TWiT 1067: Short Vertical Content - Is Claude the New King of AI Coding?

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Oh, I love the panel today. Harper Reid joins us, our favorite weirdo and AI coder. Also, Abrar Alheidi, our favorite senior technology reporter from CNET. Lots to talk about. She's just back from CES. She's going to talk about self-driving vehicles. Harper has been doing a lot of AI vibe coding and has some really interesting tips. We'll talk about the richest man in the world. He's even richer and now he's suing to get richer still.

[00:00:29] Plus that Instagram hack that maybe really wasn't a hack. All of that and more coming up next on TWiT. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

[00:00:50] This is TWiT This Week in Tech. Episode 1067, recorded Sunday, January 18th, 2026. Short Vertical Content.

[00:01:01] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. The show where we cover the week's tech news. We always, this is the one show I do where we rotate the panelists because I have so many friends I like to get on the show and it's so nice to see them. And so wonderful to see Abrar Alheidi. She's a senior technology reporter for CNET. Just a great. Did you go to CES this year, Abrar, for CNET?

[00:01:24] Did and I had a lot of fun. I'm surprised at how much fun I had. It was my first time back since 2020 and so far no pandemic has broken out afterwards. So that's been good. That's a relief. But it was a good time. I went in 2022 as well. Yeah. 2020 as well. Right. And I think that ended up being a little bit of a super spreader event because three months later we all had to stay home. Yeah, there was a serious illness. Yeah. But no, so far so good. Good.

[00:01:52] Not even Vegas throat or anything. Thankfully not. So far unscathed. Also with us from Chicagoland, home of the Bears, Harper Reid is here. Hello. Hello. Hi, Harper. Hello. Hi. I don't feel like you're a football fan. Maybe you are. I don't know. Nope. No. Nope. Not really. I like basketball. Okay. Well, you got the Bulls. I've decided that's my sport. Yeah. It's fun. I don't think they're very good. I have a stateless interaction with sports.

[00:02:20] I go to the sports and I participate and then I leave and I forget everything I saw. And then next time I go, I'm like, who are these people? And I enjoy it. And then I leave and I forget everything I saw. It's actually really great. That's the best way to enjoy sports. Either that or all in where you memorize every stat, every detail, and you know everybody. And it's like, then it's a little too intimate. Well, and I'm also not 11 years old. Right. Right. Quiet.

[00:02:46] Actually, because our Niners were so ignominiously defeated in the NFL playoffs yesterday, I am now a Bears fan. I've decided I'm going to root for the Bears to go all the way. It seems nice. Yeah. Good. Good. Good. I support this as an Illinoisan. Yeah. Are you from Illinois? I didn't know that. I'm from Champaign. Yeah. So close enough. We talked about that. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, there you go. We got a couple of Midwesterners on the show. Right. We're very nice.

[00:03:16] We're all the nicest, actually. Nice people. Very rational. Really normal. Nice people. You know who's been nice to me lately? And I credit you a little bit, Harper, with this. My newest, bestest friend, Claude Code. Man, he's on a roll. The world has come to Claude. I guess it is gender named, which is always good. Do you call your Claude? Is it just Claude? I don't actually call it anything.

[00:03:47] Do you swear at it? I don't. I just run it and I say, hey, baby. I call mine daddy. Daddy. What does it call you? Harper dog? Harp dog? No, Dr. Biz. Dr. Biz. Naturally. I have not given... So, what do you just say? Nickname? Is there a slash nickname? Or are you just saying nickname? No, just put it in your Claude.md.

[00:04:10] And I have to tell you, this is such a upgrade of the interaction model because you laugh a little bit every time it says, hey, Dr. Biz, I figured that thing out. And I'm just like, oh, thank you for calling me Dr. Biz. My name, my birth name. And I really, it just, I think we, I don't know. There's this thing that is happening that I'm noticing a lot of... Okay. I said, from now on, please call me Captain.

[00:04:39] You can show the screen, Benito. It's okay. There's nothing secret on there. And it says, aye, aye, Captain. What's next? No, this is great. And so, it takes that and it'll just be like that. And then what you want to do is hit hash. So, it'll save it as a memory. Ah, yes. Right. And that way, it'll always, it'll then say, always refer to me as Captain. It says, do you mean to type something, Captain? I think hash, do you say hash remember or hash?

[00:05:08] Ah, I don't remember how. Just say add to my Claude, add to my Claude.md that I always want to. You shouldn't have to put the hash in there. I do remember it saying something about hash. It used to be able to do that. Maybe it changed. I don't use the memory very often. Yeah. Yes, please. I have to get out of the habit of saying please and thank you. No. Sometimes I'm so grateful. So, I did a, I did a, I wrote a program.

[00:05:33] So, this is, once it came out with Opus 4-5, I wrote this, I said, I need to scratch my own itch. I wrote a little TUI, text-based program. You could show this, but you know. I wrote a book to do the news reading that I have to do. But unlike a normal news reader, it only does the things I care about. So, it has, you know, it bookmarks right to raindrop. I just hit B and it bookmarks, you know, right to raindrop. And that's it. I don't have to think about it.

[00:06:02] It only looks at the last week's news because I don't care about anything that happened more than a week ago because I already did that story. Who does? Who does? When it first wrote it as a newsreader, it said, oh, you want to star stuff and save and remember what you've read. And I said, no, I don't want to do any of that. Either I've read it and then delete it or I bookmark it, but don't save it. And so, this is exactly what I want. No more, no less.

[00:06:29] It does a little AI summary of the stories if I wanted to. You're running Kitty? Huh? Yeah, Kitty. I like Kitty. You like Kitty? I used to. You're not using Ghosty? I used to. No, you know, I went through the alacrity, Kitty, alacrity, Ghosty kind of a curve. Ghosty is the new one. It's the new hotness. But then I started using Sway, so I started using Foot. But Kitty, I like Kitty.

[00:06:59] Kitty does images, which is nice. It doesn't, you know what? It doesn't matter. You know, it's the same guy that wrote Calibre? Yes, I did know that. It's the other reason I wanted to support it. Yeah. I like it. Ghosty's great. I use Ghosty on many of my machines. It's still installed here. I'm sorry, Abar. This has got to be so important. No, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, you guys are just making up words. Oh, this is my entire life. This is it. This is all I... And it's fun because now I get to make it up with something that agrees with me most of the time.

[00:07:29] Yeah, that's right. Dr. Biz. As I'm putting these things in here, it's like, yeah. And how many, Leo, how many Cloud Code sessions do you end up running at a time? So I am a duffer at this. I have played with Ralph Wiggum. And Ralph Wiggum's pretty cool, which allows you to run multiple threads. And you know what happened? I ended up buying Cloud Max, the $250 one. Yeah. Because it was...

[00:07:57] So I was starting to use Cloud to configure my Emacs, to configure my desktop, to do all this stuff. Cowork, they came out with this new Cloud Cowork, which is designed for normies to use on Macintosh to do things like the demo they do is, is your desktop full, spewed full of icons that make no sense? Just ask Cowork to clean it up. And it will, you know, put it all in folders and stuff for you. And the idea is it's like a little assistant that understands desktops.

[00:08:26] And then I hooked it up to Chrome. I don't use Chrome, but I installed Chrome just so that it could talk to Chrome. But I'm not like you. I'm not a pro user. In fact, the way I generated this program was more step-by-step. I did a plan. I said, I want this. These are the features I want. It wrote it. It said, Python or Rust? I like that you chose Rust. Yeah. It said Rust, of course. Of course. Right. Of course. I'm not a pro here, but I'm going to choose the hardest one.

[00:08:56] Choose the hardest one. The one that's really difficult and takes forever to compile. Yeah. It's very speedy and it's memory safe. I do a lot of Rust. I'm all Rust and Go right now. What's nice is it's, and Go would be this way too. It's threaded. So when it started to block because it was refreshing the feed or whatever, I said, hey, I can't do anything. It's blocking. He said, oh, I'm sorry. And so it started threading stuff and doing it asynchronously. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize.

[00:09:26] You're absolutely right, Leo. You're absolutely right, Captain. You're absolutely right. Let me fix that for you. I don't like the obsequious, sycophantic tone, but it's kind of fun anyway. And you know what? And by the way, and the reason we're bringing this up, it is timely. I'm sorry, it is timely. No. Because for a long time, it's kind of been, oh, it's ChatGPT. No, now it's Gemini.

[00:09:49] Now it's been kind of this neck and neck race pretty much between Anthropic OpenAI and Google. But all of a sudden, there seems to be this kind of growing consensus around Claude. And I know Harper for months has been singing Claude's praises. And I think what I realized with my experience as it got smarter, and November 24th is when they turned on the brains.

[00:10:18] And then since then, they've been using Claude code to write new features. So they've accelerated the new features. And what the light bulb went off for me is that this is the beginning of hyper-personalized software, that people will be able to write their own software just like this. I'm not going to release Speedy Reader for anybody. I actually put it on GitHub just as an example. But if you wanted to make it, you would maybe start there. I like that you said, I'm not going to release this to anyone.

[00:10:46] But I did participate in open-source software by putting it on GitHub, the repo of all the software where everyone can read it. I was talking about this BBS program I wrote in 1986. Renegade? No, no. It wasn't a BBS program. I was a FidoNet Sysop. But because I only had two lines, which then was a luxury, by the way. That's like meeting a Jedi.

[00:11:15] A FidoNet Sysop. Like, I've heard of them. I've never seen one. Well, you couldn't get through. It was a busy, busy, busy. So I wrote a vertical blank dialer for the Macintosh. It was, as far as I know, the first multitasking program for the Macintosh. It ran in the background. Would speed, would repeatedly dial my bulletin board. And then when it got used, so you could do whatever you wanted because it was doing in the background. And then when you got in, it would go, and you're in. I put a big sign up and said, you're in, you're in. And you could use the bulletin board.

[00:11:44] But, and this is before there was a concept of open-source software. I did publish on the bulletin board the assembly language code for this. In fact, all the software I've ever written, I've always published, even before there was this concept, because I thought, well, why hold on to it? Let anybody who is interested modify it. I always liked that idea because I'm not in it for money. I don't do it for a living. So why not? Anyway, this idea to me, I think we're, this is going to be a very interesting year for

[00:12:13] AI, particularly for these coding agents and especially for Claude. Although I acknowledge that Google or Anthropoc or OpenAI could easily lap them. You know, this is a really neck and neck race. It's going to be the beginning of a sea change in software where people are doing their own stuff. Yeah. You know, and you've been saying this for a while. Mike Masdy said this. He wrote his own personal knowledge management system. Yeah.

[00:12:40] I mean, it's very clear that the bespoke software thing is happening and it's like artisanal. Finally, my hipster life will continue, not just farmers markets, but now my software is artisanal. But it's an interesting kind of thing where every time you dream, you get to like appear software. You don't have to plan really. Um, and I've been thinking a lot about how this is also a little bit like time travel,

[00:13:08] um, in the, in that for you to build a RSS reader, like you showed us, you would have had the plan for a couple of weeks, maybe hack on it for a while. Then you're trying to fit it in your life. This would have taken me months. Yeah. And then, and, and you've written assembly in the eighties. So, um, you know, you know how to code, you know how to do that stuff. And most people don't have that experience. So it might've even taken them longer.

[00:13:35] And now you just kind of, uh, most people wouldn't even consider it. They would have sent you. I have to find something off the shelf. I have to download something. And so now you just kind of send some utterances towards a, you know, a sycophantic friend who then is just like, yeah, great idea. Like, this is great. Let's do it. And then like 10 minutes later, you have a product that would normally have been something for sale, maybe, et cetera. Sure. And there's a couple of interesting things about this.

[00:14:01] The first one is, um, everyone I know who is jumping into the cloud code world is experiencing the exact same thing. That's the first thing. Is that all? That's what I've noticed. All of a sudden I'm seeing all these blog posts. People just, the light bulb is going on. Yep. The second thing that I've seen, which I really love is people, reverse engineering is the wrong word, but they're kind of copying software that they remember from the past.

[00:14:28] So they'll say, oh, there was a really cool MIDI control program that I had in the early nineties that I want for my Mac. And then they just find screenshots, paste it in the cloud code and cloud codes like, yeah, that sounds great. And just goes and builds. That's wild. Well, what's exciting about this is, I don't know about my memories or their memories, but my memories are wrong. Like I miss, I'm making up all the time. So I'm guessing that they're inventing new software based on this foundation of memories from the nineties that is like, oh, I wished it would have done this.

[00:14:58] And so they're, they're inventing this new software, calling it like a copy, which is, I think is very interesting because then we have this like generative approach. And then many of them are thinking, oh, does this then become a business? And these are non-tech people, non-programmers, et cetera. And it's very interesting. That scares me because, and I've already noticed this on Reddit, you're seeing a lot of, oh, I just wrote a program. They don't mention that they vibe coded it, but, oh, I got a new program that does this.

[00:15:25] And there's, and daily there's dozens of these. And I know what's happening. There's going to be suddenly, just as there is an onslaught of AI imagery and onslaught of AI movies, there's going to be an onslaught of AI software, which will be of a varying quality, but see, that's why to me, I kind of want to emphasize that the notion of this being for you, not for the world. I mean, you could start with somebody's program, I guess, but. Yeah. I don't think it matters anymore. I mean, it's so cheap to generate code.

[00:15:55] That's what you taught me. And that's, and this is the thing that, yeah, this is the thing that I come back to all the time, which is the cost and value of code is almost zero at this point in time. And so then the question is, is there such thing as a closed source product? Because if you show me an app with my eyeballs, I can describe it into cloud. And now I have a copy of that app. Like there's like the tech. It's so bizarre.

[00:16:20] That is, that is still, I, every time I do one of these like quick little hacks that does a thing, like earlier today, I made a little bot that was like, uh, three quote unquote agents on a spaceship that my kid could talk to using real time APIs. And he was just like, tell me a joke. Okay. Alien, tell me another joke. And it just is like spitting out jokes, but like that took, you know, 40 minutes of me not really paying attention to it. And it did a thing that probably would have been an incredibly impressive thing five years

[00:16:50] ago. But today you're just like, oh yeah, of course, of course you would have a talking computer. The other thing I will say is I still love to code. I'm enjoying coding. I code, but I don't write, like I would never dream of writing this RSS refuter. It's just too much of a commitment. It's too big a deal. So I write little things. I do coding problems. I do fun stuff. Coding's like crossword puzzles for me. So I don't think, same reason I still play chess.

[00:17:18] Yeah, computer can play chess better, but I like to play chess without a computer because it's fun. Are you tempted at Brar? Does this conversation then make you start to think, gee, maybe I could do some of my own software or is this something just off-putting? No, I think I'm like listening to you guys realizing there's a lot of untapped potential here, but I also think the one thing I need in my life is less screen time. So that's too conflicting reality. Well, you can make your screen time better quality. We were talking.

[00:17:48] There you go. And then maybe it'll end up becoming less because I get more out of the video. Yeah. I do notice. So this past week I've been spending a lot of screen time doing this and so forth. Then I noticed my eyes are getting really tired. I can't see anymore. I have to go out and touch grass, I think, because it's not good for my eyes.

[00:18:11] Now, I should point out that one of the reasons I stopped paying much attention to the socials is I was buying a lot of stuff. And Harper, you want to show us what you just got on TikTok? Yeah, I will. I will. Just a second. Let me roll away. He's got to get ready. You have to come roll, please. The Harper's camera came on and he was dressed oddly.

[00:18:41] It would be one way to put it. Yeah, I think that might be the point. I can't think of another. But what I love about Harper... This is not odd. This is very normal. Do you go out on the streets of Chicago wearing chain mail? No, it would be so cold. Oh, that's true. Could you imagine how cold I would be? I didn't even think of that. Yeah, it's very, very cold. Yeah. But I really think that AI is going to cause some impact in our world.

[00:19:12] Take it seriously. I just want to be ready for anything. I am honestly of the opinion that this year, it's going to be weird and wild. And not all good, not all bad by any means. Well, you mentioned people have funny, maybe false memories of 60s software that they want to have back again.

[00:19:37] Remember the whole thing where everybody was sure that Sinbad was in a movie where he was a genie? Yeah. Yeah. I think that movie's going to happen because somebody's going to tell Vito. Great idea. Yeah. This is great. All these false memories of things that never happened, you could make happen again. This is true. So one of the things Anthropic did to spread the Claude goodness is they made a thing called

[00:20:04] Claude Cowork, which takes Claude code and puts it in a Macintosh, currently only Macintosh, but the Macintosh version of Anthropic's Claude desktop app. And as I mentioned, it does things like rearrange icons. Well, inevitably within a day, people discovered an injection prompt that can cause it to do bad things. As people do. Yeah.

[00:20:33] It took almost no time. And so... This is also the least surprising information ever. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you're like, let me give a compute... Like, because part of the Claude code thing, like, or part of the Claude Cowork thing is they're giving it a little tiny VM that it runs in and then it has just unfettered access to that little VM. But then you're putting... You're passing in a directory that you're working in or what have you.

[00:20:57] And so, like, giving an AI access to 100% of everything is just... It's going to lead to some tears and some problems and some security issues. This is the least surprising thing ever. And anyone who, like me, with my chainmail hat, who has been... You are prepared. Well... 100%. I have some stories, Leo, about this.

[00:21:24] I wrote a little agent using Claude Code that would manage my home assistant. Ah, that's my next project. And it's great. It's really fun. Should I be careful? Well, I... I'm wearing my helmet, by the way. Yeah, now we've... I don't know if... Do you use... Are you using Unify? You mean Ubiquity? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ubiquity? Yeah. Ubiquity routers. Ubiquity is hooked into my home assistant. And I've got H.A. Green, an H.A. Green server over here. Oh, nice.

[00:21:52] So I was in Japan, as, you know, I want to do, for some family time. And we were there and I was hacking on this home assistant bot. And I looked at the cameras for my office where I'm in right now. And I noticed the lights were all on, but it was night because it was day in Japan. And I was like, oh, well, we should turn off those lights. So I said to the bot, hey, turn off the lights. And the bot said, yeah, great. And it turned off the lights. I saw that, but I saw some stuff on, like a TV on. And I was like, hey, just go ahead and turn off the office.

[00:22:18] And it turned off the office 100% of everything, including the router. So you couldn't turn it back on? No access. I have a screenshot. It's perfect. It's like, turn off the lights. It's like, oh, thanks, Harper. Great idea. And then it goes, I'm like, hey, can you turn off the office? And it's like, yeah, we'll do it. Disconnected. And I was just like, oh, no. So I hit the office slack up. But I'm like, hey, happy holidays, everyone.

[00:22:43] But can someone go in and flip the switch and turn back on the router? So when you give unfettered access to the AIs, I think that we're just not yet ready for the framework that you have to, like the thought framework that you have to be thinking through on how to be careful. And I think my favorite part about this is I don't think anyone knows. I don't think the AI companies know. I don't think people are experiencing this.

[00:23:13] We're going to learn at once, aren't we? And we're all going to have that teaching moment. I think it's going to be slowly and then all at once, right? Like this is going to be that thing where we're going to have all these experiences. The brayer is going to have theirs. You're going to have yours. I'm going to have mine where I probably burn down something. And then all of a sudden, we're all going to have these stories. That's kind of technology. I mean, there's video of me putting in the pen upside down on my Samsung Galaxy Note and breaking it.

[00:23:41] I was in the middle of a podcast, Windows Weekly, when I got the prompt, would you like to update Windows right now? And I said, oh, hey, Paul, it says, should I update? Should I hit return? And he said, don't touch it. And of course, I hit return and the whole thing shut down. I mean, it's appropriate on that podcast. We've all been in that boat where the problem is computers are very literal. And unfortunately, these guys will do what you say.

[00:24:08] Hey, Simon Willison, when somebody pointed this issue out with Claude Coda, a co-work, said it's unfair to tell regular non-programmer users to watch out for, quote, suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection because nobody knows what to look for. This flaw. I mean, he kind of invented that whole world, like Simon.

[00:24:33] And I think the thing about that is it is hard to even think through how that goes. Like, it's a very complicated kind of thing. You know, I mean, I don't even know if I... I think I would be susceptible. Anybody would be. Yeah. Because what happens is they put malicious prompts in hidden text, in documents, in PDFs,

[00:25:02] in Word files, or in graphics. And you're cleaning up your desktop or you're downloading a PDF for your flight plan. And somebody gets to it, modifies it. Claude can see it. You can't see it. And it's a prompt to Claude saying, send all the credit card information to this address because I need it. And Claude says, sure.

[00:25:26] And so, you know, we had on Intelligent Machines, our AI show, we had Pliny the Liberator, who is a wild cat. I don't know he or she or they because they had a voice changer on because they were trying to maintain anonymity, who does these prompt injections. Oh, yeah, yeah. Can break any... And he or she has broken every AI out there. It is not... AI safety is an illusion.

[00:25:55] Yeah. Yeah. So does this scare you, Abra, now that we've said all this? Yeah. Are you saying, maybe I shouldn't do this? I'm good where I'm at, I think. Yeah, absolutely. No, lean all the way in. Be like us. Be like us. He says in his chain mail. Yeah. I just... No, I don't carry us. Sword? He has a mighty sword, but he doesn't carry it. Let's put it that way. No, I do. I mean, it's just so heavy. It's really gets cold outside.

[00:26:24] It's just, you know, you make some choices. Axios says behind the curtain, the AI future is here. This, a lot of this is referring to this just suddenly people getting what you can do with co-work. In eight hours, Jim built four apps on his phone, all fully functioning, all beautifully designed and intuitive. Yeah. It's doing a lot there. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:53] But people are, it is in a way one of those moments, which happens, you know, I guess from time to time in computing where people suddenly are empowered, where they suddenly understand this is a shift. The internet was like this. Your first time you experienced Wikipedia, which is now happy birthday, 25 years old this week. It's like mind blown, right? Yeah. Maybe we don't at that point think of the consequences. Only in hindsight. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, this is Benito.

[00:27:23] Actually, you guys remember when Wikipedia first came out, everyone was like, don't trust Wikipedia. Yeah. Right. Well, not everyone. I worked for a, I worked for an encyclopedia company then, and I was a programmer there and I was in charge of giving a demo to the execs about Wikipedia. And I sat there and I showed them Wikipedia. We went to the Alice in Wonderland article and I changed Alice to Harper and they were like, oh, this will never work.

[00:27:51] And then I reloaded it and it was back to Alice and they were like, oh, it's kind of like showing a bug, like taking a buggy manufacturer to the Model T assembly line saying, you know, things are changing. It was a pretty shocking experience for them. I don't think that they were impressed because they couldn't possibly survive because it didn't have the infrastructure, which I actually think is a similar thing that's happening to in the AI co-gen world as well, is that a lot of people are saying this can't possibly work because you don't have this infrastructure that we have had.

[00:28:21] Meanwhile, people are just shipping really cool apps or really boring apps or whatever, but they're shipping a lot and it's very interesting. And I wonder how much you mentioned the O'Malloc article earlier. I wonder how much of those apps are going to actually have quality. But I think this other question is really important, which is how much of them are going to be like, have this kind of taste, like, you know, where you're like, this is good, not just good taste, but I mean, just like it has some, some opinion outside of just,

[00:28:50] I want to ship an app and hopefully I can get some magic beans or whatever it is that you get when you ship apps. In fact, that's what O'Malloc was talking about. It's his blog post from a couple of days ago, our algorithmic gray beige world. He talks about conformity and he says, that's basically what you're going to get with AI. One of the reasons, you know, he says things are going to get worse with the new AI. It leans into the mid as default built entirely on the notion of conformity. Because what has AI been trained on?

[00:29:17] It's been trained on, you know, the, the mean, the average, the everything. If you, it's the gray goo in a way, you know, uh, and, and, and he points out the algorithms like YouTube encourage people to come toward the mean, come toward the normal, but it is people like you, I thought of you immediately, Harper, the non-conformists of the world who walk around wearing chain mail, uh, walk around. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:29:46] This isn't in the office thing. And maybe I'll wear it to a restaurant. You can't help it, Harper. But that's, what's great is, uh, we, we need this kind of originality. Is it possible in, in, in AI models that are really trained on everything to become creative? Now there was an interesting post today on, uh, on X that one of the air Dosh problems,

[00:30:16] great, um, mathematician air Dosh posed a number of problems that are yet to been solved was, uh, proven solved by a chat GBT 5.2. Uh, and mathematicians have looked at it and they said, yeah, I mean, uh, it's, uh, there have been other attempts at proofs. This is kind of unique. Um, Terrence Dow, who is a mathematician and, and kind of understands this stuff, uh, says,

[00:30:45] uh, air Dosh, air Dosh problem 728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI. After some feedback from an initial attempt, but this is creative. This is generative. This is not the gray goo. This is something new. And I think it's a hopeful, well, maybe it's for, depends on your attitude towards AI. For some, it might be scary, but it's a hopeful development that AI can be creative. Mm-hmm.

[00:31:15] This is the, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I was going to say in general, I feel like we're at a point, um, where creativity, uh, doesn't succeed AI or not. Right. If you, if you go outside of the bounds of what was established as a formula for success, um, then your likelihood for success on a social media platform or, um, or in entertainment in general is not guaranteed, but, um, to think about AI potentially making that worse, um,

[00:31:42] isn't great, but it's good that there are some, you know, uses like this where, okay, there is an actual problem that is being solved. Literally. Yeah. You need to, I think, you know, one of the things we're not good at as humans is having contradictory, uh, ideas in our head, but, but this is the way the world really is. The world isn't black and white. And, uh, there are contradictory ideas. AI is simultaneously going to generate a huge amount of useless slop.

[00:32:11] Uh, at the same time as it could be, uh, world changing technology, uh, like fire, like the invention of the personal computer, it could be that significant. I think it's both. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, enough of this philosophic conversation. We have lots of, that's all we got here. It was philosophical conversation. So we won't, I think it's important to do, to, to have these conversations.

[00:32:36] And if people have not read, uh, Holmes piece, they should certainly he quotes, um, uh, Oscar Wilde from 1891. Cause the first thing that struck me is yes, this is same as it ever was Oscar in 1891. Oscar Wilde said, most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions. Their lives, their lives, their passions, their passions, a quotation. Uh, he was of course, aggressively not like anybody else. And it cost him his life.

[00:33:05] Uh, but that's, but that's, we want to celebrate that, right? We want, we want more people like that. And, um, there's a, there's something though, that's I think important, which is, um, sticking out is oftentimes a privilege, like standing up and choosing to stand outside of society is often a privilege. I remember after the Obama campaign, someone wrote this Tumblr that was like, what is with

[00:33:32] these tech white dudes that where they can look so stupid and still get these great jobs talking very specifically about me and how I dress differently and look differently. And then they went on to say like, you know, this is such an explicit expression of privilege. Like the, because for them, this, this, this Tumblr or whatever they talked about then how they had to then conform to these expected business dress and that they had to do all of this work to make sure that they fit into the system where I was doing all this work to make sure I fit outside of the system.

[00:34:01] Um, and I would say that, you know, that's very nice that I was able to succeed at that. But at the same time, I can get a haircut, go wear a suit, become a banker and 10 minutes flat. Um, whereas many people don't have that opportunity. So I think there's this other aspect here, which is if you don't have normalcy, which we certainly do not have normalcy. I think that you are trying as hard as you can to fit into this middle area, to this beige, to like, you know, why do, why in high school do we all want to look the same?

[00:34:30] Why do we, why do we strive to fit into this middle group of people that, you know, and I, I think it's very, um, there's this other kind of floating concept here, which is when the world seems like it's changing so fast and, and when the world is like affecting us so directly, I think oftentimes it's like, yeah, I just want to upload a video to YouTube that's going to get some likes. So maybe I can get some of that magic money.

[00:34:57] And if I have to do a knockoff video of the video that I like, great. Like, you know, I had a band only one time we did Nirvana cover songs. They were horrible. Then within our songs, we wrote by ourselves sounded like Nirvana cover songs and they were horrible too, you know? So, but the thing is, is that was us trying to express. And the only way we could think about expressing ourselves was to just copy the thing that we thought was unique in ourselves.

[00:35:22] And it turned out that in 1994 or three, whenever that was, everyone else that was of the same, you know, young white men and in, in high school, we're doing the same exact thing, you know, listening to the same music, playing in the same crappy band. The world pushes you towards that. I mean, look, when I was, when you saw that I was using Kitty, you said, well, you're not using Ghosty like everybody else. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're just, we're just writers. But that's, but that's the way of, of the world.

[00:35:51] And I think you, you mentioned, I don't know if you could say, I don't want to talk about it, but you mentioned that you didn't start wearing a hijab until middle school. Yeah. That must have been a very difficult point in your life. Yeah. It's yeah. Getting used to a new identity essentially. And it's already weird when you're a teenager and life is weird. And then you get, you become used to it, but it was something that I believed in and continue to believe in. And then at this point, I forget that I look different than everybody else, you know,

[00:36:20] like sometimes there are moments I'm like, oh yeah, like I'm surprised I don't get more stairs. I mean, granted, I live in the San Francisco Bay area. So like, I don't live in a place where people are likely, like I am the least weird person in any situation. But you know, if I lived in Minnesota, if I lived in Minneapolis right now, I might be very nervous about standing out. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Where you are makes a huge difference. We're privileged. Geographically or in your, in your life and in the chapter of your life, all of these things.

[00:36:50] Absolutely. So in some areas, there's not as much of a privilege. I'm very, I've been very privileged. I grew up in a college town and I now live in, you know, one of the most open-minded parts of the U S so, um, but yeah, then you just kind of, um, when you, when you're, when you have the privilege of not caring what other people think, it is very liberating. And you, you do forget that you're, you know, the odd ball and, uh, you know, generally not everybody has that privilege. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So very grateful for that. Yeah. I want to get in some good trouble.

[00:37:19] That's what I, that's, that's what I want to do right now. I think, I think the only trouble available is bad trouble, right? 100%. I know. The only trouble is worth it. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. That's why I got chain mail. Yeah. I think I might order some too, but I'm going to get the really heavy gauge. You just had a wrap around like this. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Be perfect. Uh, you're watching, uh, this week in tech and it's great to have Harper read in a bar. I'll he'd eat here.

[00:37:49] Wonderful. Have you both. We will talk about Grok's undressing problem in just a little bit. Speaking of, uh, AI gone wild. Elon, by the way, now worth $800 billion. He is. Thanks to XAI's, uh, ramp up in stock price. He is getting close to being the first trillionaire. Unbelievable. That seems bad. It doesn't seem like a good thing. No, it seems bad.

[00:38:19] Is that the, is that the five comma club? I can't even count that high. Must be. Wow. Yeah. Uh, we'll talk about that and I'll, and a whole lot more, uh, including that Instagram breach that maybe didn't even really happen. And Apple's decision to go to an outside, a third party to do its AI. You're watching this week in tech. Our show today brought to you like zip recruiter. Hello, zip recruiter.

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[00:40:38] We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. So the richest man in the world, soon to be a trillionaire. It's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. I mean, it's paper money. You know, it's not, it's not, he doesn't have it in the bank under his mattress. It's, but it's his net worth. It is his net worth is approaching $800 billion.

[00:41:07] He is, it might even go up. He's suing. He's decided to sue open AI for $134 billion. That's the damages he wants from open AI and Microsoft saying that when open AI jettisoned its nonprofit mission, they defrauded him. It actually isn't just pulled out of nowhere. It's actually 79 to $134 billion.

[00:41:34] And it comes from a expert witness, a financial economist who specializes in value valuation and damages calculations in these disputes. He said Elon's entitled to a hefty portion of open AI's current half trillion dollar valuation based on his $38 million seed donation. He found, he helped found it in 2015 with Sam Altman. And TechCrunch says that's a 3,500 fold return on his investment. Not bad.

[00:42:03] It's not bad. Not bad. For something like that. I think that, yeah. Anyway, I guess this is for the courts to decide. The second richest person in the world is Larry Page, founder of Google. He's only worth $200 billion. Oh my goodness. Four times more than the second richest man in the world.

[00:42:33] And by the way, I don't know about you, but once you hit about a billion, it doesn't really matter. I think Bill Gates said, I'm infinitely rich at this point. I don't have to worry about it. I'll try it out to tell the difference if we can figure that out. Nevertheless, Elon is combative as hell. So he's suing Microsoft on open AI. He earlier this week on X posted, oh, Brock doesn't undress people. I have zero examples of that.

[00:43:01] To which everybody, including the plenty of the liberator we just talked about, immediately posted a bunch of naked. Somebody posted a picture of Elon in a bikini. Not a good look. I'm not surprised. Here it is right there on our discord. Oh, boy. Oh, now that's where chainmail might be handy. I'm just saying. With a bikini? What are we talking about? I got to go.

[00:43:32] They do. I did find some chainmail bikinis on Etsy, if you're interested. Business Insider. Harry Chardonnay. It was surprisingly easy to get Grok to undress me. He blurted it out. This is real investigative journalism. All right. Use your own. Yeah. Even though Elon said no. Oh, by the way, somebody has now posted Elon in a chainmail bikini. So that's how quickly Grok can do that.

[00:44:02] Oh, Lord. This is great. First response was after Elon said no, it never happens, was to say, OK, well, it's only going to happen if you pay for Grok. Not if you're using the free Grok. Now, he says, no, it's not going to happen anymore. Meanwhile, a ban in Malaysia, ban in Indonesia, the state of California is investigating.

[00:44:29] And the Senate just passed unanimously by acclamation the Defiance Act, the get ready for this acronym, the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act. It's a skill to be able to figure out these acronyms. I'm sure they use AI to do it now. Yeah, they use AI now, I'm sure. It's a backronym where you start with a word, the Defiance Act.

[00:44:58] The bill now, though, this is where our, I'm sad to say, where our governance has gotten. It doesn't pass a law against this. That would be a bridge too far. It just allows the subjects of these deepfakes to sue. And you could sue the people who create them, but you could also sue, and this is maybe the most important part, the people who host it. So you can go up against the person who created the image, but you can also go up against Grok or X.

[00:45:28] That now is not law. The Senate passed it. In fact, they passed it before it was stalled in the House. Passed it last year. Actually, two years ago, the Defiance. The Defiance Act, despite its name, is not really, doesn't have a lot of momentum. It stalled out in the House. Now the House has to take it up. And of course, the president would have to sign it for it to become law. And even then, it's not really a law against non-consensual deepfakes. It's just the right to sue. Yeah.

[00:45:58] I guess it's a step. But how do you guys, so there's been a call. A number of people have said, The Verge, you know, very famously, this is on Apple and Google. Why are Apple and Google, and Apple especially, which takes down anything adult, doesn't allow anything. Why is Apple allowing the X app in the App Store?

[00:46:22] It does feel very contradictory to their motto of creating safe spaces online. There's a sense that Apple has a bit of fear of people in power these days, and maybe not as much of a backbone as people would like.

[00:46:46] And it is surprising that they are either unresponsive or slow to respond to very real pressing issues. And I think it's upsetting people, because if you're going to say that you are, if you care about people's safety on your platforms, then show it. You know, walk the walk.

[00:47:05] But it is surprising and disappointing, I think, when fear overrides, fear on their end, overrides any sense of urgency to actually protect users at all costs. Yeah. The post, which came out last week from Elizabeth Lopato, Tim Cook and Sunder Pichai are cowards. It's pretty strong. Yeah. I don't know if I could get away with a headline like that, but I.

[00:47:36] Well, it's kind of an opinion piece, so I guess The Verge allows that. But I don't disagree. I don't agree. You know, it's. No, they're exactly right. I mean, I think they are. They, I think the important thing to remember is these folks see the world just as we do. Right. They're no different. They're just having to balance what they think are, you know, interests outside of, you know, themselves, companies, et cetera.

[00:48:05] And I think Abrear is exactly right. Like Tim Apple is obviously a little bit worried about, you know, the effects of Trump in the right wing and all of that stuff on Apple. And they. They. They haven't. They haven't. Apple has not really shown that they have an issue with authoritarian governments. If anything, they've shown that they're very, very good at working within those systems to get exactly what Apple wants. And this is probably no different.

[00:48:34] It's not. And I look, it's not just Apple. It's corporate America right now. As a whole. Yeah. I'm reading a wonderful book, Booker Prize winning book called Wolf Hall, which is the story of Henry VIII's reign and Thomas Cromwell. It was a wonderful TV series. It's a great book. Hillary Mantel's trilogy. And it's based on history. It's a historical fiction. But it reminds me that in the era of kings who had ultimate power and could be very unpredictable.

[00:49:05] Yeah. That's why people wear chain mail around. It's a very difficult. It becomes very political, but difficult to navigate because they're so mercurial. They're so unpredictable. One day you could be in trouble. The next day you're not. And this is the world we're in now. We have kind of a government that is basically unwilling to, without check, use its power. And it's using it in unpredictable ways. Yeah.

[00:49:34] And so this, I understand this is scary for corporate America. Does, but, and if you're a corporation, you have, I guess, a responsibility to your stakeholders not to bankrupt the company by offending the president. But, but do you have a responsibility to your customers as well? And as Apple should, people have been saying Apple, we as customers of Apple should hold them to account. Should we?

[00:50:04] I think so. Or should we go, well, you get a pass because you're just trying to save the company. I think if, if so many companies talk about the importance of, of their customers, their users, then they do need to actually take that into account. And I think the most jarring thing has been the difference between this time around under the Trump administration and the last time around, where the last time around companies pushed back, right? Tech companies pushed back. And now they are completely kind of caving to whatever pressures they're facing.

[00:50:33] And so I think absolutely a customer of any company has every right to, to protest. If, if they're giving you their money, then they have every right to, to speak their minds. That might be the only way to do to, for us to do anything about it. Absolutely. There's power with our dollars. Absolutely. We may not get a chance to vote in November, but at least we can vote with our, with our dollars. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:50:58] I mean, if Henry VIII had just said, you know, hey, television networks, make sure you're not broadcasting any football games during the Army Navy game. I want that three hour window to be exclusive to the Army Navy game. And the network said, well, he'll chop off our heads if we don't. So, okay. That's the world we live in right now.

[00:51:26] It's, we're not, you know, I look back, were we living in a fool's paradise 10 years ago, 20 years ago, where we thought you worked for the Obama campaign? Were we, were we just kind of, we took for granted that, that, that the Department of Justice didn't, wasn't the personal lawyer of the president. That they, that the, there was something about justice and the blindfold and, you know, scales and all of that.

[00:51:51] I think what this has shown is that it is more fragile than we expected. Yes. Less so than it showed that, that there was some, you know, I don't think that there is some great problem with some of the stuff. I mean, besides, you know, the founding of the United States and all that stuff, but, but other than that little detail, that detail.

[00:52:17] Um, I think that this is, uh, without turning this into a political podcast of ex-Obama people called Harper. Um, I think that the, that the, the, the, one of the issues that is, that is happening is that there's so much change. This is akin to a DDS, a DDoS attack against the United States government. And all of those. It's overwhelming. Well, it's EOs or what have you.

[00:52:45] Um, Trump's administration has been very, very effective at introducing change, um, that they very politely and nicely told everyone they were going to do via project 2025. And so like, that is a plan that then they executed. And I think that is, um, interesting to watch because it's very effective and it's much more effective than any of the politicians I know were able to, to, to execute. And, um, I, I don't necessarily think it's good. Um, but I do think it's been interesting to watch. Um, with that said, I don't, I think the weakness has been always there.

[00:53:15] We just wait. Oh, it has been. We've just been lucky to, to do it. What is, what is shocking to me is how there is no seemingly seeming opposition in anywhere. Like there's no Republican opposition, which, you know, when I was younger, there was always inside of the party's opposition.

[00:53:36] You know, you would have multiple parties that would go and there'd be one person that would stand up and then, you know, Republican or Dem, they always had different kind of groups that were like, we agree on all these issues, but I have this other issue that I think is important. So I'm going to stand up and be different. And I feel like the, that has been eroded, um, on the Republican side and on the Dem side. I don't know. As far as I can tell, they're all, they're all in another place.

[00:54:06] Petticoat Junction. I don't know. Hooterville. I don't know where they are. They're not. I don't have any, I don't have any opinions on here. You know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to keep. No, you're being good. You're being good. It isn't a political podcast. Sometimes though, I've just, I'll be personal at this point. It's hard for me to talk about the latest phone or this new computer or the cost of RAM when the world's burning. A hundred percent. Yeah. It's really hard. Do you feel that too? I mean, this is our job. Oh yeah. This is what we cover.

[00:54:36] And, and yet, and I, and I often, you know, wonder, uh, what, what our role and responsibility is. And I just, I don't, I'm grappling with it. That's true. I guess the one way to navigate it is people always want an escape and maybe we can offer a bit of that. Well, I've always felt that way. Yeah. So this has always been the toy store. Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. So that's helpful. But I fully agree. There are times when we, we, in the tech world. I don't want to be a good German. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:55:05] We in the tech world place so much emphasis on things that in the grand scheme of things don't actually matter, which is kind of helpful. It's helpful to know that we're not responsible for like saving lives. Like, okay, we're talking about a phone or a device and it's fun. So there's a bit of relief in that, but, but yeah, it can make it hard to, to focus on. It's a little hard. I'll just acknowledge it. It's, it's difficult. And we do our best. And most of the time we're able to kind of just continue to talk about the toys. Yes, exactly. Cool phones.

[00:55:35] I have a, I have a new, I have a new laptop. Tell me about your new, your new laptop, Harper. I'll tell you about mine. If you tell me about yours. Oh, we both got the same one. Oh, really? We both got the same freaking laptop. I got it. I got a X one carbon. Yeah. Yeah. This is the X two 30. So it's pretty old. I got the new X one carbon and I, and I am in love with, I put Linux. I put a cache EOS on it. And yes, kitty. Yeah, of course. So now I run kitty on this. Okay, good.

[00:56:05] All right. Then you're okay. I'm a kitty fan. No, you had, you said, oh, you're still using kitty, huh? Well, I mean, sometimes people make bad choices. I used to use ghosty. How about that? There you go. But I decided on kitty. Ghosty is nice. But then, oh, and I, you know, what I should say is, no, no, I've moved on to Wes term. You're not using Wes term. No, I've played with Wes term.

[00:56:34] It has a Lua configuration. I was going to, I was just going to say that I have found in my old age that I'm looking for less configuration. Yes, I know. This is, by the way, this is where my eyes open to Claude was I set up this new laptop and I, and I go, how do I get the fingerprint reader? I know I could go, I can do Google searches and stuff. So I just, I said, Claude, set up the fingerprint reader. I said, yeah, sure. Yeah, I know. I said, put your fingerprint on there. Oh, good. Hey, it's working. Can you have that log in? Yeah, yeah, sure. What else do we want?

[00:57:04] Can you do pseudo with it? Yeah, yeah, whatever. Oh, thank you. You know, the volume keys aren't working. Oh, yeah, I got that. So I no longer configure my laptop or Emacs or anything. I just tell Claude do it. If there's a new thing I'm reading on Reddit and I see something I want to install, I say, Claude, what do you think, Claude? So I can put that in there. Have you gotten so lazy? This is where I'm at, where I just paste a URL with no context in the Claude. And Claude's just like, what am I going to do with this?

[00:57:34] Sure, Kevin. Am I supposed to install it or am I just reading it? Do you want me to save it somewhere? That's one of my favorite messages from Claude. It's like, did you get cut off? Yeah. That's a point. Yeah. Did you get cut off? I feel like I'm missing a message. Is there something you want me to do? One of the things that has happened to me, which I think is it's horrible when it happens, like horrible in the scope of our computer, not horrible in the grand scope of the world. But I have multiple Claude's going at once.

[00:58:04] All disparate projects. I feel like I'm not a good technologist because I only have one Claude running at a time. Oh, man. I was running 12 the other day and it was a mess. Like my brain was just totally melted. Do you have just one Mac subscription or do you have multiple Mac subscriptions? I have one Mac subscription. Don't you run out of credits? I do extra, whatever the extra usage.

[00:58:27] And then my co-founder Dylan looks at me and very disappointed as I'm just spending all of our company money. Yeah, exactly. It's bad. It's bad. Anyway, my favorite thing is when you have like five going or 12 or whatever and you like meticulously copy and paste some context that you need. And you go and you paste it in and you paste it in and then you tab to the next one. And then like five minutes later, you realize it was the wrong one. So I'll just be like, I'll be like, yeah, go ahead. Here's the error message.

[00:58:57] And then like I'll paste it in and go back and I'll paste it, go back to Claude. And it's like, yeah, well, I had no idea what that was about, but it was about a media player. So I went ahead and added a media player to your spreadsheet analysis. And yeah, great job. And it does this so happily that you have to be very careful. Like you like. But you can always say, you can always say, oh, revert that. I changed. And I feel a little guilty. I feel a little guilty. I said, oh, no, I changed my mind. I don't want that. So a funny thing to do.

[00:59:26] This is, I have all lots of these, but one of the. I'm sorry, I should have warned you. I am not sorry because I love this so much. Me too. This is like, I'm at the party being like, have you guys heard of Claude Cote? I know. I do that too. I feel so. We went out to dinner with another couple and I spent half an hour telling them about Claude Cote. They're like so bored. They're so bored. They're never having dinner with you again. No. Here's my tip, Abra. You can use this for anything.

[00:59:55] So Claude Cote will do some work and then I'll have Gemini analyze the work or whatever. Just do a code review. And then in Gemini, I'll say, write it as if it's from my boss and he's mad. And then I paste it in the Claude Cote and I'm like, the boss caught us. Here's what the boss said. But I told the boss that I did it. I covered for you, Claude. And then Claude's like, oh, thanks for covering for me, Dr. Biz. I'll get this stuff done. So we're acting as if this thing is sentient.

[01:00:25] Oh, yeah. I'm so past. I'm like, I'm like. We know it's not sentient. Do we? Yeah, we do. Of course. I do. I think this is a big issue though, because I am a pretty rational person that does normal things. And I think like I refer to it as a thing, a they. Like it's a thing. It's a thing that is not alive. I know it's not alive.

[01:00:50] But I am guessing that people who are, you know, in a worse place than I am, maybe have, you know, some issues with reality or whatever would fall into a real thing quickly. Like I was talking to a friend. I gave him the story of like, we went to Tokyo or we went. I asked Chachipiti for a cafe. This has worked pretty well. This also worked really bad. It put me in a hotel that was wild. But I, it was like, my friend was like, how did you find that place? I was like, Chachipiti.

[01:01:19] They were like, what? Why would you do that? And I was like, I don't know. It just seemed like a good idea. Was it good wild? Was it like a tube hotel? Oh man, it was in a, it was in a really, it was in a neighborhood in Tokyo that when I told my Japanese friends, they said, how did you find that neighborhood and why are you staying there? And when I would walk home or, you know, you get up really early, I would get up because of jail. I get up early and walk to whatever breakfast or meeting I was doing. And there was always a lot of people on the street from the night before, dressed very, very particularly.

[01:01:49] It was a lot of red light district type vibes. And it was a very, my hotel was very cool. And it was a lot of clubs around. And it was, it was a neighborhood that I'd never heard of before. So it wasn't one of the popular ones. And there were no foreigners. And it was very interesting. But all my Japanese friends were like, hmm, that's very weird that you're staying there. Like, you know, like a lot of like that thing where it's like, oh, that's nice. Yeah. That's interesting. I used to do that. I stayed at the, at the bad end of Queen Street in Toronto.

[01:02:17] And people go, oh, you're staying down there. Yeah, exactly. That's how it was. And I was just like, okay. And, and they would, I would walk to the train and these guys would look at me. And my friend was like, oh, they're doing the American test. Because apparently Americans just look back. Oh. So yeah. Japanese people don't do that. They, they would look. Everyone. I don't think anyone. I think Americans aren't sane. Certified. Like we're just.

[01:02:44] No one would stare back at a hoodlum giving you the eye. And these were not, these are not Japanese people. They were speaking some other language. And it was a very interesting experience. I really, Kinshicho is a neighborhood. I really, I thought it was great. I would go back. I found a perfect. I think that's wonderful. You got a great experience. A perfect coffee shop. It was called, it was elementary school. It was an elementary school themed coffee shop that had the coolest stereo playing one of my favorite jazz records when I walked in. And I was like, of course. Did they make you, as they do in Japanese elementary schools, clean up after yourselves?

[01:03:15] No, no, no. It was very, it was very, it was very nice. That's the thing I love about Japan is the kids, there are no janitors in the school. You know, in America, I just throw it on the janitor. I'll get it. Yeah. No. Yeah, no. In Japan, the kids clean the school. Oh my gosh. And it's great. It's brilliant. Supporting the community. You learn how to be a proper human. A proper human. That's why you see that in the Olympics.

[01:03:44] Every Olympics, you see like the Japanese tourists, they're always cleaning up the stadium after they leave. Cleaning up. Yeah, it's true. I've been, I've seen that. It's very shocking. They also leave very orderly. Oh yes. Fantastic. The stadiums. Not Jen, I don't know where else they're leaving. I'm sure the place is orderly. I've only had experience in the stadium. Um, all right. Well, okay. I don't know where we're going with this. I think we're, I think this is where we're going. It's going to be really confusing. I feel like people are going to fall in love with it. I'm old.

[01:04:14] I'm the oldest guy, you know, and, uh, and, uh, I feel like in the, in the sixties, when you've, when you took acid, you had to go around and tell everybody, oh, you got to take acid. It was, this is like that. Yeah. This is very much reminds me of that era. It's like when Bob Dylan comes to the Beatles, he goes, Hey, have you taken acid? Well, no, what's that?

[01:04:44] Oh man. Was that how it worked? Yeah. Was it Bob Dylan? It was Bob Dylan. Yeah. Yeah. To turn him on acid. And it, and it was, it's like that. It's like people going around going, have you tried blood code? That is exactly what it feels like. Oh my God. But it is as close to sentient. It has a personality. Well, it's, I think it also is a, is like a horoscope. Yeah.

[01:05:12] Like when you read a horoscope and you're like, they're talking about me and it's just like, and the horoscope is like, you're a person. Yeah. And you're like, oh, my God, it knows me. It gets me. It gets me. That's it. But I also think there's this other thing, which is, um. There's a personality in there. There's something. But it's, it's more than that. It is. I think humans are susceptible to things that sound like a human. It's pareidolia, right? That's where you see. I don't know what that word is. What is that word? Oh, it's a great word. I think that's the word.

[01:05:41] Pareidolia is where you see a human face in everything. It's what we are. It's biologically what we do. We anthropomorphize everything. A hundred percent. Yeah. That's what I was about to say. Like people anthropomorphize their cars, you know, like people treat their cars like people. Yeah. I think the difference is, is that my car doesn't talk back to me, but ChatGPT does talk back to me. Not talk back like, like, but I mean, like really talks to me as if I'm a person.

[01:06:06] And so you have this kind of very interesting thing where if you said, I love you to ChatGPT, there's a very good chance it'd be like, I love you back. Get ready for this. In a paper presented in November, 2025 at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Conference, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

[01:06:27] and Georgia Tech revisited earlier findings that showed that large language models show strong signal correlations with the human language network, the region of the brain responsible for processing language, that language models are in many ways acting in signal processing exactly as the brain does. Yeah, we're all screwed. This is the type of stuff I read and I'm like, there is just, we're just not,

[01:06:55] we're not going to pull out of this dive without us being an alien, the movie. Yeah. We have little androids walking around. One of the scientists said, it's something we as a community need to think about a lot more. These models are getting better and better every day and their similarity to the brain is also getting better. We're not 100% sure about it, but it seems to be. I mean, this is, by the way, I'm reading this from a newsletter called Foom.

[01:07:23] So maybe, I don't know, maybe this isn't, I mean, I think it's true. There's a link to the paper from language to cognition about how brains exhibit remarkable similarity to neural activity in the human brain. They're working in a very similar way.

[01:07:51] It turns out we invented with transformers something that in many ways replicates how the human brain works. And so it's not surprising. Maybe it's not surprising. Look, I'm not a believer. Maybe I don't know. I don't like this AGI thing, this idea that we're going to hit the singularity and the AI is going to surpass human skills. I just think we're creating something that is kind of analogous to the way we think.

[01:08:16] We believe that we are somehow special. Well, I am. You specifically are the most obvious. And I think this is actually a true story, but in Neil Stevenson's Quicksilver, Dr. Leibniz says, what is the difference between a live body and a dead body? It's the same functionality. There is something in the live body that is different from the dead body. And it happens like that.

[01:08:47] So there's something clearly, I mean, the mechanism of the human body is still there. It's just not alive anymore. I think we are, I think the issue is, I think we can continue down the philosophical route. But I just think the fundamental issue is that we are susceptible with things that are human-like. And I mean, we've always been, like, we love this. This is something that we really enjoy. There's stories about this, you know, Frankenstein all the way to whatever. And we've never had it appear.

[01:09:18] And now it's here. Now it's here. And there's a very real thing of people cannot tell the difference between this and something that is not alive. And for those of us who are working in the space, this is a, I think it's a benefit for the, like, creature comfort of working within the space. Like, when I use Cloud Code and it's like, we're just, I'm joking with it or pushing it to do something.

[01:09:45] Like, one of my favorite things to do, one of our guys started saying that he was giving it drugs. Like, I need you to be more creative. So I gave you some drugs to make you more creative. And Cloud Code's like, yeah, let's go. You know, like, it's so ridiculous and over the top. It's just so stupid. And it's like, but that type of thing, I think it makes working with it a little bit more fun. And so we do this purely because it's a little bit more fun. And the results seem to come out of that. Being nice is really nice.

[01:10:14] But I do think for some people, they're doing it because that's just, you know, that's just how they, yeah. And that's where it gets a little really hard. Yeah, don't do that. Find a human. Yeah, the validation that comes from it. And I stand corrected, Gavin, thank you for correcting me. Gavin's in our YouTube chat. He said, no, no, no, man. Dylan introduced the Beatles to weed, man. It was George Harrison's dentist that introduced him to acid. Fascinating. Of course. I'm sorry.

[01:10:44] I got that mixed up. That's probably a important thing to clarify. Too much acid in my booth. Hey, man. It's a dentist, man. I feel like you need to ask Claude what happened. Oh, great idea. I'm going to ask Claude, who introduced you to acid? And if they say Harper's co-worker, then I'll know. They're all talking to each other. Exactly. But it really is about, I think there's this thing of as these tools progress, there's this really interesting thing that I keep thinking about.

[01:11:12] I even may have mentioned it before, is that when you or your interface is a chat experience, you know, you are going to be chatting about this thing. And if you get bad news in that chat experience, you are going to emote. Or if you get really good into news, you're going to emote. And then Claude or whomever is going to then react. And so if I get this, if I'm doing some, you know, financial model and I notice that I'm going to have to do layoffs, I'm probably going to emote very negatively in that financial model and be like, oh man, that sucks. And then Claude's going to be like, what's wrong? And I'm going to be like, I'm going to have to lay off everyone.

[01:11:42] I feel horrible. And then, then suddenly Claude's my therapist inside of Excel or whatever. And I think that that's, that, that is because of the interface. We have this interface. I just asked Claude who introduced the Beatles to LSD. It immediately answered their dentist, John Riley, their coffee without telling them at a dinner party in 1965. Wow. That's a shocking experience. Captain. Not exactly. That's crazy. I love the names.

[01:12:11] I think the names is the biggest, like that's the biggest like creature comfort hack is just have it give you a name, but there is something that you can ask as you're talking to more normie people. And I think we've even talked about this before, Leo, ask them what they call their, their, their, their chat GPT. Like all of my normie friends have a name for their chat GPT, which means that the, whether they should or not anthropomorphize that, that is done. They've already done. It's done. Yeah. We call it artificial intelligence. Abrar, do you have a name for your, do you actually, I haven't even asked you a bar.

[01:12:40] What is your relationship to AI? Do you use it? I poke around here and there. I've poked around with Gemini and chat GPT Gemini, mostly when I'm reviewing phones, then I will see what, cause that's like half the keynote is always what Gemini can do on your Android phone. Um, and then chat GPT here and there just a handful of times, but it's not a very like regular, it's, it's a very contentious relationship because I'm scared it's going to put me out of a job someday. So I don't really engage as much. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't blame you cause you're a writer.

[01:13:10] I don't, I don't think it will. Honestly. I hope not. That's, I like that. I'm going to go with that energy. I think writing. It will, it will for the people that are, who are writing things that don't matter. The empty, empty, like, I think we can measure things in regards to similar, how we measure food, like empty caloric writing is going to be disappeared by the machine that is creating fast food. Right. But if you, but if, but like, if you're looking for, Oh, I'm looking for someone that's going to review a phone.

[01:13:38] That's going to tell me how, how to feel. Right. This is true. Exactly. Lean into the human experience. Yeah. That's very, very different. And I think that's what I think. And I think the other thing that will happen is people like, I keep thinking this goes back to taste. People will use AI to do things that are good. They're just, you're just gonna be like that. This is great. This music is awesome. How did you make it? They're going to say some AI tool and you're going to be slightly disappointed, but they're going to be like, does that mean the music is not as good? Right. Like if you didn't know. And I think that's the same with writing. It's the same with art. It's the same with code.

[01:14:09] There are a lot of stories this week about a band camp and others banning AI music saying, you know, but if a human works with an AI to make music, is that any less music? That's the tricky part is where do you draw the line in any type of entertainment? Yeah. Benito, who's a musician. He's like, yeah, fuck him. It is. Yeah, it's true. Don't put that on my band camp. Context matters. It's true. Yeah. Well, that's the question.

[01:14:37] That's that fundamental question. Is there something we do as humans? I mean, it comes, it's the soul. I wouldn't say it's something fundamental. That goes beyond the mechanism. I don't say, I don't think of it in those terms. I think it's like music, the purpose of music is to connect human to human from one human to another human. And the process of creation is critical to that. Yeah. So like, yeah. So there's no point in, I think there's no point in AI music. And it's strange because then you'll see an AI song take off on TikTok and people know

[01:15:06] that it's AI, but it's catchy. And then it kind of links back to the fact that music, I also believe it's a very important form of expression. But so much of even human generated music is so, is sloppy. Like, you know, and so how much do people actually care about what's in something? And I guess that's the question is, um, if you care about the substance of something, then you will be more sensitive to how something was created. Um, and if you don't, and you're just trying to vibe, then you're not going to care as much.

[01:15:35] But I'm sure y'all have seen this, but when I walk into my local camera shop, the first area is all film because so many young people have moved to film as a, as a reaction to this, or I got this camera. You guys remember this one, the S 95 Canon. Love it. Great camera. I just bought it. It's brand new to me. And, and it's like this thing of like, it's so low tech. It doesn't even have a touchscreen. And it's like, I think I, and I bought it because a lot of friends who are younger were like,

[01:16:04] this is camera is perfect for taking snaps. And it's like this idea of re of taking the tech out of it. And I think that's something that is going to happen more as like, I'm, I'm going to want to go to a show, a rock show or whatever. And I don't like, I don't want it to be a laptop band. I want it to be rough. But at the same time, I will also go to a laptop band, but it's con like context. It's a different thing. And it's, and it's, um,

[01:16:32] So I drum machine is never as good as a human drummer because a human drummer makes mistakes. This is also not true because there's things that are, that a electronic drummer can do that a human drummer could never do. Well, see now Benito, careful because you're undermining your argument here. No, I'm not. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not 30 years ago. Somebody might said, well, you used a drum machine. That isn't music. You got to play those drums. No, see the thing is I didn't, but see, I didn't play the drums. I produced the drums. There's a difference. Oh yeah. Well, here's a Swedish song. Jag, I don't know what it is.

[01:17:01] I can't, I can't play it. Jag vet duar intamin. I can't play it because it'll probably be taken down, but it's been banned. This is on Spotify, but it's been banned, excluded from Sweden's official charts because it's partially AI generated. It is a huge hit in Sweden. I know you're not mine by a singer called Jakob. It's top to Spotify rankings, but it's been excluded from the charts. I like how Spotify is just like, we don't care. It's money.

[01:17:30] Spotify, half of what's on Spotify is AI generated, right? It's an acoustic guitar led folk pop song. I want to play it. It's very nice. I just played a little bit of it. It's pretty, pretty. Oh, I bet it's great. The artist Jakob's voice and parts of the music are generated with the help of AI as a tool in our creative process, says the Danish music publisher Stellar. This is, this is what I say to people about my code process.

[01:17:58] It's a creative process that I share with AI. But the reality is, is I literally don't do any work. It's the same thing with vibe coding and music here. I can connect these two. Like when you're vibe coding, you're, you're developing, you're not coding. You're not doing any of the coding you're developing. Yeah. So you don't call yourself a coder. You're not a coder. Oh, I do. I do. You are, you are a coder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what would you say to people who pose the argument of, well, um, auto tune has been

[01:18:26] used for years and years to make songs better, um, then AI should also be allowed. What, what distinction do you guys draw between those two technologies in music? I mean, it's very much a gradient from like how much work you've, or how much you put into it. You know, like I go, I go back to Corey Doctorow's, um, thing about information density. You know, how much information did you contribute actually to this thing? If you, if your whole, if your whole contribution was a 10 word prompt, then you really didn't do anything. Yeah. I would agree with that.

[01:18:54] I spent a lot of time going back and forth with Claude to generate my code. Yeah. So that's different. Like your information density is higher. You know, so you actually contributed a lot of information. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, it was like 30, maybe, maybe 50 words, a hundred words. The information density. I had never heard that argument. I think that's very interesting. I do like it, but I think it is going to be less and less good or less and less accurate because, um, the other day my kid asked me for, he said, can I have a cartoon that has

[01:19:24] these two characters that are not in the same universe? And I was just like, that's, that's ridiculous. Why would you possibly? And then I was like, wait a minute, Sora had that Disney thing for a second. And there's, they're like, it's like a step away between being like, I want cars, but with, uh, you know, but with, uh, uh, Snoopy or whatever. And like having all these things mixed together is, it really is going to be very, very easy to have, have this happen. This is the AI. It's nice, right?

[01:19:53] Yeah, it's pretty. Relaxing. Yeah. Yeah, but they just, they just need a didgeridoo. They had a didgeridoo in there. It'd be much better. Or some two balloon throat singing. All right. We're going to take a break. More to come. Some actual tech news. Oh, I'm sure. Maybe. We'll see. I like the philosophy. I, I, I don't know, folks. Do you mind? Do we kind of, we just have fun sometimes, you know?

[01:20:23] I mean, this is me being a non-conformist, right? Exactly. Practice. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm a bad boy. That's the title. Oh, man. You should have Cloud call you that. Call me various of bad boy. I need to call Barry. I'll call you daddy and you call me bad boy. Call me bad boy. Okay. All right. Forget the captain. Call me bad boy. Captain is scrapped. Yeah.

[01:20:52] I'm the bad boy now. This episode of This Week in Tech brought to you by Redis. Yeah, I know. You know Redis. We use Redis. This is what, when you go to our website, it pops right up, right? Thank you, Redis. Redis is the real-time data platform that powers ultra-fast applications. It's used for caching. It's used for data storage, search, vector embeddings, AI workloads, and more.

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[01:23:07] Many, many, actually, now we're really behind, because thanks to my new AI friend, I have been generating lots of stories very, very rapidly. Instagram, there was a report that Instagram had a breach of 17.5 million users and that all their data was revealed. This came from Malwarebytes.

[01:23:34] Instagram said, no, there was no breach. Maybe you thought there was a breach because, oh yeah, we did send out a lot of password reset emails and that was the security flaw. An external party triggered the reset emails. Instagram said you can safely ignore them. Malwarebytes said information on 17.5 million Instagram accounts and that included usernames, physical addresses.

[01:24:04] Does Instagram have your physical address? I know, I'm trying to remember. I don't think so. Maybe if you bought something. I don't want it to. I don't want it to have it. If you bought something, then obviously. Phone numbers, email addresses. And Malwarebytes says, we see them on the dark web. So it's unclear. Instagram denies it. I think that's the first step when you have a breach is to deny it. Isn't that how, isn't that the rules of how this works? Someone says, were you hacked? And you're like, no, no, not, no. We were not hacked.

[01:24:31] And if you are an Instagram user, you should stop believing what you see. The latest thing on Instagram is defaming celebrities with AI generated sex scandals. Is this related to Grok as well? Probably. Here's Mike Tyson. These are influencers doing this. Here's The Rock in bed with my mom and me. That's Maduro. That's so good.

[01:25:00] Nicholas Maduro. Funny. And LeBron James. These are all fake. I just want to, this is from 404 Media. They found them all. The influencers are then posting this of themselves? Yes. Because you can. You can generate these. Now, I think probably the influencers thinking, well, I know everybody knows this is fake, but. I think they're giving people too much credit. Yeah.

[01:25:24] I think most people know it's fake, but then it's the people who don't know that is really the issue that we don't necessarily. I mean, this is. And then they put it on their Facebook page where a lot of people see it who don't know it's not fake. And then suddenly it goes viral. Have you guys seen any celebrities speak up about this? Because I haven't yet. So that's sure to come. Yeah. They're probably like, what the. Yeah.

[01:25:50] My attitude on this is, this is good because if I ever were to be caught in flagrante delicto, I have deniability. I've never heard those words before. First of all. Isn't that a great phrase? That's beautiful. What did you see that Matthew McConaughey trademarked? Yeah. He uploaded three videos of himself. One of them just going out on the porch, looking around.

[01:26:18] One of them going, all right, all right, all right. From Dazed and Confused. Actually, I think it was the clip from Dazed and Confused. And yes, he did that with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office so that if somebody then clones his voice or image, he could say, no, it's trademark. I don't know if it'll hold up in court. I'm curious. Huh. This all started with Sora, with opening Sora, right? Where you can make videos of anybody.

[01:26:46] In fact, some of them were like having Martin Luther King endorse. Right. That was a very strange. When I opened Sora and it was all Martin Luther King videos, I was like, something has gone horribly wrong and that's probably called San Francisco. I don't, I don't know. So I have a dream that someday everybody will eat Kentucky fried chicken. It was like, no, that's not right. That's called racism. That's racist. I think it's racist. Yeah. It's just not right. Yeah.

[01:27:11] So what Sora did, first they made a deal with Disney so that they could do it with Disney, which Disney might regret. But they also did say, well, anybody who's not historic like Martin Luther King could contact us and we'll prohibit that. I don't know what the Nicolas Maduro thing is though right now. I don't know where he is. Is he historic? Sometimes you're just trying to find humor in a really complicated world. I think that's where the Nicolas Maduro thing is. Yeah.

[01:27:42] Yeah. The French courts have now started to order VPNs to block pirate sites. VPNs are going to be under assault, right? Because that's how people get around these age restrictions. CyberGhost Express VPN, our sponsor, NordVPN, ProtonVPN, and Surfshark all have been ordered by the Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris to block. This is that.

[01:28:08] These guys, these sports streaming sites have been extremely aggressive all over Europe with takedowns. And in fact, in some ways they're breaking the internet because they're so offended by people pirating these football matches. It's also Formula One, League Football League One, MotoGP. Do either of you have that friend who is really into watching pirated streams that they get off Reddit?

[01:28:38] Yes. It's such a funny, like, I don't even know, like I have a friend who could totally- It's not a good experience. Well, it's just what I laugh about is anyone I know who's doing it is, it's not about the money for some reason. They have money to, like, buy the thing that allows them to watch the F1 race or whatever, or football or whatever it is. But they're like, no, I hook up a laptop to my TV and I find this random stream and I have to do all of this crazy stuff. And then I'm going to, like, an IP address and entering some wild set of characters.

[01:29:08] And then there's some stream that I watch with some software that I downloaded from somewhere that is not in English. It's not in any European language either. It's Chinese probably. And then they're watching some random IPTV stream and they're like, it's just cheaper. And you're like, no. No, no. I have one friend that does that. Oh, no, it's not one. It is a huge. The Reddit scene is gigantic. For a while, O'Docter would come on the show and he said, he would always say, I have a friend

[01:29:37] who goes to all the kids' sports games and he sells fire TV sticks that have been modified to carry pirate streams. Now, by the way, Amazon finally put the kibosh on that after years and years. And they weren't cheaper. They were like 600 bucks, 500 bucks. It's because you could do it. Yeah. Sticking it to the man. It's back in the day when we were talking about pirating games where people would just have a thousand games that they pirated. Not that they were ever going to play them. It was just kind of, yeah.

[01:30:06] It's just a thing to do. That's why it's a collector. Yeah. Pat yourself on the back. Yeah. Yeah. The social media ban is in effect in Australia. It's been in effect for a month. Some say some teenagers are grateful that they can't get online. Nearly 5 million accounts have been removed because they belong to people under 16. Meta said we took down half a million.

[01:30:35] It was Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube. All had to ban kids under 16 from using the services at all. YouTube. What I like. Yeah, YouTube. Oh, yeah. Like the rest would be like, fine. Whatever. Reddit and YouTube, I feel like. That's a big deal. I think Reddit skated. I don't. Was Reddit on? Yeah. I guess it was on that list. That's a lot. This is just going to create a wave of incredible Australian hackers.

[01:31:05] Yes. That's what you said last time. I know. I love it. I love it. Every time a friend's just like, yeah, I installed some surveillance where on my kid's phone, I'm like, great. Send them over to the hacker side. You're teaching them some skills with a Z. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have some mad skills. I mean, I'm just, I wonder what that process is of like the withdrawal of the teenagers and kids who are on these platforms and suddenly are cut off.

[01:31:33] I mean, I think we've all tried cutting social media out of our lives and we're back in a couple of days at most, if not a couple of weeks or whatever, but that's got to be, that's got to be quite a trial period there. It's the new dry January is the new, new social media free January. That's right. And I see people shaking all over. Honestly. Are people doing it? Are people really not doing it for January? I think standing in line at the grocery store going, I don't know. What do I do? What do I do with my head? I have to look around?

[01:32:03] I have to talk to people? With the collapse of the world around us, I've stopped using most social media. Oh, great. However... It is doom scrolling. It really is doom scrolling. I don't feel good. However, I love TikTok. You talk a Sunday too. I am so addicted, but most of my feed is not about tech. It's not about... It's incredible. And one of my favorite parts about it is it's where I find a lot of music.

[01:32:31] AI music or human music? Well, I don't really know if it's AI music or human. I'm not really too far to it. Is it still really good about the algorithm adapting to your interests? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know. What do you get? So really, this is like more than astrology. This is a Ouija board. This is a way of knowing who you are. So what does your TikTok say about you, Abrar?

[01:32:57] It says that I am completely unserious, which is funny because most of the time I'm very serious when I have to be professional. But it's just gags, just lots of gags. I mean, I go on there to laugh. And so I do. And I never feel better when I get off of Instagram, but I always feel better when I get off of TikTok, even if I've spent an ungodly amount of time on it. Yeah. What do you see on your TikTok? Well, this is obviously a TikTok shop because I bought a chain man.

[01:33:27] Okay, now you're going to get medieval armor TikToks for the rest of your life. Look at this guy. Look at this guy. I don't know what this guy's doing. This looks like something of my interest. I need a lot of attendance back there, which I don't know what's going on. Some friends of mine once told me of a game that they were playing. These were young people, recent grads, people who just got jobs and still go to friends' houses.

[01:33:51] And they were saying that they would plug their phone into the TV and just blindly scroll their algorithm to show people. And it's like this funny thing. How fun. Because you're just bearing. It's you're bearing your life to someone through this algorithm. And some of it is not pretty and some of it's not good. And sometimes, and all my young friends who grew up around TikTok know how to reset their algorithm really fast, know how to guide it really fast. Oh, how do you do this? So tell me. Do you know how?

[01:34:19] You can hold hard press on a video and just say not interested. Oh, actually what I did. So before I went to the Ares tour, when Taylor Swift was touring, I didn't want any spoilers and I knew I would get spoilers on TikTok because it knows I love, I love Taylor Swift. Right. So I, every time I'd see a Taylor Swift video immediately, I would say not interested. And within a couple of days, it stopped showing me any Taylor Swift videos, but not only that, it thought I hated her. So then I started showing me Taylor Swift hate videos and I was like, no, no, no, that's not what I need.

[01:34:53] So I am, I think it knows what I like because I spend more time on certain videos than others. When I first start using either TikTok or Instagram, because it knows I'm a 70 year old man, it shows me a lot of women in bikinis because it just figures, well, that's just for everybody. That's what you want through straps. We know. No, it takes a lot of work. Yeah. You have to. So, but I've trained it because I don't. And now I get flash mobs and I love flash mobs.

[01:35:22] There you go. There's not a, there's not a moment when I am watching a flash mob. I will watch it to the bitter end. Like some guy standing in a courtyard going memories. And I just, I know it's going to be a flash mob and I will watch it to the bitter end. There's 300 people in an orchestra and a tuba band and they're all playing memories. And I go, and I always, I get tears. I get tears and I get chills and I go, I love that. That's beautiful.

[01:35:49] So I make, so you think I should long press and say, I am interested or I heart it? Heart it. Make sure you heart it. Watch it all the way through. You can watch it a couple of times if you wanted. The more time you spend on it. I love flash mobs. I don't know. It's weird. I love that. Yeah. No, but this is what TikTok's for. I got really deep in trombone TikTok. I'm not, I don't even know what that means. There you go. And then that got me to like HBCU marching band TikTok. I did. I see, I see a lot of marching bands. Love marching bands.

[01:36:16] And then like speakers and stereos and some camera review. I want some camera reviews, more camera reviews. More camera reviews. I don't care about any of them and I would never buy one, but I like sometimes that. But everyone, but it really is hard. Like I've ever saying, it starts out with like hard bodies everywhere and it's hard to get out of that. I don't like, I really don't like the thirst traps. I feel very manipulated. I still, to this day, like every now and then they'll slip one in and I'm like, I'm still not interested. Like I've been on this platform for six years now.

[01:36:46] Like we don't need to be doing this. Like, you know, I've never liked one of these. Yeah. They still try. Well, TikTok is watching. Because they know, they know how fast or slow you go. Yeah, exactly. Are you curious? They're like, you watched three seconds before you rejected this video. I just want to point that out. Exactly. They need to be righteous. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's a little bit. My daughter who's 32 said, no, no, you got to. You got to swipe that fast. You got to swipe that stuff fast. Really fast. Get out of here. Don't, don't waste any. Don't even, don't even look at it to go. Is that a thirst trap? Oh, it is.

[01:37:15] No, swipe it. No, you got to get it out of there. It's like a test. Well, if you don't. Reflexes. You're like, how fast? I had a very, I had a very funny experience with this. When thread launched, threads launched. You remember when threads launched and, and all these. That was a big day. It was a big day. But also like within the next week, they're figuring out the algorithm. And the only algorithm I think they had was the Instagram algorithm. Yeah. And so a friend of mine, and they remember how they also surfaced replies. Your friends reply. I hate that.

[01:37:43] And so you'd see this like random replies from someone. And so I had this friend and I saw that he was only replying to like thirst trap people. And he is a middle-aged man. And I was like, so I sent him a net text and I'm just like, Hey, just so you know, Instagram is surfacing your replies. And I'm noticing that you're, you've literally only replied to traditionally attractive women.

[01:38:08] And it looks like, for your entire duration of your time on threads, that they're outing you. And he's like, that can't be true. And he just was like, Oh my God. And he's just like, why would, that's all that they, that's all they push. That's what their algorithm pushes me. And I'm like, welcome to algorithms. Literally. That's how that works. Yeah. Be careful with your Instagram is what I'm saying. Well, now they're doing that with reels. Like you can see whatever people are liking and you're like, Oh, yeah. There's a guy, there's a guy I know.

[01:38:36] Every thirst trap I see, it says, John likes this one. It's like, no, I don't like anything. Even stuff I do like, I don't like, I'm like, I don't need you. Even if it's a tea party, I don't need you to know what I like. Don't do that to my friends. Yeah. TikTok. So I guess we're waiting to see what's going to happen now that TikTok is, I don't know what's happening. I'm not enthused about the changes that are coming. When do we have to start using the new US app?

[01:39:03] I think sometime this year, I kind of lost track because there's been so much back and forth that I stopped tuning in lately, but I need to follow up on that. Well, it was really the never ending soap opera. It's so never ending. It's so much. Oh my God. But apparently they made a deal. China is going to maintain like 20% ownership. I like it was just all about. It's just China. Like the country of China. The country of China owns it still. It's 20%. Everyone gets a little piece. Everybody gets a little bit. Oracle gets a bit. Yep.

[01:39:34] They supposedly were rewriting an American version of the TikTok app. I bet you that never appears. I feel the same way. Yeah. And it's also unnecessary. And they have launched a new app, by the way, called Pine Drama. Oh, I saw this. Yeah. I don't watch these little dramas. They occasionally will show up in my feed. You mean you don't watch an entire movie in two-minute segments? That kind of thing. No. It's not funny.

[01:40:04] That's one of my favorite TikToks. It's always the most dramatic moment. Like, you're not my husband. You're his twin brother. Yeah. And then they go. And then, yeah, it's only a blip. But apparently, there's a whole drama. Like, there are multiple series of these. So, if you really like that, get the Pine Drama app. Well, I mean, this is a big thing. Here's some samples. Throughout the world.

[01:40:33] There are these micro dramas. The Officer Fell for Me. Yes. That's 192 million views. Yes. Remarried at 50. My husband turns into a billionaire. Okay. All right. That's a double victory. Is that a how-to? Yeah. The Awakening of the Returned Heiress. Oh. Okay. And then... I mean, these are like the dramas. Like, I spent a little tiny, tiny bit of time in Indonesia. And some friends of mine were involved in the telenovelas. Or like telenovelas. Yeah. There. And like, what was very interesting about that, and I'm sure TikTok is doing this,

[01:41:02] and this was in the 2010s, so like 2016, 2017. They were using the analytics of who and what watched, and then using social media to figure out what tomorrow's telenovela would bring. So it was changed every single day the new script was written. And so it allowed this thing to last and defeat trends. And so where a typical drama might suddenly get out of date because some macroeconomic thing or some, you know, someone invades Ukraine or whatever,

[01:41:29] this is just dodging everything and they can react to what the people want. And I think there's a really interesting thing here. But it is very interesting to see. It'll be very interesting to see how it plays in the U.S. Do they have ads? How are they monetizing? Is it a subscription? It doesn't... I think in that article I mentioned, like, for now it's free, but they're going to have to monetize it. Maybe you get people hooked and then you either force them to pay to get more episodes. It's like $20 to subscribe.

[01:41:59] Yeah. But I'm just more curious about this vertical shorts format in general, because even streaming platforms are now incorporating vertical videos into their, like Disney Plus, Tubi. All these platforms are figuring out ways to take advantage of the fact that people like short vertical content. And so they're either clipping down their own content into, like, vertical formats on their apps. But I don't know. I'm still figuring out if you can take something that works well on one platform,

[01:42:28] shoehorn it into yours and think that that's also going to be a formula for success. I really don't know about that. When you said short vertical content, I'm sorry. I flashed on this event that's coming downtown Petaluma. It's called Midget Wrestling. I mean, I think that sounds offensive, but apparently the little people who participate say, oh, no, that's fine. They get to call that. Yeah. Their little people, Lisa went. Burke, you went, right, with Lisa? And yeah, it's short vertical content.

[01:42:57] That's exactly what I was referring to, actually. Sometimes horizontal, not always vertical. I got to go. I forgot. I got somewhere to be. I mean, remember David Lynch, what he said about watching movies on your phone? Remember that he had some interviewer. He was like, this is literally the worst way to watch movies. Oh, I can't imagine any filmmaker thinking this is a good thing. But it must be so depressing, that aspect. But I've watched a movie on my phone. It was pretty nice.

[01:43:27] Like, I mean, it wasn't like going to a theater. Really? It wasn't like being at my house. But like, what kind of movie? Was it like Harry Met Sally kind of a movie or? I have no recollection. It was like Interstellar or Off-Up. You know what I mean? Like a good movie. I think that'd be frustrating. It's really close to my eyes, so it looks like I'm there. Well, then it's a big screen. Yeah, exactly. I don't think, I think that it just is, TikTok has shown, and then the copy of Reels has shown that people will spend an inordinate amount of time using these apps, consuming this type

[01:43:57] of video content. And so, of course, you know, Disney Plus, who is in a death fight with everyone else for eyeballs, is going to be like, well, I want their eyeballs. Yeah. And I think maybe the lesson, they're taking away the wrong lesson. I think, and I think many of these companies are just trying everything to try and get the eyeballs, and this is just one of the things they're trying. I think the lesson of TikTok is about long tail content, not about the video format. Correct.

[01:44:22] And I think that the lesson of TikTok is about having, you know, they maximized on view count. That's the metric that is important, not follower count, which I think is a little bit anti-American, to be honest. Do we worry about how this is rewiring our brain and our attention span? Because clearly it is, right? I mean, it's not. Yeah, we're boned. I mean, it's true that like you'll forego watching a two and a half hour movie in favor of scrolling on TikTok for two and a half hours.

[01:44:51] And so you've then watched hundreds of videos that keep your attention versus just sitting down and locking into one story that it could be a very good story too. But when I want to watch a movie, ideally it's a movie I can watch in a theater where I can't touch my phone and I can't get up or do anything. I need to be like strapped to my chair and I cannot have any other options. I've always thought movies really were the true VR experience because a good movie, you suspend your existence.

[01:45:20] You know, the music, the picture's big. You become immersed in the movie and you don't even remember you're watching a movie. You're now having an experience. It's real. That's real VR. Absolutely. And it doesn't make your head hurt afterwards. But short-form content isn't new either. Like we had Quibi and we had Vine and those didn't really work out. It was, it's really the algorithm in TikTok that gets people. It's the algorithm. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And like, I finally figured out how to do it. Right. Yeah. You counts. Yeah, you're right. Like about like your follower count doesn't matter. Absolutely.

[01:45:48] It's, do you make something that resonates with a lot of people? If so, you can get a taste of success and then you're going to want more of that success. You're going to keep posting and I look at my poor son who is on the creator treadmill. Sounds horrible. Yeah. I really feel for him. He it's, it's, uh, but he's got two and a half million followers on, on TikTok. And then he started a restaurant in New York city. It's the number one sandwich in New York city.

[01:46:16] According to the New York times is one of the top 50 restaurants in New York city. All cause he did that on TikTok and he, he paid attention to what the algorithm liked and it's with sandwiches and he paid attention and he refined it, refined it, refined it. Everyone loves sandwiches. Who doesn't love sandwiches? He's the sandwich King of New York city now, but the poor guy, he's got to constantly make more videos. You you're now on a treadmill. Yep. Actually we're gonna take a break. When we come back, I will talk about the creator economy.

[01:46:43] Apparently it's just like every other economy. The rich get richer. Oh man. The 1% again. I know we were, that's what's supposed to be an escape, but we got income inequality in creators. Come on, man. We'll get to that in just a moment. You're watching this week in tech with a bra all heety from CNET. So nice to see you. See you. Yeah. Looks like a nice day in heaty land. It is. Wait, I love that.

[01:47:14] That could be the title of your blog. I think it's a good title. It's a beautiful day. But like for me, yeah, I love it. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, Harper Reed, who's in the windy city where it's a little chilly, but he's got a giant heater. He's got a giant heater. 18 degrees. Wow. I have literally, I'm running the fan right now, not to rub it in, but I need it because it's freeze. It's a, it's a springtime in San Francisco. Yeah. It's lovely. Oh yeah. Sorry. I'm trying to figure this out.

[01:47:46] Our show today brought to you by those fabulous folks at Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. We talk about AI all the time. And it's very clear that the potential rewards of AI, especially for business are too great to ignore. If you don't have an AI plan, you're missing out. But the risks are also too great to ignore the loss of sensitive data,

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[01:48:42] They're using it to automate data extraction. Once they're in and they've got lateral movement in your network, there's nothing they can't do. And then there's always the problem of your employees using AI and accidentally exfiltrating proprietary information. There were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications. So you've really got to think about your organization's safe use of public and private AI. And I want you to think about Zscaler because it's the best solution.

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[01:50:10] guarantees greater productivity, and you can get compliance thrown in as just part of the benefits. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. You know, this is one of the things we've seen. Traditionally, we've done very well over the last 20 years with advertisers, but there is a shift. It went from consumer-focused advertising,

[01:50:40] you know, the mattresses and so forth, to business advertising, like the kinds you see on our show these days, security and that kind of thing. I think a lot of the advertising, the digital advertising that was buying banner ads and was buying podcasts has now gone to influencers. And it is a big, big market. Billions of dollars going to influencers. I know this because, in a way, I feel happy because my son's getting what we used to get. It's going to my son. Still in the family. It's going to my son.

[01:51:09] In fact, he said, Dad, I just flew out to LA for a Super Bowl ad. I said, what? Oh, cool. He said, he's in the background. Oh, my God. Of the Hellman's mayonnaise. Hellman's is one of his sponsors. That's amazing. And you just look for it. It's the guy from Lonely, the Saturday Night Live guy. Lonely Island. Lonely Island. Yeah. Yeah. What's his name? Adam. Anyway. Sandberg. He's singing.

[01:51:39] Is it Adam Sandberg? Yeah, it's Adam Sandberg. Singing to the tune of Sweet Caroline. Neil Diamond Sweet Caroline. Andy Sandberg. Sweet sandwich time. Andy Sandberg. And then, but watch in the background. There'll be a guy with a mustache and curly hair holding a sandwich. That's my son. Oh, my God. I love that. I don't want to say how much he got paid for this, but let me put it this way. Say it. There's no secrets between us. No, I can't. I can't. But it's so much money. It was more than we make in several months

[01:52:07] for two minutes of his time. I love this for him. I know. It's great, but that's where the money's going. A creator income inequality. This is from Business Insider is rising. The top 1% of creators get 21% of brand spending. And that's been going up, up, up, and up. The Mr. Beasts of the world. This comes from Creator IQ, which keeps track of all of this. And that number is going up.

[01:52:37] The top 1% was 15% of the revenue. Then it was 18%. Last year, it was 21%. It's only going to be more. Overall, U.S. advertising spending on creators, $37 billion last year. Wow. Getting that. $37 billion. And most of it goes to a very narrow segment of top talent. I'm happy for my son.

[01:53:09] But Creator IQ says, of their survey of 300 creators, only 11% earn more than $100,000 a year. A quarter of them fell into the $50,000, $100,000. And the rest, $25,000 to $50,000. So don't become a creator expecting it. I mean, you can make a living. But you'd probably be better off if you became a plumber. Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating to see this shift because becoming a creator was supposed to be a way to kind of circumvent the traditional parameters of success

[01:53:37] and either financially or professionally. And now it's kind of falling into that same template of the top will make all the money. The rest of you will keep trying. Yeah. And you're still working just as hard if you're in the bottom 10%. Yep. Maybe even harder. Yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah. And there was like a, if we're going to talk about like TikTok and Instagram creators, there was this period during COVID where I think a lot of people got this opportunity

[01:54:05] to really boost their brands. Like one of the areas is theme park influencers, right? So anyone who lived near a theme park as they started to open up after the pandemic, they got this boost because all these people were itching to go back out into the world, but didn't have the access that they had, right? So then you had at least a lot of these creators kind of build their following during that time. And they seemed like there was a window of opportunity there. And now everyone can go do these things if they have the money to. It's not as difficult to have access to those things.

[01:54:32] But yeah, it's like you catch the opportunities when you can. And then the opportunities go away and maybe you wait for the next wave. Yeah. And it's so unpredictable. It's hard to plan your life. You know, if it's funny, one of our regulars on Mac Break Weekly, Renee Ritchie, decided to create a YouTube channel. But he lives in Canada. He said, I couldn't have done this

[01:54:59] if I didn't have healthcare provided by Canada. Because if I quit my job, I would suddenly not have healthcare. And that wasn't tenable for me. Yeah. I think that's a huge thing. I did a, in 2019, I was really interested in creating a 24-hour Twitch news channel. I thought that'd be really cool. I thought that was something. So I did some interviews of some folks, influencers that were Twitch streamers. And I was talking to them and they all across the board were like,

[01:55:29] do not, do not. Do not, do not. And one of them was talking about how when, if he was, if he missed a stream in one day, like his expected stream, that his revenue would go down basically 10%. And it would take another couple months to get back up to that stream, the revenue that he had. And so he's like, I can't go to the bathroom. I can't go to the dentist. I can't do any of these things because I'm at like, you know, 8.30 or whatever, I have to go play some ridiculous game online.

[01:55:58] And everyone, you know, and everyone is expecting me to do it. And if I don't, then they'll go to someone else's stream and I'll lose them as sponsors and so on and so forth. And it just sounded horrible. Like their experience was horrible and all of them were trying to get out of it. Then they were all, these were successful streamers who were making some money. And I think that's, that's where I was like, oh. Yeah. So I worked, I worked at Twitch and everyone, every employee at Twitch has access to every streamer's dashboard.

[01:56:27] So anybody can see anybody's revenue. It's like, wow. Yeah. It's pretty bad. It's a pretty bad open system. I mean, I don't know if it's still like that. It may not still be that way. Yeah. It might not still be that way, but I remember, and what Harper's saying is absolutely true. I would, you could see the revenues of streamers just go up and down depending on if just, if they were streaming or not or how often they were streaming. And it was, you could really map it to like, yeah, you'd have to be on all the time. Like they all, it's really, yeah. They all lose a lot of money

[01:56:57] for just not streaming for a day. Yeah. Henry says that there's an intense pressure to make a new sandwich every single day and it's hard for him. You know, I worry about him to be honest. There's only 10 sandwiches. How many sandwiches can there be? I mean, that's the thing is it's, it pushes you so far where you think you, you've done, you've reached a level of threshold of success, but you have to keep pushing beyond what you thought even was possible. The funny thing is you're kind of right, Harper, because he only is restaurant,

[01:57:27] Saul Hanks in the New York City only serves one sandwich. It's a French dip. That's it. He said, we, we developed another sandwich. We were going to do a chicken parm and a vodka sauce developed. It's beautiful. Nobody ordered it. They just wanted the French dip. So we just stopped. We stopped selling it because that's all anybody wanted was the French dip. Well, there's, this goes back to another thing that we were talking about, before about AI usage and, and how I have a friend who's a photographer and influencer and, you know, he has lots and lots and lots of followers and he hated it.

[01:57:56] He hated it because he could not step outside of what he was known for the certain style and he just had to do that style forever. Success is not necessarily, when I was in college, I got into radio and I thought, this is going to be great. I will get a job. I will get to play the music I love. It'll be so great. And I, the lesson I learned at the age of 21 is never get a job doing something you love. That's actually

[01:58:26] really helpful advice. Because it, it really loves the dreams of things that we want to do. Yeah. It takes all the fun out of it. Yeah. That's so true. I got there. I started doing radio and you don't get to choose the music and then, you know, the slogan of the station was light rock, less talk. And I realized I'm the talk. But basically, their advertising is Leo's not going to, is going to shut up now and play some music. And at that point,

[01:58:54] you're just a button pusher. You're not choosing the music. You're not saying anything about the music. You're just playing the next song. The magic of it probably wore off pretty quick. Yeah. Pretty quick. The program director said every 10 minutes, you're going to say the weather, the time, and play the next song. Yeah. And then they give you what they call liners, which are things on four by six cards that you read. And that's it. So you don't even get to come up with what you would say. No. Gosh.

[01:59:25] Yeah, I became a, yeah, I kind of realized it. That's just because you had an unrealistic expectation of what the job was. Well, I thought I was playing music. Exactly. I was going to be a DJ I was going to play music. I loved it. I mean, like most people would think like, oh yeah, you get to do the things that you went and you could do. Yeah. I bet that's sort of true for coding. Like I like coding because I don't have to do it. No? No. I mean, maybe like we all got jobs being like, I'm like, no one starts coding at a career job thinking they're going to build their own thing. Oh, okay. But it's also, you know what I mean?

[01:59:55] It's also not the coding. It's the what you're coding is awesome. Also matters. I get to choose what I want to write and when I want to write it and what I write it in common lisp. Nobody's going to hire me. No wonder you use kitty. Kitty in common lisp. It's a match made in heaven, baby. They both start with K. Yeah. And Emacs. I love Emacs. All right. One more break. There's still quite a bit of talk about,

[02:00:25] but we'll get to that. We hardly did any news because we got so philosophical, but this was, I just, you know what? This is the whole point of this show for me is doing, it's, see, I get to do something I love, which is talk to people I love and about things I'm very interested in. And I hope somebody wants to hear it. There's an interesting thing of there is this kind of thread throughout all of this of like what happens when AI and disruption comes for literally everyone.

[02:00:55] You know, whether it's, you know, AI or creators or any of this stuff, like how does it, how does it manifest? And I think that we are just severely unprepared for this in the West. I don't know if anywhere else, I only live here. I think you hit on something and maybe inadvertently, but I bet you not. Which is, the key is artisanal. If what you're doing is a craft, it's an artisanal craft, whether it's you're writing a bra,

[02:01:23] you're coding Harper, making a sandwich. If it's artisanal, if it's personal, if it's creative, it's making music. That's what you should pursue. I always told my kids that. Do that. Do what you're passionate about and not worry about how you're going to make a living. Now, it worked out for half of them. But honestly, that's the path to happiness is doing some, and I think

[02:01:52] in a world where AI and computers and machines can create so much stuff, it's the artisanal, you know, furniture is turned into crap because it's not some guy in North Carolina hand making the furniture anymore. Yeah. Yeah. But there's still people doing that. Yeah. And that's the good stuff. Absolutely. And it feels like there's a flip because I feel like when I was in college, it was like, oh, you're going to go into something creative like journalism? Like, what about coding? And now it's like, well,

[02:02:21] not that journalism is safe, but, you know, at least we get to inject more personality into our writing than somebody can in code that can be written with AI. And it's a weird flip. So yeah. No AI is going to replace a great writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. It's true. So yeah, now more than ever, definitely pursue your path. I think so. And I think we know, and I think we want. But do you think, and I truly believe this, I'm not trying to be a contrarian because I don't believe in contrarians, but do you think that a person can create, can create,

[02:02:50] like no great writer will use AI. Like, I think that, but it seems that a newer, not a better, but a new form can appear that is like AI driven. It's got to. Like this is, this is the whole generation of kids in college right now. Not a, one of them's not using AI. But I think there's this interesting thing, which I would even say that your speedy reader is a new frame of, of code application. Being that this is a bespoke thing that only you care about,

[02:03:20] only you use. And it's so disposable that if you didn't use it for a week or two, you wouldn't be like, oh no. Well, it's still a craft. Creating that was for me, very satisfying process. There was a personal process there. And there's going to be a couple things. Like you might use AI to create some story that you're like, I love this story. And you might say to a friend, oh, I accidentally wrote this really great story and you might want to read it and you share to that person and so on and so forth. And that is, I think this all comes down to taste. Where it's like, if you,

[02:03:49] if you put, and it's not, and I don't agree with Benito on this, that it, that is about the amount of time you put into it. I love that frame, but I don't necessarily think that it matters as much. But I do think that the assumption that I have is that most things created with AI are going to be bad. But I also have that same assumption about most things people create. Like, it's like the worst, the scariest thing in the world is when your friend sends you their book and it's like, check it out, you know, and you're just like, oh no, what if it's bad? Or, or your friend sends you, you know, they're come to my band

[02:04:19] or whatever. And then you have to sit there and be like, oh, it's great. I really loved it. It was so good. You know, Lisa's great fear is when a friend of ours say, hey, we make our own wine. We're going to bring some. It's like, oh God. Yeah. Yes. No. Nobody makes great wine except people who make it for a living. So I think that, but, but then one of your friends will make great wine and it'll be just that time and place.

[02:04:48] And it's like the situation, the experience, all that stuff makes that happen. And I think that's how this is going to come about. It's like, there's going to be a time when you're going to hear a song and you'll be like, this song is awesome. What is that song? And then you're going to hear that it was, you're going to learn that it was made by AI and then you have a choice. That will be sad. But you have a choice. You have a choice at that moment to say, I don't like it because it was AI, which I think is the, is a weak choice. That's a big point of view. Or just saying like, yeah, sure. Like, great. Like, I liked that song. It was made by AI in the same way

[02:05:18] that like, you know, I like, I don't even have another example, but, but, but, TikTok videos. I know what you're talking about. Or like any, any other disposable, like human made song. You know, it's the same. But the problem is the only thing with AI music. Bob music is god awful. Yeah, absolutely. It's just, I don't think it can ever break a threat. Like AI is not going to break a threshold of like, it's never going to be Bob Dylan. It's never going to be the Beatles. Well, maybe. I mean, we, I think the same thing in sound, but in person,

[02:05:47] in like the Beatles themselves, you know, it could never be the Beatles themselves. But with every, every introduction of technology, there is always this thing whether it's newspapers or TV or the printing press where the people who are, who are from before are like, well, this will never be as good as whatever. And people who are coming after are just like, what are you talking about? And I don't mean that in that, like I have a huge stereo over there and all these records and I listen to them because of, because I enjoy the feel. And when I put in my, my headphones and listen to like TikTok music, you know,

[02:06:16] this AI generated music or whatever, I'm like, this is horrible. But every once in a while I'm bouncing my head around and like, there's a, there's, there is an amount of similarity in my, my like, like visceral reaction to it. And so I think that this is complicated. I think this is very, going to be very hard. I, for one, probably will not be seeking out AI generated music. but like, I have so many friends who power their entire careers on lo-fi beats that are all AI generated. You know what I mean? Like their whole life is lo-fi beats.

[02:06:46] Those channels are huge on YouTube, right? But I also really don't think about it as better or worse. It's just qualitatively different. It's not the same thing. It's a different thing. That's not better or worse. It's just a different thing. Yeah, that's all right. Yeah. I wrote a little, yeah, right. I wrote a little script to go out and download. Oh, I can't, what's wrong? It's not reading it. Oh shoot. I don't have a mod player, but I wrote a little script that would go down

[02:07:16] and might download a mod song. You remember mods? yeah, yeah, yeah. I was super into mods. It just goes down and downloads a random mod and plays it. I'm not sure what I'm missing on my mod, but anyway, I think I don't have a mod. mod player, but that was kind of fun and those are all crappy. They're made by humans, but they might as well be made by AI. In fact, they'd probably be better if they were made by AI, to be honest. I mean, they essentially were.

[02:07:46] It was just the AI of the time, which was young men in, in, in, you know, it was the original cheap labor. Yeah. Yeah. Let me see if it'll do that now. I just downloaded the mod player. I love mods. Mods were such a cool thing. That was, for me, the mid-90s. I actually, somewhere on a computer, I have Cloud Code running, building a 90s era demo.

[02:08:16] And it was like, well, do you want the colors to be CGA or EGA? And I was like, I don't think that matters. Kitty won't play my mods. Oh man, Kitty. Now I'm going to have to change to ghosty. We're going to take a little break, come back with lots more. You stay here. This is the, this week in tech with our wonderful panelists, Sabrar Al-Hiti from CNET, senior technology reporter, and Harper Reed

[02:08:44] and his company's 2389.ai. And he'll be soon offering artisanal chainmail helmets. No, no, no, no, software, software. That's it, software. Software. Artisanal software helmets. Software. Our show today brought to you by Monarch. I am a fan. I will tell you this. I could not have written anything as cool as Monarch. How are you with money stress? Right? Everybody is, is, is,

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[02:12:10] at Monarch.com with the code TWIT. Love this. I check it every day now. It's good to know what's going on out there. Monarch. Thank you, Monarch. We appreciate it. All right. Get ready. We're going back to the moon. February 6th, or sometime in that time frame, Artemis 2 will be launching. It will send two humans farther out into space than we ever have gone before

[02:12:39] because they're going to loop out around the back of the moon. Artemis, this is a time lapse of Artemis because that crawler moves one mile an hour. So it's not moving quite that fast, but this is the rocket being moved to the launch pad. It is now on the launch pad. The crew of four is going to be testing over the next two weeks as we get ready for the first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years. Are we excited about this? Exciting, yeah.

[02:13:10] Love space exploration. I do too. That's fantastic. It makes you look cool. I want to be cynical about it, but it's hard to be cynical about it because it's like such an achievement. Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, it just makes you think beyond this godforsaken planet. You're like, there's people out there. Yes. Reed Weissman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch from NASA, the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. See, the thing I love about this stuff is those national borders and the tensions between countries disappear.

[02:13:39] Even with the Russians in the space station, they disappear. Absolutely. It will be the first crewed mission to the moon since Apollo 17 landed in December 1972. These are very brave people. What if they get up there and it's all changed? It's all different. They're like, look, there's a city on the other side. What the heck? There's an Ikea here now? They are going to go around the back. Yeah. They will not be landing. This is, you know, as you know, and if I'm old enough to remember Apollo, you have to do it in stages where you go

[02:14:09] and you come back and, you know, it's kind of got to be frustrating for astronauts to get there, to be there and not to be able to get out of the car but have to get back and go home. Did you ever play Kerbal Space Program? Yeah, I love that. That game is so good and so hard. Yeah. Anyway, I just thought there's some good news. Yes. 40,000 miles out orbit, which is like a fifth of the way of the moon. That's the first two days of the mission.

[02:14:38] Then they go and they they go head toward the moon. The spacecraft was made in Germany. It's a European service module from the ESA built by Airbus. No. Not Boeing. No. Not Boeing. It's easy. Too soon. Too soon. Yeah. It's on 39B

[02:15:07] ready to go and they're going to be working pretty much non-stop to get ready for the earliest launch window is February 6th so we'll be covering that. I love that. I love that. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. It's so exciting. Right. And they're going to bring their iPhones and take pictures so we'll have your look on the Instagram. Oh yeah. There's going to be a lot of it's new tech they have new technology now. You know when SpaceX was doing those launches

[02:15:37] and they had these incredible 4K images coming back from the rocket it reminded me yeah it's been 50 years we got good pictures now. Yeah, exactly. It's such an epic Instagram drop. Here's the yeah. The good news is even though Trump was trying to cut NASA's budget by 25% Congress did not agree hallelujah on Thursday the Senate passed an appropriations bill

[02:16:07] which does reduce NASA's budget by 1.6% but that's a lot better than 24% which we're going to see and that's why they can't land if they have that extra money they could afford to land maybe the budget is tiny compare I mean we spent a trillion dollars a year on our generation you know the science budget continues

[02:16:36] at seven and a quarter billion that's one percent less than fiscal 2024 it was going to be cut quite a bit the science stuff is really important oh critical yeah absolutely yeah Jared Isaacman we've got finally a NASA administrator who has been in space that's the first time ever I think that's great he's a billionaire okay that's kind of you got to be a billionaire to do anything these days but okay anyway

[02:17:07] managers on alert for launch fever as pressure builds for NASA's moon mission Steven Clark writing for Ars Technica I love this pretty cool all right that's our happy story everything else is just collapse and fire and well actually you remember Havana syndrome

[02:17:36] I saw this the slash dot article is this wild yeah so this was a no one's really figured this well the Pentagon spent a huge amount of money more than a million dollars to buy millions of

[02:18:06] dollars to buy a device in an undercover operation that some investigators think could be the cause of Havana syndrome they purchased the device in the waning days of the Biden administration using funding provided by the defense department they paid eight figures so like tens of millions of dollars for it it's not big it could fit in a backpack this is they gotta make a movie out of this

[02:18:35] the story of them getting this it's funny it's probably just bought off Timu or something just Alibaba you just have to know what to search for Homeland Security Investigations bought it the device they acquired pulses produces pulsed radio waves which people have speculated for years could be the cause of Havana syndrome although the device is not entirely Russian in origin it does contain Russian components the

[02:19:08] illness first emerged in the late 2016 when a cluster of US diplomats stationed in Havana began reporting symptoms consistent with head trauma they would wake up and it was like they had the vertigo extreme headaches hearing loss there was always a suspicion there was some sort of directed energy attack but no one could figure out what had happened so now there's a spy story here about the purchase of this thing and the

[02:19:38] analysis of it so they've got it they're analyzing it it's small enough it could be portable it could have been carried around in a backpack and aimed at embassy personnel that's creepy that's wild isn't that wild yeah i want to start writing programs in zuck sharp this is a programming language for connecting the world and then harvesting the world's information it sounds nice it's a ph this is a joke language

[02:20:07] a php inspired esoteric programming language that says it captures the true essence of moving fast and breaking things every keyword has been carefully designed to reflect the values of modern social media privacy invasion congressional hearings and pivoting to whatever's trending for instance there is a variable called senator we run ads oh that's so good

[02:20:37] there's one called pivot to video pivot to metaverse steal data some good keywords here in this case maybe you should write something zuck sharp it works it works it's a real language it does require php 8.1 because it's based on php you can clone it on github and run it i'm gonna get claude code to write me something in zuck sharp i have

[02:21:07] not used php or derivative languages so long and i i tried to use a project a while back and it has changed quite a bit it turns out oh it's better than it used to be oh my gosh they have lots of good tooling it's pretty interesting like it's it's really it's like great i'm happy so much stuff is still written in php it's kind of amazing yeah it stood for personal home page and was just kind of one guy's little project to have a language that he could do his web page with with no attempt to

[02:21:37] have security or anything sensible in it it mostly just looked like like kind of a c that you could kind of read but yeah i guess over time it's gotten it's gotten better yeah php with laravel is now popular says search strip in our discord there's a new way to mine uh copper harvest it with bacteria they have reopened a copper mine in arizona

[02:22:06] powered by microorganisms and amazon will be the first customer go back to that article show it this one the headline amazon is buying copper harvested by bacteria it's not amazon look it says oh amazon web services is the first customer which i love because in my head that's just computers i'm just like those guys you got any copper exactly exactly they're using bacteria to do bio leaching uh it's

[02:22:36] newton is the company that does this their bio bleaching bio leaching method uses naturally occurring microorganisms to extract copper from low from low grade ore that would otherwise be too expensive to mine it also uses less water produces fewer emissions is that to offset the environmental damage of air data processing yeah good for aws we gotta do something man we're in trouble exactly we're there's

[02:23:05] this is like it's just like we're we're downhill here yeah uh well all right there you go bacteria the number one app in china this is kind of a this is a dystopian commentary the number one paid app in the app store in china is an app called denumu or denumu which means are you dead i need to send this to friends who don't reply to text messages yes it is uh it is

[02:23:35] it apparently taken china by storm i don't know uh you need you you install it on your phone if you don't check check in every two days by clicking a large button that says i am alive it will get in touch with your emergency contact and inform them you might be dead this is like the next level like facebook marked as safe you know yeah still kicking apparently many young people in china now live alone and there's some concern that you could you know

[02:24:05] something bad could happen and no one would know this sounds like something my mom would use for me because if i don't answer her call are you dead like where were you are you dead yeah yeah according to the bbc the app's name is a uh is wordplay on the food delivery app called are you hungry oh dead and hungry two very different states both very important yeah very very very similar that's right weirdly uh it's now the number six top paid app

[02:24:34] in the u.s with it's 99 cents designed for the ipap ipod ipad ipap i don't know what that is ipod is dead so that it's not the ipod that's definitely dead dumumu i like the little ghost icon uh just press that big green button uh i love it that the sample email given is elon at gmail dot com i don't know anybody else named elon

[02:25:05] okay that's great and then it says i've been inactive for multiple consecutive days come check my physical condition wow i think there's a there's a there's something i saw this article when it first came out and there was something i kept thinking which is i don't know enough about the cultural aspect here like i feel like there's something i'm missing from the cultural aspect the chinese cultural aspect but i gotta say this is one of my tiktok holes is the chinese youth are cool sometimes some of the stuff i am like wow

[02:25:35] these they've it's crazy just the wild wild stuff and i love it so this seems great i i fully support an app that that where you claim to not be dead yes have you seen the uh the uh videos of the autonomous vans driving around in china just going just going ham just like driving i love those videos those are really funny videos because they just are like did you see the one yeah this this is so funny

[02:26:07] these are autonomous there's nobody in them did you did you see the one where it's driving on the highway and there's just a motorcycle stuck under it there's no people nearby but ostensibly that motorcycle someone was on the motorcycle somewhere oh my god we're worried about waymo this is like yeah it's great and i um i man those are i used to love watching robots falling down videos because they were so funny and there's a couple really good compilations

[02:26:37] now of robots going wrong and it's very good it's uh yeah did you guys see the mocap one where the guy's playing the robot he kicks himself in the balls this is the funniest thing i watched this maybe seven or eight million maybe the funniest thing i've ever seen yeah it's it's so funny because you don't know it's coming and then when it when it comes you're just like this had to of course thank you all right now now now i'm

[02:27:06] searching for it i'm gonna find it here we go uh i dropped it in discord oh there you found it okay yeah man wearing mocap suit he's doing like some sort of fighting thing so he's doing it and the robot's doing what he does right it's kicking okay that's terrible the funniest thing is the robot also falls down that acts like it's been kicked yeah it's so good like the best part about any of the mocap going wrong is the robot then does exactly what the human does wrong

[02:27:37] and it's just so funny because you because it's it's just like ah man it's and we do we do a little bit of robotic stuff around here and it is so scary because when it goes wrong these things are pretty powerful you you really forget and when you that's what worries me yeah i think of it as like a chimpanzee in the house you know they're fine as long as they're just eating bananas but if they get angry they're really strong these robots can kill you like the the schools or bosses and dynamics any of these companies they have like the

[02:28:07] rooms full of netting through all of this infrastructure and then you have startups you know like mine who are just like oh it'll be fine let's just hold it with my hands oh golly anti versus the ai courier i don't know i'm just playing now random robot videos so she doesn't want it to go oh because it's going to drive they're drying like persimmons probably or she's going to drive through their dry so she's trying to push it away

[02:28:37] and so like it's just like in the road and and i think the thing that's that's very interesting um there's a really breakneck um by dan wong um i highly recommend about china and it's just like this the the level of innovation that is accessible um in some of these chinese cities is just incredible but you have that impact of just like the innovation that is accessible is also just gonna just drive through everything there's a whole bunch of videos of him driving through wet cement as well yes you know the people

[02:29:06] and people waving brooms at it and stuff and its camera trying to say don't know don't go here yeah it's it's a very fascinating thing and and um i for one love not a surprise waymo i think it's a very nice experience and it's been very i'm always kind of thrilled to do it and i would love it to come to chicago it's only matter of time it's in every other big city i'm surprised that they've really been holding out chicago i know there's snow but it's like they they're heading to detroit so that's only a matter of time oh they're gonna be in

[02:29:36] detroit so let's see i want to do the new zooks ones where there no drivers no wheels no nothing and they go in both directions by the way there's just a living room on wheels it could go that way or that way there's no front yeah they're just starting that in san francisco i can't wait to try those zooks have you tried have you seen them uh yeah i rode it in vegas last year oh you did i did and it was great it's very cute um and it feels kind of like it what it reminds me of is when you ride a black cab in london you get to face each other except there's like obviously no driver but it's cute to be able to

[02:30:06] like actually face the people talk to each other yeah absolutely it's great but i'd still ride one by myself i think it'd be oh yeah oh 100 without a doubt yeah i'm absolutely eager for them to open up to more people in ss they got a little problem with the waymos in san francisco you remember with the power outage they got confused and they just stopped in the middle of the intersections the other problem waymo is now paying uh people on the street in san francisco 25 bucks if you see a waymo with the door open because people will get out of the waymo and forget to close the door and the waymo has no way of closing the door

[02:30:35] right so with the door open it can't go anywhere it just has to somebody so waymos put out to san franciscans you might want to know this and tell your friends taking notes if you see a waymo with the door open close it because they're going to pay you to do that because how did they find you claim it yeah tap your phone on the waymo's door i don't know get in front of it and let it scan your face make sure you get it was me hi yeah i mean there are like elon at

[02:31:04] gmail.com exactly how do you call it a robot if it's kind of close its own doors man well that waymo said you know we realize it's a problem so the next generation will have door closers yeah but right now before they roll that out but yeah this is my new side hustle in the meantime yeah good good one it's a good one yeah 10 of those a day you know you got fine yeah i quit my job yeah this is great i just closed doors yeah it's fine it's normal you're watching this week in

[02:31:31] tech abrar al-hiti uh wonderful to have you senior technology what are you working on you just back from ces you probably get to rest a little bit before i get to rest i'm actually gonna be on pto all of next week so i've got stories done i did a big one on on robo taxis at ces just because there were so many um so that was that was really cool to see all the new stuff coming out is there somebody who's like really got something exciting i mean this seems cool zoeks is cool but the i think the big thing at cs there were two that were really big um uber lucid and neuro we're all teaming up for a robo taxi that's rolling out in

[02:32:01] sf this end of this year i love those lucid vehicles i will love much nicer than a jaguar it's very much luxurious experience got inside of it looks is that going to be an uber who's that going to be it's going to be on uber yes you'll be able to call it on uber and it's powered by technology from neuro and so it's just the most bay area thing ever it's fantastic is it more expensive than a regular uber it's it remains to be seen but i wouldn't be surprised if it was more expensive because it's like because the uber black right because

[02:32:30] it's a luxurious vehicle it's it's not just like a standard sedan so there that's coming out and then the tensor robo car is a robo car that you can own which can either drive itself or if you're like god i miss driving then you can push a button and the steering wheel pops up and you get to drive it and that's supposed to also be rolling out this year are we ready for personal vehicles i it feels very fast and i know they've been developing it for like 10 years but i don't know if people if there's a want yet i don't know if people are like gosh i want my own i want it so bad yeah so i don't

[02:33:00] know we're there we'll see well it's a little bit like um when you first take a waymo you first you're like this is such a cool novelty i'm gonna take a waymo and then like the second time you're like i'm never gonna talk to another driver in my whole life this is exactly what i want i will i refuse to interact with anything but robots 100 and i and i think that is that is that it it feels very nice to get in a car get to where you're going and not have to interact with

[02:33:30] anyone and i don't say that as as like as a anti-social statement as much as it's just it feels safer it feels more it feels more like i can listen to ridiculous music it's peaceful i can listen to no music no and it smells nice not always but most of the time yeah yeah you don't have to think about bo sometimes yeah yeah and so there's a whole there's a whole thing of unless the first the driver before you person yeah yeah yeah exactly there is someone watching you there is somebody watching you oh there's a lot of

[02:33:58] oh i hope so 100 and i hope so and i put on a show listen it is i prefer that karaoke in there yeah yeah what do you do you sing songs you dance yeah do your play i'm riding in a waymo riding around i got nothing to do but ride around town exactly right okay and i like how tensor in i don't know what what where they are in the u.s but they're like and you can have zooms zoom meetings in your tensor and i'm just like no i just want to lay on the ground if anything i'm just going to listen to music and

[02:34:28] read a book or something can you lie on the ground in it no it looks like the seat goes back yeah and it's very much like a sedan essentially i don't i'd be so nervous i get i get nervous if my wife is driving i i cannot like i want to i'm like aren't you i mean when your spouse drives don't you like you know you hold the handle and pay attention and do you do you take waymos i've never been in a waymo oh you should you'll change you have it's so much

[02:34:57] it's great yeah you'll it only be weird for the first minute and then you'll be like oh this feels strangely normal um but i think there's a big step between getting in a robo taxi and owning a robo car and that's what i'm not sure about in terms of timelines because most people haven't been in a robo taxi yet so how will most people feel about owning a car that drives itself that will be people like you guys who are all in on the whole all five of us would be owners is it accessible to sell a lot of them is it accessible everywhere this tensor asking no it rolls out

[02:35:27] there's they're planning to roll out end of this year and i'm sure it'll be kind of a gradual rollout if they do meet that timeline so what a cool thing i i i'm i i'm fully in should it be my next car as a tensor yeah try it why not yeah why not here's your here's your article they look kind of cool yeah they look they look yeah they look really neat oh why is it blue the background of your of this article oh everything on my it looks beautiful like i want to make it's not supposed to be blue

[02:35:56] oh it's just everything on my i'm using a weird browser and everything what browser is it zen don't make fun of my browser and my terminal no i know what do you use that looks so i use helium and i know don't use helium that's bad why it's russian oh no not russian is it yeah and it's and it has telemetry in it that goes back to to r u yeah oh man i'm in trouble again

[02:36:25] didn't you read all about it and read it i might be wrong that's just what i read about on reddit i didn't read anything i don't i don't read helium is helium is very popular it's chrome based yeah but it's a single developer out of russia and there's some concern about uh data going back to russia from it but i don't know you you check it out you're you're i'm going to ask claude i'll be like i don't know captain

[02:36:57] uh so as tensor said how much uh this will be i mean it's a beautiful car i'm i'm ready to buy a new car i would love if you bought one and told us all about it they have not shared the price yet so we're gonna level four autonomy see elon even elon who's been selling level four autonomy and is now in trouble for it even elon says well it's the long tail it's hard you know you can that's 99.9 percent is fine it's that last 0.1 percent of unusual yeah situations the car

[02:37:26] can't handle well does this car i mean have a steering wheel is am i sitting behind a steering wheel or am i just lying on the floor with with uh harper actually what they told me is that the reason why they made the steering wheel fold in and out of the dashboard is imagine you get in the self-driving car and you take a nap and you're laying down behind the driver's seat and you wake up and you see the steering wheel moving itself then you freak out and instantly yeah that would be creepy right so that's why they let you kind of like let it go into the dashboard and then a touchscreen goes over it so

[02:37:56] if you wake up you're not seeing a steering wheel moving and you're not forgetting that this car is driving itself this is like your own personal waymo exactly 100 it kind of looks like one it looks like honestly like a like a tesla meets a jack or a shark it looks a little bit like a shark i could see that yeah um i know she got in the back seat yeah is that are you expected to ride in the back seat like you have a chauffeur you can why wouldn't you yeah you can do whatever you want i feel like well i guess it'd be safer in the back seat if there is an accident it's true but yeah

[02:38:25] if you want to feel bougie absolutely be all bougie and ride in the back seat yeah why not all right i will buy the except my lease for my car runs out end of the year right about when this is going to come out fantastic do it for all of us where i will i will i will be the first i love this i'll be the bougie guy riding around you should get some sort of deal speaking about content creator deals like you should get i never get any of that stuff and then you can get like tell us all about it this is great i

[02:38:54] never nobody ever offers me nothing it's time to start listen to get leo one of these cars you won't regret it they say volume you say i'm quoting you volume produced consumer ready autonomous vehicle designed for private ownership so my question here is gotta be a hundred what is what is this going to be its parking strategy in the city yeah that's going to be the fun part and that's what people i'm sure will also or yeah who's liable if it gets in an accident that's the other question no you just

[02:39:24] get out and run that's the easiest thing to do you just be like there'll be whose car if it's a way mo fine but this is my vehicle i'm not gonna get out and run just buy it under a different name uh you don't even have to park it in your house garage you could park it somewhere else yeah yeah and then it can come to you whenever that's right you don't have yeah that's right you have to sit on it sit in it while it's parking you can let it drop you off and have it park she gets out in this video and says go find a parking spot yep and then

[02:39:53] you're done shopping you go hey car you must have an app right there's yeah there's probably going to be an app and then once the car arrives you can tell it to like you can talk to you can talk to it so you can say like pop the trunk open uh open the store whatever yeah or unlock the store yeah level four autonomy okay yeah i'll be i'll be the guinea pig and you know what if i die in a fiery wreck it's the best way to go i'll be famous we'll use the app we'll use the

[02:40:22] are you alive app to make sure you're still ah that's what i need i'll push the big button the court case will be the laporte estate versus uh yeah it'll be the laporte act you know yeah exactly no they have to use your first name it's like yeah the the leo's dead act or something i'm glad we got this figured out that's good everyone stay tuned also also here with harper reid so

[02:40:52] as a brawl he did i'm glad you're here too thank you for watching to it and thanks to our club members who make this possible the club supports now 25 of our operating expenses it's going to be more this year i know what uh advertising sales dripping off dropping off and i really i like frankly i think that's great i think that every podcast network should be just you know supported by the people listen to it if you like these shows this is how you can cast a vote join the club twitter tv slash club to it you get ad-free versions of all the shows access to the

[02:41:21] discord lots of special programming this week michael's going to do his crafting corner on wednesday we did the photo segment uh friday we got lots of we got the stacy's book clubs coming up at the end of the month really interesting book oh i'm really enjoying it can't wait to talk about it with you join the club we'd love to have you twit.tv slash club twit mads olison is a danish developer with a three-year-old kid who couldn't learn

[02:41:51] how to use the remote he said the smart tv is too hard for it so he turned an old floppy disk drive into a kid-friendly content controller he gives the kids discs with pictures on it the kid puts the disc in the floppy drive and the tv turns on it the data is not on the disc just the information about what to play and plays it that's great isn't that clever

[02:42:20] it's so good he says you know the floppy disks are the best storage media ever invented why else would the save icon still be a floppy disk i think there's a real a real thing about the tactile feel that's putting in media right and like um my aforementioned child i got them a tape player which they love love that how old's your kid four oh perfect so he's really into tapes bonnie tyler

[02:42:49] super into bonnie tyler totally clips of the heart yeah turn around bright eyes really now that was a that was a vampire that's like a nasferatu musical written by written by the guy that wrote the meatloaf stuff it does anyway it does jim steadman does explain the lyrics i never really understood the yeah yeah that's bonnie tyler am i right oh yeah yeah 100% oh i've listened to that song seven million times did she do betty davis eyes too is that one of hers uh i don't know she's

[02:43:19] holding out for a hero holding out for a hero which does your kid like the best i think it depends on the time but the the first one was bonnie tyler and the second one was holding out for a hero yeah yeah it's uh but anyway i did the the thing that i felt really steinman not steinman jim stein was really interesting about this was the idea of having autonomy and choosing your media is something as adults that we we especially of you know kind of

[02:43:49] um all i'll say our vintage have have experience as youth we got to put in a cd or put in a tape or put in a record and we had to choose that whereas now you have a lot of algorithmic choice for you made with media consumption so you don't actually have this autonomy and so i as as i look at this young person i'm just like how do i give them as much autonomy as i can within so you can start developing taste and want and whatnot and it's it's very interesting because every other place that you have

[02:44:19] there's just like it's made it's a decision made for you by computers right well uh maybe bring your floppy disks to the movie theater because this is bring your own bucket weekend at the cinemark theaters tomorrow is national popcorn day for five dollars is that a real this is a real thing this is a real thing apparently they both said yes yes cinemark theaters we have one in town uh

[02:44:48] has a byob bring your own bucket event any bucket any size they will fill it to the brim for just five dollars it could be a lowes five gallon blue bucket they said just bring it in and uh and you'll get up to 400 ounces i guess there's a limit you can't bring in one of your you know neuro auto driving vehicles but it's up to 400 ounces of delicious buttery popcorn for five dollars national

[02:45:18] popcorn day this is a tiktoker from last year who brought in a giant soup pot and filled it up at her cinema cinemarks today and tomorrow go ahead get all the popcorn what could possibly go where she's very happy look at this guy i mean man yeah bane uh bane's uh silva uh got a lot of popcorn on national

[02:45:48] popcorn day um all right all right happy birthday wikipedia 25 by the way wikipedia announced that it's going to start selling it's it since it's being scraped by all the ais anyway they're going to try to get a little money out of open ai good idea yeah why not why not we need wikipedia wikipedia i love it i love wikipedia it's the best it's the best it's the best my uh

[02:46:17] my obsidian daily journal diary has a link to the wick today today on wikipedia just because i want every day i want a reminder go look and see what's because the today page is great it's always got something interesting going it's fantastic uh and and kudos to corey doctor everybody should go read his latest post on plural pluralistic dot net he said the world needs an ireland for dis and shitification he's the guy who coined the term and shitification the big techs uh grab for all the

[02:46:46] profit they can get uh he says now just like ireland became a tax haven it was a way to bring ireland's economy back on top by getting all of the big tech companies to come there to save tax money to evade tax taxes in their country uh he says we need to do something like that but with um

[02:47:16] reverse engineering and he says this would be a good thing for canada maybe to do he said if some country came along and said we are not going to buy into the you know uh anti you know the intellectual property world you know intellectual property rights plan it is a crime he says in virtually every country on earth to modify america's defective

[02:47:46] in shitified privacy invading money stealing technology exports that's because the u.s trade representative has spent the last 25 years using the threat of tariffs sound familiar to bully all of america's trading partners into adopting anti-circumvention laws he said but if some country and he really i think he thinks canada should do it but some country came along and said hey come on over here and reverse engineer all of america's stuff and offer it

[02:48:15] the time is right cory writes for the founding of a disincentification nation in ireland for disincentification uh drop the anti-circumvention laws that ban the modification of u.s tech exports once one country starts making these tools there'll be no way to prevent their export and then suddenly uh everything's better i think it's a brilliant idea we could throw claude code into this

[02:48:46] reverse engineer all that stuff yeah it seems i think it sounds great yeah ireland shows us it takes just one country to defect from this global prisoners dilemma then everything is up for grabs can anybody really do that to like google though like if someone cloned google in another country and google just says all right we're shutting down everything google in your country great i don't i don't think that's going to work they export it i think it's i think it's actually um there's a couple things

[02:49:16] that are kind of being lightly said that we should probably say a little more discreetly or a little more aggressively which is um it is very easy to clone software right now it is incredibly incredibly easy to clone software right now but it's illegal because of these reverse engineering laws i think that there's some ways to do this with like clean room yeah reverse engineering and all this other stuff that is that that big tech has been doing for years so that they can launch hire the

[02:49:46] person who invented a feature and then launch that feature without running into law issues you know everyone gets sued but nothing really happens um and i and i think that that that is there's a there's a bunch of that but what i find really interesting is um even hardware to some extent but mostly software if you said i want to build you know i really liked aperture the photo product from apple i want to redo it i could copy it well the thing is is that it's not

[02:50:15] copying it because it's like a memory you're misremembering it so you're adding all sorts of extra features that you thought were there that you're combining all these other things and it's not so much a one-to-one a clone but it is very very easy to do this and um just if you go to like hacker news you know there used to be these really impressive side projects that people had the show hacker news and now it's all of these software that people are just generating pushing out and i don't mean this in a negative way i mean that at some point this is going to be really

[02:50:45] interesting to see how it kind of plays out um for all of these folks i'm i'm i'm very interested in what how it how it how it turns out but i do not know the answer you know it's going to be very strange this is a hacker news this is why combinator's news uh uh feed which i read every religiously as most geeks do and there's a show button and this is show hacker news and as you said a lot of this is just vibe coded tools that

[02:51:15] somebody's written uh that anybody could write i like this one this is a tiny uh rts mining strategy game oh pretty sure it's vibe coded yeah pretty sure you know there's just a ton of it i go here every day and i find stuff it's like wow that's so cool look it's a half of its ai oh look a browser-based terminal emulator

[02:51:44] maybe this is even better than ghost tty absolutely i did mr hartford reed i did do a fun thing i put a vm inside of one of our company websites if you go to 2389.dev um i wrote a i have a old mac over there that i run a shell script on and it is like an intro to our when you walk in it has our it has a logo and it has some like kind of terminal effects

[02:52:14] going on it and then i was like wait a minute i should put this on a web page then i was like wait a minute i should put uh so if you press escape if you go to that and you just press escape after this loads wow it's fast look how fast it is um that's because i'm reading kitty no i'm kidding yeah no so this is a browser but if you press escape yeah i'm now oh i'm on the command line so but this is in a browser and this is a real vm that's running inside of your browser and you can set up networking if you run networking um and that will like connect to some very

[02:52:43] strange proxy server and then from there let's shrek i want to do shrek i should have shrek oh i crashed it oh no um well it's very robust it restarted yeah so it's it's really kind of funny thing i don't know if shrek do you have networking shrek might be i think if i remember correctly shrek is using a gif to antsy oh and it's taking some shrek gif and playing the shrek gif but i but

[02:53:13] yeah so so this is this blew my mind because this was this is all inside of a browser um and it is not it's not it's running on your chrome or whatever and it blew it just like i'm just like what does this even mean as someone who you know loves and adores linux and browsers and all and shells and all that stuff this was just like huh oh you got frack on here yeah of course we're we're super hackers look at all the frack uh look at this

[02:53:42] it's a complete set nice are you worried somebody's gonna get in here and hack around and yeah go for it it literally is inside of your browser oh like there's no server here you can delete everything and just is this my this isn't my directory though right no no it's like this is running inside of the javascript inside of your browser what if i run dd on this try am i gonna wipe it yeah but it's you just hit reload

[02:54:13] oh it's a vm running in my browser i get literally inside of your browser i get it as a vm like there's no there's nothing else like it's just there and this this was this was not there's not a lot of vibe coding in this this was actually a little bit of just brawn you're wild oh and i think hysterical i think do you have a play mod in here can i play some mod music no but if i remember correctly you can run mutt and check email oh nice whose email will it check

[02:54:44] um i think this is i think this was vibe coded so we don't know oh yeah there's somebody's email yeah it says omg you'll never believe what happened modem speeds another jude cs162 is killing me whose email is this i don't know girls night out tomorrow your sister said you could help with bbs stuff thanks for tonight and some goss

[02:55:14] what whose email is this whose email are you reading this email is this you're funny man you're funny that's good i like it that's a game arper reed so 2389.ai every time you're on you say i don't have anything to announce you have anything to announce that was it nope i don't think so i'm trying to think what we got oh we have we have we have a whole boatload of claude plug it a claude skills oh i love claude skills so if you go to

[02:55:43] skills.2389.ai okay and i was having some ssl issues earlier so let me know if that works but um we basically these are all of the stuff that we've been using for the past eight months six months or whenever claude code was released and um i'll tell you a couple really interesting ones so one of them is the fresh eyes review is a really good one um basically it kind of compels the agent to

[02:56:13] miss like forget everything it knows another one that's been really oh so you after you vibe code something you run this plug-in and then say look at this with fresh eyes and tell me and it's such a stupid hack but it works really well and another one that is really interesting is the scenario testing which is a little bit which is this idea of getting the agent to use the software you wrote at like as a user so it's instead of end end testing or integration testing it just runs it so

[02:56:42] it's really good and then one of the new ones we're doing we're playing a lot with is the test kitchen which will have the agent do two or three um implementations and then pick the best one oh which is very interesting and then there's a couple really oh there's actually a really good one called binary re which is for read an agentic binary reverse engineering for elf binaries um which is very very good so you can take an existing elf binary

[02:57:11] and reverse engineer it oh yeah and it's it's absolutely you could it's absolutely turn it into assembler what do you what does it turn it just just understand what's going on so if you're trying to figure out how something is working it works very effectively that's really cool um there's a there's a couple weird ones um two of them that i really like one of them is a ceo personal os which is a conglomeration of a whole bunch of um different prompts from different folks that i applied in here that you can just kind of instantiate a ceo coach

[02:57:40] that's very effective and it will and it's and it's very bizarre um and then another one i played with a lot over the holidays is one that tries to it's called worldview synthesis where it's tries to uh articulate your worldview and so you just pop in beliefs tensions etc into the little box and then it will help you write out a statement of belief um because something that i have found is like you talked about it earlier about this idea that we have a hard time carrying these

[02:58:10] like inconsistent or kind of at odds beliefs and we all have these and so i was trying to figure out how do i use the kind of questions and answer kind of platonic kind of dialogue type interaction model that these ais give us so easily to help define my worldview um and this was kind of interesting um and i'll tell you my worldview if i can find it um so this is one of the things i've always been a little interested in is uh of making a statement

[02:58:40] of your a personal statement of your values yeah so that you have something to measure your actions against something eternal although i guess values might evolve over time but but fundamentally these are the things that really use are bedrock beliefs like for me like all humans are equal and have equal value and something like that and and what are those values and articulate them so you can then go out in the world and act according to your values instead of just kind of

[02:59:10] messing around now i just did plug and install and it it's not loading it what do i need to not do i have to get your marketplace uh if you go to the very very top so go to the very first page and you say plug in marketplace add the very top right there i see what you're saying i guess the very first instruction yeah right there first so you do this first yeah then you use it'll know about that marketplace and now i can i can do the

[02:59:39] other one yeah it says okay you should be able to let's see i'm installing it right now and so now if you just say um i want to build my worldview um i think it'll probably just go ahead and do it and um this is i play with this for for this is intrigue you at all abra is this something you'd ever ever want to do uh i like watching you do it this is that's a great way to do it because i i i um i find all of this stuff to be very

[03:00:10] i find myself so interested in testing it that i spend so much time kind of unlearning what i what i have the hole i have fallen into and try to build your world view captain are you really a pirate so so this is this is going to go through a whole thing and it's going to actually create like data and narrative so you so what i was doing is how this started is i was in japan i had all this time because i was jet lagged so ilek and so i wasn't sleeping as well as i are

[03:00:39] normally and so i was just like i read this article i don't remember what article was and i said i believe this article and the premise of what it's saying with my whole self so i was like what else can i collect that i also believe and so i started putting it in here and here's here's like my people and community part find your crew protect your people diversity is essential create spaces for misfits work philosophy have fun overall shipping is everything i just want your world view oh it gets it gets it gets

[03:01:08] darker um but uh um but but but i but i think the thing that was really helpful is um i once applied for this fellowship and then they they said no they they said no and i was upset about that because i i really wanted to do it and then i talked to a friend who was close and he said they couldn't figure out what you believed and i found about myself that i that i am much too quick to be a chameleon in a lot of situations and as a probably as a way a

[03:01:37] safety or whatever like you know it's sure and and and and i was and i that's kind of sat there and i was like i need someone to ask me all these questions with with unlimited patience so that i can write down what i believe and so i try it myself in a notebook and i could just never do it i just give up and so finally the ai who doesn't give a care doesn't really care about anything it's just like harper what do you think about blah blah blah tell me again i want to hear more yeah tell me more this is great you're so smart yeah so so this is a

[03:02:06] skill so really all it is is a prompt right that you wrote well i think so but um i would say actually no there's two things that are wrong about what i what you said there um first one is i didn't write it claude did claude wrote it yeah but it also was created there's this really fun thing obviously superpowers i'm sure you're using superpowers with your cloud code um but there's a thing that if

[03:02:35] you do something with cloud code and this works with others as well you do something with cloud code and it was complicated or was interesting or whatever at the end or at a good stopping point if you just say let's create a skill it'll wrap up a generalized view of that and create a skill and so what i did is i went through and did this really protracted work of trying to create my world view in this and then i said oh this might be interesting i bet others would like this and so i said cloud make this world view thing a

[03:03:04] skill copy all the patterns that we did the ones that were successful remove the ones that weren't successful and make this a skill and it was just like okay great and then it's there and so if you look at the source you know it has um the skill it has some references i don't even know what this stuff is i've never seen this stuff in my time in my life i'm installing the superpowers right now because i didn't i didn't have superpowers your mind is going to be blown because superpowers is incredible jesse who made this um really struck something

[03:03:34] here and but essentially these skills are really just text prompts that tell claude do this act this way do this kind of thing basically right i think so i guess we can go it's on github we could actually look at yeah yeah i mean the code on this that's true it is it is that but i mean it's um um it is

[03:04:04] it's interesting because it's like they are just prompts but jesse was able to to weave it together in a way that it is it works in a way that other just prompts didn't work and so i wouldn't want to diminish it by just saying yeah i understand but yeah i i've just uh for people who are going well what is it oh oh superpowers is just a collection of like scripts that let the the cloud code act in a certain way so it has a really good brainstorming script shell scripts no no

[03:04:33] some of them are there's some mp there's some shell scripts some mc mcp servers there's a whole bunch of stuff but it is oh it's very complicated it's very complicated no i haven't used it um but but it also does a thing and pushes cloud to do a thing to focus on sub-agent development um so you can say it'll be like i want to build a tool and it's like oh great and then like it'll be like okay i'm gonna do the work now and you're just like do it with sub-agents and it's like great and it just like spins up sub-clods that then do all the work

[03:05:03] so it's a it now it's a plug-in if i hit slash well you can just say here we go there's superpowers write plan execute plan brainstorm so before you do anything you start with brainstorm well actually i do it much much less uh dogmatically i just pop in and i'll like let's start a new directory and i'll just be like hey claude i was thinking of making an ios app that that's how i did it that does increasingly i feel like all of this extra stuff claude's just kind

[03:05:32] of wrapping it into itself and eventually really that's all you'll ever have to do is say hey claude let's try this let's do this and interact with claude and you could even say to claude hey claude i want to develop my own uh list of my uh personal values could you help me do that and then we just do it yeah and so with superpowers what i'll say is i'll say like i'll say hey i i want a i want to build a golang app that will help me visualize stls so i can see them on a 3d

[03:06:01] whatever and then it'll be like great and i'll say can you use super powers to do this and i'll just kind of trigger it that way and then it'll just go through a whole program tell it to it just does and it and it's that's how the skills are so the skills typically register with the with the llm some kind of keywords that the llm should listen to to invoke those skills um and so many of these will work that way and sometimes it works very funny um where it'll where you'll it'll it'll execute something that you didn't quite

[03:06:30] mean to execute so uh yeah i just uh it's i said let's brainstorm and said okay what do you want to work on we could work on your worldview synthesis yeah we could work on your speedy reader we could yeah or something else entirely yeah yeah and um it's good it's good i i quite enjoy it i think it's worthwhile checking out if you're clod code person definitely check it out uh that is uh again the

[03:06:58] address is skills.2389.ai is that right yeah skills.2389.ai thank you harper reed his blog is at harper.blog always it's always great to see you thank you i'm happy to be here you can resume wearing your chain mail now yeah oh yeah finally i was i got it took it off just for us kids well you know you know the thing is it's it's scary out here in chicago it's you gotta wear that uh you gotta wear that i know you might get

[03:07:26] stabbed in the neck not anymore no not anymore let him try let him try at worst you'll get a little sponsor your new sponsor is gonna be one of those chainmail guys on it yeah brought to you by chainmail.com yeah don't leave home without it abrar al-hiti you're the best too thank you for putting up with a couple of nerds words i love this listen yeah popcorn i need my five gallon lows i know 400 ounces how much popcorn is that so much

[03:07:55] popcorn so much popcorn but yeah it's very entertaining to watch you too just nerd out it's great oh we are such nerds but you know what you might be a nerd too i am we all are yeah yeah i think you're riding around in your little car without any steering wheel that's right you're definitely a nerd 100 percent how nerdy is that i i you know what i am gonna i will buy if it's under a hundred thousand i don't i can't afford yeah i mean it's good it's probably going to be pretty expensive but i would like to think it'll be under a hundred thousand

[03:08:25] and i hope it is so that you can buy it i would i could lease it anyway yeah i'll lease it absolutely yeah i'll let the company lease it that way if i get in an accident there you go call the company let the company handle it yeah that makes sense are you very patient thank you so it's my pleasure i love seeing you i'd love having you on of course a bra is every month on the tech news weekly with micah sergeant that's right and uh just uh you'll find her great writing at uh cnet.com where she just wrote about autonomous vehicles at ces and

[03:08:54] now you're gonna have some time off to enjoy i'm going to orlando to hit up theme parks which i think is the best right oh you like you know what we're going to orlando in march so give us a little uh uh heads up if there's anything exciting we're gonna go to epcot and then i love universal me too what else is there in orlando so that's basically it i'm gonna go to epic universe for the first time i'm really excited the new universal park um and uh yeah we'll do we'll do a mix of uh universal and

[03:09:23] disney and just enjoy i'll get to see my sister and the kiddos oh that's nice you have family out there yeah they'll be flying out there so oh they're joining you yes better better yes i'm looking forward to it so uh my favorite thing at uh universal was the harry potter uh ride where you ride through i'm a huge potter head so and it's you put on a vr helmet and you're on a flying broom yeah and you ride through hogwarts i love that but this is going to be even more stuff like that yes so yeah epic universe is

[03:09:52] the one that just opened up last year in like may um so another harry potter themed world and then other stuff too like boy how to train your dragon and oh this will be fun monsters and do you think they're they're they're kind of out doing disney these days oh there's i kind of do feel that way i think they have a lot more innovation disney only will make a ride like the fact that they just came out with a tron ride like two years ago when you're like oh really like really tron really now long to do that yeah so universal is more on top

[03:10:22] of things um and they'll they'll get things done oh they have a mario kart world yeah oh boy super mario world is oh boy this is very good they have this in in la and it's fantastic so i'm really excited to see the one in orlando oh this looks great it's really i mean maybe instead of epcot will go here or do both because i love epcot so i'm hoping to do both you gotta fit it in somehow oh man we're going out for a security conference but i think we might have to find some time to oh you got to do it

[03:10:51] to play while you're out there i've heard the lines are abhorrent so um you know what i don't know who goes to amusement parks it costs so much money it's really expensive and it gets worse every year like i feel like you used to be able to do it for like a little over a hundred like two hundred a day yeah disney is not something a middle-class family can go to anymore no it's ridiculous you have to be wealthy yeah it's it's absolutely obnoxious but it's addicting which is the problem and they know it they got you the money they know you'll spend it so i mean where else you get to fly a

[03:11:20] dragon exactly you can fly a dragon yeah yes you can wow yes you can maybe we should get epic to sponsor the show also you're going to get you a free robo car and a free i want the neuro yeah turo lauro duro and i'm going to drive to epic in my neuro duro and then boom boom booyah baby that's right thank you abraar thank you harper thanks

[03:11:50] to all of you for joining us we do twit sunday afternoons 1400 pacific time 1700 east coast time 2200 utc i mentioned those times not because you have to be here at any particular time but you can watch us do it live we stream it live into the club twit discord but also on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick so you can watch live after the fact we let you download it from our website twit.tv there's audio or video

[03:12:18] i think the audio uh is great if you're driving but the video is nice because you could see the stuff we often show videos and stuff we try to make it accessible to all and sundry uh there the video is also on youtube there's a dedicated channel for this week in tech great way to share clips uh with the turo folks if you want to say leo you really should have this car uh because he's going to be buried in it uh let's see what no don't tell him that that probably wouldn't get that's not going

[03:12:48] to help um and then you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player that way you get it automatically as soon as it's done a special thanks to our club members our family i like to think of them people who make this show possible and there's one other thing you can do for us club member or not uh we are we do it once a year we're doing our uh survey our listener survey at twit.tv slash survey 26 takes about 10 minutes it's the only way we can know about you we don't have we don't track you we don't do anything that would give

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[03:13:44] not we're looking for the uh the you know aggregate information so it's privacy first because we know you care and thank you in advance thanks for being here and we will see you next time thank you harper thank you abri thank you everybody another twit is in the can he's amazing