Why Vibe-coding Micro Apps Isn't Automatically a Bad Thing - DTNS 5187

0:00This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, January 16th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, Dr. Nikki shares what she experienced at the Cool Animal Facts Conference, and we look at a growing trend. Non-developers vibe-coding their own apps instead of buying them from actual developers. I figured you might have opinions. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Widwit Dow. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. Yeah, I knew this would be a fun discussion with us both. when, for those who don't know, is an actual developer.

0:36So this is going to be a real cool kind of opportunity to get, you know, a sense of how developers feel about this trend, which is not necessarily like a big, big story today, but it was something I came across and I was like, well, this is a big theme. And so why don't we talk about it? TechCrunch does have a story today that you can read. It's a good one. It takes a closer look at Vibe Coding as it's come to be known. That is, instead of understanding the fundamentals of developing with actual code, people can now turn to specialized chatbots and just, you know, tell them what to create, what the idea is, and iterate on those ideas through voice and text inputs instead of actual coding.

1:16TechCrunch focuses on a number of examples in the article of everyday people choosing to vibe code apps that are tailored to their specific needs instead of hunting them down, say, in the app store. The apps that they're creating aren't necessarily intended to become successful consumer products. That's a big part of this article and the point of this article anyways, but rather solutions to their own personal needs. So, you know, call them micro apps or personal apps or even fleeting apps because the idea is that they're specific to the person who created them and they're in some ways kind of disposable to that end.

1:57Hyper context specific niche by design. And for many, they, like I said, disappear when that need that generated it is no longer present. Not only are these web apps, but temporary apps are being made for mobile devices as well. That does carry its own set of challenges in getting those apps onto devices like the iPhone, which in that case anyways, maybe it's a little easier on Android, but on iPhone, relies largely on App Store hooks to install apps, although there are ways to get around that. But so that's kind of the setup here. Obviously, vibe coding is not a new thing. It's certainly something we've gotten used to in a very short amount of time.

2:42But I hadn't really considered this idea of everyday person who never would, you know, would never want to be a developer, has random need in their life and just says, well, I'm just going to create an app for it. And then when I'm done with it, just throw it away and move on. I love that. Honestly, I really. do love that um and it's i i the first thing i thought of is that even as a developer so i'm an android developer i have been for about 14 years but there's a lot of stuff that is quote programming that i don't know or that i'm not very that i sorry sorry let me um there are a lot of you know everything when yeah that's right admit it no um but i mean even as a developer there are tons of things that I do on an everyday basis that I try to, you know, that I don't have tools for.

3:35And I write very simple, probably mostly copy pasted from Stack Overflow. Although increasingly folks are relying on, you know, LLMs and generative AI to create these little snippets of code that do a certain thing that we need that may be our tools. Like I'm an Android developer, so I use Android Studio, but there's a lot of kind of like auxiliary corollary stuff that we do, whether that's building the app, like pushing it up to like running it through different, running through different systems, et cetera, et cetera, that we write little things and typically we call them scripts. They're just tiny little snips of code that are not meant for any end user to ever see or come close to, but that help us do very specific things.

4:14And like micro apps, I mean, they basically are micro apps for us where they accomplish a very specific thing and they're probably very specific to a particular project or even your particular workflow. if there's a thing that you keep doing every day that you just want to like automate a little bit developers for decades have been just writing themselves little scripts again they're not meant to be consumed by anyone else probably or at least at the very at the very least that you might share them with other teammates but you with the recognition that they're not again they're only for you guys they might have bugs in them um and that there's always like a fallback and so i just feel like this is an extension of that for, you know, non-developers.

4:55And I love this because, you know, we've had services for a long time that I feel like approached the same idea of, hey, I want to automate a bunch of stuff and I'm not a developer, or at least I'm not an expert in this and that platform. So things like Zapier or if this and that back in the day and things like that. You're reading my mind right now. Yes, exactly. And so I know, so I know, I know I'm very negative on AI and I have very strong feelings about it in regards to software engineering and software development and the general trend that a lot of companies are pushing us to use it or that it's just going to wholesale replace things that we do and especially like be used in like big scale high production things like stuff that I do.

5:37I've worked at Netflix, I've worked at Adobe and other big companies. I have issues with that. This is what I love about I think software in general or even just technology is like there are tools out there that if you care and you have something you want to do you can do it on your own you don't necessarily have to sell it you don't have to share it and i think also if i may this is something i love about android is that hobbyists and like hackers like casual hackers not like super like actual hackers that go to defcon or whatever but like you people like a tinker around can do that and i i can only like yeah and i can And only I wish that capability for everybody, seriously.

6:17And so this makes me very happy. Yeah, it's empowering, right? It's so empowering. And again, like, yeah, I think one of the most frustrating things in my life, especially as app developer, is like, oh, we kind of want an app for this. I don't have time to build it. So I loved some of the examples in TechCrunch's article about just little things like people needing to just automate some translation for podcasts or other things that in their life brings a lot of utility. I freaking love it. And I'm glad that - Or they want to keep track of a certain thing in their life. Like, oh, hey, you know what?

6:51How many drinks am I having throughout the course of a week? And there might actually be an app that tracks that. In fact, there's almost guaranteed to be a number of apps that probably are like, you know, drink tracker or vape tracker. I don't know. Choose your vice, I suppose. But someone, you know, in some cases, finding the right one, the right one that doesn't spam you with a bunch of notifications. Like there's a lot of there in many ways there can be baggage associated with this. And especially if it's an idea that really isn't that complicated to begin with, which is what it kind of seems like is the case with a lot of the examples that the TechCrunch article writes.

7:30It's like you could go to Zapier and do this, or you could, you know, figure this out in Tasker or if this and then that or any number of different ways. But if it's just as easy or easier for you to go into an LLM, talk to it for two minutes and say, this is what I want it to do. And you get something that might not be pristine from a code perspective, like pristine from a consumer code perspective, but good enough to do exactly the tasks that you need it to do and do it easily and quickly and all these things. Why the heck not? Like, what's the difference? Go for it. Yeah, 100%. And as I mentioned, even developers themselves are doing it for things that we generally either we don't do very often or we don't have any day-to-day experience for.

8:14So, like, I have, like, a friend at work who just used ChatGPT to create some scripts that helps with, like, some little thing that, you know, would take him probably, like, two days to do on his own. He just did it in, like, 10 minutes. And he'll get use out of it. It actually helps create, you know, some of the code that we work on. But it's just for him and it works. And I just love it. And I think it makes so much sense. And it feels like a lot of the tools that I've seen, and there's even certain kind of websites. Like I think there's like, you know, any kind of platform where they try to make coding or coding and products, even thinking of something like Squarespace or other website builders and things like that, where they try to like take all the technical part, the web hosting part out of it and allow you just to create.

8:59This is all just extensions of that. And we've had that around for a long time. And we've had, you know, kind of intermediary steps where you kind of have to code a little bit, but not so much. So I love that. And I think we talked about integrations with ChatGPT, with like Spotify and other things like that. And I, you know, putting aside all my usual complaints about AI, if we can get people toys to play with and allow them to create and be creative from these little technical building blocks, it makes me happy. And I think it's just a very natural extension. And it is what I think I 100 % would laud and encourage people to vibe code for, for sure.

9:39Yeah. Interesting. Totally agree. Thank you for that. Yeah, of course. I have probably vibe coded one or two things myself. You admitted it. You just said you did it. I did. A little bit. A little bit. For things I don't know. But what I do know is that us, we are not vibe coded. We are made possible. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. So we want to take time to thank Brad, Kevin Morgan, and Paul Thiessen. Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you. There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. All right, well, thanks to RWNash in the subreddit for the heads up. But Google now officially lets Gmail users rename their primary at gmail.com address without having to create a brand new account.

10:25So users can swap an old or embarrassing handle, because you know how we were kind of in the early days of the internet grabbing our handles for something new while while keeping associated data intact and attached when a user changes their email address their old address become an alias that can still receive and pass along mail users can sign into their account with either address or even switch back to the old account handle if you miss it later google does limit switches to one per 12 month period fair enough you can head Head to myaccount.google.com slash google-account-email. Go to personal info.

11:03Go to email. Go to Google account email. Then choose the option to edit and follow the prompts to pick a new address. If you don't see the feature yet, don't worry. Have no fear. It is still worrying out. Still rolling out. Yeah, I went there. Not because I really want to change my personal email address. I think at this point, it's just the tracks are so well worn. and it would be so confusing for me to do it. But I did go there to see, and it wasn't active on my account. But that was kind of one of my questions, because I've had mine since the beginning of time, according to Gmail, since the very, very early days.

11:40And of course, it was an early handle before I had any intentions of making things clear as far as who I was and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, do I want to do this? like when it came to like youtube let's say and picking a channel it made sense for me to go through the process of figuring out how i make my business you know channel my personal channel my name you know because it wasn't that way initially that made sense because it's a very forward-facing thing but i don't know that i necessarily want my personal email address to be like super easy to guess and specific and stuff you know like yeah that's just me though it it goes both ways with me because i picked uh my personal email is not my legal name but it's pretty close and i think i always regretted not and and and and just like anything else it's so interesting how you know something that i feel like back in the hotmail days was kind of like a throwaway i feel like i never really thought too much about my professional identity or whatever with my email just it was just a thing that I wanted someone to smile and think about me when they typed in my email address and you know then because of the way that especially for like I guess people in our age demographic have grown up with both the technology it just be kind of you this is my email this is the one where all the important stuff goes to it's me it's so close to me like it would be really weird for me to change that to be honest you know yeah and I mean like I guess it's up to you whether you prefer your full legal name for whatever reasons or you prefer to be like some some on the some scale of anonymous i definitely had a lot of interesting identities in college and high school which i'm glad i didn't pick for my screen name because that maybe that would be a good choice um but no i mean i i know people are really looking really looking to this i i'm really glad they've made it kind of easy peasy because i think they kind of understand that maybe socially, even if we weren't technically able to do it, maybe socially where it's a difficult, it's a more difficult thing than anticipated as both of us are probably showing that I don't want to keep my email.

13:47I'll be curious to see how many people do it. I'm sure a lot of people will. I'm sure there have been people who have been clamoring like, oh my God, that's the most embarrassing personal email address. Yet it's like instrumental to all of my accounts being connected to it and everything. So there's nothing I can do. At least now you have an option. So there you go. Good to know. And thank you, RW Nash, for the heads up. Smart glasses company Xreal has filed a U.S. patent infringement lawsuit in Texas against rival smart glasses maker Vitore. They are alleging that Vitore's Luma Pro, Luma Ultra, and Beast glasses actually use Xreal's core AR technology while infringing on the company's intellectual property.

14:32Xreal says this is about a broad pattern of copying by Vitor. They assert this is harmful to innovation in the category. Xreal has already actually secured a preliminary injunction in Germany that froze sale of several Vitor models in that country. That could extend to nine other European countries, by the way. Now, Vitor is pushing back on this. They're calling the asserted patent, quote, weak and questionable. Vitura insists its products do not infringe and is accusing Xreal of spreading false claims that Vitura is, quote, banned across nine European countries. So they're saying that Xreal is already saying that, I guess, even though that is possible but hasn't happened yet.

15:17The company is pursuing its own legal action over Xreal's statements. So, and, and, you know, when I think about this type, this type of, uh, smart glasses, cause I am really focusing a lot of on these in 2026, you know, not that this is a video show, but I've got, you know, the, the X-Real 1S in one hand, I have a box from the tour. They sent me their beast, uh, glasses, which I haven't unboxed yet, but through this lens, no pun intended um i will be very curious to kind of see like how where do these overlap especially when you consider xreal holds more than 800 patents and patent applications worldwide uh they're claiming vitor has no no fewer than 70 and none of those in u.s and europe so i'll be curious to see like is the experience very similar between the two and like can i spot any things where I'm like, hmm, this feels strikingly similar.

16:20I don't know. I'm curious. This is, maybe this is not a hot take or even a clever take, but it just seems like as Smart Glasses is entering the range of like everyday tech, just like when we had lawsuits back in the day or Apple trying to copyright slash, it would be trademarking rounded corners. It feels like in a kind of like a nascent, tech sphere we're gonna get battles like this where people are trying to set like established footholds and be the be the leader in these little micro micro industries and dang is this spicy like not just like the legal battle but the throwing shade back and forth and like right just um yeah i'd be curious to see how it turns out because i don't know honestly too much about the tech and how they differ from you know manufacturer to manufacturer so i'm kind of i just from a cure pure curiosity standpoint how this shakes out but hopefully hopefully everyone comes out unscathed because i mean can we all just get along yeah seriously well tiktok is rolling out a new europe focused age detection system that scans profile data videos and behavior patterns to predict when users are under the age of 13.

17:39flagged accounts will be reviewed by human specialists instead of simply auto-ban. This follows a year-long UK pilot that effectively removed thousands of additional under 13 accounts. That pilot was unreported before this announcement this morning, though. TikTok says the system was built specifically for European users and that there is no globally agreed to way to effectively verify user age while also, also importantly, maintaining privacy of users. To that end, appeals to bans will rely on tools like facial age estimation from Myodi along with credit card and government ID checks similar to what Meta uses.

18:18Yeah. I mean, EU regulators really pressing for stricter social media age limits. TikTok obviously responding to that. I think my personal reaction from a personal in my family kind of perspective is I'm seeing this a lot with Roblox right now, which I'm sure I'm sure has come up on the show in the past week, week and a half, Roblox rolling out its own age verification system and how that's impacting in-game chats and breaking up kind of Roblox friendships that have been around for years. And the only reason I'm hearing so much about it is because my younger daughter, who is almost 13, she's a big time Roblox player.

18:59And I feel like suddenly she's like an in-house Roblox news influencer to me in the morning. She's always Give me the update on how these age verification changes are impacting the platform and the people that use them and everything. Okay. So, yeah. And I just think that's just an indication of what we're going to see more of because we are seeing these major efforts in the EU around this. We're also seeing it here in the United States. You know, Australia, I think, last year at some point, that was a big deal. and yeah, be curious to see once the dust settles kind of what this all means and what the effective systems end up being.

19:40Yeah, I mean, maybe this is again my bias, but I do appreciate that at least for this TikTok program, they have a human specialist just because the idea of, I mean, because we've already heard like counterpoints. I think YouTube, I think, based on behaviors, tried to like age gate content and that was kind of like so-so. So, I mean, I guess good on TikTok for working on a program And for at least at this point with our understanding of things using human specialists and yeah, hope something positive net like that. We get lots of net positives from this work. So, yeah. All right. Well, do you need a snazzy gift for a coworker or colleague?

20:19Well, guess what? We have you covered. We've got dozens of ideas for you at DailyTechNewsShow.com store. We got mugs, T-shirts, mouse pads, all with our new DTNS logo. they are number one great gifts and number two a great way to support the show

20:37and finally some quick headlines that are just good to know might make you look really smart in the future because you know them all right well asus is walking back his claim which we discussed on yesterday's show that it would be killing off the rtx 5070 ti and instead will keep the card in production i like to think that they probably listened to the show and understood the mistake oh yeah yeah totally that's the only possible um answer but um nvidia is or sorry aces rather aces is blaming its earlier end of life messaging on confusion surrounding memory supply yeah it is pretty confusing meta is killing speaking of killing things off uh meta is killing off horizon workrooms and its business focused quest offerings that's effective february 16th 2026 so you still got some time they're also ceasing the sale of its vr headsets and SaaS offerings to businesses.

21:30That's interesting. Spicy. Well, Google is building a Pixel Watch left behind alert that works in both directions, letting users know when they leave their phone somewhere and when they've left their watch well behind. And wow, do I need both of those? That makes sense. I need both of those right now. Thank you. Kind of one of those features that I'm like, really? It took this long? That just seems like No brainer should have been there all along. Netflix is promising a 45 day theatrical window for Warner Brothers Discovery Films. If that rival bid goes through, it had previously been reported that Netflix was backing a far shorter 17 day run, which would have had, as we can imagine, a negative impact on theaters.

22:12on theaters. YouTube is loosening its ad rules to allow non-graphic discussions of topics like abortion, self-harm, suicide, and domestic or sexual abuse to earn full ad revenue after being disallowed back in 2017 during what has come to be known as YouTube's adpocalypse. I will have to say I actually follow a lot of channels where there's definitely a frustration that they want to talk about in a sincere, constructive way about these topics, and they have to baby it or come up with the oddest euphemisms for all of these topics just to avoid, you know, not supporting the channel. So, yay. Yeah.

22:47Yeah. So there you go. Blue Sky rolling out a Twitch-like Live Now badge for streamers. Also a cash tag, hashtag, cash tag system for conversations that center around publicly traded companies. A flawed January Windows 11 security update is freezing and crashing. Classic outlook for pop users. Microsoft is investigating the issue. And finally, in Sweden, the song, I Know You're Not Mine, which has been streamed more than five million times in a few weeks, has been barred from the country's official charts because of, you guessed it, the fact that it was created with an AI music generation model.

23:29Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. Yeah, while some of us were in Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show, Dr. Nikki was at the Cool Animal Facts Conference. That's not the actual name of the conference, but Tom sat down with Dr. Nikki to find out what tech they had there. Dr. Nikki, welcome back from the world of conferencing. Happy New Year and happy exhausted first week of the New Year. Happy starting the New Year with a conference to you, too. So you were at SICB, S-I-C-B, is that right? Yeah, that's correct. And I was at CES, which I think SICB actually still stands for something.

24:10A while ago, they went KFC on CES, and now it's just CES. Used to be the Consumer Electronics Show. But I'm excited to compare notes on this. Yeah, SICB is the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, which doesn't sound as cool but it is also nicknamed the cool animal facts conference because you will leave with forcibly installed new animal facts that you had never heard about before i'm so glad you're going to share some of those with us yeah i actually was surprised well i don't know how surprised i am as we know of things i talk about on this show there's lots of tech in every science that we do nowadays i mean from genotyping to using a computer to sequencing to modeling like you so i can't if i covered all the tech, it would be like every single talk.

24:55And there were quite a few. But there were a few like groups of things that stood out to me. I don't know if you had a similar pattern at CES. I saw that there were a lot of vacuum robots for some reason. Yeah, robotics was a thing. Physical AI was the term they were using for like moving machine learning models and computer vision into robotics. But a lot of robots, a lot of big televisions, a lot of AI, machine learning, things like that. A lot of wearables, a lot of health and wellness tech and wearables and glasses and smart glasses. That was kind of the trend at CES. How does that compare to SICPE?

25:31Honestly, it's pretty similar. And so I wanted to break down some of the things I noticed that were techie, or like at least in the titles of the talks, pretty techie. And so you guys could see how things run in parallel and how maybe these kinds of tech types get integrated into what I do and just biology in general in ways that you wouldn't really think about. And I guess we could start with robots because I think that's the most obvious. Yeah, robots are everywhere. That's the big commonality. What kind of robots do you have there? So lots of robo-physical types of things. We have, all the titles are also really great at SIGP.

26:05People try and make jokey titles, so that's fun. Oh, good. I love it. We've got mole crab appendage kidematics robots. We've got skink-inspired steering while burrowing. So skinks are kind of these limbless lizards. Oh, okay. And so it was like, you know, worm type robots are interesting in skinks burrow. So that's cool. One of my favorite ones that apparently people know about, but did you know that you can buy a kit online to make your own cyborg cockroach? Oh, I think I have heard about this. I actually interviewed these guys last year and I didn't know they did this. This is backyard brains.

26:40You control their brain? Yeah. Yeah. You can control their brain. So I listened to a talk where someone did this as part of their class. And there's a whole class about cyborgs and cybernetics and biology together. And so I thought that was awesome. And I kind of want to do it. But I kind of feel bad for the cockroaches. There's two parts of fish robotics. So we had navigating complex flow landscape with feedback control. So these are things you would hear in tech. But fish have to do this. So you have to understand how fish do it and then apply it to a robot. And then visual and pressure feedback for station holding in non-uniform flow.

27:17So water robots. And in this case, fish ones. So one is a lot of way of describing how you would swim, basically. Yeah, hydrodynamics. But the other is like standing still in water, which is hard if you've ever tried. And I think we covered this maybe last year at the Ig Nobel Prizes where they measured like dead salmon and how they were still like they used dead salmon to see if they could still swim. and anyway this is a robot development on that yeah yeah um another one that i thought was really cool is squid funnel inspired passively flexible nozzles for underwater propulsion so yeah underwater propulsion is a thing that's cool and squid do that naturally so why wouldn't we this is uh designing based on how squid do it yeah all right so like understanding squid and then how to apply that to either a robot or a boat or things like that um this one that i thought is maybe the coolest and it's similar to also something we've covered but it's modular robots as an experimental tool to study limb loss and reptile evolution so not building a robot but actually using robots to learn about animals so if you take a robot and you make its limbs shorter and shorter and shorter and see how it moves um you can maybe recreate the fossil transition from wow limbs to limbless which You can speed up evolution, basically.

28:39Or you can at least make an educated guess. Yeah, yeah. Or you could see how it might work, I guess. Yeah, so that one was pretty awesome. That's fascinating. I love that. And then there's bird robots, so aerofoil aerodynamics robot inspiration, and then sea lion gates, as in locomotion gates. Like how they walk. For a robotic system. Yeah, because they walk really weird. There's a lot of locomotion, biomechanics, modeling, and then reconstruction as robots at SICB. It's like locomotion and feeding, which are like the biomechanic things that are studied really heavily and kind of people try to reproduce robotically.

29:16Yeah. Biomimicry is a huge thing in the world of robotics, trying to look at natural animals, insects, you know, even plants in some cases to figure out how they do something. yeah and i have a personal qualm with that because sometimes it's done really poorly but in this case it's in collaboration with the biologist and i think that leads to a better outcome this was the good stuff basically yeah i think so i think so uh what about the you mentioned modeling how does that differ from robotics so for example um if you want to learn about the mechanics of a jellyfish swimming under high hydrostatic pressure you have to model probably based on videos or maybe experimental jellyfish you have in the lab model how the how it's able to swim and once you have that kind of simulating it i guess um you would like record it and then uh do the math based on that and then you could recreate it in a robot or in a in a you know 3d model uh virtually um so there is that jellyfish one there's this this title is crazy but angular spring inverted pendulum model predicts sea star gates and torque fruit scaling so yeah sea stars can walk and there's a model to determine how they do it so that part of spongebob is true yeah uh and then another one with fish which was a how-to model using flow physics uh fish schooling which is a really complex structure where each of the fish kind of determines which fish to its left and right and front and back to follow to school in a certain way.

30:53So that's a complex physical model. Yeah. Okay. So we go from robotics to the modeling, which could be used in robotics, right? Because yeah, definitely the model you have to start. And then another thing that I know from CES is a lot of algorithms, a lot of of generative models and machine learning and things like that are used in robotics as well. Did you see any of that? Yeah, I only plucked a few, but there's a few different categories. So there's visual machine learning that gets used a lot, which is, you know, can you tell this zebra from this zebra? Or can you identify this species? Or, you know, in bugs that look really similar, are they two different species?

31:33Because, you know, the machine learning is better at distinguishing some things that the human eye can't tell apart. Because there's a lot of locomotion and kinematics. One of my favorite groups studies snapping shrimp and brain injury. So they're like cousin groups to what I research. and they looked at machine learning to resolve scaling kinematics of ultra fast snapping shrimp so you know the um peacock shrimp that they're like punching shrimp okay they punch so hard it's like the speed like 60 times the speed of a bullet and they break the sound barrier so the cousins the snapping shrimp they actually snap each other in the head so fast that our cameras can't pick it up and so they use this machine learning to understand the kinematics of how they even do this because you can't capture it you can't see it that's that's incredible uh and then there's another version so this is more visual but then there's a lot of audio machine learning happening for us so uh this other type would use machine learning to decode animal calls and in this instance mobbing calls of the american crow so you can imagine we have a bunch of bird data um and in fact we do this in my lab as well and trying to analyze what bird is doing what we have a lot of data to train these models to tell them apart and then even tell different calls apart and not translate what they're saying like some people would like but at least say like this is a mating call this is something else this is uh you know that would be useful in my neighborhood to know like what those guys are up to because i try to stay on their good side yeah uh another thing at ces is wearables uh rings and glasses and fitness trackers and i know you ran into a couple of these for animals as well yeah i saw a presentation about um uh looking at agility dogs and measuring their motion patterns with collar sensors similar to some of the stuff we've covered on the show this year yeah yeah and then another wearable device that captured beak cooling in birds during stress so it was like wow you can put little backpacks on birds that don't bother them too much and then this one had a thermal sensor i also saw a talk uh where they had a wearable uh that was measuring i think it was breath rate and muscle contraction um so it was like a little transmitter backpack that they put on these birds and then they were also able to take them off and release them which is always nice and now that we can understand the mob call we know when they're calling everyone else to help take the backpack off because they're tired of it exactly uh anything else that you you saw technology-wise that's worth calling out?

34:09There's a combination of like education things and software. So biologists are pretty cheap. We don't get a lot of money. And so there's a lot of like open source, low cost software. One that I really enjoyed that's education based is an app called Fathomverse. It basically sends out images of deep sea exploration to whoever has the app and you can help them identify different species and help us map the ocean floor. So it like increased the sensibility of their measurements by 80 or something to have just people help them identify, which is really cool. Some VR platforms to be able to manipulate behavioral biology.

34:52So you can kind of view your recordings in 3D and kind of map skeletons onto, let's say, a bird, a woodpecker pecking, if we take my research. And you want to see how that looks in 3D and, you know, working with those animations to look at, I don't know, different muscle movements or things like that. And then a lot of different software developments for very specific purposes. So if you're looking at light environments, someone developed a low cost solution for spectral measurements under low light. Again, this is helpful if you're studying moths, but maybe also for the military. So there's like a lot of this overlap that you would see this at a different place.

35:34Monitoring like a low cost monetary system for solitary bees, inexpensive light trap for non-cturnal insect monitoring. So there's kind of a lot of these tracking type softwares that are usually using machine learning as well. But they're free and biologists love free stuff. This sounds like a fascinating conference. It sounds like you had a great time. Yeah, I love it. and everyone there is really excited to be there, really excited about their weird animal. I learned about an ant that had two butts. I mean, it was a great time. Solving the age-old question, do we have one or two butts? Well, this specific ant has two butts because it makes it sexier.

36:14So, I mean, how can you not be excited learning about that? That's amazing. Yeah, I think it's cool to see how things get developed and then branch out into consumer products and then research and how those can sometimes be the same thing depending on what you're looking at. And is there a place people can go to learn more about SIGB? Yeah, well, you can go to SIGB's website if you want to learn about them. And then the research that me and my postdoc presented actually recently got, well, we talked about our headbutting and goat headbutting and how it's awesome. We also have technology in that, but I've talked about it on here enough times.

36:50But we actually got like three press features the week that I was there, kind of unrelated. So you should go to my website and read those because the headbutting is in the news. And that is NicoleAckermans.com everywhere. Thank you, Dr. Nikki. Always good to talk to you. Bye. Bye. Ants with two butts. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I like that. I think I'm fine just having one butt. I want the punching shrimp. I was very quickly Googling on punching shrimp. apparently when when they when they punch they create a bubble uh that collapses so fast it becomes as hot as the sun so yeah like that but a lot faster a lot faster uh thank you dr nikki for that thank you tom merit as well we end every episode of dtns with some shared perspectives today paul wants to know about ces products or announcements that almost got it right greetings to one and all i'm catching up on your ces coverage and i loved hearing about the cool stuff i'm wondering if anyone saw any near misses as in products that missed just one feature to be excellent or just didn't quite have it together thanks for keeping me informed paul had to think about this one yeah i know i had to think about this one pretty hard okay two things come to mind i don't know if it's exactly what you were looking for but this is what came to mind from what I saw.

38:14First of all, the robot phone. I think we talked about the robot phone on DTNS at some point. I could be mistaken, but this is Honor, which is an international smartphone brand, has the robot phone, which essentially takes like a gimbal camera that it hides in the phone and then that rotates out. And so it's got this like robot eye on the top of the phone when you want a gimbal camera, which is really neat, right? I think being able to see it was nice at CES, went to the honor, you know, kind of sweet and had this, they had this whole like promotional like thing around, like, isn't it neat? Isn't it cool?

38:49But we couldn't see it running. We couldn't touch it. We couldn't really do anything with it or see it operating in any way, shape or form. And I think when I see that, I can't help but be a little skeptical. I guess they're probably trying to show it off early. That was, I think the overall goal, but man, just to see it running just to see it like like pop out on its own would be kind of cool but we didn't get that and then the other thing that came to mind for me was um went to samsung's first look kind of event you know their presentation their big stage presentation of course everything and everything's everything had something to do with ai well one of the fridge features that they showed off was like this is a fridge you know it's got ai integrated it's going to help you you know, create recipes, understand the ingredients you have in your fridge and all this kind of stuff.

39:41Very useful stuff. And I think one of the examples they said is it will even tell you what your favorite foods are. Like if you eat a lot of blueberries because, you know, they're always gone. It'll let you know, hey, you should pick up blueberries because you like them. And I think I saw that. I was like, I don't think I need AI to tell me that I like the food. Like If it's gone, that's indication enough. I ate all the blueberries. Yes, I did because I love blueberries. You don't need to tell me that. Don't tell me what I like. Don't tell me what I already know about me. I already know that about me.

40:14I know I like blueberries. I don't know if that really answers your question, Paul, but that's what came to mind for me. The last one I think is a really good one. Good idea, but I don't know. I mean, is it a good idea? it's kind of one of those things where it's like, well, yeah, I could do it. So I guess let's just bake that in too. But they didn't really need to call that out in the press thing. Like, I don't know. Low hanging fruit. No pun intended. It's N idea. It's N idea. We'll leave it at that. All right. Well, what are you thinking about? Do you have a question for us? Do you have some insight into a story?

40:48Well, please share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah. Thanks again to Dr. Nikki. Thanks to Paul 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 at patreon.com slash dtns.

41:08This week's episodes of the Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host, producer, writer, Tom Merritt. Host, writer, Jason Howell. Co-host, Sarah Lane. Co-host, Rob Dunwood. Co-host, Gwyneth Witt Dow. Producer, Anthony Lemos. Producer, Roger Chang. editor Hammond-Chamberlain, editor Victor Bognat, contributing producers Kevin Tech, Noel Cow, and Brandon Richards, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Dennerding, our mods Beatmaster, Wscottis1, BioCow, Cap Kipper, Steve Guadarama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, aka Gadget Virtuoso, and JD Galloway.

41:51Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters. Art by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Bobby Wagner. And our guest this week, Andy Beach. Thanks to all of our patrons who make this show possible. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.