 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Paul Teeson, Allyson Jobby, A.B. Puppy, and brand-new patrons Gregory and David! On this episode of DTNS, Scott Johnson talks about the importance of preserving video game history, not just the games themselves, plus Klarna turns a good news A.I. story into a bad news A.I. story, and sir, this is How You Wendy's. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 28th, 2024, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. You know, I've been joking around about how February 29th should not happen, it's against nature, but she paid 84, asked a good question, whatever we do tomorrow doesn't count then, right? Because it's a big day. I'm going to remember that and blame them after I do it. It's kind of like The Purge. It's Mayhem Day. It's The Purge! All right, sweet. Finally. No, Mayhem Day comes in May. Oh, right. Chaos Day. Mm, Chaos Day. Well then, let's start today's show with the quick hits. Speaking of chaos, Google CEO Sundar Prachai wrote a memo addressing Gemini's image generation controversy, where it sometimes made inaccurate historical images. Prachai wrote, I know some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias. To be clear, that's completely unacceptable and we got it wrong. Last week, Google suspended image generation creation, rather, in Gemini. As for a fix, Prachai says, Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We're already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. So, didn't really give a lot of information about what had happened, but looks like they're working on it. Talk about Mayhem. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says his analysis of supply chain data indicates that demand for the Apple Vision Pro is higher than Apple originally expected. Kuo says it looks like US shipments will reach 200 to 250,000 units in 2024. Says Apple originally only expected 150 to 200,000 units. He also estimates the current return rate is just 1%. So, all those early return things, those are just people making videos and then bringing it back. Vision Pro shipping times have also improved to three to five days. Kuo says he thinks this is all a combination of relatively high US demand and plans to roll out sales to other countries in the coming months. The President of the United States signed an executive order limiting, not banning, but limiting the bulk sale of geolocation, genomic, financial, biometric, health, and other personally identifying information of US citizens to companies in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. The order says the bulk sale of such data poses a national security risk. Companies ability to sell data as part of cloud service contracts, investment agreements, and employment agreements will likely be affected as well. Nintendo is suing someone. Shocker, this time they're suing the developers of emulator Yuzu, Y-U-Z-U, in US federal court alleging Yuzu violates the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the good old digital millennium copyright act. The DMCA strikes again. Nintendo also accuses Yuzu of copyright infringement, arguing that Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent several layers of Nintendo's encryption so that its users can play copyrighted Nintendo games. So if that wasn't clear, they're suing them for circumvention, which could be a fair use, but under the DMCA, if you're doing it to get around copyright, you're violating the law and direct infringement, which is like, you're actually encouraging people to do this. Nintendo wants Yuzu to lose its domain names, URLs, chatrooms, and social media presence, give Yuzu-EMU.org to Nintendo and seize and destroy Yuzu hard drives to help wipe out the emulator, and of course, money damages as well, because why not? Nintendo. Okay. Yeah, not happy with Yuzu. Okay. The chairman of the EU's Committee on Employment and Social Affairs accused Amazon of blocking investigation into breaches of Amazon employees' rights and requested that the European Parliament revoke passes for Amazon's 14 lobbyists. The passes have now been revoked. He said Amazon constantly said it was unavailable to appeared hearings or take visits from committee members. Amazon said it declined to participate because the sessions were clearly one-sided and not designed to encourage constructive debate. It also said it didn't host committee members at its facility because the request to date was shortly before Christmas during peak season. At Christmas? He's with Humbug. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. That's a look at the news. All right. If you're not familiar with Swedish fintech firm, Klarna provides things like payment processing services for the e-commerce industry, managing store claims, customer payments, buy now, pay later provider. You have likely used Klarna if you do a lot of online shopping. At some point. Now, Klarna back in 2022 laid off around 700 people. Tough times. Made some news. A small amount of its whole employee base, but still a relatively large amount of folks. This year it's expected to go public. The reason we're talking about Klarna now and talking about those numbers is because Klarna now says its AI assistant does equivalent work of around 700 people. Klarna partnered with OpenAI last year, 2023, to offer chat GPT technology as a plugin for shopping. Last month, Klarna took that powered virtual assistant global using it across the board. Now says after that month is up, the bot handles customer communications well, makes shoppers happier, drives better financial results. Things seem to be wrapped up quicker. You're getting fewer repeat questions about the same issue. Klarna also says the chat bot now handles two thirds of all customer service chats, which amounts to around 2.3 million conversations in a month. And some estimates show in improving Klarna's profits by $40 million in 2024. Now, as a company who wants to go public, the bottom line makes a lot of sense, but boy that 700 number stings a bit. This is an estimate. It's not something that had to be 700. I'm not advocating massaging numbers, but when you have a range to choose from, don't choose the range that's going to make people immediately jump to the conclusion that you've replaced people with the bot. The 700 people they laid off in 2022 were not part of the customer service because the customer service part of this is all farmed out to independent companies. I'm not saying it's great that they laid off 700 people, but it had nothing to do with this. It was two years ago, first of all, and they point out, and this is a little bit confusing, a little bit of obfuscation on their point part, but they're like, we farm out our customer service to multiple companies that are made up of 65,000 people. It's like, yeah, but not all 65,000 are working on your account. Still, the point is these 700 people that were laid off in 2022 were not the mythical 700 people that they say this new chatbot has does the equivalent of work of. So just make it 600 or 800 or something. You're still going to get people having this conversation, but when you make it the exact number, of course, people are going to jump to the conclusion that, oh, so you replaced the people, which they did not. It's a little bit like way back in the day when Apple canceled the Lisa, and somebody named Lisa also got laid off that week. It's just hard not to, our brains do this. We look for patterns. We look for stuff that looks like it fits, and this looks like it fits. Even if it doesn't fit at all, you said 700. Two years ago, you laid off 700 people. The math and the average person who's already a little irritated with stuff, you must have quit. Exactly. Yeah, I guess it's just a matter of, you know, you got to think critically about this. That's on us, but I still think that's a very unfortunate thing to report. It's kind of on them. They should have said, it's, I like percentage, like Sarah said, do a percentage or something. Yeah, do a percentage. That's sort of like unfortunate PR thing aside. What I think this does show is a company like Klarna is going to benefit a lot from chatbot assistance, AI assistance, language model assistance going forward. Other companies will too, but we talk all the time about like, but which companies are really going to benefit from this? Sounds like Klarna is a great example of this. So much customer service kind of back and forth about probably for the most part, fairly basic questions, you know, about like, where's my order? Or, you know, I didn't get the discount that I thought I was getting. That kind of stuff. That makes sense. It does. There are going to be industries where this does make sense and humans aren't needed as much. Well, and here's the other thing that's interesting, because you have to keep in mind, there's an IPO coming. So they want to, they want to make their story sound as good as possible to potential investors, which is why they wanted to say, Hey, we're doing the work of 700 people here because it shows how efficient their operation is. But what they actually said was this chatbot has the same customer satisfaction ratings as human agents. Not better. Not worse. It doesn't say how good the customer service of Klarna was before. So, you know, it could be horrible customer service. And the chatbot is just able to do also horrible customer service. But not worse, Tom, not worse. They just don't have sick days. That's the difference. Now, there's something to that. So, so Klarna took what should have been a good news story, which is like, oh, we were able to provide better customer service to people, even if it isn't exactly better. They could have said that. And they turned it into a bad news story by picking a wrong number. They should look at what Wendy's does. Wendy said Tuesday that its new digital menu boards would give it more flexibility to change the display of featured items based on demand. That was almost entirely reported. And they never said this, but they implied it. So, it was reported as Wendy's will implement surge pricing. Raise your hand if you saw that headline out there in the world, because it was everywhere. Local news stations were doing it. National news stations were doing it. It was all over the place. They never said surge pricing. So, they came back to Reuters on Wednesday and said those reports were misconstrued. Our intention is that we, quote, would not raise prices when our customers are visiting us most. So, directly disputing surge pricing. We are not going to raise prices when our customers are visiting us most. Instead, we're going to offer discounts to customers, quote, particularly in the slower times of day. So, it's not that we're making it more expensive when we have a lot of people. We're making it less expensive when there aren't a lot of people. So, here's my question. Because surge pricing was something that, I don't know, I guess I became most familiar with it when I lived in San Francisco and took a lot of ubers. Yeah, sure. That makes sense. You know, on a Friday night, it's like surge pricing. You know, deal with it or not. You need to encourage more drivers out here so we raise the prices. That's right. So, but that always, you know, if I was going from my house to you know, said Takaria, and I kind of knew it was going to be six bucks, seven bucks, and then it's like, oh, it's 12 bucks tonight. You know, that's surge pricing to me. Does surge pricing go the other way? Like, can Wendy say, you know, that hamburger that you want? We know it's 450, but maybe if you come at an off time, it's 350. It's only 350. Yeah, turns out the way numbers work, you can set them at any level you want. Now, I'm going to play both sides of this argument, because when I first saw the surge pricing story yesterday, I'm like, look, folks, surge pricing actually does save you money in other times, because instead of having to have the same price all the time, you can afford to have a lower price in the less demand times and then raise the price and have a higher price when there's more demand. Otherwise, everybody has to pay a more expensive price. That's go look it up. That's the economics of doing dynamic pricing, right? You end up, everybody shares the burden, whether there's demand or not, if you only have one price all the time. So surge pricing sucks when you're in the surge, but it actually does, you know, vary things out, and it's better when you're not in the surge. What Wendy's did is they didn't change anything. They just redefined it and said, no, no, no, we're not raising prices when it's busy, we're lowering prices when there's less demand. It's the same thing. It's just, which price are you going to call the base that changes? The price is the same. They're saying, we're not going to have the same price all the time, but it goes down better to say, no, we're lowering the price than it does to have people say you're raising the price. And it worked because every story today says, Wendy's backs off from surge pricing. And everybody's like, yeah, that'll teach them. Bunch of dummies that we bought into that. Look, here's the thing. This little, this little fluctuating short term inflation idea, I kind of hate no matter what. I just hate it. I think it's weird. I think it's manipulative and I don't like it. You want your burger to be 450. I want it to be 450. Stay that way. I'd like it low or then 450, but if it's going to be that, then great. Stick with it or whatever, because they kind of can do whatever they want. But this is how I felt when Prime did their whole, for an extra three bucks, you'll get no ads. And they did the same kind of talk bag. It was the half a glass, half full, half empty thing where they were like, well, we're not raising prices on Prime. We're just inserting a few commercials in there. It's the same price. We're not changing it. But if you don't even like those extra commercials, that's only 2.99. And we're not raising the price, but we're raising the price. That's what you're doing. And so to me, this kind of like fiddling around, I hate it. I just hate it. I mean, this is so... They want you to think they're in damage control, and you've forced them to do discounts, but they haven't changed anything. No, no. Don't like it. I just, I don't know how different this is than any store being like, hey, these t-shirts are on sale. You know, they're trying to move some merch. I mean, you know, so, you know, okay. Now the price is lower and we might get more interest because of that. I mean, that's what Wendy's is doing. Clinton in our YouTube channel is just saying, grocery stores do this all the time. The week before the sale, they raise the price because grocery stores change your prices all the time. Unless you're really paying attention, you don't notice this. The prices go all over the place because they're trying to move stock. Again, I say this all the time, prices are not based on the cost of the good. Prices are based on how much will people pay for it as long as it's above the cost of the good. This idea that like, oh, you should take the cost of the good and just add a little, that's not how pricing works. And Clinton was pointing out they do, they do exactly that. You raise the price a week before a sale and then you make it by one, get one free or, you know, or you make it 20% off and you bring it back down to the same price it was a week ago. Yeah. They did this with video games. Everyone always wondered why gaming is so resistant to inflation. We've had $45, $49 triple A titles for 30 years. And it really is a little weird that it's never gone up. And people say, why is that? What's the deal? It's us. We don't want to pay more than that. Now we finally are a psychological game. Exactly. It is. It absolutely is all in our heads. And now they're 59, they're 69. We're just now starting to try to pry more money out of people. But it's, it is us who either decides we can bear it, you know, whether we are the market, can we bear it or can we not bear it? Amish Overlord nailed it. He's like, it's like happy hour pricing. This is Wendy's, Wendy's should call it Wendy's happy hour. Like, oh, that's exactly what it is. Exactly what it is. The only difference is in old without technology, happy hour has to be at the same time every day. Now Wendy's contract demand to be like, ah, happy hour is happening right now. You know, it could happen at any time. Nailed it. I will say before we move on that I have never been able to say no to a buy one, get one free. Even if I just wanted the one, I have to have both, you know. I'm a sucker for that too. Psychological again. That's why we're doing a special buy one episode of DTNS on Patreon get 19 episodes free. It's just one price per month. We do this because we love y'all so much because we love you. That's right. Happy hour is on. You know what? If you want to recap of the week's tech headlines with insights into how technology affects and disaffects communities of color, you must subscribe to the tech, John Rob Dunwood, Stephanie Humphrey and Terence Gaines do a great job diving into the top tech stories of the week, not with an agenda, but not hiding their own point of view. And it's a point of view you don't always hear in mainstream media. New episodes, land Tuesday afternoons, find it wherever you get your podcast. Go visit tech, J-A-W-N dot com. All right, we talked a little bit about video games. So let's talk more about them. The Verge wrote a great story about the Video Game History Foundation or VGHF, a charitable organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating and teaching the history of video games. Now, unlike other game preservation groups, because there are others, the VGHF is more concerned about the associated material surrounding video games, gaming magazines, trade publications, marketing material, concept art. The foundation has 8,000 magazines across 200 publications. It's working to make available online for anybody who's interested. Hurdles, though, because there are, include publishers who are a little wary of copyright violations and the ephemeral nature of the material, which is often thrown away. Now, Scott, as a game preservationist, if I can call you that, you're excited about what the VGHF is doing here. So let's talk a little bit more about what's good, what's bad, and what might be difficult for the foundation going forward. Well, it's interesting because the culture of gaming is the one thing that seems to just sort of exist in its current day and pass us by and we don't think much about it. The games themselves, we get all up in arms about preserving, like make sure we've got plenty of copies of the original Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo entertainment system and let's make sure we don't lose digital copies of stuff that were on digital stores that have now shut down. These are all worthy things, but a lot of that's already kind of being done. It's being done whether it's being done officially or not, but it's being done. These guys swoop in and say, all right, that's great and all, but let's look at this industry which combined the music, television, and film industries combined do not equal how much revenue the video game industry does on an annual basis. And you might think, well, that should also extend to things like coverage of it and documentaries about it and archival information about it. And the answer is, or the truth is, it's not even close. So for example, I mentioned that only 4% of books and 2% of documentaries have anything to do with gaming. The rest of that is film and this is just film and television documentaries as opposed to game documentaries. And there's a big disparity. A lot of people ask, well, why this disparity? Why don't we have the same preservationist sort of ideals or even just historical observation of the gaming industry as we do other entertainment industries? And I think the answer is a simple one. It's still relatively new. We're talking 30 years a little more than that of real content where you can say that's an industry. And these other things go back way further than that. And they also are a little bit more mainstream than that. Now gaming has gotten to be very mainstream to this point. And so I think this is why now is the important time to do this and better late than never in my opinion. Because what interests me as a gamer it's kind of all over the map. I love games. I love playing them. I love getting the newest thing and playing my friends. That's all good and important. But what I really actually like is going back and saying let's talk about the 16 bit era and why Nintendo did this and why Sega did that and why isn't Sega a platform provider today? Well, there's a million points of information in between those two statements that are extremely interesting. And there's content out there, most of it YouTube, I have to admit, but a lot of content about history and the movers and the shakers and shiguro moomoto and what his role was in Nintendo and when did he start and why is he so important and these kinds of things can be found. But we don't give it the priority that we do somebody's film retrospective or a director who's who's finally retiring. Now let's go look at his 50 movies and why they were so impactful. You're going to be lousy with that information and not so much the gaming side of it stuff gets thrown away. Sarah, you mentioned there's kind of an ephemeral nature to this content. At least that's our thinking around it. And I think that needs to change. And these guys are sort of all about that. I love this one story from the Verge article. And this whole thing, by the way, deals with the founder of this site or the founder of this organization, the VGHF is actually Frank Cavaldy, Cavaldy, I believe is how you say it. He is the retired former head editor editor-in-chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a massively influential magazine at the time. And people still refer to it all the time. But anyway, the story is pretty great. He says there was this game called Super Sushi Pinball. This is a game that does not prominently feature sushi and never actually launched, he says. It was meant to be Sony's second game in the US ever. It was intended for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This is well before the PlayStation. And this is during a time when such news would not have melted the brains of console people because again, Sony didn't have a skin in the game. We should mention that this is what Ash Parish wrote on Verge. You're just reading Ash's. I'm just reading some of this, yeah. And it says that it was marketed in video game magazines over a year. Then this is his quote. This is a game that was last seen by anyone in 1990 at a trade show, says, again, Frank. He says, it's just disappeared from the world. I'd never heard of it. And I know a lot of this stuff. I've got some pretty deep trivia in retro gaming and this is something I didn't even know existed until today. Well, I think that if the game were in development today and just got scrapped, we would all know about it. Today, all of this is pretty well documented. A lot of people care enough, you know, are following game releases. But you describing this got I was sort of like, OK, well, if I compared it to like, I don't know, Hollywood rumors. Well, the Hollywood industry has been around for a century and more than that. So maybe that maybe that has a lot to do with it. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's absolutely true. Train pulling into station or arrival train at station. The Lumiere film was 1895. Yeah. So well over a century. When was space war, which is the equivalent in video games? 70 or no, 69. 62. 62. Yeah. So you've got, you know, 67 years film has had on it. And in my living memory, I remember debates being had about the preservation of film, you know, Scorsese and those guys were like, you know, these these film canisters are not being properly taken care of. They're degrading. We need to do work to preserve them. It's normal when something's new, nobody knows if it's going to be a long lasting important part of our culture. So nobody cares about it, right? Right. But once it sticks around, then you start getting preservation. Same thing happened with television back in the 60s. The BBC just threw out the videotapes of Doctor Who because it was a kid show, you know, but why do we need to keep it? Nobody knew it would become an important decades long juggernaut of a franchise. So they didn't bother preserving it. And video games is getting to that stage in its history. I agree. There was a time in Hollywood where they threw away bloopers by people. Yeah, right. It was not a thing you'd hang on to. It's like, what's the point? You don't need those. You're not going to use them. No. And now we miss all others. There's some and it makes it really interesting because it's so rare. But in the game space, there is now plenty of reasons, especially because we live in a modern day where our digital archival is the easiest it's ever been. There's zero reason why they shouldn't get some priority. And I cannot applaud these guys enough for doing this. Again, this is these guys over at gamehistory.org. Just go check it out. And you'll find all sorts of amazing content already, kind of their mission statement, what they plan to do. People can contribute to it. And not only that, it is going to all be public and they're going to just keep pumping it full of stuff. So, yeah, this is this is great. To me, this is the this is the Wikipedia verification of gaming or it could be the beginning of it's a library. It's a library. I mean, we love libraries. How are they missing calling it the video game archives VGA? Oh, that's a because then Nintendo. No, who owns VGA? Yeah, somebody has that. All right. While we get sued, let's check out the mail. Let's do it. This one comes from Lisa and John. Oh, sorry. Lisa and John, I'm happy. I just, I don't know, something weird happened with my breath. She'll choke up because it's so nice. Lisa and John say, in the Scottish borders, we enjoy your well presented informative and balanced show very much. It is excellent in a nutshell, winky face. We understand most of each topic, although occasionally we look at each other baffled. We've learned lots over the years from DTNS. Hopefully it'll keep us tech savvy in our dotage. One thing we wondered though, over a year ago, NFTs seem to dominate tech news. DTNS explained and reported on them many times we recall. Len Peralta said he had them on his website. Now nobody mentions them. Have they disappeared? Has anyone got any? And if so, what do they do with them? Have people lost money by NFTs? I recall large sums of money being mentioned for a cartoon character. Preciated NFTs may not count as news now. We were just curious. Yeah, first of all, lovely to hear from you, Lisa and John below the Alden Hills. Thank you so much for writing it. This is a wonderfully phrased email. I enjoyed this very much. NFTs are still around. They were getting most of the press because they were new. And sadly, a lot of the reporting around them focused on the get rich quick aspect versus the technology aspect. And the get rich quick aspect has busted. That's why you don't see people reporting on them as much. The technology aspect has not progressed on NFTs much since then, but they're still out there. There's still a lot of companies issuing them. And there's a niche group of collectors still collecting them, but they've become an actual subculture now instead of when they were like, hey, they might make you a lot of money. They were more mainstream. Yeah. And instead of just barfing something up in Windows Paint and saying, here's my NFT, that's what was happening is people were just shoveling it. It was shoveling. It was getting really bad. And this is what happens with the bubble. And then we had a bubble. The bubble popped and now it's settling into what it will be. And it turns out there's lots of legitimacy for what it actually is and where it's actually going. But it ain't that weird bubble we had for a hot minute. That was crazy. I think speaking of bubbles, it'll bubble back up at some point once someone has figured out a use that is more substantive for it. But it will. And it won't be the kind of bubble that pops. Hopefully it'll be one that simmers. It'll be just chilling. Like a delicious, like a delicious seafood pancake. There you go. On the grill. Regarding yesterday's show with Dr. Nikki, Venura commented on Patreon. Fantastic show had no idea that the blue on birds, for example, were due to physical structures. Nature is amazing and scary. Also as an ex-academic, the paper mill issue is serious. I remember reviewing papers purely as an advancement thing. There is some really solid research out there. So hopefully folks don't worry too much. And that's regarding the extended discussion we had in Good Day Internet. Thank you, Venura, for the comments. That's great. Indeed. Thank you. Thank you to everybody who writes us in. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send your feedback if you have some. Thank you to Scott Johnson. You're the best. Where can people find your latest because you're always doing new stuff. I do have a lot of new stuff going on. Real quick, Dr. Nikki is one of my favorite people in the world and I love what she's doing here. So keep that up, Dr. Nikki. I started a new show and I haven't talked a lot about it publicly because we just kind of been getting it off the ground deciding what's going to be. Started out very casually and now it exists. It's called The Monday Show. Not to be confused with the morning stream. We both have TMS short names, which we did not consider at the time, but we've since decided not to care. But anyway, it's myself and my daughter, Carter Johnson, who is an artist and works in the games world as well. She also is working at the university and the department that teaches games and game theory. And we have some really fun conversations. And I think people really like it. So check out The Monday Show. It happens like it sounds every Monday over at frogpants.com slash Monday and you can get that podcast wherever you get your shows. Now, we have a special deal today for patrons. They pay for one show, this show Daily Tech News show, but we're going to give them another entire show, absolutely free. Good day internet continues momentarily. Downloads of the Threads app are now well ahead of those for X, but does that mean it's more popular? We will discuss, stick around. We will. Reminder, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young joining us. Talk to you then.