Tech News Weekly Episode 301 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Jason Howell
Coming up next on Tech News Weekly. It's me, jason Howell and Mikah Sargent is here as well. We first start the show talking to Sam Abul-Samid from Guide House Insights. He talks all about lithium, iron, phosphate and how that's come into EVs here in the US. Been in China for quite a while. We're getting it here in the US. What does that even mean? Sam's got the scoop. Also, Mikah has his first of two stories of the week talking about the real impact of child safety laws on the open internet. A lot of impact there that we talk about. Also, my story of the week, meta, has legs, but it still has a long way to go. I promise you it's more interesting than just legs in Meta. And finally, call of Duty is getting moderation, help for voice chat by what else? Artificial intelligence all that and more coming up next on Tech News Weekly. Yes, you love from people you trust.

This is Tech News Weekly Episode 301, recorded Thursday, august 31, 2023. Can AI detoxify? Call of Duty.

0:01:12 - Mikah Sargent
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0:01:38 - Jason Howell
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0:02:00 - Mikah Sargent
And by Discourse, the online home for your community. Discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime, anywhere. Visit discourse.org/twit To get one month free on all self-serve plans. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent.

0:02:27 - Jason Howell
I'm the other guy, Jason Howell. Good to have you back, Mikah.

0:02:30 - Mikah Sargent
Good to be back from Denver, the mile high city on a cloud. None of those that is accurate, forgive me.

0:02:43 - Sam Abuelsamid
First and foremost, it was in a yeah it's.

0:02:45 - Mikah Sargent
You know it was in Aurora, not Denver. So that was the first thing. I don't know why they said it was Denver, but yeah, no, I'm back, I'm here. I'm looking forward to hosting this hour show together with you. Jason Howell, I'm definitely. I know how this works right.

0:03:05 - Jason Howell
It is weird, though you take one week off and it's kind of hard to get back. It happens to me every time. It's like the one reason that I'm like I don't know that I want to step away for a second because calibrating back in can be challenging, but it's good to have you back. It's good to have you here, so we have in store for you. One of my favorite guests were I personally. I'm always really interested to learn more about battery.

Advancements is something that I bring up on the show every once in a while. I just feel like, in so many different ways within the realm of technology the battery technology that is powering our devices and our EVs and everything it's so critical and yet we make these advances, or we've made these advances in the past, and all of these devices and vehicles and everything are powered off of those advances that really haven't been updated very much over the years, and I'm kind of waiting for that moment, that like spark moment, where something new happens in the world of batteries. Maybe that's happening right now. One advancement, right now at least in the realm of EVs, is lithium iron phosphate for electric vehicles. Sam Abuelsamid is here from the Wheel Bearings podcast to break it all down for you. Welcome back, sam.

0:04:20 - Sam Abuelsamid
Hey, it's great to be back with you guys again. And, Mikah, just for a little bit of a talk. You were, I think you were, in the greater Denver area, and if you were in Aurora, you were actually probably closer to Denver airport than to downtown Denver.

0:04:34 - Mikah Sargent
That's all of that is accurate. We were in the middle of nowhere at this hotel that looked like the hotel from the shining. It was all very exciting.

0:04:43 - Jason Howell
Exciting and scary and frightening. We should also mention Mikah was there for podcast movement, a podcast expo, so we don't have to mention that. We don't have to mention that. Okay, All right. They're going to be wondering like what the hell were you doing there?

0:04:57 - Mikah Sargent
No, it's fine, it's. You know, they had some, they had some troubles, but we did it and we're here.

0:05:06 - Jason Howell
Right on. Excellent, well, and so was Sam. So, sam, thank you for joining us to talk about this battery tech. Let's dive right in. Talk a little bit first of all about the way things are for EVs here in the US when it comes to that battery tech that's hiding inside.

0:05:24 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah. So first of all, little background. You know lithium ion batteries. That term encompasses a wide range of different details within the within the battery. The key thing that's common across all different types of lithium ion batteries is that there's lithium in there, that when you charge the battery it just strips off an electron from each lithium atom, deposits it at the anode and the lithium ion, the positively charged lithium ion, travels back and travels from the cathode to the anode. When you hook up something, hook up a load to it, whether it's a motor or your phone or whatever it might be, it goes back the other way. So the, the lithium ions travel back from the anode to the cathode and the electrons travel through this external circuit, through whatever device you're powering, whether that's, like I say, your phone or your car, whatever it might be.

But the cathodes? There's a lot of different kinds of batteries, different cathode materials, different cathode chemistries and what we find in most EVs today, at least in North America and this is not true in China, and I'll explain in a second. But in North America most of the EVs use some mix of for the cathode, some mix of nickel, cobalt and maybe manganese and aluminum or a couple of other things, but those, those are the primary ones and we refer to those as nickel rich chemistries and those have the highest energy density. So that means that the that cell can store more energy per unit volume and per weight than than any other type of lithium ion battery. And the what we're talking about today is lithium iron phosphate. So instead of nickel and cobalt, we're talking about using iron and phosphorus, or phosphate, which is phosphorus, a compound of phosphorus and oxygen.

And the advantage to lithium, iron phosphate or LFP cells is that they're a lot cheaper and they're about 30 to 40% less expensive because the materials are a lot more readily available than the nickel and especially the cobalt. But the downside is that they also have about 30% lower energy density. So, everything else being equal, an LFP cell is going to have about 30% and going to hold about 30% less energy than a nickel cell, and that, for an EV especially, can be problematic. But not all other things are equal, and that's what what this article is about, is that there are new advancements happening with, both with battery architecture and with the chemistries, and so we're we're seeing, as we're going to see here in North America, a lot more shift towards using LFP batteries in EVs. In China, lfp batteries already account for about two thirds of all the EVs on the road, and they're growing rapidly in Europe as well, and we're going to start seeing that happening here in North America too.

0:08:44 - Jason Howell
So when you're talking about China already having this, you know kind of in in the mix in the market and it seems like that wave is about to hit here. Are we looking at a moment when more of these hit the market that we just have to get used to? Let's say, lower range because of the lesser density of these new batteries that are being put in there? Of course, we wouldn't be paying as much, theoretically speaking, for these things, but we'd have to get accustomed to lower range. Is that kind of the trade off?

0:09:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
At least initially. Actually, no, not really, because the initial applications that we're seeing are the first one. That's, the first major one that's on the market is in the Tesla Model 3 standard range version. It uses an LFP battery from CATL, a Chinese company, and so the range is actually about the same as the nickel battery that it replaced. The battery itself is a little bit bigger than the nickel battery that it replaced, but it's a lot cheaper, and shortly we're going to start seeing the Mustang Mach-E standard range model same thing with an LFP battery and early next year the Ford F-150 Lightning with an LFP battery, both in the standard range versions. So the range is not actually going to go down because it's replacing the smaller nickel batteries that were already being used in those vehicles. But the cost of those vehicles should go down and it should at least help to make it so. Those vehicles aren't losing money for the manufacturers, which will hopefully make it easier for them to build even more EVs.

But going forward over the next several years, the big thing that we're going to see and this is one of the things that was a key point in the article is a shift towards a different battery pack architecture.

So most of the EV batteries that have been built up to this point use what we call a modular architecture, and that's because back around 2010 or so, when the modern EV era was kicking off, there's a lot of uncertainty about how long these batteries were going to last, how reliable they were going to be, and so the automakers went with a modular design. So essentially, what you have is a bunch of cells. So when you think of batteries like AA batteries or anything that you use at home, each one of those is not actually a battery, it's a cell. When you put a bunch of those together, that makes a battery, and so a battery pack for a car has anywhere from hundreds to thousands of cells in it, but they've been arranged in a modular format. So you put a bunch of cells into a box we call that a module and then put that box into a bigger box. There's the battery pack. So you got a box and a box design.

0:11:41 - Mikah Sargent
And between, you know, box.

0:11:44 - Sam Abuelsamid
And so those boxes, those casings, actually take up physical space within the volume of the battery pack. And when you actually measure out how much of the volume of a battery pack is actually active cell material, it's storing energy. And so with AA, with modular packs, it's about somewhere between 30 and 35%, depending on the specifics of the design, because you got all this extra wiring and connections and structure and everything. So what we're seeing a shift to now is what's known as either a structural pack or a cell to pack design. So you get rid of those module boxes and you just start stuffing the pack with these cells and you put them in there, glue them together, or, in the case of Tesla with their new 4680 battery packs that they have in some of the Model Ys, they fill it with a structural foam to hold it all together and basically turn it into one big giant brick of batteries.

And then when you do that, one of the companies I wrote about in the article is a company based here in Michigan called Rnext Energy. Their Aries battery pack, which is their cell to pack LFP design, holds it's got about 75% of the volume of the pack is actually cell material that is storing energy. So that's about twice as much as you get with a modular pack. So if you had the same chemistry, you would have twice as much energy in the same size of battery, which is great. This also makes it less expensive to manufacture, and so that's the direction that the industry is going to be going. Is these cellular or these structural designs, or cell to pack designs?

0:13:32 - Jason Howell
It, would there be any benefit for someone, or is this even possible for someone to retrofit their already owned vehicle for this battery technology? I mean, if it's I mean partially, it's about cost savings. So I guess if somebody already has a car with the battery technology in there, it might not make a whole lot of sense to want to do like a swap from one technology to the other. Right?

0:13:55 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, if you've got an EV today that has a battery that's working, it would not be economically viable to buy a whole new battery pack to do it, because you can't do it within the same pack. You know you, basically you know the pack. The exterior of the pack is going to be the same, it's the same mounting points, but this inside the pack is going to be a little different. So it's a different part and you know you're still talking many thousands of dollars and you're probably. You're probably even if you got a pack that had more range in it because it was, you know, had more, more cells in it, it wouldn't be worthwhile for for what it would cost. But your next generation of vehicle is likely to have this type of pack in it and it's probably going to cost less and the battery pack itself can be, can be physically smaller and keep the same range. So there's going to be a lot of advantages.

One other thing about LFP compared to nickel battery packs. You've probably seen, you know, pictures of Teslas on fire or other EVs on fire and heard the stories about how hard it is to extinguish those because because it is really hard to extinguish a battery fire LFP batteries are much more stable than nickel batteries. Nickel batteries are much more inclined to have thermal runaway and catch fire and burn out of control, and that's almost impossible to do with an LFP battery.

0:15:22 - Jason Howell
That's a huge benefit, absolutely yeah. Now what is it about the Chinese market that had them kind of switch over much earlier than ours? Like, when are we talking here? Was this? In the last couple of years, things have really changed over there, and how are they able to kind of do that so quickly compared to no, really, it started when EVs really start to sell in any notable volume in China, probably around 2015 or so 2014-15.

0:15:50 - Sam Abuelsamid
And the Chinese market is a little bit different. What the consumers were looking for there was different. People were not necessarily looking for vehicles that could drive three, four or 500 miles on a charge. They wanted to get an EV with no emissions that was relatively cheap. So the purchase price was a much bigger consideration for most Chinese consumers than the range, and so manufacturers started using LFP batteries. By the way, lfp batteries they were invented here in the US and then adopted by manufacturers in China widely, and right now we don't have any large-scale LFP production in North America, although there are a couple of plants that are currently under construction that will be producing high volumes of LFP cells in the next couple of years. So the Chinese market they were much more price-conscious, whereas here people that were buying EVs wanted maximum range. Now they can get both the range and a lower price and just as an example of what's possible with this type of thing, our next energy.

When they got started a couple of years ago, they built a prototype battery pack, an LFP battery pack, and installed it in a Tesla Model S. They went out and bought a Model S, took out the nickel pack, put in their LFP pack same size. It fit right in there in the same space With the original battery pack. The Model S had a range of about 320, 330 miles and the folks from our next energy took theirs on a test drive. They fully charged it, drove it from the Detroit area up to Northern Michigan and back again and ended up getting 752 miles of driving range on a single charge. So that shows you what's possible?

0:17:52 - Jason Howell
Yeah, no kidding, that's something I look forward to right there. That's impressive. Yeah Well, this is cool stuff. Sam really appreciate you carving out a few minutes today to talk to us about this. Of course, sam wrote this article for Forbes, forbescom. You can find his work there, also doing the wheel bearings podcast. What do you want to leave people with? Where can people follow what you're doing?

0:18:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, my main job, my day job that actually pays the bills, is I'm a principal analyst leading the transportation and mobility team research team at Guidehouse Insights. So if you're interested in some market research on emerging technologies related to energy, particularly transportation for me, go to guidehouseinsightscom and you can see what we do by our reports and we also do custom work if anybody's interested as well, right?

0:18:49 - Jason Howell
on, Sam. Thank you. Always a pleasure to get the chance to talk to you. Appreciate your time.

0:18:54 - Sam Abuelsamid
Great to talk to you guys too. Have a great day. Thank you, sam. Bye Michael, bye Jason.

0:18:59 - Mikah Sargent
Alrighty up. Next, my first of two stories of the week. Before we get there, though, I do want to tell you about our first sponsor of this very episode. This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Duo. Duo is going to help protect against breaches. With a leading access management suite, you get strong, multi-layered defenses and innovative capabilities that only allow legitimate users in and keep those bad actors out. For any organization concerned about being breached that needs protection fast, duo quickly enables strong security while also improving user productivity. Duo prevents unauthorized access with multi-layered defenses and modern capabilities that will actually thwart those sophisticated malicious access attempts. And what I love about Duo is that it is responsive, so it will increase authentication requirements in real time as risk rises. It enables high productivity by only requiring authentication when needed, which will enable swift, easy and secure access, not having to type in multiple codes and you know, pop in all of this information to establish that you're you. It is constantly being mindful of when authentication needs to take place, when it doesn't, and Duo provides an all-in-one solution for strong MFA, passwordless single sign-on and trusted endpoint verification. Duo helps you implement zero trust principles by verifying users and very important their devices. So start your free trial and sign up today at cs.co/twit. That's cs.co/twit. Thank you, duo, for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

All right, my first story of the week this week is the journalist who wrote this piece is currently on is out of office, and so I wanted to cover this because I think it's an incredibly important piece from the Verge, the Verge's McKenna Kelly, who has written an article entitled Child Safety Bills Are Reshaping the Internet for Everyone, and this is this is one of those situations where, on the face of it, everything looks hunky dory and people can kind of get behind a general idea that we need to protect the kids right. But what comes with this is a sort of insidious approach to reshaping the internet in a way that may not protect privacy, may result in more government oversight and, in many cases already has resulted in some level of government oversight, of overreach, arguably so. There are several states that have worked to introduce laws that are keeping children from watching pornography online. Okay, so what happens is, in these states, the sort of ruling has come about, this law has come about that says, if you operate a pornography site, and depending on the state and depending on the law, depending on the legislation. That sort of definition of what a pornography site or a pornography service is is different, and some say, in some places it's like if a third of your content is pornographic content, then you are operating a pornography site. Then you have to verify that you're over a certain age. In many states it's age of 18. And so, depending on the state, you will have certain requirements.

In Louisiana, because they have IDs that are able to be digital. Now, it was actually according to the first state that not only successfully age-gated content online, but also one of the first states to allow for people to digitally save their IDs on their phones then it gives those individuals the ability to show their age, but immediately, if someone is visiting a site that maybe is not a site that they it's a not safe for work site, right. Having to give their identity over in such a sort of forthright way is a little concerning for folks, right? What comes with this, though, is that, depending on the tool, it may or may not be more privacy-protecting. So, with the tool that Louisiana is using, the developer of the service says look, we do uphold user privacy. When a site or when a service is looking at your age, it is literally just a does this person? Is this person at, or over, a certain number? It isn't giving the person's date of birth, it isn't giving the person's other information in their ID, anything like that. It is simply the case that the ID and the service together know your age and then can say yes, this person is above or at the threshold. But France, according again to this piece, was working on a bunch of different kind of age verification restrictions, and when they did research into third-party services to kind of help bring this forward, they found that many of them were very intrusive and kind of did not protect user privacy, and so they have kind of pulled back a little bit, trying to look for new ways to make this happen.

So, understandably, protecting children from pornographic content before they are of a mature age where they can make those decisions for themselves, that is something that a lot of people can get behind, and that is part of what is making this such a concern for advocates for the open internet and privacy-minded folks, because what we have is another instance of pushing through legislation that has some ulterior motives but is sort of at the front and at the face of it. It's protect the kids, protect the kids. So where in these states you know you're going? Okay, we want to protect the kids, we want to keep the you know, keep our children safe online. It's introducing this age verification and, in some case, identity verification information that is going to result in, you know, in the case of Louisiana, you know the government being at the forefront of that right, and so different sites are kind of managing this in different ways. The creator of the site, just for fans, spoke with the Verge and said that it basically costs $1.50 per person for the creator to be able to verify someone's age. So every person that wants to go to the site and access the site, it costs them $1.50. And there's no promise that the person is going to, you know, spend any money once they've gotten to the site, and so it's potentially kind of bringing an end to some sites online. And in the case of a very popular pornography website, they just completely blocked traffic in those states rather than have to go forth with working in this new means of age verification.

Now, the other problem that comes along with this, outside of just the general concern for privacy, is that it's not just pornographic sites that are being age verified In some places, in some states, there are also bills that are aimed at making sure a child does not have access to social media unless they have their parents' permission. But in the case of children whose parents or guardians are abusive you know who they may live in an abusive home. In the case of queer children who may have parents who do not, you know, do not acknowledge that for their child and do not want that for their child, in those cases, obviously it can be an issue where they are kept from being able to speak with others like them. And again, it's all kind of shielded by this idea that we want to protect the kids. You know, they can talk about grooming, they can talk about different sites that will give you access to adults who are taking advantage, and all of that is kind of at the forefront of this. And so you're seeing lawmakers who are not wanting to vote against it.

And because we started to see this with the CSAM content Child Sexual Abuse Material where at the forefront that was the argument we're starting to see more states kind of jump on this and realize, oh, we can lock these things down a little bit more if we put this at the forefront, if we make it so that you are having to verify all of this stuff, then it keeps kids away from certain content. One example again from the Verge article the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and supporter of KOSA which is the Kids Online Safety Act. That's federal legislation. They say the bill will let lawmakers police content featuring trans people so to be able to keep kids from being able to see trans folks online and, in many cases, to keep trans kids from being able to access any of that content. And so there's a lot of concern that not only is it kind of reshaping the internet as a whole because of how it is costing sites money to ID people, but also with that sort of pull away from privacy, depending on the services that folks are using, because a site may not go as far as to look for the most privacy-protecting site. They may go for a service that costs not as much money and it turns out that the way that they're saving money is because they are not protecting the user's privacy.

So to have, you have to hold up your money, you have to hold up your phone and look at it and have it scan your face, and then it compares it with your social media profiles and does this and that and the other to determine what your age is, and then you're taking photos of your government issued ID and then that service gets hacked or there's a breach. There is a lot at play here, and what is kind of at the another sort of question about this, I guess inflection point, is whether we're going to see the individual state laws kind of give way to a federal law first and foremost, and if the federal law would be sort of at its inception at odds with the First Amendment right. And so there's a lot at play here, because of course there was the 1996 Communications Decency Act and that was struck down because it did infringe on First Amendment rights. So it's hard to tell what's going to happen here in the long run. But for now states individually are implementing this and we've seen again, according to McKenna Kelly, we've seen many states I'm trying to find now the exact number oh, 17 other state legislatures across the country who have just kind of copied and pasted the Louisiana bill, and in those other states they may not have something like the Louisiana digital ID where the service that they just so happen to be using is mindful of a person's privacy.

So this age gating of the internet, as McKenna Kelly is calling it, has the potential to have a huge impact on the internet, and I think the only thing in my mind that's come close has been concerns about copyright and who's responsible for copyright and how we've had a different social media site saying look, if we are responsible when someone posts a GIF on our site of some copyrighted content, then we're just not going to be able to offer our service anymore. That was the last time I've kind of seen arguably this much impact on how the internet might be in the United States. So, yeah, there's a lot here and of course, I always. This is a time where I'm always grateful to have someone who is a parent on the show, just to hear your perspective as a technologist and a parent and kind of where you are with all of this.

0:33:56 - Jason Howell
I mean, as a parent of two kids, it's hard right, because the argument that they make whether the true reason or rationale for the argument is protect the children or not that argument, that idea that we want to make a better life for our kids like who could argue against that? Who could say, no, you're wrong. Kids should have a horrible life, they should have a horrible experience. You know, running across this online and everything, I don't think anyone truly believes that. I'd say most decent people don't believe that. But at the same time, like I am a parent, I feel like I am a responsible parent. Both my wife and I are responsible parents. We've had a lot of conversations with our kids about the internet, about topics like sex and being, you know, sexual identity and being queer and trans and all of these things. We've done our part as parents to bring these into the conversation with our kids from a pretty young age to the point to where it's not this thing that they or we fear necessarily. We don't actually sure there are things online that we are afraid of, absolutely. You know, if one of my daughters met the wrong person online, like that's, you know that's something that I certainly don't want to see ever happen. But at the same time, we've also talked about this enough and you know, in a back and forth conversation, not just a one directed, you know, we tell you, you listen, we make it a full on conversation as far as like, well, what happens if? What? You know, what do you know about this? What can we tell you? We have set it up to a point to where, at least so far and hopefully into the future, there is no shame, there is no stigma attached to these topics and that they can make critical. You know, hopefully we're teaching them critical thinking and critical decision making capabilities, so that you know these things don't I don't know disarm or short circuit them in the situation, and that's something responsible can be done in that situation.

Do I think that the architecture of the internet should be upended because there are bad things on the internet? I don't believe so, because I think, no matter what I mean, even if this is in place, there will still be bad things on the internet. We'll just have a worse internet with bad things on it. And so, as a parent, I think, for me anyways, you know everybody's different, but for me it really just comes down to how involved, how communicative? What is the relationship that you have with your kids to teach them these things, so that we aren't because we're not always gonna be there to protect them, and I don't know what laws like these do to educate our kids to be, you know, to be more responsible, to be more critical in the ways that they approach their existence online.

0:37:06 - Mikah Sargent
So that's how I feel about it. That's incredibly well put, because there's a frustration I have with the idea of any sort of punting of responsibility by a parent or guardian in such a way that, instead of taking responsibility, you're doing it's not even giving the responsibility to someone else, like education. You know, in many cases in the United States, parents, guardians, can't teach their own kids the basic education they need, so they send them to school. That punting makes sense and that is a punting that results in them, you know, actually getting what they need. They just aren't able to do that themselves. But the punting that is just because I can't or won't or I'm uncomfortable doing so, I'm just gonna completely shut you down to it instead of actually taking my responsibility as your parent or guardian and teaching you and preparing you. Oh, that really grounds my gears.

0:38:12 - Jason Howell
So well put, I think you know what drives my gears? Yeah, yeah, I mean I think also with the root of it is just a level of technology understanding or misunderstanding. I think there are a lot of people that are afraid of technology. They are afraid of the power of the reach social media. You know you're working with numbers that are just so large and so vast that it's impo like it's practically impossible for the human brain to really understand the scale of certain things. And I think people emotionally can get tied up in that and think this is too complicated for me to figure out. So, instead of learning, instead of teaching, I just wanna go to the source and I wanna cut it off.

And, as you're talking about here with this story, what is the cost of cutting it off? You may think that you've solved the problem, but you really haven't. And what is the collateral damage that goes along with that? And it actually turns out to be quite a lot, considering what we've grown accustomed to and what we value about an open internet. We'd lose it, and I think that it's also. You know, it's a slippery slope. Once you know again, once you go down that road, other things seem more possible. And then where are you? Five, 10 years down the line, looking back, going okay, that was the moment that everything really changed.

0:39:39 - Mikah Sargent
And then the fire nation attacked. Well put, sorry, that is. That's a reference that, if you know, you know. Let's move on. Jason Howell, like I, don't know.

0:39:50 - Jason Howell
But anyways, one thing I do know about changing Patrick De La Henti in our Discord notes Legs in VR. Have you ever thought about why they aren't there? It's a promise that rarely delivers. I'm gonna talk about that. Quite a segue there from one topic to the other, but you know we'll change gears a little bit.

But first this episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. So what's the most effective way to find the best people for your roles? Well, zip Recruiter, that's basically all you need to do. Look for Zip Recruiter. They are the most effective and you can see for yourself. Right now you can actually try it for free. You go to ziprecruiter.com/tnw, do that. That way they know that we sent you and that's pretty important and you'll experience the value that Zip Recruiter brings to hiring.

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If you're still waiting for your legs to appear in your MetaQuest 2 VR headset, you may be happy with some news that's coming out right now. Basically, legs are happening on the MetaQuest 2 headset. The device is beta software at least, so if you're running the beta software you'll have legs in at least a very small part of the experience for now, but I think it's a sign of things to come. This may sound super insignificant, but I think it's interesting because it's been a common complaint. So before we look at how things are with this news, let's talk about how things were. A little bit. Leg representation, if it is a thing on the MetaQuest notably absent from the beginning. I think some games have tried to replicate it, but it never really felt quite right and, let's be honest, legs are really hard to simulate.

When you're talking about a VR environment, when you're using a VR headset, you've got the headset on your head. It's tracking where you look and so your avatar can mirror that inside of the experience. It's got cameras looking out, so if, and it's looking outward, where your hands usually are. So you can have hand tracking, so it has an idea of what your hands are doing at any given time, and they've gotten better with that over time. Before the hand tracking there was the controller, so a controller in each hand that has kind of gyroscopes to detect where your hands are in space, how they're turning. Even, like I've noticed, which is pretty cool when you're looking at your avatar in these VR headsets and your thumb even touches the little thumb joystick not moving it, but just makes contact with it, then your avatar thumb drops. It's like they've got these sensors in to really kind of integrate your limbs into the experience. And what does that do? That improves the kind of immersive quality of things.

When you're talking about legs, it's a little different. Right Legs are all the way down there down at the bottom. Often they're blocked by our arms or, maybe, you know, our torso or our body. There's no clear shot of our legs. Nor do we have controllers or any sort of you know thing hooked up to them to get that kind of tracking. Motion tracking hardware isn't really attached to our feet, usually for assistance, although I do have a Nintendo Switch and we've got the Switch Sports and for the soccer game. You know it comes. The game came with a little strap that you can put one of your motion controllers into the strap on your legs. So I guess you can do motion tracking, but you know it's kind of a hack job. For the most part it's not like fully integrated.

So VR hardware is then meant to guess what your legs might be doing at any given time, and so far they've opted for like leaving the legs out entirely and you're just kind of like a hovering torso, head, arms. It's really just like the top half of your body moving around in space, and that essentially allows for that movement to be pretty seamless, right, depending on you know how fast you're moving with the joystick. There's no like bottom half of you to like break the immersive quality of that experience. You just kind of move at the speed at which you decide. If there were legs there, it would have to kind of ramp up animation and it would have to kind of make guesses, and I don't know. I guess they've tried it and it hasn't been that great.

Well, last year Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a bunch of updates to the hardware, the VR hardware, the MetaQuest 2 hardware and its Horizon World software environment, and they showed off a video of Zuckerberg and someone else I didn't catch her name in a virtual environment and in that video and actually I have the link in the show notes for kind of like an animation of what that looked like. They're standing there, they're like looking around Mark Zuckerberg, you know. He's like lifting his legs, he's tapping his heel with his hand, he's jumping in place. Oh my God, it just looks amazing. They solved the leg thing Only. Yeah, yeah, we can all celebrate finally, legs in VR.

0:46:35 - Mikah Sargent
I'm kicking my legs right now.

0:46:38 - Jason Howell
In the air to celebrate. Everybody called oh, I almost said the actual word, bs, I almost just went for it. Oh good, tame it down a little bit. Meta later actually admitted to the fact that the video was created with motion capture after all.

So the Meta said well, you know this is it was MoCap but it's a preview of what's to come. Well, we're now at the what's to come point and after nearly a year, leg support has come to the Quest Horizon Home app. The V57 update is a public test channel beta version of this. So this is not Horizon Worlds, this is the Horizon Home app, at least to start. They said Horizon Worlds will get this update in a matter of weeks, but don't get your hopes up.

Still not doing any sort of leg tracking. They're simulating things. So actual leg movement doesn't get matched, you know, with your body. It doesn't match that of your virtual avatar necessarily. But when you look into a virtual mirror you're gonna see some legs reflecting back at you, at least right now. And I mean you know credit where credit is due. This is totally beta. So this is. I realized it could come across as like, well, you're criticizing something that's meant to be kind of early stages, but it's nothing. I guess my point is is nothing like what Marcus Eckerberg was showing off a year ago. If you look down, you're not gonna actually see those legs on your avatar. You're still gonna be floating. It's only when you look in the mirror will you see the legs a little wonky. Upload VR says that moving with a thumb stick, as well as the transition between sitting and standing, very not graceful things are. You know, still chunky and everything, but you know it's something.

You're a beta tester, what can I say? I am wondering, though, if the next iteration of the hardware, whenever and whatever that might be, might actually address these shortcomings. I'm wondering because there were some animations on threads posted by someone looking at the new software build and the smart guardian walkthrough, you know, when you're like setting up your safe space to in which, in your room, to do your VR stuff has kind of like an animation of, I believe, a woman wearing a headset. The headset looks very different from the Quest 2. It actually has seems to have, anyways, some cameras that look out, but also possibly downward, and I'm wondering I mean that would be kind of cool. The next headset had its totally speculation based on an animation.

I don't know how you know how much history meta has in like leaking future hardware designs through their software experiences. You know updates on previous hardware? Probably not. You know something that they do, but it gives you something to think about. It'd be kind of neat, and I think it would actually be really neat to finally kind of get the leg integration in there. When hand tracking came and the first time that I played around with hand tracking and I had my controller set down, I was just like yeah, it's really immersed, like it really makes a difference.

0:49:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, I agree, I don't know about the leg thing. For me I think that, because it's kind of been not part of the experience for so long, it'll just be. Yeah, and I just wonder, does it affect the brain in the same way that some of the other limbs and aspects do? That'll be fascinating for them to do that research. I guess, if hopefully someone out there is, will it make people feel less sick because our brains will be more convinced.

We know that some people can find relief. Some folks who have lost their limbs can find relief using a mirror to essentially duplicate the limb that they do have in the place where they don't have a limb, and by letting them look at that the brain can kind of recalibrate and they may not feel that phantom limb pain. And so there perhaps is some sort of psychological aspect to having legs in VR, where on the front of it folks might kind of chuckle and see it as just like, oh, now they've added legs. But there may be more to it than just the fact that they've added legs because it was the next thing to add. It might make a difference for folks in VR. So I'll be interested to see if that is the case.

0:51:27 - Jason Howell
I mean, I think, once they get leg tracking down, I'm going to have to commission, I'm gonna have to hire a developer and I'm gonna create the very first virtual Rockettes simulation so that we can all get into a line and do the kick dance with other players, just because we can, just because leg tracking allows for it. It would be like Beat Saber meets the Rockettes. What do you think? Yeah, I'm down. I'm so happy.

0:51:58 - Mikah Sargent
I can't wait. I believe I even came up with that. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the. That'll be the first game I buy once we get legs.

0:52:09 - Jason Howell
Oh that is so ridiculous For folks listening to the podcast.

0:52:13 - Mikah Sargent
The video has just changed to John Ashley, our producer, shaking his head in.

0:52:19 - Jason Howell
He's just shaking his head because he didn't come up with the idea first.

0:52:22 - Sam Abuelsamid
That's what it is exactly, at least $20, okay.

0:52:25 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, now we've gone to the Picard face palm.

0:52:31 - Jason Howell
I think it'll be great. You just you wait and see. John, you're gonna wish you got in on this gravy. All right? Okay, apparently not All right. Well, I'm done. Put a fork in me because I am done. I don't know how that got to Rockettes, but it did. I think.

0:52:47 - Mikah Sargent
Over to you, Mikah, yeah yeah, I will tell you about my second story of the week, but first I do want to take a quick break to tell you about discourse, which can be the online home for your community. Discourse is bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. For over a decade now, discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities, and heck, that's a great goal to have. By harnessing the power of discussion, real time chat, ai yes, ai discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with your community anytime and anywhere. If you out there would like to create a community, well, just visit discourseorg. Slash twit and you will get one month free on all self-serve plans.

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All right back to the show and I am kind of pumped about this next story. We talk about AI and we talk about its use in I can't remember oh, we were. I just did the story where AI was being used to track like deforestation and forest fires and all that kind of stuff, and we talked about how there's a lot of focus on AI for making a quick buck for people and writing limericks and doing a bunch of goofy stuff, but where sometimes the focus is not paid is on ways that it is cleverly being used to help just improve the world, and I think this is potentially one of the smartest implementations of a type of AI that I've seen in a while. And what I have to tell you is I started out skeptical. I promise we're gonna get there to the thing. I just want to lead up to it. I started out skeptical when I saw the headline and as I was thinking about it and then as I read on more and more, I became more sold by this idea.

So I remember from my childhood I have never really been a gamer, but my stepdad was a huge gamer and would occasionally have the gamer chat playing over the television as opposed to on the headset, and the horrible, horrible things that people said to each other. It doesn't stick with me individually gladly, but sort of. I remember just people being terrible to each other. Gamer chat is one of the worst, just the worst exposures. It feels like that you can have for yourself and call of duty, according to Paul Therat, happens to be one of the worst places for some of the worst of what gamer chat offers. So Activision is working on combating toxicity. They've announced that they have partnered with a company called Modulate that is using AI to help moderate modern warfare two, war zone two and modern warfare three.

Now, activision has been very smart about this, because I could feel already a lot of gamers out there going what they're moderating my chat, blah, blah, blah. Ai is gonna be doing that. The cool thing is, and the smart thing I think that they have done, is they have said listen, the AI is not an active moderator, so the AI is not able to ban you, it's not able to kick you out, it's not able to do any of that. Instead, it's just a tattletale and so it listens to in real time. It listens to the speech that is taking place in a gamer chat, and then it will not only kind of find toxicity in comments, but it will also kind of rate the toxicity, and it's got so many different, so many different aspects of how it's rating this, and I think this is what makes this so magical. From there, then, if a person kind of continues to show that they are not you know that they are not that they are choosing to be toxic over being non-toxic, then a human being can come in and kind of take that moderation to the next level. So you are only kind of having a record made of you and your potential toxicity, but it is up to actual human beings to take that to the next level.

Now what's awesome about this is that it's not just keyword searches that it's doing. It's not looking for you saying a bad word on its own and then you end up being flagged for that. No, it is on the fly, analyzing your tone and your intent. It's analyzing the group that you're a part of. It's analyzing your age. It's analyzing a whole bunch of different aspects. And so one of the examples is if you are in a party and the chat detects a prepubescent voice and you are doing some of the things that you would do with adults that is already kind of not okay then your rating of like defensiveness is higher. So, whereas you would still kind of get a little bit of a record for being toxic with adults, if there are prepubescent voices in the chat, then your rating is higher in terms of your toxicity. And then this is where I was kind of blown away.

There are certain words that certain groups have reclaimed in different aspects, and they give the N-word as an example of a word that, in a specific form, has been reclaimed by people of color and particularly black folks. And so, with that, if you are among your cohort, so to speak, and you are using that form of the N-word with that cohort, and the system is analyzing your tone but also the reactions of the other people with whom you're speaking, and using all of that together to determine if this is sort of a community communicating with a word that has been reclaimed for them, versus if this is a word that's being used in a negative way, as a slur, and they do make it clear that they do not detect or identify ethnicity of individual speakers. So, again, they are using reactions and tone together to determine how a word might be being used, and then they can kind of decide okay, this is a group of folks who have reclaimed the use of this word and they're all doing it in a very specific way that is acceptable in this community. And then another thing, and I was like woo, this is awesome.

Talksmod, which is the name of the system that's being rolled out, has introduced a new category called violent radicalization, and so what it does is it looks for terms and phrases relating to white supremacist groups, radicalization and extremism in real time. So what it looks for are the promotion or sharing of this ideology, recruitment or convincing others to join a group or a movement, targeted grooming or convincing vulnerable individuals like children and teens, to join a group or a movement. And planning violent actions or actively planning to commit physical violence. The Talksmod group uses research from. This is like how have I not heard of this? This isn't just some thing that just came around and just slapped this up. No, they're using actual research from groups again I'm quoting from the article from groups like ADL. They're doing studies from NYU. They're using all of this to actually find and identify these different signals, these different categories of phrases and terms, and are regularly updating that and keeping it up to date so that they can properly categorize and tag whenever someone might be doing this.

So again, this is like I think, one of the most magnificent rollouts potentially of a technology in that Activision could have just said we're slapping it on the product and AI is gonna start blocking people left and right. No, they're doing a rating system. They're having humans actually make the moderation choices in the end and then to partner with a company called Modulate that is using peer reviewed research and university studies and actual science, to properly categorize this. I think it's I don't know. I'm just, I'm celebrating this. I think this is a win all around Now of course, we will see as it starts to roll out. I'm sure we'll hear a number of stories about it, but up to this point, I think this is awesome and I just, yeah, I'd like to see other games with chat make use of tools like this. So, yeah, what are your thoughts? I don't know if you're a gamer, jason, but I just thought this was so. Chef's Kiss.

1:04:55 - Jason Howell
Yeah, I mean, I think they're doing it the right way. My kind of feeling on AI tools like this is, yeah, absolutely not meant to replace the involvement of humans, but to supplement to kind of superpower a human's involvement which this kind of does that right. Of course, some people are gonna be like, well, I don't care that it's a machine, that it's a robot and AI that's snooping on my you know, on what we're saying here, that they have no right to snoop in on our conversation. Well, actually, they do right, like as social media platforms have the right to moderate their platforms and say we accept this type of speech and we don't accept this type of speech same with a call of duty and what's being spoken on there If it doesn't represent, you know, if it's not good for humanity, if it doesn't represent company values, like, yeah, they absolutely have the right to do something like this.

So I think that's a great way to kind of escalate it. Also, this is not the first time that this tool has been used. It's been I think it's been on Roblox, my understanding for at least a couple of years, so, but I think the scale is just different here. I think Roblox or sorry, not Roblox, the one I'm thinking of. They are involved with oh, darn, it.

Rec Room. Rec Room. Thank you. Rec Room is the other one 23 million monthly active users last year, I believe, for Rec Room, compared to Call of Duty's 92 million as of the second quarter of this year. So the scale is different. But that's the beauty of AI tools like this you couldn't employ enough people to be able to do this to this degree. And yet here we are, and it's not executing any user accounts automatically, it's just escalating the right things, the things that it believes to be crossing a line, and I think that's a great approach.

1:07:05 - Mikah Sargent
I agree. Yeah, I want this to succeed, as it appears to have done well in other places. I want to see it succeed in something as far-reaching and as impactful as this huge game, and if this is an opportunity to reduce harm, boy howdy, I'm always for that.

1:07:32 - Jason Howell
Yeah, indeed, indeed Good stuff. All right, we've reached the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. We love doing this show and we thank you for watching and listening. We do the show every Thursday. All you gotta do is go to twittvtnw and you can subscribe, because that is the most important thing, right? If you subscribe, then we will realize that you subscribe because our download numbers go up and that's the number that we report back to our advertisers. It helps the whole ship stay afloat. So thank you for doing that, twittvtnw.

1:08:06 - Mikah Sargent
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I know by now you've heard of Discord. It's a fun place to go to chat with your fellow ClubTwit members and also those of us here at Twit. All of that is available at twittv slash club twit. It starts at $7 a month or $84 a year, and it's not like a tiered subscription where you pay more to get more. No, it's just that some folks said look, there's so much value to the club, we would like to pay you more than $7 a month, so we give people that ability to do so. You really do want to sign up for the club because on top of all of those great perks you are going to get access to some special shows that are only available in the club. That's right, clubtwit exclusive shows. There is the Untitled Linux show, which is probably guessed to show all about Linux. There's the Hands on Windows program from Paul Therot that covers Windows tips and tricks. My Hands on Mac program that covers Mac tips and tricks, as well as the Home Theater Geeks program, which is relaunched in the club, from Scott Wilkinson and Jason Howells. Ai show is also there in the club Again, all ClubTwit exclusive.

So you gotta join the club if you wanna hear those shows and watch those shows and check them out. Twittv slash club twit. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm at Mikah Sargent on many social media network or you can head to chiwawacoffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A, h-u-acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. If you're a ClubTwit member, check out Hands on Mac later today. You can also check out Ask the Tech guys with Leo Laporte and myself, where we take your questions live on air and answer them for you. It's a great tech support show and on Tuesdays you can watch iOS today with Rosemary Orchard and yours truly, where we cover all things iOS, iPadOS, tvos, et cetera. Jason Howell what about you?

1:10:36 - Jason Howell
Well, you can find me on all social networks. Do a search for my name instead of me going through all the different permutations and combinations of them. I'll just say if you look for Jason Howell, you'll probably see my face shining back at you on one of them, so look for me there. Yes, I do have the AI show happening in the club, doing that with Jeff Jarvis today in fact and we actually have a non-club announcement about that, which is that every Thursday at 1pm Pacific, even though the AI show is a club exclusive, we'll be recording the show live on the live stream, so you can check it out, see what you're missing while we do it in real time. So that even happens today. Of course, once this is in podcast form, it'll be too late for you to catch it, but for next week, remember, every Thursday 1pm Pacific, twittv slash live. You can check the AI show out that I'm doing with Jeff Jarvis, and then that might motivate you to subscribe to Club Twit. So check it out.

Big thanks to everybody at the studio for helping us do the show each and every week. Could not do it without you all. John, the Johns, as I will call them right now, burke, and sometimes there. I don't know who's there right now, but I do know John is there pushing the buttons, about to push the button on me to end this show. So thank you, john, thank you to everyone out there for watching and listening. We'll see you next time on Tech News Weekly. Bye, everybody.

1:11:58 - Rod Pyle
Bye, hey. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra Magazine, and each week I joined with my co-host to bring you, this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the final frontier. We talk to NASA, chief space scientists, engineers, educators and artists and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and TV, and we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So, whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars rocket, join us on this week in space to be part of the greatest adventure of all time.