 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listener thanks to all of you including Pat, DeGrashe, Daniels and Irwin Sturre. Coming up on DTS, why ads and Xbox games might be a good thing, an algorithm to help identify bored students, and does Netflix's gaming strategy finally make sense? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 18th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We are too excited to bring you the tech news on this Monday, so let's start with a few tech things you should know. Gizmodo began publishing the leaked documents obtained from Metta by whistleblower Francis Haugen. These documents were previously only available to Congress in some media outlets. Gizmodo has since published 28 documents in the initial batch, which were reviewed and redacted by legal and academic partners to minimize potential harms and impacts to Metta employee privacy. China's National Bureau of Statistics reports the quarterly output of integrated circuits dropped 4.2% on the year in Q1. That's the first decline since Q1 2019 before COVID-19. And it's because of COVID this time. Continuing COVID lockdowns in China played a role in this decline with various parts of Shanghai in lockdown for around a month. And that is impacting chip production. Earlier this month, a coin-based suspended Indian rupee transfers to its app through India's UPI network. The Economic Times of India reports that at least four other crypto trading services have either suspended rupee deposits or have had banks pull support from money transfers to their platforms. Data from CoinGecko shows that daily crypto trading volumes in India decreased between 88 and 96% since Peking last year. Panic's play date handheld console began shipping April 18th. Shipments will begin for customers in Group 1 of its initial pre-order. It's like boarding an airline. And Panic estimates shipments will reach all of this group by the end of May. So it takes about as long as Group 1 takes to board an airline. Pre-orders were initially set to begin at the end of 2021. But Panic pushed that back after discovering some battery issues with the initial finish units. But it's all good now. And we're going to try to talk to Scott Johnson about this on Wednesday. App researcher Jane Mancham-Wong tweeted that Twitter's edit tweet feature appears to recreate a new tweet with amended content that sits alongside the old tweets. Wong calls this an immutable approach since the same tweet idea is not used for the edited tweet. It's unclear, at least at this point, how a tweet's edit history will appear to users. Yeah, maybe they haven't figured it out yet. Alright, let's talk about Microsoft and Ad's Insiders sources. Business Insider is what you're probably familiar with, but they're just Insider in this case. They do all kinds of insidious things now. Insider sources say that Microsoft began working on a program to let brands advertise within free-to-play Xbox games. The ads may start appearing as early as Q3 of this year. This would not mean banner ads like you see in a free-to-play mobile game. Instead, sources said an example might be an ad appearing on a billboard, like in a racing game as you drive by, or some other in-game paid placement. Microsoft knows that these ads could irritate players and does not appear to be ready for in any ad goes free for all. They're going to build a private marketplace and only let select brands use the program. So they're going to be very careful about what shows up in that billboard as you're racing by. This also isn't a direct move to create another revenue stream. You might be surprised to learn this. Microsoft reportedly won't take a cut of any of this. It will also not use data from its other services like Bing to target ads in the games. This is just for the developers to be able to put ads in their own games. All revenue would go to the game developer. One would assume this is a way to motivate developers to make free-to-play titles for the Xbox. You get to keep all your revenue. Of course, these titles also generally use microtransactions in addition to the advertising. And Microsoft does get a cut of those. But yeah, as I said, we might start seeing these in Xbox games as early as Q3. Now, Rich, you were looking into this and the Verge noted that they did have something like this briefly before. Yeah, you know, there was a defunct, now defunct, Microsoft-owned advertising company called Massive. And they signed deals with EA games back in 2008. So, you know, a little bit of time ago, putting ads in games like Madden NFL, Skate, NHL, some NASCAR franchises. But these were the differences here. You were still paying the 50, 60 bucks for those titles and then seeing those ads in there where I think being free-to-play at least, I think changes the morality of this, right? If you're going to be a person that's upset by ads. It adjusts the outrage meter a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Well, and what's interesting to me about this is, comparing this, it really seems like they want to, at least the way it's described in this article. Again, we don't have the details from Microsoft yet. We're just reporting, but that this feels like almost like paid product placement in a movie, which is like not my favorite thing. I'm not like yay product placement. But in terms of like having that or having to watch a commercial or have a banner ad or something like that, if you can organically integrate that, one that might be able to add a sense of realism to a game where you're going to have kind of fake ads anyway. I'm thinking like in a, I don't know, like a Grand Theft Auto game. You have tons of fake ads everywhere and that you splash up a real Pepsi billboard. I don't think that's like the worst experience in the world as a gamer. So if they take that approach and they're being very selective and saying like, listen, these beverage brands can advertise here. This car brand can advertise in these spaces and stuff like that. If they are going to be very selective about it, I don't feel like I have any issue with this if it gets more decent free to play games out there. It also seems like, I mean, this is a way for Microsoft to say developers come hang. Let's make some free games, have a little fun, see what sticks, and then you could develop beyond that. I feel like this is pretty cut and dry. I don't know why anybody would be that outraged. When something's free, you're often going to get advertisements along with that. That's how it works. Yeah, if it's free to play, then your ad revenue is either the in-game payments, which people have their own problems with, whether it's pay to win, etc., or advertisements. At a certain point, the developer has to make money somehow and I know a lot of people's answer is like, just charge me for it. Don't make it free. Not everybody can afford a game. You get more uptake with free to play. I feel like what Microsoft's doing here is saying, look, any of these developers could put ads in their game on their own. We're going to try to make it a good experience when they do. We're going to help them do it and help them do it right, which is integrate it into the game and be selective about what goes into the game, which is better than just random banner ads that show up for some kind of cryptocurrency you've never heard of when you're just trying to play Solitaire. I get that some people are like, don't care, don't want ads, in which case, don't play these free to play games. I think that's a perfectly reasonable reaction. You don't have to or maybe the developers can make a paid version without ads available for you. But for people who can't afford it and don't mind it, this might be the best way to kind of split that baby. Yeah, I mean, free to play games aren't going anywhere. And like personally, I'm not a fan of that mechanic generally anyway in a lot of games. So again, like to me, the advertising is beside the point. If you enjoy a game that has a lot of microtransactions where you can invest in stuff and have that experience, that's great. Microsoft isn't like kind of getting in that way. And I also think it's a really, it's very timely, given that over the last week or so we've talked about, hey, here's what's meta-charging for different platforms for commission rates. We've heard for years now people disputing Apple's commission rates on stuff like that. Obviously, it doesn't apply to the in-app transactions with microtransactions. But again, it's Microsoft being able to talk to developers and say, hey, we have this very selective ad revenue. High-quality program. Yeah, high-quality ad revenue that potentially could be coming to you. And by the way, no commission on that. Seems to be would be a very effective incentive for developers. Yeah. And Beatmaster80 asks a pertinent question in our chat. The games industry is making more profit than ever before. Why should this be needed? Well, one answer is would you turn down a raise? Everybody wants more money. But the other answer is this is useful for the parts of the game industry that are just getting started and just growing. Not necessarily targeted just at EA. It could be perfectly beneficial for game companies that size. But it helps smaller developers too. I think that's part of the idea anyway. Well, moving on to the classroom. Lots of folks in our audience are either in classrooms themselves or have kids in classrooms. And this is an interesting one. Classroom technologies make software called class that helps teachers understand what's going on when those classrooms are virtual. It can monitor how often students raise their hands. If the student agrees, see what the student is viewing, among other things. Protocol reports that classroom is working with Intel to incorporate an algorithm that would attempt to identify what emotions students look like they're feeling. Maybe they're bored. Maybe they're distracted. Maybe they're confused by the information that's being presented. Intel's algorithm was trained on actual students using laptops with 3D cameras. They hired psychologists as well to categorize emotions which were then used to train the algorithm. Two of the three labelers had to agree for a label to be used in the data set. So there was no attempt to verify the labels by assessing the student's moods directly. The validity of the algorithm is meant to be found by its effectiveness in aiding teachers. In practice, it combines facial expression analysis with contextual information about what a student is working on to determine their level of understanding. Are they confused? Are they bored? Etc. Classroom technologies plans to integrate this into the class software and test it in a college setting. And if they deploy it, the idea would be to help teachers assess how well the class is comprehending the lesson. So we called on Dave Rodback, psychology professor at Algamut State University to tell us his thoughts as both a psychologist and a teacher. Dave. I'm of at least two minds about this. On the one hand in class, I'll walk around and I'll see expressions on people's faces when they're not wearing masks. Happily right now they wear masks but I see expressions even in their eyes and I see if somebody's confused and I'll say, do you want me to explain this some more? Or do you want me to explain this from a different angle and I'll do that. I teach things like advanced statistics and neuroscience, things that are sort of non-trivial, let's say. So in that case, automating that is good, it seems to me. The problem is that we were told over the years that facial expressions are universal and they really aren't as universal as we like to think. It's not nearly as cut and dried. This is then another place where we can let bias just creep in and I don't want bias in automatic systems. I don't want them in any systems but when it becomes hard-coded, that's a real problem. I remember writing my introduction to calculus midterm back in 1984, that's a while ago, and I was having trouble with the problem and I sort of stretched and leaned back and it looked probably like I was trying to look at other people's papers and even if I was, I'm legally blind, I have 10% visual acuity. So the TA comes over and he looks to see if he thinks that I'm cheating and I held out my CNIB Canadian National Institute for the Blind card and he knew then that I wasn't cheating. But what I'm saying is that we'd have to do this on individuals. You'd have to verify this on every single individual in a class. Then I think it's probably okay but the amount of work it would take to do this would be large. You'd have to get samples of people's facial expressions and correlate those and do a very good job of each individual to see what facial expressions mean, boredom, which ones mean I'm confused, which ones mean I just have to go to the bathroom. That seems like a lot of work. Maybe someday we can do that but I think a skilled instructor can do that already. And then there's the issue of behavior looks like one thing, it can be something else. So I think we have to worry about that kind of thing before we jump on the let's automate everything and then hard code potentially biases against all I don't know, blind, sarcastic future university professors. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you Dave for doing that, for giving us your reaction there. Because he's steeped in the psychology universities and psychology professor but he also teaches. So he had all sides of this story and really brings up a great point about the fact that we actually don't have a great sense of what a facial expression actually means. If you look at the story that Sarah was telling you about, they don't go and ask or test the students to find out what they were actually feeling. They were going with psychology professors agreeing with each other what they thought which might not be right. Given what Dave was telling us here. And then there's the idea of bias we talked last week about how diagnostic assistance for emergency rooms was improved when they trained the data on the hospital's local population because the data set would vary from hospital to hospital based on the demographics of the population that hospital is serving. And I didn't see any evidence that they're doing that here. It looked like they had trained with some students and they had one data set that was meant to apply to all. And that's when bias starts to creep in and you don't train those data sets specifically to the population. I would like to see them say, well when we deploy this in Algoma University, we're going to train it on Algoma students. The other issue is in a teacher-student relationship there's a power dynamic there. I think the students aren't. And when you are giving this information to the teacher, I was thinking about this, the more I read about this and I think there could be a utility for this even if it wasn't a localized set which I still think is the ideal scenario where it's individually trained on you stored locally and then they can run an algorithm on that. But if that's not the case, give that information to the student. Say like, hey, we've noticed that it seemed like maybe you were confused based on how you were interacting with today's lesson seemed like maybe you weren't getting full comprehension. Would you like to reach out to the teacher in this case doesn't automatically report it, doesn't make you like complicit for not understanding or like feel like it's important. That would be a great way to train the data too is to get the students' confirmation of their feelings involved as well. Yeah, I think that kind of flattens and makes it less problematic from a power dynamic level if there is any bias and yeah to your point of time being able to report back on it. Yeah, because otherwise if the training data were good and it was good at accurately assessing confusion, I think it's a great tool for the teacher and not really surveillance for the teacher to go like, oh, this is reminding me that that person may need an extra explanation right? It's what Dave was saying he can do in person would be helpful. I think that's super helpful. He's just, you got to get it trained well. Well folks, if you have a thought about this or anything we talk about on the show, email us, let us know. And if you're like, great I'd love to. What's your email address? You never say it. Well, I'm going to say it right now. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Email us. Do it. I've been trying to guess Netflix's path forward with its gaming strategy since it launched the gaming strategy. Netflix, if you've been following this, you know is allowing you to play its games. There's like a dozen or so mobile games and I think like a couple others. You just login with your Netflix account and you can play for free. No additional charge. Put it that way. So far it's mostly been those mobile games. They are mostly unrelated to their TV properties. They have a couple stranger things games in there, but those were adapted from the show after the fact and not made originally as part of Netflix gaming. Now, we have the first example of Netflix directly tying a game to a new show right from the start. The show is actually based on the card game Exploding Kittens from The Oatmeal. The show is coming in 2023 but first, almost a year before that, a mobile game developed along with the show will launch this May along with two new cards related to the game and the show that you can get for the actual card game. The TV series is being produced by Greg Daniels, you know the guy behind the office and Mike Judge the guy behind Biva's butt head. You've heard of him. Yeah. They're teaming up on this. They're not the show runners but they're the executive producers. The story will involve God and the devil being sent to earth in the bodies of house cats. Yes. So, off to a good start. 100% in. The game will be separate from the existing mobile kittens game. There's a mobile version of the card game that'll still exist. That'll still have its own version. It'll be separate from this Netflix version. The Netflix version will be based on the TV show. This is what a lot of folks expected Netflix to do with gaming in the first place though tie in a TV show to the games but this is a card game that already has a mobile game being adapted into a TV show and a second version of a mobile game coming off the TV show. So, it's a little more complicated than I would have expected. Is this the best first shot for Netflix and is this a great way for the company to learn how to do this? Gosh, I mean besides the fact that I love the premise of this game and I'm a Netflix subscriber so I could have some fun with this. We've been talking about Netflix getting into gaming for months. I don't know. Close to a year at this point. There's nothing that really at least has stuck out to me as far as me kind of surveying on the Twitterverse and beyond of anything that has really captured the hearts and minds of anybody who uses Netflix. It just seems like a playground. This could be the first part of that. The first part of something being kind of like a viral game that drives new people to Netflix or at least keeps people hanging out at Netflix because that's the whole point. Netflix has a lot of competitors now Netflix is trying new things in order to get new subscribers and keep the existing subscribers they have. I don't know. I'm not sure if Exploding Kittens is it but I mean this is my wheelhouse. If you made any game this would be the game that I would play. What's interesting to me is I remember when Netflix first got into original content and it seemed like outside of maybe not Lily Hammer house of cards that was algorithmically generated to be a hit. They did all their customer data like the people this actor, this setting, this style this director, we're going to put all that together and this is how boom this is going to be our tentpole high prestige show. It seems like while the idea of playing with original content pairing those two together it would seem like that's a great way to introduce new IP before maybe a show hits if you're doing this kind of release schedule this is the way to do so in a way that we can out we've correlated that people that love Exploding Kittens 95% of them also are huge Mike Judge fans and love that style of humor and love the stuff that he is doing there. This to me is like we have found all the things that will make the hit we have we have found like an already pretty rabid audience for a very popular party game with an established name that's going to say like hey this is good they're going to get it they're going to get the same style of humor as we come to expect from dude behind the oatmeal now I can't remember his name and so like to me this is like the safest possible way to do this even though I do think I'm telling you we're alluding to that this is very clearly like an original IP like a way to introduce that pipeline going forward it seems like yeah it feels like the more I think about it it's smart not to turn Bridgerton into a game not to turn stranger things into more games please don't create something from the ground up that lends itself to a game so that the game and the TV show are developed from the beginning and a card game that has an interesting story premise which is what this sounds like to me is an excellent way to do that because you've already got a built-in fan base for the card game they're going to want to watch or at least try the TV show they might be more willing to play the mobile game although it's a little weird that there's going to be another mobile game version of it but yeah I think the next step from this would be to say hey Miller world which Netflix owns can we create a game based on your comic we did it on a card game this is what we learned let's try it we'll create a game based on the comic and turn the comic into a TV show I can see that that's starting to feel like a logical way for this to happen yeah and increasingly Netflix and Roger I know we've had discussions about this on pastures like Netflix is increasingly like an IP factory that's how they're going to whether it's original content whether it's now increasingly games this very much feels like we're in the business IP that will increasingly diversify the way you consume and I mean this is the great thing if you focus on the IP whether or not it succeeds as a video or a series or not it's less monumental well we still have an avenue of making this a game or we have an avenue of taking this IP and using it for something else so yeah it doesn't pan out everywhere but it doesn't mean we're taking a loss on it but rather we can have a commodity that we can then look and turn around into a different thing we see this with video games and soundtracks right there are lots and lots of great music that are churned out created just for video games but they find a second life not just as original soundtracks that you download for consumers but also for use on first com was basically licensing out the soundtrack from middle of honor for people to use in documentaries or their own shows as bed music if you want something that sounded world war two you know narrative style like a very solemn moment we have a soundtrack for that you want something it's all very action and we have a soundtrack for that so it's really just stretching out what you can do with the same IP and the metric for success for Netflix is subscriber sign ups and retention so if you are expanding that IP like you're talking about Roger and people love it then you've got now you've got two reasons for the exploding fan to stay subscribed to Netflix or to sign up to Netflix they don't even care if you never play the game or watch it as long as you love it enough to think well I wouldn't want to be able to get you know I wouldn't the game especially is something like once you've watched the TV show you've watched you're waiting for a new one the game is like yeah but I might want to play it again so that's an interesting play for retention well you might wonder you know what are QR codes really good for and the answer may be college football the Verge noted on sportslogos.net that this spring the University of Central Florida or UCF's football team will use QR codes instead of numbers on the back of the players jerseys the front will still have their number so numbers aren't going away but the QR code will be on the back QR code links to players biographies on UCF's website you know that includes stats like how old they are how tall they are high school etc if you're thinking wouldn't this be hard to scan they're running around a field doesn't make a lot of sense appears UCF will also display players QR codes on the home stadium's Jumbotron so that if you're really interested that might make more sense you might recall last year the UCF Knights as they're known kept the numbers on the back of their jerseys but swap their last names for Twitter handles so they're pretty forward thinking oh they are forward thinking is a way to say it you might also say great at getting attention from people you might be another way because you're right like the QR codes even if you're in the stadium looking up at the Jumbotron video I'm imagining this is most useful for people at home even then trying to get your camera out pointed at the screen in time to catch the QR code at the link during even a slow motion video replay seems totally unwieldy totally unuseful having them up on the Jumbotron seems more useful which you wouldn't have had to put them on their jerseys at that point and it's going to definitely make the referees jobs harder because they're going to have everybody flip over so you can see their number you have to wear AR goggles to read the QR code that's magic leap is going to sponsor that kind of turn into a new little registry hollow lens in your surface let's make the refs do their job better we have no QR codes in our mail bag as far as I'm aware is that correct Sarah it is correct but Desmond from what feels like summer in Richmond, Virginia as Desmond says says I was listening to your conversation about AI art in episode 4253 as an instructional designer I've used images from this person does not exist to provide pictures in my courses instead of using stock images I emailed the creator one time about copyright and he told me he believes AI created works that can't be copyrighted and I was free to use them however I wanted this is a handy way for me as an instructional designer to make my courses richer well the courts may or may not agree with him but at least that means he's not going to go after you which is a good first step on the copyright and I love this example thank you Desmond because we were wondering last week and they were wondering on the tech John too like what are these used for like why would you want AI to create art for you and this is a great example right from an actual artist who you might think would be threatened by this but instead is using it as a tool I mean listen if you I don't know right now if I needed to get some sort of a stock image of a man on a skateboard you know and it looked like he was in Florida whatever like getty images would be the first place I would go but that's not free so I can see certainly in a scholastic situation where this actually might make a lot of sense making stock art for people that has you know that is cheap to make because he didn't pay an artist and copyright free because well or at least copyright ambiguous at this point yeah hey we have a brand new boss to thank Cyber Hound Tech started following us over the weekend new patron just started backing us on Patreon thank you so much Cyber Hound Tech great to have you on the team indeed get in there enjoy Cyber Hound Tech we won't even make you put a QR code in the back of your uniform you can just join on in unless you want to that's totally cool and we'll try to scan it as you run by there's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS live folks know that it starts right after we finish this show but just a reminder DTNS is live Monday through Friday for PM Eastern 2100 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're back tomorrow doing it all again with Nate Langston joining us talk to you then this show is part of the Frogpants Network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program