 Coming up on DTNS, Sony shuts down old PlayStation stores, catching errors in machine learning data sets and the meaning of the Microsoft network. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 29th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, Trisha Hershberger, TV host, gamer and creator back on the show, welcome back Trish. Thank you for having me. It's so exciting to be here chatting tech with you guys again. It's great to have you back. We were just having a lovely time talking about glasses and VR headsets and more on good day internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member and get that show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Pax East 2021, which was originally scheduled June 3rd through the 6th has been canceled, replaced by Pax Online 2021, July 15th through July 18th where organizers are cautiously optimistic that Pax West and Pax Unplugged can take place in person as scheduled in September and December, respectively. Those fingers are firmly crossed. A study by Stanford University found that the Apple Watch series three can determine a user's quote unquote frailty, a metric used to evaluate functional mobility and exercise capacity using at home six minute walking test while of course wearing the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch was able to accurately assess frailty with a sensitivity of 90% and specificity of 85% when supervised in a clinical setting. Over the weekend, two malicious commits to add a backdoor were pushed to the official PGP Git repository meant to look like a minor typo correction that appeared to be signed by PHP maintainers, Rasmus Lerdorf and Nikita Popoff. Popoff said that the commits were reverted right away as part of a post commit code review with the project planning to decommission its own Git server and move to GitHub permanently to avoid the issue happening again. Visa will allow the use of the stablecoin USD coin to settle transactions on its payment network through a pilot program with crypto.com and they have plans to expand to other partners later this year. USD coin is pegged to the US dollar, so one coin equals one dollar and uses the Ethereum blockchain for transactions that could save Visa some money and time. IBM launched the first developer certification for programming quantum computers. The IBM Quantum Developer Certification will focus on the open source QSCIT SDK and is the first of a series of planned quantum certifications. All right, let's talk robots. Boston Dynamics announced Stretch, a new robot that doesn't play baseball but is instead designed to move boxes in warehouses. Although that's how a lot of baseball players start, so who knows? Stretch has a square mobile base on wheels, so no legs, not like Spot, has a pole called a perception mast that holds the cameras and the sensors and then of course the robotic arm with a suction pad array on the end that can move boxes up to 50 pounds. They have to be flat, so it's a little limited but if you've got boxes with a flat service that can move them up to 50 pounds and can operate either plugged in for as long as you have electricity or up to eight hours on battery power. The big advantage over existing warehouse automation is you don't need to bolt Stretch down to keep it from tipping over or provided a track. So you can use it one day on a truck, another day on a conveyor belt, next day shelving in the aisles. This makes it more affordable and flexible although Boston Dynamics has not yet released a price. So we don't know how much more affordable. Stretch also works faster than Boston Dynamics previous handle robot that does similar functions thanks to some patent pending counterweights in Stretch's arm. That allows it to swivel around, pick up the boxes, move them, put them on the conveyor belt without having to be bolted down. Meaning you don't have to move the whole body to move the arm like you do with handle and it won't tilt over. That's one of the big problems with being able to pick up heavy objects. Stretch can supposedly move up to 800 cases an hour which is about the same as what humans do and Boston Dynamics is looking for pilot testers right now in hopes to deploy Stretch commercially sometime next year. Well, I watched the video of Boston Dynamics being like, look, this is what Stretch can do. And my first thought was kind of cute. I know it's not supposed to mimic a human or an animal in any way. The little suction cups like looking at each other. I don't know, they just always look alive to me. I like robots, I think they're cool. But at the same time it was like, wow, this makes a lot of sense obviously in a warehouse but just any situation where a human who's previously doing this work and is doing the work perhaps alongside of the robot is going to hurt themselves over a period of time. You've got repetitive motion and a lot of weight being handled. It's pretty impressive. Trish, what do you think of the new robot? I think it looks surprisingly like standard, especially for a Boston Dynamics robot. Usually I feel like the Boston Dynamics robots can either be incredibly realistic and cute or the stuff that nightmares are made out of. And this looks to me like, oh, that's a robot you'd find in an industrial warehouse. So that was surprising. But yeah, I mean, I'm not a fan of automation taking jobs from people that could otherwise do them. But I think this is gonna come down to cost. Like you kind of said, Tom they haven't really released what the price point's gonna be. We know the efficiency they have said is going to be comparable to one human worker. So what is the lifespan of this robot? I mean, is it going to be priced the same as a three to five year one person salary and where does it start to pay off? I think that's the big question that's gonna decide if this is actually tenable or not. So we'll see. It's definitely interesting though, like from a robotics perspective, I'm happy to see it work and it's cool that it doesn't have to be bolted down. Yeah, that's, I think the interesting thing that you nailed it, which is this doesn't make as impressive a demo as big dog, walking up a hillside, right? But it is in fact more impressive because of the things you don't realize just looking at it. The fact that it is flexible can be used in a lot of different ways, doesn't have to be on a track, doesn't have to be bolted down. That is very attractive to warehouse logistics and there's been a lot of studies and I'm hopeful that these studies bear out that more companies than not will use these to free up workers to do other things rather than replace them. In which case, if that ends up being true and that's an if, what Sarah said about this, being less wear and tear on the human body but allowing you to do other things means that hopefully companies would actually get more productivity out of the same workers without people having to lose their jobs. So, I mean, there at least is the possibility of that happening depending on the company, of course. I'm also kind of curious about the idea that which Boston Dynamics is pushing is, yeah, you could use it on a truck one day and then the warehouse the next day or maybe out on the driveway the third day type thing. Like what is the map that we're getting? Is it sort of like what my Roomba vacuum understands over time of like, ah, yes, yes, I know your house, we're starting in this corner and these are the things that I'm going to be able to avoid as I navigate the space. It's really cool if that is actually true. Yeah, all those cameras and sensors need to work well and that's actually one of the reasons they're often on rails is for safety reasons, right? So, if it's free moving like that, it has to be very good at detecting oh, there's a person there, I don't want to run them over. Right. Yeah, I mean, if we're looking at robotics helping people out as far as not hurting themselves, I'm down to see the next exoskeleton. So, Boston Dynamics, when you want to make an exoskeleton for Amazon workers who lift packages, sign me up. There you go. All right, let's talk about machine learning. MIT computer scientists led a team that looked at 10 of the most cited data sets used to test machine learning systems and found that 3.4% of data was either inaccurate or mislabeled. Google's quick draw test set, which includes user submitted doodles, had the most errors at about 5 million, which is 10% of the data set there. Some of the errors coming from mislabeling animal species, for example, a meerkat being labeled as a red panda, say, or mislabeling a picture based on a less prominent object in the frame, so a picture of a lit jack-o'-lantern being labeled as a candle. More mundane, but problematic examples are things like negative Amazon reviews labeled as positive. Aha, see, this actually becomes kind of interesting. Researchers used a confidence learning framework to examine data sets for label noise, then reviewed the possible label mistakes using people on mechanical Turk. They found 54% rather a flag data to have incorrect labels. Higher capacity models were less impacted by these mislabelings, and lower capacity models significantly improved ML model performance when using the corrected data sets for training. The study published its findings at labelerrors.com, which I really recommend everybody go to just to get a sense of what gets mislabeled and how you can kind of as a human go, ah, I see why I did that. I see where it's going here. Yeah, this is how we get to a point where machine learning is smarter over time. Yeah, that miniature snauzer is an Australian silky terrier and I'm offended that this machine learning algorithm is misidentified. Well, like, but whether or not you're offended, you can say, yeah, okay, I get it, that it was doing its job, but it's not quite there yet. And to be able to have a little bit more human interaction and folks helping it become smarter is totally key to all of this. Yeah, I think what's really good about this is it is a way forward to self-correction for these models to say like, don't just let the data sets out there, let's do some fine tuning, let's do some refining on this, and it will improve your machine learning model in the end if you do that. That's important because, yes, the fact, that the rotisserie chicken is labeled as a hook may not be a huge thing on its own, but we were talking about five million of these things building up, and that's 10% of your data set. There's no, bias is just one of the problems that that will cause. Yeah, it's totally wild. I don't know if you guys saw the one that it was a picture of a baby with a pacifier and it labeled it as a nipple. Like there's some that I'm like, how did it even get there? I mean, I obviously understand the correlation between a baby and a nipple, but like in that picture, what? But yeah, you could see how this would really throw off a data set pretty badly. And the data sets, if people don't understand, I know a lot of you do, but that is how it learns in supervised learning. Now there's unsupervised learning and that's a whole different thing and that's probably where we're headed anyway, but in the meantime, we have a lot of this supervised learning that says, hey, we need to have these things labeled properly for it to understand what it's looking at. And so you wanna be able to automate the labeling so that you can have bigger data sets and then you can train more things, but if those data sets are not properly labeled, then you're not going to have as good of a machine learning algorithm at the other end. So this is great. This is a great study to kind of show how to improve that accuracy. I think that'll be really beneficial. Sony announced it's shutting down the PlayStation Store for the PlayStation 3 and remaining purchasing capabilities on the PSP on July 2nd. And if you Vita users are like, oh, am I exempted? No, sadly, store closing for the PS Vita on August 27th. Digital purchases of both games, downloadable content and in-game purchases won't be possible after the shutdown, but users will still be able to download and play previously purchased games, videos and media content. You just won't be able to buy new stuff for those devices. Users will still be able to purchase cross-buy content following the closures. Sony also closed region-specific versions of its browser-based PlayStation Store. If you were using that as a workaround, that could be used to buy games for those consoles. That has gone away as well. So Trish, these are older products. A lot of people still have them. My brother still has a PlayStation 3. How big of a deal do you think this is? I think it's a big deal and then it kind of signals what Sony's overall look at the handheld gaming market is. So either Sony has looked at the shelf life of the PSP, the PS Vita, et cetera, and said, yes, these are older products. It's time to retire them and focus elsewhere, either because mobile gaming is the new gaming, especially now that you can get cloud access to all of your Game Pass games and play AAA titles on your Android phone, if you wanted to. Or they're just kind of handing the win to Nintendo for the Switch. But I think either way, this is an obvious move to show that Sony is throwing in the towel on the handheld market. And I don't know that it's a bad decision. Honestly, as sad as I am to kind of retire those old devices and as sad as I am for people who still know and love those devices, it probably is a smart business move for Sony. I don't know, where do you guys stand on this? Yeah, I look at this and I think everything has to have an end date. So these arguments are always about, is it time yet? It's not that these things are gonna last forever. Nobody expects the PlayStation 1 to be supported anymore. So I feel like when I look at this, and maybe it's just because my brother has a PS3, but it feels like time for the PSP and the Vita, like you said, Sony has realized mobile has moved on. But I wish they could do something else for the PlayStation 3, and this could apply to the mobile as well, like provide streaming game access to stuff that doesn't even run on the PS3, but you could run through a cloud service. They would, I mean, we haven't seen Sony mess around with cloud gaming in too intensive a way. I mean, with Microsoft is now including cloud in their Game Pass Ultimate subscription. And I think they've even rebranded it from Android to cloud, which is an interesting play and may signal things to come in the future. But yeah, I mean, that's a fantastic idea that have Sony offer some type of cloud gaming access on your older hardware, that would be great. Yeah, I mean, as long as the hardware can handle it, and that's the idea with the cloud gaming is a lot more hardware can handle it. I feel like that would be a better way to message this. Like, hey, no, you can't buy stuff anymore because we're not supporting it, but here's an option that maybe in the future. Hey folks, you got an idea on that? You have thoughts on that? You can share those thoughts with us in our Discord and you can join that by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of cloud gaming, Microsoft first launched an underlying network service for the original Xbox console back in November of 2002 under the name Xbox Live. Remember, it was glorious at the time. Microsoft has now rebranded the service as Xbox Network. A Microsoft spokesperson said that the change, quote, is intended to distinguish the underlying networking service from Xbox Live Gold. While not as old, Xbox Live Gold memberships have still been around for a while since 2007, originally a requirement for online play on the console. Since that time, Gold memberships have added other benefits, including access to chatting, game recording and streaming, bundled games and more. And its original core feature, which was online gameplay, has opened up a bit to general Xbox Network users as well with Microsoft allowing online play for free to play games without a subscription in the coming months. So, does this rebrand speak more to how Xbox Network has changed or Xbox Live Gold has changed? Trisha, what do you think? I think that this is all a move to eventually phase out Xbox Live and potentially Xbox Live Gold and somehow merge it with Game Pass. So I think it was last time they had tried to raise the price of Xbox Live Gold to be closer in price to Game Pass. A lot of people in the industry thought, this looks like a move that you're trying to push people to Game Pass. Now that being said, Game Pass is a fantastic deal if you're someone who plays a wide variety of games. I mean, it's honestly, it can't be beat, it's fantastic at $9.99 a month for a single console or $14.99 a month if you want it for both console, PC and mobile. But not everybody, and this was the feedback at that time. This is kind of the conversation that was happening on the internet. Not everybody wants to play a wide variety of games. What if you only play a free to play online game and you are paying for Xbox Live Gold because you wanted that online party chat? So that was the conversation at the time. Like now those people are being asked to pay more in the middle of the pandemic. This is kind of a crappy move. And so I think that this more recent move to distinguish Xbox Network, which now includes that online multiplayer for free to play games and Xbox Live Gold is a bunch of extra features. I think they did that on purpose so that they can eventually merge Xbox Live Gold with Game Pass in some way. But that's just my hypothesis. I don't have any insight information. That's what it looks like to me. It is weird to me that Xbox Live has been such a common name for so long and there's so much brand recognition with it to go away from that to Xbox Network. But I mean, Xbox Network does let you know this is the online access you've been looking for. So the name certainly makes sense. What do you think of the move, Sarah? I think the live thing, even though you're totally right, I mean, that's what we've known this as for a long time. I think it could possibly still throw off people, especially people who are maybe thinking, well, I only play like one game. It's not really like, do I really need this live aspect? Which is kind of how I feel about my VR headset. I mean, there aren't really that many games I'm playing on the headset, but the ones that I care about, I really care about. Or the shows on HBO that I watch. Do I really want to pay all this money for all the stuff that I don't pay for? It's all the same idea. And I think Microsoft is trying to slowly try to get people from saying, well, hold on a second. This is the network that you're paying for. And the network can be all sorts of tiers of what you would like for your experience to be. And it doesn't necessarily have to be some live aspect. And I don't know. Gosh, we talk about so many, whether it's like VOD services or gaming services all the time where companies seem to be struggling to figure out what to rebrand something that people already love. Yeah, I'm with y'all. I think Xbox Game Pass is clear. I'm paying to get games. Xbox Network is clear. I'm getting network services, whether it pay or not, right? I can get free on free to play. That just seems more modern. The idea of paying just to access the internet on something where I'm already paying to access the internet to my ISP, it just didn't wear well anymore. So it makes sense to me that they would try to break it down that way. Xiaomi announced the 1199 Euro Mi 11 Ultra, a flagship follow-up to the Mi 11 released at the end of 2021. Big addition with the Ultra is an updated camera module, which sports Samsung's new ISOCELL GN250 megapixel sensor and a separate 5X periscope telephoto lens. Also features a 1.1 inch 450-nit OLED display on the back that can be used as a selfie viewfinder or for notifications. But if you're like, man, that's a great camera. I really wish I could use that to take selfies. Well, that's what they're doing with this rear display. This is actually the second ultimate phone to offer the rear screen this year. The ASUS ROG Phone 5 also offers a rear OLED panel. And we've seen rear viewfinders before, usually at lower res. So these are nicer ones that we're doing here. But I don't know if this is the thing that makes me go for Xiaomi on a flagship phone. Tricia, the idea of being able to use the full camera to do a selfie, is that compelling to you? I mean, I guess it depends on the quality of the front-facing cam, right? So for me, this is very appealing. I'm someone that does content creation for a living. And I always use, if I'm going to use my phone, I will always use the front-facing cam so that I can see exactly what's in my frame and what I'm filming. But the front-facing cam is usually not quite as nice as the rear-facing cam. And I have friends that will just put it on whatever the wide rear-facing camera is, hold it as far as they can and hope that it all gets in there. I feel like maybe I'm a little bit too much of a control freak for that. So having a viewfinder on the back to be able to use that nicer camera could be really good. Then my question would say, you know, how high quality is that screen on the back? Am I really going to be able to see the details that I need to see in it? And again, I mean, is that a worthy trade for the lack of quality that you get on the front-facing cam if that's the case? I don't know for this particular phone if the front-facing camera is of very high quality or not, but it's certainly an interesting move. It's 20 megapixels. I just looked it up. Oh, it's 20 on the front-facing? I would probably just use the front-facing to be honest. And it's interesting that the Asus ROG Phone 5 also offered that. It's definitely a unique move, I would say, within the industry. And I think it's very niche and very specialized. Yeah, I'm totally with you on that. I like to think of myself as a photography aficionado. But when it comes to something like this, I'm like, huh, I wouldn't even be able to use a 50 megapixel sensor in any meaningful way on a regular basis that would justify me buying this phone that a lot of people would. And I've just sort of gotten used to, yeah, if I'm taking a photo of myself, I'm just kind of dealing with whatever front-facing camera is available. Or yeah, I'm sort of taking a shot into the wind and hoping that it looks good later. It's a kind of a funny form factor. I'm sort of like, huh, with a nice enough camera in a phone like this, if I were to buy it and it were new, I'd want a really nice case. Because I'm great with shattering things. But it's got, it's, again, it's, there's, you've got your, it's not really a dual screen situation. There's a limited notification slash camera information situation on the back. And that is super helpful. But I personally, I'm like, I don't know, is this good in practice? Or does this just seem like it's good in practice? Yeah, 1.1 inches, not a lot, even, even with an OLED screen. So you're not getting a wide view to set up your shot. Right, yeah, I mean, you're trying to take something that's a photo that will, you know, impress your friends and neighbors. You're not gonna be able to see a whole lot in that viewfinder until you're done anyway. Well, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, or SMG, is installing new smart poles, which act as street lights, traffic lights, also environmental sensors, footfall counters, smartphone chargers, Wi-Fi access points, CCTV, and more. They do it all. SMG plans to continue rolling the poles out as well as piloting a version of the infrastructure, which can also charge drones and electric vehicles and detect parking violations. Yeah, this is really interesting. So the poles just look like a typical street lamp. Yeah, they're not really in the way anymore than they would be anyway. They're going to customize them based on the neighborhood. So the ones that go into Mindong would be different than the ones up in Wijambu, or stuff like that, depends on the needs of the area. Maybe you don't need to monitor parking in certain areas, but we've been kind of following with the fits and starts of smart cities over the years. And this is really an interesting way to elegantly provide that infrastructure. I like this. It's super cool. We're in the future. We're living in the future. That's what it is. Especially if you're in Seoul, where they're really in the future. When they're extra in the future, all by time zone, but also by smartphone. But yeah, anything that's, if you need a street lamp anyway, and it can do all these things, I got nothing bad to say about it. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Comey, and this was a conversation that we had last week regarding Dyson's vacuum cleaner that illuminates dirt and records the amount that it collects to become a smarter vacuum. Comey says, did it remind you a little of the DNA detecting vacuums in the movie Gadica, circa 1997? I hope Dyson is smart enough to avoid any marketing nightmare features, but it made me realize the vacuum cleaner is getting close to the level of it made in privacy, such as detecting black versus blonde hair, for instance. Comey also wrote us back and said PS. The Dyson V15, which is the one that we talked about on the show, only counts dust particles by size, but with the latest imaging technologies and also artificial intelligence, if forensic equipment companies decide to install cameras in a vacuum, I think it could be soon possible to detect things like human hair and skin flakes in the dust. Obviously the impulse would be to jump to privacy violations. I mean, I just bought a pet vacuum that wants to connect to the internet to tell me, to automatically order refills on Amazon and that sort of thing is frightening. But I like what Comey is suggesting as a forensic tool, like at a crime scene where you could do all the normal forensics that you do and in the cleanup, maybe collect extra data for that crime scene. If there are responsible uses for that, I think that's an interesting one. Also shout out to the movie Gattica. Thank you for bringing that up. I know it's been a while. I was like, 1997, where were we all even at that time? Lost in Texas for a minute, wow, yeah, that was a while ago. Yeah, good times. Well, if you have feedback like Comey or questions or comments about anything that we talk about or we might talk about it on a future show, do email us, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels. Today, they include Tim Ashman, Brandon Brooks, and Tim Deputy. Also thanks to our brand new bosses, we've got Christy Cornholio, Roy Seney, and Josh Rutstein. All just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, bosses. Christy, saw what you were doing. We see you. Yep, and we thank you for your support, quite frankly. I think it's pronounced Kruste. Kruste, yeah, sorry. Kruste Cornholio. Also thanks to Trisha Hershberger for being with us today. Such a nice treat to have you, Trisha. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. This has been so lovely. Thank you so much. If you want to find me on the interwebs, you can do that on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook at that girl Trish with no I in the girl. So it's just that GRL Trish. Or on Twitch and YouTube slash Trisha Hershberger. Just my name. Twitch is probably where I'm most active right now. Twitch and Twitter and Instagram. But yeah, I would welcome you to join the community, any of those places. And again, thank you so much for having me. This has been a real good time. Oh good, yeah, we love having you. Our Twitch bot informs us you were last streaming Luigi's Mansion 3. So there you go. Yes, I was on Sunday. That's the kind of stuff you can see over at Trisha's channel. Folks, sometimes you don't have time. We get it. And you need just the headlines. That's why we have a related show, Daily Tech Headlines. All the essential tech news in just about five minutes. You can subscribe to this one and that one and pick whichever one fits the moment of your lifestyle that day at dailytechheadlines.com. We're live on this show Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That is 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And guess what? We'll be back tomorrow doing it all again with Amar Wilson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.