TWiT 1076: I'm Monitoring the Situation - Meta's Horizon Worlds Stays Alive Against The Odds

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Yanko Reckers is here, Lisa Schmeiser, Dan Patterson. We're going to talk about the 49 megabyte web page. It's the norm these days. Elon Musk, you've got some splaining to do, and NVIDIA's new Yassify filter. All that coming up next on TWiT. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise.

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[00:01:23] This is TWIT. This Week in Tech, episode 1076, recorded Sunday, March 22nd, 2026. I'm monitoring the situation. It's time for TWIT. Time to talk about the week's tech news on This Week in Tech. Hello,

[00:01:49] everybody. I'm Leo Laporte, and we have a great panel. As always, say hello to Lisa Schmeiser from NoJitter.com. Hello, Lisa. Hi, it's good to be back. You always come at the same time every year when Girl Scout cookies appear. Is that because you're a scout leader and you just know that you have? I don't get it. Do you plan it? So, Girl Scouts of Northern California, we have closed our cookie sales

[00:02:15] for the year. Oh. I do tend to pop on the show a couple times a year, but if it's Q1, it's cookie season. I didn't know they closed it. I just, I saw them last week at the grocery store. I guess that was the last. You saw them on this. That was their last weekend. Yeah. Aw. Can you buy them online? You know, I believe you probably still could. I will drop in a link later for the Girl Scout cookie

[00:02:39] finder. And I do want to point out that for Girl Scouts as a national organization, different regional councils have different sale dates. So, if you Google for Girl Scout cookies for sale, I am sure you'll find something and everybody is set up to ship across the country now. So... They also have different names depending on your geography. It depends on the baker you go with because each council has one of two bakers, either Little Brownie Bakers or ABC Bakers. And the bakers themselves hold the

[00:03:09] copyrights on the names of the cookies, not the Girl Scout organization. So... A peanut butter sandwich, if you get it from ABC Bakers is a do-si-do if you get it from Little Brownie and... It's the difference between Caramel Delights and Samoas depending on who your baker is. Isn't that funny? And... Girl Scouts of Northern California, we changed our baker. So, that's why you can no longer buy Samoas from San Jose up to Delmar County. They're the same cookie and they're just delicious. So... They really are good. Hi, this is Benito.

[00:03:39] The recipes are similar. I usually don't interrupt during this portion of the show, but... So, do the cookies taste different if they come from the different bakers? It depends on the cookies. So, first of all, great question. And... Let's do a tasting, Benito. We did do a taste test when we switched. And depending on the cookie, I'm happy to report that the Thin Mint recipe stays the same and the Truffle's recipe stays the same. But if it's

[00:04:04] a peanut butter variant, your tastes are going to vary depending on what you really like in that peanut butter sandwich cookie. So... Shocking. Well, Lisa's not the only person here, but when it comes to Girl Scout cookies, she is the priority. I'm an expert. That's Dan Patterson. Hello, Dan from Blackbird.ai. Hey, Leo. Senior Director of Content there. Good to see you. You too. How's everything on beautiful Henry Street in Brooklyn? I cannot complain. It is finally... You know, we had snow on the ground for three months.

[00:04:34] It was like a normal winter, but here it just felt like a frigid, long winter. And now it's pushing 70 and, you know, I planted some wildflowers with my kid in the backyard earlier today. Oh, nice. Oh, how fun. I wonder if I plant a Thin Mint if I get a Thin Mint tree. Yeah. That would be... Oh, it got me going. Also here, Yonko Reckers,

[00:04:59] long time writer for First GigaOM. We see him on Variety. And of course, his newsletter is lowpass.cc. Hi, Yonko. Good to see you in San Francisco, where the weather has been extraordinarily warm as in most of the Southwest. I'm actually in the East Bay and it's even warmer over here. So... Yeah. So is Lisa. Yeah. Yeah. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.

[00:05:28] So, actually, you know, since you're here, Dan, you worked for a while for CBS News. I know you have a long radio history as do I. No one has one as long as I do. In December, it'll be my 50th year as a broadcaster. Wow. That's all. I started as a child. But I was really sad to see the news. And I guess it's not really a tech story, but that CBS

[00:05:53] was going to kill its radio news division. That's the folks that do the top of the hour newscast. Yeah, it's sad. Um, I, right. I too came from radio. I started in FM and then did AM talk radio, uh, as a producer for a long time. And then worked at ABC news radio and at CBS, I was with the network, but did hits

[00:06:18] with CBS radio and had many friends there. Um, and I mean, this would be a tech story in many ways is a tech story because radio was the defining and revolutionary tech of its era. Um, and to see this happen. September 1927. Wow. Bill Paley, uh, that, this is how he started the CBS radio network. Of course, uh, became, uh, a must listen during world war two with Edward R Murrow

[00:06:47] on the, on the rooftop of London during the blitz. This is London. Uh, and, uh, 700 stations who were using that top of the hour news service will lose it May 22nd. Yeah. The question to me, for me is, is this purely economic or is it part of the changing landscape of media? You cover media Yanko. Do you have an opinion on that?

[00:07:16] Yanko I mean, it's a good question. And as a third factor playing into that is also all the changes at CBS, uh, the politically driven political changes. Exactly. So people might also wonder like, why are they cutting down on news divisions at this exact moment where we kind of all need a lot of news? Um, but there is obviously something to the economic changes to the medium too. And, um, people just listening to more podcasts, uh, whenever you get into your car, Spotify comes

[00:07:44] on automatically and so forth. And so there is viewership, I think our listenership, I think is declining for some of these stations, but it is really, uh, a sad moment. And it also comes at a time when, you know, public radio has been defunded. And so some of those stations are giving up on original reporting and, uh, all of this happening at the same time, while maybe understandable is

[00:08:09] definitely not good. People still listen to radio. The last stat I saw was that 88% of Americans listen to a radio at some point during the week. So that's a vast majority. Lisa, you have younger, younger people in the house, people in your home. Do they ever say, Hey mom, turn on the radio when you get in the car? Um, not to listen to news per se.

[00:08:37] Yeah. Well, maybe that's part of the problem is this news. To be fair, I would have to say that our household is may not be typical because we do have media people in the household. So yeah, we'll turn on the, we will turn on the radio for the news. That's simply I put on tune in and then I listened to CNN or MSNBC. Also because I am, I am pathologically cheap. I do, I have not and will, and do not pay for extra tech in the car if I don't have to. So,

[00:09:07] so the radio is the default for us. Although a lot of cars now, especially electric vehicles, don't even come with radios. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you just basically, the presumption is that you are going to attach your phone and do it that way. The thing I kind of can't wrap my brain around is it seems like radio as an industry should have been really well positioned to dominate in podcasts because you've already got this apparatus in place

[00:09:33] for reporting and recording. You already understand the audio medium in a way that like two people with microphones who recap movies may not. So I've never been able to figure out why it is that big media and news organizations that have already done this, why are they dominating the podcasts more? Why don't I know the names of two to three series podcasts?

[00:10:02] Yeah. As a, as a podcaster or I'd like to hear what you think, Dan, before I, Yeah. Well, I wonder if ours aligned Leo, um, look, in fact, Leo, you and I started, I started podcasting in the mid to late aughts and I was in radio at the same time. And I was hired by the talk radio news service to help the, and not just the, I know, talk radio is often associated

[00:10:26] with conservatives, but this was the broad spectrum, you know, the air America days through, you know, I ran radio rows. So it was everybody, every spectrum and from big networks down to local affiliates. Um, and these are the same challenges at major news networks that you addressed Lisa. And you're right. It, it is, it, while I was in major news, it was kind of unfathomable to me,

[00:10:52] like, why aren't we producing for this medium? And I think the one answer I have is there are two answers. One is cultural and the second is economic. Both were locked into when I say cultural, I mean, there is a way we do the news. There is a way we do the radio. And this is the way we do the radio. This is the way news networks are run from the local affiliate to the network.

[00:11:23] And economic many, there's just a, an ROI. Many at the time podcasts now make a lot of money. Uh, but at the time, you know, from 2008 through 2015, 16, you know, these were, you would sink a lot of resources in and you would see networks, uh, like NPR invest resources into radio. Uh, but the ROI

[00:11:47] just wasn't there. Um, and then in the last, maybe in the, the 2020s, uh, the headwinds that I experienced were, were kind of a new manifestation of that. Like, well, we could do a podcast, but who listens to podcasts? Yeah. I remember when, uh, I was, of course I was on KFI

[00:12:11] in 2004 doing my weekend radio show. And, uh, I had found out about podcasting and I said, Hey, actually before there was podcasting, I said, Hey, do you mind if I put the radio show on the internet, you know, as a download? And they said, yeah, cause they didn't think anybody that didn't, we wasn't going to hit their, their, their ratings. Uh, cause for, at that time, radio was all about live, right? It was all about live local listening. And so they thought, well, you know, you could put the

[00:12:40] show later on the internet. Nobody's going to care about that. And when podcasting came along, they had the same attitude. It wasn't for maybe another decade that radio stations, broadcasters started saying, Oh, this podcasting is not a flash in the pan. It could actually be eating our lunch. But the, I think what really happened to rate it, look, if there is any listenership to radio at this point, it is probably not music. It's probably not

[00:13:06] news. It's probably sports, right? More than anything. You still might listen to a baseball game on the radio. Oh yeah. Did the Bay area, didn't we lose a station that was broadcasting live baseball play by play? I don't know. Cause I, cause now I don't, I don't follow the radio. So I could be wouldn't know. No, the other side, the other angle on this is of course,

[00:13:31] this is private equity. This is Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison. And there's what is it? Sky dance bought Paramount with extreme debt. If Larry Ellison hadn't said, I will pledge my personal fortune to back up this debt. Uh, they really wouldn't be able to have made make that deal.

[00:13:55] And then the, the, the Warner deal that's coming or rather the, um, uh, they're going to be buying Warner brothers. Yeah. The Warner, Warner discovery deal that's coming for, this is an 11 billion dollar company buying 111 billion dollar business. You could see the debt is extreme. And so what's the first thing private equity does is they, is they sell parts off. They try to save money. Yeah. And so it makes sense that this is, this is part of the acquisition. And this is what's happened to radio

[00:14:23] in general is as private equity has moved in and the number of owners, the ownership has dwindled. There's only a handful of radio companies left, all of them heavily leveraged. Uh, you're going to see this kind of decimation of the business. This is what happens. What happened to red lobster? This is what happens. And private equity comes in, they kill businesses, Joanne's fabrics,

[00:14:46] Joanne's fabrics. You know, I, I had, I go on and on and on with, without getting into the politics or without getting into the corporate muck. Well, we can, let's say this with politics. Somebody is putting their thumb on the scale through the FCC through David Carr at the FCC. That's part of it for sure. That's how Ellison and skydance got Warner discovery because Netflix said

[00:15:15] Netflix is a business. It's certainly how this will fly through regulation far faster than, than many other. So that's part of it. It's not the whole story. Yeah. I, but I, I, I wanted to note one opportunity here though. And I, I prefaced it without getting into the politics or the corporate muck. I, and I know many people have strong feelings about Barry Weiss, but she has a tremendous opportunity here as well to do the

[00:15:40] thing, Lisa, that you mentioned, which is innovate. And I know that she has caught a lot of flack. I am not pro or against Barry, but she has an opportunity now to innovate where others may be at network news have not, or could not because of some of these other challenges. Will she? I don't know, but I think that there is an opportunity in front of her to create innovation and produce podcasts and

[00:16:09] multimedia and encourage a new form of network news or a new usher in a new era of network news. Dan, I think you make a really great point about culture and how that can actually impede the longer term survival of a news or media organization. Cause this also reminds me of the, um, contraction

[00:16:31] pains that newspapers have gone through. And I remember through the early aughts reading about, um, well, in San Francisco, well, in San Francisco, there were wave after wave of layoffs and reductions at the Chronicle. And at the same time we had another site called SFist where you had, and in full disclosure, I did write for SFist here and there, but the people there were building an on the ground news organization and paying attention to things and getting really high

[00:16:58] engagement. And I used to wonder why doesn't, why doesn't someone just try to acquire that the Gothamist sites? Why doesn't somebody say, Hey, they clearly know how to build an audience online where newspaper sites are not, they're clearly building on a news organization, get them under one roof. And I, this reminds me of that same thing where you're like, Oh, it would be so easy except inside the Chronicle newsroom. I did have a friend who went from,

[00:17:27] from SFist to the Chronicle and she's like, you would not believe how hostile they are to the internet. You would not believe. Oh yeah. Oh, for sure. Even when I worked, even when I worked for Ziff Davis on the site, which was an MSNBC joint production, the TV people hated the web people. I mean, this is Ziff Davis and MSNBC, but the TV people hated the web people and the way people hated the TV people and neither one got the culture. Then it was just a complete mismatch.

[00:17:52] So that's ironic. I mean, that was in 20. That separation existed everywhere, right? That's the crazy thing. Like going to other organizations I've worked for where then people were suddenly like, Oh, you got to talk to the web people. And I thought, I thought we are the web people. Yeah. I should point out. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I spend, our publication is online, but I spend a lot of time thinking about, okay, is there a way I can reach my B2B

[00:18:21] enterprise technologist audience over TikTok or another channel where I can build up a younger audience more effectively? Because I feel like I need to know where and how people are getting their information in order to reach them and inform them. And I, I, again, this comes back to why not, I don't understand how you can be so wedded to the way you always did things to the detriment of the medium that you love. That's, that's just a thing that I keep trying to wrap my brain around.

[00:18:48] So just so people understand the landscape here, uh, CBS radio was sold to one of the other big radio companies, intercom a while ago. The only thing that Paramount kept was CBS radio news. So this is basically Paramount cutting all of its radio operations. And by the way, Barry Weiss did write the memo. It came from their CBS news editor in chief. I think Dan, it is an interesting opportunity for

[00:19:17] Barry Weiss. Um, I'm not convinced that she will grasp it, but, uh, no, because she has no broadcast background at all. She came from print. No network news, no news background. She has no news background. She's never run a newsroom. She writes op-eds, but you know, I mean, I said that as to, I know that people have strong feelings about Barry and I certainly have gossip chains in my text messages

[00:19:43] that go on and on about this. Um, but you're very, you're very, um, ecumenical giving her the benefit of the doubt. Well, right. I'm just trying to say, you know, without getting into personality fights or, or to talk about the politics or the, the corporate stuff, there's an opportunity here. And there, that's all, there's an opportunity to make change. That's, that's all I'm saying. But audio is, uh, just as good as big as it ever was. There are more than a million podcasts,

[00:20:12] podcasts, uh, ad sales is in the tens of billions of dollars. Now it's gone through the roof. We're not getting any of it, but the, but Joe Rogan's got it all. But, uh, and, uh, but anyway, it is a good time to be a podcaster. And you know, every time these things happen, I get phone calls from other broadcasters saying, so tell me how you get in this podcast thing. What is this? How does it work? And I, and I say, don't do it for money. That's all. So anyway, I don't want to, I don't want to

[00:20:39] belabor it. I just thought it's a sign of the times, isn't it? In so many ways. And, uh, and it's a sad, can I say one more thing, like just one counterpoint? Sure. I actually feel like maybe the opportunity for news organizations is to not always innovate and stick to the stuff that they're good at stick to news. Yeah. Stick to the news, like allow yourself to be long. Don't try to like make it a tick tock thing or whatever you report it. Don't make 60 minutes into 90 seconds. Keep it 60 minutes,

[00:21:07] please. But you know what they look at? They look at the research that says people under 25 get all their news from tick tock. And they say, well, you know, you know, that was, that's really the thing that radio scares radios that their audience is 54 years old and over maybe 65 and older. And so, look at the ads, the ads tell you who's there. They see their audience dying basically. I mean, literally. So they're really nervous about the whole thing. And that makes me sad, but I am happy.

[00:21:35] It really isn't about audio. It's not about conversations. It's not about news even it's about whether it comes through the air via an antenna or it goes through your internet connection. And that's just the delivery medium. That's not the important thing. The important thing is the content, the people doing the content, the listeners who want good content. And I just- Parasocial relationship between the listener and the-

[00:22:03] That's what's great. Radio is always that way, even before podcasting. That's why I loved podcasting because it preserved that sense of one-to-one conversation between the broadcaster and the listener. I'm talking into your ear right now. Oh, there's a podcast a friend of mine used to run called Friends in Your Ears. Yeah. That's kind of gross, but- I didn't say how they were ears.

[00:22:29] There's a lot of tech news. We're going to get to it. I am on a mission after talking with my boss, the wonderful Lisa Laporte, who shares not only my name in my home, but also runs this business. She says, you got to make this show shorter. You're just killing people here. I'm going to try to be a little bit more cognizant of your time and we're going to keep this thing moving. So we're going to take a break right now. I am thrilled to have this wonderful panel with me, Dan Patterson from

[00:22:57] Blackbird.ai, not only an AI expert, a radio expert, he's a content guru, all of the above. Alicia Schmeiser will weigh in on the news that Microsoft is sorry about Windows and they're going to fix it. I'm sure you'll have something to say about that from nojitter.com. And a media guy, Yanko Reckers from his, of course, the newsletter, lowpass.cc. And yes, we'll talk about Project

[00:23:26] Hail Mary. Have you seen it yet, Yanko? Sorry, what? Project Hail Mary. Have you seen it? No. Anybody seen it? I've seen it. Not yet. Is it good? But Benito said, when you start talking about it, I'm going to tell me so I can cover my ears. And I said, well, you read the book, you know what happens. He said, yeah, but I don't, I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how they do it. Well, I will let you know ahead of time if you don't want any spoilers. It's really good.

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[00:27:35] was being blocked from using its agentic shopping tool at Amazon. Amazon students said, no, you can't use perplexity to shop on Amazon. And a judge said, they're right. Well, a judge has now reversed that. The U.S. appeals court put the injunction on hold. So now you can use perplexity to shop on Amazon. It struck me as anti-competitive that Amazon was basically saying,

[00:28:02] we don't want you to go to amazon.com and not see our ads, not see Amazon's picks. We want you to use our AI agent, not somebody else's. But this is kind of a fight for the future of how the internet works, right? So Leo, full disclosure, No Jitter is now part of the industry dive newsroom. So I spent a lot of time

[00:28:25] doing second reads and edits on our verticals for retail and for customer experience, CX. There's two things going on here. One is that if you have AI shopping agents that are independent of retailers, then the retailers lose control over the customer experience. I.e. the customer data. Yeah. Well, yes, exactly. Right. I mean, let's be honest. That's what they want.

[00:28:54] What they don't want is your dollar for their product, which you think that's what the merchant wants. Well, they want to lock you into the ecosystem and make sure that once you start spending money. They want everything. Well, they also want your shopping habits and they want that data because it helps them figure out new lines. But also remember that Amazon does make a lot of money based on sticking sponsored results in there and their recommendations. Sure, they're an ad company as much as anything else.

[00:29:20] So if you have a third party shopping agent that reduces the efficacy of all those paid placements, you know, you're hitting them in the pocketbook. They're not going to like that. But what's to stop the courts from stopping us from using ad blockers? Because that's the same thing, right? Yeah. And this, right. And I mean, Lisa, what you're driving at is this kind of disintermediates that customer relationship and it creates a new moat, right? So I could, in theory, my agent,

[00:29:50] could stop serving Amazon products and start serving Best Buy products or Walmart products. Yes, because it will depend on the relationship that agents have with different retailers. But that's what the customer wants. The customer says, I just want to find those running shoes at the best price. I'm not tied to Amazon. Well, what's been really interesting about how companies are approaching the whole AI shopping experience is you have a lot of retailers who are like, we would like to use AI to make sure

[00:30:16] that the customer gets a great recommendation and a great experience and we have proactive high touch outreach, right? Right. Right. Right. But what it all comes down to is everybody seems to want to just kind of pick up the customer and put them where they want them. They'd like to be able to remove a customer's ability to do comparison shopping. They'd like to be able to remove a customer's ability to, I mean, this also

[00:30:42] ties into dynamic pricing too, because if you can use AI to do price comparisons, it's that much harder to lock somebody into an ecosystem where, oh, well, this is the price I have to pay and on the back of the life, you can afford it. I understand why Amazon wanted this court order. Yeah. Absolutely. No, because it's a business. It doesn't, it doesn't care about the shopping experience. It cares about the data and the money. But it's like Amazon saying you can use, because it was really Perplexity's browser

[00:31:10] that they wanted to block. It's like Amazon saying, well, you can use Chrome, but you can't use Safari because Safari blocks my cookies. Right? None of your business, Amazon. None of your business. I'll defend the customers, right? Just take a look at the larger shopping experience, which is that you have a lot of companies that are really invested in trying to put the shopper onto a specific path and keep them there because it's

[00:31:39] good for their bottom line. And the less agency the shopper has, the better. That is the approach. Yeah. So are you defending Amazon or? No. You're just giving them their angle. Just giving us their angle. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, I understand. They're trying to protect their revenue stream, which is not the sale. No. And no, the customer experience has nothing to do with what Amazon's doing here.

[00:32:06] It's as if I'm walking down Main Street and there's two bookstores next to each other. And I go in one bookstore and I say, well, let me look at your price. And they say, well, you can't go to another next door and see the price there. You have to either buy it here or you can't have it. Yeah. I mean, and I want to stress that like the exact opposite, which is when people walk into independent bookstores and then price check against Amazon, read a few pages and say, I'll just buy this at Amazon. Like, I think that's, I feel for this. I feel for the small bookstores.

[00:32:32] I do too. That happens all the time. In fact, that's exactly, it was pulling up the moat. It's a, it's an, it's a, it's a rabbinical precept. They call it the shopkeeper's dilemma or something where it is actually almost a sin to go into a store, get the information about what you want to buy and then go to another store and buy it. Right. It's as old as the Talmud.

[00:33:01] It's, it's an ancient dilemma. That said, there have been browser plugins that you can use for years that will price hunt and help you think. Yeah. Or camel, camel, camel. Yes. Yes. Or if you are on something like Rakuten, which gives you the discounts for shopping at certain places, it will also tell you, oh, you can buy this for so much cheaper at this other place. It's all paid placement. Lisa uses Rakuten. Yeah. And I say, Lisa, they're taking all of your information. And every time I say that, she

[00:33:30] shows me the check. She says, yeah. And I got this $38 check from Rakuten. I mean, at least you're getting paid for your information being taken. Most of the time it's just for free. That's better. But from like the CX and the retail perspective, what everybody is fighting for now is the ability to lock a customer into a guaranteed repeat interaction to eliminate competition by just,

[00:33:56] oh, it doesn't exist. And some of them will do it pretty successfully. And some of them will have a very hard time trying to keep people. No, no, don't look over there. Stay here. Kitharell and I are watching on Twitch. It says, isn't it ironic that Amazon's going through the same thing they did to the main street shops 10 years ago? Yeah, it is. They're trying to defend themselves. Yeah. This is Benito. So there's also a thing here of dynamic pricing that Amazon does, right?

[00:34:26] So like they might not be able to do that with AI agents. Exactly. And dynamic pricing is a whole nother thing. I mean, you've gone to grocery stores and noticed that a lot of places are now going to the electronic displays for pricing. They swore when they did that, that they weren't doing it so that they could change the price. Oh, come on. No, it just saves us because we don't have to have that person with the sticker machine going around. Yeah.

[00:34:54] That's why they did it. But that doesn't, that's why they did it. That doesn't mean they're not doing dynamic pricing. You come in the door, the cameras register you and they say, oh, that's Schmeiser. She can pay 10% more and all the prices in the whole store go up. If you've got an app or you're trying to scan digital coupons, that tells them everything about which aisles are you hitting? Which categories? What are you willing to pay? And that's why you get an eight foot long receipt at Target, right?

[00:35:19] It is an exciting new world in asking, how can you use data to lock a customer into protracted repeat engagement and maximize your profit while making sure that they don't feel hurt? Are you a comparison shopper? I was just thinking of the guy who used to go around and change the prices now goes around and unlocks those glass cabinets that are everywhere for every single product. So they didn't really

[00:35:45] save anything here, but they just moved everything around. I was at a drugstore yesterday and there was nothing left that you could take off. Everything's locked up now, isn't it? Oh, it's so miserable. I hate it. First they came for the razor blades and I didn't complain because I didn't shave. Oh my God. Then they came for the nasal sprays and I said nothing because I don't have allergies. And no, that's a terrible analogy. Dan, do you have a thought?

[00:36:16] Well, you know, what's interesting, the only major tech company that doesn't have AI built into the browser still is Apple. Oh, Safari. Yeah. And Vivaldi. Vivaldi swears they won't. Yeah. And Firefox has a switch. So you can't. I said by major tech companies, Leo. Oh yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. There's a cheap shot. Oh, cheap shot. I would get back to you for that burn, but it's probably more kind of lock cabinet. I do. I loved Mozilla. I mean, I still do.

[00:36:45] I still use a Firefox fork called Zen. I love it. But yeah. I think Lisa's absolutely right. I mean, this is just about the customer relationship. The one thing that has been constant from the podcast era to the social media era, and now the AI era is the value of data or increased in value. The value of our personal data. Of our personal data. Yeah.

[00:37:11] To which I segue to Cash Patel's admission that the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency are buying data about us from the data brokers. Thank you very much. We knew this was going to happen, but I didn't, you know, this is almost shows Cash Patel's naivete. Oh, this is what shows it?

[00:37:41] Well, there's a few things. There's a few things. He is a podcaster after all. You can't expect much. He's testifying on Wednesday to Congress. And it's the first time the FBI has admitted, yeah, we buy people's data from data brokers, location data and more. We aren't required. We aren't required. We aren't required to have a warrant to do that. There's no, there's no, you don't visit a judge for that.

[00:38:09] Ron Wyden, who's always been pretty good on these digital things, asked if the FBI would commit to not buying American location data. Patel said, We use all tools to do our mission. He said, We do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution. I don't think the Constitution knew about data brokers cash, but there was this thing called the Fourth Amendment you might have heard of. No, you wouldn't have heard of it. Come on.

[00:38:37] Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, it has led to some valuable intelligence for us, said the director of the FBI. Wyden said this is at an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment. So now, you know, they said the quiet part out loud. I would be. Go ahead, Janka. I was going to say he was probably going to say it really wide eyed with the deer in the headlight.

[00:39:07] What do you mean? Yeah, of course we buy the roast. Of course we do. I would be genuinely surprised if. I mean, to be. Honestly, that sounds like every testimony I've ever heard from an FBI director or anyone else. I would be surprised if they weren't already buying. I think they always have. No, no, they always have. And, you know, we know about Penn Register warrants

[00:39:35] that allow them to get location data for like a buck fifty from the cellular companies and all this. There's always been this free flow of information. So it's people like me, frankly, who have for years said, oh, don't worry about your privacy. It's not like the, you know, the feds are spying on you or anything. It's just delete that weed free game you've downloaded. Yeah. I mean, I think that really there should be much more education on what you put on your mobile device

[00:40:03] and how you can use services. This is not a plug or a log roll, but services like Delete Me and others that will do the perpetual data removal. Are they a sponsor? Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's a great service. And I think that that educating consumers about what you put on your device and how it impacts you and your privacy is really important. And what you can do about it is equally important. Because we went to see Hail Mary on Thursday.

[00:40:32] There was a big ad from the state of California about your privacy saying, you know, showing how you're being spied on and all this stuff. And then go to privacy.ca.gov and learn what we're doing to protect you. And they made a lot of, hey, when they announced it, we're going to have a registry that you can remove yourself from data brokers. But I went there. And first of all, it doesn't take effect until this fall. Second, it's only 40. When I checked, it was 49 data brokers. There are more than 500.

[00:41:02] It's a drop in the bucket. To me, this is almost, yeah, California's doing something. It's like Marsha Blackburn's federal privacy bill, which really all it did was nullify state privacy laws with a weak, virtually nothing federal law. So it was really an anti-privacy law. I feel like lawmakers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes

[00:41:31] that they don't, they understand, law enforcement's going to them, Cash Patel's going, hey, it'd be a shame if we couldn't buy this data. And they're going, oh yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. And there's no movement towards privacy protection. I don't think it's Cash Patel. I think you have lobbyists for the data brokers who are like, without data moving through an information economy, nothing can get done. You wouldn't want to be the reason the economy slows down, would you? They hire the same people

[00:42:00] Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax hire to say, you know, our entire economy relies upon credit brokers who, we've got to collect this information. We don't, in this country, we really have not created a culture where people understand that as of right now, you are generating a lot of data that people make a lot of money on and you're not seeing a cut. I mentioned earlier.

[00:42:30] It is basically, you are providing a lot of free assets or resources for other people to get very rich on. That's so smart. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, you know what? It turns out the internet's not free. This whole time, we were sold this notion that, oh, look at all the free, look at Gmail and all this free stuff you get on the internet. It was never free. Wasn't the adage, if it's free, you are the product? Like that, I mean, it's always been. Well, I think it may hurt

[00:43:00] that perhaps back in the 90s, you had a lot of journalists who would uncritically echo the information wants to be free. And what that morphed into was, oh, information should be free. It was somebody else named Shmeo Sheport that said that. I definitely said things like that. Well, you know, it was so easy to be idealistic because you're like, we'll connect everybody and you'll be so informed. I was a wide-eyed optimist. Yeah. Yeah. I mentioned earlier

[00:43:29] that if Amazon wants a law against comparison shopping, they might also want a law preventing you from using an ad blocker. Great blog post this week called the 49 megabyte web page. This guy went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines, was greeted with 422 network requests, 49 megabytes of data, took two minutes, this is one page, two minutes before the page settled.

[00:43:58] We've all gone through this. He says, and you wonder why every sane tech person has an ad blocker installed on all the systems of their loved ones. We've gotten to this crazy world where it's expected that they're collecting all this information, that they're showing us all these ads. And it's not even surprising anymore.

[00:44:26] So 49 megabytes is a little surprising. This is Shubham Bose's blog. And well done on picking that one up. Speaking of which, it might be a good time to do an ad right now. Yeah. The thing is, our ads don't follow you around because it's a podcast and an RSS feed. I don't know anything about you. I can't collect any information. Our advertisers buy ads on our shows

[00:44:56] because they say, well, we're pretty sure you have a tech savvy audience and that's the audience we want to reach. I think that's a better kind of relationship. It's a, I think it's a fairer relationship. So I have, I am, and then we also offer a club if you don't want ads, you can pay us a little money and that way we don't have to show you ads. I think that this is upfront. We're not following you around. Unless people listen on YouTube or Twitch or this or that. Or Spotify. And by the way,

[00:45:25] this is why, you know, Joe Rogan moved to Spotify with an exclusive with offered millions of dollars. This is why Spotify was, was for a while trying to eat the podcast world because advertisers love it because Spotify knows who listens. They have your credit card number. They know how much you listen. They know when you're rewound. They know when you stop. They know all of that stuff. But we, as a podcaster with an RSS feed, we don't, we are on Spotify. We are on YouTube. We're on Apple. We're on all those platforms.

[00:45:54] And even Apple has announced they're going to do video now, but only through companies that sell ads, right? Put two and two together. You see what the whole point of this is. Apple is going to get an ad revenue of that ad share, share of that ad revenue in return. And advertisers get the information about who you are and who's listening. So we don't do that. And it's one of the reasons it's harder for us to sell ads, to be honest.

[00:46:26] This is a different world. We're, we're kind of old fashioned in that regard. It's a great panel. And I appreciate all of you. Alicia Schmeiser, always a pleasure having you on no jitter.com. She's the EIC and the person in charge no jitter.com. Also at no jitter on all your platforms, right? Yes. And it's about telecommunications. We cover enterprise communication and collaboration.

[00:46:54] And we do focus on the levels from, from the very basics, such as network configuration and the technologies that allow you to rapidly move video and audio signals plus other data all the way up through the end users unified communication experience. So we'll cover Zoom or Teams or WebEx or, and we're also taking a look at contact centers and the custom and technologies

[00:47:23] that are part of the quote unquote customer journey since that involves how companies choose to communicate with people who work outside their company. And before this you worked at Windows IT Pro so I'm going to take advantage of that on our next story because Microsoft said something pretty funny this week. And so I've kind of need somebody who knows a little bit about Windows. Thank you for being here. Yonko Reckers is also here. His newsletter Lopass.cc doing well,

[00:47:53] right Yonko? Yeah, it is doing well. I'm running up to three years actually next month. Yeah, you were one of the first people who said, you know what? I want to own my own stuff, my own content. 17,000 subscribers. That's pretty good. Nice job. Roughly around that number. You know, it goes up and down. But yeah, it's something to be proud of. Well done. Lopass.cc and Yonko covers AR as well. We have a story for you. Actually,

[00:48:23] a story you broke. So we'll get to that in just a little bit. And Dan Patterson who works at Blackbird.ai, he's Senior Director of Content. We've mentioned it before. Blackbird does a great job of helping people see through the misinformation. Yeah, thanks. We try. How do we do that? Well... I'm giving you a chance to plug. Yeah.

[00:48:52] We haven't talked about AI yet, Leo. You know what? This is a weird... I think part of it is that we have an AI show now in Intelligent Machines on Wednesday. And so I don't channel as many AI shows twit. For a while, that's all we were talking about. Yeah. Well, we use AI, but we also have a large intelligence analyst team. That's a big part of what you do. We help organizations, commercial

[00:49:22] but also non-commercial and executives or leaders. We protect them from narrative-based disinformation attacks. That's an interesting thing. Is that becoming an issue with businesses now? Yeah, for sure. I mean, you and I might think of this colloquially... We might think of it as deep fakes or even doxing, brigading, but at scale and targeted at an individual

[00:49:51] or teams. Executives, for sure. Leaders, whether you're an executive at a commercial or non-commercial entity. and many of these... A lot of what we see on the web is manipulated and a lot of these attacks, you can think of it as just people saying bad things, but there are actionable threats and there's a lot of really

[00:50:21] harmful information that is spread by bad actors at large scale. So we use AI to analyze and monitor trends and we use human analysts to not just interpret the data but to work directly with organizations and help them make smart decisions. I think this is a growth industry, I hate to say it. This is increasingly... It's so easy now to create an army of bots. bots.

[00:50:50] What did X announce they had killed 800 million bots last year? 800 million? I remember when Twitter had 350 million members, period. Unbelievable. I think actually that... Well, we're talking about Elon as well because that was of course the whole thing before he bought Twitter. He said, you know, they got a bot problem. Yeah.

[00:51:20] And it's nothing... It's only gotten better. Little did he know what was in that kitchen sink. This episode of This Week in Tech brought to you by Shopify. Have you ever thought of starting your own business? You have a great idea, but those pesky little details, they can get in the way. How do you charge people? Who's going to design your website? How do you handle fulfillment? Look, I know what it's like. I've been there and I've watched my own kids start their businesses, but you know what? They got it done. With

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[00:52:49] Go to shopify.com slash twit. That's shopify.com slash twit. So we do a show called Windows Weekly. And of late, I think people have been kind of upset with one of our hosts, Paul Thurrott, because he seems kind of grumpy. He's a little grumpy. You know, I mean, he has a lifetime covering Windows, but he never seems happy anymore.

[00:53:19] Apparently, he's not alone. Microsoft announced this week that they are going to make major improvements to Windows 11. Quote, we're evolving how Windows is built behind the scenes to raise the quality bar. Pavan Davaluri, who's the new executive vice president of Windows and devices at Microsoft. We are focusing on making Windows 11 more responsive and consistent so performance feels smooth and reliable. Yeah, lately,

[00:53:48] Windows stutters and bogs down. Over the course of the year, we're improving system performance and app responsiveness. File Explorer. And Windows Service Pack 2. Well, you know what? Back in its day, Service Pack 2 for XP. That was good. That was really good, right? Yeah. Come a long way since Windows 7. Sorry to interrupt you. Part of the problem also is Copilot. Microsoft's been shoving their AI

[00:54:17] in every corner and they say they're going to back off on that as well. You don't buy it? No, I'm just... Did you not want Copilot in literally everything you do? In everything? Google's kind of doing the same thing in Workspace, man. It's everywhere. There's a Gemini button in everything. It's driving me nuts. It's when they began auto-mashing it into Maps that I got super mad

[00:54:46] because all I want is a really simple map app that tells me how to get from point A to point B and when to switch lanes and what time to go and I do not need Gemini for any of that. I had a structured workflow that worked just fine. See, Pavan Devaluri even mentioned Linux. He said, we're going to make Windows subsystem for Linux better. Please don't move to Linux. Please. Please. It's practically begging.

[00:55:15] One of the things people consistently complain about because we all have widescreen monitors is Microsoft in Windows 11 took away the ability to take the taskbar which sits on the bottom and put it on the left or right where you have a lot more space. Pavan says, we're going to bring that back too. Good. Good. I hope that makes people happy. Quote, repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we've heard from you. We're introducing the ability to reposition it.

[00:55:45] They should say reintroduce, by the way, Pavan, because you took it out. To reposition it to the tops or sides of your screen making it easier to personalize your workspace. Windows update will be improved to allow users more control over how and when updates install. How many times have you been sitting there using Windows and it says, I'm going to reboot now. You don't mind, do you? I don't mean to meet up on Windows. Paul does a very good job of that all by himself. But that's why we love Paul because he's

[00:56:28] name. It's called Windows K2, which is the same name as Mount Everest Peak. Maybe because this is a tall mountain to climb Microsoft. I don't know. Also, there's not a lot of oxygen up there. Yeah, K2 is number two behind Everest. Oh, K2 is the second tallest. Yeah. That's right. Sorry. Thank you. Have you been up there? You sound like you know.

[00:56:58] Oh, that book is so great and so heroic. I love it so much. He's my favorite narrative nonfiction writer. Oh, he's the best. I love him. And that was the year that so many people died on the way up. 96, yeah. I remember watching. That was actually, to get back to the shifting media paradigms, it was actually one of the first developing stories where it was easier to get dispatches over the web than in the more conventional media outlets.

[00:57:29] People were going to be like, well, I'll see what time our newsweek has to say. And meanwhile, there were websites going, oh my goodness, guess what just happened? So it was. That was the beginning of that 96. It really was. Yeah. When it all started. Yeah. So. Yeah. Now if, you know, somebody passes away. So Leo, I want to note that I want to note that with Microsoft, something they have been trying really hard to do for about 10 years is de-center the operating

[00:57:58] system and the desktop as the hub where you work. And in a lot of ways, lockdown was great for this because they were able to pivot really quickly with teams and because of their huge enterprise footprint where they already had a built-in customer base with Microsoft 365, it was super easy for them to push teams out to everybody and make that your default collaborative workspace. But even pre-lockdown, as far back

[00:58:28] as 2016, they were really pushing the idea that you needed to get away from an operating system, a desktop and apps over to a centralized workspace and a shift in how you looked at computing so it was more task focused rather than apps focused. So instead of saying I'm going to open up this Excel spreadsheet, put in a hundred numbers and then see what that means for sales projections, what you'd say instead is, oh, I'm going to, oh, it's time for

[00:58:58] me to do the sales projection workflow and if that touches on parts of email or Excel, then hooray, that's what happens. The biggest obstacle they've had is that the typical user and the typical customer does not move as quickly as a tech company does. It's really easy to eat the dog food inside a company but if you're a regular company with an IT budget, you are probably using workflows and systems

[00:59:27] that are 10 or more years old and they're fine and you don't have money for an upgrade. And you don't want to upgrade. You don't want to retrain. You don't want to suffer through the bugs. It's a huge capital expenditure and you have to be able to if you're a school district or local government, you have to really justify it, which is why Microsoft has found itself in a position where it's trying to push people to one model but a huge percentage of its customer base is like we need you to support the thing that we bought back

[00:59:57] in the before times and with Windows 11 That's tied them down, hasn't it? That's really been their problem. Backward compatibility is a curse. No. The difference with Apple and Microsoft is that Apple has been willing to go buy Intel. No, Apple is like, oh, do you not like that you can no longer charge your phone using this cable? Well, that's too bad. Here's how you buy the cable. Sorry about that. And Windows hasn't done that.

[01:00:26] And what they tried to do with Windows 11 instead is be like, we're going to try and gently use you into this. And people are like, you are not. And also you cramming Copilot is the exact opposite of gentle. So please stop. I'm going to guess, Lisa, you're the only person on this panel who still uses Windows though. You would actually guess wrong. I've moved to a Mac environment. Dan, Windows? No. I mean, I have and I was pretty Xbox for a long time.

[01:00:56] Xbox is not Windows. Wait a minute. Let's not get it. No, no. I have an Xbox. That counts. Windows. Yeah. I mean, I have a test suite, but that's not the same thing. Yeah. The next box might be Windows. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. But that's not for two more years. Just out of curiosity, Yanko, you using Windows? I just try to remember when I used Windows the last time and it might have been XP or something. I don't know. Windows XP was fantastic. Oh my gosh. I was a Windows 7 fan. I think Windows 7 was really the last

[01:01:25] Take us back to the timeline where I didn't like the UI so much. It was a little Fisher Pricey for me. Big buttons and colors and stuff. That's why I like 7, which is basically XP with a nice interface on top of it. So it's just me. I'm the only Windows user here, I guess. Benito, you use Windows? I play video games. Yeah. Ah, it's gamers. That's right. Although that's changing rapidly thanks to Steam

[01:01:54] and Proton. The Steam deck runs Linux and the compatibility layer Proton now runs many, many great Windows games as well, if not better than Windows does. And so things are shifting a little bit in that world. I used to have a Windows laptop just for accessing Salesforce because it was so much easier. There you go. There you go. But you know, macOS is certifying itself as well. You know, macOS. that's, yeah, honestly, it's don't. Oh,

[01:02:24] the apps don't get me started on how bad the mobile apps are getting. They really need to do a hard story over. People not watching video, she's throwing a finger across her throat when she makes that sound. Sorry. Use your imagination. imagination. Speaking of changes, well, this is kind of a strange story because earlier this week, Meta said,

[01:02:54] you know that virtual reality world that you guys have been hanging out in your MetaQuest? We're going to shut that down. We're going to have a mobile version. We're not going to have a MetaQuest version. But very quickly, Yanko had the story. They changed their mind. What happened, Yanko? It was basically a day later they came out and were like, oh, our bad. We're actually going to keep it around. We're just not going to update it anymore, essentially. You will not be able to

[01:03:24] create new worlds. We will also not make any new worlds in VR anymore. But people can still use these existing Horizon worlds for the foreseeable future. So what you're saying is Horizon Worlds has legs? It has legs, yes. Very nicely done. So it's an interesting and complicated story, right? Because it's one of those things where people are like, oh yeah, but VR has been dead and nobody's using it. And there

[01:03:54] is some truth to it. Horizon worlds in VR has never really been a big hit. I actually used it for a while quite a bit. Did you? You used to hang out there? I like playing a couple of games. Arena Quest. Now I'm actually not remembering the name. But you had to put on the nerd helmet to do it? Yeah, but it was fun. Even in those pre-lag times, actually, it was a lot of fun. Once you're having fun,

[01:04:24] it doesn't MetaQuest. I actually stupidly bought the $1,500 MetaQuest Pro. That was insane. It was quickly marked down by about 50 or 100%. And then I gave it away. But I played a few games in there. It was fun. I really liked the one where you listen to music and I really enjoyed that. And that was fun. But I mean, so the bigger trends here is that VR is still around. People are still using VR, but the

[01:04:54] audience really has shifted over the last year or two. Where before it was a mix of a little bit of everything. There was people who were doing fitness, older people actually getting into this, and people playing Beat Saber. one or two years ago, it really started to shift. Now it's all teenagers and younger kids using it. They're all playing these crazy, messy, free-to-play games, guerrilla tech and so forth, which are

[01:05:23] when you're my age, I just have to throw my arms up. I can't do this. But they're getting a kick out of it, and it's actually getting used quite a bit. So that's sustaining VR. interesting. It'll be interesting. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Janko. It'll be interesting to see, speaking of Steam, how the Steam frame, their ARM-based VR headset that comes out this summer, how that kind of shifts the market, or at least, no pun intended, reframes it onto

[01:05:53] gaming. Did Apple make a mistake not focusing on gaming with the Vision Pro? I think so. I mean, I don't know, because it's a $3,500 device, right? So those teenagers are not going to buy that. And the adults, their parents are probably not going to hand it down to them, which is what happened to a lot of those MetaQuest headsets. MetaQuest is pretty affordable if you don't do the Pro version. I want one for $300, which is actually really good.

[01:06:23] Oftentimes you can pick one up for $250, and for that it's really hard to beat essentially. But going back to this Horizon Worlds thing, so they said, oh, we're going to shut it down. Then they changed their tune on it because there was enough people in it really protesting and being upset about it because they had created stuff for it. There's comedy clubs in there. There's music shows in there. There's all these different games in there. People meet there for at Galax Anonymous and those kinds of things. Really?

[01:06:53] There are AA meetings in medical medicine. There's all kinds of stuff. Wow, that's interesting. So all of that going away. That's actually a great use for that. Yeah. Come to think of it. You've got anonymity. You don't have to leave the house, but you can get support anywhere anytime. I think that's actually kind of cool. And then Meta gets to grow its list of alcoholics. No, they don't. I hope not. I would hope not. That is strange marketing right there. There's still people playing Second Life, right? Second Life has gotten weird.

[01:07:23] It was always weird. It was always a little weird. So there's enough, I guess, well, not enough for them to keep it up to date. They're not going to work on it. And it also, like, there's some stuff that wasn't actually part of the official announcement, or it was kind of hinted at, but Meta has been moving to their own engine, essentially, for some of these things. Like on mobile and on VR, they were using Unity, right? They were using Unity. Right now, if you

[01:07:54] get into Horizon Worlds in VR, most of that stuff is still Unity-based. And so they were going to transition to this new engine, both on mobile and in VR. And essentially, I assume they just ran the numbers and were like, well, really not enough people are using it in VR. It's going to be very expensive to bring this new engine to VR, so let's just only focus on mobile with this new engine and let's shut everything down. That's not running on it. And then when people protested they were like, well, actually, it's not that expensive for us

[01:08:24] to keep the Unity Worlds up and running, so let's do that. But the new stuff is going to be on mobile, essentially. Interesting. I mean, if you're doing it for mobile, you might as well just do a MetaQuest version of it. I would imagine it's not... I mean, the mobile strategy, I do not understand. Is it VR? How do you do it in mobile? You just hold your phone? No, you use your... It's mobile games, essentially. So when you do the Horizon app on your phone, you can now play games in it, and some of

[01:08:54] these Horizon worlds, social games where you meet with other people and do all kinds of stuff. have to strap your phone to your face. No, no, no, no. But so a lot of these games and a lot of games that they're investing in now are mobile only, and I'm still kind of unsure who's going to download the Horizon app to play mobile games because there's so many other places you can play mobile games and get mobile games. It kind of feels like meta... There's still corporations that

[01:09:22] have a contract in place for the metaverse so they can't shut it down. You think it's that? Yeah. That's what it feels like. Because why would they just shut it down? Well, people don't pay to do Horizon Worlds, right? And it's free, right? It must cost them so much money. It must cost them so much Generally, it's free. I think you can or you could buy certain things, and they started to introduce monetization stuff, goods, like in-game

[01:09:52] stuff, like everywhere. But also, they don't really have a replacement yet. So they obviously cut back on the VR efforts. They fired 10,000 people. They're part of Reality Labs. They're concentrating more of their efforts on mobile, and obviously they're spending a ton of money on AI, so they're cutting back. But they're still also not completely giving up on it. They're still working on future headsets, like two different lines. You know what would save it? Actually, it would save Second Life,

[01:10:22] too. If they use the new NVIDIA DLSS sexy filter, that would make it so much more fun. GTC, and we covered this on Monday, Jensen Wong's keynote at the NVIDIA conference on Monday. Among many things they announced, one of which made the stock market jump when he said, we're going to actually make a trillion dollars selling our chips next year, up from half a trillion.

[01:10:52] But the thing that they announced that got the most attention because gamers hated it was something called DLSS5, which takes existing game content and sexies it up. It adds the lighting, it adds some smoother textures, and that makes it more real. I think it makes it more realistic. I think it's actually pretty cool, but gamers don't like AI, I guess. And there was a kind of a general sense of revulsion. There's also some problems. I think the Verge wrote about it, where in some of the sports

[01:11:22] games that use actual characters based on likenesses of real athletes, when you add VR to it, that doesn't really understand who's who, they're just going to turn into this other good looking dude who has now a lot more detail, but doesn't look at all like the person who is associated with the number on his shirt, right? So that's a little problematic. I think honestly... The skeets about this

[01:11:57] game. I think it looks pretty good, I'll be honest with you. Let me see if I can... The Yassify filter. The Yassify. Look, I'm a gamer, but the gaming takes have all been pretty basic and boring. Gamers just have this kind of knee-jerk revulsion to anything with AI. I got bad news for you. It's going to happen no matter what you think. I got to speak up for the gamers here.

[01:12:27] I said this last week on Intelligent Machines, but it's about changing the art direction of the game. Like, this changes the art direction of the game. Period. I think this changes the consensual reality, huh? Don't you think this looks more like me than me? I question for you on that. You know, the yesified version or

[01:12:56] the hello version. We already have this body of work that shows the negative self-esteem or the mental health effects when people spend way too much time scrolling through on Instagram or TikTok and they're seeing these AI tweaked people that don't look like real life. Don't you think something like this, if you're also seeing in your games, don't you worry about how that might affect people's experience? People know, I mean,

[01:13:25] for a long time there was this thought that cartoons would make kids violence, but kids know the difference. That's a cartoon. And even movies don't make people violent, even violent movies. I think people will know it's a game. I'm not expected to look as handsome as Leo Laporte. I can buy Benito's argument. It is different artwork. If you're changing a specific art

[01:13:53] direction or artistic intention, I can understand that argument. But I don't think that is every use case in gaming. I think that is particular use cases. And especially when you apply this to older games, or games that don't have the budget of a AAA studio, I think this can provide one path. It's going to be an option in the game too. If you don't like

[01:14:23] it, you go into your video settings and you just turn it off. It does have some potential risks. Here's a DSLL, DLSS Spongebob, and that's damn creepy. I don't think that's really what DLSS will do. I can't help it. I think it is with the participation of the game publishers, right? If you have a NVIDIA video card, you can turn it on on any game. I thought that publishers had to

[01:14:53] consent to this. Maybe they do, but that would be an artificial constraint because it's built into the card. You could do it without their permission. That would be smart of NVIDIA. You've raised an interesting question about consent then, haven't you? Because who gets to consent to this stuff. Maybe NVIDIA is smart enough to say. The counter counter argument is, yes, the publisher may say do it because we like that everything looks so shiny now, but the artists who actually worked on the game may still be really upset. Could you

[01:15:23] make the same arguments about ray tracing? That fundamentally changes how your game looks. It fundamentally changes how it looks. It's a setting, and you can turn it on and off depending on your performance. But all that stuff is programmed in by the game designers. That's true, but it's also a button I can click to turn it on or off. but they intended that. I have machines that do AI upscaling. My NVIDIA TV, my shield has an AI upscaling

[01:15:52] feature, and it actually does a very good job taking HD content and making it 4K, and it looks great. NVIDIA is probably the same technology, just a later generation. I don't know. I think the initial reaction will fade and we're going to get used to this. We're going to take a break. You're listening to This Week in Tech with Dan Patterson, Lisa Schmeiser, and Yanko Rutgers. A great panel. Good to have you. We'll

[01:16:22] have more in just a bit. Elon's going to be paying some money. Maybe some big bucks. This version, this episode, this segment of This Week in Tech is brought to you by OutSystems, the number one AI development platform. OutSystems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future, where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale. OutSystems enables them to build AI agents

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[01:18:22] Outsystems, dot com slash twit to book a demo. Outsystems dot com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support. I take you back now to early 2022 when Elon Musk tweeted out, I'm going to buy Twitter because it's just a mess and it's full of bots and it sucks. and he even I think said funding secured

[01:18:52] and he no that was another tweet. Elon was big at tweeting at the time. The SEC even looked into his tweets because at some point he was so critical of Twitter it looked like he had initially said he was going to pay $44 billion for Twitter and it looked like maybe he was trying to drive the price down by driving the stock price down. The SEC took a look at it stock manipulation and declined to do anything

[01:19:21] about it. Well a class action lawsuit from shareholders did do something about it on Friday a jury in California determined that Elon Musk had misled investors via public statements that depressed the price of the company's stock ahead of his purchase of the service. I mean it was to me it seemed pretty obvious that that's what was going on.

[01:19:51] A number of investors started a suit certified as a class action saying we've been defrauded the jury and that Musk made them intentionally those tweets as part of a larger scheme the jury rejected arguments about the larger scheme but did find him liable damages not yet determined that will happen later but the plaintiffs are seeking as much as 2.6 billion dollars

[01:20:20] which I guess Elon could afford he's worth much more than that but even when you're worth a hundred billion a few billion starts to add up is this justice Dan I'm curious maybe I just haven't googled this deeply enough I'm curious about the who which shareholders joined this Steve Garrett Nancy Price John Garrett and Brian

[01:20:49] Belgrave sued him in October of 2022 the month before he actually closed the deal I mean is it justice I think you said it yourself like it it seemed his tactics it seemed like he was trying to do something very particular so I think that if you if you you should know who you get into bed with ah good point so he tweeted in May of 2022 saying I'm going to put the Twitter deal on hold

[01:21:19] pending details supporting calculations that spam and fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users Twitter had asserted that he said I don't buy it I think it's a lot more than 5% now that he's the owner we know it's a lot more than 5% he also said in a May 16th comment at a conference that he believed that 20% of Twitter users were fake accounts when the then

[01:21:49] Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said there's no way for a third party to even know this we don't make that information visible to third parties Elon tweeted a poop emoji this might be the first time a jury has found a poop emoji misleading Elon loves the poop emoji by the way wasn't this the same case where they had a hard time finding a jury because so many people were like I hate that guy maybe

[01:22:18] they didn't it's been a little while but I also remember vaguely remember that him making the point about the bots was like really back of the napkin mouth he's like well I tweeted something and then I read all the retweets and comments and they're all bots and really that only proves that all your followers are bots so

[01:22:48] Twitter ultimately sold for a lot more than probably it was worth 44 billion dollars after Elon was forced by a Delaware court to buy it at the price that he had quoted he didn't want to he was trying to get out of it the jury deliberated for four days so that means it wasn't like an instant like oh yeah this guy's guilty it took him four days but they did unanimously find that

[01:23:18] the tweets from May 13th and May 17th were materially false or misleading but they didn't hold them liable for the press conference or the comments at the conference from May 16th and they said even though the plaintiffs part of the lawsuit was that there was a scheme going on they didn't they didn't agree with that but they are going to award damages per share of Twitter stock for each day of the class

[01:23:47] period which goes from May 13th 2022 to October 3rd 2022 so it could be could add up to quite a big deal and the irony of all of that is that his if there was a scheme it clearly didn't work because he had to pay the original price and now he has to pay on top of it for some stupid tweets that he did so yeah Elon had taken the stand during the trial

[01:24:17] saying I really did have concerns over the bots and I didn't intend to drive the stock price down I was that wasn't my meaning at all I guess they were not persuaded at the same time he argued that he should pay less for it so right he was trying to get out of the deal at the time yeah um in other news

[01:24:47] Samsung is ending sales of its $2,900 tri-fold phone this on the heels of news that Samsung is is really suffering in its phone business that it's that it's losing money hand over fist which is a surprise since it is the number one android handset I believe yeah that is a surprise uh I think that the trifold sold well

[01:25:17] uh buyers were paying above retail on the on the on ebay and other secondhand markets um there's Ars Technica speculates it might have more to do Ryan Witwarm Ryan Witwarm sorry writing in Ars Technica it might have more to do with the cost of the components with RAM prices doubling and so forth which could also explain why they're losing money on phones in general right yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah and

[01:25:47] storage and processors it's all it's all gone through all gone up and I have to think I think you're right that at this point the Iran war the resulting oil crisis is going to hit a lot of companies really hard and helium right yeah a helium plant was destroyed this is a besides it's not just for balloons anymore no it's used in semiconductor

[01:26:17] manufacture and medical devices I might add and that's going to really hit the helium supply so we're economically we're in a world of hurt I think except for Party City yeah party city got hit by the vulture capitalists oh it's gone yeah we used to have one private equity road again

[01:26:46] that's I store now because I think they still do them there or grocery store that's sad I that yeah we used to get those big mylar you know 70th birthday balloons things like that yeah can't get them anymore I guess speaking of the war there has been some concern with the slashing of CISA our national security organization they had a leader who

[01:27:16] left after a year of turmoil and they have a temporary leader now and many many CISA security experts were fired that with the war in Iran there's some concern about Iran hacking activity so far there's only been one I don't know kind of minor if maybe it's not so minor if you're one of the 200,000 devices that medical equipment provider called Stryker

[01:27:46] was hit by a hacking group Handala claiming to be pro-Iran they say they erased data from 200,000 devices including servers and mobile phones used by their Stryker employees if that's all that's not as bad as it is we know about right now we're working with an incomplete data set and as the

[01:28:17] attacks will likely increase that I mean that's just geopolitics and it's it is one tool that somebody who is an actor that's on the defense is like especially what do you mean by asymmetric in that context I mean the US has greater kinetic capabilities and we have greater economic capabilities meaning we can just fund things for longer there will be some attrition but

[01:28:47] we can fund our kinetic activities longer so an actor on the defense will use tactics I mean this is a time tested in every war ever this is what happened in Vietnam for sure yeah so we saw guerrilla warfare in Vietnam and cyber attacks are the new form of that and Iran is one of the most they are not up there with the US

[01:29:16] or Israel in terms of their cyber capabilities but I would put them they're certainly as good as North Korea and much better than most of their peers they are very cyber capable and they learned a lot from Stuxnax so again I wouldn't expect we see massive cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure right now but perhaps the likelihood would increase as the duration

[01:29:46] of the conflict extends and adding to that comes physical attacks on infrastructure right I think just this morning Iran said when there was this whole back and forth about that trade of Hormuz and Trump said he wants to blow up power planes now Iran mentioned a bunch of targets that they would retaliate on and interestingly IT infrastructure was part of that and there was like early on in the war there was the attack on the

[01:30:18] two of them there was one in Bahrain I think and one in UAE and all those countries are trying to become havens for AI companies right investing heavily into AI you'd nuts to build a data center in

[01:30:48] it it not though because the street of Hormuz controls 20% of the world's oil yeah so it is threatening everything from how we move goods and services because the price of diesel is going to shoot up to whether or not we will be able to have genuinely global networking and data movement because when cloud centers go down that's going to hit people in different places and if you have hackers

[01:31:17] coming in and targeting medical service companies that's that's just that's the beginning of an iceberg what about utilities what about hospitals um how complex very nervous and I'm also nervous about the use launch on warning status with all of our

[01:31:47] nukes oh god yeah um but I mean like I would be surprised if we well I won't be surprised I don't know I mean this talk of tactical is you're right Lisa it tactical becomes strategic very quickly especially with nuclear conflict um I just and there's the huge humanitarian cost now I did say that tremendous we're in the US but many of our listeners are we have listeners all over the world I'm always glad when I see

[01:32:16] Galia in our club discord she lives in Tel Aviv and I'm terrified for her I have we have many listeners in the Middle East right she was down there and she came back up to join us

[01:32:46] I just it's going to be good news for the box office on Project Hail Mary however because escapism as you know when times are tough people go to the movies Japan has decided as of October 1st to allow what they yeah this is something

[01:33:16] we've always chewed from time to time I think our FBI and others have for instance put out malware that removes malware but it's always a very risky thing and there's always this nervousness that this will escalate as well you ever used a nuclear weapon but

[01:33:47] I think sometimes I think that cyber attacks could escalate to that level of risk as well you attack their infrastructure they attack our infrastructure and I don't know if we're very very vulnerable this is happening all the is hacking everybody all the time but

[01:34:17] Leo to your point we had a policy that was stuck was an interesting event for a number of reasons it certainly was an interesting cyber event but it also shifted our policy and you're right just as a to attack the scatter devices

[01:34:46] that were used in the Iranian centrifuges to control the speed to basically break them to turn them up so fast that they could not create you know enrich uranium to as a precursor to making an atomic weapon and it was very effective except it and

[01:35:15] was widely used in attacks by hackers against us yeah and it also shifted our policy from defensive to maybe it's okay to do a little offensive well Japan has now decided that the time is right to allow offensive ops because online the nation faces quote the most complicated national security environment since World War II

[01:35:44] the chief cabinet secretary Minoru Kiihara explained the threat from cyber attacks are having a huge impact on people's lives and economic activities this is quite an important threat to Japanese national security so they're going to enact the proactive cyber defense actions allowing if authorized and it looks like it will be Japanese police and the

[01:36:14] security forces to attack and disable infrastructure only we're only going to attack the infrastructure that's used to run cyber attacks but I guess that could include data devices this is just one more step in a weird escalational spiral that frankly terrifies me especially when you look at Cuba where the power has been out now all

[01:36:44] week the whole island imagine what would happen if we lost well you wouldn't have a twit podcast if we lost power for a week that wouldn't be the worst of it I know but everything we do our entire lives rely on electricity now think of all the medically fragile people who would die think of all the people who are in ventilators think of

[01:37:25] and if that falls apart mass starvation ensues I hope you have a victory garden I bet you're growing tomatoes Lisa I just feel like you must be growing tomatoes I do we I was actually going through going well we could probably barter a

[01:37:58] I saw something on social media today and I can't credit who it was from where they were like look we can't micro garden our way out of 2026 but this is a great opportunity for us to start having conversations about what the food systems in the U.S.. look like and how people can live in high density places and still have a little bit more food autonomy than there were books about that through the

[01:38:28] 2000s do you remember yeah like animal vegetable meaning to do that well like the thing that they point out is you have to have an enormous amount of fish

[01:38:58] the fish fertilize the vegetables and fruit and then you can eat the fish so I was a microbiology undergraduate and my undergraduate research was actually in recirculating aquaculture where the engine it was a huge cross departmental collaboration and my job was honestly just to assay bacteria because that's what you do when you are 21 and the whole point was it was supposed to be a self contained recirculating facility for growing tilapia and then the

[01:39:28] nitrogen can be used for fertilizing things like that those are incredibly complex and finicky systems like it's not just a matter of sticking some fish in a tub and putting in a pump and calling it good there's a lot of chemistry involved and modern agriculture is really data driven a lot of these tractors are tied into satellite services that tell you when to do everything you need to do in the fields and exactly how much

[01:39:57] fertilizer to put down and when and how to water and things like that and farmers know what they're doing and asking us all to up skill to that

[01:40:28] is it too late to plant them or is this the time no no no no yeah yeah you live in an apartment do you have somewhere you could plant tomatoes I

[01:40:58] reduce the use of fossil fuels not getting your apples from south America is a good start yeah there's there I think there's a lot to be said for eat local it also tastes better yeah oh yeah and I would argue that would it be nice to have strawberries in November sometimes sure it would but they're going to taste terrible and like just wait I mean I can say this from a position

[01:41:28] we have to relearn canning and making of jams and all of that stuff right and salting our beef we're going to all need to learn how to salt meat and do you I

[01:41:58] cannot wait for project I have to go soon we have learned you can grow potatoes in space yes we just learned that it was it was a fictional trope but in fact they were able to grow potatoes on the international space station so there let's take a break we have more to talk about and we have a wonderful panel to do it with Lisa Schmeiser from nojitter

[01:42:27] dot com yankoreckers lowpass dot cc and of course dan patterson blackbird dot ai another radio refugee our show today brought to you by modulate this is really cool this is a really interesting use of ai everyday enterprises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic right

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[01:45:39] conversation understanding deep fake detection and emotion detection velma check it out at preview dot modulate dot ai really really good speaking of sears and voice fraud it all ties together in the end sears exposed ai chat but phone calls and text chats they were saving them to a wide open database on the web

[01:46:10] phone of course when you talk to a customer service chat bot you may be giving personal information contact information phone numbers now sears department stores as we were talking about earlier are gone

[01:46:52] female voices we ignore men right actually what's really interesting I don't remember the did you not hear me Dan are you not listening I don't remember the vendor off the top of my head but we recently got pitched by a company that was telling us about the different specialized ai agents it was building for different lines of work and what I noticed when they did the pitch was for HR and for marketing they had given the agents female

[01:47:21] names and for IT troubleshooting and procurement more troublingly the IT troubleshooting was named Vikram have you rebooted the computer I can't believe they named it Vikram this seems vaguely problematic for a lot of yes oh my god and when you call up to get recipe advice it's always a nice italian voice I actually

[01:47:51] assigned a reporter to look into and talk to people about hey how is agentic AI enforcing and introducing systemic bias into workplace interactions because if this is what vendors are putting forward like how is this shaping the way people perceive you know people named Vikram in real life I'm sure all of you are IT geniuses or you know well let's be honest saying this seems to be a female role or a male role yeah uh jeremiah

[01:48:21] fowler security researcher found three publicly exposed databases from sears containing massive troves of chat logs audio files and text transcriptions from sears home services customers uh 3.7 million chat logs 1.4 million audio files all public fowler said i found a csv file um that contained 54,359 complete

[01:48:51] chat logs uh with samantha nobody with no no Vikram uh chats though no um anyway do you want a csv file that tells you 50,000 times to turn it off and on again uh you know that's right you don't really need that one um let's talk about uh prediction markets because this is a really interesting uh

[01:49:20] growth market we've all heard about cows cows cows now um what's the what's the other one uh poly market yeah uh these are basically gambling right it's obvious you're but they call it a prediction market so it's not illegal in many states or any states because I guess it's kind of a loophole wait a minute Nevada just outlawed Arizona just filed criminal charges over at Calci over

[01:49:50] illegal gambling Nevada which is the home of course of all those casinos has markets is you can bet on anything and we've seen this insiders from you know the Pentagon who knew something about the Venezuela extraction of Maduro would place a bet right

[01:50:20] before it happened saying yeah I think Maduro is going to be captured in the next two weeks and then good news Major League Baseball which I guess I guess FanDuel and DraftKings was already taken by football Major League Baseball struck a deal with Polymarket the official event

[01:50:50] prediction platform Major League Baseball is already you know I remember Pete Rose was kept out of the Hall of Fame for betting on a baseball game those rules are kind of long gone and they've prosecuted or at least come down pretty hard on players who were clearly throwing games yeah throwing games thrown in the dirt or you know predictions on particular pitches

[01:51:20] right Major League Baseball actually last year was a case of two players facing federal charges for manipulating their on-field performance so what's the best way to ensure the integrity of the game do a deal with Polly Market right because then you could do prop bets on anything like there's a lot of reasons to dislike Pete Rose but it's it's really the league really has

[01:51:48] to confront that hypocrisy it's fair it's just unbelievable I just but I guess there's so much money well I'm wondering how long until we're going to see some legislation around this well and you know the sad thing is all most of the time that legislation comes from lobbyists with the casino operations who say if you're going to come to our casinos it really feels like I mean

[01:52:18] there there are conversations especially in the media world about how this is an interesting and new emerging technology and there are reasons to consider it but this really to me feels like the 2000 2001 2002 era of crypto where there was a rush to the space and we saw massive companies doing massive deals with crypto companies before regulation came in and we found out there was oh

[01:52:48] surprise there was a ton of fraud going on so polymarket no it's I think you're right people like to make it sound like they know what they're talking about too and they've gamified the experience and all you have to do is give someone the quick dopamine hit and like oh there is nothing wrong with this ever donk so what is a particularly masculine thing that

[01:53:18] we men do we are standing monitoring the situation right with our arms folded just watching it go down we're monitoring this well polymarket has created the situation room in Washington DC where you can monitor the situation it's got big screens with the world you know the war everything you can bet on anything it's not a sports bar live x feeds flight

[01:53:47] radar bloomberg terminals where you can sip your bourbon and smoke a cigar and monitor the situation men's spaces men's activities you can tell look there's a cigar there's some whiskey it's opening march 20th on k street just up the street k street on k this is the

[01:54:17] most 2026 thing ever isn't it if i could get this napkin for christina warren she collects this kind of memorabilia meet me at the poly market situation room news bar watching a construction site you know how men can't stop yeah look at this but this is not just construction you can monitor the world situation everything going on and you can make and because it's poly

[01:54:47] market you can make a bet on any of this will his hair catch on fire when he's lighting the olympic torch six to one odds there are other places i would like to spend my time i'm monitoring the situation jeez a flip what a world we live in also prediction markets are like the wrong name elections the last week's elections

[01:55:17] they were all wrong it was all what the people who are betting wanted to happen wishful thinking well there was that story where that journalist got threatened when they were reporting on bombing in the middle east they were going to kill him because he had i bet this and you said that first they reached out and tried to do the more flies with honey thing with hey there's an inaccuracy in your story if you could report this instead that would be great

[01:55:46] thank you and like a good journalist this guy was like oh did I get something wrong and then he's like no and then he was he wouldn't do it wow yeah

[01:56:17] no it was it was a genuinely disturbing thing because it's it's another way where you know you're going to have under resourced reporters who whose names are attached to reporting the facts who are going to get threatened by institutional betters and what kind of backup do they have what kind of protection will they have and it it's easy to find your address with data sold by data brokers or given to you by cash patel yes hi here you go cash this is reported it's bugging me and of course cash goes yeah is he a

[01:56:47] liberal well don't these guys also don't these markets also advertise on podcasts isn't it all just one giant oh yeah not on mine yeah no not on mine in fact we've turned down not a significant amount of money from crypto investments and and and good for you prediction markets and all this stuff well done well done but this is the reason why they don't allow sports teams in Vegas before right it's because like the mob would threaten the players

[01:57:14] there's nothing bigger now than the knights and the raiders Vegas is sports city usa now although if you ask every time i go to vegas i'll ask a a driver you know hey how are you feeling about the oakland days they're like we don't want them i was just gonna say except for the a's yes to a person poor a's they're like no one asked for this poor oakland wanted them nobody wants them

[01:57:40] we have to ball us now want their owner what are they called the ballers yeah it's the oakland beast the oakland ballers are fantastic the games are they saying at the coliseum no no no no no they played a completely different venue one that's a little bit closer to uh emeryville actually and it's triple a or is it single a is it is it good it's fun um we used to have a uh no a minor league baseball team in sonoma called the crushers because there was like grape crushing

[01:58:10] grapes yeah yeah yeah and it was it was it was so much fun because there it's like handymen and yeah high school teachers now these guys are pro but they're like well they're pros they want to be pros yeah it's an independent independent they're locals they got kevin mitchell to the former san francisco giant to manage them so it's called the pioneer league they're part of what's called the pioneer league they play at ramondi park it's so much fun like one of my favorite things from last

[01:58:36] summer is i went during the day that they teamed up with the oakland zoo and awesome oh my gosh no they were giving out like possum hats they had oakland they had oakland docents there to give you animal facts um the the oakland bees mascot is actually a possum as well so it was just this great synergy of two really classic oh you know pro community they have to do this stuff because

[01:59:01] otherwise they wouldn't sell tickets so the crushers they would have they have like a bark a lounger right behind home plate yeah that you could win the right to sit there during the whole game and watch the game which sounds deadly uh they it was you know they would always they would have amusements in between every inning right i'm sure the possums do the same thing yeah yeah like with one where you bring 10 kids out and you have them put their forehead on a baseball bat and run around in a

[01:59:27] circle on the home plate until they get really dizzy and see if they can run to first base oh i love those yeah laughs yeah no like one of my goals for this year is to get up to a humboldt craps game i love independent baseball like but the oakland ballers are they were such a good time last year um like i i also go to the oakland roots games because i'm i'm for all of the small non-nfl and and um no i

[01:59:53] would say if you're in sports used to be if you are in the east bay do yourself a favor and get to an oakland ballers game this season it's gonna be amazing that's that's it used to be farm hands you know and stuff that's what baseball used to be yeah um yeah so it's too bad it got so corporatized and yeah but anyway so expensive we're all about the oakland bees now las vegas hates the oakland a's betting is happening oh i get it now betting is coming for us all leo the bees replaced the a's i get it

[02:00:22] yes yes now i get it uh that took a while the whole world started going downhill i could tell you the exact date march 21st 2006 was when it all started going to hell that was the day twitter launched 20 years ago yesterday oh no kidding the first tweet jack dorsey the first tweet and it was but wasn't called twitter with an e it was twitter without the e that was that was the fashion because

[02:00:51] you had tumblr flicker and remember and you can only interact with sending a text to 40404 that's right because it was originally it was the only way that was the only way you could do it before only way you could interact yeah and that's why it was 140 characters right yeah that's why yeah i remember i was on uh audio which is a podcasting platform started by biz and ev and and some of the others who co-founded twitter as well and we logged in one day and they said we're shutting down

[02:01:20] audio to start this new site called twttr so uh a bunch of podcasting nerds signed up that's right yeah right around now 2006 yeah yeah actually they did a good thing they biz paid back the audio investors gave them their money oh no kidding yeah which was audio was really great too i mean it was podcast like it took i i think it was kind of killed by itunes 4.9 which is exactly what happened it was the the first podcast directory mainstream but audio was a great directory

[02:01:50] it had ajax which was big at the time you could drag and drop stuff they also had this interesting idea of people leaving each other personal voice messages to become part of their rss feeds or something right yeah that's right i don't know if anybody ever did it but i thought oh that's kind of oh that's such a blast from the past right that's yeah i i think i filed a couple reports back then using that that's yeah i mean aren't bringing that back rss yeah i have my plaque wait a minute let me

[02:02:17] get my plaque hey what do you guys use for rss readers by the way i'm using feedly right now um there's one that just launched this past week i'm trying to look at um elon took over twitter and remember he took away all the blue checks so i got this plaque it said in in honor of leo laporte who had a verified a twitter account before they were available for purchase november 2022 yeah it's

[02:02:46] got light but now i have a blue check because elon gave it back i get a i get it with a what corey doctorow calls a non-consensual blue check i have a consensual non-use of twitter policy yeah well i don't want people to think i paid for it or anything anyway or 20 years ago yesterday uh twitter it all started actually that's uh and south by southwest in 2007 when uh four square

[02:03:14] launched twitter launched we blew up at south by it was so cool back then yeah oh south by was this week yeah that's when internet was uh was new and exciting and fun you can use all those all the platforms to post post onto all the other platforms oh my goodness yeah absolutely yeah and then use yahoo pipes to bring them all together yeah oh yeah yeah oh man i made so much irrelevant nonsense with yahoo pipes

[02:03:43] all the the young people are going who are these old people talking about old stuff you're watching this week in tech with uh with old people not so old as me but uh we're not as young as you either we're glad you're here uh dan and lisa and yanko uh and i'm very glad you're here you club twit members we thank you so much uh for making twit possible uh we started the club during covid when we realized

[02:04:12] uh you know we were going to have to really go to our listeners and help get them to help us stay afloat and you've done it and i really appreciate it if you're not a club member and you like what you hear if you want us to keep doing shows if you like the club shows that we do a whole bunch of them in our club twit discord if you want ad free versions of our shows twit.tv club twit 10 bucks a month gets you all of that and more but mostly gets you that nice warm fuzzy feeling that you're supporting

[02:04:40] quality programming that doesn't spy on you that doesn't talk down to you that delivers good content content with as much integrity as we can muster i think that's pretty important and it's frankly a endangered species these days twit.tv club twit to show your support thank you thank you in advance so i did go see uh project hail mary uh on thursday i wanted to see it in a format it's available on imax

[02:05:09] i'm kind of against imax because it becomes all about the screen you know and the movie kind of loses comes in second place i've seen enough movies now in imax i'm thinking like i saw everything ever yeah one battle after another rather uh an imax and i thought it was better in a normal on a normal size screen because it was so big you know but i saw it in this new uh screen x format which is a

[02:05:35] little weird it's movie theaters trying to find some way to get you to come in something that they can do that you can't so our local movie theater has you know the bark loungers and the food that they bring to you and all that but they also have taken the side walls of the theater and turned them into screens and they have laser projectors on the side walls and some movies including project hail mary are made so that in some scenes that extends around the wall so it's like almost like watching

[02:06:03] in virtual reality you know um and it's a gimmick but actually worked pretty well in project hail mary it was mostly the space scene so they could and you could tell they'd made the movie makers made content for those side walls and it's foveated just like the vision pro because you're you know it's your peripheral vision so it doesn't really need to be in focus but you just get a feeling like it's ex the space expanding around you but and and benito said don't know spoilers and i said benito you read

[02:06:31] the book how can i spoil it he said no i don't want to have any movie spoilers i will tell you this this isn't a spoiler great movie they lived up to the book if you loved the book which i did you will still love the movie they were pretty true to the book as always there's a few differences they added a little more action to make it an action movie but i think in general it's really good i remember talking

[02:06:59] to andy weir the author the guy who did the martian and now project hail mary when uh the book came out he had already signed movie rights and he told me yeah ryan gosling's gonna star and i kind of went and then he mentioned that the the the direction the team of directors it's two directors uh uh phil lord and christopher miller were uh known for uh the lego movie which i thought well okay so i was

[02:07:28] a little nervous andy said no no no you're this is going to be great he was very much involved in the production of the movie he has a producer credit and i think he was sitting there the whole time because they were there's a great script they did a good job and it's a it's a it's a feel-good movie as salon said it's movie medicine and in these troubled times it's nice to see something that makes you feel

[02:07:53] good so that's my review so for the imax thing leo for most films that are shot on imax you'll probably want to shoot it on imac you want to watch it on imax and project hail mary the thing with the thing with it is that it changes aspect ratios and that's what the wall thing is yeah i hate that it didn't have to be on the walls it could just be like a longer a longer landscape right i mean that's that's that's another thing i don't like about imax when it sometimes fills the screen and sometimes doesn't like when it goes back and forth they did that with that's the filmmaker's choice that's not i don't

[02:08:23] like that yeah one battle after another was full imax the whole movie but it's just it's too overwhelming it becomes about the screen to me and i really just want to see the story um i don't actually honestly think i needed screen x either but that i was able to get good seats for it so i don't think anybody wanted to see it in that format uh so i was able to go uh see it i i watched a really good uh youtube

[02:08:50] with a astrophysicist who said it's the science is very good and there's some they take some liberties they have to to make the story work but uh i think in general it's quite good there is i won't say anything because i want to protect you benito after you see the movie there's one thing you can say i'll just mute you well for myself for i'll meet you no i don't want to spoil it for anybody i'll wait there's one thing

[02:09:18] where they make a statement about the ability the perceptive abilities of a character in the movie that they don't follow through on that's really uh kind of opaque but other than that it's fine it was i it that didn't bother me that much i think it was very good i think project hail mary is superb and you're gonna enjoy it it's a feel-good movie take the kids there's no

[02:09:47] swearing because uh the star of the movie is a school teacher not ryan gosling the character he plays rylan grace is a school teacher right that's a whole thread i forgot yeah yeah it's in the book too he says i don't know if you've ever met any actual teachers in real life they don't say i was gonna say high school teachers anyway it's a very funny part of the book actually because at the beginning of the book you can't remember who he is and he says fudge and he goes why am i saying fudge

[02:10:20] anyway it made me want to reread the uh the book uh casting is excellent and actually ryan gosling is perfect as rylan grace because as we know from the move from the book rylan grace is a wimpy coward perfect uh they did the spider-verse movies that's right lord miller and they actually are very good uh directors i am i am anti-animation alex you're right i don't like i don't like comic book movies

[02:10:49] and i don't like animated movies um but i did like project hell mary and i think you will too the only thing i didn't like it's an amazon production and they say it in big letters and there's a smile it's like oh yeah i got a jeff bezos saying they're gonna finance melania somehow they have yeah somehow very nice uh we were talking about

[02:11:16] south by southwest normally i do an in memoriam nobody nobody uh as far as i know nobody died this week so i will do the in memoriam on amy webb's annual trend report she has been doing this with their future uh institute uh for many years she said she had a funeral at south by where she announced things are moving way too fast to do an annual trend report okay her future today strategy group

[02:11:43] was going to stop that was the last one she put on a black club we're going to get a are we getting amy on soon benito i think she's coming soon yeah i'm sorry i tried because she usually tries to come on after after south by south yeah she does this great thing she says we are gathered here today to celebrate and remember the life of the trend report 1500 people to see her she's famous for her south by uh talks and then it's very somber then the university of texas marching band comes in and they pepped

[02:12:13] everybody up so good good on you actually i guess chuck norris did pass this week but he's not a tech leader in any way but we can acknowledge that and and uh xander from uh uh buffy buffy i guess that's sort of nerd adjacent should mention that and finally speaking of nerds i like to do a pick

[02:12:37] every week this is a cassette player with usbc and bluetooth so if you still have your old cassette collection your mixtapes from when you were uh 19 this is this sounds pretty cool this is from maxwell not maxell and maxwell used to be like no it is max under right it's maxell yeah it's the where they had

[02:13:03] the hair going back yeah yep this is maxell's new cassette player uh it has a usbc port so it's rechargeable it has an audio jack so you can use wired headphones and bluetooth 5.4 so you can play it through your sonos speakers just wait it looks like a walkman because i might actually buy that i don't have any cassettes but i might actually buy that i have a whole box of cassettes in the base can i

[02:13:30] borrow some cassettes yanko my fear is that they're all like the tape is degraded at this point but yeah they're gonna fall apart the minute you put it in the cassette player because that's coming back as the weirdest uh legacy tech that come to come back next it's eight tracks and then we'll know that we're i think it's the romance of the mixtape yeah that's the that's a highly personal tangible

[02:13:53] artifact like cds cds are so much better but getting into 45 minutes and then having a perfect transition when it switches or when you have to turn it over yeah it was such an art so so one of the things that i've among the teens anthropologically speaking like they will use spotify playlists as sort of temporary social watering holes where they'll collaborate on a playlist together to send

[02:14:20] each other messages or be mean to each other or be nice to each other or to like process or like because because my daughter was recently making one with friends after a particularly harrowing test where they were all like this is how i felt about that french test um but for them spotify is this really transient liquid environment and they are all super into the romance of fixed music media

[02:14:43] like and vinyl well vinyl is something that you collect for the aesthetics for them mixed tapes are a way for you to demonstrate your personal flair in an artifact i agree but see like the same way they have they don't do it on cassettes yeah they do it with spotify they no spotify is too fluid spotify is online so they do do it very quickly you know spotify right it's an ephemeral they can come and go a cassette yeah you have to listen you can try to fast forward and rewind and fast forward and

[02:15:13] you can hand it to people it's not just texting a link there's but see so you know how like what it is so you but they don't have cd burners though and it doesn't have that nostalgic pre-internet thing that they don't have cassette players either cool cassette players either well they do now thanks to maxel yeah now just can they get some cassettes the other thing bringing us full circle from the beginning of the show when's the last time you recorded a song off the radio trying to avoid the dj talking and

[02:15:43] like 1994 yeah oh my gosh that's the true mixtape great movie high fidelity with john cusack he's all about mixtapes making the perfect mixtape oh that was a great movie yeah great movie if you want to learn about the ancient art of mixtapes dianko it sounds like you made a few mixtapes in your time

[02:16:06] i made quite a few mixtapes did you woo your spouse with a mixtape uh you know that was a little too late at this point because but that was why we did it isn't it to to get girls i mean we pretended to have other reasons too it was one of the ways you could have a conversation with the music you chose right yeah yeah yeah that's right a conversation with the music you chose and to extend your personality

[02:16:33] right as burke says in our chat room the true mixtape is about who it's for who you're making it for you don't make it for yourself you're making it as a message to somebody and then you get to do all the art maybe somebody you have to do all the art and this is yourself and all that stuff now i want to make some mixtapes yeah thank you so much you guys are great dan patterson uh blackbird.ai

[02:17:00] things going well yeah things are good your health is good scratchy yeah yeah health is good my daughter had strep last week and so a little bit of it this week antibiotics are wonderful but i didn't notice you sounds fine a little scratchy here yeah and the uh the other stuff is yeah that's right that's right yes uh no it's wonderful to be here and wonderful to see you you know it's great to see you and i'm glad your health is good dan had a little health scare and yeah i was nervous i'm really glad

[02:17:28] everything's going well yeah you'll find him senior director of content at blackbird.ai take a look at raven that's the new thing right with a yeah we just uh released an api oh so i can use my uh my claude to oh yeah we have i mean like api feels like yeah we have mcps and yeah that's the hotness the new hotness yeah yeah we will talk to your claude your claude and my claude can talk yes i've been having

[02:17:58] so much fun getting my agent all uh all hooked up installed on your new mac mini yeah it's an old mac mini but yeah thank you dan thanks schmeiser thank you for your girl scout cookies and your long time friendship editor-in-chief at nojitter.com anything you would like to plug at all please do just let me say please come please come read us that will be it's the thing we're doing some great work

[02:18:26] taking a look at work uh automating workflows at this point and what ai does well and where there are still opportunities to excel and how this will impact everything from the way we work together to the way that we interact with corporations oh you have a lot of ai stuff now yeah we do oh this is good yeah we're also needing to focus a lot more on how the raw material of ai ie data is really going

[02:18:55] to end up shaping the ways in which it's used and um the emerging problems that we're seeing with enterprise level data oh it's a big one i know yeah man data discovery was already a was a problem well before this and it's only become more amplified over time well and with ai garbage in garbage out right it's all about the quality of the data the see you want to say mixtapes are classic and retro

[02:19:19] garbage in garbage out is that's very absolutely foundational thank you so much lisa yanko records thank you everybody should subscribe lowpass.cc yanko is one of the you know he's still doing journalism wow yes that's amazing man that's older than mixtapes

[02:19:44] in a way yes it's great to see you uh subscribe covers ar vr streaming media every thursday lowpass.cc thank you and three year anniversary coming up so really some fun stuff yeah fantastic that's that's that's so great it's eight dollars a month it's great it's well worth it and you have a lot of free posts too so people don't i do have free posts yes yeah so sign up for

[02:20:10] free and then if you like it maybe you will thanks to all of you for joining us we do twit every sunday 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern 2100 utc you can watch us live as we do it of course if you're in the club you can be in the discord with us watch on the discord or uh and anybody can do this watch on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin or kick six different platforms uh but that's only for the live

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[02:21:05] become a member of the club we would love to have you um i guess that's all i need to say except thanks for joining us we'll see you next time another twit is in the can bye bye you are amazing you fahren in the urlaub we are here for you with children the on the

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