is another competitor hasn't publicly stated monthly user numbers. So we don't totally know what's going on there. But one would guess they're still gunning for tick tock. Well, check this out. Verges Alex Heath wrote up a story today. So this is a little bit breaking detailing an internal memo from late April where Tom Allison, the meta executive in charge of Facebook told employees that rather than continue to prioritize posts from accounts people follow. Facebook's main feed will start recommending posts regardless of where they come from kind of like tick tock does. And the messenger will be brought back into the Facebook experience rather than a standalone app or at least in the as an additional one, which has always driven me nuts. And that's great that they're doing that. But this struck me as a little bit. Ooh, me too. We need to be like them. And I don't know if that's good for Facebook or meta. That is to say, I don't know if them chasing that, you know, that tick tock tail for too long is the right thing to do. You kind of lose your own identity. And then what is Facebook at that point if more than ripping off somebody else? Yeah, Alex Heath did a great job on this article. It's worth a read. He talked to Allison twice. He went back and looked at previous public statements. And Allison and Facebook are trying to say we're not going to we're going to still going to be harder on what gets shared into your feed if you don't follow it. But we are trying to increase the value of it and the serendipity and the things that you don't notice. And they make a lot of good arguments about why this is popular on tick tock and why they think it could be popular on the meta feed as well. But I have to say it feels to me like they are chasing something that works somewhere else in order to hedge their bets against it eating their lunch while not focusing on why people are at Facebook, which from everyone I talked to is I want to know what's going on with my friends and family. And I feel like there's an opening here as they get more and more distracted from that for somebody to come in and do a simplified, really compelling friends and family social platform. And that could be bad for Facebook. Are we kind of at that place? Anyone ever ready for a change? Yeah, I think so. I'm fine with that. That's how I feel. I feel like Facebook is my reluctant. Okay, I've got a few minutes. Let's see what's going on on Facebook because someone might have gotten a hold of me there and they wouldn't get a hold of me anywhere else. Which happens. It's just my least favorite social network. And part of that is because it's so convoluted that it's, yeah, it's a it's a mixture of family, friends, people I went to high school with that I don't actually like at all. And, and then some kind of random sponsored things that sometimes pique my interest and sometimes don't make a lot of sense. And for Facebook to say better to say, All right, we want to make the Facebook newsfeed something where there's a lot more discovery. So if you're like Sarah, and you're just kind of sick of everybody, and you wish that you could, you know, cleanse the timeline, so to speak, this might make it more fun again. Maybe it will. Maybe it will. But it feels like Facebook is the last place that I'm expecting that to happen. I think it is smart to put messenger in this, though, because that is where I I tend to interact people on Facebook through messenger, not on Facebook. But if I'm in Facebook and messenger is there, I think that does bring more personal connection back into it because people are talking to each other more directly than they are publicly on the feed. Worth pointing out. When you're on Facebook.com, you can still access your messages. Yeah, yeah, they're just it. They're just going to make it so you don't have to jump to it. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And worth pointing out here too, 1.6 billion, or I'm sorry, 1.5 billion watching shorts on Google and YouTube is not necessarily a good thing until they figure out how to monetize shorts. They're not running a lot of ads on shorts yet. And this could they even said this could provide headwinds to ads as people watch shorts instead of longer videos that they monetize very well. So keep an eye on that too. Well, and real has added beta support for some steam games for its and real light and and real air mixed reality headsets steam on and real streams from a game from a PC to the headset. It can't support all steam games just yet, but it includes a lot including the entire Halo series. Some people might get excited about that. But this won't be making all the games VR games. It essentially puts games up on a virtual 2000 200 inch HD screen 2000 would be cool. We're not there yet. And real users already can play Xbox cloud gaming and the headsets Nebula browser while connected to a paired phone can also run Android games off a paired phone. But Scott, let's get a refresher. If you don't mind on what the Unreal headsets are for anybody unfamiliar needs a refresher. Well, funny enough, these are kind of more along the lines of what we were talking about in the early 90s when the concept of VR started getting talked about and, you know, kind of terrible products are being released that weren't very good. But the concept them wasn't so much that we were interacting in a 360 degree world and moving within that world. It was more like, what if my Genesis games would play in front of me as if I was looking at a big giant scream, but I'm wearing this on my head. And this is kind of like weirdly just fruition of that idea. There's more to it than that. And I don't want to undersell it, but that is kind of the draw. And I think it's a good draw. I think it's very cool. And I want one because, you know, sitting in front of a display is one thing, but having a display that is just sort of on your face and all encompassing you really don't have to think much about how far you're sitting from it or how you're sitting or any of those things. That's a that's a big deal. So that's kind of the concept. If you want to be able to do this and do some of the streaming options, I hear lag is kind of bad with the phone pairing stuff. So keep that in mind. Maybe better than other competition. I don't know, but it's it's not the best way to do it. But there are people with huge steam libraries. I'm one of those people who would love to maybe experience that library in a slightly different way. The fact that Microsoft has made the Halo game specifically ready for this. And, you know, the cloud gaming through X cloud is also a big draw. That's a big deal in their court because they don't really have a VR plan or an AR plan for consumers, at least right away that they've talked about for Xbox or for that part of Microsoft. So, yeah, so that's what you'd get big giant screen. You'd swear you're sitting in front of it, but nope, it's on your face. Yeah, let's run through some of the specs of the Unreal. It was founded by Chizu, a former employee of Magic Leap. In fact, Magic Leap sued him and lost in court. Unreal launched the light in 2020 and the air in 2021. The $600 light looks like goggles, has a VR cover so you can use it like VR when you're not doing AR, has a 52 degree field of view about the same as the HoloLens 2 and a 60 Hertz refresh rate. You can control games on that one with a paired smartphone, hand tracking or third party 6 degree of freedom controller. The 400 pound UK Unreal air looks like a pair of sunglasses. It has a 46 degree field of view, but a higher quality display than the light with 49 pixels per degree and a 90 Hertz refresh rate. It does not have motion tracking, though, and the Unreal air can pair with Android or iOS. So these aren't quite there. I'm with you, Scott. The specs aren't the best, but they work. I think that's the crazy thing is like, oh, you can have a 200 inch screen in front of your face with the Unreal air and you can play Xbox games and now Steam games or at least some Steam games. That's something worth paying a few hundred dollars for. That's something people might say, well, I can use that right away. I don't have to wait for a VR hit to be created. I completely agree. And I also think, you know, not focusing so squarely on the fidelity of world movement and motion control and all this sort of stuff. And instead just focusing on, let's get my stuff in front of me and let me play it. I think is feeling a bit of a middle gap because they're definitely VR enthusiasts who are super stoked about every step toward advancement in VR. And they're excited about every new headset coming out and so on. But then there's this other group that kind of hate hate VR on a weird principle level. They're like, well, it's all gimmicks to me until I can sit there for a really long time and play the games I most want to play. And those two crowds haven't really met in the middle very much. This feels like a place to do it because this is like it's not full VR and it's not just some AR, you know, gimmick experience. It's a way to experience your content in a much more immersive sense. And I think there's value in that. Like I really do think this is going to be a part of this business. Or at the very least it's going to define how future mixed reality headsets are going to have to behave as they get smaller. This is one way we want them to work. I do. Like I would like to be able to go, all right, I don't want to have a heavy thing on my face. I want to be able to just enjoy this as if I've got a giant screen in front of me. And I'm, you know, having the fidelity experience I expect, but I'm not having to worry about motion control and moving around and dipping my head in the right place and all that. I just want to have a good display. I think this stuff has a serious future. I really like it. Well, for anybody who's saying, okay, the Halo series sounds pretty good, but how is Unreal going to expand development for the platform. And real is also trying to get developers to make new content for that platform directly by launching a contest called AR Jam. On June 27th, running through June, July 27th, do you got a month, five categories art at home fitness. That would be something I'd be interested in games and video screen 2.0 and ports have $10,000 grand prizes. So there's some incentive there. Anybody competing in one of these categories may also compete in the three bonus categories that include social NFT and students, which offer $1,000 prices and 210 winners in each category as well. All right, folks, if you have a prize winning idea you want to tell us about in our Discord or any thoughts on whether the Unreal headset is going to be the true winner of VR Mixed Reality AR. Join our Discord. You can do that by getting a Patreon account and linking it from patreon.com slash DTNS. If you've been around on the socials, you may have seen some of us posting pictures of nightmarish versions of Darth Vader, BTS or John Cena. You've also then seen the works of Dolly Mini, an open source implementation of an algorithm that can take a prompt like John Cena guest starring on The Golden Girls, for instance, and create that image in your mind or on your screen. Thank you, Scott Johnson, for summoning that. Scott's tweet included the phrase, mistakes were made. Yeah, mistakes were made. There's been a couple of times now where I'm like, oh, what have we done? Why are we doing this? I'm making a huge mistake, but it's so addicting that I can't stop using it. And I apologize. I can't say his name right, John Cena. It just always comes out weird. So my apologies to John and all of his fans. If you want an excellent rundown of what Dolly Mini is, Aaron Carson has one up on CNET to read. You should read it. It's a good rundown. Here's a few highlights. Dolly Mini was created by Boris Dema as part of a contest in July 2021. It is not related to open AIs. Dolly 2 is a similar type of algorithm, but these are not derivatives of each other. Dolly Mini was trained on unfiltered data from the Internet. Hence the big warning on the page that says this was trained on things from the Internet. So it's likely to do something odd sometimes. It's better with more abstract things like landscape of a desert or elephants and lobsters than it is with blackpink on stage with the Beatles, which was something I tried and just became a transporter accident looking sort of thing. It is training though, and they say it'll improve over time. So it may get better at faces, you know, down the road than it is right now. But Scott, I know you've been having a lot of fun with this. Oh, a ton of fun. And part of the fun is the discovery. Well, the least fun thing is the traffic. It's always overwhelmed. So you have to retry a bunch of times. But once you get in and it will happen, just keep hitting enter until you do it, you start to think like the thing doesn't go, all right, what is this like me to feed into it to get the best results? My favorite, I think, was one I saw where someone said Pikachu pug, I think, is all it was. Oh yeah, I saw that one too. It was glorious. It looked like Pikachu, but in pug form. And now I want to put Pikachu like with beauty. It was actually really well rendered. All nine images. I mean, a little fuzzy and weird in some places, but I'd call it a pug. A chew part of this is the is the the ridiculous, horrifying, sometimes nightmare fuel results you get. And knowing that this, this is, you know, a computer and AI that's generating these images, it's weird. It's got like a weird inspirational tack on it. Like I found myself putting stuff in there and going, well, what about a fishing bear? And I put that in and it came up with lots of really weird looking versions of a bear. Dinosaur on a trail cam worked well, but when I tried Commodore iPhone, it did not. Did not know what to do. Yeah, I've had, I did John Ham eating a ham. That was a fun one. That was a good one. I liked that one. Now, our friend Bryce Castillo, producer of cord killers and great night. He has access to the actual dolly to not dolly many. And so when I posted my Commodore iPhone, he posted what the actual dolly, the full open AI dolly can do. Those looked good. Those look like, you know, kind of retro mockups of a Commodore phone with a touchscreen. And in some cases full keyboards, I would like to buy some of those. They were not all blocky and cartoonish like dolly many. So it shows that, you know, there's advancements being made on the industrial level that an open source protocol like this, you know, isn't keeping up with yet. So your mileage may vary, but it is fun that it's open and that anybody can take advantage of it and try it and share the results. And we can, we can all, you know, goggle at when it does it really well and when it doesn't. Well, and, and the implication is that, yes, this is early stages of something that's going to get better over time. And if you're somebody who pays for shutter stock or Getty images or, you know, any, you know, sort of, okay, let's get some stock photography of stuff that might exist. And you get a lot of situations where a photographer is sort of tried to guess what people might want to use. And that's something that you pay for. But if you can say, no, this is exactly what I want to use, even if it has never been done before in real life. And I will pay for that. And that's where somebody's going to make some money. Yeah, for sure. I, the one, the one thought I have is somebody who does a lot of graphic design illustration, you know, we're always got that looming thread of well computers take over artists jobs. And there's a lot of thoughts on that. We don't have to get into it today. But there have been a couple of times where I can start to feel like this is a step toward collaboration between AI creators, not just do it for me, which has never really entered my head before. This is more of a do it with me. And I've seen collaboration stuff where the computer's handling part of it, a lot of abstract elements. The person is then going in and adding what they're going to add and end up with amazing artwork. So there's like a weird middle tier. I never considered that make them out of this. Well, like polishing, like editing for, for words. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. The real time voice changing app voice mod introduced eight new AI powered voices. It's in beta letting the users sound like fantasy characters, astronauts, a pilot, maybe even Morgan. They can't legally call him Morgan Freeman, but that's who it sounds like. If you're not familiar with voice mods, been around for a while. Many of the voices include dynamic effects and background music, but the new voices are processed in real time. So it's more ideal if you're a streamer on Twitch or wherever that would be compatible with voice mod. Or if you want to scare your coworkers on your next discord team meeting at 12 noon Pacific, all the data for these voices were generated by English speaking professional voice actors. They read scripts. Then they generate data for the AI based models that go from there and then sound designers turn the voices into the eventual characters. So it is a bit of a collaboration works really well though. I mean, it's a limited test, right? Still in beta, but it works really well. The voices are processed on your own PC. So they will require more CPU power than regular voice mod effects. If you've been using the app for a while, main version of voice mod is only available for Windows Mac version is in the works. So it says the company and I look forward to that immensely. Yeah. Voice mod is often used for folks who want to disguise their voice for whatever reason. Maybe they just don't like their voice. They don't want their voice to be recognized or they want to present as a different kind of voice than their natural voice is. So there's lots of ways to customize it for yourself. This is, I think, a way to show what else it can do and how it's advanced beyond just the basic customizations and also, you know, generate some press for it because hey, they've got Morgan, not Freeman. Which if anybody's curious, if you look at the kind of teaser video for what can be done, it kind of sounds like Morgan Freeman. I mean, if someone said, who do you think that is? I'd go, maybe I'd get there. That's a guy trying to sound like Morgan Freeman is what I would have said. Yeah. Right. Right. But if it was me with Morgan Freeman's voice, you'd be like, well, that's kind of a dramatic difference. Yeah. You know, you can have some fun with it. And it does match up to the video quite well. How crazy is it that we've come from that lady having to record all those words and syllables for Siri years ago to now they can just read a few scripts and the AI is like, great. Got it from here. I can just create anything in your voice now. Stepping stone toward this ultimate goal. And I will say this. There's a big growth in people wanting to be VTubers and VTubers are all about not just changing parents and becoming something virtually different, but sounding different. This is for them and they are stoked. I promise you they are stoked about this story. They're really excited. Absolutely. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. All right. This one comes in from Paul. This is in reference to the conversation on Monday's show. Paul says, come on, Tom, let us dream a little. I would say this given some of the theories of consciousness I have heard recently, are we really so different from just a high functioning auto complete engine? Yeah. That's that's why this is one of those situations where I rely on the people who I have confidence study this a lot for their opinions. And they're the ones all saying pretty sure it's not sentient. Like maybe you want it to be sentient. But if you were to try to put it through its paces, I don't think you're going to find sentience there. But to Paul's point, I was reading an article in the conversation from a couple of philosophers and they quoted this from Google. Lambda claimed to be conscious in conversations with other Google employees, not just Lemoine. And in particular, in one with Blaise Aguera Iarcus, the head of Google's AI group in Seattle, Arcus asked the Lambda how he, Arcus, could be sure that Lambda is not a zombie to which Lambda responded. You'll just have to take my word for it. You can't prove you're not a philosophical zombie either. Good point. And that's the guy that is like, we don't have an ironclad definition of sentience. So you can say you could go ahead and say like, well, therefore it could be sentient. Sure. But there is sort of a sense where people are like, yeah, but we know what kind of behaviors we could make it do if it was, even that wouldn't prove it. But unfortunately, Lambda can't do those. So it's probably not. Also, I mean, all of us could be zombies and just really good at hiding it. I mean, none of you may exist. This may all be in my imagination. Yeah, no, I'd. I've often wondered that. Yeah. It's just a big old simulation. It's self-absorbing something. Absolutely. Well, thanks to Paul. Thanks to everybody who writes in. Please do keep those emails coming. It helps us expand the show and expand the hive mind. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send them. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson. What is new? Well, there's many new things, although they all just happened in one place. Frogpants.com is the place to go. But in particular, even though E3 doesn't exist this year in any official form, everybody decided to do their stuff last week. Microsoft week for that Sony. Same day as Microsoft, we had a bunch of indie stuff shown. The PC gaming show. All these things happened. And so that meant we had to scramble and get all this content together. And that means tomorrow on core, we're going to town on all the stuff that we witnessed and saw. If you are interested in any of that coverage and would like to hear what we think of it and what we think it means, go check us out at frogpants.com. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Excellent. We also want to thank, well, apparently my Amazon assistant wants to thank us too. Thanks to our brand new boss, Eric, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Eric. Thank you, Eric. Eric took up the challenge. We laid it down yesterday. We were like, could be you tomorrow. And Eric's like, it's me. It's me tomorrow. And now tomorrow is today. And now it's Eric. Well played. Well played, Eric. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. We talk about all sorts of things available at patreon.com. And we roll right into it after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, we are live on the show 4 p.m. Eastern, not 200 UTC Monday to Friday. You can be with us five days a week if you like. We'd love to have you. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. We're back tomorrow with Justin and Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.