 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Jeffrey Zilx, Kria Artem, Tony Glass, and we have two new patrons, Kellen and Joshua. Welcome to you both. On this episode of DTNS, Pokemon weighs in on Pell World. Google announces a new model called Lumiere, and Kevin Pereira is here to tell you how he ditched the house for a road warrior. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 25th, 2024. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunlop. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us is Kevin Pereira, a host of AI for Humans, a new podcast covering AI designed for humans. Hi, Kevin. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. How's life on the road? It's thankfully sedentary for the moment, but life on the road is fun. It's a fascinating journey. I've been doing it full time for almost two years now, and I hope to not do it full time for the next few years. Ah, yeah. We're gonna get into all of that a little bit later in the show. Kevin's gonna tell us the good and the bad of being a little bit more upwardly mobile when it comes to your actual house. But for now, let's start with the quick heads. The Pokemon company officially weighed in on the Pell World controversy we talked about on DTNS yesterday, saying it hasn't granted any permission to another company, adding that it intends to investigate and take appropriate measures against PocketPair, which runs Pell World. The game sold over eight million copies in less than six dates after launching on January 19th and is currently still available on PCs via Steam and Xbox. Fubo announced a new way to get instant headlines from live news programs like Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and more, allowing you to know exactly what is happening on a news channel as it happens. Using AI to achieve this Fubo claims it's the first TV service streaming or cable to offer such a service. Microsoft has lay enough 1,900 workers thereabouts in its Microsoft gaming division. About 8% of the unit's overall 22,000 employees that includes roles at Activision Blizzard. In other Microsoft news, Mesh, that's the company's mixed reality platform that offers 3D meetings inside of Microsoft Teams is now out of preview and allows Teams users to gather, so to speak, in virtual spaces with or without a VR headset. The spatial audio feature in Mesh mimics the ability to have the type of private conversations you might have in an office. Maybe you move away from everybody else and you chat with a coworker in a slightly different area. In this case, it would be a virtual space. Mesh is part of Microsoft Teams business plan, although it does require a Teams premium license to use. Some pixel users are reporting issues of being locked out of their data stored in internal storage across all apps after installing the January 2024 Google Play Update. This includes issues like not being able to play downloaded audio or video files or take new pictures while the files app appears to be empty and other apps simply aren't working. The problem affects Google Pixel 6, 7 and 8 series devices and the company says it's aware of it. Most pixel users are still on the November 2023 release of Google Play and Google may delay its 2024 release while it investigates the issue. A new study from Custodio, which makes parental software controls, found that children ages four through 18 spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok in 2023. That's an increase from 107 minutes in 2022. The study surveyed 400,000 families and schools worldwide specifically looking at data from the US, the UK, Spain, Australia and France. All right, let's talk about new advancements in large language models. This one's coming from Google. The company announced Lumiere. This was back on Tuesday. It's an AI video generator that it's calling a space-time diffusion model for realistic video generation in the pre-print paper that it also released explaining how it works. As far as text to image AI video generators go, pretty impressive, at least from what they've shown us. Google says Lumiere utilizes unique architecture to generate a video's whole scene at once. So the whole sort of space and time thing is space being where something is in the video to be generated. Maybe there's a cat and time, how that cat moves and changes throughout that video's time, both part of the finished product. This is different from how some other models create video by putting together small parts or little frames in order to create a video. This creates an entire video in one process. Now, okay, Kevin, you covered a lot of the stuff. Sure do. On your show, AI for humans, does Lumiere feel like a leap forward? Does the announcement and the promise of Lumiere feel like a leap forward? Absolutely. Feels like a wonderful iteration in a right direction for these sort of models and tools to go. But in true Google fashion, at least as of recently, they have announced something. They've shown us videos, they've promised demos, but we cannot exactly get our hands on it. This happened just before the holiday break with Gemini Pro, where they claim they have a new large language model that can rival open AIs, but we can't use it yet. We can't get our hands on it. So until we can actually get in there, play with the code and start generating videos, it's hard to say. But what you touched on was really important, Sarah. The way that most models work now, there's a bunch of people in the generative video space, and their models will try to generate key frames of the scene. So if you say, I want a dinosaur on roller skates or I want a dinosaur flying a plane, whatever it is with a dinosaur that you want to generate, it will try to go and say, okay, here's frame one, a key frame, here's frame 10, and then that's why you get the swimmy sea of pixels where sometimes the roller skates melt in the background. The one's hands look normal type, right? Yeah. It's thinking cohesively, how do I get from this image to this image? It's not doing what Google's Lumiere is supposedly doing, which again is contextualizing, here is the scene, here is the subject in the scene, here's how that subject needs to get from A to B. So instead of it interpolating and trying to make the frames bleed and mesh and melt into each other, it's thinking about how those two interact. And that is revolutionary. Well, it looks awesome. Hopefully there's gonna be more than just documentation and paperwork to tell us what this thing will actually do. We'll be able to play with it and actually test it out hopefully sooner than later. But it does look really, really, really cool. And I wonder if it'll actually replace other types of maybe animation or things like that. Yeah, I think that's where I land on a lot of the stuff is like, this looks amazing. That video was five seconds long. Do we get into an era where my friends, three year old, I put on a YouTube video and this is fully Lumiere generated. And it looks better than something that a human could animate themselves. No, of course people go like, wow, no one's better than a human. And I don't dispute that. But I feel like these little snippets of something that works really well is like, okay, but what do we do with this? There are precious few examples of like a very short dinosaur on roller skates video that you would use unless it was like, I don't know, on your homepage. All you need is five seconds. Who needs 15 seconds of a dinosaur on roller skates? Like we did, we had this. Had you hung out with a three year old recently? They might want more. Okay, fair enough. I will submit that this time, just a year ago, we were celebrating grainy little still thumbnails where you say, I asked for a horse wearing a top hat and that kind of looks like a brown smudge with a little black square on top. I'm gonna round that up to a horse and a top hat. And now we're having discussions of, is this image even real? Would you even hire a photographer to do your headshots? If you're making a deck to pitch a concept or you're working on that website, it's gonna be hard to stuff the dinosaur into the roller skates, but I'm gonna try to find both of those and make that happen. It's not a question with still imagery. We got there so fast in the grand scheme, if you zoom out, that here we're talking about, this five seconds of text prompt to a machine which has generated realistic looking video with lighting and physics and clothing and hair reacting the way they naturally would. We're not there yet, you're absolutely right. But Gavin, my co-host on AI for Humans, we pointed a little bit to the bleachers and said, we think in two to three years time, text to Hollywood level content is going to be possible. And I think we're on that trajectory still. Yeah, that's amazing. Two to three years from where we were a year ago to where we could be in those two to three years is absolutely amazing. But we're gonna change gears a little bit and talk about Apple because it's not like we haven't been talking about Apple all week and all last week, but Apple today announced in response to the Digital Market Sack, which goes into effect in the EU in March, the developers will be able to offer alternative app stores on iPhones and iPads and opt out of using Apple's in-app payment system, which charges commissions of up to 30%. Apple will not charge a commission on apps installed through alternative marketplaces, nor will it charge a commission for alternative payment systems, which are also allowed under the app store updates in the European Union. We've got some caveats. There's a core technology fee, 0.5 euros, the equivalent of 50 cents, math is hard, per install, per account, on an annual basis. The first one million installs are free for all developers. After those initial one million installs, the feed does come into play. And there are a couple more, right Rob? Yeah, so another one is like, folks were saying, well, what if I wanna just use the app store, but I don't wanna pay as much? That's something that Apple offers as well because the app store commissions are dropping to 17% for developers who opt into the new EU terms, but continue to use the app store. They will also incur a 3% payment processing fee and must pay the 0.5 euros core technology fee. Developers who stay on the old terms will continue to pay up to 30% for using the app store just like they do today. So you don't have to opt into some of these changes and you might not be in a region that it's available to, but yeah, Kevin, have you, I don't know, maybe you have an app in the Apple app store that this applies to, but how much do you follow the stuff otherwise? Yeah, apps are like children to me. I might have one somewhere, I don't know. The point is, the 50 euro thing, which are 0.5 euros, which is like 54 freedom bucks, 54 cents, I believe, right? And that's an annual fee, correct, per install? It's an annual fee per install for the entire time that you have it installed. Yeah. So it can get pretty expensive. And my thought on this is that when I initially read the headline, it's like, oh, wow, they actually really acquiesced. It's like, oh, wait a minute, no, Apple's still gonna make sure they get that money. They're still getting there. And this is EU only, right? We looked at what they're doing in the US because of the Epic lawsuit and whatnot. They're still taking like a 27% cut even if you side load something. And then with the 3% payment processing, Apple looks like they've kind of won the battle. But I would love to point it back. Like, do you think this moves the chains at all? Like, I haven't seen developers getting super excited for this. I've seen the internet sort of say, hey, competition good, anything good, any change good. But are developers super positive about this? You know, just because Apple recently announced the Vision Pro and next Friday, a week from tomorrow, we, the DTNS family, will be getting our unit. So I'm super pumped about that for Apple Vision Show, one of the shows that we also are launching and have. But because of that, I think you hear a lot of like, well, why didn't more people buy the Vision Pro? Obviously, because it's expensive. And the market is not, it's early days, you know, isn't market. But also because Apple isn't particularly friendly to developers over a course of decades. This is just something that Apple has been able to do because it's Apple. And I think you have a lot of developers at this point pushing back and saying, well, we have other options, you know, and your option, maybe it's good, but it's not the only one. And I think that plays into a lot of this as well. Yeah, interesting to think that Apple was once, like the great Uniter, bringing all the labels together to sell their songs for 99 cents in their store. But now it seems like they can't get Netflix or Spotify or YouTube to develop apps for like the Vision Pro, probably because of the gatekeeping that is the app store at the moment. Yeah, that is absolutely the case. It's like, why would we give you 30%? Folks can just use the web browser and we keep all the money. That's what the big platforms are gonna do. The developers are really like, man, Apple, you know, you're complying with what the law says you have to do, but it literally will cost us more money to not use you. How does that work for us? And Apple, their stance on this is that we're going to make as much money as the law allows us to. So you will see now that there are very different laws, very different ways that Apple operates in the economic area of the EU as compared to the United States because they, you know, still here, as you said, they're still 27% over there. It's now 17. So it is a big difference. And I think Apple is going to basically, until law tells them that they must change, they're going to make all the money that they can make. Yeah. So the world of AI is fast moving and that's why you should listen to AI Name This Show each week, Tristan Jutra and Teja Kastodi examine the hype and the fear and everything in between to keep you informed about all the latest news in the AI world. Catch it at ainamethisshow.com. All right, so for many people, the idea of, you know, selling all your possessions and getting a van and going cross country sounds very freeing. But it also means stripping down modern life to only the bare essentials in a really small and perhaps versatile space. That isn't always true though, you can do it all. Plenty of technology can make living on wheels as comfortable as a house and have added benefits to. Thankfully, Kevin Pereira is doing exactly this, has been doing the van life, the trailer life, whatever you want to call it, Kevin, for some time. So let's talk about how this works. And I think many of the folks in our audience want to start with internet. Yeah, I mean, that's the big one. Of course, the folks in this audience would care about connectivity, which was admittedly my number one concern. It wasn't the creature comforts. It wasn't, you know, even what's the battery system on it. It wasn't how many cubic feet of storage do I have. It was how do I stay connected so that I can eke out an existence and know what's going on? Like I need to be able to be remote, but still doom scroll so that I can't sleep peacefully in whatever canyon I sit down with. Yeah, you don't want to get too crazy. Exactly. So, you know, connectivity now, now when I started this journey, Starlink was like a whisper. It was a long waiting list. There was uncertainty and fear and doubt about all things. So LTE connectivity or 5G was still the way to go. There were some other satellite providers that were charging hundreds of dollars a month for, you know, 20 gigs of data and then you're capped and your speeds were, you know, 20 megs a second if you were lucky. And so Starlink has really changed the game. So it's hard to talk about mobile connectivity without checking Starlink. They've, I did not go with Starlink for my journey though, for a myriad reasons. If you're going to be very, very, very off the grid to the point where there's no cell towers anywhere near you, which is fairly easy to do in North America, then Starlink is the option. That's the best way to go. Good luck navigating their plans, which seem to change every three or four months. You're going to be spending a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand dollars to get into their hardware ecosystem. And, you know, they have, like I said, their plans change all the time. So that was a little bit of a headache. I went with something that I think was briefly on the screen, which this is hashtag, not an ad. It was just a game changer for me and something we can probably geek out a little bit. There's a company called Waveform. There are other companies, but I went with that panel that's on the screen right now. This is a four by four, multiple in, multiple out antenna kit that requires no external power. And I got one of these and hooked it up to a T-Mobile home internet router, which did include gently voiding a warranty and popping some security stickers. But once I connected that booster to that mobile internet, because I am a T-Mobile subscriber, again, hashtag, not an ad. I pay full price for things. It was $30 a month for T-Mobile home internet. And I was crushing Starlink users at multiple sites by simply pointing that little panel on a pole, an external pole, pointing it in the rough direction of the nearest cell tower. And my LTE and 5G speeds were insane. I was getting 300 megs per second down, 100 plus megs up. This is like an over-the-air antenna for people who just want free television. Basically, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's designed to grab those specific LTE and 5G spectrums and they make just a 5G one, they make just an LTE one. I wanted broad spectrum and I didn't want a hyper-directional panel. I could have gotten faster speeds if I opted for a panel that you had to point precisely in the direction of a tower. But I'm telling you, your mileage may vary, no road pun intended. But this panel saved me in so many places when I was just looking at different apps on where to book, where to stay. There's Bureau of Land Management, BLM Land. There's plenty of reviews that will say what your connectivity might be, what kind of bars you might expect, what your download speeds may be. If I knew that there was a sliver of connectivity with that panel, I felt like fully confident that I can roll up, deploy the home and be connected at high enough speeds to record podcasts and play Xbox games and it worked flawlessly. Kevin, now that you've got the internet taken care of, what are some of the other pieces of technology that you're using just to, because you're a tech guy, you're into tech, you do a podcast, what other things are you using just to allow you to exist in this tech-laden world that we live in? Yeah, there's some really un-sexy tech and there's some very cool stuff, some stuff you don't think about. The RV Life app is something that I came to rely upon. It will show you different campsites, it will give you the ins and outs of how to actually get in and out, which is a big deal, depending upon the size of your rig. There were reviews on the connectivity speeds. Are you hearing the chaos happening outside, by the way? I'm not, I'm just thinking of like, if I compare this to Yelp, somebody on RV Life being like, you know, getting in and out was great, but boy, the neighbors, the neighbors. You'll get a little bit of that. I'm like three stars. There's no one star, it was my birthday, campground review. You don't get that, what you do on Yelp, you know? The sense of entitlement. They didn't seat my party of 70 within the first five minutes, so I hate you, Cheesecake Factory. But with the RV Life app, again, I felt like these are just, this is what I gravitated towards. Again, getting in and out of things, steep grades, having enough room to back in a trailer, whether it's a travel trailer or a fifth wheel, we can get into the differences there. RV Life really was great and it has a GPS on it, which is, let's say, trucker or hauler friendly. If you rely on an Apple Maps or a Google Maps, you can't put in things like bridge clearances, and you might not get alerts for things like high wind, and again, when you're hauling a 35 foot something that's 16,000 pounds, you wanna make sure you can fit under bridges and that the wind is not gonna tump you over. And those are things that a trucker-friendly GPS, a dedicated app or unit, a garment makes a bunch of them as well, that's really important to have. And then quickly, the little nice to haves, I threw an RV lock on mine, a little digital keypad, so that I didn't have to fumble around with the janitor loop full of keys everywhere. I could just leave, come back, dial in a code and be good. Walkie-talkies, very basic, but very important. If you're in an area where cell signal is low and you haven't set up your booster just yet, being able to communicate, get in and out, back your rig in if you're traveling with a partner, that's really big. And then the tiniest little thing, but it can be very important if you're traveling with pets, there's a thing called a temp stick and there's another device called a waggle. They are both temperature sensors that install in your trailer. One relies on Wi-Fi, which is fine if you know you're gonna have, again, connectivity and plenty of shared Wi-Fi, but if the power goes out and you don't have a generator or don't have a backup, you might want something that is relying on a cell network, that's where the waggle comes in. But basically, you wanna know if you have to leave your pets behind for a few hours, you're going on a hike, you're going to a co-working space, you're hunting for a latte or just some good eggs, you wanna make sure that your pets are safe while they're back in the trailer. So both of those are good options. All right, so we've talked a lot about the technology that you have to make modern life comfortable, but what about some of the more difficult questions? You're living on the road, you're constantly on the move, you're constantly breaking down and setting up. What do you use for safe water and just like general power and sewage? Yeah, that's the fun one. They call it a stinky, slinky, Sarah. Oh, okay. We can get into that. It's not glamorous at times. Let me be clear, it's not glamorous. And unlike having a home or an apartment where you call your landlord or you dial up a handy person, you might not be in an area where anybody is around to help service anything. So you have to become an instant expert. I had to figure out how to fix a refrigerator while we were in the middle of nowhere because if I didn't, all of our food would have spoiled. We've been in campsites that are really beautiful campgrounds on lakes and they're luxury campgrounds, which I do put in air quotes. Yet the water would go out so you better have clean water in a spare tank. And so for that, water filtration I think is a must. Any of these campgrounds or if you're going to a mooch dock or boondock as they call it, dry docking, anything where you're not connected to utilities, you're gonna want some clean water and clean power. So I use the ClearSource Ultra Water Filter. Oh, no, I'll pro here. I'll pro on this show. Three Filter System has taken some very questionable water sources and made them drinkable and made showering and doing dishes and all that fun stuff really clean and great. You want a power management system, not just a surge protector because if you're plugging into 30 amp or 50 amp power, I use 50 amp power here because I've got two air conditioning units. We have the TV, a fireplace, an electronic one, all sorts of gadgets being powered. This is a really nice van, Kevin. Yeah, it's not, I mean, like I said, nicer than my first few apartments, by a long shot. And... Oh, is that one of those? It was fine, but this sounds really nice. Oh yeah, that's right, yeah. No, this one's way nicer. I'll put it that way. Power management systems are good because you want to know, not just that you're gonna be safe in case of a power oopsie, but you wanna know if there's a reverse polarity issue, if the line's not grounded. You don't want a big pop happening because it can ruin your entire rig. So I use an EMS, an electric management system. I don't know if we have that one, but I use one of those for a 50 amp system. And then you might wanna consider lithium batteries versus the old battery systems. They can store energy a lot longer and with a basic solar panel setup, you can last a lot longer if you don't wanna be hooked up someplace. I don't know, Rob. Sounds pretty fun to me. We ready? We ready for van life? I just... What's it gonna take to get y'all out on the open road? Will you tell me? What's it gonna take? What's wrong with it? I got stuff and, you know, it's like, you know, finally my two kids are out at the house and I finally feel like I have enough space in my 2,400 square feet. So I don't know if van life is for me, but forever, but maybe for like, my wife and I, if we were to just go do something for three months or something like that, I've actually thought about written like an RV because believe it or not, I actually have a CDL driver's license so I can drive trucks, drive buses, those kind of things. So I've thought about getting something like that to just do like a three month cross country tour. But we just haven't gotten to that yet. I mean, Kevin, just, I don't know, as we wrap up this segment and we're gonna talk a little bit more about it in GDI because there's so many more questions I have, but you know, for anyone who's sort of like, well, Kevin seems to have it dialed in and has done some trial and error, what initially got you on this road, on this path? Yeah, thank you for asking, Sarah. We just wanted something different. I was in LA for 20 plus years and living that existence in life. A friend said, you might wanna try the camping thing. I said that sounds like a lot of learning and a lot of this and a lot of that. And they rightfully said, first of all, it's a lot of tech if you wanna look at it that way. So that's a fun project for you and you can dip your toe in the water. You don't have to leap. So the rig and the setup that I'm using right now, the same advice I would give to someone else. I started by borrowing a friend's truck and going to a U-Haul and renting the smallest little storage container trailer that they had. And I went to an empty Costco parking lot after hours and I just practiced backing up and getting in and out. And once I had basic confidence down in that, then I rented a small travel trailer. You don't have to leap in. There are services where you can go and rent a little travel trailer. You could probably tow it behind your car even if there is just a basic hitch bar there. You can also get a small little class C motor home. So you can dip a toe in and try it out. You don't have to write a huge check and leap in and learn lessons on your own gear. And so that's what did it for me. It was the pursuit of something new, a new hobby, seeing if it would unlock new passions, which it did. And the barrier to entry was really easy. I didn't have to leap right into the massive 35-foot rig and diesel truck. I love it. I love it. Kudos to you. And I know it hasn't been seamless or easy, but I mean, all of the stuff that you've learned to be able to tell the next person about it, I think is extremely helpful for a lot of us who think, you know, that cross-country trip or longer could be kind of fun after all and is not out of the realm of possibility. All right, before we wrap up the show, let's check out the mail bag. So yesterday in Good Day Internet, we were talking about whether or not returning to the office is indeed dead. Ryan wrote in, I found myself agreeing with Tom and that working from home isn't always as productive. I run a small entertainment business. For the past five years, I've maintained an office space in a commercial building. The benefit is that meeting clients with a storefront seems more professional, but I also have three kids at home. Even if I go to a dedicated part of the house and say, dad's at work, please pretend I'm not here, it's difficult for a young kid to understand that I'm inaccessible if I'm physically in that building. And even when they're all in school, working from home is comfortable, but then there's the laundry and the dishes. The mental separation of leaving the home to go someplace where the sole focus is to do the work and then go home really helps boost my productivity. I just think that folks who think that they're never gonna have to go back into the office again, you're gonna have to go back into the office again. There's billions and billions of dollars worth of real estate out there that these businesses are saying, we're just not going to lose that money. We're gonna make it come back in. So hybrid is probably the best of what you can probably ask for, for most companies these days. That's just my opinion. Yeah, yeah. I wish I had the microphone to thump against my chest like Wolf of Wall Street. I'm not going back. I'm not going back. Yeah. Well, and I always say to people, I'm like, I never was there. Well, I mean, I used to be in an office all the time, but it's like pre-COVID, I was like, oh, working from home was pretty dope. I mean, there are things that are challenging and definitely time management things that I have to really chuck myself on. But yeah, I don't know. I think everybody's different. So maybe the takeaway for now is if return to work is not mandatory for lots of workers, but is for some, we can all find different ways to go forward. And Kevin's van life could be a part of that. Speaking of Kevin, Kevin Perrera, such a pleasure to have you on the show. This was really fun. We're going to be talking a little bit more about everything that's going on with you and GDI. But for now, let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Thanks, yeah. I host the AI for Humans podcast with my buddy Gavin Purcell. You can grab that pretty much anywhere. You can get a podcast these days, but head to AI for Humans dot show if you want to check out the old website because we put one of those up. I think they're still relevant. I don't know anymore, but it's there. And then my buddies and I, we just launched a weird generative AI thing today, but I can talk about that later because I don't want anybody to leave this Twitch stream to go see that Twitch stream. So why not wait? Certainly not. Oh, gotta love a good tease. Patrons, you can stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. And it sounds like you'd like to, even more so than usual today. We're going to ask about Kevin's other projects, including that Twitch channel with generative AI. Mm, sounds good. You can also catch the live show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com for slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Shannon Morse. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.