 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, and one of the earliest and biggest supporters of DTNS was Patrick Cohn, who passed away Monday. Patrick was full of wisdom, joy, and endless support for so many of us. Thank you, Patrick, for all you gave us. Godspeed, Time Jumper. On this episode of DTNS, Patrick Norton helps you get the tech you need for any long winter drives you got coming up, plus what kind of AI the kids love most and why your hand might be your employee badge soon. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 28th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Burr, it's winter. I'm Sarah Lane. At the edge of the 314, I'm Patrick Norton. And on the show is producer Roger Chang. It doesn't feel like a Tuesday. It feels like it's more than a Tuesday. Like it's a four's day. Yeah? Sure. Right. It's a double Tuesday, which is four's day. Everybody knows that. Exactly. Everybody knows that. Maybe we should just start with the quick hits then. YouTube is making a push into gaming, giving its premium users access to a set of online games, known as Playables, that can be directly played both on the mobile and desktop apps. Playables launched back in September to select users, but an email started circulating to YouTube premium subscribers last week. Notifying those who opt in that they can start playing a total of 37 minigames that effectively live inside YouTube. Coming from inside the YouTube. Scientists at the Oxford Institute studied the internet usage of 2.4 million people aged 15 to 89 across 168 countries to see how it harmed their mental health. They published their findings in a paper called Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age in the journal Clinical Psychological Science on Tuesday. They found, and I'll quote, Our results do not provide evidence supporting the view that the internet and technologies enabled by it such as smart phones with internet access are actively promoting or harming either well-being or mental health globally. According to Ars Technica, one of the co-authors of the study said, If you really want an answer to this question, you have to hit pause on implementing your random idea you think is going to save young people. You should have the type of data that would be required for a diagnosis before you start proposing solutions or treatments. Now, there are some caveats on this study. I discussed those and some of my thoughts in my newsletter. And if you want more on that, check out tectom.substack.com. IKEA announced three new smart home sensors. The parasol, parasol with two L's, door and window sensor can tell when a door or window opens or closes and can also pair with an IKEA smart bulb. The bell horn wireless motion sensor can activate a light when it detects motion. And the barding water sensor can send a mobile notification and also trigger an alarm if it detects a leak. All three sensors are less than 10 euros. The motion sensor is coming in January. The door and window sensors in April and the water sensor in July. Those are some affordable sensors there. Finland's Varjo launched a new mixed reality headset Tuesday called the XR4. It's meant for business use. So, for examples that they gave in the CNBC article, a pilot training for a defense contractor, a surveyor mapping a construction site, stuff like that. It has two 4K displays with a brighter and wider field of view than the previous Varjo headsets. It uses two 20 megapixel cameras for pass-through video to augmented reality so you can look around while you're using it. And it uses laser scanning to detect surfaces as well as coming with noise-canceling mics, which is good for construction site use, I expect. And integrated speakers. The XR4 costs $3,990. Aw, man! You were going to get two, weren't you? Well, I was going to, but now just the one. Google partnered with Clean Energy Startup Fervo to bring Fervo's first-of-a-kind geothermal energy plant online in Nevada using new tech for harnessing geothermal power. The project, which will be used to power Google data centers, generates about 3.5 megawatts of electricity, enough to power roughly 2,600 homes. Alright, folks. AWS, Amazon's cloud arm. It's more than an arm. It's like half of Amazon's body is holding its re-invent conference for customers of its cloud service. And as you might expect, it's mostly enterprise stuff, but let's go through some of the announcements, shall we? Yeah, yes, let's do it. So Amazon's Palm Scanning Service, Amazon One Enterprise, is now available to companies. Amazon One previously existed, and you might have used it, depending on, you know, what grocery store you might be in, but this is an employee thing. So instead of something like a key card or, you know, or equivalent, it would be just scanning of your hand to come and go. And also replace fobs and passwords. IHG Hotels and Resorts, a turnstile manufacturer, Boone Adam, and elevator and escalator provider, Cone, have all signed up as customers. I'm sure Amazon hopes more are on the way. It becomes available in a preview starting Monday. We have a bunch of other things that we're going to mention that they talked about, but I feel like this is the one most likely to come into your experience somewhere, right? If you're working at a company that says no more, no more key cards, everybody, you just palm scan your hand. Oh, man, I mean, not every corporate entity that I've worked for has required me to have a fob on me, but that's pretty common. And, you know, most of the time it's pretty seamless, but, you know, you leave something in your car or, I don't know, a fob, and then, you know, somebody's got to call upstairs and make sure that you're who you say you are. So Amazon one works at the Whole Foods market that is near me. I signed up right away. Some employees at Whole Foods said like, whoa, interesting that you signed up. A lot of people don't want to do this. And I was like, nope, sign me up. Sounds great. It's worked seamlessly ever since. My hand is no secret. Exactly. I mean, I'm, you know, it's, I didn't think it was going to take my identity anything any more than something else would. But my local gym, which happens to be like in the same parking lot as that Whole Foods. So that's probably, you know, part of why it was a test system. And they added the palm one technology a few months ago. And the first time I walked in and they were like, okay, don't freak out. And I was like, yeah, I got it. You're already in my system. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I listen, you can choose to either trust Amazon with biometric data such as this or not. But my two experiences, you know, in places that are frequent somewhat often have been pretty positive. Well, because this is AWS, you're not necessarily trusting Amazon like you would with Whole Foods. You're trusting the administrator of the AWS instance of Amazon one enterprise, which is your gym, I guess, in that case. Patrick, I have a question. Is it good that this means you can no longer like just steal someone's key card and use it to get into the building like they do in the spy movies? Or does it mean people will steal your hand? Yeah, I was watching a movie the other day where, well, you know, my boys saw Snatch for the first time. The Diamond Heist movie and great movie, great movie. But you know, there's a point where there's a hand removed for reasons. And if that's a spoiler, I apologize to everyone. But it was interesting because like we started talking about this. I'm immediately like, OK, protecting the privacy of these users, new service, you know, and it's like, OK, the metadata is encrypted. And they're sent to a dedicated Amazon one enterprise service account AWS cloud with all the security and isolation features of AWS. So it should be safe. I don't have to worry about because I'm automatically thinking like what's going to happen. And who's going to be able to 3D print an image of Sarah's palm so they can use her gym membership, which sounds ridiculous. But there's always going to be something like I've if somebody can game the system, they'll try. Yeah. Well, here's the thing because Clinton's saying that no to trusting Amazon with biometric data. But you're already trusting Amazon with biometric data. You probably just don't know it. If you're using biometric data somewhere, chances are it's probably stored in AWS. So it's already there. Amazon isn't using it. That is hard for you to wrap your head around. It's like Amazon's providing the service in the cloud for almost everything you do. So that's different than Amazon using it for one of Amazon's own products. But I will not change your opinion. But it's important to know that I don't even use the thumb scanner on my phone, but that's for a whole different set. Let's get through the rest of the reinvent stuff here. Amazon designing its own chips for AI model training is where you get the model to know how to do that. And inferencing is when you use it to do the thing. That's important to know because these chips do different things. AWS Tranium 2 is four times better at performance than the previous version for elastic compute customers can do 100,000 clusters. And that means it can train 300 billion parameters. That's one and a half times the size of GPT-3. Amazon didn't give a date on that one, but that one can do the training and the inferencing. The ARM-based Graviton 4 is meant for inferencing. So just running through an already trained model like the kinds of thing that you have in neural processors on phones and laptops. This one promises 30% better performance than the Graviton 3. And all hardware interfaces are encrypted that they didn't give us details on what they exactly mean by that. Available in the EC2-R8G instance in preview today and available generally within the coming months. What other announcements should we look at before we go, Sarah? So AWS's automated speech recognition service Transcribe is now supporting more than 100 languages. Amazon Personalize, that's machine learning to help developers make better recommendations for their customers, now uses large language models to generate more compelling content. And Amazon Lex, that's a managed service for building your own conversational interfaces. Now also uses LLMs for accurate conversation responses. We also have a few new serverless options for customers, Aurora, Elastic Cache and Redshift serverless services. And Amazon Workspaces, that's essentially the Fire TV Cube with different software to connect to a virtual workspace in the cloud. Designed for workers who are coming in somewhere and don't need to sign into a workstation that has everything locally because it's all in the cloud. Yeah, if you're a Daily Tech Headlines listener, you already knew about that one because Sarah told you about it yesterday. That's right, Tom. Well, speaking of AI, because we're about to talk about AI in a big way, I'm sorry everybody who hates AI, but it's not going anywhere. According to OFCOM's latest study of AI use in the UK, this is part of a larger study about internet use in general. But AI specifically, pretty unsurprisingly, the younger set, teenagers and children embrace generative AI for their daily lives more than adults do. This includes services like ChatGPT, Snapchat My AI, Mid Journey, Bing Chat, Dolly, there are others of course. Now some of the numbers are kind of interesting though. 79% of polled teenagers aged 13 through 17, so very much in the teen space, say that they use generative AI tools and services. 40% of polled kids between ages 7 and 12 say, yes, we do too. Anybody polled above 16 years old is where that number drops further, with only 31% saying that they use AI tools. 69% of that same age group says they've just never used an AI tool. And 24% of the same age group says they don't even know what I'm talking about right now. My big takeaway from this is that if you're 18 years old or older, you're old, according to this study. Also, Snapchat My AI is the most popular generative tool among children and teens used by half of 7 to 17 year olds and 75% of those are female. ChatGPT is the big one for anyone over the age of 16, 23% use ChatGPT. For anyone 7 to 17 that does use ChatGPT because some of them do, even though it's not the most popular, boys tend to use ChatGPT in that age group more than girls do. You know, I had to remind myself after kind of diving through these numbers and trying to pick out what was most interesting for us to all talk about. Patrick, I know you're a father of teens. Tom and I have one teen, you know, one almost teen. Tom and I have teen dogs. But Snapchat My AI, I had to go back into Snapchat and remind myself what this is. It is a very, you know, it's a chat GPT. I mean, I guess I'm aging myself of making that comparison, but it's Snapchat inside Snapchat being like, what do you want to do where I was like, do this? I was like, I can't do this. I'm just a chatter, you know, where I was like, make my profile pic cool. Can't do that now, but I could like answer questions about math. So I was like, okay, I'm starting to understand why younger, well, first of all, you have to be using Snap, right? You know, in some capacity, but I can see where this could come in handy as just kind of a right hand man when it comes to, you know, giving you or a woman right hand, right hand, right hand. I don't know. I sent you. Yes, a sentient being who is, you know, somewhat dangerous, but also wants to help you ace that math test. But yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't use that. But I'm also, I'm, I'm aged out of that bracket. Chat GPT I use for the purposes of the show all the time just to be like, I want to know what I'm talking about. But yeah, I think, I think we have to, we have to brace ourselves for a life where younger people are going to be using these tools and will never remember a time where they didn't exist much as, I don't know, millennials don't remember not having the Internet. It's, I mean, it's, it's something we were talking about at work recently is that when you look at Gen Z, and they search, you know, according to all the people out there, many of whom are actually people who are of Gen Z and writing for, you know, boomers and Gen Xers, like, this is how we do things, old person. So the, when they go to search for something, they don't necessarily go to Google search. They go to TikTok or they go to YouTube or they go to Instagram and they search on a particular subject. And it's, it's, it knits together in an interesting way. Because if, if you're just getting into Google search, if you're in your teens and you're Google searching and you're getting like 2700 crappy pseudo content ads that don't actually answer the question you asked, you can go to TikTok and search for, how do I do this? And you get a two minute video that answers your question. I can guarantee which one of those you're going to keep coming back to. And, you know, they are using different tools to do the same things we did because they don't remember the tools working really well 10 years ago, like we did. So it's, yeah, it's a generational thing. It's also odd to just to see how, you know, as, as I have a couple of tools of the office were like, we've added an AI and it's like, you can't even do what you're supposed to do very well. Why are you adding an AI? Couldn't you fix the font display issues? Insert name of large company that makes business applications. So I don't know, it's, it's, it'll, I think it will be interesting to see if this generation is still using these tools. Or, you know, I mean, if they are actually the future, we're all going to be using them or if it's going to be sort of the thing where it is a gigantic flash. And then everybody kind of goes back to doing things the exact same way they did before. Yeah, it was interesting to see 58% using it for fun. People are still trying these things out. So they're still trying to see what they're good for 33% using it for work 25% for school studies, lower percentage using it for coding. So not as many people in this survey using it for coding as you might have expected, but it is interested to watch. Folks, if you can't get enough Android in your life, listen to Android faithful every week. Android aficionados, Ron Richardson, Huan Tui Dao bring you the latest Android news and information. You can watch it live if you want Tuesdays at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific on our YouTube channel. YouTube.com slash daily tech news show and our twitch channel twitch.tv slash good day internet. And of course you can get it whenever you want at your leisure at Android faithful.com. Patrick Norton, this is your time to shine because you are a man who likes to be on the open road. Now, if you are also a person who, you know, is feels the way Patrick does. And if you plan on doing some long distance driving this winter, you know, you might have to deal with all sorts of stuff. Icy roads, limited visibility, overall weather, creating challenges depending on where you are. So there are things you can do to prepare. Right, Patrick? Yes. Well, yes, there are. I almost might say this, this, these might be some useful tools if you would hate winter driving. And there's a lot of reasons I hate winter driving. I don't really worry about winter driving some more in part because I've been driving in snow and ice for three or four decades. And because I'm old and experienced and have a friend that teaches winter driving to people like automotive engineers in Detroit, I drive slow because even it's people don't realize and I used to have a ski house and there was this curve and the curve was covered with ice. And it was really fun watching people in these $60,000, $80,000 all-wheel drive vehicles learn this really brutal lesson in, yes, four-wheel drive helps you accelerate really quickly. It does not help you violate the laws of physics and stop really quickly. And we literally watched three of these cars miss the gigantic tree at the curve. One tagged the gigantic tree in the curve. We helped pull four of them out. It was an interesting afternoon watching people like, I don't understand, it just wouldn't stop. It's like, wow, man, we need to talk about ice and how slick things work. But it's kind of crazy, right? By the best winter tires you can afford. Like I said, I have a friend who's a firefighter and he trains people in winter driving. And he's like, man, proper winter tires will actually embarrass a four-wheel drive truck on an icy road. And there's times when you just want to realize... Embarrassing in a good way? Or like the two-wheel drive car, the two-wheel drive commuting Econobox is driving away on ice while the wheels are spinning on the four-wheel drive truck. Search for YouTube for do winter tires really work and you'll get some really interesting videos. You can't slam the accelerator down because your wheels will spin. But in a lot of cases, it's kind of amazing what a set of blitz-axle do as somebody who's had some really horrendous ice experiences in the last couple of years. In any case, you know, one of the things... If you haven't been to them, if you're traveling in the winter or if you're traveling, you know, it's kind of crazy, right? Because we've had a lot of really brutal storms. We've had a lot of really brutal wind incidents, especially here in the Midwest. Wildfires became a thing for like everywhere in Canada and the United States in the last couple of years. Dot websites like roads.ca.gov, nvroads.com, candrive.gov, traveler.modot.org. These are really great for figuring out like what's going on with work zones, if there's winter weather closures, if roads are being plowed, when they are or are not being plowed. I've been using Waze a lot more than Google Maps these days. It helps to tell with my commute because of that active relationship with people reporting data. It has bad weather alerts turned on by defaults and you can report bad weather just like a road hazard. So if things go hairball, you can go into that, you know, stand and share and give the information just like if you saw a truck on the side of the road or an accident. Yeah, I've actually done that with fog where the fog reduced visibility to zero and it's like, hey, people need to know that, yeah. Especially when they're driving at 95 miles an hour west of Sacramento. Which is always a terrifying experience. And they shouldn't be doing that. No, they should not. Yeah. So, you know, especially out here, you know, out there with the fog out here when the crazy storms hit. It's really nice to be able to, something that's happened in the last few years is apps that allow you to look at your route and all of the weather along that route. So you can actually see the route before you go and kind of plan around there. You can dig through your favorite weather app. Like, you know, I probably have six weather apps on my phone. You can sit there and scroll around and look at it and kind of guesstimate where things are at. But there are a couple apps that are really, really specific about, you know, what's going on with the weather on your road trip. So Drive Weather is one. It's available on iOS and Android, driveweatherapp.com and Weather on the Way, which is iOS only. That's weatherontheway.app. So to cut to the chase, both allow you to enter in a route. Say, you know, Reno, Nevada to St. Louis to see what the weather looks like and where it actually should be as you get to locations along different locations along your route. And you can change your route accordingly or which may be the smart approach to not leave your house at all. Honey, it's bad out there. We're not going anywhere. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the great road trips of my adult life involved driving from California with the dog. Literally, basically, you know, from the Pacific Ocean to my parents' folks, my folks' house in Long Beach Island at the other end of the country. And halfway across Wyoming, it went from unlimited visibility to a visibility of about 45 feet. It spent a day and a half between Laramie and Cheyenne. And being able to have that way's prediction that says, like, hey, there's a chance that the snow is going to happen on that route. Like, it's not going to make the weather better, but at least you can prepare. At least you're prepared. Yeah. Yeah. And this, you know, when this happened, this was like, this was back in the, you know, calling up the phone numbers to find out what the weather was like. This was kind of pre, certainly pre-fancy phone era online. But it's kind of crazy. I love seeing the temperatures along the route that they offer in there, the weather along the route. If you drive a van or an RV or you're pulling a trailer, they will actually allow you to see the wind speeds across the route, which is great. That's great. Yeah. And, you know, if you've ever driven in a 40 mile an hour wind while pulling a trailer, you've had a life experience you probably never ever want to have again. So Drive Weather Pro or Drive Weather is a pro version. It's $15 a year, $7 a month. It gives you seven day weather forecasts and icy pavement indicator. It drops the ads from the service. It lets you add stop and waypoints in between. Adds wind speed and direction and address to address routing. So in the free version, you can kind of do, you know, Reno, St. Louis. In the paid version, you can do this address here to this address here. You get very, very specific weather on the way has a one week free trial. Then it's $25 a year. I really like the vertical timeline in it where you can scroll and has the weather icons on one side and the temperature on the other. So you can actually kind of see what's going on. It's like, oh, we're going to need the winter jackets by the time we get halfway across Kansas because it's stupid cold. These apps are pretty slick. And, you know, I mentioned that lovely day I spent in Laramie and Cheyenne. If those, if these had existed back then, I might have been able to plan a route so I didn't spend a couple days driving eight miles. Well, more than eight miles, but you get the idea here. They're pretty amazing. And I was really impressed. You know, if I never spent 10 hours driving 100 miles across Iowa and black ice dodging jackknife tractor trailers, I'm down with that. And if you haven't seen him, check out Drive Weather Pro or Weather on the Way. Real quick, Patrick, how far is it from Reno to St. Louis? About 24 hours straight driving. But let me. Oh boy, which, which probably is not recommended, especially in winter weather conditions. Well, you know, when I was 20, 25, all things were possible at my current seasoned age. Isn't that always the way, you know, they can just drive all night. It was a bad idea then, but I could do it. It's a really bad idea now. I have 27 hours, 1,836 miles if you take pretty much any route from hitherto. Yeah. All right, we're going to check out the mailbag. Now this first one comes in from Phil who wrote on Patreon actually, but still mailbag. Thru and through Phil says here in Sweden where I live Thanksgiving isn't a thing at all. But for some reason the sales are and a lot of shops have just been calling it black week as they last much longer than a day and there's no association with black Friday at all. Did not know that. Happy to hear that. I guess if you got a good deal, Phil, that's fun. I knew they had black Friday sales overseas, but I didn't know that they had black week. We were joking around. It feels like black week everywhere, right? We were joking around yesterday on Good Day Internet that it should be black Friday month. And what should we call it? Arles Batch has been wrote in and suggested by Vember. So, you know, keep the suggestions coming. That's a good one by Vember. Yeah. I mean, I also hear that and I think it's some sort of gigantic like Viking death metal. It's like, it's like mustaches buying things. November is a cool month. In November. Jeremiah wrote in about video conferencing research. We mentioned the study that showed that there is an indication that zoom fatigue is real. Video conferencing fatigue is real. Jeremiah said since the pandemic, a large number of gamers who play D&D or a range of other tabletop role playing games have moved to doing them over video conference. A lot of folks playing on Discord, Google Meet, et cetera. I wonder what it would look like if they included that sort of activity in future research as it's not a thing you would think of as work. I love this idea, Jeremiah, but does it make a difference if you're doing something fun? Do you not have the fatigue? I guess as for my own observation, I can say sessions may have fallen in time from the average four hours for in-person games to three hours. But I can't say that it's necessarily due to fatigue. PS, there's a lot of tech involved in tabletop RPG gaming these days due to the move to more remote play. Lots of specialty tools and the like. Thank you, Jeremiah. Send us some of those tool examples too. That'd be cool. Yeah. Thanks to you, Phil and Jeremiah and everybody who sends us in feedback. We will take it. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Also, thanks to you, Patrick Norton. Bravian the Icy Roads for our benefit. We learned a lot with you today. Let folks know where else they can keep up with your work. Oh, you can head over to Twitter at Patrick Norton or we are relaunching AVXL in December. So if you want to get your home theater audio on, go check out AVXL on your favorite podcatcher. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Popular Science has stopped publishing its magazine. There's no more magazine version of Popular Science. It actually stopped its print version a while back. Now it doesn't even have a digital version. So what's left? We'll talk about that and pause and mark this milestone in magazine history. Well, one milestone that you can always count on is us doing our show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. And you can find out more, tell a friend. DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.