 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Mike McLaughlin, Miss Music Teacher, and James C. Smith. Coming up on DTNS, autonomous valet for any car, processors made out of honey, and is Austin, the new Silicon Valley? I went here to find out. This is the Daily Tech News show for Friday, April 8th, 2022, in the office of Texas. That's out there. And from Studio Redwood on Sarah Lane. Also from Austin, Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young. And not in Texas. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yeah, I traveled to Austin. I'm in Justin's studio. Yeah. You're a little to the east of me. I am. You're an east Austin. I'm drifting at an eastwardly motion. Yeah. But by and large, we're here together. This is so fun. Thank you for having me here. It is an absolute honor to have DTNS, such a venerable flagship emanate from my home. Yeah. Our first post-pandemic, well, it's not post-pandemic, but our first since the pandemic happened. Since lockdown. Post-lockdown. Yeah, post-lockdown. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Snapchat partnered with Sign All to launch an ASL alphabet lens designed to help users learn American Sign Language. The lens uses hand tracking tech that the app used for its finger spelling lens last year, and the lens is available now on both iOS and Android. And an encrypted email service Proton Mail has acquired France's Simple Login, which offers an open source service for creating email aliases to let folks keep their actual email address private. Simple Login works like a browser extension or a web app or mobile app. Users have a dashboard where they can track the aliases and then if they get spammy, they can just turn them off. Proton plans to integrate Simple Login into Proton Mail while continuing to maintain it as a standalone service as well. Google's become the latest phone maker to partner with iFixit to offer official repair parts. Google's program covers models from the Pixel 2 through the Pixel 6 Pro. This will include batteries, cameras, and also displays. Parts will be available later this year in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and the EU. NVIDIA's game streaming service GeForce Now has begun offering free-to-play game demos supporting five titles. Users will need an active GeForce Now account if you wanna play those demos. Taiwan's Investigation Bureau informed Reuters that it launched probes into roughly 100 Chinese companies suspected of poaching Taiwanese semiconductor engineers. Chinese firms can hire Taiwanese engineers, but they cannot invest in parts of the Taiwanese semiconductor supply chain and that includes chip design. Since 2021, Taiwan prosecuted seven cases of illegal poaching with 27 companies either rated by investigators or summoned for questioning. All right, we talked about this a little bit at the end of the extended show, Good Day Internet yesterday, but Sarah, tell us about the unmentioning. Well, first I'll tell you about a couple other features that Twitter's rolling out, but the unmentioning is part of that. Twitter rolled out several new features, including two new ones for alt text. So images with alt text will now show an alt badge in the corner and alt text will be displayed when hovering over the badge, basically telling you what is this picture? What does this picture describe? You might have seen this on other social networks. Twitter is going to incorporate it as well, but Twitter's also testing a feature on the web called unmentioning. I know it sounds like a horror movie, but there's a menu next to the reply button right now that includes mute and embed. So select users, so because it's a test. We'll now see an option called get you out of this conversation. If you choose that option, you'll get an explanation that your Twitter handle will be grayed out on that post and you won't be mentioned in further replies and you won't get notifications about the thread. Once you commit to being unmentioned, you also can undo it. So if you really want out of that conversation, you gotta mean it. So I think that my initial reaction to this is that right now, alt text is more of a feature that mainline mainstream Twitter users will actually understand and care about because it is something that makes a post richer. Unmentioning is primarily right now at least for power users that are often tagged in conversations or brought into conversations that go on longer than they care to be a part of. Sure, or even a spam tweet where you're like, why was I even in that? That's the only caveat that I would put on it is that in the future, we might see more of a spam issue where this kind of stuff happens to more and more of a baseline user. But considering Twitter is always living in fear of their users and the biggest ones that they'll live in fear of are the ones that are tagged in these kinds of things, it's serving their constituency. It's a nice to have. I have been caught in a situation where I said something and two respondents started arguing with each other. And I had to sit there and watch the thread play out. And I was, in that case, strong enough not to join, but I imagine a lot of people do join in when they wouldn't otherwise if they had the option. So this can not only help prevent harassment, but it can help some people remove themselves from something they might otherwise not be able to resist joining in on. It's like being part of the reply all email and having to say to everybody, can you please just take me off of this? But then you're actually contributing to the problem. So just saying like, no, get me out of the conversation. I don't need to say anything. Are you amongst yourselves? I just, I'm no longer wanting to get notifications that I have a new reply. I think that is the thing that happens now, right? Is that you'll post something to people who have a lot of time on their hands will go back and forth and the tweets will only get longer and longer and longer as they whittle away their hours. And then you have to at some point make a very polite plea to like, can you please remove me from this? Which very rarely goes well, right? You should give yourself, it seems obvious now, but if you can take someone out of a conversation, they should also be able to take themselves out of the conversation. It makes sense to me. Also, we shouldn't minimize the alt text part of this because if you're unclear, people who need alt text, people who use screen readers can obviously hear alt text. That's what it's there for. And Twitter tries to encourage people to use it. This new feature lets the rest of us know whether it's there or not. So it's really meant for awareness for people to know, well, if you retweet this, if there's no alt text, it might not be accessible. And it also is a way to just get people to think about alt text like, oh yeah, that's important. I should include that. But do you want to know what? Now I actually don't know if it is a net good because oftentimes, if alt text right now is primarily an accessibility thing, then the alt text will always be very, very, very straight ahead in the way that an old school photo caption would be. I think I know where you're going. If it's visual, and so now it is secondary media, so now a picture of a politician you don't like, the alt text could read, here's a big old piece of trash or something like that, which is horrible if this is an accessibility thing. So I wonder... And that's true of images now, but yeah. Sure, yeah. But if it's something that isn't primarily used for as opposed to making it richer, yeah. That's why we can't have nice things. Well, here I am ruining a feature before it even is ruined. So... Ruin this next one. Exactly. I am. Thank you, Tom. Hey, TechCrunch. You ever read them? Yeah. You're pretty good. I've heard of them. Tech, a Maryland-based AV company that's begun a pilot to provide high-level autonomy for one specific use case. Automated parking. Steer tech, and that is steer like the bovine none of the... Like you have here. Like we have here in Texas. Now has at least two OEM partnerships to embed its parking technology as a feature for passenger vehicles. But now it's expanding on that original thesis and moving into the commercial sector thanks to funding from the North Central Texas Council of Governments that's working with the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, DFW. This is designed to show off how automated parking ecosystems might alleviate traffic and busy curbside drop-off and pickup areas at the airport. The pilot, which will use 10 test vehicles at first, is set to go on for over a year with three subsystems, low-speed vehicle automation for valet parking, supervisory parking management so that the DFW system can watch over and control all the vehicles in AP mode, and active digital curb management. Steer tech also plans to open source its valet parking API. So OEM is looking to add automated valet parking or parking management companies integrating curbside management can have access to real-time autonomous vehicle data. This is a weird company. And I think this is a good play to get funding. I don't mean it's a stunt. I mean, I think they have a real technology and they've got a real partnership with DFW to do this. So this is not just, you know, vaporware, but it's an interesting product which is aftermarket automated parking. So they use the advanced driving systems that exist in certain cars, which means not every car can do it, to say we can actually equip you with automated parking. And then they can also work with fleets and things like that to do it as well with the idea that eventually if they can get this technology into platforms as well as aftermarket, then they'll get enough parking lots and airports and stadiums to get on board that people will say, oh, it's great. I can just drive up to the curb and my car parks itself. That's kind of cool. That's the dream, right? The dream that you have an appropriate car that has the appropriate software that you then go to an airport or a stadium like you mentioned, and this thing exists. Right now, I would say it's a glimmer. It is a good idea. It is alleviating a problem, but we are miles and miles and miles away from seeing this in any kind of way that I think would affect, you know, people that are listening to this right now considering the adoption of cars. Like I would wonder, aside from cars that can do some kind of self-autonomous driving now, like I would my, I just got a RAV4 two years ago, like, and it has radar assisted driving. I don't think it would be able to be updated to do anything like this. It was a little hard to find details about this, Sarah. I don't know if you were able to find more details about how it worked. It was a little vague, you know, other than you've got to put it in your car model to see if it works. I mean, I agree with you. And no, I don't think there are any more details really than what we've already talked about, but I agree with you, Justin, that this seems very far away from something that just becomes, oh, that's how we all do things. Go to the grocery store, car parks itself kind of thing. We're getting closer though. And I think something like the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport being a testing bed for something like this is a pretty good one. It's a large airport, a lot of cars, and figure out how exactly this not only saves people time, but maybe saves some traffic jams. Well, I mean, those are sort of the two things that we care about when it comes to autonomous driving, right? Sure, it would be nice to sort of sit back and not worry about it, but you want to get somewhere faster and you want to have less traffic. Well, the thing that is going to push adoption of this is the fact that, hey, would you like to valet park at the airport for roughly the price of you parking in a lot and possibly getting in a tram and having that take you to the airport? If you went right up to departures, you just got out of your car and that was it. Well, that's the saving time thing. Yeah, but yeah, exactly. It's on the consumer side, right? Like the consumer would be updating a thing so they can get a benefit, which is good. The question is at this level of the tech is that like, what is the percentage of daily traffic that comes through DFW that could update for this benefit? Well, if someone out there would mark this story down for our 2034 DTS 20th anniversary show, we can find out if by then we're like, yeah, now every car does this, isn't it great? It's revolutionized our lives. Cause I do feel like it may not be steertech that does it. It might be, it might not, but this seems like something that autonomous vehicles will absolutely make a reality. 100%, it's just the adoption of the tech itself. Yeah, neuromorphic computing is another promising tech. It promises faster and more efficient computing that works like human brains do. It's neuromorphic and that it works like our neurons. Each neuron in our brain can process and store data, both, not just one or the other. That makes it faster and more power efficient. The human brain, for example, uses around 10 to 20 Watts, the TDP on that. It's really low. Neuromorphic computers use something called a memrister to get the same effect. It's a type of resistor that remembers, hence memrister, how much current flowed through it in the past. It doesn't need to be powered to retain its memory either. IBM and Intel have been working on this for a while. Now scientists at Washington State University have developed a memrister for neuromorphic computing using honey. If you listen to this week in science, they talked about it there as well. The folks at Washington State University solidified honey, so it's not running, it's solid, and held it between two metal electrodes. So there is some metal involved. The honey, though, acted like a synapse between two neurons, and the memrister made from the honey could switch on and off at speeds between 100 and 500 nanoseconds. It also emulated some of the spike plasticity that you see in synapses. That's essential for developing something called SNN, spiking neural network, that can simulate learning by dynamically remapping neural networks. It's, if you didn't follow that, it's essentially how you get the most out of a neuromorphic computer and make it super advantageous. The scientists' first attempt at the honey-based memristers are about the size of a human hair, so they're macro scale. They'd like to get that down to nano scale, about one 1,000th of a human hair. That would let them bundle millions or possibly billions of memristers, and that should put it in range of neuromorphic prototypes from IBM and Intel, just made of honey instead of rare earth minerals. Still, short of the human brain's 100 billion or more, but definitely useful. And of course, the part of the chip that's honey is biodegradable and renewable. That's the whole point of this exercise. If you don't know already, bacteria can't survive in honey, so your computer's not gonna spoil. Also, neuromorphic systems don't get as hot as traditional computers, so it shouldn't melt either, and the chips will dissolve in water, which is good for disposal, but it's bad if you spill coffee on it. Yeah. What can't bees do? That's my question. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of still a question to be answered. Just like quantum computers, they're good at some tasks, but not all tasks, because what we have now are von Neumann machines, and all our software is built to take advantage of that. So there's lots of things that neuromorphic computing can do. It's just a matter of getting them practical and then letting people take advantage of them. So it seems like there's two threads here in this story. There's the neuromorphic computing side of it, which seems to continue to move on. And that's not new. That's just a bit of a... That is the thing that is constantly moving forward. And then there's this renewable element of like, all right, we're not gonna be as reliant on things that are already scarce. We're gonna be able to use bigger things. I'm taking from you that this, it is the renewable element that is really what's special. Yeah, I wanted to explain all the neuromorphic to understand like, why were they doing that? And maybe it's harder to make a von Neumann chip out of honey. It'd be nice if we could have honey-based chips in all of our computers, but von Neumann-oriented computers like we have now are hot. And so the honey would melt, whereas memristors run cooler. So you can make it out of honey. And then the idea is like, now you've got a renewable resource, you don't have to mine for it, China can't corner the market on it because bees are everywhere. I do love the idea that like, well, look, I got a real sweet deal on this laptop, but unfortunately it's, yeah, it's made of honey. And now I have a sticky lap. Well, folks, if you have some sweet nothings to tell us, join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can link to your Patreon account to take advantage of. Go sign up, patreon.com slash DTNS. Thursday night, Tesla opened its new Austin, Texas factory, announcing that the Cybertruck and the Optimus robot will go on sale in 2023. Austin's been getting a lot of tech attention lately. TechCrunch has been doing a series of spotlights. This week it shined its spotlight on Austin, Texas due to its growing tech startup scene. There's lots of VC talk in that article, the amount of capital invested in Austin startups doubled over the year in 2021. The Zebra, Firefly Aerospace, Abrigo, Zen Business, Iodine Software, Icon, Spark Cognition all reached a billion dollar or more valuations in the past year. So they're all unicorns. And of course the headline grabbing detail that not only Tesla, but Oracle has moved their headquarters here. Austin's been a tech scene for a long time, but this is a spike in growth and people moving headquarters here. So, it's different than when I was here in the 90s and it was Apple and Wang and AMD, all of those plus Google and Intel and Meta and SpaceX. But it's expanded from software development into web three, real estate tech, consumer goods, insurance technology. And the article describes Austin going from a but can it be a valid market attitude to could it surpass the Bay Area? I've been here for a couple of hours now, Justin. And I'm pretty sure I have the answer, but you live here, so what do you think? Oh, sure, yeah. Just ask any Texas local and they will very much be excited by me speaking for Austin, Texas. You've been here for more than a year now? For, yeah, yeah, a year and a three days. So, you know, that feeling pretty much clears me. No, it's not going to surpass the Bay Area, but that's a dumb standard to hold it to. What we are seeing here now is I think an outgrowth of two things. First and foremost, you cannot overstate the fact that the lockdown and the explosion of work from home fundamentally reshaped certain industries. The tech industry is one of them of where things can be done and how much people have an adoption on Zoom. The second is that if you wanted to get out of California and you were looking for a business friendly state for which to move, the fact that the tech industry had about, you know, a six to seven year really hot love affair with Austin, Texas for South by Southwest Interactive where it was kind of fabled that all these businesses, including Twitter were kind of born and launched. Like there's a lot of mythology here that now, you know, we can all date ourselves and say like that's coming up on like 10 years, you know? So there is a little bit of recent nostalgia for it. When the VC money shows up, the unicorns will follow. When the headquarters show up, the engineers will be coming up with ideas that now they'll be closer to access to money. And that's why a lot of this is happening. One more thing here, you're right. Tech companies have been building branches in Austin forever. Of note though, Google just built one down here in downtown and it's an ostentatious building. It is a gigantic like part of the city skyline. So it's not like they're just getting an office park or like a bunch of we work areas to put in there. They want to be known as being a huge part of Austin. So it's notable, the locals hate it because it brings in California yuppies like me who drive up housing prices. But I do think it's real, but the idea that it's going to be better than the Bay Area is, I think, just a false thing. Well, but I mean, so here, the reasons that having so many startups and tech companies in one place, if you take the Bay Area, for example, is housing prices skyrocket, traffic is horrible, commuting sucks and yeah, the bigger the company gets, the farther away that mothership has to be in order to house all the employees that have to come from somewhere. So what do you see in Austin as being either kind of the same situation as that or somehow laid out better? Oh, it's uniquely terrible. I mean, like it's not as bad as the Bay Area, which, I mean, you know, San Francisco is a tiny town. Oakland's a little bit larger and Silicon Valley itself is not all that big, but there is no more building out of infrastructure. You know, to go north or south on either of the highways is going to be something that is a painful process. And look, Austin is the fourth largest by population city in Texas. It was never meant to be a metropolis. That's Dallas, that's Houston, San Antonio is even bigger, but it has outgrown its setup long ago. And that was before the lockdown, all of a sudden up sent a bunch of people like me who were like, oh, I don't know. Like I can afford to buy a house in Austin, which is funny because everywhere else in Texas, Austin is really expensive. But if you live for a decade in the Bay Area, like it's totally affordable. You know, I lived here from 93 to 99 and all of this sounds very familiar. Californians coming in. In fact, when I moved from Austin to San Francisco, my friends at Austin were like, yeah, finally, one of us going over there instead of them coming here. So that is consistent. And like tech companies coming in was also a thing. When you're talking about Google building a big monstrosity downtown, I remember Intel, right? As I was leaving building a big monstrosity that became a symbol of the dot-com bust because they didn't finish the building before they had to abandon it. And it sat in downtown Austin for years, half done. Yeah. And so there's like a memrister of anxiety about tech booms in Austin that I think runs deep. Yeah, I do think that the tech industry is in a different phase than it was in the 90s. And unlike Intel, Google's sailboat that they have built right on the river on downtown is now finished. So there is a lot of cash and also cashier. Look, Austin, Texas is a thing that people want to be associated with. There's a reason why Elon Musk had a gigantic party that may or may not have included Kanye West to talk about the fact that they are now a Texas company. Like there is an element of cool that is new at the very least, much like Miami. Those are the two biggest beneficiaries of post-lockout tech scenes. That would be the one thing I would add. If you didn't listen to yesterday's show, we talked to Nico Monford a little bit about the Atlanta tech scene. I feel like instead of Austin becoming the next San Francisco, I feel like instead, Sarah, we're getting a decentralization of the tech hub. It's Atlanta, it can be Florida, it can be Boulder, it can be all over the place. Amen to that. Living in the Bay Area, I mean, I'm in the North Bay, but I'm in the Bay Area now. I have been so, for years, I've been like, but why here? Why? And that's where you get too much of that like tech bro culture kind of thing where it's not really the fault of any one person, but you get enough people doing the same thing in one place and it starts to become a thing that takes on its own life. And to decentralize that, I think is a great idea. And it also gives many cities across the world opportunities to be bigger players, which they should have been in the first place. Many cities can now be annoyed by tech pros. Yeah, it's not just San Francisco anymore. Like, don't put it all on me. Exactly. Everybody needs a tech pro. The marina has been broken loose like a pinata scattering tech pros across America's floor. True story. Yeah. What's in a tech bro pinata? Don't answer that. Well, if you're ready to fly to your next travel destination like Tom did this very morning to go to Austin, Texas, you might not be sure which airlines have direct flights, which are connecting, what's best for you. It's a big world. Chris Christensen has a great resource for you. If so, this is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another tech in travel minute. I want to introduce you to a simple website which does one thing, but it does it pretty well. And that's flightconnections.com. If I want to know, for instance, where I can fly direct from San Francisco, I can go to flightconnections.com and say San Francisco and see all the different places or I can see if I'm flying to a particular place, what airlines fly between those two routes. That can come in handy if you're trying to book a flight with miles and you want to know which airline miles you might be able to use for that particular trip. The flightconnections.com and this is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. All right. Well, it's too late for me. I took a direct flight anyway, but that's good stuff. I like that. I like those single-purpose websites too. Yeah. I was not familiar with flightconnections before this morning, but I checked it out. I don't really have anywhere to go just yet, but I'll, you know, I'll be, I'll be. It's also a great travel idea website. If you just look at the local Go's Direct, you can just get some ideas. Oh, maybe that's steady. That'd be nice. Right. Yeah. Like it's far, but I could do this. What a great way to get to it. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. We got a good one from Christopher. This came in yesterday. Christopher was talking about our discussion that we had recently about Twitter, giving us an edit button. Finally, Christopher says the big issue I see compared to other social media sites is how much of a feature retweeting and quote tweeting is on the Twitter platform. If I retweet something and then somebody edits the tweet, I don't want the edited version on my profile because I didn't choose to retweet that new version, but you still have to be able to show that it was changed after the fact since the name is still linked to my retweet. Christopher says, I think Twitter's gonna have issues handling the veracity of a tweet after it's been edited. We're feel out an edited tweet to be edited a second time and I've retweeted the edited version. How do you show that this was the edited version? And then there's a new version compared to that other version that I did compared to the original. I get what Christopher's saying and I think the key to this is that he said how much of a feature retweeting is on the platform because what I've been looking at is like, editing is not new, Facebook has it. And people don't say, well, the problem with Facebook is you can edit a Facebook post, but Twitter is more about the public record and retweeting and passing along. So maybe there's more care that needs to be taken. I still think they can do it. Just put a make up version history. Exactly. I still think that works. It's not the end of the world. Yeah. But that's a fair point, Christopher. Yeah, no, it's, you make good points. And I think... Sorry, sorry, sorry. The problem with that is that it's been a desire from the community for so long that now we're critiquing solutions that don't exist, right? Like we're fantasy booking our own way that we would fix it and then the problems with these things. Yeah. Now that we got the edit button that everybody wanted, let's think about all the ways that it'll go really wrong. Exactly. Or how the edit button will work. Actually, I do think the people complaining about the edit button are the people who've always hated the edit button and we're glad it wasn't there. And now they're like, we're losing our battle. Oh well. I was one of them. Well, a battle that is not lost is having Justin Robert Young on the show week after week. Justin, always a pleasure. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. We'll all be going to the H-E-B because Tom ate all my chips and salsa. So I'm going to need to get more of it. But also I will be... Oh, at Founders Day. If you're in central Texas, then... Oh, actually, we know that's already sold out. Politics, politics, politics is a podcast that I do. And so you can go ahead and get it. The new episode that is out right now is in part about the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Might sound like something that you have no interest in. But if you like Walt Disney World, you will really like it because it's the reason why they are their own government. Find out why the local Republicans are possibly putting an end to that. Politics, politics, politics. It's different than the Edwards Aquifer, right? It's different. Yeah, good. Yeah, well, don't spoil it, Tom. Special thanks to Chris Harrison. Chris Harrison is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. And boy, do we appreciate you, Chris. Thank you for all the years of support. Thank you, Chris. Chris, Chris, Chris for press. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. It's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. We roll right into it after DTNS. For all of you who subscribe or listen live. But a reminder, DTNS is live Monday through Friday at 4 or 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Have a great weekend, everyone. We'll be back Monday. Talk to you then. This week's episode of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Mann, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Frappolino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Kuhn, technical producer, Anthony Lemo, Spanish language, host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jenny Hutter, Ryan's correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detherty. Hi, Mott. Beatmaster, W. Scott is one. Kyle Kow, Captain Gipper, Gadget Bridge Rosso, Steve Garteroma, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stephens and J.B. Galloway. Bob and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Way, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looter, Mustafa A., A-Cast and Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show included Lamar Wilson, Scott Johnson, Nika Monford and Justin Robert Young. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.