 Coming up on D TNS our video game TV series about to get good, a hopeful material for better cheaper solar panels. And why predictive texting is just slowing you down, man. Stop it. This is the daily tech news for Wednesday, November 24th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty. There's a longer version of this show called good day internet. We were just doing an update on the a five G FAA stuff on that show. You can get it by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash D TNS. Big thanks to our top patrons, including David Mosher, Dan Voiles and Logan Larson. Let's start with a few tech things you should know time to say goodbye to dub smash. Reddit's going to shut down the short form video platform on February 22nd. Reddit largely integrated dub smash's functionality into its overhauled camera app, which is adding the ability to change video speed, set a timer, do minor edits with plans to launch exclusive lenses. Reddit says video is one of its fastest growing content types with a 70% increase in videos watched in 2021 and 30% increase in daily active video viewers. Short video viewership also increased 50% on the quarter. So they just didn't need it separated anymore. I guess I've been doing a bunch of that myself on Reddit. So it's good to hear I'm not Asia's sources say Apple plans to work with TSMC to produce five G modems fry phones by 2023. Currently Qualcomm supplies modems for Apple devices. Apple acquired Intel's modem business assets for $1 billion in July of 2019 billion Samsung announced it's going to build a 17 billion chip fab in Taylor, Texas, right outside Austin. Company will break ground on the plant next year with production expected to begin in 2024. Plants expected to produce processors for Samsung's own products as well as being sell to other companies, which is what Samsung does with its chips. Epic games in the news again, they have acquired this time harmonics, the developer of rock band and other musical experiences. Quite a few games actually harmonic says its games will remain on steam and will not become epic game store exclusives. The developer said it will continue to work on rock band for DLC, but will also work on making musical journeys and gameplay. That's a quote for fortnight. That makes sense. And a group of about 70 Japanese firms, including the three largest banks will bring testing a yet will begin testing a yen based digital currency with plans to launch at some time in fiscal 2022. This is not a consumer oriented CBDC. This is called DC JPY backed by bank deposits. These would be used as a common platform to speed up large scale fund transfers and settlements. So this is one of the more back end digital currencies, not one that where you would spend it, you know, out of 7 11 or something. All right. Let's talk about solar materials. Crystal Ion silicon is not a superhero. It's the most common material used in solar panels, but it takes a lot of energy and time to process it. Whereas pair of Skype has emerged as a possible alternative to crystalline silicon. It's made from lead salts, which are available in large quantities and will cheaper to process. So it's very promising. It can be made into a liquid and you just print the film from the liquid. Now one issue with Perfskites is that unlike most semiconductors, they are highly disordered, lots of defects. So you would think that would reduce performance and maybe there'd have to be a lot of work done to smooth them out. Except that isn't true. In fact, sometimes the defects increase performance. Scientists at the University of Cambridge published a study in the journal Nature Nanotechnology about why that is. First, the defects do cause the expected reduction in performance by causing a little disorder at the electronic level. So you're not wrong when you think, Oh, well, that should cause a problem. However, the disorder of the spatial chemistry improves performance. So that makes up the difference. Basically, the chemistry funnels the charge away from the disordered traps caused by the defects. This discovery will help them fine tune how Perfskite is made to maximize efficiency, opening the possibility of taking advantage of that chemical disorder and semiconductor design in order to take advantage of that improved efficiency elsewhere. So you may wonder why don't we have Perfskite solar cells just out there replacing silicon everywhere? And we do we do have them commercially available. A lot of times they're in combination with silicon. Problem is there's still a lot of work to be done on how long it lasts, what its durability, what its stability is, as well as the normal issues of just making something make sense to manufacture at scale. But this study definitely helps move the ball down the road for Perfskite regarding efficiency and performance. High efficiency will ease the pressure on manufacturing. Because if you can get more out of a single panel, then you don't have to make as many panels to get the same amount of energy. Perfskites might also be useful for making LEDs and X-ray detectors as well. Yeah, the big hold up for me has always been a kind of a cost performance question. Very expensive early on but kind of pays for itself over time. And for a lot of us, that's not necessarily the decision we want to make right away or whatever. This helps move me closer down the road, just to say hey, it might be more affordable at some point. And not just more affordable, maybe more efficient and more efficiency means that me doing this would have a better personal impact on why I'm doing it than it would have previously. So I think this is a great sounding innovation. I do wish it extended and maybe it will at some point, often discoveries like this turn into other discoveries down the down the road. But I would love to see battery technology affected in a similarly cool way, take a cheap and cheap and easy to make material and then figure out a way to get longer charges out of our out of our battery systems that's been stagnant for so long. But hey, take what you can get. Let's harness the sun's power and do it a little cheaper and a little more efficiently. Yeah, this is good news for for bringing down the cost of solar cells, which are also already getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. I mean, honestly, folks, if you haven't gone and done the calculations at at what like energy stage or a place like that, go do them. Even if you live in a cloudy area, the costs have come down so much that it still might pay for itself over a couple of years, even without the subsidies, like it's, they keep getting cheaper and cheaper. And this indicates that they might continue to get even cheaper, even more effective, because more efficiency means you don't have to buy as many panels, all that stuff. I like what you're saying it's got about, you know, gosh, there's something there of like, well, if the chemistry of the solar cell for pair of sky works there, is there something we can learn from that and make the chemistry of lithium work better for us somehow? I imagine we've kind of exhausted everything because batteries, at least lithium ion batteries are so well studied. But but yeah, if anybody out there's working in the industry and knows like, Hey, yeah, no, there is something that we could take from that. Let us know feedback daily tech new show.com. Well, tech crunch is reporting on that Netflix gaming thing. And guess what tech or Netflix has added the racing title and the fresh off the shelves racing title asphalt extreme to its game lineup. Now some of you may have heard of this game before I've played it before. And that's because it's well, it was originally launched in 2016. It's nearly six years old. But they're going to be rolling this out globally coming to the US subscribers in the coming weeks. Fans probably noticed it was pulled from app stores at the end of September last year. Maybe you did. Maybe you didn't. It's an older game. Memory doesn't tend to stick around that long for games like this. But Netflix released a trailer for the game on its YouTube channel, noting asphalt extremes availability exclusively for Netflix subscribers with no ads or in app purchases. So this relatively, I won't call it unknown, but it's a racing game, but casual racing players could get in too easily. It's very arcadey. It's a good time. It's not the greatest racing game in the world, but it's all right. Here it is again, new life on a new service. It's an interesting new wrinkle in Netflix's plan. I have started to come around to the belief that Netflix does want to make a gaming service that that it absolutely does want to make a gaming service that it's not just doing this to extend the brands of its originals that it will do that it will use Bridgerton and stranger things and Squid Game to feed into this, but that it really does want to create a separate business, a new business, a new revenue generator. And it may not look like that right now because they started with card blast and now a six year old five year old title asphalt extreme. But what this reminds me of Scott is how Netflix streaming started. Do you remember how Netflix streaming started at the very beginning when you could only get it on the Netflix Roku player box? Yeah, it would take everything in your DVD queue and look and see if it had the rights to stream it. It had the rights to stream about 10 things. I'm exaggerating, but you know, you would have the weirdest stuff from your queue would show up on Netflix streaming. It was one row Netflix back then was one row of like, here's a weird documentary. Here's an indie film. You know, here's here's another like off movie that you forgot you put in your DVD queue and it's like 300th in line. And you could stream it. But it was all really odd off the wall stuff because it was what they could get the rights to. And it was what they could they could afford to put up on a server and start streaming it. And of course, we all know we think of Netflix just as a streaming service anymore, people forget the DVD dot com even exists, even though it's still out there. I think we're in we're in the broken Netflix player stage of Netflix gaming, which I like your thinking every time charge it's there in the tab, weird stuff. But hey, it doesn't cost you anything extra, which Netflix streaming didn't originally. That's true. Every time there's a new wrinkle to this story. You have a new thing to say about it actually. And I end up agreeing every time I think this is the path they're taking. There's no right. The fact that I'm wrong every time, which you're not. I mean, you're wrong, but you're not wrong. Yeah. The idea that these things are coming to market in this way. And by the way, they've got a if their goal is to take a bunch of old stuff first, acquire it and make it new again on their service. They have a treasure trove of the last five to 10 year old games. My my steam library is bursting with them of games that people have forgotten about that were okay, maybe better than average, small teams, middle teams, this sort of thing with games that are just sitting there waiting to find some kind of resurrection. And if that's their plan for a little bit here to get things going, they have no limit. And I think they may be thinking that they may be thinking, well, we've got lots of opportunities. Because look at all these smaller games that maybe didn't go very far or didn't get the exposure they wanted or something else competed it out of the market at the time. And now we can bring these in here. They'll be new to most people. And that's kind of what they did with those early streaming 720p videos that you were describing. Yep, they weren't new hot original content, or even new hot movies that had just been out that summer. These were old things that maybe were easier to get licensing for to do the streaming for or whatever. So build on that, build on that. And then you introduce new features here and there, you follow that that product rollout. It starts to make sense if you think of it that way. And I'm starting to think you're right. So until you're wrong again, which may may not be a happen, Tom, I don't know weeks from now. But yeah, we'll see. But but as it stands right now, I really think after this acquisition, I'm almost sure that that's their plan because why else are they doing this? It's it's it's just a slow build. Like you start with card blast and the Stranger Things game that you already like helped make. Then you get Alice asphalt extreme. And it's like, well, it's kind of old, but it was kind of popular on mobile. Then then you get something that's maybe a little little older, but more popular or something a little newer, but less popular. And then next thing you know, Netflix has everything available, you know, like five years from now, I could totally see that. Yep. Alright, folks, we get your ideas and we use them. We had a great episode yesterday, partly about the Australian energy market operator, reaching a milestone of going into negative energy. In other words, they were creating more solar energy than they were using. Thanks to KV over on our subreddit. Be like KV, let us know what you want to hear us talk about on the show. You can do that at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Some people rely on predictive texting when when they're texting. That's that's the function that makes a guess at the next word you might want to type. Usually shows two or three of them across the top of your keyboard, depending on what you're using. And then the idea is you just select that world without wasting time typing it out. Some people swear it speeds up their texting quite a bit. A study published in the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, however, found that using predictive text did not speed up typing. But that was a small study, 17 people. Maybe they were just all bad at texting. It's not a big sample. The idea that it speeds things up seems obvious. Instead of typing out every little letter, you make one tap. How could it not be faster? The longer the word, the more time you're saving. The argument that it's slower is that instead of moving right into typing the word, you have to pause and read the suggestions and decide if the one you want is in there. If it's not, you've now wasted time and have to type it out anyway. Even if you continue typing while you're doing that, it you're slowing down over the long term. That could slow things down. At least that's how the argument goes. So in 2019 Parola Christensen at the University of Cambridge and fellow scientists studied typing data from 37,000 volunteers using their own mobile phones. That was a very good way to make sure that they were able to work out the people who were good or bad at texting. People who used predictive text averaged 33 words per minute. People who just used autocorrect typed 43 words per minute. People who used neither typed 35 words per minute. So autocorrect was actually the fastest. But Professor Christensen wanted to know why. Is there a situation in which predictive text is effective? First, they determined that the average time it takes to tap a letter on a mobile keyboard is about 0.26 seconds for most people. The average time to decide whether to tap a predictive suggestion or not is about 0.46 seconds. They also took into account strategies like only using predictions for longer words. So if you're only typing T-H-E, you don't even look. Or always typing the next word while looking for the next one to be predicted. So you're making progress while you're looking while you're hunting for the next word. This analysis found a couple of things. Looking at every word no matter how long and never beginning typing slowed people down eight words per minute. So don't do that. But typing three letters before looking at suggestions and only looking at words that were six letters or longer increased speed two words permitted over not using predictive text at all. The upshot here is you're probably better off not using predictive text because it's really hard to just look at words that are six letters or longer. But you can read more on this in Professor Christensen's article on the conversation. It's obvious to me that if this was a perfect system, we talked about this pre-show a little bit, if it's a perfect system it would be predicting everything I ever wanted to say to anybody. And it doesn't do that. We're not there yet. The AI is not there yet. If it was we'd be living in a very different world I think. Yeah we'd all be out of work. Yeah I just would have to think and it would know and that doesn't work that way. So what it does for me now in terms of convenience is a bigger word. I think phlebotomist was thrown around in our prep meeting. That's a great example because that word is ridiculous and hard to remember how to spell it exactly right and difficult to do quickly. And so in those cases I know I've saved time by hitting that big word but most of the time it's just going to get it wrong. That's why people play games with it and say you know start a sentence with this but then only use the third predictive text word until it stops or gives you emoticons or whatever. It's a fun little game. We all have a good time with it but more over here I just wanted to say I love studies like this. I absolutely love them. It's a thing that we just sort of have now. We all take it for granted. It's part of our everyday use case for our phones and our devices and somebody saying well all right what is it actually doing for us. Is it doing anything for us. Is there a benefit. Is there is there is a kind of neutral where it's okay if we have it. It's okay if we don't and that's okay but let's just get the numbers and get the data account for different use cases. I love that kind of stuff and further reading I think is required for anyone else out there who likes the stuff as well. It's a very cool little study. Yeah I like this study too especially because the the upshot is for once not there ought to be a law. The upshot is hey you want to keep using predictive texting go for it. There's nothing wrong with it but here's the only way that it will likely speed things up for you. On the other hand speed may not be your your only consideration. Maybe you're like I just don't want to have to think I'm bad at spelling. You know I want predictive text for other things and that that's awesome but but it is interesting to find out that yes I always thought this seems like it's taking longer when I would use predictive texting because I'm having to to wait and look and find the right word and and at least the current systems maybe they'll get better at predicting and get faster in the future but the current systems bear out that yeah you're you're better off with autocorrect. Who would have guessed autocorrect is the fastest. Yeah well maybe your phone predicts maybe your phone predicted that the venerable bioware epic tale of mass effect might one day make its way to a televised series. Hmm well let's talk about that deadline sources say Amazon Studios is nearing a deal to make a TV series based on mass effect. Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salkey said that the new fantasy series will of time based on the books of the same name is one of its top five series of all time and the studio is continuing to invest in fantasy genres of all kinds. EA seems to be focused on making TV series based on mass effect happen somewhere telling Business Insider earlier that this year that it's quote not a matter of if but a matter of when and the verge noted an Instagram post from February by Henry Cavill with a blurred out corner of a printout of the Wikipedia page for mass effect three read into that but you will remember that happening and wondering anyway next year we have a halo series coming from Paramount Plus the last of us coming to HBO based on that series is this the time for quality live action video game based TV series upon it says this finally here maybe here's my argument that it might be already here I don't know how many in this audience have seen arcane or knew that arcane the animated series on Netflix is based on League of Legends but it is here's the nice thing you don't need to know a thing about League of Legends to get into it and I've talked to people who've never heard of that game before never played it before and played the game and have come to me saying well that's officially my favorite thing I've ever seen on streaming or that's my favorite show this year of all time or that's my favorite animated this or that like it really hit with people and I think that along with a few other little C wins are going to push us in a direction where finally gaming can be seen as more than just an entertainment on its own but bleed this other direction it used to be kind of the other way games became more like TV and movies now we kind of bring it back we have great stories we have great characters and we can really flesh that stuff out and make something special so I don't think there's ever been a better time for something like Mass Effect to happen I think it's really interesting from my personal point of view because I've seen how video game IPs have translated into another format besides games and the initial set was cartoons right they had pole position back from the early it was like 82 and that had a it was a game surrounding the name based on the the Namco driving game pole position which is an arcade driver and the game had the game in the show really had nothing alike other than the fact that there were cars in it yeah and what you see now is because I think so much of video gaming has matured to the point where there's deep narrative right you have uncharted coming out and uh the last of us was written by by a former you know Hollywood script writers and so you have kind of this melding between the two genres where it makes sense because now you have an audience that's already been exposed to the IP playing the video games why not enjoy the show based on the favorite characters if you ever wanted to find out how so-and-so worked out on his own this would be a great way to do it same way the comic books went from kind of like hey just as a throwaway summer block bus or get the kids of the family you know their butts into the movie theater now it's become more hey now we can get more nuance because uh the titles themselves have gotten more sophisticated but the audience has grown up and now they're in that target demographic that yeah it's not it's Roger's Roger a hundred percent right it's like comic books we finally got to a place where it made sense and nobody questions how well the MCU is doing or even some of the DC things for that matter and we're kind of getting there with video games but I would even add previous to this it's been films it's like all right well what can we do in an hour and a half or two hours to tell the story of Assassin's Creed or to tell the story of whatever it happens to be this is the I think that the real sea change here is shifting to an episodic serialized format because the games are long mass effect for those that don't know is a great big space operatic game where basically you're told a huge story that you interact in think Star Wars mixed with Star Trek mixed with the expanse it's very much in that range of stuff so you know what you're beginning into science fiction wise but telling that in a film would be a bummer because it's not enough time telling it in three films is not enough time telling it across seasons of multiple seasons of a show assuming it does well that's how this stuff will shine and that's where I think the big difference is arcane would have been a fine two-hour animated film but it's so much better as a nine episode arc with a second season on its way I think that mass effect in particular would benefit from this just like you know last of us or any of these others they are they are serialized stories told over 20 30 hours of gameplay let's tell them over 20 30 hours of viewing I think they can do that now you have streaming to thank for that yeah I know I was about to complain all day about about all these streaming services but if you didn't have all these streaming services and the budgets that are going into them and the ability to prove that like hey we can we can drop a 12 episode series on a Netflix and it does pretty good you wouldn't have people taking these bets who knows maybe maybe mass effect last of us Halo and even the Uncharted movie will all be awful we still have to wait to see but my guess is they won't at least one or two if not all of them will be pretty good I think the day is gone I'll go ahead oh no I was about to say like what Tom hit on is like gaming and streaming have have merged at a point like you could have not done this without the the the ability of streaming but streaming wouldn't been able to kind of have this because video games are essentially world building right we build this world you can go populate so you're not necessarily screwed in to a specific narrative even with mass effect with the very like there's an overarching narrative but there's so many other different stories within it that you can take I mean you see this with the Mandalorian right if you told someone hey we're gonna make a Star Wars a property based solely on you know what Mandalorians and maybe Bobo Fett might do people it's like well no way you can't make a whole movie you'll never get enough audience and people won't come back week to week on cable for that you'll never hear these words coming this fall to MBC mass effect it's not gonna happen in this world we live in now where there's weird streaming money coming from strange places like Amazon and Netflix and these places that didn't exist 20 years ago to say like look we don't need to get you know the bulk of the audience on day one right even with DVRs the the Nielsen driven world was you really need you know 90 plus of the audience on day one now you don't now you need people in the first 28 days they can jump in later once the wave hits and people start talking about how much they look at squid game squid game didn't come out of the gate hot it had to build for a week and a half or two and then it was now the biggest show Netflix has ever had because of that in the first 28 days that's the kind of pattern you need for people to be willing to say like hey you know what even if we don't get people day one we think people will want to come and sample this just just like they're doing with arcane arcane is a slow burn too I think it is and it's and and the only final thing I'd say about mass effect is the only real controversial thing about this announcement is all is is which are they going to do are they going to choose a female captain shepherd commander shepherd or the male commander shepherd I did the math unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you played 83.3% of players played male shepherd I think we're getting a male shepherd so I'm just throwing that out as my little prediction we'll come back to it whenever the show airs and see if I was right but female shepherd is the superior shepherd I just want to put it out all right wow putting the flag in the ground I like it by the way I did predictive text wrote mass effect and predictive test text finished the sentence mass effect of course comes in a bit I mean it's not wrong right it's the kind of like that's the that's the news hook right there yeah depends on how you define a bit but yeah we'll see JR tokens estate has blocked a cryptocurrency that launched in august called JRR token TOKEN after filing a complaint with the world intellectual property organization that the product infringed on the author's trademark this was just a day after tokens for the cryptocurrency went on sale to organize the people toward a common goal of making JRR token the one token that rules them all websites selling and promoting the currency JRR token dot com and the token of power dot com screwed up they featured rings hobbit holes and a wizard that looked like Gandalf come on the JRR token developer also had to pay the estate's legal costs losing the case they tried to say look there's no chance of confusion between the token and the lord of the rings works we're a cryptocurrency so we get to call it that and the judge I think reasonably said sure but you're using a ring and you're using a wizard and so now you're starting to infringe on the trademark you're starting to use the elements of the Tolkien estate's properties if you hadn't done that sure you could have called it JRR token that would have been fine but but you overstepped their bounds so no more JRR token no that whole thing oh man you might say it's been destroyed in the fires of my copyright lawsuit you may get emails about this if you do send them to me but I've had enough weird experiences recently with NFTs and my own artwork where people are trying to sell me my own minting work yeah that's great twice now this happened I've come to the conclusion and I apologize both times and I come to the conclusion that the crypto world isn't as concerned about traditional copyright law and some other stuff that you'd think they might be that will come with time I'm sure but right now they think all this stuff is open source that's my take we'll see hopefully that that change that's always been the internet at the cutting edge has been fast and loose with intellectual property and I think I think intellectual property laws are too strict I think they do reduce innovation that's the same token by the same token I kind of think this was infringing this was our token story of the day also I'm using token ring here locally how many more token references can we make real quickly before we get out of here looking into the mail bag I see all the people who sent us stuff for our tech gift special tomorrow in the DTNS feed there will be a short episode with tech gift ideas from folks on the DTNS team as well as folks in the audience thank you so much for sending us your 30 second recordings that includes Mark Bussell Jr. Nick Kearney SP James Thatcher George Sang and Matt Schulz all sent us in recommendations they'll be joined right next to Rich Drafilino Justin Robert Young Scott Johnson himself Terrence Gaines Shannon Morris it's an all star cast in addition to all their voices telling you about their tech gift picks we're going to have links to everything they suggest if you want to follow up at DailyTechNewShow.com also a special thanks to Tim Deputy one of our lifetime supporters top lifetime supporters for DTNS thanks for all the years of support Tim and thank you Scott Johnson before we head off on the long weekend here in the U.S. what do you got to tell folks well if you like there was a few gaming discussions today and if that seemed fun or you liked my take on any of that I have some good news there are a number of game shows that are on my network but the one I want to point you to is one called Core which covers everything from console announcements all the way down to whatever games we're playing and everything in between the big issues the big stuff happening around the industry and we really go deep a lot of the times the long show too so if you're in the mood for one of those check it out frogpants.com slash core or wherever you get your podcasts we record a fresh one tonight in fact beat the Thanksgiving rush normally it's on Thursdays and I hope you guys will enjoy it so go check it out that's frogpants.com slash core and for everything else you can find me at frogpants.com we are live Monday through Friday most weeks at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live we are off Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States we are back however next Monday we will talk to you then this week's episodes of daily tech news show were created by the following people host producer and writer Tom Merritt host producer and writer Sarah Lane executive producer Booker Roger Chang producer writer and host Rich Stravolino video producer and twitch producer Joe Kuntz associate producer Anthony Lemos Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos news host writer and producer Jen Cutter science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding our mods beatmaster W. Scottus 1 bio cow Captain Gepper Jack Shid Steve Guadirama Paul Reese Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway modern video hosting provided by Dan Christensen video feed by Sean Way music and art provided by Martin Bell Dan Looters Mustafa A. A. Cast creative arts and Len Peralta A. Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor Patreon support from Stefan Brown contributors for this week's shows included Scott Johnson and our guests this week were Nika Monford and Robert Herron and thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible