 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Ms. Music Teacher, James C. Smith, and Miranda Genel. Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft and Adobe are going in on A.I. imagery, a digital camera community mourns one of its own, and when it comes to flagship devices, what is really the killer spec that we need? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 21st, 2023. In Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the suburbs of Atlanta, I'm Terrence Gaines. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Genel. Well Terrence, we're glad to have you with us. I am envious of you being on the other side of the country from me because we're getting a lot of rain here in California, but what's new? Nothing much. I may have to be muting myself because I caught a cold and it's my fault, totally my fault. Never exercise and then go right outside and do lawn yard work. Been there, been there. Well, it is spring, so perhaps sunnier days are on the horizon for everybody. Meanwhile, let's start with the quick heads. TikTok made changes to its community guidelines, expanding its rules on synthetic and manipulated media. The platform now requires all realistic A.I. that's generated content to be clearly disclosed, either with an overlaid sticker or within the description, kind of like ads. The rules also explicitly prohibit synthetic media that contains the likeness of a real private figure or a public figure endorsing a product. Alright, Microsoft subsidiary, Nuance Communications announced a new application to automatically generate drafts of clinical notes for clinicians after a patient's visit called Dragon Ambion E Experience Express. That's a big word. The app uses the GPT-4 model and generates a draft within seconds of a visit rather than Nuance's previous solution, which took about four hours. I think we'll have some happy clinicians in our audience. If that's you, do let us know. We'd love to hear from you. Google flagged several apps from the Chinese e-commerce company Pin Duo Duo as malware, suspending its official app in the Play Store. Google will use its Google Play Protect feature on Android to block users from installing third-party APKs of these flagged apps and also warn users who already have it installed to remove it, or them. You know, there are more than one. Pin Duo Duo's spokesperson denied the speculation and accusation that its app was malicious at all. Alright, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports that the upcoming iPhone 15 with a USB-C port will only allow faster charging speeds on Apple-certified cables under its made-for-iPhone program. Currently, the iPhone 14 supports up to 20-watt charging on Lightning with the iPhone 14 Pro supporting 27-watt charging. That makes sense for Apple to have to use a special cable. Yeah, help proprietary of them. NVIDIA announced its new DGX Cloud Service at this year's GPU Technology Conference. The service lets users rent virtual versions of the company's DGX server boxes. Each virtual server will feature 8 NVIDIA H100 or A100 GPUs and 640 GB of memory. The virtual service can also be integrated with existing on-site GDX servers using the company's base command software. Pricing starts at a cool $37,000 per month. But again, if you're a company that wants this, you might feel it's well worth it. Kind of a bargain if you're looking at a comparison to something like a physical DGX server, which will run you $200,000. DGX servers are typically used in AI-related workloads, including large language models or LLMs and generative AI. All right, Terrence, let's talk about some layoffs and what they might mean to things that we love. All right. Yesterday, DTNS covered Amazon performing yet another round of layoffs that have been coming in waves since last November. Sometimes it isn't clear to the outside of what exactly is being cut inside of a company of Amazon size when thousands of people lose their jobs at once. But today, we have a direct casualty. After 25 years of detailed reviews of digital cameras and accessories, DPReview is being shut down by Amazon and the entire team has been laid off. Yeah. In fact, this was a big, big, big, sad conversation we were having in our team discord this morning. Rich Strafilino said, this is big news, guys. And yeah, if you're unfamiliar with DPReview, you likely are if you're one of our listeners. But DPReview has been around forever, at least in internet times. It was founded back in 1998 and operated independently for 12 years before it was bought by Amazon back in 2010. At that point, the DPReview team, which operated out of England, was relocated to Seattle to be closer to Amazon headquarters, all made sense at the time. Now, since 2010, fewer people buy standalone digital cameras, especially because we've got smartphones that do pretty great things. But for those that do, and there are many people that do, a website like DPReview that goes above and beyond the in-depth is essential and welcomed. It's sort of, I guess like if Wirecutter reviewed every digital camera on the market with exhaustive details on image quality and specs and features and video reviews who love and live and breathe camera gear. But DPReview never really evolved under Amazon. A lot of people wondered, well, how will it get incorporated? Never really did, at least into any overall business model that Amazon put forth in a significant way. Now, Roger, I know you were an enthusiastic eyeball-share with DPReview, so why do we think this happened? What went wrong here? I think the biggest one is what you mentioned. Since 2010, at least for the Japanese camera manufacturers, the sales between 2010 and 2021 dropped 95%, like the number of shipments that they made. So there is significantly less money in that space than there used to be. So when they picked up DPReview, and DPReview, along with Imaging Resource, was one of the big go-to sites back in the early 2000s for anything related to digital cameras, whether it was lenses, accessories, flashes, hot shoe adapters, anything. It was really, really good. It was a valuable resource and what was fascinating is when Amazon did buy them, and as you mentioned, they didn't really integrate them in a tightly knit way. The site still existed as a stand-alone site, although if you were shopping for digital cameras on the Amazon site, you would see DPReview recommends this camera or this set of cameras. If you were looking, say, at a mirrorless camera or a digital SLR, it would have these recommendations, but it never really went further than that. And I have suspected for a long time, part of it was just because of the affiliate links that used to come from that site were tremendous. Like, they would have ones, not just for Amazon, but for B&H and a couple of other online stores that used to get tremendous traffic, because they were the go-to site to go if you wanted to buy a new camera. But before you plunked down $5,000, $6,000, $1,200 on camera, you wanted to make sure what you were getting was good. And there were very few other options out there, and DPReview was so good. So really, I think it's just a shift in the fact that the market has dropped, at least for consumer cameras, not so much for professional digital photography. In Amazon, it was just like, oh, well, we got what we wanted out of them, and we need to cut back since we're already having layouts. It kind of makes business sense in that way, although I'm sure a lot of camera enthusiasts are probably shedding it here, because it was still is, you have until April, still a great resource if you are in the market for camera accessories. Speaking of shedding the tear, I wonder if the employees or the people behind DPReview kind of saw this coming. I mean, we mentioned everybody going to smartphones, not using digital cameras as much, the site never being fully integrated into Amazon. I wonder if the people were kind of like, all right, any day now, any day now it's coming, let me figure out something else, let me figure something else out, because this is coming eventually. Yeah, I mean, I know, I don't work at Amazon, never have, and I don't really know what went on with DPReview specifically, but I just feel like, okay, we had 12 years, 13 now, to kind of figure out how to, let's say, Amazon, I type in digital camera for daughter, something like that, I'm going to get a bunch of results, maybe something that DPReview said, this is the camera that you want, and maybe it's at a higher end type thing, but here's why, yada, yada, yada, maybe that's one of the options, but there will be lots of others, because that's Amazon's business, right? And there are lots of reviews, some of which may be helpful, some of which may not be, you know, there's a whole bot thing going on when it comes to reviews on Amazon, which is not unique to the electronics category, but to have some sort of like the pro-corner type thing for certain categories like digital cameras, which more and more, I guess you could, I'm not going to call it like a niche market, because we're not there yet, but more and more is something where it's like, if you're an enthusiast, this is still a product category that makes a lot of sense to you, unspecs really matter, but the fact that Amazon didn't do anything with that, you know, it's in an ego year or two with something like that going on, fine, but it almost seems like, and the TechCrunch article that talks about the fact that DP Review is now gone, it's sort of worth it because the writer is pretty bummed out about it and just said, I don't even know if Amazon knew that it bought DP Review, that's how much it didn't leverage it in any significant way. And you know, it's weird and kind of crass, maybe to mention it, but at the end of the day, if you're buying something and you buy it through Amazon, Amazon's happy, right? I don't think that's crass, I think that's not cool. And what DP Review meant to them was really just another way to kind of funnel people into their store. Sure, yeah. And if they kind of get lost along the way of products, what does it matter if they end up buying something? And what it means to other people, well, that's a sad thing, but when it comes down to it, as long as we're making the money and we can cut what they see as fat, things like this are gonna happen. Well, as we mentioned, a lot of folks, myself included, who are camera enthusiasts, definitely photography enthusiasts, but are pretty much just rockin' the smartphone day-to-day these days. New flagship phones are always kind of exciting when you look at specs. The latest, OPPO announcing its new flagship phone, the Find X6 Pro, offering 2,023 flagship specs. That would be this year, including a 3168x1440 AMO LED screen, IP68 rating for water and dust, and support for 100-watt wired charging. Also featuring three rear Hasselblad branded camera sensors, each offering 50 megapixels. Main camera offers a 1-inch Sony sensor, also includes an ultra-wide and a 3x periscope zoom telephoto lens, shipping in China on May 24th, starting at $6,001, which is about $873. Sounds like a steal for those sorts of specs. We don't have word on international availability, but when to watch. Speaking of new features, Google updated the Pixel Watch to add fall detection feature, which will automatically detect hard falls and automatically contact emergency services. Hopefully they have tested the roller coaster thing that the Apple Watch went through recently. The update also adds the ability to press the watch's crown to see the time, even when it's powered off or otherwise out of battery. So we got a new smartphone. We got a Pixel Watch update. Terrence, I know you're an iOS user. I am as well. You're also the co-host of the Snoboes podcast. So you talk about specs a lot. Flagship phones from various companies increasingly have similar specs. You kind of start getting into like, well, for the price, what's better? What's right for me? What ecosystem am I in? And there are specs that are, I think, really important to my life. And there are specs that I go, oh, interesting, but maybe kind of gimmicky. What is your take on when you see something like this? Some new phone that gets rolled out or an update to wearable, for example, what are the specs that mean the most to you? Yes, you're right. We've been doing a lot of specs when it comes to our own podcast, especially as it relates to iPhones. But we've started to pare down a lot of the specs where we're not going over all of the specs because what I've noticed is that people care less about the specs as long as when they go to do something on the device, it's just there. And what I mean by that is like, for instance, we'll take the fall detection feature for Google. Nobody wants to say, all right, I've got this watch. I'm about to go hiking. Let me turn on my Google watch fall detection feature. Let me make sure it's up to date. Let me make sure I got it all set up. Make sure I got everything going. They just want it to work. So when it comes to actually deciding what they're going to buy or deciding do I need this extra feature, I think it's more of does this feature justify the cost that I'm about to spend for this device, but when they actually get it, they're not actually going through and setting everything and adjusting everything to actually say, okay, I bought this device for this feature. Let me go in and tweak it to work to my specific use case. They just want to know it's there. And they want to say, okay, I spent eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hundred dollars in a lot of cases for this new phone. It's got these new features, but I really don't care that much as long as they just work when I actually use it. So that's what I've kind of noticed when dealing with our own reviews. It's like, yeah, I need it to justify the cost, but I really don't care as long as it just works. You know, just based on our previous camera discussion, besides everything being behind me on my little workbench, I haven't used DSLR in years regularly anyway. Everything is now baked into the phone, but at the same time, even that has changed. First of all, the phone sensors have gotten better, and there's a lot of stuff built into the phone itself. So there's less reliance on, I don't know, cool filter apps. I mean, I've got 30 filter apps on my iPhone that I'd never open anymore because I don't really need them because the iPhone does everything itself. It wasn't always the case as the resolution has gotten better and better with photos and videos, and we have more options. I feel like that's sort of the killer spec. Now, I know a lot of people who don't really take a lot of photos at all and don't really care about quality. You know, there might be some photos taken of the family, you know, during the holidays type thing, but there's not so much emphasis on this. I think where a lot of people, that's where something like the new Oppo phone, the X6 Pro, the Find X6 Pro that I just mentioned, you know, a lot of people are going to say like, for less than a thousand US dollars, that is an amazing camera that you have. That's also your phone. That's also the way you might pay for things and, you know, this and that, and just, you know, takes up less space. I don't know. I wonder when digital cameras will be like, you know, the vinyl people where, you know, there's a resurgence because it's kind of cool rather than necessary. Definitely, and I'll add this real quick, especially in the smartphone market, if you're not an iPhone or you're not a flagship phone from, like, Samsung or even Google's Google Pixel line, you really just kind of spam specs because you want to impress potential buyers because as Terrence said, most people don't really understand what all the specs are, but they know big must be better. You're faster. Yeah, so you're just trying to check all the boxes, you know, that people go up to the car dealership and they see, well, this car has like 25 things that are standard feature and this one only has 12. And so you're trying to play to that value judgment for possible consumers, whether or not they might use it, right? If you're a critical buyer, you're like, well, I don't really need that because how often do I take pictures? But if you're just, you know, if you're plumping down, you know, 900 bucks or something, you want to make sure that you're getting a good value. That's right. Well, if you have an idea of what you would like us to talk about on our future show, one way to let us know is using our subreddit. It's a great little community over there. Submit stories and vote on others, get them up to the top so we see them more easily, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, Terrence. I hope you're ready to talk about AI because it won't stop. Sometimes I feel that way. When I open up my browser in the morning, I'm like, oh boy, here we go again. But the hits keep coming. Microsoft announced it began rolling out its Bing image creator to Bing preview testers. This uses OpenAI's Dolly model to generate images directly within Bing chat. And you might say, well, which one? Microsoft didn't say which version of Dolly it's using here, just that it's using the very latest Dolly models. The feature will only be available through Bing's creative mode, coming to Bing's balanced and precise modes in the future and will roll out to the edge sidebar. That actually confused me a little bit this morning because you have to be over in the creative mode. Each request will generate four images from a prompt, each with a small Bing watermark in the lower left corner. Bing says, we want everyone to know we helped you here. Bing is also getting two new search features, visual stories and knowledge cards 2.0. The knowledge cards used to function like Google's knowledge panels, more or less. But now we'll include AI generated infographics and more interactive elements like charts and graphs and timelines. Not to be outdone. We have a new contender in the AI arms race. Adobe announced a beta of Firefly, what the company calls a, quote, family of creative, generative AI models. At launch, this includes two models. One offers text to image generation. Another generates stylized text. At launch, Firefly will operate as a standalone web app, but the company plans to integrate the models throughout this creative suite. Adobe said all training data for its models either came from content out of its copyright, was licensed for training, or was in the Adobe Stock Library because of course they want to make sure that people know they are not stealing artists, not stealing their work because that's been a big deal when AI first started popping out. Yeah, no kidding. And yeah, if you're an artist saying, what Adobe is claiming is either not true or not good enough for me, please do let us know because that's interesting. I am an Adobe user. I fire up Photoshop a couple of times a month to do this or that. I am not well-skilled at all and I'm not really using much more of Adobe's creative suite. But when I do, I kind of know how to do what I know how to do and everything else is either start Googling or ask somebody who's better at this than I am. Both tend to, you know, surface results that I'm looking for, but it's time consuming and a little cumbersome and to have anything, especially for stylized text or at least give me an image that I can start playing with rather than build all these layers myself. That's awesome. I mean, I see nothing wrong with this as far as somebody who's kind of more of a tinker than an expert. If you're more of an expert, I can see where you kind of go like, now where are we going to get all these folks who don't really know what they're doing? They didn't go to enough classes in graphic art to have these sorts of tools. It's kind of the same conversation that we've been having for a while is, are these tools good for the folks who need the help or do they end up hurting the folks who are better at it in the first place? Well, back in the day, I used to be a blogger. It was the big thing. And don't go look at my old blog post. Also, I'm pretty sure, yeah, but I'm pretty sure I copyrighted some images as a thumbnail for my blog post. So I could definitely see, you know, Firefly something like this coming in place to where I don't really want to get into the habit of, or I really don't have the time to create a whole image for this blog post that I just wrote or to make it relevant to today. Let's say I'm a YouTuber and I went all through all this effort to shoot the video, edit the video, add all these things. Now I gotta go and make a thumbnail. I can see people, give me a picture of Lama, like you said, with sunglasses. And that's my thumbnail. You know, I could definitely see that happening to where it's like, I don't have to put a lot of thought in it. But I needed to where nobody can say hey, you stole my picture, you know, but I can do it real fast. Like, if you're in a multi disciplinary setting, say you're making motion graphics or you're doing a video and you need to make the title sequence, you need to make the bumpers and all that. Oftentimes you kinda have to start from scratch. You gotta generate, you know, in After Effects you gotta make your shapes or you pull in assets from Photoshop and if you pull in an asset oftentimes you're not gonna have a vector image you're gonna have a raster image so if you try stretching it or resizing it's gonna look weird. I think this will allow people to essentially just build and create and basically simplify a lot of the initial setup work to building whatever they need to do whether it's a larger composition or a larger piece to finish work because oftentimes it's like looking for a tool when you're working on your car, it's like where's that screwdriver, where's that socket wrench that I need that one specific size for that I don't have and then you try to figure out something with what you do have this I think will simplify that product. This will also I think help a lot of individual contractors who might not have the budget to maybe hire a few more people to help them with the project and they have to do it all solo. This I could see being a very, very valuable tool. That's a good, that was kind of what I was getting at. In the past I've had people say, hey we want to hire you for this freelance project, can you do this? My answer is yes I can in my mind I'm like I don't know how to do this but I know who does and I'll work it out with them kind of thing because you want work. For me to say I don't know how to do it but I can figure it out with a bunch of built in tools so it's more of me just kind of having some fun within menus rather than farming out actual work to other humans with the other humans that wanted my work maybe aren't so excited about this but yeah this does streamline a lot of things. I think that's sort of the takeaway. So thank you Microsoft, thank you Adobe and thank you to all companies who give us AI stories every day because like an atmospheric river it never seems to end. No time soon anyway. Well hopefully you're not underwater and if you're not you might be excited that Acer, Acer the PC maker is hitting the road. Yep they announced their new E-Bike called the E-Bi E-B-I-I 35 pound bike so pretty light offering a 250 watt front spoke motor with a top assisted speed of 15 miles per hour and a 68 mile range no kind of fire on this thing. Acer says that the bike will adapt to a rider's preferred level of assistance and riding conditions over time so it wants to get to know you forthcoming companion app for the bike will do proximity based locking GPS positioning some fun stuff like that and it is for Acer after all so the bike's removable 460 watt battery can be used as a giant USB-C battery if you so choose. We don't know anything about price yet or availability but Terrence it sounds kind of good to me. It does. I was trying to figure out what's my use case or could I use this and not me personally but my kids I have junior high and high school aged children and their schools are like literally right around the corner and I dread every morning having to fight traffic just for a five minute ride so Acer may be getting my money if this is a price right so I can get my kids their own wheels until they are begging me to use my own which I'm not looking forward to that at all. I also love and I know Acer's not the first company to do this but also saying like and when you're not using your bike this is a great battery for all your computing needs you know charge your house. That's a pretty smart play if you think about it. Acer's just known for PC laptops, PC accessories you know that that markets like the digital camera markets slimming down a little bit what better way to kind of segue into a different market than the e-bikes which is you know on the uptake as Ristrafalina would tell you. Rich loves his bikes. And selling it not only as a means of transportation but additional power you know even even when you're not riding it it's still useful. Indeed. Alright got a couple mail bags let's check it out now. This one comes from John and Terence if this doesn't make sense to you I'll try to clarify. We were talking about the idea of having well we're not going to make it up but the idea of some expert saying we need a single lunar time zone so you know various companies, various governments people going to international space station got to talk to each other what are we doing up there let's have one singular time zone but that's kind of an issue because the moon doesn't have the same you know the number of hours in the day that earth does etc etc anyway John says that discussion reminded me that way back when Swatch yes the watch maker had this idea that the whole world would use internet time dividing a day into 1000 time units for example a new time unit would be called a beat instead of dividing the virtual and real day into 24 hours and 60 minutes per hour the internet time system proposed by Swatch divided the day into 1000 beats each beat is a minute and 26.4 seconds there was a new meridian internet time would be based on a new meridian opposed to the Greenwich Meridian for example the new meridian going through the Swatch's business in Beale, Switzerland called the BMT meridian the BMT would be the reference for internet time so you've got Beale mean time or BMT another invention of Swatch linking up to the central European winter or standard time which is UTC plus one hour when it's midnight in BMT the internet time is 0000 beats and noon is 500 beats Terrence there will be test later did you catch all of that absolutely not so do all these roll into one time zone or is it the idea is that the earth would all operate on a time zone that is I don't know more time focused than what we've all just gotten used to instead of having a bunch of time zones we would all use this time zone but instead of having hours and minutes per day it would be beats I guess my question is if it's just one zone do we need to call it a zone yeah I mean it's mean time at that point it would just be time wouldn't it yes time relative to where you are but it's always the same time is your four o'clock dark mine might be there would be I think there would be a lot of friction over choosing what the new meridian would be I see the rest of it sounds sort of useful although because it's not an integer the seconds aren't an actual integer but a fraction of one confusing for people who are converting but really the sticking point would be the meridian who gets to be the meridian Swatch said where our headquarters is so yeah of course you'd have to buy into that for anything like this to work but and I used to have several Swatch watches in fact remember the Sniffy Band back in the day they didn't last forever but yes John thank you for bringing it to our attention and maybe be nostalgic for anybody who says oh yeah I remember that whole Swatch idea what a fun gimmick and spec well someone who isn't a gimmick is you Terence again so thanks for being with us today let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you are working on yeah sure sure sure you can find me like we mentioned earlier in the show me and my co-host Anika Montford we do an in depth of all things Apple at thesnoboscast.com we talk about Apple we talk about a little bit of tech and some cultural things that interest us in addition to that myself Rob Dunwood who's been on the show multiple times and Stephanie Humphreys the tech John which is a tech show from our read black perspective so definitely check that out and we definitely appreciate all the viewers all the people who came from DTNS and vice versa who definitely want to say thank you for that well thank you for being with us always a pleasure to have you on the show we also have another thank you to give out and that is to our brand new boss named Mark Mark just started backing us on Patreon we'll see you Mark and we thank you speaking of patrons stick around for our extended show Good Day Internet we roll right into it when DTNS wraps up we're gonna talk a little bit more about Nvidia's AI announcements and I might talk a little bit more about scratch and sniff watch bands but just a reminder we do this show live and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 2100 UTC those are the time zones we're using please for now find out more at dailytechnewshow.com live we're back tomorrow do it all again with Scott Johnson joining us talk to you then take it easy this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program