Meta Risks Subscription Fatigue With New Plans - DTNS 5278

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

0:57Still waiting in line?

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2:15This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, May 28, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. We do three things. Well, today, Meta did something. Launched its paid subscription tiers, but what is the value of those upgrades? That's what we're going to talk all about. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Windwet Dow. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. All right. Meta launched paid subscription plans just yesterday, Wednesday. Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus cost$3.99 per month. There's a WhatsApp Plus also that costs$2.99 a month.

2:58TechCrunch says Instagram and Facebook subscribers will get profile customization options. They'll get story insights, other exclusive features, whatever they may be, including super reactions. WhatsApp's subscription will include themes, extra pinned chats, stickers, ringtones. Feels like a goodie bag. What else is in there? Oh, I got some ringtones. um instagram facebook's verified subscriptions will continue to be offered separately for blue check marks and impersonation protection if that's something that uh that you need there you go meta is also testing a subscription for meta ai meta one plus seven dollars 99 cents per month meta one premium is 19.99 cents per month both tiers give you expanded access to image generation video creation extended reasoning capabilities which will be capped for free users so you reach that cap pretty standard and these subscriptions include all the facebook plus instagram plus and whatsapp plus features as well so it's kind of like you get a bundle the rollout of meta ai subscriptions has started in singapore guatemala and bolivia and that may sound like a lot it is a lot to manage.

4:18Don't worry. Meta will eventually let you bundle everything together. Eventually, you're going to be able to have the ability to do that. As Meta's subscription revenue expands, eMarketer projects that Meta may pass Google in global digital ad revenue this year, $243.5 billion to Google's$239.5 billion. Meta has opened new ad opportunities on WhatsApp and on threads, but Meta's advantage plus automated ad suite is the main driver. more than a million advertisers using it per month. Meta's ad growth projected to be 24.1 % to Google's 11.9%. And yeah, Meta also wants to get a cut of the cloud computing business.

5:02They're going on a tear today, basically, Wend. There's so much here. We'll dive into it. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling investors Wednesday that entering the cloud computing market is, quote, definitely on the table. hmm especially if meta builds out more data center capacity than it will eventually need uh the next web points out that this is happening as open ai moves toward more advertising right 2.5 billion dollars in advertising revenue expected for them this year x is planning to use xai to enhance its advertising business so to recap because i know that that was a lot everyone is looking at Google as the tail to chase, if that is a metaphor that works here.

5:45I don't know if that works. But anyways, they're chasing Google's tail. What do you think? For sure. I suppose I'm trying to feel like I'm trying to understand how I personally feel about this because I will say, I mean, I'm not the biggest fan of meta personally, but the kind of things that they're offering the subscriptions are things that I normally wouldn't kind of give much of a fuss about. I think it's all good bonus stuff. And at a price where I feel like if you live your life on Facebook and or Instagram, these are things that I think seem reasonable enough to ask someone to add on. There's not anything that reminds me of the little more disastrous X subscriptions where it kind of tied into the verification, things like that too.

6:28It seems like just nice add-ons. And again, if you live your life on WhatsApp and Facebook, these things make sense. And yeah, it's so funny because I feel like a lot of times we think of meta. I feel like as much as we know that meta is a force to be reckoned with in many, many different avenues, it also feels like often, yeah, even like their glasses, it feels like they stumble a bit on so many things, but it is very obvious that they are very much, I would even say they're nibbling a little bit at Google's Lunch. They kind of like grab a corner of a sandwich and are just like chomping down a little bit because certainly - They got some crumbs.

7:01Yeah, they definitely got some crumbs because that ad projection is pretty – that feels pretty significant. And, of course, kind of mimicking what Google has done with Google's own – oh, my gosh, what is it called again? The Google's – I have this subscription. The Gemini? Yeah, the Gemini thing. AI Pro or whatever. Yeah, yeah, which I just discovered actually gave me Fitbit Pro or Google Health Pro, whatever we call it now. So it does seem to be that they're definitely competing kind of like in a very, very parallel way. I don't know. it kind of all makes sense lots of randomness together yeah and then and then a little bit of this a little bit of that it's like a salad it's like a salad or like cable is this like the new cable bundles where we get like max and hbo and whatever showtime or whatever it was for a certain amount of month but this time it's just ai and okay feels that way a little bit i don't know like when i look at when i look at the paid tiers like when we're talking about you Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Plus.

8:03It's not a lot that you'd be paying per month if you were doing them kind of piece by piece,$3.99 a month,$2.99 a month. But, man, you've got to be a hardcore fan to – like when I look at WhatsApp subscription, themes, stickers, ringtones, extra pinned chats. That sounds like an actual functional feature that someone might find value in. But you're paying$3 a month for that. And when we're in a moment of subscription fatigue, I think everybody's feeling this. Man, I kind of don't want to, but I probably should do one of those services where it goes into your email and pulls back all of the subscriptions that you actually belong to because I'm sure there's something in there that I've just forgotten about, I'm guessing.

8:47But I belong to a lot of them. And that means, especially at this point, I really have to find value in what I'm paying for unless I've truly forgotten about it. And for me,$3 for stickers and ringtones, not a whole lot of value there. When you're talking about AI, like the meta AI services, then we're starting to get into a world that I feel a little more comfortable with from a paying for perspective. Because I've got a subscription to ChatGPT. I've got Perplexity. I've got a Claude. I'm actually doing the$100 tier on Claude. So I'm used to paying for those to get something out of them. And that something that I get is this like workability, this integration into everything that I do at a very deep level on a day-to-day basis.

9:34And that's kind of the rub for me with meta is that meta AI hardly ever plays into that category for me. And so I see why they're doing the play in the value game. They're underpricing their meta AI,$7.99 a month, let's say, to start, compared to some of the alternatives that you're definitely spending more on the entry level if you're paying for the service. But I don't think of meta AI in those same terms as I do the other ones that I pay for. And I wonder how many other people do or don't. That's a really good point. I think I'm still thinking of like 10, 15 years ago, especially as like a software developer where there's a lot of expectation of freemium, you know, where the basic services should be free.

10:16And that certainly we sort of either implicitly or explicitly understand that ad revenue is kind of where a company makes its money, especially a company like Meta and Google. And if you feel like it, especially for like more smaller services, if you feel like giving them a little bit extra, then you can pay for these a little more frivolous. Like they're not necessary. and that's kind of like also the the good thing is that well the you get the you get the primary service for free but then you get if you wanted to support the service you could buy these little frivolous things but that being said facebook and meta seem to be doing just fine they don't they don't need they don't need a lightweight you know they don't need like a tip basically a tip service i guess to think about it that's a really good point i yeah i'm kind of trying to figure out too because it does feel like at least in terms of like ai services i totally agree with you and also like the idea of them getting into cloud computing feels like definitely starting from like the back of the pack whereas ads ad revenue certainly is something that they're already very good at and something that seems to fit with their model i don't know how i i really and i i'm not that not that i'm a cloud computing expert by any means i really wonder how that would pan out like how how does how does that work for for a company like meta and where they're positioned right now to get into cloud computing given that everybody's already got like you know quite a bit Yes, the competitors are firmly planted in those directions.

11:33I mean, to a degree, it kind of feels a little bit like Zuckerberg continuing to look at the business of meta and going, God, where is everyone else? We got to be there. You know, they made that kind of early-ish pledge that the metaverse was the next thing. Yeah. And they put a lot of resources into that being the next thing. and they doubled down on that and they continued to. And at a certain point, they had to kind of reckon with the fact that, okay, maybe it's actually not. Maybe it's AI. Maybe it's cloud. And that is kind of, I think, the perspective, whether it's right or wrong, that meta is, while they are still a strong entity in the tech world, playing a bit of catch-up here.

12:18And I don't know, it feels a little bit like looking around and going, oh, well, they're over there. I want to play in that team too. Or I want to play in that sandbox. And, you know, maybe their efforts in AI also drive their capabilities in cloud because they can both kind of feed the same, you know, feed those same efforts from the cloud. And a lot of that has to be done in the cloud, the way things are architected right now. So maybe that kind of plays into that. But, yeah, interesting. Still throwing spaghetti at the wall. Meta Ray Band stick, ad revenue sticks. I guess we'll see if cloud computing spaghetti sticks.

12:52So we got crumbs, we got salad bar, and we got spaghetti. Sounds like a good lunch. We record this before lunch. Can you all tell that? Oh, my goodness. All right. Well, you're able to have DTS for your lunch, I guess, or for our lunch. Thanks because of you guys, because of you, the listeners. So we want to take time to thank Justin Zellers, Chris Beneteau, Jeffrey Zilks, and TJ Drennan. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for lunch.

13:25This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Parles-tu français? Hablas espanol? Parle italiano? If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world.

14:09With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash acast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply. Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds.

14:55Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.

15:07All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. All right, well, in advance of the beginning of Computex, we're getting some chip news, not potato chips. You know, the silicon kind. Intel announced its Arc G series chips built on the Core 3 Ultra line. The G3 and G3 Extreme models will have the Arc B390 GPUs with real-time ray tracing. And XS? Is that how you say that? XS? XESS? No, that works for me. Okay, XESS XS is how I'm going to say it. XS3 upscaling. Details are still thin, but the chips will have two performance cores and four efficiency cores. and all built on the 18A process with support for Wi-Fi 7R2, Thunderbolt 4, and Bluetooth 6.

15:54All of the chips are optimized for Windows full-screen Xbox mode. The Acer Predator Atlas 8 gaming handheld will be one of the first devices with the new chips. Meanwhile, Qualcomm is trying to take a bite. Man, there's a lot of food in these stories today. Anyway, Qualcomm is trying to take a bite of the MacBook Neo market with the Snapdragon C line of chips for laptops at the$300 price point. Specs were not announced, but it does include integrated MPU and is built on Qualcomm's smartphone cryo architecture. That's cryo with a K. The register points out it may be hard for manufacturers to hit that$300 price point with a Snapdragon C laptop because of, drumroll please, the price of memory.

16:38Everybody say it with us, the price of memory. The memory price hikes, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, okay. You know, I guess when gaming stories come up, I just feel the need to say I am not a hardcore gamer or anything. It is notable that their announcement here with the chips, at least when I'm saying they, I mean Intel, comes a day or so after Steam Deck announced their own price increase. those prices going up so i think the handheld category maybe taking some lumps but i guess they're all taking some lumps right now but i mean even given that intel um seeming to be offering some strong performance some uh strong features here not giving up in other words yeah uh you know possibly a solid handheld push from intel at a time when they need it but um i think there are also plenty of people, as I was reading around, that are kind of waiting to see if Intel can right some of the wrongs of its previous ARC efforts.

17:44You know, is it going to be able to deliver stable drivers? Is it going to be able to deliver solid, consistent game support? There's a lot of questions here on whether Intel can stick the landing with this. It feels even more important now than ever, given, again, how much everything is getting more expensive and how, like, kind of the consumer end is as i'd say like us as gaming consumers especially um i mean not more than anybody else but are really feeling this hurt yeah that steam deck story was insane um you have a deck i do i do and um i i'm going to definitely take a lot better care of it since it's gonna be more expensive you're gonna comfort it i did i i did drop something on it the other day right on the screen i'm sorry i'm a bad person and i was like oh no no no i'm so sorry baby we'll take That's not a good time.

18:32No, not a good time.

18:38Well, shifting gears a little bit, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman used info from his sources, his wonderful sources. He's usually pretty spot on to recreate what the interface of the forthcoming iOS 27 might look like. Siri gets a new app that works like a chat bot, similar to ChatGPT, Clawed, Gemini apps, that sort of stuff. Siri responses will also continue to be available system-wide, OS-wide, through a button push or voice activation with results emerging from the dynamic island. Now, that'll be very interesting, especially meant for quick queries, so you'll get that up there. But you can also use Spotlight Search, which will still launch when you swipe down from the top, but now include Siri-powered responses.

19:28of course using Gemini, which we know Gemini is kind of underpinning a lot of this tech to power them. You can use it to launch apps, search across calendars, notes, that sort of stuff, start messages, all the usual queries that you just might normally do. And a card with the response emerges from that dynamic island. And you can also swipe down further to enter into a chat bot style conversation from there so that that all makes a lot of sense because of this you're going to need to swipe down from the top left to see notifications so now we're starting to see this like zoned approach on notifications we've been seeing that on android which we can talk about the camera app will let you do a reverse image search with google or send it to your favorite agent for analysis the camera may also get reframe and extend tools which can use a generative model to change perspective or expand or extend the space and kind of fill, you know, outfill, I think is the word, the information that, you know, it guesses would be there.

20:36Siri in general is going to now be able to use screen context and personal information on device to answer questions. Gurman does note that, quote, the company often tests multiple designs of features internally, and the final version set to be introduced to the public in June could differ from this. So I have no doubt that Apple is working on all this, that Gurman has the right sources, but there he's just kind of saying like, anything is subject to change, but this is what it looks like it's going to be right now. Some of this sounds familiar to us, right? It really does. I'm not really too fond of, and maybe that's the thing of living in the year of our smartphone 2026, is that especially with AI, we have all of these features and it's getting hard to figure out a new gesture, a new zone, a new place to put things.

21:24I have that split notification settings thing on my Samsung Z Fold 7 on One UI. One UI, I don't remember the version. And I have to say, I don't really like it that much personally, just because of messing with, is it decades now? At least a decade plus of motor memory. But it's just so funny to see how kind of full of things and gestures and dynamic islands and all kinds of surfaces. I'm kind of – I'd be curious, especially since the joke, of course, for a while has been how Apple has been behind in the AI race. I don't know, Jason. Do you think this is – I mean just given – if we can take everything that – and as you said, Mark Gurman is pretty reliable.

22:07If you can take everything that, you know, we just talked about or that you just mentioned rather at face value, do you think that would be enough to really get Apple a proper spot like out of the jokering and onto like the actual table? Man, I must be hungry. Yeah, we both must be hungry. Yeah, I mean, I think it could. It all depends on execution, right? And Apple is generally pretty good at making sure that when they execute certain things, especially on their iPhones and these smartphone devices, pretty darn important to Apple. They've made some missteps. But I'd say by and large, usually when they get something to the point to where they're unleashing it on folks, they've thought really long and hard about why things are where they are, how they appear, how integrated they feel.

22:56And people get used to it. You know, it's just the way that the new way that it is. And I think that there is a thirst. There is a hunger to continue with the lunch metaphor. There is a deep, deep hunger for a picnic. No, there's hunger for for Apple to, you know, to improve Siri in a meaningful way. Siri has been what it has been for a very long time. And I think a lot of users are just like, it could be so much better, especially what they know about this moment to the year of our AI 2026. to call it. So yeah, I think that they could definitely right the ship a little bit here, and it sounds like we're going to see a lot of these kind of promised changes.

23:40Finally, how many of those remains to be seen, as Gurman noted there at the end? I'm super curious. Also, I got to give a little bit of applause to Apple for taking the openness approach when it comes to models on the device. I think that isn't always the sort of thing that you expect from Apple. And yet I think that's a really great way to go to give people the choice to be like, if you want to use a different LLM for this, just set it and it works inside. So I like that. No, you make a really good point that they do focus on execution. They will wait to get their execution as perfect as they can.

24:18And they do have a very good, very loyal user base that is waiting, patiently, loyally waiting, that is nothing all but compliments. But of course, we're just a couple of Android people, so we'll just wait and see. But if you are an iOS person or otherwise have any feedback on this or anything else that gets brought on the show, guess what? We would love that feedback. And you can get in touch with us to provide that feedback on the socials. At D &S Show on X, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, and Mastodon. And for TikTok and YouTube, you can find us at Daily Tech News Show.

24:57This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you will never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com.

25:35Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. All right, we got some quick headlines for you. It is good to know and make you look smart in the future. Smarter, because you're already smart. So smarter. Well, the Aura Ring 5 is 30 % thinner than the previous model, which drops from four low-power photo detectors to three more powerful ones while still getting a week on a charge.

26:18It's available for pre-order now, shipping June 4th, starting at$3.99 for silver and black and$4.99 for those other colors. Other colors. The Linux Foundation overseeing a project called DNS for AI Discovery, or DNS-AID, DNS-AID, to help agent-to-agent discovery, to help developers, and this is a quote, quote, developers to publish and discover agents with the same reliability and ubiquity that we've used to navigate the internet for decades. It's like a directory for AI agents. Interesting. Well, Xiaomi's 17T and 17T Pro are new mid-range phones that pack 5X optical image stabilization, OIS telephoto cameras, along with large silicon carbon batteries up to, wait for it, 7 ,000 milliamps with 100 watt fast charging, 1.5K AMOLED displays with a 144 hertz refresh, and an affordable price tag starting at 650 pounds.

27:15Not surprisingly, no U.S. launch plan. Yeah, pretty much standard with Xiaomi. On the other end of the price teeter-totter, though, we've got Virtu, which launched the Alpha Fold, a luxury foldable with an Hermes agent on board. It's a phone that's aimed at executive starts. Starts$6 ,880 for calfskin touches all the way up to – go ahead and finish that sandwich before you hear this. $46 ,800. That includes an 18-karat gold touches, diamond accents, and alligator leather. Yes, someone out there apparently buys these phones. What does an Hermes agent do? Okay, that's something we'll ponder over lunch.

28:03Okay, we already mentioned it before, but Valve did raise the price of the Steam Deck as it came back in stock. The 512-gigabyte version of the OLED unit is now$789 up from$549. And the one terabyte handheld is up from$649 to$949. And oh, by the way, it's now out of stock again. There it goes. Thank you for the heads up, RW Nash and our subreddit. Last.fm is going independent again after nearly 20 years as part of first CBS, which bought it like 19 years ago, and then Paramount Skydance. With its core functionality of music scrobbling to work exactly as it always has, at least for now. Love it.

28:48Keep scrobbling. Well, YouTube is rolling out new premium-only podcast tools, including a new Ask Music chatbot for recommendations and AutoSpeed, smart playback control for dynamic speed control based on content variability, and a new on-the-go listening UI. Premium-only. U.S. prosecutors charge Google information security engineer Michel Spagnuolo with wire fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering for using internal search trend data to place$2.7 million in polymarket bets on the 2025 Google year-end search market and netting$1.2 million in the process. Well, researchers at Graz University of Technology demonstrated a no-permission web attack called Frost, that's capital F-R-O-S-T, that uses the browser's OPFS storage API on a M2 Mac to fingerprint which sites and apps are open with 89 % accuracy for sites and 96 % accuracy for running apps.

29:50Ooh, frosty. And finally, an interesting read on Wired that you should check out that focuses on new moms returning from parental leave to their software jobs, only to find that generative AI tools have rewritten coding workflows and changed the expectations in the job market, how quickly things have changed. Interesting story to catch up on there. You know, I completely forgot to write into the top of the show that we have Dr. Nikki on with us today. Those were the essentials that we talked about. We're going to dive deeper with Dr. Nikki. Tell us all about it, Wyn. All right. Well, in April, a team of students deployed robotic birds in Grand Teton National Park to help restore a declining population.

30:35Tom caught up with Dr. Nikki to find out why robots are playing a part. The greater sage grouse is a weird-looking bird native to the western United States, and its population is threatened by habitat loss. In Jackson Hole, that population is now down to just three birds. Just three. Three very lonely birds. Biologists are trying to help by building a robot. Dr. Nikki, tell us more. Well, I think if we have listeners from Wyoming, they'll know about the sage grouse. They're a big deal out there and maybe bird nerd listeners. But the problem with these grouse is that they have mating grounds that are called a lek right near the Jackson Hole Airport, which, for fun fact, is the only airport in a national park, if you get that trivia.

31:23Oh, no. Unfortunately, though, for the birds, they're really attached to these mating grounds and they don't want to move. So they've had a lot of bird strikes with airplanes, which is dangerous both for the birds and the planes. And there's been about 35 grouse strikes in the last few years. So with a very small population, that already makes a huge dent. So biologists are trying to convince the birds to move to a safer spot a little bit, a few miles away. And so they built some robo grouse to lure them there. Okay, so they're not replacing the grouse with robotic versions. We're not there yet.

31:59Yeah. So how does that work? Why do we need a decoy to do that? So first I'll explain why these grass are so interesting. So if you can imagine kind of a turkey-like bird, and they have this very dramatic mating display where they have these yellow sacks on their chests and they puff them up. They make these weird percussive sounds and they waddle around and they move their wings up and down. So I gave you a clip, if you want, for the sound that they make, which is crazy. okay let's take a listen to the sound here listen close it's it's subtle but i you'll you'll definitely hear it it's like a click yes yes they use oh they use these pouches to kind of make this water drop sound almost anyway they're really cool um but the they're really attached to their mating grounds so the research team had this idea to give decoy robots and put them in a better spot that's not at the airport.

32:57And so they want to make these decoys do this mating ritual. And if they're convincing enough, maybe the rest of the group will follow them, establish a new lecking ground, and then maybe they'll raise their chicks there and the future generations will stay in the better spot. Oh, so this is like the person who stands out in front of the bar. It's like, come on in. Yeah, exactly. Come to the new leck. They're like spinning a sign. Come over here. Yeah. What what. Makes a robo grouse tick. How does that work? So this idea initially. Yeah, I try to give you guys the tech details, but initially this actually came from a group of students who made some paper mache grouse that had some decent success, except they're not super weatherproof.

33:44So this group thought they'd make kind of a bit more serious versions. And it is a group of local students and robotic, like a robotics team that did this as an after school project. And each robot cost about 150 bucks in parts, which is not bad for a robot. So they're made out of foam shells. So if you've ever seen like what a taxidermy mount is made of, it's just foam in the shape of like a grouse. And then they have 3D printed head. So that's tech. And the feathers are interesting because they're provided by fish and wildlife because it's a threatened bird. And because feathers are protected in the whole country, you can't just get them anywhere.

34:20So they had to get special donations. And then inside there's a motor that's activated by motion sensors. So when other birds come by, the birds will start doing their dance. And they're like mounted on a pole so they can swivel around and the wings can - They're pole dancers. I didn't even get that pun in. How did I miss that? So yeah, they swivel around this pole. They do the robot, right? And they move their wings up and down. Um, and it's funny that the, the students who were doing this noted that they were getting really frustrated from burning out a bunch of servos, but eventually they did get it working because they had a time end, which was right before lucking season.

35:00Um, and so they turned these on from 5am to 9am to attract all the birds over there. And then they have a camera monitoring system to make sure that the birds are indeed responding to the robo birds. Okay. Is it working? Do we know yet? Or is it too early to tell? They put them in for this lecking season, so over the spring. And so fingers crossed that it works out because they really need to help the prairie grouse. Hopefully all the birds don't fall for the robot grouse and just don't want any others. Yeah, well, fingers crossed. Let's not come up with new problems. Don't tell them, okay? Yeah.

35:38No, this is really interesting. And hopefully, you know, fingers crossed, like we said, it succeeds. What are some other ways that robotics is being used for conservation like this? So there's loads of ways and I haven't listed all of them, but I did remember that we talked about a robot antelope on DTNS before. Maybe this was last year where they built one of those like creepy dogs into an antelope that follows the herd so that scientists can monitor them and then directs them away from roads. And so lots of robots like I feel like for conservation, the main thing that people build is monitoring one.

36:11So you could clearly do like a little, you know, like an alligator bot or a bird bot that helps monitor these groups without being detected and scaring them away. But there's also robots that are used as a deterrent. So I read a paper about people doing this with coyotes where they had like a little car, like one of these robot cars that had like an anti-coyote light on it that turned on when the coyotes got too close to wildlife or like livestock or human homes and things like that. So there's like a nice robot and a mean robot. There's definitely some wily coyote Acme feeling. I just can't imagine being the scientist group that builds these.

36:50The other one, which we covered as well, is just kind of how to better understand animals, but more from like a mechanistic standpoint. So we once discussed this fossil robot that they kind of had this alligator-shaped fossil that they knew about the skeleton and the footprints. And they used this to kind of like retcon a robot to see how it moved in quote-unquote real life and kind of understand its biomechanics. So there's loads of applications. And this is just another really cool one, especially for the prairie grass because they need a lot of help. So anything that people can do is a plus.

37:23Yeah, yeah. No, this is fascinating. Thanks for explaining the pole dancing robot grouse to us and why it is important. If you ever go to Grand Teton, maybe you'll spot them and get tricked. Yeah. I wonder if that could become a tourist attraction, which would be bad. You don't want to distract the lecking season. Don't go near them. Yeah, exactly. Dr. Nikki, thank you so much for chatting with us again. It's good to have you back. Where can folks find more of what you do? People can find me over at NicoleAckermans.com, same handle on Blue Sky and at Nerdtacular. 2026 if you're going to be there in a few weeks yes we're going to do the science versus technology debate it's going to be great come say hi and debate me i guess sounds good talk to you soon all right north pole dancing grouse uh doesn't quite fit into our food theme but um no notable nonetheless yes very much so very much so all right we end every episode of dt ness with some shared perspectives.

38:21Yesterday, we mentioned on the show the need to reboot your Windows machine and update the secure boot certificate before June 1st. That's right around the corner. Martin has another use case for why you might need to do that. Yes, Martin writes, thank you for covering the secure boot certification expiration. I have a laptop that dual boots Windows and Ubuntu, and it's been a while since I booted into Windows. I'll have to boot into Windows soon and let it do its updates. Yeah. It's like when you have that and you think you're going to need it. Like I do this with, I think with like, it's different, but the same.

38:57Like a Google voice number. I have this number that like I have to keep logging into every three months and send a random dummy message to my phone so that it knows that I'm still using it. And you got to remember to do that. Don't let it not happen. So a good tip, Martin. Thank you. All right. Well, what are you thinking about? Do you have some tip for us or other insight into a story? Share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah, big thanks again to Dr. Nikki. Thank you, Martin, for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron.

39:30That's patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll see you tomorrow.

39:43The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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