 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Norm Fezikas, Chris Allen and Chris Smith. Coming up on DTNS, could 3D printing solve the supply chain crisis? Anchor makes a 3D printer that could help. Plus, why TikTok songs get stuck in your head? And what are that Twitter edit function is a good idea. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 6th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And on the show's producer, Roger Chan. We have endeavored to put together a slate of wonderful tech things you should know. Let's give them to you now. Uber will add trains, buses, planes and car rentals to its app in the UK. The company will partner with providers of these transportation services, building software integrations to let people buy tickets within the app. This will start with your star train bookings with flight integration coming later this year. Uber also says it's looking into integrating hotel bookings. And meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle says Uber has reached a deal with Yellow Cab SF and also Flywheel to integrate taxis into Uber's app, similar to what they're doing in New York City. I feel like Uber's just becoming a transportation app. Hey, how to get things, places, including you. And pizza and pizza. AMD confirmed that a bug in its GPU drivers changes the settings of Ryzen CPUs and BIOS without something that they call in the industry your permission. Some users reported seeing auto overclocked CPUs. And don't forget, AMD typically warns that overclocking CPUs can void its warranty. The company said it will share more information on the bug soon. German police seized servers and Bitcoin used by the tour network website Hydra, which had been in operation since 2015. Flashpoint and chain analysis both estimate the marketplace had annual revenue of $1.37 billion, facilitating the sale of narcotics, fake documents and other illegal or great market goods to 17 million customers. It also operated the Bitcoin Bank Mixer, which laundered money through cryptocurrency transactions. Google announced a new AI architecture called Pathways Language Model, or PALM, a 540 billion parameter model designed with few shot learning, which reduces the number of tasks, specific training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. In other words, doesn't need bounds of data every time it leads to learn a new thing. It can use what it learned from other things, which is how humans learn. Google claims it outperforms other AI language models and average human performance in benchmarks with notable performance, understanding arithmetic and common sense reasoning tasks, as well as generating explanations of text, including, and most importantly, jokes. Meta announced it will not hold its FA Developer Conference this year while it gears up for new initiatives like the Metaverse. It will still hold other developer conferences such as Conversations, which is focused around messaging that comes on May 19th and Connect, which focuses on VR and AR and more metaverse oriented things. Yeah, so metaverse makes sense. All right, I get it. Let's talk a little more about TikTok. Let's do it. According to a 2011 study from Finnish researcher Lassie A. Lickenen, 90% of people have songs stuck in their head at least once a week. I am one of that 90% very much so. Another article from the Kennedy Center on earworms, which is the term for music that you can't stop hearing in your mind, says the Germans were talking about the phenomenon at least 100 years ago, calling it or worm. Researchers from Dartmouth College also found that the audio cortex in your brain activates in the same way it does when you're actually listening to the song versus imagining the song. CNET's Erin Carson wrote up a really interesting article. She reached out to a researcher who studies earworms, Kalula Kingenli, at the Queensland University of Technology. And Kingenli says people aren't imagining things when they get songs stuck in their heads. She describes the zig arc effect, saying, quote, leaving a task unfinished results in a sense of tension because you feel psychologically compelled to finish the task. So your mind can't let go of that task. And quote, you might say, OK, well, what if I listen to the whole song? Well, you probably wouldn't if it were, say, a TikTok video because the videos are too short to play an entire song. And there's a whole looping thing if you keep it going. No one has studied TikTok earworms specifically yet, but Kalula Kingenli says there's other research that explores how repetition helps get songs stuck in your head. So I think this is fascinating as a big TikTok user. This happens to me all the time. So as we were, you know, when I when I thought about this, when we knew this was coming up on discussion, I was starting to think of the various ones that get stuck in my head and why and some of them are ones I've heard for months. So it's not like a brand new song I've heard, but now I can't get it out of my head. The problem with TikTok is you only hear that thing for as long as the thing runs. So let's say it's a 20 second, 30 second or even less, let's say 10 second on the average loop of a song. It's often what I find anyway is I'll later hear the full song and it really throws me for a loop. So if there's tension being caused by me not having the sort of conclusion of a song and hearing it right then, I think I'm adding tension by hearing the full song later and then having that weird 10 second bit jump out so hard while the rest of the song feels new and fresh to me. So I think there's a lot, probably a lot to learn about how our brains behave this way, why they behave this way. But I can tell you what, if anything, this tells me stop watching TikToks before bed because I don't need to go to bed with more tension. I have enough of that as it is. There's the blue light. There's the social media stressor. Now there's the TikTok song is going to get stuck in your head to keep you awake. There's so many reasons. I mean, I so getting a song stuck in my head is actually an ongoing problem of mine. I recently rewatched the movie Bridesmaids, funny movie. At the end, I don't think this is a spoiler. Wilson Phillips performs the song Hold On, which is a beloved late 80s song. I have had I watched that movie. I don't know a week ago. I've had that song in my head like waking up in the middle of the night in my head. The entire week since watching the movie. I think I listen to the entire song. I'm not totally sure, but I really am fascinated by why this sort of thing, you know, replays in our minds. And I think I think, you know, Aaron Carson's deep dive into why this happens and that the brain wanting to complete something has a lot to do with it. Yeah, for sure. Listen, out west, we're a little lax. So if you say so that this is a savage problem, then I'll tap in and look in this box and see if I can name any other TikTok songs that are super hot right now. Man, I'm trying to think of the name, actually, of the one that Eileen's been walking around and singing constantly for the past couple of weeks because she's seen it everywhere. But it feels to me like TikTok was designed to stick songs in your head, which may be true. It may be, like, it started as musically, right? And Duyan in China, like, the whole idea was like, let's make people engage. How do we engage? Catchy songs. How do we do catchy songs? Short bits so that they get stuck in their head and then they want to go back and listen to the whole song to get it out of their head. But on TikTok, we'll never give them the whole song so that it'll be a fool's errand and they'll come back and never get it out of your head. I mean, it's kind of how it's supposed to work. It is how it's supposed to work. And there's been great success, like empirical or otherwise, where you can say, look, this artist sold a ton of CDs or this artist who started on TikTok playing their guitar and singing now has a recording contract and a career and is doing great. You know, you could say the same thing about people's upstarts and things like SoundCloud and other places. So it already is kind of a hotbed for that to have that kind of outgrowth. The problem is for us who are just listening to it, it gets stuck in our head. We don't have the full context or song. And then when we do hear the song, it just feels weird. And so I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. I feel like TikTok should be better at like working with the record labels to say, this is just a piece of this song. You want the whole thing? Like, go get it. And TikTok doesn't care about that. They don't care. I don't think they care about that. And it's unfortunate because like there's a couple of songs like I really like Post Malone. I'm a big fan. Me too. And I really like, there's some songs on his most recent 2019 album that I just think are classics and amazing. But there's a couple in there that I first heard on TikTok. And it was just a little teeny bit. A little bit how I first heard Sunflower on Spider-Verse, the movie. And because of that, I now associate those things with a failed video on TikTok or with a Spider-Man animated feature or whatever. So I can't actually enjoy those songs. I think the way they were intended to be. And I hate to keep harping on that, but that's part of the problem and part of our brain hang up. So if we're going to do further study about this, I hope to keep that stuff in mind too. Cause you never want to be sick of 10 seconds, but super stoked about the other three and a half minutes. Yeah, yeah. Well, we have some tips from Dr. Pat Conlon in Thailand of how to get a song out of your head if it gets stuck in there. So don't listen before bed. We talked about that. Don't repeat songs. Listen all the way through. Apparently if you go find the actual song, listen all the way through that gets it out. Chewing gum apparently disrupts the part of your brain that does the earworm, that can work. Walking out of step with the beat of the song stuck in your head, not thinking about it too much is another one. And literally said, if an earworm lasts more than 24 hours, you might want to talk to your doctor because there are some problems. I will be calling my doctor shortly after this broadcast. I mean, it feels like there are times because Wilson Phillips has been in my head more than 24 hours. If Wilson Phillips lasts more than 24 hours, consult your physicians. Side effects include vomiting. All right, let's get to this one. Associate Professor Sun Kulad of Demontford University published an article on the conversation describing a paper he co-authored about why some countries in Africa, he used South Africa and Kenya as examples, might do what's called leapfrog into manufacturing because of 3D printing. Let's talk a little bit of leapfrogging. Leapfrogging is when an area adopts a new technology faster and reaps more benefit from it than a seemingly more developed area because the more developed area is locked into using the older technology and therefore adapts to the new stuff slower. Great example of this is mobile payments. They were adopted and became widespread in African countries like Kenya and PASA being the big example because they didn't have another way to do easy payments. They didn't have a credit card system that was as developed and the rest of the world took longer to catch up with them. Kulad and colleagues suggest that 3D printing also benefits by avoiding logistics and supply chain issues, waste less material and can reuse what it does waste. So it's efficient, it's useful for small shops for working from home and the skills of current manufacturers aren't applicable to 3D printing. So you're not gonna see big manufacturers immediately send a bunch of their people into doing it and the immediate profitability is also not there. So the big manufacturers aren't gonna do that because of the slow adoption of it. That's a perfect recipe for leapfrogging. He suggests that governments encourage retraining programs to get people up and running with 3D printing. South Africa apparently has a good one but the easier 3D printers get the less training will be needed and granted, industrial printers get a lot of the attention these days and rightly so they have an outsized impact but for leapfrogging, home printers play a big part and China's Anker, the maker of fine accessories for your phone and car, just announced a 3D printer that might make it even easier to start your home printing business. The Ankermake M5 3D comes in two halves. You just connect the two with eight screws, plug in two USB-C cables, plug in the power and you're up and running. It's a very easy to assemble 3D printer and it prints fast too. Anker says it will print at 250 millimeters per second out of the box. The Verges Son Hollister notes that that's five times as fast as an Ender 3 Pro. It's about five times as fast as most of them. The other thing Anker promises is ease of use. You'll be able to send designs directly to it over wifi either from your own device or sometimes straight from the cloud. It accepts G-code and uses standard nozzles so it should be able to build a community and it has a webcam for monitoring print jobs and recording videos. It will also use an algorithm to pause your print job if it notices it's going bad and send you an alert. The Ankermake launched on Kickstarter yesterday at the early bird price of $499. Anker expects it will eventually sell at retail for $759 so it's a steal right now. Shipping is expected to begin in September partly because they don't have the whole thing ready yet. They told the Verges the hardware is at 75% and the software is at 2%. Feels like a chance for a big leap forward and I don't mean in the tech itself it sounds like it's not like we're gonna break open brand new ways of 3D printing things but Anker is known for really super efficient accessories, parts and pieces to your tech world and they sell a ton of them and I've never been unhappy with a piece of Anker hardware. I even liked their packaging. I feel like they just make a nice, classy piece of hardware whenever I need something from them. So the idea that Anker is doing it is exciting to me. The idea that they could potentially bring affordable 3D printing to a much larger audience is very exciting and somebody somewhere needs to be a, I don't know if the word mainstream is not the right word but somebody who's just a little higher up in the notoriety department who makes a lot of stuff, people know the name to start really pushing 3D printer technology. Right now it's fine. You find companies you trust but they're usually names that you've never heard of before and you gotta do a ton of research to see who you trust and all the big names that you know aren't making it yet. I feel like maybe Anker's got an opportunity here that could push them further, certainly further ahead in this particular market but just make them a more household name. Yeah, BioCal was asking if it has a self-leveling bed because one of the ways you get faster is not having the thing fall off which can be a problem I know from a lot of people who do this. Two belts instead of one, two lead screws instead of one, a textured build service, a die cast aluminum base for weight and yes, algorithms for self-leveling. So I don't know if it works but it sounds like they've got all the things that you would want to make this easier. To me it feels like MakerBot was either the HeathKid or maybe the Apple One or even Apple Two of 3D printing and Anker's making a bid to, I don't know if they're quite the Mac, maybe they're the Amiga of 3D printing. We'll see. That's a good way to put it. I feel like they have enough of a reputation that they can kind of straddle a line here and be a thing people see as discount and less money and I get them on Amazon and they're cheap and whatever but good quality and them but they're also not some huge expectation on them the way it would be if this was Google or Apple or somebody else making this device. So I think they have an advantage there and moreover we just need to start getting to a place where if we want them to be something in the household as a normal item, it's got to be able to be, it's got to start being easy for me to walk up to one and go, I broke this on my chair, 3D print me a new one. Which would make it more of the Mac. Beatmasters reminding me the Amiga didn't have a great fate so. That's a good point, yeah. I just, I feel like for the last decade, every year at CES you got the 3D area, 3D printing area and you go, oh cool. Lots of cool stuff. Yeah, when does this become something that everybody's just got a 3D printer on their home the way that you just have a printer, right? Maybe you don't use it every day but you've got it in case you need it. And it surprises me that we kinda are still in that hobbyist phase rather than, oh the essential phase where you have to have that or else you're just gonna overpay for something that you could just make yourself. Yeah, PCs made a big splash in the early 80s and then stayed in the hobbyist phase if you remember until the early 90s when it was the internet that really started to bring them around to more mainstream appeal as well as the Mac. I don't know, anchors like said, they're great at design. Yeah, it's just hard to know when your tipping point is ready so maybe they're making a big bet on this is it, this might be the time. Maybe they're not. Maybe they're not. But it's certainly an interesting attempt. Well, oh sorry, go ahead. If you're feeling social out there, I know this is what you're gonna say. You wanna get in touch with the DTNS audience on the socials, let us know if you're a 3D printer, if you're actually a 3D printer because that would be amazing. Those algorithms are getting really good. Let us know at DTNS show on Twitter and at DTNS pics on Instagram. Well, as if waiting for our show to finish recording at 2 31 PM, Tuesday, Twitter posted the following. All right, I saw this pop live and it kind of freaked me out. Yes, we've been working on an edit feature since last year, says the tweet. No, we didn't get the idea from a poll. We're kicking off testing within Twitter Blue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn't and what's possible. Twitter head of consumer product, Jay Sullivan said, the feature would need things like time limits, controls and transparency about what has been edited. It will take input before launching the future. So why is this such a big deal? Why are people talking about this today as if it's the biggest thing that ever happened on Twitter? I have a couple of theories. My main one is they've been asking for this feature forever and now that we have to make rubber meat road, Twitter has to figure out how best to implement it. And you're probably, my opinion is, even though they're testing this with Twitter Blue, you're probably not gonna get to use this unless, even when it's finished, unless you're a Twitter Blue subscriber. Oh, for sure. I would imagine. Well, because this is the, you know, it's the most requested feature on Twitter since the dawn of Twitter. You know, it's become a joke at this point that the company is just never gonna let you edit tweets. So I don't know why it would become a free feature when it could be something that people pay a few dollars a month to have. That said, thank you, Elon Musk. I'm just kidding. Obviously Twitter's been working on this for some time. You know, it's obviously been under wraps. And I can't remember the last time I tweeted something and went like, that was, there was a typo or look stupid or, you know, let me delete and, you know, repost it type of thing. But it's happened. Happened to all of us. You know, if you tweet regularly enough, it's going to happen to you. That said, Jay Sullivan, Twitter's Jay Sullivan saying, okay, well, you know, we really have to, you know, think about transparency, time limits. That'll be interesting because there are plenty of other social networks that let you edit something. And, you know, it shows up as edited. I don't know, you know, in Slack, for example, is another example of when something gets edited. It's pretty clear that that has happened. And I wonder why it's so much harder for Twitter to just not turn this on without overthinking it. Yeah, I mean, those are all really good points and who knows what the real answers are. But I can tell you, I just finished 30 days of Twitter blue subscription that I wanted to try it. Mainly I wanted to talk about here and we haven't really had an opportunity yet, but I wanted to know what happened there. So for $2.99 a month, you can sign up for this Twitter blue thing. Among some of its features or things like, we're going to feed you some ad-free content from publishers that you trust. So this Verge article, for example, will have no ads on it. As long as you stay within the browser that we're using within Twitter, this is an ad-free experience. There's a few things like that, but the main feature for me to test was there was a time delay kind of like Gmail, where you've sent an email and you want to undo because you messed up and you want to change it before you send it again. That got built into that, baked into that. And for me, that's as good as an edit feature in a lot of ways, or it's at least a good start toward that. The problem is implementation on it is really, really terrible. And so my feedback for them moving forward with this is to keep UI and user experience in mind at all times because the reason I canceled, the only reason I canceled is because when you go to send it and it says, are you sure? Anything you want to change gives you a little time window to make your decision. Whether you decide to edit or whether you decide to say no, go ahead and send it or just let it send on its own after the time expires, all of that takes you to a whole nother page where it's just that tweet. So if you were in a thread or you're looking at a larger discussion, you've got to go back and find where you were. It doesn't leave you there like a normal tweet does. So normal Twitter behavior is, I do a reply, it puts it right where it was and I don't leave the discussion. This feature made you leave the discussion every time. And it actually made my experience with Twitter way worse. Desktop was fine by the way, the implementation there was fine the way they handled it, but just a bad user experience on the phone, maybe that'll get better. Features like this will make me interested in the possibility of re-upping for Blue and maybe debate a test of this. There's some interest in my head for this, but anyway, based on that experience, I'm a little concerned that they, it's not that they won't do it, it's that they may do it kind of wrong and not notice that they're doing it wrong. So anyway, take that for what you will. The biggest fear of them doing it wrong isn't the UI sadly, although you've made a good case that maybe it should be. The biggest fear that I've seen people say about them doing it wrong is people will use this to cause misinformation. They'll use it to troll people. They'll say something, get a bunch of responses, then they'll edit it to say something else and make everybody look foolish. I actually don't care that much about the Twitter edit button. I'm very confused why people are, this is the most requested feature. I get why people want it, but I don't understand why it's so requested. And I should be the one who wants it the most because I make typos like crazy. However, I get why people are worried about the edit button and yet every other service has it and none of those fears have come to pass. Facebook's problem is not that it has an edit button and people use it to spread misinformation. They just spread it right the first time. And the way Facebook does this is it includes an indication that something has been edited and lets you see the versions and go back and say, oh, this is what they changed so that you can easily uncover if somebody's trying to troll everybody and therefore Facebook never gets used that way and I don't see why Twitter would. Maybe people will in like the first few days but over and over and over again other platforms have implemented an edit button and it has not realized all the fears that people say about it. That said, I still don't get why it's the most requested. It's still weird to me. Maybe it's because there aren't many features we need and so everyone just freaks out about the one we never get. Well, and I think it's something that I think a lot of people go, well, that would be pretty easy just offer it. And it's been so many years since Twitter was like, we'll offer lots of other things except that one. But still, why don't people just let it go and like, well, I guess they'll never do it. Why has it become this campaign issue, this thing where people are cheering, where Elon Musk can get everybody all fired up where there's an April 1st post. I still don't understand. I think part of it is just, it's been memed. It's a memification of a problem. So because of so many years, it's now become this joke and now how do you get out of that? It's self-propelling. Yeah, I think it's Twitter's fault. They should have done this a long time ago. It seemed to me, and maybe this is just, I'm overthinking it again, but it seemed to me that Twitter was deliberately not allowing this so people could talk about it so that there's more fanfare when the feature was actually announced. Yeah, I guess trying to figure out why some things never die on the internet while other things do is still something that scientists debate, so. Wilson Phillips, they would know. Well, I bet you didn't think that I was gonna talk about talking mushrooms today, but you would be wrong. The Royal Society, Open Science published a research article by Andrew Adamatsky of the unconventional computing laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol called Language of Fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity. You should read it if you wanna know the actual science. There's a lot of details in there. We will summarize it the best we can. We found it notable that a fungus can talk with noted vocabularies from the researchers of up to 50 words that the distribution of those fungal word lengths closely matched those of human languages. From the abstract, quote, fungi exhibit oscillations of extracellular electrical potential. The scientists analyzed electrical activity of ghost fungi, enoki fungi, and split gill fungi. They assumed that the spikes were used to communicate in a mycelial network and group the spikes into words for linguistic analysis. The split gill fungi had the most complex sentences. Adamatsky said, quote, we do not know if there's a direct relationship between spiking patterns in fungi and human speech. Possibly not. On the other hand, there are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families, and species. I was just curious to compare. Man, the split gill fungi vocabulary is just ridiculous, right? Like, you ever sit down with a split gill fungi and you're like, whoa, college boy, you know, using your $6 word there. We get it, you have an MBA. I totally prefer a conversation with a ghost fungi because of that. It's just more straightforward. Yeah, if you can. I mean, we've mentioned before the show and I'm gonna bring it up now so Star Trek people beware, but I'm now starting to think that Star Trek Discovery was onto something with this whole, we're gonna travel through space much faster because it turns out space mushrooms have all kinds of cool ways to make things happen in space. As I kind of thought it was real dumb before and now I'm not sure I was right. Maybe, cool. I mean, some of this was already known before this particular paper and that's what they were riffing on in Discovery, but it is really cool to see like, oh no, we didn't just prove it. We just took it a little bit farther into understanding the mycelial network. Whether we can use it to traverse space and time, that remains to be proven. Yeah, just be careful out there. Mushrooms are both tasty and scary at the same time. Be careful out there. What is this, Hill Street Blue? Yeah, just... Span, no to your mushrooms. Well, thanks to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us today. What is new in your world? Well, there's always a million things and there's tons of podcasts to go listen to and all that stuff at frogpants.com, but today I'd like to recommend people check out my comic, although I've been a little lax lately on getting it done with so many other projects going on. Check out fredandcan.com. It's all about a guy who lives in a house with a sentient can of cream corn and hilarity ensues, often to the expense of Fred. But I think you might like it. It's a little bit different, which was the goal is to make something that nobody else was making. And I really enjoyed doing it. I hope you would like it as well. Go check it out. It's at fredandcan.com. And for everything else, poke me on Twitter. I'm at Scott Johnson. I'm so glad Fred and Can is back. Yay, missed it. I like Fred and I really like Can. Oh, God. Can's the best. Also, I also like brand new bosses. Don't we all? We have a new one today and that boss's name is Jason. Jason just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Jason! Thank you, Jason! Yeah, you know what Jason gets? He's going to get live with it. He's going to get columns from Roger. He's going to get all kinds of cool stuff. I just posted the monthly briefing on Patreon. Jason gets all that. Do you? Yeah, I think about that. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet also for patrons. Patreon.com slash DTNS. It's where you can learn more about that. And a reminder that we are live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern at 2,800 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnoshow.com. We are back tomorrow with Nika Munfer joining us. Talk to you then.