how is it going let's go so today we're going to be talking about the secrets of making high quality art in blender and everywhere so but before we get started let me just briefly introduce myself to get it out of the way so my name is Gleb Alexandrov I have a wife a kid a cat a blog blender 2.8 test built a blind guardian t-shirt a useless L account a useful YouTube account some fancy renders some renders that suck the panic monster to help me fight procrastination and a caffeine addiction so why do some renders suck and others don't or how should I put it why do some renders get in the editor's pick on art station receive lots of love our words stuff like that and others even from the same artist end up in a gray zone not bad but not great either I think most people in this room have had this experience of creating something in blender say concept art or a 3d model for game or just a render and then realizing that something about it looks terribly off it looks off but you can't put your finger on what exactly is wrong about it so you go to blender artists or maybe you go to Facebook and you ask your Facebook friends hey what's wrong with my render and everybody really adds to your confusion you get a bunch of mutually exclusive comments like add some interest odd details or keep it minimal remove something out of it or maybe it's about colors or check your references or my favorite improve composition thank you but what exactly so today I want to talk about one particular theory in composition that in my opinion has a great potential for explaining many many things and for preventing such situations when you render obviously suck but you don't know what to do and where to start so this is kind of a secret of making high quality art that is being used I believe by successful artists from Blizzard Dreamworks industrial light and magic Pixar by artists like Torfreq Vitaly Bulgarov Neil Blevins many many others by blender artists of course like Daniel Bysted Master Zeon me so in fact all these renders that you see behind me have this thing in common but before we begin talking about what the heck is this thing let me just say a it's not a prescribed mathematical method be it works see how many of you guys have heard about Neil Blevins by show of hands one two just two people alright how many of you guys haven't heard about Neil Blevins the rest of you especially for those of you who haven't heard about Neil Neil is a professional 3d artist who specializes in robots alien creatures sci-fi landscapes stuff like that now working as a digital artist for Pixar animation studios Neil has a blog Neil Blevins.com where he's posting extremely useful tutorials on composition on 3ds max on many things so a couple of years ago I stumbled across one of his tutorials that was called primary secondary tertiary shapes and the main thought of this tutorial was that if your image has a nice distribution of big medium and small shapes the resulting image will tend to be more pleasing to the eye and once I read this tutorial and once I saw this diagrams of the right and the wrong distribution of big medium small shapes inside the composition I thought well that's great I also love simplifying stuff like that like arrange your big medium shapes inside the composition like this you win arrange it like this you lose and I wanted to kind of crash test this theory that Neil has planted into my head so I took a bunch of top-rated works from CG Hub actually these are from art station back then it was CG Hub one of the most popular online galleries like porn hub for CG artists if you know what I mean so I took a bunch of top-rated works and I started painting big medium small shapes with red blue yellow like this and after some painting I started to realize that the distribution of shapes in all these images really looks similar it really looks like what Neil has described in his tutorial and I think that's very important thing that helped me just in my work and had an incredibly positive influence on how I tend to the things but before you ask what the heck let's try to make sense of it so definitions first primary shapes are your big shapes it's a kind of a shape that you see if you squint at an image as soon as you blur your eye it's already reads secondary shapes are your smaller shapes that break up or sit on top of the primary shapes tertiary shapes are again even smaller details successful images tend to have all these three levels in place and they are balanced against each other big shapes are needed because they help to organize all other shapes small shapes are needed because of many reasons one of which is pure curiosity and desire to explore the image and obviously secondary shapes are needed to give a transition between big and small miss one level things go haywire all bad renders in the world have this sin of breaking a balance say whether it's a wall a huge wall that is covered with tiny tiny bricks without any middle ground or whether it's a robot which lacks just intricate details the successful renders on the other hand tend to have all these three levels in place and they fall into a certain kind of balance and we find images pleasing that fall into a certain kind of balance just like we find music pleasing that has all frequencies represented imagine your favorite song now imagine the waveform of it like try to cut off the high frequencies and it will sound muffled and if you cut off the bus it will sound teeny you can't crank up or cut off a certain band of frequency without ruining the sound and appealing design is no different have big medium small shapes have them in a certain balance but then the natural question arises is there any way to determine the right size for the shapes say certain proportion golden ratio the answer would be yes and and no I try to calculate using these renders for example but I didn't manage to find out for sure is if there is any kind of common proportion manifesting itself through all these images or not because obviously artists tend to choose different proportions based on many things on style on the scale on personal preference on the time of the day but that being said I still see some kind of ratio in play to me the ratio between big medium small shapes in this bunch of renders that they have cherry peaked from our station looks something like one to five hyphen one to ten so when I say medium I actually mean five to ten times smaller than the big and when I say small I actually mean five to ten times smaller than the medium but don't take it too seriously it's not some divine proportion of awesome CG art or something like that hey at least we know that it's a range of sizes rather than some fixed size so it's very important to have variety to the sizes of shapes in each three categories and what's really crucial is how you distribute these shapes inside your composition straight ahead a rhythm gets boring very quickly if you take a look at these two diagrams you will notice that the right distribution is much more natural and kind of unpredictable as the result the eye stays in the image for a longer time the eye have some things to explore the eye doesn't get bored by this repeating pattern of small shapes because once the eye recognizes the pattern and solves the mystery its case closed I mean who still keeps looking for their shoes once they found them that would be stupid so I think the best way to talk about it is to take a look at some more examples here you can see the primary shape broken down into three rather boring slabs and also you can see the abundance of small shapes spread out kind of uniformly across this image and the uniform distribution like this is really uncomfortable to look at it doesn't give the eye any spot to rest and it doesn't have enough variety to keep us looking I wonder if you agree with me but this distribution of shapes looks much much more enjoyable because now we don't see this horrible block of small shapes spread out in the uniform pattern lots of things is going on here we see some areas of high frequency details some areas with practically no details medium shapes different looking medium shapes pattern breakers and it really adds dynamics it adds visual interest successful images tend to have a somewhat unpredictable distribution of shapes with just enough surprise to keep us watching whether it's a substance material or a concept art if you allow me and yet another musical metaphor imagine you have to choose between two drum tracks the first one being and the second one I bet you would choose the one with more groove because who doesn't love a good funky beat so so far we have big medium small shapes distributed in a somewhat unpredictable way the next thing we have to master is an empty space it's very important I think to have an empty space in your distribution of shapes because it gives the actual features more space to breathe it allows them to speak more loudly if all areas of your by the way this is amazing render by Mastersion I love it and if all areas of your image have an equal amount of energy you're doing it wrong you just have to balance the areas of visual detail with the areas of visual rest otherwise you will create something like this dinoboard from the last night and the age of extinction total rubbish here's musical metaphor number three for you guys imagine orchestra now imagine all musicians of this orchestra started playing at once with maximum loudness this would sound just like this dinoboard if you know what I mean you just have to balance areas of detail with the areas of rest if I had to create a transformer I would have definitely included some empty space inside the composition just to make sure that I avoid this dinoboard effect great renders always have some negative space to balance the areas of density some renders have lots of negative space just like this one by torfrak so let's imagine we have followed through all the steps of this theory and we got big medium small shapes with a variety to the sizes of shapes in each three categories we have a somewhat unpredictable distribution we balance the areas of details with the areas of rest the benefit of doing all this is having clumps or groups of shapes emerging here and there and that's the fourth and final hallmark of high-quality art for today there is a universal agreement on both ends of the spectrum from pixel art nerds to photographers that a having points of interest is good for your composition and be it's better to have three five seven nine objects rather than lots of objects is just a better way of organizing the space and guiding the viewer's eye through the composition and if you pretty much follow up through all the steps of this tutorial you will get this as a bonus as cynics the YouTube design genius points out our visual system enjoys grouping objects together into larger more manageable objects so clumping can make an image more brain-friendly hence makes it more aesthetically pleasing needless to say if you now take a look at all this editors picks you will see this clumps or groups of shapes everywhere and I can go through this endlessly just just check it out guys so these are very important things to consider when you're basically making an image let's once again recap them first have big medium small shapes have a variety to the sizes of shapes in each three categories make sure that the distribution of shapes inside the composition is somewhat unpredictable and chaotic balance the areas of details with the areas of rest and allow these clumps or groups of shapes to flourish and of course the rules like these are just guidelines much like every other rule in designing composition and it's up to you as a 3d artist to determine what's right or wrong for the composition but the next time you will have this question don't immediately go to Facebook just think about big medium small shapes and their distribution thank you


Coming up on DTNS, the Epic Apple case reaches the heart of the matter. Should you worry about that Wi-Fi vulnerability you may have heard about and Venus flytraps become soft robots. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, May 12th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redbud, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about internet traffic, super glue in your fingers and so much more on Good Day Internet. Get that wider show. Become a member of patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. GitHub added support for physical security keys when using Git over SSH, which lets developers send push, fetch and pull requests remotely. GitHub previously allowed passwords, personal access tokens or an SSH key to access Git over SSH, but does plan to remove support for passwords later this year, citing their consistent source of account security challenges. Speaking of standards and connectivity, the Connectivity Standards Alliance made up of hundreds of device manufacturers, including Apple, Amazon, Google and Samsung, announced the Open Smart Home Standard Project Connected Home over IP or CHIP has been rebranded. So if you heard about CHIP, it's now called Matter Devices with Matter, M-A-T-T-E-R branding to go on sale by late 2021. I kind of liked CHIP better, but OK. Amazon updated the Echo Show 8 now with the same 13 megapixel sensor as the Show 10 and also the ability to digitally pan and zoom to follow users, support for AR features and a new octa-core process for the same $130 price. The Echo Show 5 was also refreshed, now offering a two megapixel front camera for $85 and a kids edition available for $95. Also different rear fabric and a two year warranty. TCL has given out pricing information on the XL collection of its 85 inch TVs previously announced at CES. We were talking to Robert Herron yesterday, all the TVs are coming out now. The 4K 4 Series TV is currently on sale for $1,600 and the QLED 85R745 with full array local dimming and Dolby Vision HDR support is $3,000 shipping in the coming weeks. TCL also announced it will launch an 8K mini LED 85 inch TV later this year. They didn't give exact pricing or availability on that yet. In a blog opposed published Wednesday, security researcher Fabian Braun Line demonstrated how Apple's find my network can be exploited to become a data transfer mechanism. By faking the way that an air tag broadcasts its location as an encrypted message, that's the way it works, the hack lets packets of arbitrary data be transmitted over the find my network, which is capable of using the data connection of any nearby Apple device that has find my enabled. And Braun Line's demo short tech strings are sent back over the find my network to a home Mac and it was successful, but it's not clear if this could be used maliciously. Yeah, it just seems like a way to send messages in a weird, weird, odd hack. So, so far it just seems like a cool hack, but I won't keep an eye on it. This one is possibly used maliciously. Let's talk about the Wi-Fi frag attacks. Belgian security researcher, Mati Vanhof published details of the frag attacks, as they call them. The attacks take advantage of newly discovered vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi standard. Now they're newly discovered, but some of the vulnerabilities appear to have been there all the way back to 1997. There's also some common programming mistakes that Vanhof discovered in Wi-Fi products that can be taken advantage of. The vulnerabilities could be used to inject plain text frames or malicious code into a protected Wi-Fi network. So you've got it encrypted, but this is a way to sneak in. An attacker, however, must be within radio range of the network so they can connect. The user must have some fairly uncommon network settings. So most people wouldn't be vulnerable if they have the standard settings. And the user also has to be tricked into interacting with the attack. It requires you to fool the user. Vanhof disclosed the bugs to the Wi-Fi Alliance about nine months ago. Microsoft has addressed three of the 12 in Windows in the March 9th patch. A patch for the Linux kernel is in the release system working its way through and multiple router makers are developing patches as well. The Wi-Fi Alliance said there's no evidence these vulnerabilities have ever been used and the bugs can be avoided by following recommended security practices. Keep yourself from being tricked, for instance, not using those network settings, for instance, as well as quote, through routine device updates that enable detection of suspect transmissions. So there's a way to like catch them if they're happening through some updates. So yes, patch, but no, don't freak out because you're probably not vulnerable to this. So one of the first things I thought was the headline itself is one of those that seems like it'd be fun to freak out about something as old as 97 or issues going back to 97. Just makes for a fun conversation. But if anything, I'm glad to hear that something was at least so obscure or hard to find that it took this long for it to be detected. And now it's being fixed and talked about and people are updating. And I don't know, it's mostly a feel-good story for me in the security news. I kind of like this one. Yeah, dating back to 1997. I mean, even saying Vanhoef disclosed the bug to the Wi-Fi Alliance nine months ago, you go, okay, well, that was some time ago. We're just now hearing about it. But the fact that Wi-Fi standards constantly being upgraded over the years, updated and upgraded. And yet there are still vulnerabilities that have been there all along. It just took, you know, not that nobody else has ever known about them before, but surprisingly, you know, this stuff was new to a lot of companies because they weren't taken advantage of in any meaningful way. Yeah, it's a good reminder how to think about security. Security is a constant defense trying to minimize your risk as close to zero as possible, but you never get to zero. It's always a race. And when there is a vulnerability, it's tempting to think like, well, somebody should have caught that. But vulnerabilities are discovered by people trying to figure out how to break something. And you don't know they're gonna exist until somebody's tried hard enough and been ingenious enough to figure it out. This vulnerability could have been discovered in 1997, but I think the key point is no one ever did until Vanhof did. And so it wasn't likely to be used. It's also really difficult to implement and all of that. But this is a great story because it shows that like, even something this obscure and hard to figure out is getting discovered by someone who wants to protect us before somebody who could have misused it. Yeah, it blows me away. My daughter was born that year and we still haven't found the proper patch for her. So wish us luck, everybody. Just kidding. That sounded worse than I meant it. She's wonderful. All right, moving on. Hey, YouTube plans to launch a 100 million with an M fund to pay popular creators on its recently launched shorts platform. This is sort of their TikTok slash Reels competitor. In the coming months with plans to fund content through 2022, YouTube will reach out to creators who receive the most engagement and views to offer this funding. They do not need to be part of the YouTube partners program as it's currently constituted. YouTube did not detail the amounts or the metrics or any of that. Snap and TikTok also have programs to pay creators to create content on their platforms. And on Alphabet's latest earnings call, CEO, Senator Pichai said shorts received 6.5 billion daily views globally, which is a lot, but it's also YouTube. And I don't think that's as much as they want yet, but this is a way to do it. Let's start paying out those top creators. I have a big question about this though. If you are a top creator of short form TikTok style content, chances are you're already doing that at TikTok. You're already doing that on Reels over on Instagram or anywhere else. Snap for that matter. YouTube coming to you and saying, hey, come do that over here. They're not saying, or at least we don't think they're saying, come be a part of this exclusively, just make sure your content is here and that it's driving numbers. And that's it, what it seems like. Yeah, cause you're not part of the partners program, which is where the exclusivity things are. I mean, we don't know, they might be trying to make people do exclusives, but it doesn't say. And my guess is YouTube just wants to get that content over. And if it's popular enough on shorts, they don't care if it's also popular somewhere else. They're just going to keep feeding money to the stuff that people are watching the most on YouTube. Well, and this whole $100 million fund, which is sure like, well, that sounds like a lot. Okay, it's two popular creators through the end of next year. So it sounds like YouTube is saying, let's make a real short bet here and kind of see where we are at the end of 2022. Are we paying a million dollars each to 100 creators? It's probably more creators who are getting a lot less money from us. And then at that point, then maybe we reassess, who are the real stars? Then we talk exclusivity and reaching out on a more personal level.  And it's so many different kinds of video. I mean, instead of, I don't know, what YouTube was in the very early days where people were just uploading whatever they had on a camera, it's longer form content, it's series, it's tutorials, it's highly produced movies and documentaries, it's all of the things. Shorts has a place on YouTube, but YouTube is still trying to figure out how to be the place where you want to see that kind of content, because that's where TikTok is just raining supreme. And it's like a me too thing, rather than, oh, YouTube's doing something different here. Yeah, and also there's this other side thing that I just remembered. And this happened a lot with reels in the early days, that's smoothed out a little bit for Instagram, but a lot of the content that was showing me up on reels and currently on this new shorts program are repurposed TikTok videos, often with the TikTok logo stamped right on the video, which they have built in when you export a video or download a video, people are just repurposing a lot of content right now. And I would assume that would smooth out over time and anybody they're gonna pay, they're gonna wanna have raw, real, not just a TikTok video re-uploaded to their service, but that's kind of what's happening right now. A lot of this stuff is just repurposed. I think you've both changed my theory on this and I think it will stick. I was thinking this is not gonna work for YouTube, but W. Scottus one in one of our mods and in our chat room says, I like shorts because I don't have to leave YouTube and go to another app to see this content. In my mind, it doesn't matter, but that's just me. And then something Sarah was saying about how, this is content that is often reposted and people are fine with that. I think what's gonna happen here is that, yes, TikTok survives because it's an entire ecosystem, right? You're in TikTok to do TikTok and TikTok is great at showing you things, Snapchat the same way. I do my Snapchat things and I show me and show me Snapchat in context. And I don't think YouTube can beat them at that game, but I do think there are people who are like, yeah, I just don't wanna use TikTok. I don't wanna pick up Snapchat, but I do wanna see some of those funny videos. Shorts may be good at that. It will never beat TikTok or Snapchat or even Reels, but it could just be a persistent window to feature that content to say like, hey, if you wanna see some of the funny stuff on TikTok without having to become a TikTok user, here it is. And that might be successful enough for YouTube, which point, I don't know that you need to pay people for that, I will say. Well, a huge part of it will be the app experience on mobile because part of the reason TikTok is outside the algorithm is the app to beat at the moment. Is it's just flick, flick, flick, bam, bam, boom, follow, don't follow whatever. And in YouTube and Instagram, for that matter, you've got this issue of like, all right, where's the button for the Reels and where's the rest of it? And they try to center it, so that's cool. That mobile experience is gonna have a lot to say about how this sticks more than desktop, but I could see why if you're on desktop or a notebook or something, you just stay and watch them there.  There you go, good point. But it also succeeds within the department store. Shorts is like the department store restaurant. That's a really good comparison. I mean, we don't wanna like put, the creation of the content is the important part here and we all know that can be great and everything, but that's a great analogy. Very nice. All right, Xiaomi and the US Defense Department reached an agreement to remove Xiaomi from a list of firms barred from US investment. The Defense Department put Xiaomi on the list back in November, identifying it as a communist Chinese military company. The listing would have led to Xiaomi being removed from US stock exchanges and also global benchmark indexes. However, Xiaomi challenged the listing in court and US district judge Randolph Contreras issued an initial injunction holding up implementation. A filing in US court said the US and Xiaomi have now agreed to resolve the issue without the need for litigation and will file a joint proposal with the court before May 20th. Earlier this week, the US extended a 2019 executive order barring use of Huawei's networking equipment by US companies. So Xiaomi, Huawei, two different stories also Wednesday, the US Senate's commerce committee will vote whether to send a bipartisan bill targeting Chinese tech to the floor. It would spend $100 billion on domestic research and development at US colleges, universities and regional tech hubs and increased sanctions on China. Yeah, so this is the US recalibrating. Xiaomi was an overreach and the new administration took time to evaluate that and has now decided, yeah, okay, I think we're cool taking Xiaomi off that list but they're not taking a bunch of others off the list. Like you said, Huawei is not going anywhere. It's staying on that list. So I don't think this is the US letting up pressure on China in this way for good or ill. I do think this is the US sort of refocusing and saying, okay, what do we really wanna pursue here? Well, yeah, but also, I mean, this is gonna be misconstrued to somehow a political approval, but I like the idea that not all these companies are the same. Why would they be? It's easy to say, well, one Chinese company in tech is like all Chinese companies. Well, yeah, even the previous administration did not ban every single Chinese company. Exactly, yeah, that kind of... Case by case basis. Yeah, exactly. Discriminating based on whatever the real reasons are seems like the right way to do it. So good on them and maybe the others will see the light of day. I don't know. Some of them are kind of egregious. It'll be hard to, but... And the other side of this, if you were an investor in Xiaomi or a customer of Xiaomi and you were worried because you were worried about this entity list, not making it through court or whatever, that goes away. There's now probably not gonna be a court case. We'll find out for sure May 20th when the settlement is put before the judge, but it sounds like they're gonna resolve that. Hey folks, if you need a little more explanation on big tech topics like 5G or latency in bandwidth or this week, we've got an episode about Wi-Fi 6 coming to our related show, Know A Little More. If you'd like to know a little more about Wi-Fi 6 and a bunch of other things, go subscribe at knowalittlemore.com. Let's check in on the Epic versus Apple trial for the past two days. Epic has been making their central case that Apple is a monopoly because it costs money and it's difficult to switch to another platform. Essentially what Epic's trying to show is that lock-in and a lack of substitutions, in other words, things that are easily swapped out, make Apple a monopoly. Epic also tried to argue that Apple has an aftermarket monopoly in in-app payments. Epic's expert witness was the chairman of the global economics group, David Evans. There's a good breakdown of his testimony on protocol from Ben Brody if you want more on that. Here's essentially what Evans argued though. Apple is a monopoly over the market of getting apps to iOS users. That's what Epic is trying to convince the judge. Yes, it is a monopoly because iOS users are locked in. It's a separate market from Android because of the difficulty and the cost of switching phones. Evans showed data that when Fortnite was removed from the iOS app store, playing time on iOS went down 56 minutes per week but only rose nine minutes per week on other platforms. He says this indicates people found it too hard to switch to another platform. Evans also tried to make an argument for an aftermarket monopoly on in-app payments. That argument relies on a Supreme Court decision that found Kodak was acting as a monopoly in the aftermarket by refusing to sell parts directly to independent service organizations. That decision is generally construed very narrowly and often involves changes of policy. We're not talking about any changes of policy. It's not like Apple gets you as a customer and then ups the price of the app store. So Epic is trying to define iOS users as a market because it's hard for them to switch and therefore Apple is monopolizing the distribution of apps to them and then also making an even harder market that its aftermarket policy is limited to in-app payments and is a monopoly itself. In cross examination, Apple got Evans to admit that Apple does not have a monopoly in the phone business because it only has 47% of the US market share. Apple also challenged Evans's assertion that buying a game on a non-iPhone platform is not a substitution for buying it on the iPhone. They're like, if you get Fortnite on Android, that's a substitution, right? Apple argues that players often play games on multiple platforms. They're not locked into playing just on iOS and people do that. iOS is just one of the ways you can play Fortnite. Apple also argued there is robust competition in games outside of iOS. Judge Gonzalez Rogers, though, is where this all comes down to. Remember, this is a bench trial, so you gotta convince the judge. Judge Gonzalez Rogers challenged Evans on treating in-app purchases as a separate aftermarket from app distribution. Again, that's construed very narrowly, so it didn't sound like that was convincing her. The judge pointed out that Fortnite's in-game currency could be bought on the web and used in the iOS app. She's like, how is that a monopoly if you can just go to your browser and buy it? However, she did indicate she may have issue with Apple prohibiting developers from telling users they could go to the web to get them. So that's something to watch. She may, depending on how she writes the decision, she might wrap Apple on the knuckles for prohibiting you from even telling you to go there. This is where we're at. This is the state of the Apple Epic. We've got more witnesses. This is gonna last in the next week, but that's where we are so far with that argument. The big thing that we didn't get to here is the conversation they're having about other consoles and the argument that Apple is making that how is this any different than consoles, PlayStation, Xbox and anyone else where you have a relatively closed system and it's not easy to switch to somebody else and that's true in all the same ways. At least that's Apple's argument and I think I agree with it. It's getting really interesting. People really wanna laugh and scoff at this trial and laugh that they have to talk about individual gamey things and that banana, stupid banana costume came up in arguments and all this stuff, it's all kind of a riot but at the end of the day, there's really interesting precedent stuff being talked about and I think if you look at it from the broad sense and really pay attention to what's going on, it's fascinating and I'm no lawyer but I am enjoying this back and forth. I hope others are. Yeah, it's all gonna come down whether the judge thinks, yeah, it costs a lot of money to get a new phone and it's a pain to move all your data over and all your apps may not be there. Yeah, that's enough lock in or if the judge says, well, you know, it may not be super easy but you can do it and therefore you're not locked in. Fascinating. Let's jump over to the UK. They introduced an online safety bill which would place a duty of care on social media companies to quickly remove illegal content and some abuse that is not criminal. Sites must also limit the spread of terrorist material, suicide content and child sexual abuse and report such content to authorities. If a company does not meet its duty of care, UK regulator, Ofcom can find companies up to 10% of turnover or 18 million pounds. Let's see, order access to, sorry, order access to sites to be blocked and pursue criminal action against the senior managers involved. That one made a lot of eyebrows raise. The bill also requires companies to protect small or excuse me, protect overall freedom of expression and reinstate unfairly removed material. It forbids discrimination against political viewpoints and prohibits the arbitrary removal of journalistic content. Yeah, so this is a UK bill, it's not finalized yet but so a lot of the devil's in the details here. Like Ofcom gets a lot of power in this and what are the checks on that power? How do they determine when a company hasn't met its duty of care?  Yeah, I should this go forward and get defined a little bit, a little bit more, particularly when it comes to that senior management thing. My eyebrows were definitely raised, I just got what I read that because you see this all the time, not just in the UK of course, but large companies who say, all right, well, we're trying really hard, we don't want terrorist material on our platform but it's a game of whack-a-mole and who is at fault and this is a very much an ongoing discussion and depending who you talk to, the answer is different. But once you get people at the top of this very successful social network say, I'm not naming any names but you can connect the dots being in potential criminal liability territory. And again, like you said, Tom, this is a bill, there's a lot more that has to happen before any of this becomes law. That is very interesting because it's less of a, well, we're trying our best and more of a, oh no, we actually need to do things very differently. Yeah, I wonder if at the end of the day, this all comes down to the winner being the companies who figured out the fastest way to get rid of stuff the UK doesn't want you to have on there. In other words, like speed is the kicker here. It's all about who can speed run this process and eliminate this particular content faster than the other guy because then there's your standard, right? And everyone else is gonna have to catch up to that, which is a weird standard. So I'm real torn on that but I'm also kind of fascinated by that. Like whose tools are gonna be better is kind of what's gonna determine who's the most compliant. I'm really curious to see how they define certain elements like terrorist material. What is terrorist material and how do you define that when you also have things that would like to protect overall freedom of expression? If showing support for a particular cause, although it might be aligned with a group that might be considered a terrorist group, you run into a lot of gray areas and this kind of reminds me of what Justin used to say about policing a lot of this stuff is that share a hell portal, right? You're gonna get into the weeds with a lot of this stuff.  I don't know, it feels like there needs to be as the process goes on, it needs to be a little more defined with some of the... Well, it may be defined. Have you read the bill? Because I haven't. So I don't want to say it should be more defined if the bill actually has it defined, but your point is right. The devil is in the details of how it is defined. There are plenty of precedents for calling it for terrorist material that haven't caused problems. So if they're following that to say like, oh, in the past, this has been called terrorist material, we're gonna follow that definition. Great, if it's got a more vague definition, then your concern is absolutely valid. Same with journalism. There are some precedents for how to define journalism. Are they following those? And even, but even then, the duty of care definition is the really important one here. How do you define who has to meet it so that you're not keeping smaller businesses out because they can't afford to do it? And what is the definition of having responded quickly enough? Those are the important questions to ask when you read that bill. Scientists at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, or NTU, have successfully controlled a Venus flytrap using electric signals from a smartphone. This could introduce a range of uses from robotics to employing the plants as environmental sensors. The NTU's School of Material Science and Engineering Researcher, Luo Yifei, demonstrated how sending a signal from an app to tiny electrodes that are attached to the plant could make its trap close like it does when it catches a fly and also without damaging the plant. The researchers also detached the trap portion of the Venus flytrap and attached it to a robotic arm so that a signal could tell it to grip something very thin and fragile, like a piece of wire. The hope is that plants, as living sensors, could help monitor environmental pollution from gas or water and also act like soft robots. Yeah, the soft robot part of this really caught my eye. Being able to use that material, that sensor, I don't know if you'd have to keep growing Venus flytraps to provide it, but the idea of soft robots is they're able to do things that metal servos can't because they're softer, they're gentler, they don't damage the people who work with them. And on a Venus flytrap, being able to move threads, that could provide a lot of sensitive, manipulative ability to robots that a lot of robots don't have right now. That's a massive potential cool thing when it comes to prosthetics, for example. How much pressure somebody puts on a prosthetic arm and prosthetic fingers, having that gentler take rather than the big, like you said, servo, big awkward robot take that most of robotics seems to be stuck with right now. This is a much cooler, more granular approach to movement and I hope it translates to some of that as well, that would be really cool. It could also be the beginning of what's that musical, you know, where the Venus flytrap eats people. Just be careful. Yeah, Steve Martin and Martin Short. I can't remember the name of the movie. Rick Moranis was in it? A little shop of horrors. A little shop of horrors. A little shop of horrors. We got there, we got there. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. We got a nice email from Scott who wrote in, it wasn't you, Scott Johnson, different Scott. Yeah, just in case you thought maybe you had amnesia, different Scott. Scott says, between the possibility of the next Apple Watch having a glucose monitor to the coverage of Bigfoot's connected insulin pens, y'all did a great job explaining and understanding them, especially understanding the lifting of the management burden with Bigfoot. That's a real tangible relief. Thank you so much, Scott. Scott goes on to say, come October, all have lived with type one diabetes for 40 years. And in my time seeing T1D tech covered, rarely is it understood or explained well by those outside the community. Scott also says, as a side note, yes, Sarah's smart lights are still just as valid after the Bigfoot announcement as they were before we can all get along, no problem. Yes, you were saying, my lights don't seem that important in light of this. But Scott says, no, your lights are still important. But thank you, Scott. And a higher compliment, I cannot imagine being paid from someone within a community saying that, because we work hard to try to get this stuff right to saying we did it this time. So thank you, Scott. I really appreciate that. Yeah, thank you so much. Love the feedback. Love all of your feedback. You got questions, you got comments, you can send all of that to us. We read it all. We promise feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels. Today they include Dustin Campbell, Alexander Nasev, and Johnny Hernandez. We'd also like to give a very special Wednesday thank you to Martin James, who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Martin, you're the best. Thank you for all the years of support. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, what have you been up to since we saw you last? Well, busy trying to fulfill that Kickstarter you guys helped me get. And a big thanks to your audience once again. But to keep up with that and everything else I have going on right now, a great place to do it is the newsletter.  And there's cool stuff every week. You get comics and art and shows and information and weird stuff about my own personal life. So go check it out. Feel free to reply to that stuff. Send me your emails back. Let me know what you think. Again, that is frogpants.club. And thanks for having me on as always. Of course, speaking of being on, we're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 20 30 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back here again doing it all tomorrow with Justin, Robert Young. Talk to you that. I hope you have enjoyed this brover.


This is a small crowd, I'll just make it a bit more informal. My name is Manoj Gupta. I'm founder and CEO of Craftshilla.com. We are India's largest online market place for ethnic products. For ethnic products for us means that anything and everything which has come out of this country, which is the IP of this country, a product can be traced over 500, 2000, 2000s of years. That pretty much is ethnic for us. Theoretically we are focused on ethnic, but from a category perspective we are cross. We have ethnic fashion, ethnic moves, ethnic home, handicrafts. We have herbal products, Ayurvedic products, traditional products. We go basically agnostic across categories, but thematically only focus on ethnic. We started about four and a half years ago in 2011. At that point I'm pretty much in India at this stage. In some ways we were one of the very few market places which emerged in 2011. Personally just to give you my background, before starting Craftshilla I was a venture capitalist at Nexo Center Partners. I was involved in few of the early stage companies there. I was there for four years. Before that I started a tech company in US in San Diego. Ran it for six years, sold it and came back to India. So pretty much come from a tech background. So if you want to talk tech, but I'll keep it focused on Craftshilla, our journey, what we have done. One of the unique things about Craftshilla, the three or four unique things about Craftshilla. One of that is that we are as you know Craftshilla, ethnic space. So we are not creating a replica of anything in East or West. We are what we are, part of India, completely rooted in India. In that way very very unique. The second thing unique about this is this category has an interesting gross margin. 60 to 80 percent gross margin. We take 20 percent commission. This is a category where you can actually become profitable in your farmers. I keep telling a lot of people that we cannot become profitable. I don't think anyone can in the world in India. Third thing unique about this category is that about Craftshilla as such. We are one of the very few e-commerce companies. We don't give discounts, coupons, nothing. We're not here that kind of story from us. It's an e-commerce story. It's completely built on value to the consumer and value to seller. Therefore, really selling the value proportion of a real consumer company I would say. So coming to the portioning. So Etsy basically is rooted in more about handmade, primary producers. So if you are a wholesaler, you cannot sell on Etsy for example.  We are about ethnic. So handmade is a subset of what we do. But we also are machine made. There is no restriction on that. So the way we look at ethnic, we looked at ethnic and we are looking at ethnic. And the reason why we are so successful, despite, to tell you, we are the largest ethnic brand right now in India. It's the kind of thing we do. The reason is that we looked at ethnic from a very mainstream angle. We said ethnic is so mainstream. Why make it exotic? So a lot of times ethnic, you know, you will see the companies in e-commerce focused on offset of the market. A lot of times we count or ethnic brands as such to focus on higher end langas, higher end saris and those kinds of things. We said that with online, I can actually take ethnic, actually I can target the mainstream ethnic part. Which is huge.  So that's regarding the, you know, positioning. We look at very mainstream ethnic. We don't look at high and low end across the spectrum of all the consumer spectrum. We have 50 rupees product. We have 50,000 rupees langa. Because we are marketplace, you know, we can play with the, we don't have to restrict ourselves to a particular inventory or particular type of product. Our story is that, you know, we are ethnic, we are a marketplace for ethnic products. So basically those are the few unique things about Krapsela.  We have 4 million products across categories, about a half a million orders every month. Over, now we have more than 2 million registered customers. For 30 million unique visits and, you know, pretty well funded. We are more than 50 million dollar funded right now. Or basically stories that we are here to create something really, really big in ethnic. You know, we are here to sort of take over the whole ethnic empire and really get into all kind of ethnic, whether it's ethnic products, ethnic services, ethnic brands.  Whatever, whatever is a gamut of ethnic, you know, we are here to capture that. Primarily, basically, you know, the vision of Krapsela was, when it takes societies back to root, we realize that a lot of people are going in a particular direction and there's a lot of opportunity in other directions. I keep, you know, because I come from a VC background, I always, you know, used to tell and still keep telling that if some, if the opportunity is neither in the east and neither in the west, it's always northeast, north, south, you know, in different directions. You have to just look at opportunities and, you know, where it doesn't exist. And, you know, Krapsela is looking at that opportunity, looking at opportunity which is not traditionally very hard to picture VC, for example.  You're not building Uber of India. You're not building EJ of India. You're not building... What are you building? It's very hard to pitch that story. So, but I think there's a huge opportunity in this statement here. And, you know, we're seeing the, you know, we're reaping the benefits in some ways of that. And we believe it's a huge opportunity. And as I said, there's nothing, none exists like Krapsela globally. We are very, very unique in that perspective. And we are one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies known like 10 times, last 12 months, continue to grow very, very fast. As we grow our story will get highlighted a lot more. I personally believe that next two to three years will be one of the top three or top five e-commerce brands in India. So what has been the success mantra? You know, I'm just being very fluid. If you have any questions, you know, happy to answer, we'll talk. Basically, as I said, you know, it's being unique. We could have, you know, abed something and created something, but it chose to be unique. And because we were unique, we had advantages where, you know, we were not fighting for the same consumer. We didn't have to give discounts once and, you know, really scale up with very, very little money. So we have raised the table of dollars, but we still have like 75% of my money lying in the bank right now. It's something we have achieved in, you know, very small amount of money. Capital efficiency is one of the, you know, success mantra. Whatever we do, we are very, very capital efficient. We are one of the leanest and meanest startup. We are one of the leanest and meanest marketplace. We don't have no inventory, no warehouse, no logistics, nothing.  And of course, we have a global approach. One of the unique things, the other thing we should talk about is that the market actually don't, not only exist in India, but also it's outside of India. We can literally, you know, the domain in which we are playing is, the market in which we are playing is a global e-commerce marketplace, not just Indian e-commerce. And one of the other things has been the focus and position that if you want to run a startup, you have to understand that being very, very focused and not, you know, going east or west and being very, very persistent about, you know, what you're doing and being believing in you and just going in the direction in which you believe that that is the right direction for me is very, very important in any startup.  You know, when we started just to, you know, iterate the story of Tesla in some ways, is that when we started, we started with Big Bang. We didn't have a lot of money, but we were doing a lot of discounts. That was 2011 time. We thought, you know, we could do something. We could do a lot of these numbers on paper and, you know, so to receive real good money and those kind of stuff. But of course, you know, that approach didn't work. We ran out of money. We basically, from 100 people, we became 10 people. And we went to a very, very tough phase in 2012, 2013, 2014. And at that point in time is when, you know, a lot of the foundation for today got built. We realized that, you know, we don't have to give up on discounts to run any kind of something. And that would not have come unless, you know, we have gone through this tough phase. We realized that, you know, there's a lot of things we can do to tech. We don't really need to hire people. So, till about, you know, about the end of 2014, we were like 12 people. And we were doing more than 100 to 120 kilowatts a day. So, and we were profitable. That's one of the things very big about us when we were profitable. And that basically, that was the time when, you know, we learned a lot of basic things about business. We learned how to borrow a consumer. And, you know, 2015 was the time for us when we scaled really rapidly. We grew very, very fast. We raised two rounds of funds. One was CDP and CDC from really good venture funds. And so that's basically, in some ways, I thought, you know, these have been the phases of Tesla. You know, it was an impulsive start. It was not a start when it was the spotting of the opportunity and the starting the next day. If you think too much in any startup, you know, it always makes you think about more pro and cons. And you start to think with more cons and less cons and less cons too and so on and so forth. So, any startup, in my view, is a good startup. You see, it has been an impulsive start. It's not about thinking too much. Then there was a foundation build-up. There was a scale build-up. And now we're getting into more and more brand build-up, you know, TV advertising and print advertising and stuff. And in 2017, 2018 is when we are looking to go public and, you know, go to the world. Here is the e-commerce company. It's really built on, you know, two values of business. And something, you know, is an example of something that can be really built. So a lot of people don't believe that in e-commerce in India, things can be built with a value. I think we need to, you know, someone needs to have to show that as an example. Hopefully, we can do that. I think pretty much that's the story. I think, you know, we are also a company which has been built on, you know, constraints. So I say to a lot of people that you have to define a table to dance. This is the table now. There's nothing else. We don't have a whole floor to dance. So show me the magic. And because we were built, a company which built out of constraints, magic happened. And we will continue to show magic because we continue to believe in constraints and not really spending too much or more into scams or this kind of stuff.  It's more about observation than insights. You know, we can read a lot of papers. We can read, read two-dollar data. I always say that entrepreneurs are data creators. They create data for the next generation. They have very little. They take the data and, you know, do something. So it's all about observation, experiments, a portrait spotting. And sometimes they have to go out of context. So I don't come from handicraft industry. I always see that the best doctor is not necessarily the best business in healthcare. Out of context always helps you to see a business or something with less emotion, more truthfully and, you know, look it at a bird's eye view and say there's an opportunity. So it doesn't necessarily have to be in the same domain in which you're doing. Sometimes, you know, just going out of context helps. And you should have passion to build something large. Small doesn't matter. You have to build something large.  And being personal focus is simple. Complex business models don't work. If you have too many complex things going on, think about simplifying it. Anyways, business is a complex environment. You don't want to over-complicate with your own variables and, you know, constraints and stuff. And scalability is very important. Anything you do, one of the reasons why we chose marketplace is because it's very, very scalable. Today everyone wants to be marketplace. Four years before, it was not the case. I was one of the very few companies at that point in time chose to be marketplace. But it's very, very scalable. It helps you scale infinitely without really worrying about inventory, warehouse, you know, financing.  It's a beautiful journey. I keep that slide as the last slide always. Just to, you know, absorb people to become an entrepreneur. In my view, you have one life.  That's it, yeah. Any questions you have? Yeah, in the world where you need to reach faster to the customer. I mean, you need to make delivery faster to the customer. You said that you don't have a warehouse or something like that. So I think you have actually built a constraint over there. So how do you deal with this?  Yeah, so delivery time, specifically, we choose the things about our business. If we are not in a category where customers are looking to buy, get the product initially.  But even then, even today, customers are okay waiting three, four, five days. Second thing is that a lot of first sellers actually dispatch on the same day. They're very, very quick because they've seen how online has shaped their, you know, business, their livelihoods. You know, a lot of first sellers actually own how, you know, big cars and those kind of stuff. And they actually were struggling to get there. So they have seen that, you know, that. And they also understand that customers need to get products very quickly. They dispatch on the same day. About 80% of first sellers dispatch on the same day. What value proposition your send is actually bringing in when you actually bought, what was the strategy? The send. Send, yeah. Yeah, so we acquired send, which is a logistic, virtual logistic. It's not, there's no feet on the street. Which to take, give us the reach. So then basically integrates with all the company.  Today we have 20,000 pin code weeks. The second thing is gives us efficiency. So any shipment gets routed to the courier company, which is at least RTO and least cost for us. So I'm not dependent on the particular courier company, Gold Power. So it has done well for us. Again, you know, we didn't acquire proper logistic something because for us that's not very capital efficient. Yeah, also one of my friend had this kind of model and he started, he actually used to buy it from Dubai or somewhere. He used to sell it. But he has to close it down because the rejection rate was quite a few. I don't exactly remember the number of the percentage, what was the rejection, but the rejection criteria was like the color I saw or the shade I saw is exactly not matching or something like that. So what is your rejection ratio and how you are dealing with it? Yeah, for us actually it's not very bad, about 3% is acceptable. So how big is the seller network that you have and how did you create that network with such a thin team? We have close to about 30,000 sellers. 30,000 sellers, you know, there are two things that work for us. One thing was, we started in an era when no one was there for a ethnic seller to list their products. So Crab's law in some ways was de facto domain or de facto destination to list ethnic products. Ethnic today, it was the hottest category for all marketplaces. It was in the case three or four years back. We championed this category, we brought in the category to this level where everyone wants to be known. But at that point in time, sellers didn't have a lot of prices to own. Second thing is that we have open market place philosophy. It means you don't restrict anyone from entering the industry. We are one of the easiest platform to list the product. And we kept it that way so that, you know, a lot of our sellers are not very online savvy and those kinds of stuff. We didn't want it to be very, very complicated. It's a word of mouth. Even today, we don't have a seller acquisition. It's a completely word of mouth. So one seller telling another seller, they're telling their family member, friend, another shopkeeper, that I listed and I saw this benefit to you also. It's a completely word of mouth. Yeah, thank you.


Potsulans are materials that can be added to concrete to increase its strength and durability. Natural potsulans such as pumice have been found to be effective substitutes for artificial potsulans like fly ash, which are often produced from coal combustion. Pumice has been shown to provide comparable strength to concrete made with conventional Portland cement when used at 10-20% replacement levels. This suggests that pumice could be used as a cost-effective alternative to fly ash while still providing the same level of performance. This article was authored by Mohamed Ahefny and Daniel McAlliff.


Got a new mug She sure does We saw this from afar And walked up.  I mean everywhere and all of these bikes connect to one master bike and It steers So that you can have a Conference on the bike How healthy is that? Somebody answer my questions So I missed the moment she already did this now let's see if she can do it again, and we'll fake excitement Now it's Lance's turn. He did not fall this time. I know and I didn't cheat like you didn't turn Alright, it's a beautiful rainy day here in Mountain View Waiting for my ride to come get me. Just dropped the bike off. We're gonna go get some Google food Today's agenda. I feel like this is a morning post, but it is 1.42 right now in the afternoon Today's agenda is to try to finish some taxes Now last time I tried to finish some taxes I got the the income reported that I had for the year and that was about it So now we're trying to look at expenses today. Printed out some reports on some legal sized paper Which seems cool. I don't know. I've never done that before Hopefully you get this taken care of later, but hopefully also this eye headache doesn't get any worse I'm sure you can see it Wish me luck. What's that? Oh my goodness. It's a boy What is that a pine cone? Oh My goodness, where did this come from? Things you see walking to get dinner I guess We are actually going to get dinner not going to the hit school These trucks right here Don't get my shot. Don't get my shot. Don't get my shot. There we go. Yeah So these these trucks over here, they're called the hit school Because they do high intensity interval training. Somebody drives the truck around. It's full of equipment They whip out like six airdine bikes and just start making people sweat It's actually not a bad idea really. Maybe uh, maybe I'll start doing that with all my free time So negative Sometimes it's good Let's play some hoops So update from a few weeks later Taxes aren't done. I'm sure no one's shocked by that I did start Doing stuff with them. So I started going through some of my Expenses my business expenses stuff Um, it's a long list of purchases that have amalgamated over the years. So I'm actually pretty proud that I've gotten at least a little bit done One thing I don't have any way that I've tracked food purchases Like going to restaurants and talking about business stuff Pretty much all of my outings are like that, but I don't have any proof of that. So I don't know. Um, we're gonna keep going through it and see what happens while I Make this coffee Um, what's next? So Yeah, that looks good Oh, this is the blooming phase. You put about 50 grams of water a top 23 grams of Coffee grinds grounded at a Fairly fine grind Sorry, there's food on there And you let it bloom for about 30 to 45 seconds Okay, so we got to still finish the taxes I also want to do a conditioning course where I teach people about conditioning because I feel like that is some disconnect of I've heard about this conditioning method, but I don't really know how to use it Or when I would use it or anything and it it's been kind of frustrating for me because I It seems kind of intuitive. I don't know if I'm just oversimplifying things. So Uh, I I'm gonna work through some stuff and put it out Who knows how long that'll take I got projects that started in may that I need to finish Hopefully this weekend or at least get a finalized plan and deadline By the end of this weekend time for the next pour Do Ooh, baby Ooh baby, so taxes projects Been doing some websites. They're looking good managed to get some stuff done on them And I like reading I've been reading more and I highly recommend it I'm feeling good We'll do one more pour and then the coffee. We'll have to rest That's mostly BS But it does have to drain out of the cone. That is right here So that's the update. Um, I'm sure Everyone will know one of my taxes are done because I'm going to screen it at the top of my lungs And you'll probably be able to hear it from wherever you are Work has been good I'm busy Schedules about full I just had to fill in some cracks in my schedule and I think I managed to do that this week. So Next week might be a a nearly legitimately full week Um, we'll see though business is booming and I'm saving a lot of money because I'm so poor Let's end on that. Goodbye


This study identified two gene networks associated with pulmonary fibrosis in mice. The first network was related to inflammation and fibroblast activation, while the second network was related to extracellular matrix remodeling. These networks were found to be highly conserved across species, suggesting that they may play a role in human pulmonary fibrosis. Additionally, the researchers identified CB1 are antagonists as potential therapeutic agents for treating pulmonary fibrosis. This article was authored by Mohamed Araf, Abhishek Basu, Kailin M. Wolff and others.