Union Yes for Game Developers - DTNS 5094

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2:05Huyen Tue Dao: Oh, this? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 29th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We follow up on context. We're going to do that specifically today. And we try to help each other understand. Today, why do developers want to unionize? Well, ask a developer, namely me. Yay, well, that's convenient. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm going to it now. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

2:32Huyen Tue Dao: 450 workers in Blizzard's Diablo team have formed a union represented by the Communications Workers of America. That includes Diablo's developers, artists, designers, engineers, and support staff. The Diablo team wants to bargain for the things you might expect in a union, improved compensation, job security, workplace conditions, that kind of thing. More than 3 ,500 Microsoft employees are now represented by the CWA, mostly in game studios. That includes 500 World of Warcraft workers, fellow Blizzard employees as well. Last year, workers at Microsoft's Raven Software secured a contract with Microsoft after suing, alleging the company refused to bargain.

3:15Huyen Tue Dao: So this is de rigueur at Microsoft Gaming now. When you're a developer, you're working for a company, how do you feel about the pros and cons of a union and how this is spreading, at least in the game developer world? Yeah, so I'm wildly not an expert on unions very much because I've been a developer all my life and it's very uncommon. But I will say that, and I'm not a game developer, I'm an app developer, but I will say that I'm very positive on this. and it actually personal side note I got into computer engineering because I wanted to be a game developer and then someone from Firaxis Sid Meier Civilizations studio came and spoke at my uni and after that I don't remember the details but I didn't want to be a game developer after that I was like I'm just going to make or I'm just going to play them I'm not going to make them so take that as you will so so so just to say that as I understand it and I don't have and I have like not any direct friends, but like friends of friends or wives of friends that work in the game industry is that, yeah, conditions are not great.

4:17I think that all of the things that sort of are exciting about this job in regards to high stakes, tight deadlines are just thousands of times more like severe and less good. That's your Friday nomenclature, less good in the game industry. And so I'm very enthusiastic for it, especially for the job security and workplace conditions, because as I understand it, it is still not uncommon to work an obscene amount of hours, especially in the lead up to release. And especially as we've reported many, many times, like as we've been doing the show, layoffs are still quite common, especially in this current environment.

4:59So I cannot help but feel that this is a very big net positive. I know that there are negatives, but even as someone who works at a company where I get paid, I won't say way too much, but I get paid decently and the work-life balance is nominally better. That is not the standard for any software industry at all. And, you know, I do think that this is a good precedence. And I think it is, I think it will be something that sets a precedence that we all kind of need to be aware of and kind of take into account. Because I think the one thing that I'd say for the software engineering companies, especially larger ones like Microsoft and especially in the U.S.

5:36is that they have an advantage because people tend to just take it as written that because we pay you so like so many buckets of money, you should just shut up about everything else. or that any work conditions, long hours, the fact that you could have a mass layoff regardless of your seniority, regardless of your productivity, that there's a lot of insecurity, especially right now. And that is all, and there's like a very common mindset. We'll say, well, that's just the trade-off of getting paid a lot of money. And I personally, even though I'm a person that is benefiting from this system, I do feel like that it's not tenable and that it is not fair and that unions in general would be a good thing.

6:16I mean, the negatives that I can think of just off the top of my head, again, not really an expert on this is, of course, like lowered salaries, which I'd say across the board, at least in the U.S., we're all we got all that that that we're all a bit overpaid. I'm so someone's gonna be mad at me for saying that, but but we are. um and that that especially even though nominally we're all moving towards like better work life balance and people are even talking about four-day weeks there are times and there are companies where the press there's a a social pressure within the company to keep working as hard as you can or even like very like explicit like hey um you know people that run big uh social media companies uh that rebranded are very famous for saying you know i want you sleeping on the floor.

7:01Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. And I don't know. We're not requiring you to, but if you're not, you're not showing your dedication. Yeah. And it's, it's a wild contrast because I do talk to developers in the EU and just the contrast, like they get so surprised when we, when the culture exchange happens and we know we discuss things like whether it's salary, whether it's, you know, the whole at will work versus kind of more like the kind of structured contracts over the EU. It's amazing. And it is a significant drop in work-life balance and quality. So that's just, yeah, I'm willing, I would personally be willing to make less money if somehow that contributed to across the board better work conditions for everyone, because it is really hairy right now.

7:51I've had many, many friends laid off. and I don't know the inner workings of all those companies but it is a common thing that you know seniority can it's like good they come at you from all tax like the more senior people can be easily laid off because they're more expensive but then also of course young grads who are you know working their way up are more easily you know like I guess pressured into working 60 hours a week that was like the thing when I graduated school is that hey if you want to work at Microsoft or Google, well, Microsoft specifically, you're going to do the Microsoft week, I think, or which was 60 hours.

8:25I think that was the thing. So I think there's just all kinds of aspects that unionizing would help in this country. So yeah, that's my spiel. I'm for it.

8:36Huyen Tue Dao: I was a member of a union at one point in my life, the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees. Amazing. Been a minute. It was like back in the nineties when I worked at a library, like a state university library. And I haven't been a union member for a long time. I have a good friend who's been a longtime union organizer though. So I feel like I have a fair appreciation of unions and their benefits. I think though, it's funny that you're saying we might make less. The idea of the union is that you should make at least as much, if not more per person, right? They're going to bargain for no pay cuts.

9:13Huyen Tue Dao: And I think unions are important. I think they are certainly justifiable in that if companies can get together and do things, employees should be free to get together and do things. And if the employees want to bond together and bargain, I think they should. And I think in a properly working arrangement, that benefits the company and the employees, right? It balances things out. Because a lot of times I think companies will put in place policies that burn their employees out, you know, and you need to pay attention to what the employees are saying when they're like, we are not as productive as we would be if we had decent working conditions.

9:49Huyen Tue Dao: So it can have that effect. It can also drive up costs. It can cause people who aren't very good at their job to stay in that job and reduce the productivity and the quality of things. If you go to a pure seniority situation for layoffs, you might not end up keeping the best people and not be able to keep young people with better ideas. You have to be careful of that. I'm not saying that's a thing that's absolutely going to happen, but those are the negative consequences when the balance is out of whack. So you got to watch out for that. I hear the layoffs thing a lot And I don't like layoffs.

10:32Huyen Tue Dao: I've been laid off before. It's not great. But as somebody who's also running my own very minuscule version of the company, there are times when you just got to, you got to cut costs, you know, and you've got to cut things that aren't working. If there's a game that you're like, we're spending lots of money on this and it's just not selling, it's just not bringing in the money, then you have to cut back on that. And so, you know, layoffs are not going away. Layoffs are not just because, you know, some big billionaire is greedy and wants to keep all the money. Layoffs have a legitimate reason. And unions are good in that they can make sure that the layoffs are only happening when they're necessary.

11:11Yeah. And that's, that's the thing though. As I, and I totally understand that it would be impossible. And, and for, for, as you said, like if a company is not doing well, that is just the rock and the hard, like there's literally

11:21Huyen Tue Dao: no way they can, like if someone's doing well, they might have a part of the business that's not right. You know, I think that's where, where people get really angry. It's like you made$10 billion in profit, but you still laid off a hundred people. It's like, well, that could have been justifiable. Maybe those hundred people weren't contributing. Right. Yeah. Um, yeah, no, I, I, and I, I really do appreciate all of those, I think possible negatives. The, the thing with the, the taking a pay cut is that just for example, um, okay, I'm a little specific. He won't mind. So my husband and I actually make quite a disparate amount of money.

11:55Like we're both of we do the exact same thing. We started almost at the exact same time. And just because of the companies we work at, I make about 30 % to 50 % more than him. And so there's people like me, and I even think of the extreme example of like, and I forgot the name of the AI researcher that Meta hired for so many millions of dollars. Like, yeah. So it's a bit of an extreme example, but these kinds of discrepancies, even on people of the same exact, like again, my husband and I, same exact experience, same exact seniority level. And so I think that the thing is like, if you get in a position like me, you're like, Ooh, this is nice.

12:32You know what I'm saying? So there would be some, I guess, rationalizing, normalizing of salaries, which I actually just anecdotally have heard people get a little bit nervous about because yeah, I mean, if you're in a position where you're making way too much money for what we do, that's a thing. And it's so interesting because i i do hear and i i've heard many times just from the culture that yeah oh the union the lazy union guy is like before they had memes it was a meme right or a stereotype um but it's so funny because i think at the same time it's it i guess it goes without saying that that is true regardless of whether you have a union or not um and it's easier to get rid of

13:12Huyen Tue Dao: them but it still happens you're absolutely right yeah there was one other thing i was thinking of is that in the absence of a union, and I used to work at a company called Atlassian and they've adopted something and I'm going to get it wrong, but it's a meta strategy procedure. Sorry, it's Friday and I flipped five hours. So I can't think of the right word, but it's basically in regards to promotion and retention. So basically they plot everybody's performance in a curve and then they immediately eliminate the bottom 10%, 5%. I don't know what the percentage is. I doubt it's double digits, but it's a it's a pretty significant percentage.

13:50So in lieu in lieu of unions to try to kind of, I guess, to be as fair, objective as possible. This is how they try to try to manage, I guess, keeping the workforce at a tenable, you know, number, but still trying to, you know, cut out the folks that aren't performing. Now the side effect, now that sounds in abstract very reasonable, but in practice, it has made it so that people get very competitive. Very cutthroat. Very cutthroat. Even in software, like a lot of promotion and performance is about, okay, what have you done? Like how many projects have you done? Like what kind of collaborations?

14:29Like what impact? And even to the point where how can you trace what you've done to the amount of money that the company makes? Which sometimes the software developer is so abstract, especially since a lot of apps are free. So it's become very cutthroat. And the thing that is really worrying me for my colleagues is that the morale, and I'm not going to say, I think just generally morale goes down, right? Because especially for like folks that are maybe again, younger, that have less experience and less opportunities, the morale just goes down. So I can only can I can. And it's so weird because when that morale goes down, productivity tanks.

15:04Like I definitely have times in my life where my productivity is not great. And maybe I should have been considered for that bottom 10 percent because my morale is down. So and I know that that and I even though I don't have first time experience, that is all the kind of stories that we've heard. You know, we've heard all kinds of stories like that from the game industry. So I cannot help but think that even if the specific conditions and everything are not like, I don't know, alleviated by having a union, just knowing that you have a little more agency and power in your like, I don't know, in your ability to retain a job.

15:36I don't know. That would just boost my morale, which, hey, usually boost productivity.

15:41Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. Usually when you feel like there's someone on your side and you're not alone, right? Yeah. Like that helps you in all kinds of walks of life. so that makes sense to me. Yeah. Well, I'm curious what folks who are in the industry or even outside of the industry, maybe you're in a union, maybe you're not, what you're thinking about this too. So please send along your comments either on the Patreon post or feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Well, DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to that Charlie dude, Justin Zellers, Carmine Bailey and welcome new patron Hector Caba. Hector Caba.

16:19Hector Caba.

16:19Huyen Tue Dao: Welcome. You have the best name.

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18:37Huyen Tue Dao: And McCrispy strips dipped in Caesar sauce, no notes. Right now at participating McDonald's, the$2.99 Caesar snack wrap is making me rethink my entire go-to order. Caesar sauce is at participating McDonald's for a limited time, so go try it before it's gone. Prices and participation may vary.

18:58Huyen Tue Dao: There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Apple has challenged the order with the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which this week submitted a legal filing in the case that the Financial Times says was not limited to data protected by Apple's ADP, meaning it wanted broad access to all iCloud accounts. In other UK regulatory news, Valve has decided to comply with the UK's Online Safety Act by requiring UK subjects to verify their age with a credit card in order to access mature content. You must be 18 in the UK to obtain a credit card. So that's the connection there. Yeah. As far as that UK investigatory powers revelation, I looked at that story four times before it finally sunk in.

19:43Huyen Tue Dao: They're like, oh, yeah, I was already just jumping to the conclusion that they wanted every iCloud user's data. You know, the people who weren't in advanced data protection, I'm like, well, of course they want those too. But I guess that wasn't explicitly known before. So that is a bigger deal. And yeah, Valve saying like, you know what? We're not going to try to do facial recognition. We're not going to let you use death stranding to fool our system. We're just going to say, if you don't have a credit card, sorry, you can't prove you're 18. That sounds simple and straightforward in this world, not less straightforward.

20:13Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, yeah. A few stories today that I'm putting together here to tell the tale of a resurgent tech industry in China, which is trying to overcome trade barriers from the United States. The context here is that the United States has restricted all advanced chips that can be used for AI training for being exported to China. So the training type chips, the top level stuff like the Blackwells from NVIDIA, and also restricted the sale of machines or any technology that uses U.S. intellectual property to make those kinds of chips. So you can't even sell a lithography machine to a Chinese company unless you get a license from the U.S.

20:51Huyen Tue Dao: If that lithography machine is using intellectual property from a U.S. company, which they most are. U.S. companies have been able to sell chips that are good for inferencing. That's the part where a trained model answers your query. But even those were paused for several months over the summer, like NVIDIA's H20. Since those have been unpaused, China's government has encouraged its domestic companies not to buy them. And now I tell you all of that so that you have the context to understand the results of those varying pressures. Alibaba announced that revenue rose 2 % on the year, driven by AI demand for its cloud services, right?

21:29Huyen Tue Dao: It can't get new NVIDIA chips, but its cloud services are still in demand. Alibaba also announced it is testing an inferencing chip of its own design made by a mainland Chinese company that is compatible with software written for NVIDIA chips. So if you've got NVIDIA chips now and you don't want to buy the H20 and piss off the government, you possibly soon could buy one from Alibaba. Shanghai's Meta X is preparing a chip for mass production that has more memory than the NVIDIA H20, but uses more power. That's usually the tradeoff on these mainland Chinese designs. Beijing's Cambricon technologies had robust orders over the summer for its chip, leading it to increase its market cap to$87 billion.

22:10Huyen Tue Dao: That's equivalent to Roblox and bigger than Dell. And Huawei has seen record orders for its Ascend chips, which are close to, if not ahead on some metrics, to some of NVIDIA's Blackwell chips. Those are NVIDIA's top line chips, though it uses a lot more power. Huawei just posted a first half profit with revenue up 3.94%. However, net profit fell 32 % on the year, but it reversed a loss in Q4. So they're going the right direction. The information reports that DeepSeek is going to use Huawei's chips to train the smaller version of its upcoming R2 models. The only Chinese company reporting a fall recently is CarMaker BYD.

22:51Huyen Tue Dao: its profit dropped 29.9%, but that's a result of the intense price wars over EVs in China. As these companies resist the headwinds imposed by the U.S., the U.S. announced it will no longer grant a waiver to Korea's Samsung or SK Hynix to use chip-making equipment based on USIP in their Chinese operations. I guess bring in new stuff. They can use what's already there, but they can't add to it, which is going to put pressure on the companies to find other markets to make their memory chips. All right. Well, meanwhile, U.S. companies are reporting earnings that generally show a positive upward trend on demand for AI servers.

23:31So Dell posted sales up 19 % on the year with revenue guidance for next quarter revised up to 19.5%. Dell shipped more AI servers in the first half of this year than all of last year. Dell Store's sales softened, but it's pinning its future growth on servers. So the outlier in the general positivity from U.S. tech companies that make equipment for data centers came from Marvell, which had a record 58 % year-over-year revenue jump thanks to AI demand, but was expected to have even stronger growth. So the takeaway is that the worst report is one that set a record for the company. So sales are really strong.

24:12Yeah.

24:13Huyen Tue Dao: So on the U.S. side, it kind of doesn't matter, except maybe for NVIDIA and AMD, that there's these restrictions on China because server sales are going gangbusters worldwide. And then to summarize that China news, it essentially looks to me like the U.S. restrictions are pressuring these companies to improve faster than they would have otherwise. Now, whether China and the U.S. will come to some agreement to release those restrictions before that pressure really pays off is anybody's guess. But, you know, they're not there yet. They're not making training chips that really can compete. And the stuff they are making is very power hungry.

24:55Huyen Tue Dao: So it's not all rosy there. But you're definitely seeing the effect of accelerating the development of China's domestic industry because of these restrictions, which I'm not sure is one of the side effects that they were going for. Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced a new subsidiary called Reliance Intelligence that will aim to create a national-scale AI infrastructure in India. Reliance will partner with Google to build the cloud infrastructure, starting with a data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat. And Reliance Intelligence will create a joint venture with Meta to offer Lama models, met as Lama Models as a service for businesses.

25:36Huyen Tue Dao: Reliance also plans to take its telecom and digital device subsidiary Reliance Geo International and do an IPO and issue public stock sometime by mid-2026. So if you haven't already been paying attention to Reliance, which I know a lot of you have, keep them on your radar because they are starting to move beyond the borders of India where they are dominant already. Well, with the release of every popular product comes the inevitable bug or two that you don't experience until the product is used at scale. And those bugs provide sustenance for starving blogs hungry for traffic. And so we come to that moment for the Google Pixel 10 series.

26:169to5 Google reports that multiple users are having trouble maintaining a stable connection between the Pixel 10 phones and Android Auto. The dashboard display just shows a blank screen, even though music and phone calls still play sound. and if it does get past the blank screen, the interface is sluggish. Nobody has figured out a reliable workaround yet. And the next one isn't really a bug, but Pixel 10 owners will find their new phones are locked to 60 hertz refresh rate to save battery life. So if you don't care about your battery and just want that buttery smooth 120 hertz refresh rate, you'll need to turn on smooth display in the display and touch settings.

26:53Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, that last one is interesting. I could, I actually went and checked my old pixel fold. Like, did I, did I have to do that? Which I didn't. My 120 Hertz was on, but, uh, yeah, the, uh, the, uh, big popular or, you know, uh, thing with a lot of attention on it, having a bug is, is it never fails. Uh, and, uh, yeah, um, I'm sorry to see the Android auto folks, uh, relying on this. We usually there's a workaround, but there's really no work. Nobody's figured out it was like clearing the cache. Doesn't work. Reinstalling doesn't work. None of it works. It's just buggy. I wonder if it's just a few more people needing to get on whatever it is, whether that's Pixel 10s or whether it is Android 16.

27:34So we'll see.

27:35Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, it seems like it's Pixel 10 specific. So it must be something in the transmission, right? Yeah. Here's one that might blow over or could blow up. A federal judge in the U.S. state of California has ruled there is enough evidence to set a trial for November to determine whether NVIDIA benefited from confidential data taken by an engineer from Paris-based Vallejo. He left the company Vallejo to work for NVIDIA. This is intriguing. NVIDIA and Vallejo were working together on a project for Mercedes-Benz when that employee switched sides in the middle of the project. Suddenly, he's on the same video conference call, but he's working for NVIDIA now instead of Vallejo.

28:21Huyen Tue Dao: And during one of those video conference calls, Vallejo employees were like, isn't that our source code? On our former colleague's screen, who's now working for NVIDIA over there? They took a screenshot. So they have the evidence, and that is not in dispute. That engineer has been convicted in Germany of infringing business secrets. NVIDIA says not only did it roll back all the work that engineer did once this was discovered, but they fired him. And so they asked the judge, like, dismiss this case. We didn't benefit from this. The judge, however, noted that NVIDIA did seem to make some rapid progress with its parking assistance technology after that code was shared.

29:02Huyen Tue Dao: And that there were, and I quote from the judge, numerous functionalities directly paralleling Vallejo's stolen code. so she's like yeah i'm not going to dismiss this till we go to trial we're going to have a trial and determine if there are other explanations for these coincidences sorry i'm yeah i see you i see you feeling the pain i feel oh god okay uh be careful guys out there come on all right well if you're a kobo e-reader and you are a former pocket easer which pocket should down in may We have good news for both of you. Kobo has a deal with Instapaper to let you use to let you access any articles you save to Instapaper, including one offline, just like you used to be able to do for pocket.

29:48The one thing it lacks is handwritten annotations.

29:51Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, but maybe they'll add that because they're just getting started. Friday marked the end of the U.S. tariff exemption for packages worth less than$800. This is often referred to as the de minimis exemption. This was ordered in July, but Friday is the day that you can't do it anymore. The exemption has been in place since 1938. It started as like$5 back then, but it has most recently been raised from$200 to$800 in 2015. With a surge in e-commerce from companies like AliExpress and Timu and Shein, qualifying packages skyrocketed. There were 139 million de minimis exemptions in the U.S. in 2015.

30:32Huyen Tue Dao: there were 1.36 billion in 2024. Now, obviously, most of those come from China, but Canada, Mexico and UK are the next biggest senders after China. The change will not only raise prices directly because it puts a tariff on these packages that were exempt before, but it also increases delays. It increases paperwork. It increases the costs associated with inspections and compliance and all that stuff. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is offering a temporary flat rate based on which country the package originates from, but all international postal systems will have to collect each parcel's individual value, like an exact amount, by February 28th.

31:15Huyen Tue Dao: And a lot of countries have just said, we're not shipping parcels to the U.S. until we get this figured out because there hasn't been enough cooperation over the system. And when you have that many packages, you got to figure out a system. Yeah. I've gotten quite a few emails from various sellers because I buy, you know, I'm a weeb, so I buy a lot of Japanese stuff. But also just, hey, we're going to stop shipping to the U.S. for a while. Sorry. We'll let you know. Interestingly, Chinese companies seem to be having the least problem with this because their de minimis exemption was taken away longer ago.

31:50Huyen Tue Dao: So they've gotten used to it. They've figured it out. Yeah. All right. Well, as Microsoft negotiated with OpenAI, it released its first foundation model developed entirely in-house. So Microsoft CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleiman, announced the MAI One Preview model is being tested on public websites and Microsoft is taking requests for early access. Good to know. Hey, folks. Also good to know we have a new item in our store, a bumper sticker. If you would like the DTNS logo on a bumper sticker, perfect for adding to, well, a bumper, I suppose, but, you know, laptop or something like that. You can pick that up as well as mugs and T-shirts and mouse pads.

32:33Huyen Tue Dao: It's a great way to support the show. You can find it at DailyTechNewsShow.com.

32:42This 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. This message is brought to you by Coligard. If you recorded songs off the radio for a mixtape, it might be time to scream for colon cancer.

33:19The Cologuard test is non-invasive, requires no special prep or time off, and you start screening right from your home. It's just three simple steps. Set up, sample, and ship. If you're 45 or older and at average risk, ask your doctor about the Cologuard test. Available by prescription only. Learn more or request a prescription at Cologuard.com slash podcast.

33:44We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom today. Bodhi has some added info on EV tax exemptions in the U.S.

33:53Huyen Tue Dao: Every time I do segments with Bodhi, he's so good about following up with additional information that comes out, you know, after we record. And this time he's writing that a follow up to our discussion on the federal EV tax credits in the U.S. The IRS clarified an important deal. It was being reported that you had to take delivery of your vehicle on or before September 30th to get the tax credit. In other words, you had to drive it off the lot. You had to be behind the wheel. But the IRS has clarified this. Bodhi says if the vehicle won't be delivered by September 30th, the buyer can still receive the tax credit if they sign a binding contract with the dealer or automaker and put a deposit down on the vehicle on or before September 30th.

34:36Huyen Tue Dao: In other words, you don't have to have yourself in the car, but as long as there's a legal thing that says you're buying this car and there's no backing out of it, then you get the tax credit. That just makes so much more sense, just given like shipping or delivery timelines can be so fluid. That makes sense. Especially with new cars, right? Yeah, totally. Well, what are you thinking about? Do you have some insight into a story? Please share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Big thanks to Bodie for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business.

35:12Huyen Tue Dao: Become a patron. Do it now. Patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll talk to you on Monday. Actually, we're off on Monday for the U.S. holiday. We'll talk to you on Tuesday.

35:24Huyen Tue Dao: This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show Briefing were created by the following people. Host, producer, and writer Tom Merritt. Host and writer Jason Howell. Co-host Rob Dunwood. Co-host Jen Cutter. Co-host Wen Tue Dao. Producer Anthony Lemos. Producer Roger Chang. Editor Hammond Chamberlain. Editor Victor Bognat. Science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans. Social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods. Beatmaster. Wscottis1. BioCow. Cotton Kipper. Steve Gonorama. Paul Reese. Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso. And J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen.

35:58Huyen Tue Dao: Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters. Art by Lynn Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Bobby Wagner. Our guests this week were Bodie Grimm and Andy Beach. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.

36:28This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.

36:36Huyen Tue Dao: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

36:44This 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. Hey guys, it's Drew Afualo from the comment section. Listen, it's time to stop settling for hair products that just don't work.

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